Melody Maker: August 27, 1994
SCOTT MOORHEAD was just five years old when he fell in love for the first time. At an age when most of us were still sticking bogies under the classroom desk, grappling with the challenge posed by shoelaces and learning to excuse ourselves from school dinners by secreting the worst excesses (brussel sprouts) into the pockets of our shorts, young Scott was already intent on carving up hearts.
"Her name was Blythe Elliot and I would ache for her just to come through the door," he says, and his eyes twinkle at the memory.
"I drew pictures of dinosaurs for her on a chalkboard. My mother and her parents had the foolhardy notion for me to go over and spend the night at her house. I remember golden music played in my ears when they suggested it. There was a kind of pale eroticism about it. We'd been playing all day. She had a big brother in the next room who was shooting at the walls with his dart gun like a f***ing psycho. I was staring at him and it was like 'Hi, way to go'. And she was like...I just adored her.
"And I kissed her on the elbow and she said, 'stop it'. Then we had a little adult peck on the lips. Then that night when we'd taken a bath and we had our jammies on and we were ready for bed, I remember us walking in a circle together with my arm around her shoulder. We walked around three times, all the time talking, and then we stopped and we kiss. Then we walked around and again and kissed again. And that's what lovers do. They go walking, then they stop and kiss. Then they walk and talk some more, then they stop and kiss. A few weeks later I had to move away. That was my first heartbreak and it was long."
I WONDER if Blythe knew what she lost that day. I wonder if she ever found out that eight or so years after their innocent tryst little Scott Moorhead reverted to the name on his birth certificate Jeffrey Scott Buckley. By now he was getting pretty good on his grandmother's guitar, the one he found soon after being hauled away from Blythe. Would she, if she scanned the review pages of the US and UK music mags, recognize this Jeff Buckley as that Scott Moorhead who stole her heart all those years ago. How would she curse fate when she saw how words like "Immaculate", "Irresistible", "Startling" and "Fascinating" were being used to describe his debut album, "Grace"-an album created with as much care as he used to draw those dinosaurs for her when they were both just five. How deeply would she fall in love again when she played the album, how confused yet entranced like all of us she'd be.
Like us, she'd wonder how something so dazzling can be so organic, so innocent one moment so grindingly sexual the next, and how choirboy-sweet its protagonist soothes us only to roar like a savage when we think we're safe in his lyrical embrace. Like us, she'd glow for days. Poor Blythe.
Or maybe...not.
"YOU have beautiful nails," Buckley whispers, flirting with a waitress in the way only the outrageously attractive can. At a sage 27, he exudes that stereotypical wonderlust seemingly mandatory for Californians. We're in an Ethiopian cafe, a few doors down from the Black Cat, the Washington club where Jeff and his band are playing tonigh.
In between trying to explain the concept of "all-tones" by bashing away at every piece of crockery on the table, he's telling me how as a kid, he'd steal into abandoned buildings and scream, just to hear his voice echo all around him. Jeff Buckley's scream is but one weapon in a formidable arsenal. Later, much later, he'll tell me that a scream is "the only noise someone can make when they're crying. You can't talk if you're crying, but you can scream and say all you need to say." Recalling a little more of his youth, he continues.
"I really identify with that book 'Geek Love'. It's a lot like my family, the way we moved around all the time and how things were so freaky. My mother was into the metaphysical study called Escatology. My friends would all come over and because they all had enormous guilt complexes it would be easy for them to become born-again Christians. They'd give me all their records saying, 'here take them, they're the devil's music!' I mean, what can you do?"
Buckley's eclecticism is not the sort however that merely comes from having a big record collection. It's more disengaged than that, surely approaching a peak early on with his enormously strange cover of Van Morrison's "Young Lovers Do" on the recent "Sin-e" EP and surpassing itself any number of times on "Grace". His attitude to sound and on what constitutes "music" is rewardingly wayward.
"Music is something you do not control," he explains, "just like you do not control life. All you can do is understand its nature and its relationship to you. All you control is your will to let go. The rest of it is how you feel underneath."
All this of course was the rage when Paganini was the toast of the town. It's just that we seem to have forgotten it somewhere along the way.
At the Black Cat, before a Saturday night crowd more into getting pissed than possessed, Buckley's voice wails and swoops then mutters madly to itself for nearly 15 minutes before the crowd's attention is gained and the teasing opening chords of the sleepy racial ballad "Mojo Pin" flutter into the room and his fan club grows by another 300 or so. The effect is mesmeric. From here, unimaginably, it gets even better. If only there was room.
These are Jeff's first shows with the band who play on "Grace". Mick, Matt and Michael had seen his solo shows and literally begged to join him. They're perfect for the music.
"Dream Brother", (the final track on "Grace" and the one with the lyric, "Don't be like the one who made me so/Don't be like the one who left behind his name/Cos they're waiting for you like I waited for mine and nobody ever came") is introduced with an explanitory, "this is not who most people think it's about."
JEFF Buckley had no dad but he had a hell of a mum. It's her influence that can be felt breathing and dancing through the most beautiful songs on "Grace". Jeff's natural father, Tim, up and left as soon as Jeff was born. He OD'd and died in 1975. Jeff met him for the first and last time just two months before. Singing in the car with his mother, a classically trained pianist, is Jeff's first musical memory. It's her these lazy pipe-and-slipper critics with their Sixties CD reissues should be citing, not someone who bounced him on his knee for five minutes when he was still dribbling all over himself.
"He wasn't a bad father he just wasn't raised right and this life, is insane."
He didn't have the emotional capacity to deal with a love affair and being a musician?
"Apparently not. Especially not a child, so he just split. But there is a real exquisite insubordination in just being a woman that I think I got in touch with early on. My mom taught me so much, stuff that I'm actually only finding out now.
"As far as my dad's situation goes, I've become a better person from being able to be organically un-attached from it. It's a pointless comparison to make. It's not a key to my work or my intentions."
THE Sixties of course, so the story goes, died at Altamont. As we speak, however, just down the road, those good old hippies at Pepsi are trying to re-live the memories with Woodstock '94 the merest mention of which provokes a wonderfully vitriolic attack from Jeff that you've no doubt read on this week's news pages. One basic premise comes from it-in the words of one of Jeff's labelmates who was greeted in his day with similar critical fervor: you shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.
"It's important to know the difference between real life and an IV going into your brain. It's important to know that life is going on around you, you have to gather the knowledge and nutrition from your everyday hours. You can't depend on MTV for your beauty. You've got to make your own life. You can't leave it up to leaders. Jesus, JFK, Kurt Cobain they all got f***ed up. Kurt didn't feel loved or maybe he didn't recognize it. But it won't ever happen with a leader, independence has to come or you'll die. You'll end up like someone's puppet and you'll be gone like a chump before you're 30."
"Grace" is out now on Columbia. Jeff Buckley appears on the Maker stage at Reading Festival on Sunday, August 28
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