Lee Underwood obit

Tribute to Lee Underwood, 1938 – 14 July 2026

 He was not on the list.

GARY STEEL pays tribute to Lee Underwood – Tim Buckley guitarist, music journalist, poet – who died last week.

Google kindly concocts a daily itemised list of musician obituaries for me. This might sound morbid, but the musicians I grew up loving are dropping off like flies. I would have expected to see a long list of obituaries for Lee Underwood, who was a significant figure in both music and music journalism, but it hasn’t yet happened.

Lee was known primarily for providing electric guitar accompaniment for Tim Buckley, an incredible singer-songwriter from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s who also seems to have become something of a footnote in the culture wars of the 2020s. That’s a great pity, because Tim Buckley, who died prematurely at 28 from an accidental heroin overdose in 1975, did something that no other music artists did in creating a body of work over nine studio albums between 1966 and 1974 that evolved from folk-rock to folk-jazz to freak-jazz-improv to sexy funk, all the while developing his artistry and cultivating a vocal prowess that is still unchallenged.

And the unseen force that nurtured and cultivated and then accompanied and collaborated with Buckley was Lee Underwood, a guitarist who joined the singer for his very first, self-titled album of naïve folk-rock songs and stuck with him through the introspective, uncharted waters of Happy Sad, Blue Afternoon, Lorca, and possibly the best album ever made by anyone in the rock era, Starsailor (1970).

But this is about Lee Underwood, not Buckley, right? Well, Lee’s subsequent wanderings are inevitably overshadowed by both the beauty of what he created with Tim and Tim’s tragic death. The thing about Lee’s Buckley years is that Tim’s musical curiosity and waywardness may never have been piqued had it not been for Underwood, whose knowledge of jazz and avant-garde history wasn’t to be sneezed at, and who introduced much of the music that inspired him to the young singer-songwriter.

And Lee wasn’t exactly a slouch at guitar, either. While straddling blues, folk and jazz, he was never the kind of player that set out to impress, but his lines formed a structural backbone to Buckley’s songs that created mini-melodies in the gaps between Buckley’s fantastic, extreme ululations. His is mostly a mellow-toned exposition that provides a calm centre over which Buckley hollers, although on Starsailor, he really rips. Buckley himself strummed 12-string acoustic guitar, but it was Lee who tailor-made his guitar sonics to suit Buckley’s evolving style, from the standard jangle of that first album to the hollow-bodied sound of those intimate jazz-folk albums through to the sonic extremities he navigated, along with Buckley, on Starsailor.

It must have been hard for Lee to find a way forward after he extricated himself from Tim and went off to do his own thing. He even came back for a short time in 1973 but quickly decided that Tim’s new funky direction, which involved session musos with a very set agenda and aesthetics, wasn’t for him.

Later, Lee did an extraordinary thing. He got a gig at jazz magazine Downbeat, where he was the West Coast editor from 1975 to 1981, and later, he wrote for a number of publications, including the real famous ones like Rolling Stone and Billboard.

And in the 1980s, for some time he found happiness with his partner, who also sadly died too young. During this time he became involved in the new age music genre and produced several albums, including the recently reissued California Sigh (1988), an album that sounds curiously hip in 2026.

By the late ‘90s, Lee was enmeshed in a big project: writing the biography of Tim Buckley, Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered, a book that glowed with his journalistic skill, intelligence and humility, and in which he told the story of their often painful journey together with a great deal of love for his late, lamented friend.

This century, Lee turned yet another corner, with a new passion: poetry, and there he was prolific. He published four books of verse.

I knew him as a frequent commenter on a Tim Buckley Facebook page, on which he would reply graciously to questions from fans. I was thrilled when I wrote an appreciation for Starsailor in 2020 (you can read that here) that Lee praised my effort, and we had a brief but meaningful email exchange.

There’s a lot more to say about Lee Underwood, but I’m still can’t quite imagine him gone. I’ll update this page as things settle and I think of things to add, along with apt comments from others.

If you get a chance, take a listen to Happy Sad, Blue Afternoon, Lorca or Starsailor, and you’ll hear just how keyed into Tim Buckley’s muse Lee was; so much so, that it’s hard to think of another collaborator that would have sounded right on those albums.