Jeff Buckley Is The Real Thing

Village Voice, November 14, 1994
by Chris Smith

JEFF BUCKLEY IS THE REAL THING : a world-class rocker with an amazing voice who sprang from the coffeehouse culture of the East Village. Now, one step from the kind of success that helped kill his father, Tim Buckley, Jeff is being groomed by corporate fame merchants who are betting that he’ll be a legend soon.
With a debut record, Grace, that’s stunning in its virtuosity and emotional power, St. Mark’s fixture Jeff Buckley is following in the footsteps of his father, sixties legend Tim Buckley. But don’t tell him that.

Coffee. coffee. Jeff Buckley’s gotta have coffee. Hot, black, washing down a bargain Indian dinner on East 6th Street. Two quick cups.

Coffee. Jangling the nerves, speeding the late-night scribbles in his notebook, the one with the screaming death’s head on the black leather cover. From such coffeehouse jottings came the impressionistic lyrics on Buckley’s startling debut album, Grace.

Now the 27-year-old singer walks through the East Village in search of more fuel. Buckley is dressed like a poster-boy for the java-and-poetry-reading set: porkpie hat, over sized gray Kurt Cobain-meets-New England-grandpa cardigan, baggy homeboy black jeans with a silver wallet chain drooping down his left leg. There are two rings in his left ear and another one south of his neck – “I’ll never tell where,” Buckley says. He grew up in the suburbs of L.A., but fled four years ago and immediately felt in sync with New York’s bohemian scene.

“Herein lie the ghosts of Truman Capote and David Byrne’s Talking Heads,” Buckley says excitedly, his words taking on a free-verse lilt. “And the Ramones. And Bad Brains. And Ginsberg lives just down the way. There’s LaMonte Young. Even Ayn Rand and Jack Kerouac. And Robert Mapplethorpe! Penny Arcade is here. And disco and bathhouses and the oldest Jewish restaurant….”

His cultural tour dodges one looming spirit – his father, singer Tim Buckley, a downtown music hero of the late sixties. A few blocks from Jeff’s East Village apartment is the former Fillmore East, where Tim shared the opening-night bill with Janis Joplin; to the west, down Bleeker, is the Bitter End, the prototypical coffeehouse where Tim once sang.

Bopping down St. Marks Place, Buckley stops in front of Sin-e. Buckley spent a year in this tiny Irish coffeehouse, playing for tips and turning himself into an artsy minstrel – and setting off a music-industry feeding frenzy for his talents. “I just wanted to be a chanteuse,” Buckley says mischievously.

He glances through Sin-e’s plate glass. A promotional blowup of his Grace album cover stares back fro the wall inside the cafe. The photo of a brooding Buckley is just a cardboard fragment of the Columbia Records marketing campaign designed to take him from coffeehouse darling to big-label star – without losing his hipster credibility.

It’s a tricky leap, and no one knows its dangers better than Jeff Buckley. Twenty years ago, the same difficult leap helped kill his father.

Coffee house culture has already launched artists into mainstream music: Most spectacularly, Lisa Loeb used the Reality Bites soundtrack as a trampoline to a record deal.

But Jeff Buckley is the real thing, the first world-class rock singer who’s learned his craft at Fez, Bang On, the First Street Cafe, Sin-e, and other smoky, experimental outposts of the folkie-beatnik revival. Buckley can howl with the bombast of Jim Morrison or tip-toe with the minor-key delicacy of Van Morrison. That he’s waifishly, dreamily charismatic doesn’t hurt, either. “If Jeff doesn’t have it all, he certainly comes very, very close;” Seymour Stein, the president of Sire Records and a master of finding talent below 14th Street – he discovered Talking Heads and Madonna. But he lost out this time.

Buckley’s acrobatic voice turns heads, but there’s another quality that connects with college-educated twenty-somethings: the naked, sometimes naive emotionalism of his songs. They aren’t baby-oh-baby numbers but textured tales of the heart, delivered with disarming, unfashionable openness. In concert, Buckley will wave his band to silence so he can whisper, without irony, “I love you” to the audience.

Rock is clotted with knowing, cynical bands: here’s a hunger for Buckley’s undisguised passion. It’s a passion not easily categorized as ecstasy or anger – but it flows through Buckley’s voice like some primal force. “I can overwhelm people with my feelings,” he says. “It’s been a problem of mine since I was a kid.”

It’s raining as we shuffle through Tompkins Square Park on our coffee quest. “I like this park,” Buckley says. “Iggy [Pop] is smart enough to live by it.”

Nothing in Buckley’s world is without a musical connection. Waiting for his cup coffee – chocolate-almond this time – inside the Life Cafe on Avenue B, he pounds the counter top in time with the Led Zeppelin tune blasting from the stereo. We take a table along the sidewalk, and Buckley seems to absorb and transmute every stray street noise. From a passing radio comes “I never knew love before…”; Buckley out-sings Dionne Warwick. Told that a review of Grace described him as “ululating,” Buckley shakes his head and demonstrates real ululation, belting out a quavering shriek worthy of a Greek fury.

Buckley says he decided early that “music was my true parent.” Certainly his experience with flesh-and-blood relations had been confusing. He was born during the short marriage of Mary Guibert, Panamanian by birth and a classical pianist by training, and Tim Buckley.

Tim Buckley began as an eccentrically talented folk singer, one of the first “next Dylans” on the sixties Greenwich Village scene. But he zigged into commercially disastrous, artistically stunning trippy new jazz, then zagged into some embarrassing white-boy rhythm and blues.

More ruinous was Tim’s drug use. He died of a heroin overdose in 1975 at the age of 28, practically penniless, leaving behind ten albums, a rabid cult following, and an 8-year-old son who never really knew him.

Jeff takes off his porkpie hat and cradles it, then balances it with great gentleness on his knee. “I have a hat because it’s teaching me responsibility. I have to keep it in my sight,” Buckley says softly, as if many things have disappeared from his view. Than he’s joking again. “Also, it’s saving my ass from getting a cold every time I come out of a gig.”

As a child, Buckley moved often, “depending on the money, or what man, or what opportunity my mom had,” he says. “I just put my stuff in paper bags. Unfinished business, it’s been my life.”

Even his name was unstable. “It used to be Scott Moorehead, until the time I was, I don’t know, 10. Kids at school call you stuff like Scotty watty doo-doo snotty, Scotty potty, Snot Dopehead. And I was sick of that. My mom had long divorced from my stepfather, and I said, ‘Who am I really, Ma?’ So I took a look at the birth certificate, and it said 'Jeffrey Scott Buckley.’ I said, okay – I’m choosing who I am.” He laughs. “Besides, it didn’t help matters any – Buckley, Buttlick, Fuckley….”

Lately, his name’s been a hassle again. Reviewers of Grace write that Jeff has inherited his father’s doe-eyed good looks (true), his achingly romantic sensibility (also true), and his father’s voice (wrong – Jeff’s was more ethereal). That the comparisons are made at all infuriates Jeff.

“Rock journalists are little boys who look at music as something like collecting baseball cards,” he says acidly. “And they like to see statistics and they like to see connections. It’s like the cabala; rock is the cabala. And it makes no light of anything. It’s just shit. It’s just copy.”

How badly does he want to be his own man? Clubs booking Buckley must sign a contract promising there’ll be no mention of Tim in their publicity. And recently, during a concert in Paris, Buckley says, “there were a couple of old hippies asking for Tim tunes. They started singing them like they were war chants, trying to get me to do them. So in response, I did an impression of Tim dying of an overdose. "That,” he says, “shut them up.”

Buckley’s East Village apartment – two narrow, shoebox-shaped rooms connected by a spiral staircase – is done in Young Intellectual Rock Musician Classic. Which means there’s no furniture except for an unmade bed; cluttering the floor are clothes, amps, and the works of Rimbaud, Rilke, and Kerouac; serving as a window curtain is a dark-green bath towel.

Buckley sweeps dozens of pieces of fan mail from the floor and sits down, swami-style, on an overstuffed pillow. His inky brown eyes stare out of an androgynous, liquidly sexy face – “I’ve got the Charles Manson thing where my face always changes,” Buckley says with a laugh, and it’s true: During the next hour, his face flows through Jim Morrison, Adam Ant, Steven Tyler, and Kristen McMenamy.

Words tumble out of Buckley in roly-poly, scabrously funny run-on sentences, as he discourses on God, women, and the adolescent shock of realizing Kiss was a scam. The same earnest sentimentality that makes Buckley’s music compelling can, in person, make him sound like a beatnik by way of Spinal Tap : “I dig having an all-access pass to my emotions,” he says at one point.

Buckley selects a coil of incense and lights it. Then he reaches for a vial of Tahitian sandalwood oil. “I like to anoint myself,” he says, rubbing the oil on his chest, neck, and underarms.

The sensitive-guy bit seems calculated at times, but Buckley did have an authentically bohemian youth. “I was pretty much raised on marijuana and rock and roll,” he says. This would have made Buckley popular almost anywhere else, but he went to high school in conservative Orange County, California. “I had long, long hair and weird clothes,” he says. “the 'prize students’ called me fag and beat me up.”

He took refuge in a wild range of music: the Smiths. Hendrix. Piaf. The Sex Pistols. Miles Davis. Patti Smith. Count Basie. The man Buckley considers his real father, Ron Moorehead, was an auto mechanic and his mother’s second husband; Moorehead turned 9-year-old Jeff on to Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.

It’s easy to hear Robert Plant’s influence when Buckley sings, and there’s a feeling of vaguely Middle Eastern mysticism in several tunes on Grace. But most of Buckley’s songs defy categories; they’re mood pieces floating from jazz to folk to rock, and they aren’t radio-friendly, meandering for six or seven minutes and glowing with odd instrumentation like harmonium and table. “Mojo Pin” is a tale of unrequited lust (“I was pining away for somebody, and I was high when I wrote it”). Buckley’s voice has a feminine shimmer on “Last Goodbye” before it pivots into a chugging blues sensuality.

Buckley bounces up and searches through hundreds of cassettes and CDs piled on his bedroom floor, pulling out other influences. “You’ve got to hear this,” he says, sighing as he grabs a cassette. “This is my Elvis.” From his boom box wails Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani who is king of Sufi Muslim devotional singers. A sound at once divine and orgiastic surges from the low-fi tape.

Buckley seems real, real gone: He sits cross-legged, with his hands propped on his knees, his thumbs and index fingers forming circles. As the Pakistani chant swirls, Buckley closes his eyes and rolls his head in time to the rhythm. Twenty minutes pass before he emerges from his reverie.

One night in 1991 at St Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights, an all-star roster of downtown musicians assembled to play Tim Buckley’s music: Elliot Sharp, Robert Quine, Syd Straw, Shelley Hirsch, Richard Hell. And the unknown Jeff Buckley, in his New York debut, walked away as the event’s star.

Buckley had noodled around in Los Angeles garage bands before moving to New York in 1990. Janine Nichols runs the arts program at St. Ann’s, and she offered Jeff a spot in the Tim Buckley tribute. Jeff wavered. He’d spent only one week with Tim, about two months before Tim’s death, and what he’d learned about his father since then left him deeply ambivalent. “But I’d always been angry about missing his funeral, and this was a way to say good-bye,” Buckley says. “I sacrificed part of myself to do it.”

Hal Willer, the avant-garde producer who organized the tribute, didn’t know what to expect when Jeff appeared for rehearsals. “But he just absolutely had it,” Willner says. “It’s definitely a voice from Heaven.”

Buckley stood out for other reasons. “There’s a certain kind of downtown attitude – you’re not supposed to show too much enthusiasm,” says guitarist Gary Lucas, who accompanied Buckley on two songs. “In the middle of all these cool people acting very cool was Jeff, who looked like an overexcited puppy.”

Afterward, Lucas asked Buckley to join his band, Gods & Monsters. Lucas says the group was on the verge of a record deal – until Buckley replaced the rhythm section just before an important date. The tension got worse when Buckley complained about Lucas’ standing near the front of the stage. “Jeff says, 'Even in the Rolling Stones, Keith stays behind Mick, ’ Well, excuse me,” Lucas says, “it’s been my band since 1989. I don’t stand in the back.” (Lucas and Buckley are on better terms now; two songs they co-wrote appear on Grace.)

Buckley went solo and began his apprenticeship at Sin-e, becoming “cyberminstrel guy.” In shows stretching to three hours, he assayed Edith Piaf, Alex Chilton, Mahalia Jackson, Ride, Mose Allison. “I wanted to slip into the skin of really great songs,” he says. “I wanted to put myself through a new childhood, discover the basics of what I do.”

Shane Doyle, the co-owner of Sin-e, watched Buckley’s search for an identity. “I believe that anybody who ends up in New York isn’t quite right, anyway,” Doyle says in a thick Dublin brogue. “They come to New York, put themselves in little boxes, and try to build a new family. Jeff gets up onstage, and he doesn’t know what’s going to come out, but it’s his way of trying to deal with it. The emotions are all on the surface when he sings.”

On bad nights, Buckley’s human-juke-box act would produce a mere $30 in his tip jar. More often, he’d provoke tears with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and ecstatic whoops with Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do.”

Ellen Cavolina, the booker at Fez, signed up Buckley as quickly as she could. “I see hundreds of people standing up there, just their little bad self and an electric guitar, and nothing happens, you know? When Jeff sang "Young Lovers,” it was absolutely the most moving thing I’d ever heard.“

A series of live, in-studio performances on college radio station WFMU intensified Buckley’s hot-bohemian credentials. Crowds for his Monday-night appearances at Sin-e spilled onto the sidewalk.

Soon long black limousines began lining scruffy St. Mark’s Place. "Clive Davis, Seymour Stein, the person who books Letterman, all these punters were showing up,” Doyle says. “Jeff shrank from the attention. He’d sing from back in the corner over there.”

He wasn’t completely repulsed, however, hiring a lawyer to handle the bidding. All of Buckley’s anti-star rhetoric made his choice of ultra-corporate Columbia a shock to his downtown friends. “Even if I was on Rough Trade [a small independent label], the pressures and the dynamics would still be the same,” Buckley argues. “I don’t know any record company that has a great reputation for building artists. I’m highly paranoid when it comes to this business.”

Columbia, Buckley says, has respected his desire to take it slow – “They’re not about to make me ice, ice baby.” Maybe – the company did allow Buckley an unhurried year to come up with material for Grace. But he’s also piling up a pretty substantial debt: Columbia has already bankrolled six weeks in a Woodstock studio, two American tours and one of Europe, plus a “documentary” on the making of the album and an EP recorded live at Sin-e. Two weeks ago Buckley began a 34-city tour that finishes with shows on December 17 at Irving Plaza and on December 18 at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken.

As part of its Jeff-is-a-serious-artist marketing strategy, Columbia loudly endorses Buckley’s refusal of a Gap ad and his rejection of magazine-cover offers. Regarding videos, there seems to be a slight difference of opinion.

“I hate MTV,” Buckley says. “They don’t care about me. They don’t care about music. They don’t care about songs. They don’t care about art. They don’t care about people. They don’t are about blood, life, dreams. And the average youth of America – those are the ones that shouted at me and beat me up. Why do I want to play for them?” That said, a clip for the song “Grace” started appearing on MTV’s alternative showcase, 120 Minutes, in October.

Don Ienner smiles down from the balcony of the Supper Club on West 47th Street. Ienner is 41, built like a Big Ten linebacker, and the president of Columbia Records, but everyone insists on calling him Donnie.

Milling and chattering below him are 1,000 key players in the alternative-music world: disc jockeys and programming directors from the hippest radio stations across the country. They’ve come from Seattle and Ann Arbor and Athens, Georgia, for the annual College Music Journal convention. And on this autumn night, the taste-making tribe of ripped jeans and nose rings has gathered to check out Ienner’s newest acquisition.

“This is a big show,” whispers George Stein, Buckley’s lawyer and co-manager. “All the college reps are here. That’s the grass roots. Reach them, and….”

So very little has been left to chance. When Buckley flew in from Paris the day before, he wasn’t allowed to return to his apartment, where the phone might wake him up. Instead, management kept him secluded in the Hotel Macklowe. Ienner’s even gone grunge for the night, sort of: He’s wearing a white flannel shirt with green stripes. The shirt is so crisply its cuffs could slice paper.

Buckley’s performance isn’t quite as neat. The sound mix muddies the complex, jazzy arrangements of his three-man band. But Buckley’s voice is nothing short of thrilling. He takes the stage without any introduction and proceeds to quiet the room with a low, wordless wail. Slowly he builds the pitch to a sharp falsetto, sweet and soulful. Buckley then jiggles the note like a temperamental door lock. Vibrato shakes his jaw from side to side. He swoops from Indian raga-inflected curlicues to sensual, Billie Holiday-ish longing.

In the last row of the audience, Issey Monk is trembling. The 21-year-old NYU student sings every lyric with Buckley. “Doesn’t he just give you goose bumps?” a girlfriend asks Issey; Issey displays her left arm, pebbled with excitement. When Buckley sings “All I want to do is love everyone,” Issey and friends fall to their knees. “He’ll be a legend soon,” she says.

After the show, Buckley hugs everyone in his dressing room, then dashes out onto West 47th Street, stopping to hug friends on the sidewalk. Finally he jumps into a cab. He starts punching the back of the driver’s seat. “This sucks!” he yells. He claims to be upset by the praise poured on him during his European tour. The adoration showed no sign of relenting tonight.

“It’s just insane!” he says. “I’ve had an album out for what, three weeks? I really don’t understand the attraction. I’m happy for it. But it’s just overwhelming.”

Buckley’s P.R. man, who’s in the front seat, turns around. “Maybe you should have made a stinky album,” he jokes.

“Maybe I should just accept it,” Buckley says. “But to go to Europe and people care – a lot. Loudly. Very strange.”

It must feel like a big responsibility, I say. “No,” he says. “It’s like being betrothed to a nymphomaniac. Who is the woman of your dreams.”

“Uhhhhh – that’s a problem?” “Yes,” Buckley says. “A nymphomaniac? Never satisfied.” He’d better rest up.