Tim Buckley
Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology

Tim Buckley, for the uninitiated, was a lot more than just a guy who happened to be Jeff's dad. He was more, even, than just another anguished rock star who OD'ed young and pretty. Myth was a big part of Buckley — a young man possessed of a physical beauty and a bell-like voice that almost seemed a little too perfect for this world (the voice anyway, with its full-bodied, operatic power, certainly seemed too perfect for rock). The myth, especially as it developed after Tim's death, defined Buckley as a complex visionary, constantly searching for the truest expression of his mysterious creative impulses.

His erratic recorded legacy — the 10 albums he made between 1966 and his death in 1975 — tells a somewhat different story, that of a scattershot and probably very disturbed artist who flitted from style to style, provoking his audience at one moment and sucking up to them in the next.

Leave it to Rhino, though, to finally make some sort of sense of the elder Buckley. The new two-disc set Morning Glory compiles 33 cuts spanning Tim's career and includes both the obligatory showpieces as well as some surprising choices that go a long way towards illuminating the themes and musical ideas that weave their way through Buckley's work. In fairly succinct fashion, Morning Glory traces Buckley's emotional and psychological path from unrequited romantic to poet to cynic to aging junkie on the make.

The anthology does an equally fine job tracing Buckley's musical development: The artist's early, relatively folksy 12-string songs become more baroque and mystical, gradually embellishing themselves with strings, harpsichords and intricate, epic structures before stripping away the poetic excess and coming back to earth. Buckley's seminal, semi-psychedelic Hello and Goodbye (included here almost in its entirety) contains song cycles as hauntingly beautiful and convoluted as anything Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were doing back then.

Barely a year later, Tim had found the freedom of jazz, scatting and howling loose, improvised-sounding tunes with just acoustic bass, drums and vibes. The urge to improvise and take chances intensified over the next few years, a period that apparently coincided with Buckley's burgeoning self-destructiveness. By the time we get to the iconoclastic, button-pushing Monterey — an atonal experiment with Tim's Yoko Ono-ish shrieking layered over an Eight Miles High anti-rhythm guitar and Elvin Jones-ish polyrhythms — Buckley has fully revealed himself as a ranting, fallen angel.

From those heights of madness, it was all downhill (a downhill sadly but appropriately represented here too), with a series of increasingly bland recordings that only occasionally exhibited flashes of inspiration. But when Tim was on his game, there was nothing quite like it, and this welcome anthology collects virtually all of those '60s chestnuts roasted on the fire of Buckley's passion and confusion. (Rhino/Elektra)

—Lance Goldenberg