Lee Underwood

Who is Lee Underwood?

Lee Underwood is an American musician and writer notable for performing on lead guitar with Tim Buckley for most of Buckley's career. Underwood appeared on all nine 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, Los Angeles Times. He served as the west coast editor of Down Beat 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.