Buckley Setting High Standards

The Gazette

October 6, 1994

By Mark Lepage

Submitted by Sai

Jeff Buckley had a dream.

  "I think all my friends are having sex with one another. In a hospital room, on a hospital gurney. Kinda weird."

  He has others. Buckley has flying dreams, where maintaining his altitude requires a series of tiny gestures and decisions-which muscle to move, which eyebrow to twitch.

  Let the metaphor embrace his live performance, where the 27-year old's expressionistic flights are attracting attention in even the most jaded circles.

  "I make a connection between music and dreams," Buckley says from the decidedly concrete surroundings of his record company's Manhattan office.

  "I don't see the difference between my waking reality and my sleeping reality, where the dreams come up. They're both streams, but because one is below the other doesn't mean they're separate."

  The grainy-voiced speaker is the same man whose soaring, agile falsetto animates the omnivorously sensual album Grace, his studio debut.

  Critics are setting high standards for Buckley, calling names from Van and Jim Morrison (no relation) to Led Zeppelin to Edith Piaf from the hyperbole file. The son of Tim Buckley (he does not discuss his father, and references to a hard upbringing warn the interlocutor away from that turf), Jeff Buckley's own standards may be higher still.

Hardly stolid

  Begin with the album, which swims in all those waters. His record company pins it down as "alternative/AOR/easy listening/heavy metal/jazz." Buckley's voice is the stone in all those settings, but it is hardly stolid, ranging from howls that recall Robert Plant through a torchy jazziness, all of it glowing under candlelight.

  More than the catholicity of his tastes, it is Buckley's convictions about song and performance that pique interest.

  Reconciling the speaker's voice with the singer gets easier once he starts to describe the live experience from behind the mike.

  "It's just like when you take ecstasy with somebody and you reveal that you are in love with them, or that something incredibly staining happened to you when you were a kid-something you'd never tell anybody.

  "And you start to tell them more. And more and more and more. And you become so intoxicated with revealing your secrets that pretty soon you're completely laid open. And then that person leaves."

  And the performer is left "drained and tender. I never get used to it."

  It is the stuff of mockery in some circles, and Buckley says he spent his youth in California on the other end of fists, "just rotting away in Los Angeles" as a sensitive kid. Grace, the title song, is "about not fearing death or the violence people can inflict on you."

  Buckley describes himself as "uncensored," and true to the term, forges right ahead when the next step in a hard upbringing/sensitive kid conversation is reached.

Stage is his arena

  "I'm in therapy so that if I'm in a relationship with somebody, it's me that I'm sending and not my scars and my ghosts."

  He recommends it to all artists because it "makes the subconscious conscious."

  Reconciling seemingly divergent forces is a theme, and the stage is his arena. Conscious of male and female sides, Buckley defines male as "the structure of the song. I don't get up there and just do diaphanous bullshit. Words and language itself are very structured and have to do with tangible things that you can see and touch, but the voice is the is something inexplicable. It means something without needing to be explained.

  "That's the cool thing about music, that for once in anybody's life there is a perfect marriage between the two."

Jeff Buckley, with Brenda Kahn, at Club Soda Oct. 25. Tickets cost $10 and are available at 10 .m. at Admission outlets (790-1245).