Rock Star magazine, November, 1994
By Jean Marc Caimi
Contributed by Sai
Translated by me
There are difficult times for each of us. Jeff Buckley has already paid his personal pledge by facing a fatherless childhood. Now he can look to the future with an overwhelming debut album.
Little Scott Moorhead liked Blythe's parents very much. One evening when they had to go out, the child had heard them discuss the fact that he could have stayed with her. Those words were a kind of celestial music, the first that five-year-old boy would listen to in his life. The wait for that moment was sweet and childishly erotic. Scott was immersed in such a state of grace that he even forgot that he did not have a father and was behind the absurd role of the "little man" of the house. Even Blythe's sobbing brother, who had thrown his darts at the wall all afternoon, was fine with him. In those moments the greatest terror disappeared: that of having to leave all this again to go away, to follow a wandering mother ever happy with nothing. Three weeks later, Scott was in the car, headed to another city: from the beloved California he was gliding east. With his heart hollowed in his chest, melancholy, unable to cope with car sickness.
Scott is now 27 and has decided to adopt his father's name. He met him for the first time when he was eight years old, at Easter, for a period of nine days. Two months later, in June 1975, Tim Buckley died of an overdose of heroin and morphine. He was twenty-eight. Jeffrey Scott Buckley is now a boy prodigy and has distilled the controversial essence of his childhood and adolescence in the songs of his debut album, Grace, in steps of deep melancholy and overwhelming flashes of positive energy. Before reaching the lyrics, the emotions are immediately perceived, overflowing, with each passing. Before reaching the lyrics, the emotions are immediately perceived, overflowing, with each passing. Thanks to a voice that relies on an inimitable genetic heritage and manages to be first gently confidential, then an unreachable falsetto and finally detached powerfully. Grace uses a musical language that is independent of the lexicon, which does not speak to the head, rather, to a point at the level of the stomach. If you tie this record to a particularly dense period of emotions of your life, you would risk, listening to it after many years, to suffer the effect of opening a door of a 747 to 9,000 meters: to be violently sucked out of reality, for a long dive out of time. "It's like a guard at the gate of memory," says Buckley, "you can get the full experience of memory when you're completely submitting to your will ... You can be destroyed or marked ... you do not know ... it's like dying." His mother's hand, a classical pianist, seems to have lowered his personal accord on the disc, both in a metaphorical and in a prosaic sense. "She made me listen to everything from Charles Mingus to Gershwin", confirms Buckley, "I acquired my rhythmic sense from her, she comes from Panama and has also taught me to appreciate Latin music, I'm always a little bit behind to the beat, and it can only be because of her." Then there was the period in which Jeff's mother had given herself to the study of eschatology, a part of the theology that aims to analyze the ultimate destiny of man and the universe, and had infected the whole neighborhood. Above all the young friends of the boy, who, full of guilt, thought it was a great idea to become reverent Christians. So they fled to his house and gave him rock records saying it was stuff for the devil. "My mother put so many things in my head, they're coming out all now, one at a time." When he arrived in New York in 1991, Jeff was planning to become an actor. But the music kept echoing in his ears. "There has always been music," says Buckley, "it was my friend, my ally and my torment. I do not remember any moment she was not present. In another reality. But there was a period in which I stopped singing, from 16 to 19. I did it on purpose, as a kind of punishment or perhaps as a cure."
The young Jeff began to make his bones in the bands of the folk area of New York's East Village, to go out at the beginning of this year with his first work Live At Sin-E '(recorded precisely at the Cafe Sin-E', in area). This was followed by an EP, Peyote Radio Theater, with 14 minutes of Alex Chilton's "Kanga-Roo". Buckley, however, was determined to share his experience with other musicians, because "the best music comes out of a band, and even if I like Dylan's songs, there are too many aspects of music that can only be achieved with your band. You can reach a state of trance where what happens inside the human psyche is sung." The first to present himself to Buckley was bassist Mick Grondahl, who had seen one of Jeff's performances at Columbia University. "We played together, until late at night, we had a great time together." Then came Matt Johnson, on the drums, a musician with a great sense of the song-form, recommended to Jeff by his friends.The three tried together for four weeks before going in Woodstock studios to record Grace, so, working in the studio, they became a real band, assisted by the production of Andy Wallace (formerly for Soul Asylum) and by the collation of Karl Berger, who arranged together with Buckley the string parts: the way is of a subtle magic, to have an immediate confirmation just listen to "Last Goodbye". The first unsettling two tracks of the album were composed with Gary Lucas, ex-Captain Beefheart, already Buckley's stage partner. There are three covers: "Lilac Wine" by J. Shelton, "Hallelujah" by L. Cohen, recorded live, guitar and vocals, and "Corpus Christi Carol" by B. Britten. The musical influences, which are perceived in the music of Buckley, are those of a person with a boundless collection of records. A person who has lived and listened to music for a lifetime, and who does not intend to retrace any fashion of the moment. It draws on the great timeless music, perhaps the one of Van Morrison of the seventies, or as evidenced by his covers, from that of the Big Star of Chilton. "The music comes mysteriously from the inside, but the one that comes out has the name of a variety of characters" And so Buckley remembers the names of the musicians that always crowd his mind and who he loves to play live: "Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Smiths, I love Morrissey's words and Johnny's music, Edith Piaf, My Bloody Valentine, James Brown, Lush..." with Miki present in the front row at his London concert. Jeff continues to deny the influence of his father Tim on his musical training. But he also knows that it's just a way of protecting himself from the past. It is a lost love that Jeff sings in "Last Goodbye": "This is our last embrace...must I dream and always see your face?" And it is a love just as lost as that of Tim in "Once I Was": "Once I was your love, I was looking after your own eyes. Soon there will be another to tell you that I was just a lie. "
It's amazing how Jeff Buckley became a musician so far from his peers. It is difficult to think of a way to react to the vortex of our generation, which does not pass through the bitter and disconsolate guitar of people like Cobain or the angry rhymes of Public Enemy and Ice-T. Like a gigantic button uterus that welcomes all those who can not feel comfortable in the world they are in, music paradoxically standardizes its own members. Impressed with the same connotations, Jeff continued to express himself freely, guided by an ineffable guiding spirit, hidden by generational stratification. He did not try to win the battle against physiological degradation with the strategy he prefers today. That of attacking the enemy with a compact mass of people, who follow only one ideology, one mind. Looking for the impact effect, even if this is devastating for the troop itself. Buckley is more a solitary knight who has fallen among us from other times, who seeks salvation with his own unique and inimitable characteristics, starting from his own soul. "You can not depend on MTV to feed you, you have to live your life. You can not support others, all the leaders got fucked: Christ, Kennedy, Cobain. Freedom, you have to look for it with your strength. If you wait for someone to do it for you, you become a figurehead and you end up burning before you turn thirty."
By Jean Marc Caimi
Contributed by Sai
Translated by me
There are difficult times for each of us. Jeff Buckley has already paid his personal pledge by facing a fatherless childhood. Now he can look to the future with an overwhelming debut album.
Little Scott Moorhead liked Blythe's parents very much. One evening when they had to go out, the child had heard them discuss the fact that he could have stayed with her. Those words were a kind of celestial music, the first that five-year-old boy would listen to in his life. The wait for that moment was sweet and childishly erotic. Scott was immersed in such a state of grace that he even forgot that he did not have a father and was behind the absurd role of the "little man" of the house. Even Blythe's sobbing brother, who had thrown his darts at the wall all afternoon, was fine with him. In those moments the greatest terror disappeared: that of having to leave all this again to go away, to follow a wandering mother ever happy with nothing. Three weeks later, Scott was in the car, headed to another city: from the beloved California he was gliding east. With his heart hollowed in his chest, melancholy, unable to cope with car sickness.
Scott is now 27 and has decided to adopt his father's name. He met him for the first time when he was eight years old, at Easter, for a period of nine days. Two months later, in June 1975, Tim Buckley died of an overdose of heroin and morphine. He was twenty-eight. Jeffrey Scott Buckley is now a boy prodigy and has distilled the controversial essence of his childhood and adolescence in the songs of his debut album, Grace, in steps of deep melancholy and overwhelming flashes of positive energy. Before reaching the lyrics, the emotions are immediately perceived, overflowing, with each passing. Before reaching the lyrics, the emotions are immediately perceived, overflowing, with each passing. Thanks to a voice that relies on an inimitable genetic heritage and manages to be first gently confidential, then an unreachable falsetto and finally detached powerfully. Grace uses a musical language that is independent of the lexicon, which does not speak to the head, rather, to a point at the level of the stomach. If you tie this record to a particularly dense period of emotions of your life, you would risk, listening to it after many years, to suffer the effect of opening a door of a 747 to 9,000 meters: to be violently sucked out of reality, for a long dive out of time. "It's like a guard at the gate of memory," says Buckley, "you can get the full experience of memory when you're completely submitting to your will ... You can be destroyed or marked ... you do not know ... it's like dying." His mother's hand, a classical pianist, seems to have lowered his personal accord on the disc, both in a metaphorical and in a prosaic sense. "She made me listen to everything from Charles Mingus to Gershwin", confirms Buckley, "I acquired my rhythmic sense from her, she comes from Panama and has also taught me to appreciate Latin music, I'm always a little bit behind to the beat, and it can only be because of her." Then there was the period in which Jeff's mother had given herself to the study of eschatology, a part of the theology that aims to analyze the ultimate destiny of man and the universe, and had infected the whole neighborhood. Above all the young friends of the boy, who, full of guilt, thought it was a great idea to become reverent Christians. So they fled to his house and gave him rock records saying it was stuff for the devil. "My mother put so many things in my head, they're coming out all now, one at a time." When he arrived in New York in 1991, Jeff was planning to become an actor. But the music kept echoing in his ears. "There has always been music," says Buckley, "it was my friend, my ally and my torment. I do not remember any moment she was not present. In another reality. But there was a period in which I stopped singing, from 16 to 19. I did it on purpose, as a kind of punishment or perhaps as a cure."
The young Jeff began to make his bones in the bands of the folk area of New York's East Village, to go out at the beginning of this year with his first work Live At Sin-E '(recorded precisely at the Cafe Sin-E', in area). This was followed by an EP, Peyote Radio Theater, with 14 minutes of Alex Chilton's "Kanga-Roo". Buckley, however, was determined to share his experience with other musicians, because "the best music comes out of a band, and even if I like Dylan's songs, there are too many aspects of music that can only be achieved with your band. You can reach a state of trance where what happens inside the human psyche is sung." The first to present himself to Buckley was bassist Mick Grondahl, who had seen one of Jeff's performances at Columbia University. "We played together, until late at night, we had a great time together." Then came Matt Johnson, on the drums, a musician with a great sense of the song-form, recommended to Jeff by his friends.The three tried together for four weeks before going in Woodstock studios to record Grace, so, working in the studio, they became a real band, assisted by the production of Andy Wallace (formerly for Soul Asylum) and by the collation of Karl Berger, who arranged together with Buckley the string parts: the way is of a subtle magic, to have an immediate confirmation just listen to "Last Goodbye". The first unsettling two tracks of the album were composed with Gary Lucas, ex-Captain Beefheart, already Buckley's stage partner. There are three covers: "Lilac Wine" by J. Shelton, "Hallelujah" by L. Cohen, recorded live, guitar and vocals, and "Corpus Christi Carol" by B. Britten. The musical influences, which are perceived in the music of Buckley, are those of a person with a boundless collection of records. A person who has lived and listened to music for a lifetime, and who does not intend to retrace any fashion of the moment. It draws on the great timeless music, perhaps the one of Van Morrison of the seventies, or as evidenced by his covers, from that of the Big Star of Chilton. "The music comes mysteriously from the inside, but the one that comes out has the name of a variety of characters" And so Buckley remembers the names of the musicians that always crowd his mind and who he loves to play live: "Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Smiths, I love Morrissey's words and Johnny's music, Edith Piaf, My Bloody Valentine, James Brown, Lush..." with Miki present in the front row at his London concert. Jeff continues to deny the influence of his father Tim on his musical training. But he also knows that it's just a way of protecting himself from the past. It is a lost love that Jeff sings in "Last Goodbye": "This is our last embrace...must I dream and always see your face?" And it is a love just as lost as that of Tim in "Once I Was": "Once I was your love, I was looking after your own eyes. Soon there will be another to tell you that I was just a lie. "
It's amazing how Jeff Buckley became a musician so far from his peers. It is difficult to think of a way to react to the vortex of our generation, which does not pass through the bitter and disconsolate guitar of people like Cobain or the angry rhymes of Public Enemy and Ice-T. Like a gigantic button uterus that welcomes all those who can not feel comfortable in the world they are in, music paradoxically standardizes its own members. Impressed with the same connotations, Jeff continued to express himself freely, guided by an ineffable guiding spirit, hidden by generational stratification. He did not try to win the battle against physiological degradation with the strategy he prefers today. That of attacking the enemy with a compact mass of people, who follow only one ideology, one mind. Looking for the impact effect, even if this is devastating for the troop itself. Buckley is more a solitary knight who has fallen among us from other times, who seeks salvation with his own unique and inimitable characteristics, starting from his own soul. "You can not depend on MTV to feed you, you have to live your life. You can not support others, all the leaders got fucked: Christ, Kennedy, Cobain. Freedom, you have to look for it with your strength. If you wait for someone to do it for you, you become a figurehead and you end up burning before you turn thirty."
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