Jeff Buckley: a cool and clever cat.
Tivoli, Dublin, January 14, 1995
By Bill Prince
Q, March, 1995
It's probably just as well that pop stars cannot be assembled at a pick 'n' mix counter, or there would be dozens of Jeff Buckleys already: the faultless lineage (son of troubled troubadour Tim-but you knew that already); a voice that leaves most other singers trailing in it's quiksilver slipstream; looks that would give the young Paul Newman a canter for his coinage; all gift-wrapped in the kind of critical acclaim that in normal circumstances, can usually be relied upon to take a hectic detour around such seemingly mutually assured seduction.
Paradoxically, the statistics are, on paper at least, less thrilling: Buckley's debut album, Grace, has sold a little over 30,000 copies in the UK since its release last August, and tonight's European tour opener at the medium sized Tivoli Theater would suggest only a relatively minor leap in stature since last Summer's 400 capacity Whelan's show.
Then there are those who will remind us that the same that at the same age (28 ), Buckley Sr was already dead having recorded eight albums of artistic affluence. Yet it's just this slow-burning buildup that seems to have got everyone so transfixed, evidenced by the countless low-key living room size gigs the solo Buckley has played over the last few years (documented on the four-track independently released EP Live at Sin-é), or the ineffable confidence that prompted him to assemble a band just three weeks before the recording of his major label debut. A debut, furthermore, that belies its stall-setting status to revel in its own joyous sweep, the sort of reckless daring that allows a clutch of idiosyncratic covers (Leonard Cohen, Benjamin Britten and after an anti-fashion, Elkie Brooks) to rub shoulders with swooning hymns to the fault-lines to which the path of true love must forever yield. Here, surely, was an artist for once seriously prepared to rattle the bars of his own, albeit gilded, cage...
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Buckley is proud of Grace, but shugs simply of its end-of-year-poll-winning positions: "There's no way you can predict the effect of an album." His is a cavalier attitude fueled by Marianas Trench-deep reserves of self-confidence. His own horizons are not hard to fathom: limitless would be the word that springs most likely to mind, if only for the way he'll take a simple enquiry after the health of his, frankly, hoarse voice: "Sometimes you have to hammer into shape. There's a balance between being protective with it and being wanton and brutish", or the way he'll essay a whole stream of theories that call upon Maria Callas, Robert Plant, and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell as witnesses to the debilitating effects of "high Cs and all that stuff. It's just fucking havoc". Buckley's equally sanguine about the possibilities that the steady growth of the Grace fanclub may well soon afford. Enormodomes must surely beckon.
" I love small places," he counters. "We can't really afford to do them right now, but in the future I'd really like to do, like residencies, two or maybe three nights in each city in really small clubs.
"The only way I can see changing a giant stadium into a really intimate space," he adds, "is by writing like Hey Jude where everybody knows it and it goes right through you. So the writing would have to change. But I like the environment of a small gig better. People come to clubs to drink and to be with friends; to get laid and fall in love, or maybe to forget and even get depressed. It's an emotional kind of place. But people go to stadiums to eat hot dogs and get beer and buy souvenir T-shirts. It's not the same thing."
Directly adjoining the tin-roofed playhouse (now showing: Happy Birthday Dear Alice, "a hilarious new comedy by Bernard Farrell"), The Tivoli'a consequently post Saturday night stage time of 1 a.m. does little to dissuade the hard-drinking denizens of Dublin. In a city where the cab drivers are as likely to be grooving to Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure as they are arguing along to talk radio, there's a little point drawing conclusions from the staggeringly heterogeneous crowd. Clearly music fans all, there is nevertheless a hard core at the front who loudly proclaim themselves to be disciples. That said, the unheralded arrival of Buckley and his band comprising old friends, only recently tested in environments like this (drummer Matt Johnson, guitarist Michael Tighe, and bassist Mick Grondahl-as unfamiliar with the ugly stick as their leader, it should be said) goes unnoticed until-house DJ finally silenced-the refusal of Buckley's amplifier to spark into life eventually draws gazes to the stage, eliciting the first of tonight's many "ooohs" as his taut, almost feral frame settles, unfazed by this potentially embarrassing false start, on the edge of the drum riser.
Power restored, the band launch into Dream Brother, the fabled paean to Buckley père, although according to its author concerning instead his close friend, ex-Fishbone keyboards and trombone player Chris Dowd ("I just wanted to sing about a man instead of a girl"). Immediately, Buckley's muzezzin wail is disturbing the rafters and the audience is already going hipswayingly ape shit at all this wobbly, warbling witchcraft.
So Real is just like the record, only louder: no mean feat considering the serpentine, voluptuous sound of the album and the strictly conventional line-up of two guitars, bass and drums upon which the Buckley voice is currently prostrated. So it is with The Last Goodbye and Eternal Life: the latter to all intents and purposes Helter Skelter recast with the metallic precision of grunge. This, and a "new one" What Will You Say (coincidentally written by the former Fishboning friend), point to a possible firming up of Buckley's predominantly eerie, edgy canon; signaling too, perhaps, a resolve not to be forever cast as the unkempt angel with the gossamer vocals.
Nor does Buckley limit himself to merely showboating with that flummoxing vocal range of his, instead often taking the very tenor of his voice and casting it off in all directions, his head shaking so violently as to raise doubts about the long-term effects the style might have on that blessed larynx.
Lilac Wine, the oddity in Grace's already oddball trio of covers, is, in stark contrast, delivered in such hushed tones as to be effectively drowned out by the audience "shhhhh"-ing the drinkers at the bar. Mojo Pin and Grace both rage with the vocal triumphalism of someone for whom failure seems to hold no special terror, while as if to counter these exertions (and prefaced with a warning "I'm nursing a cold"), the headily spiraling Lover, You Should've Come Over opens out from a smoldering, gravely register.
It's a little after 2 a.m. when Buckley returns alone for the solitary encore, finding the wide open spaces in John Cale's reading of Cohen's Hallelujah before, and, just as the voice is finally grounded ("I can't sing anymore") calling a halt to the proceedings with a graceful ark into the delighted crowd.
Upstairs afterwards, a phalanx of Euro rock hacks swiftly encircle the man in the mouldering fake fur coat and busily feed him Grace CDs to be autographed. Eventually the arrival of a close female friend offers an escape route into the night, which the shattered and coughing Buckley gladly takes. How much longer he'll be allowed such an easy exit from the clamoring corporate rock maw remains to be seen...
Tivoli, Dublin, January 14, 1995
By Bill Prince
Q, March, 1995
It's probably just as well that pop stars cannot be assembled at a pick 'n' mix counter, or there would be dozens of Jeff Buckleys already: the faultless lineage (son of troubled troubadour Tim-but you knew that already); a voice that leaves most other singers trailing in it's quiksilver slipstream; looks that would give the young Paul Newman a canter for his coinage; all gift-wrapped in the kind of critical acclaim that in normal circumstances, can usually be relied upon to take a hectic detour around such seemingly mutually assured seduction.
Paradoxically, the statistics are, on paper at least, less thrilling: Buckley's debut album, Grace, has sold a little over 30,000 copies in the UK since its release last August, and tonight's European tour opener at the medium sized Tivoli Theater would suggest only a relatively minor leap in stature since last Summer's 400 capacity Whelan's show.
Then there are those who will remind us that the same that at the same age (28 ), Buckley Sr was already dead having recorded eight albums of artistic affluence. Yet it's just this slow-burning buildup that seems to have got everyone so transfixed, evidenced by the countless low-key living room size gigs the solo Buckley has played over the last few years (documented on the four-track independently released EP Live at Sin-é), or the ineffable confidence that prompted him to assemble a band just three weeks before the recording of his major label debut. A debut, furthermore, that belies its stall-setting status to revel in its own joyous sweep, the sort of reckless daring that allows a clutch of idiosyncratic covers (Leonard Cohen, Benjamin Britten and after an anti-fashion, Elkie Brooks) to rub shoulders with swooning hymns to the fault-lines to which the path of true love must forever yield. Here, surely, was an artist for once seriously prepared to rattle the bars of his own, albeit gilded, cage...
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Buckley is proud of Grace, but shugs simply of its end-of-year-poll-winning positions: "There's no way you can predict the effect of an album." His is a cavalier attitude fueled by Marianas Trench-deep reserves of self-confidence. His own horizons are not hard to fathom: limitless would be the word that springs most likely to mind, if only for the way he'll take a simple enquiry after the health of his, frankly, hoarse voice: "Sometimes you have to hammer into shape. There's a balance between being protective with it and being wanton and brutish", or the way he'll essay a whole stream of theories that call upon Maria Callas, Robert Plant, and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell as witnesses to the debilitating effects of "high Cs and all that stuff. It's just fucking havoc". Buckley's equally sanguine about the possibilities that the steady growth of the Grace fanclub may well soon afford. Enormodomes must surely beckon.
" I love small places," he counters. "We can't really afford to do them right now, but in the future I'd really like to do, like residencies, two or maybe three nights in each city in really small clubs.
"The only way I can see changing a giant stadium into a really intimate space," he adds, "is by writing like Hey Jude where everybody knows it and it goes right through you. So the writing would have to change. But I like the environment of a small gig better. People come to clubs to drink and to be with friends; to get laid and fall in love, or maybe to forget and even get depressed. It's an emotional kind of place. But people go to stadiums to eat hot dogs and get beer and buy souvenir T-shirts. It's not the same thing."
Directly adjoining the tin-roofed playhouse (now showing: Happy Birthday Dear Alice, "a hilarious new comedy by Bernard Farrell"), The Tivoli'a consequently post Saturday night stage time of 1 a.m. does little to dissuade the hard-drinking denizens of Dublin. In a city where the cab drivers are as likely to be grooving to Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure as they are arguing along to talk radio, there's a little point drawing conclusions from the staggeringly heterogeneous crowd. Clearly music fans all, there is nevertheless a hard core at the front who loudly proclaim themselves to be disciples. That said, the unheralded arrival of Buckley and his band comprising old friends, only recently tested in environments like this (drummer Matt Johnson, guitarist Michael Tighe, and bassist Mick Grondahl-as unfamiliar with the ugly stick as their leader, it should be said) goes unnoticed until-house DJ finally silenced-the refusal of Buckley's amplifier to spark into life eventually draws gazes to the stage, eliciting the first of tonight's many "ooohs" as his taut, almost feral frame settles, unfazed by this potentially embarrassing false start, on the edge of the drum riser.
Power restored, the band launch into Dream Brother, the fabled paean to Buckley père, although according to its author concerning instead his close friend, ex-Fishbone keyboards and trombone player Chris Dowd ("I just wanted to sing about a man instead of a girl"). Immediately, Buckley's muzezzin wail is disturbing the rafters and the audience is already going hipswayingly ape shit at all this wobbly, warbling witchcraft.
So Real is just like the record, only louder: no mean feat considering the serpentine, voluptuous sound of the album and the strictly conventional line-up of two guitars, bass and drums upon which the Buckley voice is currently prostrated. So it is with The Last Goodbye and Eternal Life: the latter to all intents and purposes Helter Skelter recast with the metallic precision of grunge. This, and a "new one" What Will You Say (coincidentally written by the former Fishboning friend), point to a possible firming up of Buckley's predominantly eerie, edgy canon; signaling too, perhaps, a resolve not to be forever cast as the unkempt angel with the gossamer vocals.
Nor does Buckley limit himself to merely showboating with that flummoxing vocal range of his, instead often taking the very tenor of his voice and casting it off in all directions, his head shaking so violently as to raise doubts about the long-term effects the style might have on that blessed larynx.
Lilac Wine, the oddity in Grace's already oddball trio of covers, is, in stark contrast, delivered in such hushed tones as to be effectively drowned out by the audience "shhhhh"-ing the drinkers at the bar. Mojo Pin and Grace both rage with the vocal triumphalism of someone for whom failure seems to hold no special terror, while as if to counter these exertions (and prefaced with a warning "I'm nursing a cold"), the headily spiraling Lover, You Should've Come Over opens out from a smoldering, gravely register.
It's a little after 2 a.m. when Buckley returns alone for the solitary encore, finding the wide open spaces in John Cale's reading of Cohen's Hallelujah before, and, just as the voice is finally grounded ("I can't sing anymore") calling a halt to the proceedings with a graceful ark into the delighted crowd.
Upstairs afterwards, a phalanx of Euro rock hacks swiftly encircle the man in the mouldering fake fur coat and busily feed him Grace CDs to be autographed. Eventually the arrival of a close female friend offers an escape route into the night, which the shattered and coughing Buckley gladly takes. How much longer he'll be allowed such an easy exit from the clamoring corporate rock maw remains to be seen...
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