(guest blogged by Howie Klein)
In 1967 I was just a kid, booking concerts at my college, State University of New York at Stony Brook. I had befriended The Doors the year before at Ondine, a small club where they played for a month while their first album was being mixed. I paid them $400 to play at my school. Around the same time I found these 3 cool guys-- Jackson Browne, Steve Noonan and Tim Buckley-- at a Velvet Underground show at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and they came and hung around the campus for a while. I asked Tim, who had already released an album, to open for The Doors. It was a great concert and the last time I saw Buckley or Morrison. They both died young, although Buckley had a son, Jeff, also a great singer, who also died young.
Tim Buckley's voice is stunning and people couldn't figure out if his music was folk or jazz or rock. I want to play you one of his better known songs, "Song To The Siren," although the reason it's well-known is because other artists have covered it-- like Robert Plant and the incredible version by This Mortal Coil-- and because Buckley somehow wound up performing it on a Monkees TV show episode in 1968:
