Sweet Surrender: Tim Buckley

Note: I hope I don't offend anyone with this post, cultural conventions being what they are, so different in every country.

When I was a kid we used to watch a TV show called The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

It was a cool show about a bunch of US Calvary soldiers led by the handsome Leutenant Rip Masters. Naturally the US Calvary Soldiers spent all their time fighting "Red Injuns" with the help of an alsation dog named, yes you guessed it - "Rin-Tin-Tin."

Like all good TV shows of that period (Book Him Dano! or Smith You've Done it Again etc) it had a catchcry. The catch-cry, which came from the show's little boy star (Rusty), was: "Go get him Rinnie!".
At the time Rinnie was usually catching a bank robber - or a "nasty Injun" - cause in those days all Native Americans were called "Injuns", and all "Injuns" seemed to be "bad uns"- and all bank robbers were caught by little boys with dogs.

Of course the big irony is that the Injuns, who had names like "Black Cloud", "Chief Running Horse", "Chief Red Eagle",  were often played by 'white men' - white men with fat paunches, white skin and white stripes painted on their faces. In fact, to be perfectly honest, now I read the names of indigenous Native American characters, they sound like heroes - which of course they were in real life.

You might be interested to know that the boy who played Rusty, was also in the movie Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye. He later went on to be a very good carpenter. (Out of interest, you can see Rusty in the very first image of this post - the nancy boy one one over on the far right, with his left arm docked below the elbow - minor drop saw injury).

Travel forwards in time, to a few years later in 'real life', when I've hung up my pop guns and I'm a bit older, about seventeen, and Rinnie has gone the way of all good children's soaps - and along into the vacuum (along with the Doors, Deep Purple, Stones) drifts a singer named Tim Buckley.

Buckley was rumoured by his record company to have a four octave voice. With this four octave voice, he sang such groovy songs as "Get on Top Of Me Woman" and ... err..... other seedy songs that currently escape what remains of my little grey cells.

Suprisngly Buckley's songs were often about sex and/or  drugs. Suffice it to say, they weren't the kind of songs you wanted your teenage daughter singing. Suffice it to also say that lots of teenage girls did sing the songs.

Not that I was a teenage girl, but I sang them as well - often when under the influence of non alcoholic apple cider. I sang them yes - but sadly for my neighbours not with the same elastic elan as Buckley - because I am unique in the world in that I have a 'no' octave voice.

Anyway, Buckley (like his son Jeff) died young - which is very sad. He was 28. He died from a drug overdose.

Why am I telling you this?

So you know he is a great singer. All great singers, by definition, die young. Of course some really bad singers, or even good singers with bad haircuts (eg I'm leaving on a jet plane John Denver) die young. So it's not a mutually exclusive club - by any means.

In his Album "Greetings from LA"  Buckley had a song called "Sweet Surrender" - which is what I thought of when I saw his weeks Illustration Friday prompt.

I always thought that "Sweet Surrender"  was about surrendering yourself to earthly pleasures - but in retrospect, on a wider scale, now I have studied poetry at uni for a while and can write 2000 word essays about absolutely nothing at all, I can see that "Sweet Surrender" has several  different layers of meaning.

Just like this post.

For example, if you observe the previous picture I have zoomed in on the face. And in the next pic, I have changed the viewpoint. Apparently you have to do that for picture books, to keep the kids interested. Not that this is a kid's book. Far from it. It's not even a kid's post. Though there are kids in the images.

In fact, I was going to give you the lyrics to Sweet Surrender, but on re-reading them nearly 40 years later they seem so trite - especially  when dissassociated from the voice.  I guess it just shows that it's all in the delivery.

Ahh shucks. I can't resist. Here's a few.

So this flim-flam lover boy

Found him a flamingo.

And his flamingo

Showed him how to tango.

And when they tangoed

It'd send their heart's a â˜flutter.

Teased him 'till he'd stutter.

Made him so young and tender.

Sweet to surrender

And so sweet surrender.

In sweet surrender.

Ahh, sweet surrender to love.

So you see, the song isn't just about little boys playing cowboys. It's also about flimflams (whatever they are), flamingoes, spanish dancing, cardiac murmers, speech defects, cooking steak, lolly addiction - and, above all, romance.

So with the word 'romance' I have to leave you... but before I do one l ast picture. I have been practicing my negative space. It's something that I am bad at - like being silent.

thanks so much for reading. :)

If your eyeballs aren't worn out you can read about Tim Buckley here.  There's a pic of him on that web page and you'll see that, as well as being a fine singer, he had cool side levers.

By the way, please click the pictures in this post to m ake them bigger. :)