Lee Underwood

Lee Underwood (born 1938) is an American musician and writer notable for performing on lead guitar with Tim Buckley for most of Buckley's career.^[1] Underwood appeared on most of the albums Buckley recorded during his brief life, and on several posthumous releases, including Live in London. He appears on the DVD Tim Buckley: My Fleeting House discussing Tim Buckley's impressive artistic evolutionary development through five different musical phases – from folk, to folk-rock, to jazz, to avant-garde innovations, to dance-oriented popular music in which he merged all of his previous influences and concepts into an organic whole.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Underwood became an internationally well-known music journalist. He contributed interviews, essays, and record reviews to various notable periodicals such as Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and Los Angeles Times. He served as the west coast editor of Down Beat^[1] from 1975 to 1981.

He wrote and published Blue Melody:Tim Buckley Remembered in 2002, cited by Uncut music magazine as one of the year's ten best biographies. Earlier, in 1990, he co-authored jazz flautist Paul Horn's autobiography, for which he received the Crystal Award for Music Journalism from the New Age Music network.

Underwood's most recent book is Timewinds, a book of poetry published by Poetic Matrix Press in 2010. His site at leeunderwood.net includes several essays on music and musicians (including Tim Buckley), essays on philosophical issues, audio readings of many of his poems, and a full-length book of wisdom-word e-mails written to a host of recipients, entitled Diamonds in the Sky.

As a musician himself, Underwood has recorded three CDs – California Sigh (1988), a solo guitar work produced by synthesist Steve Roach; Phantom Light (2003), a solo acoustic piano recording; and Gathering Light, also a solo acoustic piano work, recorded in 2009.

Discography

with Tim Buckley

• Tim Buckley (1966)
• Goodbye and Hello (1967)
• Happy Sad (1969)
• Blue Afternoon (1969)
• Lorca (1970)
• Starsailor (1970)
• Greetings from L.A. (1972)
• Sefronia (1973)
• Look at the Fool (1974)

References