Happy Sad

Because there is an abundance of live and radio shows by Buckley in official release, this bootleg of European radio broadcasts isn't as valuable as it could have been, especially as all of the songs (mostly drawn from the Happy Sad/Blue Afternoon era) are available on legitimate albums. The sound is only mediocre, but all this aside, the performances are good and it's not a bad set of material. Side one has versions of "Gypsy Woman" and "Buzzin' Fly," both taken from a 1968 Danish radio show, and the arrangements are close to the jazzy kind employed on his Dream Letter: Live in London 1968 CD. Although the six songs on the second side are identified as coming from a 1970 Top Gear BBC broadcast, they too are similar in mood to Live in London. These sound as though they could have actually been recorded in 1968 (in an article in the Bucketfull of Brains fanzine, critic John Platt asserts that this was the year), since the emphasis is on acoustic singer/songwriter tunes with a jazzy tinge. ~ Richie Unterberger