#harlequin bass

[i-give-you-a-fish]

can i please have the most interestingly patterned fish you have! (in your opinion!) thank you!!!!

You get a Harlequin Bass

Serranus tigrinus

[violetfeatherwind]

I was looking up different fish, and found this particular breed. Look at it and tell me that they do not resemble Glitz and Glam a lot!

[merlinaknight]

@impossiblegothpersonfarm @fauxcongenialite @virtualbunny @4gh0st @elemiller @semteslagirl @officialderickdrakesite I just saw this still and I can't breathe. 😍❤️‍🔥

[evergreen-cc]

This June come see two of the newest names in the music scene: BOYTEARS and Sirens of Andromeda at Edgewave! Back to back performances from this summer's hottest punk bands in sunny Oasis Springs! Purchase your festival tickets while there's still time! [=

Thanks to @aniraklova for creating the event!

Pop-punk band BOYTEARS originated in San Myshuno in 2022. Their first album Harlequin Desires quickly grew in popularity after its release in December 2023. The all-female band is said to be working on their second album, and are rumored to give a sneak peak at their Edgewave performance.

[front and back covers of Harlequin Desires. The band members are, as pictured on the album: CiCi (lead guitar), AJ (lead vocals), Nova (bass guitar), Ellie (keyboard), Michelle (rhythm guitar), and Lori (drums)]

Sirens of Andromeda recently emerged as one of the only all-Sixam bands in the goth rock scene. They released their first EP, ABOVE, in March which received a flood of popularity and praise.

[front and back covers of ABOVE EP. Band members are, as pictured on the poster: Darius (violin, cello), Zita (guitar, piano), Skyla (vocals), Celina (bass), and Kaleo (drums)]

[starpunchsteria]

[BAND AU 🎸] I watched a KISS documentary where they called the group “The Monster, The Harlequin Lover, The Spaceman, and the Catman” and my brain chemistry was altered forever

(close-ups, alt versions, and extra info under the cut!)

I was originally going to give them face-paint but I really like them without it! Also, this Ivy’s face doesn’t necessarily hold up anymore in Steriaverse!! But I didn’t wanna change it because I liked it

Pamela - Bass Guitar

Harley - Rhythm Guitar + Lead Vocalist

Briar - Lead Guitar

Selina - Drummer

[arizonaaaaaa]

Glee cast sings Joker: Folie à Deux, a soundtrack by Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix. And Harlequin, a companion album to the movie soundtrack

Since both albums have pretty much the same songs I decided to make a singular post for those, Joker songs will have ♠️ in the beginning while Harlequin songs will have ♦️ so you can check out both version later

♠️Slap That Bass (originally from “Shall We Dance”) sung by Mike and Will in “The Substitute”

-in Joker 2 this song, Get Happy and What the World Needs are song in a mash-up, but I’ll put them here separately. This one in particular would be a fantasy sequence just like Make Em Laugh, putting Mike to sing this time since listening to the original, his voice is quite similar, and there’s space for a little tap dancing he can do

♠️♦️Get Happy (originally by Ruth Etting) sung by Kurt and Rachel in “Duets”

-sung on the show in a mash-up with Happy Days Are Here Again by Barbra Streisand, both the movie and Harlequin’s version are way happier than the one in the show that it’s not necessarily sad but it’s not a flashmob number where people join to dance

♠️What the World Needs Now is Love (originally by Burt Bacharach) sung by Artie, Blaine, Kurt, Mercedes, Rachel, Sam and Will in “What the World Needs Now”

-to finish the triple mash-up from the movie, this was actually the 700 performance filmed in the show, it’s a very beautiful scene that I wish had more attention to it, really sums all of the impact glee had towards its years

♠️For Once in My Life (originally by Stevie Wonder) sung by Artie Abrams in “Wonder-ful”

-also sung on the show, the glee version is severely happier and lighter tho, i mean, glee itself as a whole is lighter than Joker, except for that episode

♠️♦️If My Friends Could See Me Now (originally from "Sweet Charity") sung by Rachel Berry in “Hell-O”

-Rachel singing about the dreamy boy she found out of nowhere, the songs talks about a famous man so that fits even more, it could either be a club song or fantasy, either would be a hell of a performance

♠️♦️Folie à Deux sung by Kurt Hummel in season 2

-Kurt would be singing this alone in the Warblers choir room, singing about how he is in love with Blaine, how he is slightly obsessed with Blaine and how his friends thinks he’s crazy for it, they weren’t as far as I remember, they were actually very supportive, even Mr Schue, anyway, for the sake of the drama Blaine would get in the room and innocently ask “who’s this about” and Kurt would mumble with his words

♠️Bewitched sung by Mercedes Jones

-already covered here, go check it out ;)

♠️♦️That's Entertainment (originally from "The Band Wagon") sung by Cassandra July

-another song for Cassie to make a point to Rachel, would probably be sung in a more sexy tone with very sexy choreography and would probably give Rachel a bi panic, maybe she could sing as well but I’ll give as a Cassie solo for the sake of she was only featured once in this series and it was with a song that was already sung on glee

♠️When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You) (originally by Seger Ellis) sung by Rachel Berry in “Mattress”

-this one was featured in the show but wasn’t a recorded solo and honestly, I’m mad, this being the song Rachel sings when she’s nervous/sad is so sweet to me, y’all wouldn’t get it, deserved to be fully covered and released in the season 1 album

♠️To Love Somebody (originally by Bee Gees) sung by Rory and Sugar in “Saturday Night Glee-Ver”

-in case you didn’t notice before, neither of them appeared in the episode, due to Vanessa’s contract and… Damian doing something else I guess. Anyway, since the episode is basically a Bee Gees tribute I don’t see why they couldn’t perform this, it certainly fit Rory’s baritone voice and Sugar’s… kind of sweet voice when she doesn’t sound like a frog being squished by a truck?

♠️♦️(They Long To Be) Close To You (originally by Burt Bacharach) sung by Sam Evans in “What the World Needs Now”

-you had to see my face when I realized this was the song in the simpsons movie, I bursted out crying then I cried about Samcedes and it became a mess, I love this song, I love this performance, still hate season 6 but I can’t help but love this underrated song

♠️♦️The Joker (originally from “The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd”) sung by Noah ‘Puck’ Puckerman in season 3

-he would sing this song around the time he realizes that he is a senior and he went from feared cool bad boy to loser who’ll fail a year and have no future, the Harlequin version has a lot of guitars and drums so he would sing this version, it could start in the choir room and flee to the auditorium with him wearing a clown makeup

♠️♦️Gonna Build a Mountain (originally from “The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd”) sung by Brittany and Santana in “The Hurt Locker, Part One”

-this song shifts into a wedding fantasy in the movie but doesn’t literally become one, I’m going for the same idea, both of them singing this after the proposal imagining them in dresses going to the aisle, a lot of people would be happier, including me, fuck klaine

♠️♦️I've Got the World on a String (originally by Frank Sinatra) sung by Sue Sylvester

-… listen. Just imagine she singing this when she had a crush on someone, either Will or idk who else she liked, and she’s walking down the hall singing about the love she is feeling there’s like a massive jinx effect like everyone is tripping or everyone is being slushied or the fire alarms starts shooting water everywhere, cinema if I might

♠️If You Go Away (originally by Rod McKuen) sung by Joe Hart

-might be a little of a stretch here but vocally speaking he is the only voice fitting here, I almost gave it to Blaine but his voice is too high, Joe could sing this about his relationship with Quinn, how he wants to be with her but it’s afraid God will be sad or something, and Quinn is a senior almost graduating, she doesn’t have time for this so she does goes away, leaving Joe all sad and alone

♠️Gonna Build a Mountain (Reprise) sung by Blaine and Kurt in “The Hurt Locker, Part Two”

-as a reference to Brittana singing this in the previous episode about their wedding, Klaine would sing this merely as a joke or in a state of craziness from being stuck in the elevator for so long, probably wouldn’t be recorded, it would also serve as a hint that they would also get married later in the season

♠️♦️That's Life (originally by Frank Sinatra) sung by Mercedes, Rachel and Tina

-in season one these three recorded a cover of Tell Him by Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand, since then, they never had a trio together, they more than anyone else deserve it. This song would be amazing, it’s a song about fighting to get where you want and never give up, something we saw from them in various season, but season 3 in particular was when all three were willing to get more, I would’ve loved a cover of this

♠️True Love Will Find You in the End (originally by Daniel Johnston) sung by Will Schuester in “New Directions”

-I believe we all hate the way the newbies just got thrown away once they lost nationals right? They didn’t even sung a verse once they lost, it would be nice to see them perform To Sir With Love or My Life Would Suck Without You and it would be even nicer if Mr Schue showed his love with a song, a sweet acoustic cover just like Forever Young and Teach Your Children

♦️Good Morning (originally from "Babes in Arms") sung by Artie, Blaine, Finn and Puck

-I’m sorry but ever since I heard this I can only think about the Family Guy cover they did and I love it, it would be Blaine on the piano with the other three dancing these what? 30s, 40s jazz moves? I don’t know

♦️Oh, When the Saints (originally by Louis Armstrong) sung by Joe, Mercedes, Quinn, Rory and Sam in “Heart”

-strange roster of singers don’t you think? Well, after Artie performed with the boys for Sugar, Rory would do the same but with the god squad, his baritone voice would make the performance very energetic as well as Mercedes high notes, it’s a gospel song, she sings one everyday as a workout, the other three would sing less but still have a verse or two

♦️Smile (originally by Charlie Chaplin) sung by Artie, Finn, Mercedes and Rachel in “Mattress”

-I didn’t remember this song on the show so I had to rewatch it and damn, I didn’t remember it at all, it’s very sad, sung right after Mr Schue says he won’t be there for sectionals, and I liked it, it’s a good cover, although it sounds sometimes like an harmonies battle, they sing a line and you have eight different people doing “oh’s” and “ah’s”

♦️Happy Mistake sung by Rachel Berry in season 5

-I think she could sing this at the time she’s thinking about giving up on broadway, her head would probably be full with a lot of things, he career, the tv show, Santana, Finn and it would be too much for her to handle, so she would have this breakdown while singing and wishing for a little light at the end of the tunnel

Finally, that’s the end, for now, in case you don’t know Gaga will be releasing her seventh album studio in February, we still don’t have a date so i won’t say when I’ll start working on it, I will also be working on a post showing stats for this series, who sung more songs, what type they sung more etc. I liked working on this a lot, I listened to songs I never heard before, I will also start working on Gaga’s unreleased songs, but since there’s a ton of them out there it’s not coming out soon, either way, thank you so much for keeping up with this little series of mine lol, glee x Gaga will be back in February, bye ;)

[pallysuune]

That's swell~ Motley plays more like The Fool kind of archetype but knows what he's doing. One scene is him planting a foot on a knocked down Drukhari and the latter can't do anything about it. A moment later,

"Motley frowned unhappily and shot Ozarhylh a mournful, pleading look. For all the cheap theatrics Ozarhylh understood that the Harlequin was telling him to come along now or suffer retribution later."

_____

Hmm, tbh, Idk who would suit voicing Nocturne. There's Samuel Ramey with a deeper register (albeit, he's an operatic bass), who voiced the Beast in Over the Garden Wall and performed as Phantom, but idk much else.

_____

What does Meli like about Nocturne? And how do you think Yrliet and Marazhai react to finding out that she's being romanced by a Solitaire? How would the two find out about it?

I love that "acts like an idiot but is actually absurdly smart and competent" trope. I dunno why, but I've always liked it. I feel like I'm going to enjoy Motley a lot. XD

Oh man, it's been forever since I've watched Over the Garden Wall. I may have to look it up, because I don't think I remember his voice, even.

There's definitely an allure to the mystery of Nocturne for Meli. He's got that sort of charm that's difficult to resist. Also, he's helped her out a lot when she's in difficult positions, which helps, lol.

As for Yrliet and Marazhai, I think they'd both definitely be taken aback. Marzhi less so, since he's somewhat more used to seeing Harlequin in Commorragh. He doesn't understand it, but he doesn't care enough about Meli on a personal/romantic level to do anything about it.

We see in game that Yrliet is definitely afraid of Solitaires in the same way many aeldari are, even saying something about how it leads to misfortune or something similar, iirc. She definitely tries to talk Meli out of having any sort of relationship with him, and genuinely thinks that this will end with Meli dead and the rest of the crew possibly joining her.

[saints-who-never-existed]

Rereading The Terror

Chapter Twenty-Five: Crozier

This is it, lads - Carnivale! D: And boy is there a lot to dig into!

Crozier and Fitzjames retire to Erebus for much of the evening - neither of them want much part in the festivities so they sit drinking whisky in silence. Cannae blame them really.

There's a delightful mention of Mr Murray, the sailmaker - he's described as being old with a wizened visage, and is dressed up like a mortician. I had a half-remembered hunch about him so looked it up to check - homeboy was 43 years old in real life! Harsh, Simmons, very harsh!

When it's time for the feast - consisting of the polar bear Fairholme shot - it's Jopson and Hoar, Little and Le Vesconte that come to fetch the Captains. There's something quite sweet about that that I can't quite put my finger on - very formal somehow.

Once they're back out on the ice, there's good news and bad news. Bad news is that the men have clearly figured out how to brew some bootleg booze and are all absolutely plastered. The good news - as far as I'm concerned - is that it's Le Vesconte along with the other officers and stewards - who are dishing out food to the men. It's just a lovely little role reversal that makes me smile.

Also interesting is the frequent mention of Le Vesconte's gold tooth. I imagine it's a reference to the remains that were found that were thought for years to be his but were later identified as Goodsir's by the presence of a specific metallic dental filling?

Once they're all digging in to the food, it's quite an eerie free-for-all: "It was as if more than a hundred predators were revelling in their kill."

Then, it's time for a song and a show! The song is 'Rule Britannia' and the show involves Hickey on Manson's shoulders, both of them trussed up in a costume made from the hides of the slaughtered polar bears. With them is a man dressed up ghoulishly as a decapitated Sir John which I really shouldn't find as funny as I do. I've written "Objectively hilarious" next to this passage.

As the singing swells to a climax and Sir John's grandfather clock strikes midnight, shit then hits the fan with Tuunbaq's eerie arrival: "Crozier saw that there was a second large white shape in the room. It stood on its hind legs. It was farther back in the darkness than Manson and Hickey's bear-hide-white glow. And it was much larger. And taller." "There came a second roar...The sound ground so low into the bass regions, grew so reverberating, and emerged so ferocious that it made the captain of HMS Terror want to piss his pants right there in front of his men."

From then on, all is chaos. We have a description of a man in a harlequin costume (one of the doctors as, just like in the show, they're all in matching clown/harlequin costumes) running past Crozier in flames. We all get Fitzjames described as "...the only figure not costumed and not running" which jumped out at me for some reason.

Crozier and Fitzjames make it out of the now-burning Carnivale tent - Crozier with an unconscious George Chambers on his shoulder - only to find the Marines firing indiscriminately into the fleeing crowds, trying to take down Tuunbaq. "CEASE FIRE! GODDAMN YOUR EYES, SERGEANT TOZER I'LL BREAK YOU TO A PRIVATE FOR THIS AND HAVE YOU HANGED IF YOU DON'T CEASE THAT FUCKING FIRE IMMEDIATELY!"

Eventually, the other officers start rallying round and you know I'm looking out for my special boy when that happens: "Lieutenant Little came up through the smoke and steam...saluted clumsily, his right arm was burned, and reported for duty. With Little at his side, Crozier found it easier to gain control of the men..."

So there we are, all that's left is to tally up the awful toll in the morning...

[folkimplosionmusic]

Tim Buckley

Martin Aston, MOJO, July 1995

IN 1965, THE LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE CHEETAH dubbed three emerging singer-songwriters – Jackson Browne, Steve Noonan, and Tim Buckley – 'The Orange County Three'.

Browne progressed towards a comfortably feted stardom which endures to this day Noonan vanished into the ether after one album. And somewhere between their two paths drifted the late Tim Buckley. Between rabid adulation and ignoble obscurity, between legendary status and the losers' list, his is a fixed position, like a star that shines fiercely in the night sky but in space was extinguished eons ago.

Twenty years after his death on June 29, 1975, diehard disciples complain of the mismanagement of Tim Buckley's legacy. Here was a man whose recordings remain extraordinary cross-pollinations of folk-rock, folk-jazz, the avant-garde and all points in between. They are, in the words of Lillian Roxon's famed 1969 Rock Encyclopaedia, "easily the most beautiful in the new music, beautifully produced and arranged, always managing to be wildly passionate and pure at the same time". A shame, then, that they are still to be posthumously rewarded with a decent CD reissue campaign.

"When an artist finally comes through all this mess, you hear a pure voice," said Tim Buckley three months before he died. "We're in the habit of emulating those voices when they're dead."

TIMOTHY CHARLES BUCKLEY III WAS BORN IN AMSTERDAM, New York on Valentine's Day, 1947, his family uprooting westwards a decade later to Anaheim, home of Disneyland and strip malls. He grew up with music. Grandma dug Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, mom adored Sinatra and Garland. Timothy Charles III himself leaned towards the gnarled county of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, the lonesome sound of the singing cowboys. The kid even taught himself to play the banjo.

Larry Beckett, the Buena Vista high school friend who added erudite lyrics to Buckley melodies over the years, recalls how schoolboy Tim always wanted to sing. Buckley had learnt how to use his perfect pitch from crooners like Nat 'King' Cole and Johnny Mathis but chose to exercise his range by screaming at buses and imitating the sound of trumpets. His voice set sail for the edge early

Jim Fielder, Tim's other best buddy at school, recalls first hearing the Buckley voice. "One hesitates to get flowery but the words 'gift from God' sprung to mind," he says. "He had an incredible range of four octaves, always in tune, with a great vibrato he had complete control over. You don't normally hear that stuff from a 17-year-old."

Recruited by C&W combo Princess Ramona & The Cherokee Riders, Buckley played guitar in a yellow hummingbird shirt and turquoise hat. The Princess soon saw that Timmy's heart wasn't in country – his nascent love of Miles Davis and John Coltrane testified to that – so suggested he turn instead to the burgeoning folk scene. Despite an intuitive gift for its melodic nuances, 'folk-rock' was a tag that would later irk him. Buckley was always cynical about how the business worked. "You hear what they want you to play when you're breaking into the business," he told Sounds in 1972, "and you show 'em what you've got."

With Fielder on bass and lyricist Beckett on drums they formed two bands, the Top 40-oriented Bohemians and the more esoteric, acoustic Harlequin 3, who would mix in poetry and freely ad-lib from Ken Nordine's Word Jazz monologues.

Buckley quickly won great notices in LA, and the 'Orange County Three' accolade only heightened the interest of the music business. Mothers Of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black was impressed enough to suggest a meeting with Herb Cohen, a manager with a curiously dual reputation for unswerving breadheadedness and courageous work with mavericks from Lenny Bruce and the Mothers to Captain Beefheart and Wild Man Fischer. Instantly smitten – "there was no question that Tim had something unique" – Cohen sent a demo to Jac Holzman at Elektra, home of folk-rocking excellence.

"I must have listened to it twice a day for a week," said Holzman. "Whenever anything was getting me down, I'd run for Buckley. He was exactly the kind of artist with whom we wanted to grow – young and in the process of developing, extraordinarily gifted and so untyped that there existed no formula or pattern to which anyone would be committed."

Buckley in turn told Zigzag that he respected Holzman because he believed Jac only signed multi-talented acts who made each album an individual statement. Yet Buckley's self-titled debut album in 1966 was also his most generic. "I was only 19," Buckley later recalled in Changes magazine, "and going into the studio was like Disneyland. I'd do anything anybody said." The beat-guitar chime of Lee Underwood and the songs' baroque dressings were blood-related to The Byrds, par for the folk-rock course. "Naive, stiff, quaky and innocent, but a ticket into the marketplace," was Underwood's verdict. But you can discern what Cohen and Holzman had so clearly appraised: above all, that soaring counter-tenor voice and remarkable melodic gift.

The follow-up, Goodbye & Hello (1967), was tainted less by convention than by overambition. Producer Jerry Yester probably saw the chance to drape Buckley's ravishing voice in all the soft-rock flourishes at his disposal, while Beckett's convoluted wordplay was just the wrong side of pretentious. Buckley had radically outgrown the first album's high-school origins, his voice now adopting the languid resonances of his Greenwich Village folk idol Fred Neil on the aching ballads 'Once I Was' and 'Morning Glory'.

"Me and Tim hung around in Greenwich Village during the 1960s," recalls the reclusive songsmith of 'Everybody's Talkin'' and 'Dolphins'. "Tim was completely immersed in the music 24 hours a day He ate, drank and breathed music. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Tim worked on chord progressions and melody lines in his dreams, he was that committed to the art form."

In the Neil vein, Buckley's bristling 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain' is a six-minute epistle to his already estranged wife Mary Guibert and son Jeffrey Scott (better known now as Jeff Buckley).

"The marriage was a disaster," says Jim Fielder. "Mary was full of life and talent, a classical pianist and Tim's equal. But the pregnancy made it go sour, as neither of them was ready for it. To Tim it was draining his creative force, and Mary wasn't willing to take the chance on his career, putting it to him like, Settle down and raise a baby or we're through. That kind of showdown."

In the climax to 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain', Buckley yelped, pleaded, even shrieked "Baby, pleeeaEEESSE!"), the first evidence of the places his pain would take him. Honesty was the key. When Buckley and Beckett played it autobiographical – exquisitely vulnerable, naive yet insightful – the results were stunning. When they played to the gallery it sounded forced. Of the title track's anti-Vietnam tract, Buckley said, "I just hate the motherfucker. It's like, 'OK motherfuckers, you want a protest song, here it is'. They were bugging the hell out of me so I figured, just this once, and then I wouldn't have to do it again.

"Talking about war is futile," he reckoned. "What can you say about it? You want it to end but you know it won't. Fear is a limited subject but love isn't. I ain't talking about sunsets 'n' trees, I'm involved with America...but the people in America, not the politics. All I can see is the injustice."

Elektra's Jac Holzman, however, felt positive: a poster of Buckley loomed large over Sunset Strip. "As we got deeper into 1967 and Vietnam," Holzman observed, "the combined effect of his words, his music, his passion, his persona struck a particular resonance. To some extent he was the bright side of people's tortured souls, and maybe of his own tortured soul. He could express anguish that wasn't negative."

Goodbye & Hello reached 171 on the Billboard chart, but Buckley wasn't in the mood to consolidate. Instead, when Tonight Show guest host Alan King made fun of his hair, the singer retorted, "You know, it's really surprising, I always thought you were a piece of cardboard." On another outing he refused to lip-synch to 'Pleasant Street' and walked out.

WITH HINDSIGHT, UNDERWOOD TRACES Buckley's depressive tendencies to his father who "suffered a head injury in the Second World War and from then on his insecurities and rage made life miserable for Tim. He saw Tim's beauty, and called him a faggot and beat him up. He looked at Tim's talent and said he'd never make it. His mother didn't help: she'd tell him he'd die young because that's what poets always did. So he grew up deeply hurt and feeling inadequate, yet driven by this extraordinary musical talent that possessed him." The result, Underwood ventures, "gave Tim a deep-seated fear of success...he wanted people to love him but, as they did, he pushed them away".

"Long after his death," says Beckett, "I realised that there were very few songs he wrote that didn't have the word 'home' in them. It seemed like he felt homeless, and nothing would restore it. He seemed OK in high school, maybe a little wild, but he got increasingly neurotic. He'd almost welcome a negative comment that would reaffirm his feelings."

When, in 1970, Jerry Yester's wife Judy Henske poked fun at the line "I'm as puzzled as the oyster" in the majestic 'Song To The Siren', Buckley instantly dropped the song from the set. "He took the smallest criticism to heart," says Larry Beckett, "so that he couldn't even perform a song which he admitted was one of his all-time favourites!"

Another incident stands out from this period. Tim's choirboy looks and froth of curls had attracted a Love Generation-style teenybop following. At a show at New York's Philharmonic Hall, his most prestigious to date, various objects were thrown on stage, a red carnation among them. Buckley stooped down, picked it up and proceeded to chew the petals and spit them out.

"He was very vulnerable and emotional," says Beckett's ex-wife Manda. "It made him terribly attractive to everybody of both sexes. People just sort of swooned around him because he was so sweet. I think that frightened him. He was difficult to deal with because he was scared of his power over people. He almost seemed to reject his audiences for loving him so much. He wasn't mature enough to accept that kind of attention."

Tim would also embroider the truth. At school he'd lied about playing C&W bars, while Larry Beckett remembers dubious boasts of female conquests. Buckley also claimed to have played guitar on The Byrds' first album, which Roger McGuinn always denied. "Tim liked to feed the legend," Beckett recalls with a wry chuckle. "He was quite amoral – if a lie gave a laugh or strengthened his mystique, that was fine. But his music was always honest."

"If someone dared him to do something, he'd do it," recalls British bassist Danny Thompson, who accompanied Buckley on his 1968 UK visit. "This free spirit was what most people saw, but I also saw a bit of a loner. Unlike most people who get into drugs, he wasn't a sad junkie figure. He was more of a naughty boy who said, 'OK, I'll have a go, I'll drink that'."

If he admired Hendrix and Hardin and Havens, Buckley frequently railed against the rock establishment. "All people see is velvet pants and long, blond hair," he fumed. 'A perfect person with spangles and flowered shirts – that's vibrations to them."

"He viewed the blues-oriented rock of the day as white thievery and an emotional sham," says Underwood. "He criticised musicians who spent three weeks learning Clapton licks, when Mingus had spent his whole life living his music.

Retreating to his home base in Venice, LA, Buckley and Underwood took time out to immerse themselves in the music of the East Coast jazz titans. Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus and Ornette Coleman all provided inspiration as rehearsals slowly metamorphosed into jam sessions. The day before playing New York's prestigious Fillmore East theatre, Buckley asked vibraphonist David Friedman to rehearse for the show. Seven hours without sheet music later, a new sound was born.

With Happy/Sad (1969), Buckley began to arc away from the underground culture that had launched him. New York photographer Joe Stevens, a good friend of Buckley's at the time, recalls the singer's suspicious attitude towards the forthcoming Woodstock festival. "He said, Are you really going? Oh man, it's going to be awful.' Yet we used to hang out on a friend's farm which was like a scaled-down Woodstock, with hippy girls walking around, weird food, drugs, freedom and trees."

Although Jerry Yester was again involved, Happy/Sad was the polar opposite to Goodbye & Hello's crowded ambition: spacious, supple, a sea of possibilities. The line-up was just vibraphone, string bass, acoustic 12-string and gently rippling electric guitar. "The Modern Jazz Quartet Of Folk," enthused vibraphonist David Friedman. "Heart music," Buckley offered, and Elektra used his words in the ads like a manifesto. Happy/Sad's only real comparison is Astral Weeks, a similarly symmetrical, fluid work that revels in its lack of boundaries while possessing a unique tension.

"The trick of writing," Buckley felt, "is to make it sound like it's all happening for the first time. So you feel it's everybody's idea."

Van Morrison, Laura Nyro and John Martyn were also melting the walls between rock, blues, folk and jazz; at 22, Buckley was the youngest of the bunch. He'd also caught the jazz bug the hardest. Yester revealed that the band resisted second takes, while 'Strange Feeling' was bravely anchored to the bass line of Miles Davis's 'All Blues' before Buckley's voice set sail, caressing and cajoling.

"Being with Tim was like going out with an English professor," recalls Bob Duffy, Buckley's tour manager at the time. "He was very serious and almost stodgy, exactly the opposite of what you'd think a rock star would be. He wasn't in the music business to get laid. If one of the guys in the band came up and mentioned women, 13 of them would run out of the room, except for Tim who just sat there, guitar in hand, almost like he was teaching himself the songs again even though he'd played these songs 200 times, because he wanted the show to be as musically performed as possible. I saw incredible shows that he got depressed about, and wouldn't talk to anyone afterwards – he was very Zappa-like in that demanding way, but he was one of the sanest people on that level that I worked with."

As its very title acknowledged, despite Happy/Sad's sun-splashed backdrop, musical invention and lyrical joie de vivre, its mood was acutely introspective. Critic Simon Reynolds has described it as "a poignant premonition of loss, of an inevitable autumn..."

Lyrics had clearly shifted to a secondary, supportive role. Larry Beckett says he was politely informed that the singer would pen the lyrics alone. "He was moving toward a jazz sound, so to have wild poetry all over the map, you'd miss the jazz. But it was my feeling too that Tim felt his success was due to my lyrics rather than his music, so he wanted to see how well he'd do alone. He tended to believe the worst about himself..."

"It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye & Hello, because most of the bases were touched," Buckley admitted. "That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs. Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it isn't easy because you can't repeat yourself. The way Jac [Holzman] had set it up you were supposed to move artistically, but the way the business is you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you do, so there's a dichotomy there. People like a certain type of thing at a certain time, and it's very hard to progress.

In another interview Tim said, "I can see where I'm heading, and it will probably be further and further from what people expected of me."

"He was very friendly and open to ideas, not a prima donna or a hypocrite," recalls John Balkin, who played bass with Buckley in 1969-70. "There was no drugs, sex and rock'n'roll in relation to him as an artist, not like Joplin and Hendrix, getting stoned before or during a gig. He felt stifled and frustrated by the boundaries that be, trying to stretch as an artist but making a living too. I remember Herbie Cohen saying, 'Go drive a truck then'..."

PROGRESSION WAS NOW BUCKLEY'S WATCH-word. Dream Letter, recorded in 1968 at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, was already more diffuse than Happy/ Sad, lacking the pulse of Carter CC Collins's congas. The budget couldn't afford him or bassist John Miller, so Pentangle's Danny Thompson was drafted in to play an intuitively supportive – and barely rehearsed – role.

"I got a call asking me to turn up and rehearse everything at once," recalls Thompson. "He refused to get into a routine of singing 'the song'. We did a TV show, and when it came to doing it live Tim said, 'Let's do another song', which we'd never rehearsed. It was two minutes longer than our time slot, and the producer was putting his finger across his throat, and Tim looked at him with a puzzled expression and carried on, like art and music was far more important than any of this rubbish that surrounds it. He was fearless."

Clive Selwood, who ran the UK branch of Elektra records, recalls the same episode: "Tim had got a slot on the Julie Felix Show on BBC. He turned up to rehearsals with Danny Thompson an hour late; he shuffled in, nodded when introduced to the producer, unsheathed his guitar, and they launched into an extemporisation of one of his songs that lasted over an hour. The producer and Felix watched open-mouthed, not daring to interrupt. The most exhaustingly magical performance I have ever witnessed – and all to an audience of three. When it was done, Tim slapped his guitar in the case, said 'OK?' to the producer, and departed."

A year later after a heady bout of touring, including the Fillmore East's opening night alongside BB King, Buckley's muse was flying high. In 1968 he'd sounded enraptured, a wayward choirboy testing the limits of a new-found sound, but the voice of 1969 scatted and scorched, twisting and ascending like a wreath of smoke. The music mixed blues, jazz and ballads, throwing in calypso, even cooking on the verge of funk. A key Buckley moment arrived at the climax of a simmering 14-minute 'Gypsy Woman' (from Happy/Sad), when he yelled, "Oh, cast a spell on Timmy!", like an exorcism in reverse. Few singers craved possession so hungrily.

A little-known artefact from this period is his soundtrack music for the film Changes, directed by Hall Bartlett who later went on to helm Jonathan Livingston Seagull. A live set from the Troubadour, finally released two years ago, previewed material that surfaced on Lorca (1970). The album was named after the murdered Spanish poet, whose simultaneously violent and tender poetics Buckley was vocally mirroring. On the song 'Lorca' itself, and on 'Anonymous Proposition' and 'Driftin',' Buckley floats and stings over a languid blue-note haze – crooning and stretching half-tones over shapeless stanzas.

"We never had any music to read from," bassist John Balkin remembers. "We just noodled through and went for it, just finding the right note or coming off a note and making it right." Buckley regarded the title track as "my identity as a unique singer; as an original voice."

The timing wasn't great. Now tuning into such mellow songsmiths as James Taylor, the Love Generation was in no mood to follow in Buckley's wayward footsteps, any more than Buckley had kowtowed to Elektra's craving for old-style troubadour charm. As Holzman says, "he was making music for himself at that point...which is fine, except for the problem of finding enough people to listen to it."

"An artist has a responsibility to know what's gone down and what's going on in his field, not to copy but to be aware," the creator responded. "Only that way can he strengthen his own perception and ability"

Around this time Holzman was poised to sell Elektra, which upset Buckley Although major label offers were on the table – "a lot of bread, which makes me feel really good" – he decided that money wasn't the issue: "That's not where I'm at. I can live on a low budget." After some deliberation he signed to Straight, a Warners-distributed label formed by Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa. "It would be better for me to stay with one man who had taken care of me," he said. "No matter what anyone thinks of Herbie, he's a great dude." But he capitulated to Cohen's demand to record a more accessible record: aptly named, Blue Afternoon (1969) is a collection of narcotic folk-torch ballads.

"Tim always wrote about love and suffering in all their manifestations," says Lee Underwood. "He felt that underneath love was fear, fear of love and success and attention and responsibility" In the album's centrepiece, 'Blue Melody', Buckley keens: "There ain't no wealth that can buy my pride/There ain't no pain that can cleanse my soul/No, just a blue melody/Sailing far away from me." In 'So Lonely', he confessed that "Nobody comes around here no more". In press material for the album, Buckley said the songs had been written for Marlene Dietrich.

Blue Afternoon beat Lorca to the shops by a month. With two albums vying for attention, his already diminished sales potential was halved. (Lorca didn't even chart). Buckley never commercially-minded, was still looking forward. "When I did Blue Afternoon, I had just about finished writing set songs," he told Zigzag. "I had to stretch out a little bit...the next [album] is mostly dealing in time signatures."

Has any troubadour ever stretched out quite as Buckley did on 1970's Starsailor? Buckley's third album in a year in the words of bassist John Balkin, was "a whole different genre". Balkin, who ran a free improvisation group with Buzz and Bunk Gardner of the Mothers, had introduced Buckley to opera singer Cathy Berberian's interpretations of songs by Luciano Berio, inspiring the ever-restless Buckley to new heights. Over throbbing rhythms and atonal dynamics, the Gardners' blowing was matched by Buckley's gymnastic yodels and screams: one moment he sounded like an autistic child, the next like Tarzan. Everything peaked on the title song, with its 16 tracks of vocal overdubs. Larry Beckett, recalled to add impressionistic poetry to expressionistic music, also had a field day: to wit, the likes of "Behold the healing festival/complete for an instant/the dance figure pure constellation." Indeed.

"For the 'Starsailor' track itself," recalls Balkin, "we wanted things like Timmy's voice moving and circling the room, coming over the top like a horn section, like another instrument, not like five separate voices. His range was incredible. He could get down with the bass part and be up again in a split second."

Fiercely beautiful, Starsailor is a unique masterpiece. Aside from 'Song To The Siren', the album was the epitome of uneasy listening. "Sometimes you're writing and you know that you're not going to fit," Buckley responded. "But you do it because it's your heart and soul and you gotta say it. When you play a chord, you're dating yourself...the fewer chords you play, the less likely you are to get conditioned, and the more you can reveal of what you are."

If Starsailor came close to Coltrane's 'sheets of sound', it was hard not to see it as commercial suicide. Attempts to reproduce Starsailor live didn't help. "The shows Tim booked himself after Starsailor were total free improvisation, vocal gymnastics time," recalls Balkin. "I can still see him onstage, his head down, snoring. There was one episode of barking at the audience too. After one show, Frank Zappa said we sounded good, and he wasn't one who easily handed out compliments."

"BUCKLEY YODELLING BAFFLES AUDIENCE," ran a Rolling Stone headline. As Herb Cohen says today, "he was changing too drastically, playing material that audiences weren't necessarily coming to hear and that was beyond the realm of their capability"..."An instrumentalist can be understood doing just about anything, but people are really geared to something coming out of the mouth being words," a resentful Buckley said in a subsequent press release. "I use my voice as an instrument when I'm performing live. The most shocking thing I've ever seen people come up against, beside a performer taking off his clothes, is dealing with someone who doesn't sing words. If I had my way, words wouldn't mean a thing."

Buckley was driven into deep depression by Starsailor's failure. Straight wouldn't provide tour support, the old band had fragmented because there was so little work for them, and Buckley was reduced to booking his own shows in small clubs. At last he shared the bitter, neglected status of his jazz idols. Underwood confirms that in order to take the sting away, Buckley dabbled in barbiturates and heroin. When Buckley prefaced 'I Don't Need It To Rain' on the Troubadour album by saying, "This one's called Give Smack A Chance", it was a dangerous joke. "He was mocking the peace movement, the whole Beatles mentality of the day" says Underwood.

At least his personal life had improved. He'd re-married, bought a house in upmarket Laguna Beach (subsequently painted black to outrage the neighbours), and effectively gone to ground. "I'd been going strong since 1966 and really needed a rest," was Buckley's explanation. "I hadn't caught up with any living." He also inherited his wife Judy's seven-year-old son Taylor.

Judy doesn't recall any drug abuse. Nor does she remember Tim driving a cab, chaffeuring Sly Stone or studying ethnomusicology at UCLA, as the singer often claimed at the time. Instead, she recalls Tim reading voraciously catching up with his favourite Latin American writers at the UCLA library and channelling his creative urges into acting.

The unreleased 1971 cult film Why? Starring OJ Simpson was shot during this period. "It was their first film but both Tim and OJ were incredible actors. The camera loved them," remembers co-star Linda Gillen. "Tim had this James Dean quality He's so handsome in the movie and yet such a mess! You know those Brat Pack kind of films, where people play prefabricated rebels who see themselves as kinda bad but they have a PR taking care of business? Well, Tim was the real deal. He didn't give a fuck how he looked or dressed. He had no hidden agenda. He had an incredible naivety.

"We used to improvise in the film. Tim's character talks to the effect that you can't commit suicide. You can't amend your feelings for other people; you have to find that thing that's good in you and keep that alive. A lot of the group had been onto my character about taking heroin but Tim would always be the sympathetic one. But that was Tim. He'd understand where they were coming from, why they would do what they did.

"On set, I used to hum to myself to fight off boredom and Tim would pick up on what I was humming, like 'Miss Otis Regrets', and we'd end up harmonising together" she continues. "I loved Fred Neil, and asked if he knew 'Dolphins', which he sung for me. He'd say 'They got to Fred Neil, don't let it happen to you'. He'd talk in this strange, paranoid, ominous way, about 'the man'. That night, we went to buy Fred's album and bypassed Tim's on the way! He never hustled his records to me; he wasn't a self-promoter.

"I wondered why Tim was working on this schleppy movie, because I knew people like Roger McGuinn who were making millions, and he said, very silently 'I need the money'. We were only earning $420 a week on the film, and I said, is that all the money you have right now? and he said, 'No, I'm getting a song covered,' which I think was 'Gypsy Woman' which Neil Diamond was going to do."

Meanwhile, the comic plot of his unfilmed screenplay Fully Air-Conditioned Inside was based on a struggling musician who blows up an audience calling for old songs and makes his escape tucked beneath the wings of a vulture, singing 'My Way'...

WHEN AN ALBUM FINALLY EMERGED IN 1972, Buckley had once again avoided covering familiar ground. Greetings From LA was a seriously funky amalgam of rock and soul. His youthful verve might have gone, but his wondrous holler whipped things along. "After Starsailor, I decided to re-evaluate, and I decided the way to come back was to be funkier than everybody," he boasted. But would radio stations play a record as shocking lyrically as Starsailor had been musically?

Judy was the new muse ('An exceptionally beautiful woman, provocative and witty too," says Underwood) and the album was drenched in lust. In a year when David Bowie made sex a refrigeratedly alien concept, Buckley wrote a set of linked songs in a sultry New Orleans populated by a constellation of pimps, whores and hustlers. "I went down to the meat rack tavern," was the album's opening line; and it closed on, "I'm looking for a street corner girl/And she's gonna beat me, whip me, spank me, make it all right again..."

Buckley explained his reasoning to Chrissie Hynde when she interviewed him for the NME in 1974. "I realised all the sex idols in rock weren't saying anything sexy – not Jagger or [Jim] Morrison. Nor had I learned anything sexually from a rock song. So I decided to make it human and not so mysterious."

Producer Hal Willner who subsequently organised the Tribute To Tim Buckley show at St Anne's Church, Brooklyn, remembers the singer at this time. "I saw Buckley live four times, including two of the best performances I've ever seen. He was everything someone could look for in music, totally transcendent. The first time took 100 per cent of my attention, like taking some sort of pill. You'd expect it from guys like Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, but that's a very rare feeling to get in rock. Another time he opened for Zappa in his Grand Wazoo period, and the audience was incredibly rude to him, booing and heckling. But he handled it beautifully just carrying on, talking sarcastically, trying to get them to blow pot smoke on the stage. He was a genius in every sense. He should be seen on the same level as Edith Piaf and Miles Davis."

"Rock'n'roll was meant to be body music," Buckley stated in Downbeat magazine. But diehard fans wanted to know why he was now singing rock'n'roll. "His last albums were dictated somewhat by business considerations," says Lee Underwood, "but few understood they were also dictated by major music considerations. Where else could he go after Starsailor's intellectual heights except to its opposite, to white funk dance music, rooted in sexuality? At least Tim's R&B was honest, unlike the over-rehearsed stuff that pretends to be spontaneous. Greetings is still one of the best rock'n'roll albums ever to come down the pike. Throughout his career, he constantly asked and answered a question that can be terrifying, which is, Where do we go from here? People criticised him during Lorca and Starsailor and wanted him to play rock'n'roll, but when he did they said he sold out."

True compromise was far more detectable on 1974's album Sefronia, released by Cohen and Zappa's new DiscReet label under the Warner Brothers umbrella. "Everyone was second guessing where he should go next," says his old friend Donna Young, "and Tim started listening to what other people thought."

Some new-found literary acumen was displayed on the title track, a ballad as lush as the album's reading of Fred Neil's 'Dolphins'. But five of the songs were covers, including the sappy MOR duet 'I Know I'd Recognise Your Face', while pale retreads of Greetings' honeyed funk served as filler. Guitarist Joe Falsia was now in the Tonto role, Underwood having stepped down to deal with his drug addiction. Herbie Cohen was obviously calling the shots. "Some of those songs were beautiful but you have to get through Herb's idea of what is commercial," says Underwood.

As commercial compromises go, Sefronia was terrific – radio-friendly and lyrically approachable – but Buckley knew the score. "If I write too much music, it loses, as happened on Sefronia. Y'know, it gets stale." In reference to the folk-rock era, he observed that "the comradeship is just not there any more, and it affects the music." His boisterous barrelhouse sound was showcased at 1974's Knebworth Festival in Britain, where Buckley opened a bill that included Van Morrison, The Doobie Brothers and The Allman Brothers Band. It was his first UK show since 1968, and few knew who he was.

Photographer Joe Stevens reacquainted himself with Tim at a DiscReet launch in London: "He was sitting at a table signing autographs, which I couldn't have imagined him doing before. When he saw me he said, 'Come on, let's get out of here,' before they'd even said, 'Ladies'n'gentlemen, Tim Buckley!' We hit the street, took some photos, then took a taxi back to my place. He spent two days curled around my TV set, cooing at my girlfriend. We got calls from Warners accusing me of kidnapping their artist! You could see what had happened to him. The youth had gone out of his face, and his smile would break into a frown as soon as it had finished."

Look At The Fool (1975), with its frazzled, Tijuana-soul feel, was purer Buckley again, but the songwriting meandered badly – 'Wanda Lu' remains one of the most ignominious final songs of any brilliant career. "It just seemed that the more down he became, the more desperate he sounded," his sister Kathleen told Musician magazine. "The work of a man desperately trying to connect with an audience that has deserted him," pronounced Melody Maker. The photo on the back cover caught Buckley with a quizzical, defeated expression. Look at the fool, indeed. Honest to the end.

In 1974, Buckley wrote to Lee Underwood: "You are what you are, you know what you are, and there are no words for loneliness – black, bitter, aching loneliness that gnaws the roots of silence in the night..."

"Tim felt he'd given everything to no avail," says Underwood. "He was even suicidal for a short while because he felt there was no place left to go, emotionally speaking. He was gaining new audiences and improving his singing within conventional song forms, but comments that he'd sold out made him feel terrible. He never understood his fear of success, and remained divided and tormented to the end. I urged him to take therapy shortly before his death, when he was feeling very bitter, to the point of suicide, but he said, 'Lose the anger, lose the music'."

"We saw a lot of him over the years as disillusionment set in," says Clive Selwood, who, inspired by Buckley's session for BBC's John Peel Show, later founded the Strange Fruit label and its Peel Sessions. "When we first met he spent his leisure time cycling across Venice Beach, guzzling a six-pack. When we last met, he was carrying a gun, in fear of the reactionary side of American life, who despised his long hair. He said, 'If you're carrying a gun, you stand a chance'."

"He continually took chances with his life," adds Larry Beckett. "He'd drive like a maniac risking accidents. For a couple of years he drank a lot and took downers to the point where it nearly killed him, but he'd always escape. Then he got into this romantic heroin-taking thing. Then his luck ran out." Buckley's most revered idols were Fred Neil – who chose anonymity rather than exploit the success of 'Everybody's Talkin'' – and Miles Davis, both icons and both junkies. "He lived on the edge, creatively and psychologically" says Lee Underwood. "He treated drugs as tools, to feel or think things through in more intense ways. To explore."

One planned exploration was a musical adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel Out Of The Islands and a screenplay of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. Of more immediate consequence, Buckley had won the part of Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's film Bound For Glory. The role might have restored him to public consciousness as well as financial independence, but in the end it went instead to David Carradine.

Buckley was still up for playing live. After a short tour culminating in a sold-out show at an l,800-capacity venue in Dallas, the band partied on the way home, as was customary An inebriated Tim proceeded to his good friend Richard Keeling's house in order to score some heroin.

As Underwood tells it, Keeling, in flagrante delicto and unwilling to be disturbed, argued with Buckley: "Finally in frustration, Richard put a quantity of heroin on a mirror and thrust it at Tim, saying, 'Go ahead, take it all', like a challenge. As was his way, Tim sniffed the lot. Whenever he was threatened or told what to do, he rebelled."

Staggering and lurching around the house, Buckley had to be taken home, where Judy Buckley laid him on the floor with a pillow. She then put him to bed, thinking he would recover; when she checked later, he'd turned an ominous shade of blue. The paramedics were called but it was too late. Tim Buckley was dead.

"I remember Herb saying Tim had died, and we all just sat there," recalls Bob Duffy, Buckley's old tour manager. "It wasn't expected but it was like watching a movie, and that was its natural ending."

"It was painful to listen to his records after he died," says Linda Gillen. "I remember how vibrant he was. He had that same lost alienation as friends who had committed suicide. He was smart, wonderful, mean nasty, kind, racist, and a loyal friend, all kinds of contradictions. A true original."

"When he died, I took a week off," remembers Joe Stevens. "He was special – an innocent in an animal machine."

IN 1983, IVO WATTS-RUSSELL of the 4AD label had the inspired notion to marry the vaporous drama of the Cocteau Twins to Buckley's 'Song To The Siren'. Punk's Stalinist purge was over, and the result was a haunting highlight of post-New Wave rock, launching both This Mortal Coil and Buckley's posthumous reputation.

Before he died, Buckley had been planning a live LP spanning the various phases of his career. Sixteen years later Dream Letter was released to great acclaim. "Nobody would have listened before," reckons Herb Cohen. "Things have their own cycle, usually close to 20 years. You have to wait."

"He knowingly compromised his fierce artistic ideals, but his gut feeling was that he'd get more freedom later," says Larry Beckett. "If he'd gone into hiding for 10 years, no end of labels would have recorded anything he wanted. Things do come around."

"He was one of the great ballad singers of all time, up there with Mathis and Sinatra," believes Lee Underwood. "He would have pulled out of his youthful confusion, expanded his musical scope to include great popular and jazz songs. Tim Buckley didn't say 'I am this, I am that'. He said, 'I am all of these things'."

© Martin Aston, 1995

[mywifeleftme]

53: Camp Lo // Uptown Saturday Night

Uptown Saturday Night Camp Lo 1997, Profile

There’s an old Donald Glover bit about how people who rave about ‘80s hip-hop need to go back and actually listen to it, because it’s mostly just guys saying shit like, (in a Melle Mel candence) “Well I went to the hat store todayyyy / and I got myself a hat / ha HA!” I think of ‘80s rap as equivalent to ‘50s rock: it’s raw and exciting stuff, but for the modern listener it’s bound to feel a little primitive because you’re hearing a genre before its techniques and technology have fully matured. And that makes the ‘90s hip-hop’s equivalent of rock’s ‘60s, the first decade when artists had a fixed foundation to build upon, and the genre exploded into a psychedelic variety of styles that has continued to expand to this day.

Camp Lo had as idiosyncratic and unprecedented a sound on their debut Uptown Saturday Night as Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast, Digable Planets, or the Beastie Boys did. Released in a year when Juicy Couture velour defined urban style, Camp Lo’s emcees were duded up like Blaxploitation-era pimps, spitting a thieves’ argot studded with references spanning 70 years of New York culture. Their beats, largely provided by DJ Ski, were sparkling boom bap that pulled as much from Roy Ayers as James Brown. According to Ski, Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba talked to each other in the same impenetrable slang they rapped in, bringing to mind the phenomenon of twin language:

Check the queen bee, Lady Ree digging Grace Check the place 3 o’clock. Shot? No, we ain’t Fret and cock, bring it in the paint? No such thing Flash the dynamite, sing my superfly to the Cleopatra in the casino with gold sugar Dig my harlequin and drench you in my Donald Goines (from “Coolie High”)

Short of discovering some remote enclave in the Bronx where people talk like this, it’s safe to assume Suede and Cheeba had developed a mutually-reinforcing linguistic bond, where (to pull a quote from that twin language story) “words are invented and abbreviated or restricted codes are used because full explanations are redundant.” Though there were a few emcees with more variable flows, nobody in the game sounded slicker than Camp Lo.

As fly as the rhymes are, Uptown Saturday Night is a producer’s showcase. Though he doesn’t get touted as frequently as Pete Rock, DJ Premier, or Large Professor, DJ Ski is as great a producer as New York has ever produced. Dusty literary journal The Kenyon Review, of all places, published a great (and uncredited?) piece on Ski’s beats for Camp Lo a few years back that’s worth reading. Here’s the writer on Uptown closer “Sparkle (Mr. Midnight Mix)”:

“Appearing at a time when boom bap beats were at their peak, the song has no drums, but somehow still has a very high nod factor. Extremely low in the mix are what sound like the original drums, so low that they might only be audible because of headphone bleed in the vocal track. But it is really the flow of Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba that retains the rhythm of the original, heavily swung drums. The vocals thus carry a ghost rhythm propelling the track forward, even as the vibes and fluid, filtered bass and piano lines lazily rise and fall, cresting here, submerged there.”

Great shit. Uptown covers a lot of stylistic ground, though high-rolling party tunes are the order of the day, like “Luchini (This is It)” with an irresistible trumpet loop launching itself off a thwacking snare hit. Nearly every beat on the record is indelible, from the kaiju-sized horns of “Krystal Karrington” to the cooing, vibe-chilled “Coolie High” (a preview of Ski’s 2010s work on Curren$y’s classic Pilot Talk trilogy). And, on the warped Twilight Zone-sampling “Negro League,” Ski even seems to have an ear on the off-kilter underground sound El-P was creating with Company Flow.

Various forms of fuckery on the part of Camp Lo’s label conspired to prevent the band from following up on Uptown Saturday Night till 2002, and by then it was too late to recapture their former momentum. They’ve had sparks of inspiration in the decades since, but we’ll never know whether the magic of their debut would’ve been reproducible under better circumstances. Regardless, Uptown Saturday Night has a place among the greatest records of rap’s first golden decade.

53/365

[skin-quilt]

Here are the albums I listened front to back recently with my rating out of five. One is low, five is high. Ya dig?

12.10.24 No Cure - I Hope I Die Here - 5 Greylotus – Motherwort - 5

12.9.24 Blockhead - Mortality Is Lit! - 4 Blockhead - Space Werewolves Will Be The End Of Us All - 4 Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee - 1

12.5.24 Kings Of Leon - Mechanical Bull - 4 Atreyu - Paranoia Sessions - 1 The Doors - L.A. Woman - 5

12.4.24 Crywank - Just Popping In To Say Hi - 1 Ice Cube - Man Down - 4 Shante - The Bitch Is Back - 5

12.3.24 Lady Gaga - Harlequin - 1 Canibus - Can I Bus - 2 Fat Joe - Don Cartagna - 3 Tanya Tucker - TNT - 1

12.2.24 3rd Bass - The Cactus Album - 2 Haircuts For Men - Steam Slop - 4

11.27.24 Pornosonic - Cream Streets - 5 Kool G. Rap & D.J. Polo - Live And Let Die - 5 Black Milk - No Poison No Paradise - 1

[breckstonevailskier]

Title: “Get Happy” (Lady Gaga) Harley Quinn Cover by Robyn Adele Anderson Description: Why so serious?? 👻 I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews about the new Joker movie but one thing is for sure, Lady Gaga’s new album “Harlequin” slaps! Happy to see how many amazing colleagues of mine got to play on it. To pay homage, I’ve decided to put a little Harley Quinn spin on “Get Happy” which was both an ironic and iconic song choice for the trailers. Enjoy! 🖤❤️ 3 new albums and 4 new prints! https://ift.tt/utm8s9v For more videos, support me on Patreon! https://ift.tt/BdbtPGF Check out all my music on your favorite platform! https://ift.tt/ayuYKge Subscribe to my YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/user/AdeleRobyn Find me on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter! https://ift.tt/U9sLDJR https://ift.tt/MQ2opGK https://ift.tt/4gdIPXv https://twitter.com/robynadele The Band: Vocals — Robyn Adele Anderson Keys — Lecco Morris Bass — Charlie Himel Drums — Rossen Nedelchev Trumpet — Rafael Castillo-Halvorssen Trombone — Gina Benalcázar López - Mix and Master — Tom Jorgensen Audio — Amrish Mahabir Video — Sam Carrion Filmed at Smash Studios NYC Arranged by Robyn Adele Anderson All my videos are done live, using one take. “Get Happy” (Lady Gaga) Harley Quinn Cover by Robyn Adele Anderson YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6RDpATDukk

[nameincoming]

a couple years ago i was really fixated on designing these arboreal people who descended from lab rats but were spliced with like.... some serraninae and hypoplectrus species for. some reason (for funsies). inspiration fishies under the cut

harlequin bass (serranus tigrinus)

chalk bass (serranus tortugarum)

indigo hamlet (hypoplectrus indigo)

[candiceaof6-blog]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: G.H. BASS Sz 10 Women's Harlequin Waterproof Duck Boot Rain Boot Brown.

[j77m]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: G.H. Bass & Co.Men Harlequin Duck Boots, Olive Size 7.

[susangg9]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: G.H. Bass & Co. Harlequin Waterproof Duck Boots 6M.