Fare Musica, October, 1994
By Stefano Pistolini
Submitted byAnanula
Translated by me
There are several reasons to be worried before meeting Jeff. On the one hand the awareness of being in front of the most important musical debut of the year. On the other hand, the record company's request to abstain from any question on the main theme of interest of the character: the fact that he is the son of Tim, compositional genius and inimitable vocalist, who disappeared in the '70s. "To talk about his father is the wrong way to start an interview, Jeff does not want to hear of him, he considers him a stranger." Finally there is the reputation that surrounds this 28 year old supported by the faith of the great occasions from his own label: he is said to be a lunatic, a turbulent type, one with whom it can be difficult to relate...
It will not be like that: with Jeff Buckley, if you avoid talking about his father, you are quick to become friends. You are fascinated, hypnotized by his intellectual convolutions, his thinking, elaborate aloud, live, for his dedication - all too visible, but ultimately openly sincere - towards music, more than an art form, as a form of life.
In circulation, available there is "Grace" that for innovative potential, for evocative power-as well as for that "Buckley spirit" that makes us think of a real family brand-it is a record to consider unmissable, indiscriminately advisable to everyone.
For a lucky few instead, at least for now, are the concerts of Jeff and his quartet (two guitars, bass and drums, on this occasion used in a format anything but standard) that, evening after night, invent a kind of revisitation, of free reinterpretation of the material that on his disk lies in pure form. A musician's set can last an hour or two; the version of a song ranging from four to fifteen minutes. Everything depends on how the atmosphere of the evening takes place, from what are the wills and intentions that pass through Jeff's head, through the filter of his sensitivity.
These lines are the report (as faithful as possible) of that elusive stream of consciousness represented by a face-to-face meeting with Buckley. The questions do not interest him too much: once formulated, he repeats them to himself, dissects them, undresses them and then gives them an answer that soon leaves the main reason for sliding down the slopes of ruminations and storytelling. The obsessive theme is always the same: life is music and luckily there is music to relieve us from the pains and horrors of our daily pace.
Of his father, the great Tim that we adored, faithful to the provisions, I avoid talking, but it is himself, with some hints, to make me understand that the light and sweet man disappeared for two decades, for him it is only a shadow that crossed his life, leaving only a trail of pain behind him.
"I was born in the middle of nowhere," he says "in the southern part of Orange County, the most reactionary and horrible place for a small American boy. And I was born on the wrong side of society: I was a puppy in a trailer park, those self-propelled houses that are little more than caravans. I was raised by a mother and a stepfather sweet and in love with life. Which, however, made sure that my beginnings were neither better nor worse than those of any boy."
He speaks of an adolescence that seems a literary stereotype: wanderings, dreams and disillusions, adventures of all kinds, dangers around the corner, a great country to be known and in a certain sense to challenge. We leave the word to him, who speaks away by himself, looking in indefinite spots of the tapestry. He is lying on a sofa of this hall where the meeting is organized: we are in the United States, to the south, in the heart of Atlanta, a sad and disinherited place, especially on a Sunday like this. It will not be easy to give a human face to the '96 Olympics, I think to myself, remembering how I wandered the whole morning looking for an open bar. Now it's almost evening, the air is sticky, the room is dim. And Jeff speaks, a monologue, a speech with little punctuation that recalls the songs of "Grace": the same power of fascination, the same ability to penetrate the intimate. Sounds, stilettos, bleeding.
"...the 60s I love it...that great music...MC5, Jesus Christ Superstar, Doors, Pink Floyd, Barbara Streisand...in the '70s it was easier to believe that the devil existed...it was culture of the time that took it that way...now people prefer to devote themselves to pornography..."
"I've always been attracted by the story of Charles Manson, his character and also the parable of the Third Reich, I think it's the atrocity that lures me...the darkness. My parents were kind of peace & love, but for some reason I felt that what they proposed to me was not the whole truth..."
"Idealism still lives in the last generation, I can say I've seen idealist rapists, idealist killers, it's all a mobile party...I no longer believe in idealists or even leaders, but if you want to write that I'm an idealist because you're a journalist and you need a label for me, go ahead."
"Language is not a complete tool for expressing the world of sensations and feelings in a complete and complex way. It has shortcomings, rigidity, rules.Therefore, poetry exists: to complete the language, but in the end the sounds are needed, we need music to express everything, for example the absolute torment of a deep pain."
"I like doing simple things, for example, changing the strings to my guitar. I'm there and there's just me, my guitar and a beer. Everything's in order, serene, everything makes sense. I'm left-handed, even if I play the guitar right-handed. My teacher used to say that left-handed people are crazy. I answered them by saying that left-handed people become crazy because they live in a world of boring right-handed people."
"I want to clarify the previous speech: I like the music of the 60s and this can be perceived from 'Grace', but I like all music, that of today, especially that of small local bands, but also the Melvins and especially Kurt Cobain, and that of the 20s and 30s. But I can not put all this on one disc..."
"I love American music above all because it contains a frightening amount of soul, nobody can do the same and the English think only of fashions..."
"Generation X is another invention of journalists and sociologists looking for categories to support their work. It is certainly not an initiative of members of that generation to be chained under a label...likewise, you'll never find young person who will claim that he plays alternative music: he will tell you that he plays his own music. Destroy the parents, make them want to kill you: these are the only things that are important to these young people. It's the great lesson that comes from Capt. Beefheart and Iggy Pop."
"I always arrive too late on things because I do not like movements and I do not like being associated with them. I feel old, I'm almost thirty, I feel anachronistic, I feel part of a very small movement without a name: made only of music..."
"When I jump like crazy, in concert, while I play one of my songs, I do not do it for show or because I have lost control, I only do it to keep the time..."
"Every night is different, I have everything I need: my music, my band and a whole set of people, brand new, ready to listen to me. I feel part of a myth, every night. The important thing is not to be boring. Always be different."
"Live, I improvise a lot. But I always try not to lose the thread of a song at all, but sometimes I do lose it. Other times I simply like the songs for three minutes."
"Recording in the studio is like painting with someone who is there to follow you, to depreciate you, to remember that you have some time to do all the work. They can be destabilizing presences: you can get to hate a producer. I want succeed in having and keeping a band."
"Kerouac, Patti Smith, Corso. They live before writing. It's poetry that floats through the air. They had solid faiths. Incredible. Bob Dylan: he's a great poet. Even now."
"My generation belongs to the visual age. Nobody reads, all the kids just watch MTV. Even the music has become visual. It's the dance of the mind. It sticks to the psyche...like war."
"MTV...video and music. It's the most successful revolution of the twentieth century. It should bother me and instead it could become my condition to exist. Until a few months ago I was but a music consumer, today I'm a recording artist. So in my video, I only put myself and a puppet...MTV is trash but inside there is a lot of America. It means that I like rubbish and I like America."
"My Father? It has nothing to do with me. "
"Cobain was the newest person in the whole scene. I respect him and I feel very close to him...the good things he wrote...words and music I liked...Some people never know how to accept the love that others or themselves try to give them. I believe that MTV, Rolling Stone and Spin are happy that Cobain is dead: so they have their dead genius and can devote themselves to singing their deeds."
"I think playing makes more sense than working in a store, wearing a mask, or being a soldier and fighting around the world. Leonard Cohen...he's alone, there's only him and his face. Kurt was also a regular person, he, his wife, a daughter. The day is beautiful but suddenly you do not give a damn...a gun in your mouth...I can not think about it. Now we have our good corpse to worship. Another useless adoration. It did not surprise me, but it made me suffer...but this is pop music..."Smell like teen spirits"...I do not remember when I heard it the first time, but I remember it made me jump out of bed. He was in Los Angeles. Now he's dead. He's just a dead man."
"I am destructive. I like being intoxicated. Wine, ecstasy, mushrooms...not cocaine . The last time I did ecstasy I told the person next to me that I loved the truth...Being addicted gives me awareness. But it's not an exception: with TV everyone is addicted."
"Music is love: the best. It means leaving the cage. Facing fears. Political ideal? I believe that love is the most political movement that exists. The problem is that it does not last."
"I have an egocentric view of the world. We all have it. And my music comes from every part of my body. It comes from my movements: hugging, kissing, walking, killing...music comes from the world."
It's night now. Someone enters and declares the interview over. Better: by now I was hypnotized by this ex-boy, completely absorbed in emptying his spirit and stomach. We stand up, formally embarrassed. There is the evening ahead, none of us knows a soul in this difficult American city. Around midnight he has an interview on a local radio station. He asks me to accompany him. All right: I have a rented car, a lot of time and a prophet to talk about. A little will irritate me, a little will amaze me. It was a long time that a pop star did not interest me so much...
By Stefano Pistolini
Submitted byAnanula
Translated by me
There are several reasons to be worried before meeting Jeff. On the one hand the awareness of being in front of the most important musical debut of the year. On the other hand, the record company's request to abstain from any question on the main theme of interest of the character: the fact that he is the son of Tim, compositional genius and inimitable vocalist, who disappeared in the '70s. "To talk about his father is the wrong way to start an interview, Jeff does not want to hear of him, he considers him a stranger." Finally there is the reputation that surrounds this 28 year old supported by the faith of the great occasions from his own label: he is said to be a lunatic, a turbulent type, one with whom it can be difficult to relate...
It will not be like that: with Jeff Buckley, if you avoid talking about his father, you are quick to become friends. You are fascinated, hypnotized by his intellectual convolutions, his thinking, elaborate aloud, live, for his dedication - all too visible, but ultimately openly sincere - towards music, more than an art form, as a form of life.
In circulation, available there is "Grace" that for innovative potential, for evocative power-as well as for that "Buckley spirit" that makes us think of a real family brand-it is a record to consider unmissable, indiscriminately advisable to everyone.
For a lucky few instead, at least for now, are the concerts of Jeff and his quartet (two guitars, bass and drums, on this occasion used in a format anything but standard) that, evening after night, invent a kind of revisitation, of free reinterpretation of the material that on his disk lies in pure form. A musician's set can last an hour or two; the version of a song ranging from four to fifteen minutes. Everything depends on how the atmosphere of the evening takes place, from what are the wills and intentions that pass through Jeff's head, through the filter of his sensitivity.
These lines are the report (as faithful as possible) of that elusive stream of consciousness represented by a face-to-face meeting with Buckley. The questions do not interest him too much: once formulated, he repeats them to himself, dissects them, undresses them and then gives them an answer that soon leaves the main reason for sliding down the slopes of ruminations and storytelling. The obsessive theme is always the same: life is music and luckily there is music to relieve us from the pains and horrors of our daily pace.
Of his father, the great Tim that we adored, faithful to the provisions, I avoid talking, but it is himself, with some hints, to make me understand that the light and sweet man disappeared for two decades, for him it is only a shadow that crossed his life, leaving only a trail of pain behind him.
"I was born in the middle of nowhere," he says "in the southern part of Orange County, the most reactionary and horrible place for a small American boy. And I was born on the wrong side of society: I was a puppy in a trailer park, those self-propelled houses that are little more than caravans. I was raised by a mother and a stepfather sweet and in love with life. Which, however, made sure that my beginnings were neither better nor worse than those of any boy."
He speaks of an adolescence that seems a literary stereotype: wanderings, dreams and disillusions, adventures of all kinds, dangers around the corner, a great country to be known and in a certain sense to challenge. We leave the word to him, who speaks away by himself, looking in indefinite spots of the tapestry. He is lying on a sofa of this hall where the meeting is organized: we are in the United States, to the south, in the heart of Atlanta, a sad and disinherited place, especially on a Sunday like this. It will not be easy to give a human face to the '96 Olympics, I think to myself, remembering how I wandered the whole morning looking for an open bar. Now it's almost evening, the air is sticky, the room is dim. And Jeff speaks, a monologue, a speech with little punctuation that recalls the songs of "Grace": the same power of fascination, the same ability to penetrate the intimate. Sounds, stilettos, bleeding.
"...the 60s I love it...that great music...MC5, Jesus Christ Superstar, Doors, Pink Floyd, Barbara Streisand...in the '70s it was easier to believe that the devil existed...it was culture of the time that took it that way...now people prefer to devote themselves to pornography..."
"I've always been attracted by the story of Charles Manson, his character and also the parable of the Third Reich, I think it's the atrocity that lures me...the darkness. My parents were kind of peace & love, but for some reason I felt that what they proposed to me was not the whole truth..."
"Idealism still lives in the last generation, I can say I've seen idealist rapists, idealist killers, it's all a mobile party...I no longer believe in idealists or even leaders, but if you want to write that I'm an idealist because you're a journalist and you need a label for me, go ahead."
"Language is not a complete tool for expressing the world of sensations and feelings in a complete and complex way. It has shortcomings, rigidity, rules.Therefore, poetry exists: to complete the language, but in the end the sounds are needed, we need music to express everything, for example the absolute torment of a deep pain."
"I like doing simple things, for example, changing the strings to my guitar. I'm there and there's just me, my guitar and a beer. Everything's in order, serene, everything makes sense. I'm left-handed, even if I play the guitar right-handed. My teacher used to say that left-handed people are crazy. I answered them by saying that left-handed people become crazy because they live in a world of boring right-handed people."
"I want to clarify the previous speech: I like the music of the 60s and this can be perceived from 'Grace', but I like all music, that of today, especially that of small local bands, but also the Melvins and especially Kurt Cobain, and that of the 20s and 30s. But I can not put all this on one disc..."
"I love American music above all because it contains a frightening amount of soul, nobody can do the same and the English think only of fashions..."
"Generation X is another invention of journalists and sociologists looking for categories to support their work. It is certainly not an initiative of members of that generation to be chained under a label...likewise, you'll never find young person who will claim that he plays alternative music: he will tell you that he plays his own music. Destroy the parents, make them want to kill you: these are the only things that are important to these young people. It's the great lesson that comes from Capt. Beefheart and Iggy Pop."
"I always arrive too late on things because I do not like movements and I do not like being associated with them. I feel old, I'm almost thirty, I feel anachronistic, I feel part of a very small movement without a name: made only of music..."
"When I jump like crazy, in concert, while I play one of my songs, I do not do it for show or because I have lost control, I only do it to keep the time..."
"Every night is different, I have everything I need: my music, my band and a whole set of people, brand new, ready to listen to me. I feel part of a myth, every night. The important thing is not to be boring. Always be different."
"Live, I improvise a lot. But I always try not to lose the thread of a song at all, but sometimes I do lose it. Other times I simply like the songs for three minutes."
"Recording in the studio is like painting with someone who is there to follow you, to depreciate you, to remember that you have some time to do all the work. They can be destabilizing presences: you can get to hate a producer. I want succeed in having and keeping a band."
"Kerouac, Patti Smith, Corso. They live before writing. It's poetry that floats through the air. They had solid faiths. Incredible. Bob Dylan: he's a great poet. Even now."
"My generation belongs to the visual age. Nobody reads, all the kids just watch MTV. Even the music has become visual. It's the dance of the mind. It sticks to the psyche...like war."
"MTV...video and music. It's the most successful revolution of the twentieth century. It should bother me and instead it could become my condition to exist. Until a few months ago I was but a music consumer, today I'm a recording artist. So in my video, I only put myself and a puppet...MTV is trash but inside there is a lot of America. It means that I like rubbish and I like America."
"My Father? It has nothing to do with me. "
"Cobain was the newest person in the whole scene. I respect him and I feel very close to him...the good things he wrote...words and music I liked...Some people never know how to accept the love that others or themselves try to give them. I believe that MTV, Rolling Stone and Spin are happy that Cobain is dead: so they have their dead genius and can devote themselves to singing their deeds."
"I think playing makes more sense than working in a store, wearing a mask, or being a soldier and fighting around the world. Leonard Cohen...he's alone, there's only him and his face. Kurt was also a regular person, he, his wife, a daughter. The day is beautiful but suddenly you do not give a damn...a gun in your mouth...I can not think about it. Now we have our good corpse to worship. Another useless adoration. It did not surprise me, but it made me suffer...but this is pop music..."Smell like teen spirits"...I do not remember when I heard it the first time, but I remember it made me jump out of bed. He was in Los Angeles. Now he's dead. He's just a dead man."
"I am destructive. I like being intoxicated. Wine, ecstasy, mushrooms...not cocaine . The last time I did ecstasy I told the person next to me that I loved the truth...Being addicted gives me awareness. But it's not an exception: with TV everyone is addicted."
"Music is love: the best. It means leaving the cage. Facing fears. Political ideal? I believe that love is the most political movement that exists. The problem is that it does not last."
"I have an egocentric view of the world. We all have it. And my music comes from every part of my body. It comes from my movements: hugging, kissing, walking, killing...music comes from the world."
It's night now. Someone enters and declares the interview over. Better: by now I was hypnotized by this ex-boy, completely absorbed in emptying his spirit and stomach. We stand up, formally embarrassed. There is the evening ahead, none of us knows a soul in this difficult American city. Around midnight he has an interview on a local radio station. He asks me to accompany him. All right: I have a rented car, a lot of time and a prophet to talk about. A little will irritate me, a little will amaze me. It was a long time that a pop star did not interest me so much...
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