December 13, 1994
By Dan DeLuca
Submitted by Niella
In his own voice at times Jeff Buckley looks and sounds like his father, '60s folk singer Tim Buckley, but artistically-and in many other ways-he's his own man.
NEW YORK-Jeff Buckley is on the couch. He's tossing and turning, running a hand through his dyed brown-red hair, pulling his work boots up beneath him, biting his lip, hopping up to take another hit of caffeine.
He's talking about moving from town to town with his mother and his childhood in stultifying Southern California. Riffing on the beloved Led Zeppelin, Judy Garland and George Carlin records that got him through adolescence. His voice trailing off, his doe eyes cast toward the ceiling, when the subject of the Father He Never Knew comes up.
The black leather divan is in the Sony Music studio complex in midtown Manhattan. In the room next door, editors are watching tape of an MTV Unplugged performance by Buckley's label mate Bob Dylan, filmed on the sound stage down the hall.
The stunningly gifted Buckley, who will play at J.C. Dobbs tonight (punk-folk wordslinger Brenda Kahn opens), has interrupted his tour for a stop in his adopted home town. Among the singer's first chores is an early-morning performance for Sony honchos who have not yet laid eyes on Columbia Record's cherished jewel.
Even before it was released in late summer, Buckley's Columbia debut, Grace, was burdened with a mountain of hype. The singer had held a nearly two-year residency at Greenwich Village's Cafe Sin-e-documented on the four-song EP Live at Sin-e-where his weekly appearances wowed media types. His guitar, voice, florid originals, and a range of covers, from Alex Chilton's "Kanga Roo" to Edith Piaf's "Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin," set off a major-label feeding frenzy.
But Buckley isn't simply a great-looking kid with a dark, born-to-brood brow and an abundance of talent.
His angelic street-urchin features and ghostly falsetto reflect his rock-and-roll lineage: He can look and sound eerily like his father, hallowed '60s folkie Tim Buckley, the beloved artist who died of a drug overdose in 1975 at age 28. The same age Jeff is right now. Buckley is aware of the circus of attention his irresistible story has generated. He tries to ignore it.
"About the hype, I care not," he says, "I care not. We're doing this slowly and subtly. I toured for a year before I had any music out, and touring nowadays is suicide financially. But playing in front of people every night is the only way I can work. And I wanted people to have the chance to see me before anything was shoved down their throats."
The payoff is that Buckley has become a showman, an artist who can hold a room rapt with his blessedly gentle reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," or the wildly rocking ululations of his melodramatic compositions such as "Grace" or "So Real."
"I love bombast," he confesses, "I'm really into over-the-top emotion."
Buckley indulges his love for excess not with rock star stage moves or exotic instrumentation. His band, which consists of good friends Michael Tighe on guitar, Matt Johnson on drums and Mick Grondahl on bass, is a fairly conventional rock unit.
The secret weapon is his voice, an instrument of dazzling range that can glow with a luminous spirituality one moment ("Corpus Christi Carol (For Roy)") and make him sound like Robert Plant's younger brother ("Mojo Pin," "Eternal Life") the next. The sound of it can't help but spook anyone familiar with Tim Buckley's work, though Jeff's voice has a more fragile, tragic quality.
Buckley made quite a splash when he made his New York debut in 1991, shortly after relocating from California, at a tribute to his father at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn Heights. He still isn't sure that he made the right call in deciding to perform.
"It was a tribute to somebody I knew only through strangers. Why would I sing a tribute to him?" he asks rhetorically, his arms folded across his chest, disappearing into his yellow-and-black plaid flannel shirt.
Buckley's not in the habit of spilling his guts about his father.
"I have a tremendously intimate understanding and emotional relationship with the whole thing, and I just don't share it with journalists. And I certainly don't share it with hippies," he says softly, referring to the rabid Tim Buckley fans that have descended upon him.
Jeff's father and mother, Mary Guibert, were married only briefly. Tim left shortly after Jeff was born, then remarried and started another family. Jeff met him only a few times as a toddler, and spent a week with him when he was 8.
"I was trying to get another meeting with him, but he never wrote or called. And two months later, he died...He picked a whole other family. And we weren't invited to the funeral."
So when Buckley was invited to perform, he agreed as a way to say goodbye to his father for good.
"I needed something to mean something to me. I wanted it to be unannounced-one song, and be gone. And it worked, because I was pure of heart, and stripped of wants and needs for my ego. But Hal (Willner, who produced the event) couldn't see fit not to announce me, and after that, all the old friends started showing up. So, in a way, I sacrificed my anonymity for my father, whereas he sacrificed me for his fame. So I guess I made a mistake. I guess I made a mistake."
When Buckley was growing up in California, his mother was married for two years to a man named Ron Moorhead. During that time, Jeff, who was born Jeffrey Scott Buckley, was known as Scott Moorhead. After his mother and Moorhead divorced, when he was 11, he asked his mother to show him his birth certificate and started calling himself Jeff Buckley. Buckley and his mother moved from town to town in conservative Orange County, Jeff packing his belongings in grocery bags.
"The people around us were very upper-middle class," he says, with disdain. "White, straight. It was very David Lynch. Two cars in the garage, every garage with all the tools lined up in order on the wall. Daddy, Mommy, Buffy, Jody, the dog and three cats. The pool out back and the satanically perfect lawn in the front. You just have yourself and a few other misfits to keep you going."
Musically, Buckley grew up on '70s album-rock radio. "that was heady stuff," he says. "Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Seals & Crofts, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Sly."
His father's music, he says, never played much of a role for him. Instead, he was soaking up his mother's Barbara Streisand and Beatles albums, and the Led Zeppelin catalogue.
"All that stuff taught me that music could mark a time in your day, and hold memories for you," he says. "That really stuck, and was the impetus for me to get my own music going."
After high school, he moved to Los Angeles, attended the Musician's Institute for Guitar, worked as an electrician's apprentice and a hotel desk clerk, and began to play in bands, sometimes with Fishbone bassist Chris Dowd.
In 1990, he came to New York, "for the life."
"I just want to have a completely adventurous, passionate, weird life," says the singer, who looks much younger than his his years, and seems unaware of pretentious he sounds saying such things as "The natural inertia of my life has always been tremendously emotional."
He loves the city. He's single ("I'm not the marrying type") and lives alone in Greenwich Village.
"There's an expectation of originality in the art circles. And there's a real amazing uniqueness. You just sit still and cool (stuff) will come to you. Allen Ginsberg will walk down the street. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (the Pakistani qawwali singer who's one of Buckley's biggest heroes) will come to you. Bob Dylan will play...on your birthday."
When he arrived in New York, "mostly I just starved. I thought about stealing pretzels so often. Just a couple off the spindle and I'll pay you back, baby."
He collaborated with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas (who co-wrote the title track and "Mojo Pin" on Grace) in Lucas' band Gods and Monsters, then settled in at downtown cafes such as Sin-e and Fez to immerse himself in his own work and treasured material from other sources. (There's a 10-minute version of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" on Sin-e.) Over time, he began to turn his disparate influences into a genre-blending alchemy all his own.
When recording the at times brilliant, at times hopelessly florid Grace, his aim was to keep the music untamed and retain the intimacy of his live shows.
"I'll do anything to make this music," he says. "As long as as it's wild and uncontrollable, and as long as it's eccentrically me."
Playing live is "so refueling and so galvanizing and so nutritious. And it's always new. That's what blows me away: Music is always new. It's not something that you can contrive. You just have to allow it to happen. You read the river as you go. The soul that comes through is the magic people call chaos. And that's a real gift. That's my drug of choice."
IF YOU GO
Jeff Buckley will be at J.C Dobbs at 8 tonight. Tickets are $6. Call 215-925-4053.
By Dan DeLuca
Submitted by Niella
In his own voice at times Jeff Buckley looks and sounds like his father, '60s folk singer Tim Buckley, but artistically-and in many other ways-he's his own man.
NEW YORK-Jeff Buckley is on the couch. He's tossing and turning, running a hand through his dyed brown-red hair, pulling his work boots up beneath him, biting his lip, hopping up to take another hit of caffeine.
He's talking about moving from town to town with his mother and his childhood in stultifying Southern California. Riffing on the beloved Led Zeppelin, Judy Garland and George Carlin records that got him through adolescence. His voice trailing off, his doe eyes cast toward the ceiling, when the subject of the Father He Never Knew comes up.
The black leather divan is in the Sony Music studio complex in midtown Manhattan. In the room next door, editors are watching tape of an MTV Unplugged performance by Buckley's label mate Bob Dylan, filmed on the sound stage down the hall.
The stunningly gifted Buckley, who will play at J.C. Dobbs tonight (punk-folk wordslinger Brenda Kahn opens), has interrupted his tour for a stop in his adopted home town. Among the singer's first chores is an early-morning performance for Sony honchos who have not yet laid eyes on Columbia Record's cherished jewel.
Even before it was released in late summer, Buckley's Columbia debut, Grace, was burdened with a mountain of hype. The singer had held a nearly two-year residency at Greenwich Village's Cafe Sin-e-documented on the four-song EP Live at Sin-e-where his weekly appearances wowed media types. His guitar, voice, florid originals, and a range of covers, from Alex Chilton's "Kanga Roo" to Edith Piaf's "Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin," set off a major-label feeding frenzy.
But Buckley isn't simply a great-looking kid with a dark, born-to-brood brow and an abundance of talent.
His angelic street-urchin features and ghostly falsetto reflect his rock-and-roll lineage: He can look and sound eerily like his father, hallowed '60s folkie Tim Buckley, the beloved artist who died of a drug overdose in 1975 at age 28. The same age Jeff is right now. Buckley is aware of the circus of attention his irresistible story has generated. He tries to ignore it.
"About the hype, I care not," he says, "I care not. We're doing this slowly and subtly. I toured for a year before I had any music out, and touring nowadays is suicide financially. But playing in front of people every night is the only way I can work. And I wanted people to have the chance to see me before anything was shoved down their throats."
The payoff is that Buckley has become a showman, an artist who can hold a room rapt with his blessedly gentle reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," or the wildly rocking ululations of his melodramatic compositions such as "Grace" or "So Real."
"I love bombast," he confesses, "I'm really into over-the-top emotion."
Buckley indulges his love for excess not with rock star stage moves or exotic instrumentation. His band, which consists of good friends Michael Tighe on guitar, Matt Johnson on drums and Mick Grondahl on bass, is a fairly conventional rock unit.
The secret weapon is his voice, an instrument of dazzling range that can glow with a luminous spirituality one moment ("Corpus Christi Carol (For Roy)") and make him sound like Robert Plant's younger brother ("Mojo Pin," "Eternal Life") the next. The sound of it can't help but spook anyone familiar with Tim Buckley's work, though Jeff's voice has a more fragile, tragic quality.
Buckley made quite a splash when he made his New York debut in 1991, shortly after relocating from California, at a tribute to his father at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn Heights. He still isn't sure that he made the right call in deciding to perform.
"It was a tribute to somebody I knew only through strangers. Why would I sing a tribute to him?" he asks rhetorically, his arms folded across his chest, disappearing into his yellow-and-black plaid flannel shirt.
Buckley's not in the habit of spilling his guts about his father.
"I have a tremendously intimate understanding and emotional relationship with the whole thing, and I just don't share it with journalists. And I certainly don't share it with hippies," he says softly, referring to the rabid Tim Buckley fans that have descended upon him.
Jeff's father and mother, Mary Guibert, were married only briefly. Tim left shortly after Jeff was born, then remarried and started another family. Jeff met him only a few times as a toddler, and spent a week with him when he was 8.
"I was trying to get another meeting with him, but he never wrote or called. And two months later, he died...He picked a whole other family. And we weren't invited to the funeral."
So when Buckley was invited to perform, he agreed as a way to say goodbye to his father for good.
"I needed something to mean something to me. I wanted it to be unannounced-one song, and be gone. And it worked, because I was pure of heart, and stripped of wants and needs for my ego. But Hal (Willner, who produced the event) couldn't see fit not to announce me, and after that, all the old friends started showing up. So, in a way, I sacrificed my anonymity for my father, whereas he sacrificed me for his fame. So I guess I made a mistake. I guess I made a mistake."
When Buckley was growing up in California, his mother was married for two years to a man named Ron Moorhead. During that time, Jeff, who was born Jeffrey Scott Buckley, was known as Scott Moorhead. After his mother and Moorhead divorced, when he was 11, he asked his mother to show him his birth certificate and started calling himself Jeff Buckley. Buckley and his mother moved from town to town in conservative Orange County, Jeff packing his belongings in grocery bags.
"The people around us were very upper-middle class," he says, with disdain. "White, straight. It was very David Lynch. Two cars in the garage, every garage with all the tools lined up in order on the wall. Daddy, Mommy, Buffy, Jody, the dog and three cats. The pool out back and the satanically perfect lawn in the front. You just have yourself and a few other misfits to keep you going."
Musically, Buckley grew up on '70s album-rock radio. "that was heady stuff," he says. "Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Seals & Crofts, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Sly."
His father's music, he says, never played much of a role for him. Instead, he was soaking up his mother's Barbara Streisand and Beatles albums, and the Led Zeppelin catalogue.
"All that stuff taught me that music could mark a time in your day, and hold memories for you," he says. "That really stuck, and was the impetus for me to get my own music going."
After high school, he moved to Los Angeles, attended the Musician's Institute for Guitar, worked as an electrician's apprentice and a hotel desk clerk, and began to play in bands, sometimes with Fishbone bassist Chris Dowd.
In 1990, he came to New York, "for the life."
"I just want to have a completely adventurous, passionate, weird life," says the singer, who looks much younger than his his years, and seems unaware of pretentious he sounds saying such things as "The natural inertia of my life has always been tremendously emotional."
He loves the city. He's single ("I'm not the marrying type") and lives alone in Greenwich Village.
"There's an expectation of originality in the art circles. And there's a real amazing uniqueness. You just sit still and cool (stuff) will come to you. Allen Ginsberg will walk down the street. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (the Pakistani qawwali singer who's one of Buckley's biggest heroes) will come to you. Bob Dylan will play...on your birthday."
When he arrived in New York, "mostly I just starved. I thought about stealing pretzels so often. Just a couple off the spindle and I'll pay you back, baby."
He collaborated with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas (who co-wrote the title track and "Mojo Pin" on Grace) in Lucas' band Gods and Monsters, then settled in at downtown cafes such as Sin-e and Fez to immerse himself in his own work and treasured material from other sources. (There's a 10-minute version of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" on Sin-e.) Over time, he began to turn his disparate influences into a genre-blending alchemy all his own.
When recording the at times brilliant, at times hopelessly florid Grace, his aim was to keep the music untamed and retain the intimacy of his live shows.
"I'll do anything to make this music," he says. "As long as as it's wild and uncontrollable, and as long as it's eccentrically me."
Playing live is "so refueling and so galvanizing and so nutritious. And it's always new. That's what blows me away: Music is always new. It's not something that you can contrive. You just have to allow it to happen. You read the river as you go. The soul that comes through is the magic people call chaos. And that's a real gift. That's my drug of choice."
IF YOU GO
Jeff Buckley will be at J.C Dobbs at 8 tonight. Tickets are $6. Call 215-925-4053.
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