December, 1994
By Hillary Meister
"Some people hate stuff until they find a situation where they really need it," said Jeff Buckley. "They'll start off with 'this sucks, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks,' then 'boom.' Better watch out because someday they'll need that song. They'll need it more than anything in the world and then we'll have to have a huge feast on their words. Eat their own crow."
I followed Jeff into the neither reaches of The Point in Atlanta, situated in the middle of Little Five Points. He meandered into the club in the late afternoon prior to his soundcheck, sat on the worn couch in the upstairs dressing room and pontificated on all the things that pissed him off. I told him his album Grace came at a time when I needed to hear music he calls "low-down dreamy bit of the psyche."
"No grunge," I heard myself saying.
"What is grunge?" he asks, but doesn't wait for answer. "That's just technology and attitude. Anybody can step on a fuzz pedal, but that doesn't mean you can write a song."
Buckley's Grace has received remarkable acclaim. Recorded meticulously, with Andy Wallace (Soul Asylum) producing, the album features seven originals and three covers. Buckley devours music of all kinds and hence unearths gems that seem to have been written exclusively for his celestial voice. "The world of music is way vaster and way more eternal and way huger than the music business will ever be, ever" Buckley said. One particularly interesting cover on Grace is the madrigal "Corpus Christi Carol" by Benjamin Britten. "My friend Roy played it for me a long time ago so I gave it back to him. It was written in the '30s or the '40s. He copied a medieval...wrote it in the style of that."
Buckley also incorporates dulcimer and harmonium into his songs, adding the necessary ethereal twists to his dexterous guitar playing. "It's a great sounding thing. I saw my first harmonium on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood...I always thought I had to have one. It used to be 'people need Sega, everybody has one.' Well, that's the way the harmonium used to be. It was all the rage in France in the 18th century. I think it was mixing the squeeze box with a piano." Buckley shifts position, runs his hand through wet, red-splotched shaggy hair, and looks pensive. "It's the same old climate. Everybody knows about Pearl Jam and Tears for Fears but nobody knows about Yo La Tengo and Thurston Moore's solo (work), Coctails, Shudder to Think...Oh look," Buckley pauses, picking up a CD from the coffee table. "Sky Cries Mary-harmonium!"
Record company managers had been chasing Buckley down for years. Even before Buckley entered puberty, he fought off attempts by music business people that were looking to make the young Jeff into the next-generation Tim Buckley, Jeff's father who had died in the early '70s of a drug overdose.
The Sr. Buckley experimented with forms of folk music, sometimes creating jazzy, improvisations in voice and instruments and sometimes creating what Jeff calls "embarrassing" attempts. But the familial connection ends at the genes leaving Jeff to stave off over zealous Tim Buckley fans, writers and record execs that would like to fulfill the connection further.
At 28, Jeff is happy being Jeff and is bound and determined to stake his own claim in music-making of which he refers to as 'soul music.' "I always say soul. I think Sonic Youth is soul music," he said. Grace is filled with that passionate fire and live, his expression of it helps create the music as much as the instruments. "That's where the whole anti-passion, anti-body thing comes in with usual raising and expression of feelings. Because it's very sexual to express yourself and it's very liberating and it's audacious and people are taught not to be that way, they're taught to be tame."
Jeff Buckley will play at The Talk House in Miami on December 4 and at the Jazz & Blues Club in Orlando on December 5.
By Hillary Meister
"Some people hate stuff until they find a situation where they really need it," said Jeff Buckley. "They'll start off with 'this sucks, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks,' then 'boom.' Better watch out because someday they'll need that song. They'll need it more than anything in the world and then we'll have to have a huge feast on their words. Eat their own crow."
I followed Jeff into the neither reaches of The Point in Atlanta, situated in the middle of Little Five Points. He meandered into the club in the late afternoon prior to his soundcheck, sat on the worn couch in the upstairs dressing room and pontificated on all the things that pissed him off. I told him his album Grace came at a time when I needed to hear music he calls "low-down dreamy bit of the psyche."
"No grunge," I heard myself saying.
"What is grunge?" he asks, but doesn't wait for answer. "That's just technology and attitude. Anybody can step on a fuzz pedal, but that doesn't mean you can write a song."
Buckley's Grace has received remarkable acclaim. Recorded meticulously, with Andy Wallace (Soul Asylum) producing, the album features seven originals and three covers. Buckley devours music of all kinds and hence unearths gems that seem to have been written exclusively for his celestial voice. "The world of music is way vaster and way more eternal and way huger than the music business will ever be, ever" Buckley said. One particularly interesting cover on Grace is the madrigal "Corpus Christi Carol" by Benjamin Britten. "My friend Roy played it for me a long time ago so I gave it back to him. It was written in the '30s or the '40s. He copied a medieval...wrote it in the style of that."
Buckley also incorporates dulcimer and harmonium into his songs, adding the necessary ethereal twists to his dexterous guitar playing. "It's a great sounding thing. I saw my first harmonium on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood...I always thought I had to have one. It used to be 'people need Sega, everybody has one.' Well, that's the way the harmonium used to be. It was all the rage in France in the 18th century. I think it was mixing the squeeze box with a piano." Buckley shifts position, runs his hand through wet, red-splotched shaggy hair, and looks pensive. "It's the same old climate. Everybody knows about Pearl Jam and Tears for Fears but nobody knows about Yo La Tengo and Thurston Moore's solo (work), Coctails, Shudder to Think...Oh look," Buckley pauses, picking up a CD from the coffee table. "Sky Cries Mary-harmonium!"
Record company managers had been chasing Buckley down for years. Even before Buckley entered puberty, he fought off attempts by music business people that were looking to make the young Jeff into the next-generation Tim Buckley, Jeff's father who had died in the early '70s of a drug overdose.
The Sr. Buckley experimented with forms of folk music, sometimes creating jazzy, improvisations in voice and instruments and sometimes creating what Jeff calls "embarrassing" attempts. But the familial connection ends at the genes leaving Jeff to stave off over zealous Tim Buckley fans, writers and record execs that would like to fulfill the connection further.
At 28, Jeff is happy being Jeff and is bound and determined to stake his own claim in music-making of which he refers to as 'soul music.' "I always say soul. I think Sonic Youth is soul music," he said. Grace is filled with that passionate fire and live, his expression of it helps create the music as much as the instruments. "That's where the whole anti-passion, anti-body thing comes in with usual raising and expression of feelings. Because it's very sexual to express yourself and it's very liberating and it's audacious and people are taught not to be that way, they're taught to be tame."
Jeff Buckley will play at The Talk House in Miami on December 4 and at the Jazz & Blues Club in Orlando on December 5.
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