Sudden Jeff Cult

NME: March 4, 1995

 Practically an overnight sensation, and the man responsible for last year's intense, soulfully seductive Grace album, is JEFF BUCKLEY a bonafide sensitive, wracked artiste-or just a spoiled white pin-up boy singing counterfeit blues? AMY RAPHAEL makes a French connection to find the man behind the management.

The singer sits distractedly on his tour bus. He drops a lump of sugar into a plastic cup, stares solemnly into it then stirs the black tea with unnecessary vigour. He takes a sip, winces as he burns his tongue, lifts an armpit, sniffs, and looks up.

  "Do I smell?" he asks.
  It's unpleasant being on the road with a "bus full of boys," he explains, making some joke about unwashed underwear. Then he gazes out of the window, his face taking on a blank, distant expression.

  HALFWAY THROUGH a European tour, and Jeff Buckley-one of the most feted new stars of the past two years-is wired, ill at ease and seemingly incapable of turning on the charm. He is also, in spite of his BO obsession, very pretentious. Once, people looked into his eyes and found a disconcertingly intense stare which convinced them Buckley was for real.
  Today, those same eyes are passion-free, empty. After Grace successfully presented itself as one of the most seductive and soulful albums of last year, it's crushing when the realization dawns that perhaps you've been had. That Jeff may, after all, be nothing more than a faker.
  Initially, excuses buzz around your head: Jeff has experienced almost a year of attention for Grace, and surely all the acclaim, the fuss must eventually become exhausting, the media circus monotonous. But this isn't like dealing with a tortured artiste; there is little to show that this is a rock star sensitive enough to be self-destructive because he can't deal with the artifice of the music business.
  There are too many dollar signs behind too many dull eyes and too much corporate behaviour...From, for instance, his management, who seem to be doing so much to protect their precious client that they will barely co-operate with us to ensure there is enough time or opportunity for the interview and photos.

  THE BUCKLEY tour bus is parked outside a venue a few kilometres outside Toulouse, in south-west France. It's a warm afternoon and guitarist Michael Tighe sits by the river reading a book. The band has driven overnight from Paris, where they did national press and made a video for the upcoming single "Last Goodbye." While drummer Matt Johnson and bassist Mick Grondahl wander around in the sun, Jeff remains on the coach.
  Jeff's tour manager says that Jeff will be doing the photos in the dressing-room, a dark, featureless space underneath the stage. The photographer asks if there is an alternative and is eventually directed to a dingy living-room above the venue with a dark green sofa in it. The tour manager, toying with the four pens hung around his neck, insists that Jeff can't have his photo taken outside-not even for a rapid five or ten-minute session.
  "It's his voice," he explains, looking up from beneath his baseball cap. "He can't go outside because of his voice."
  Back on the bus, Jeff fetches a packet of Marlboros and searches in vain for a light...

  THE FIRST interview ends abruptly. After less than an hour, the tour manager appears out of nowhere and says it's time for Jeff to leave the safety of the bus to soundcheck. Jeff says "whoopee," talks for a further minute, suddenly stands up and announces he's "gotta go." He flashes a grin, says was a "nice" interview and wanders up to the back of the bus for a shirt to put over his white vest.
  Inside Le Bikini, an ugly metal and breeze block building with an 800-capacity, Jeff saves his voice for most of the soundcheck, playing Led Zeppelin riffs on various guitars. Then he opens his mouth and sings and extended version of "Mojo Pin" with his eyes shut.
  Outside, dusk is approaching. The tour manager reappears and scowls when asked once more if, please, would Jeff just spend five minutes-five minutes-standing by a wall adjoining venue and have his photo taken and then, perhaps, do another, short interview. Tension mounts. The tour manager hides his eyes under the baseball cap, reaches for his pens and sighs. Jeff is upset. He feels a certain negativity coming from us. This is confusing; he hasn't even been introduced to the photographer yet. Why did he say it had been a "nice interview"?
  It is growing darker. The tour manager ignores our blank faces and says with a pained look that he'll ask Jeff about coming outside for five minutes and having another 20-minute talk. It's dark and the soundcheck ends after over an hour. A light is set up outside and Jeff appears, wrapped up in a leather jacket, and an acrylic scarf. It's not cold, but he looks frozen. His eyes are dull and his face expressionless, until, gradually, he begins to respond to the photographer. By the time he is lounging on the green sofa in the upstairs flat, Jeff has warmed up, but there is nothing of the tender, unrestrained passion which drew people into "Grace".
  At the start of the second interview, Jeff is flicking through a French magazine which has cartoon pictures of Beck, Liz Phair, and himself on its cover below the question: "Does the future of rock belong to these Americans?" He claims to have said nothing which even hinted at the "negativity" alluded to by the faithful tour manager. God only knows who's protecting who.

  IT IS tough fighting off the feeling of disappointment, especially when Jeff refuses to play the interview game. Tonight's venue is oversold by 200 tickets, Grace is still selling well in France, and his face stares out of numerous national and local magazines. Why does he suppose the French have gone for him in such a big way?
  "Ask a French person," he shrugs and then takes his time to expand. "Our audience is always mellow and normal. It's not a praise that extraordinary; we happen to give them something they want. It's not anything like, 'You're a young, strapping rock god,' which I'm not. They just enjoy having Grace in their houses."
  Of course, music rarely exists in such simple terms. Jeff may have seemed like a natural born star to the major label which eventually signed him -- he moved from California to New York in 1990 and began to explore the folk circuit there. After a while, he secured a solo residency at a small club in New York's East Village in 1992 and 1993, where he attracted increasingly devoted audience and heightening record company interest, culminating in Big Cat releasing the Live at Sin-é EP. But, without wishing to suggest a sinister marketing plan, Columbia also inevitably recognised his dual appeal.
  Being the son of the folk-rock cult legend Tim Buckley, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 1975, undeniably this made Jeff a curiosity. Those who revered or even just remembered Tim Buckley wondered if Jeff would have the same distinctive voice; could he use it as an instrument as his father did?
  But for those who had barely heard of Tim, Jeff had something else immediate to offer: babe appeal. What have variously been described as a "cherubic" face, "liquid brown eyes and ski-jump cheekbones" and Johnny Depp/Matt Dillon "film star good looks" have helped attract a younger audience who may have otherwise ridiculed someone whose album includes a Benjamin Britten song.

  Jeff counters the father angle by emphasising their tenuous relationship.
Tim walked out on Jeff and his mother when he was six months old, and only met him again for the first time just eight or nine days before he died. He performed one of his father's songs at a Tim Buckley tribute show in New York in 1991, but now fiercely empathetic that his success is entirely his own, and nothing to do with a paternal legacy. He's equally unwilling to acknowledge any image agenda.
  "Tim Buckley being my father is not my legacy," he says flatly. "It wasn't bestowed on me, ground zero. I'm sure it has opened doors, but I have never walked through them. Most of the crowd is made up of people who come to like the music for what it is. If people come to see me because of who my father was, or because they think I'm a pin-up, then the joke is on both of them."
  Jeff was born Jeffrey Scott Buckley 28 years ago, but his mother called him Scott Moorhead after Tim left and she remarried. When he was old enough, Jeff found his birth certificate and decided to take his original name.

  If he had known that the name Buckley would prove to be something of a stigma, would Jeff still have taken it?
  "Probably, it's my rebellious nature for people to take me for what I am, without compromise. The worst thing to have done would have been to change it."
  Accusations of patronage and image marketing may niggle him, but it's only when the F-word is mentioned that Buckley bristles visibly. 'Fake,' he claims, is not a concept he can relate to.
  "I don't want to play white blues; blues is blues, soul is soul. Music is...just human beings, really. I couldn't go on stage and simply go through the motions, because I'd rot from the inside. It's like asking 'Am I capable of faking my orgasms?' Why hit your dog? Why fake an 'I love you'?
  "Angst may be a recent journalistic buzzword, but all emotions have always been around. There are bands which you know are self-consciously angst-ridden, but they'll be one flavour 'til they drop. If all someone sees in my music is angst-or fake angst-then that's their funeral. Enjoy your next eight hours with MTV."
Jeff wants it known that his music touches people.

  "There was a boy in Seattle who didn't want to live any more. Not that my album saved his life, just that he felt completely out of place with everyone, and when he heard Grace it dawned on him that lots and lots of people were like him. And that there is a language which exists, which can speak instead of being silent all the time. It was a very austere letter. My pet name for him was 'The Kid Who Felt Nothing'."

  JEFF'LL TRY and convince you he doesn't have an agenda, that he can't be faking it because he's been there: he has sunk low, very low. He has made music the one constant in his life--his mother's nomadic spirit resulted in a childhood spent being shunted from one California school to another and while he was bullied as the new kid in class, he would seek solace in The Beatles, Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz Soundtrack, Mahler's Second Symphony and the Smiths.
  He made music his "best friends" and joined his first band in 1980. But there was a point in his life when nothing could make him want to get out of bed in the morning.
  It was in the mid to late '80s and Jeff was living in Los Angeles, reaching the end of his teens. One day he got up and burned all of the stores and "vomitous" poetry he'd written since he was a kid. When he talks about that time now, sitting on the tour bus with the sun falling on his face, there is a flicker of life in his eyes.
  "I hated what I'd been writing. I hated myself. I was depressed. It was about four months before the riots. Burning all that stuff was actually a big mistake....but sometimes you've got to do something that matches the hurt."
  He's reluctant to be more specific.
  "There were lots of personal things...I rotting from the inside, I was dying. I don't know why. I didn't feel like anything was possible. I had a crappy job...I didn't play guitar or sing. Everything was a chore. I was dead. Useless. All I had were basic dreams, nightmares, sex dreams. I was a bachelor, a total ugly moron, an outskirts guy...sometimes things just creep up on you, and you've just got to sit and wade through them, like a f---ing period."
  Like a what?
  "Like a period. You know, there's nothing you can do, you just feel helpless and sick. Boom! Sometimes it last for three years."
  And when you have these extended "periods", do you wallow in the misery?
  "I can't really say I'm conscious of enjoying it, I just am in it. But I do enjoy expressing it, which some people would say was enjoying it. Nobody likes to feel like shit, but when you do, you have to do things which illustrate the way you feel. I know there's a whole contingent of art throughout history which has been made out of suffering, and that's awesome art. But it's not everything and it can be really boring-very self-centred."
  So, while he was suffering, Jeff kept on writing.
  "I was desperately trying to keep a narrative. But it turned very self-abusive. And, contained in that self-abuse, was a lot of grief. Then one day, I had to get out of Hollywood, so I took my station wagon to the beach in one of my temper tantrums. I went to all these cafes where young white college musicians were playing awful jazz with no soul. I thought 'This is what I am now.'
  "If you don't feel as though you're on the edge of a cliff all the time, or the edge of truth or just in love...you've got to feel. To feel happy, to know you belong somewhere. I was OK after that realisation. I drove home, put on my Fishbone and my Rollins Band and said: 'F---k you.' And I rote "Eternal Love" and "Last Goodbye." But it wasn't like I accepted myself-I still don't. It takes a long time."

  DURING THE second interview, Jeff's more lively, his mood swings more engaging. Yet it's still disrupted by the tour manager, who comes into the living room several times in 20 minutes to remind Jeff that dinner is ready, apparently not hearing Jeff telling him that "it's not worth eating".
  "He wants to get me out of your clutches," he laughs, but does what he's told and leaves.
  Between being summoned, Buckley vows that he is boring, that there is nothing interesting about him.
  "Except," he says suddenly, his face lighting up, "except that I was a Pretender for four or five minutes."
  A Pretender?
  "Yeah. When I played at the Garage (last September), the gig was chocked full of notables. The guy from Radiohead-I thought 'Creep' was great-Miki from Lush (Miki? At a gig?-Ed)-I loved their first album-and f---ing Chrissie Hynde. After the gig, which was really daunting, very electric, I went to the bar to get a Guinness and there was Chrissie Hynde with John McEnroe, asking if I'd like to go back to the rehearsal hall with her and Martin (Chambers) and Adam (Seymour)."
  "We started off playing Jimi Hendrix and Iggy Pop, then 'Tattooed Love Boys', 'Talk of the Town', 'Message of Love', 'Back on the Chain Gang'...then I went off for a piss and when I came back, they'd got off stage and were totally not into it any more. We hung out some more, then I went back to my boring little hotel room."
  For the first time, there is untempered excitement in Jeff's voice and his eyes are warmer. Yet, when he talks about his own music, the passion is somehow diluted-and the excuses begin to buzz around your head again. Perhaps he's lived with Grace for too long, perhaps because it's too close to him.
  But there's little chance to find out Just as Jeff's explaining what he meant when he once talked of some place he wanted to get to in music-"If I was to be completely lost in it, to be absolutely f---ed, totally smashed on music, what would it sound like?"-the moment is lost.
  It's the tour manager, with a timecheck...
  In the last few moments before he goes to dinner, Jeff talks about dreams.
  "I have recurring nightmares. In one, I'm in my bedroom in one of the many places I lived as a kid, doing my homework to my radio. Suddenly, the music starts to creep into this demonic howl. It becomes the most scary music you could possible hear. Then I get sucked into the floor and I can't scream. Then I wake up"-and what he sees as the purity of music ("It's better than trusting the sun or the ocean, because you can't pollute music. It always remains innocent.").
  As he says this, Jeff has wrapped his acrylic scarf round his neck and chin, his eyes are distant and his attention is on the living room door.

  A THOUSAND people cram into Le Bikini. They are hot and sweaty but Jeff looks at them and says, in his all-American way: "You all look very beautiful." The band hover in the background as he stands perfectly still in front of his mic and lets his voice flood out over the crowd. He croons, wails and howls through the "Grace" songs: drifting majestically through "Mojo Pin"; swirling high for the torch-song "Lover, You Should've Come Over"; rocking out for "So Real".
  Most of the crowd seem to know the songs, but they still look mystified, as if they're unsure how to respond. They stand as still as Buckley and clap politely after each song, but there's hardly the euphoric response often shown by French audiences.
  After an hour the band walk off, leaving Jeff alone on stage for his take on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". His body glistens under the stage lights and eyes are firmly shut as he gently picks his guitar and sings in a low, sobbing voice. It's indulgent and over-long, but the audience, at last, seem enraptured, looking up at him with something approaching awe.
  Clearly, he's got talent to burn. But it's hard to watch Jeff Buckley onstage and forget the empty eyes, the over-protective management and the ridiculous interview and photo set-ups. Having met the man behind the voice, it's easy to see the show as little more than a platform for his vocal gymnastics; impressive, for sure, but they quickly lose their mesmerising effect.
  Earlier, when asked about keeping the corporate and creative sides of music separate, he simply says this:

  "This doesn't hit me as a day-to-day job. There is always some newness. Being there, doing music with the guys, is such a non-literal, non-academic thing. It's great-anything you want, you can do. You can be a complete idiot."
  And if Buckley wants to be self-indulgent, there are plenty of people keen to indulge him. But there may come a time when having a great voice isn't enough. You can convince people that you're 'for real' for only so long.