September, 1994
By Hilary Meister
"Alternative Press thinks I sound like Whitesnake," said Jeff Buckley while we sat upstairs at The Point in Atlanta on a blustery September day. "They don't think I'm alternative. They think I'm some sort of metal boy!" he grinned. I had the music of Grace, Buckley's first full-length album for Columbia, playing in my head. There have been comparisons to Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant, but overall...
"Waking up and finding out you're actually not alternative...You and I both know - I could take "Psychic Powerless, Another Man's Sack" by Butthole Surfers and clear the fuckin' room. That's alternative! Or Bartok or Ornette Coleman or Captain Beefheart - that's some stuff that will annoy parents anywhere." Buckley was visibly agitated at the thought.
We began our conversation, though who can remember what set us off, discussing Geraldo Rivera interviewing Charles Manson. That got the 28 year old Buckley off and running for quite a while, postulating on the nature of evil that is Manson, and the buffoonery of Rivera. "He's got this commercial - he's the father of two, a loving husband, and he's crassly on camera kissing his kids, kibitzing with his wife, totally politician because he's been such a neanderthal, artificial fake all his life!"
Eventually, Buckley leads the discussion to music critics, still maintaining his firey attitude, quick-draw response, and New York savvy. "It's easy to be a music critic. It's a strange past-time and it's a strange job to have. Everybody can do what he's doing, but he can't do what I'm doing. I suppose that job has to exist but not so much power put upon it. The music and the experience of it is so individual." He proceeds to narrate tales of criticism heeped upon himself and others such as how one writer in Toronto took offense to Buckley's quiet demeanor on stage, calling him arrogant and here, Buckley impersonates the writer, "'his arrogance belies the passion of his music.'" Jeff's face twitches as he nasally expells the words etched into his memory. Jeff Buckley took most of us by surprise during his '94 solo tour across America and the big pond. There were few people at those shows, little hype behind the singer, and little radio airplay. He was going for the throat touring Live at Sin-é, a 4-song live acoustic solo performance recorded at New York's tiny Club Sin-é. Buckley had been performing in New York for several years while record company mongrels stood drooling in the aisles. He wanted the chance to hone his craft, something so few musicians these days are willing to take. He had already rejected his Southern California upbringing, the connections that his famous avant-folk father, Tim Buckley, left behind after his drug overdose in the early '70s, such as a manager who kept tabs on Jeff waiting for the right moment to pounce. And Buckley tried it all - hard rock, reggae, session work, guitar school finally giving in to the call of the East - New York. "I knew I would fit. I knew I would thrive. There's great stuff that happens in California but as far as living there I'm better off in New York," Buckley exclaimed.
Though Jeff would rather not discuss his father, and constantly fights off comparisons and mere mentions, the genes are still there - the good looks, the voice, the pension for unusual sounds and musical hybrids. "Some things he did were great and some things were embarrassing," said Buckley of his father. "Like, Star Sailor I will hold up to any fucking album and say that this is really something. I have a very intimate relationship with the whole story and it has nothing to do with me. I have my own life. I make my own money. I make my own music. I have my own friends."
It's ironic that while Jeff began on a journey to stake his own territory, to claim his piece of the musical rock and to shed any remaining attachments to his father's music that he would perform at a Tim Buckley tribute concert. It was one of Jeff's first major appearances in New York at St. Ann's, a church in Brooklyn that sometimes holds hip concerts, organized by producer Hal Willner. He was so swamped with Tim Buckley fans, music business people, and others wanting to bring the ghost of Tim back with Jeff that it caused the young Buckley to forage deeper into the underground confines of New York in places like the Knitting Factory and the new Thread Waxing Space. He had a brief and shining near-to mainstream moment when he joined forces with Gary Lucas, ex-guitarist for Captain Beefheart, bassist Tony Maimone and Golden Palominos' eclectic drummer Anton Fier in a project called Gods & Monsters. The band dissolved allowing Buckley to wander off and explore his voice as his main instrument.
He wanted to pay his dues by performing in coffee shops in Greenwich Village learning the craft of songwriting by listening to some of the greats - Bob Dylan, Van Morrison. In reading stories about Buckley the tales of limos leaving off record company execs, swarms of A&R suit and ties, leaches, and musicians is enough to break anyone's doubts that Buckley definitely had something going. He held them all at bay, keeping to his ideals of a slow climb upwards, leaving room to meet the musicians that would eventually form his rhythm section in a natural setting, and escaping the hunt with only a few scratches. He lived on his own merits at this time, soaking up the underground culture, music, and life experiences that would ultimately lead him into a deal with Columbia and the promise that Buckley could basically create without pressure.
So, here sat Buckley on his first run through America with his band made up of Mick Grondahl on bass, Matt Johnson on drums and Michael Tighe on second guitar. He's already thinking of things to come. "The next album has this song that we're working on called 'Chocolate' that's all about sex - having the person," Buckley explains. "I dig joy. The thing about Grace, on my end, on one part it's me, Mick, and Matty gaining each other, but the material is a lot of me putting things to rest so we can go on. I'm not really all that attached to the debut-just the thing we're going to come up with later. Stuff like 'So Real' and 'Kanga-Roo' is more pointing to the future and even beyond." Buckley said, referring in one part to his take of Alex Chilton's "Kanga-Roo" on the teaser Peyote Radio Theatre EP released prior to Grace. "We don't really rehearse, we just create, which is better. The guitar sort of lead the arrangement but Matty started doing this thing on the tom soloing and then Mick started hearing this bass line-I thought it sounded like an old man snoring, just like this weird thing. And I remember my step father snoring and having it scare me. That's what it reminded me of."
Buckley shifts position on the torn couch when Mick comes upstairs and sits down. I ask him about "Eternal Life," the most rambunctious song on Grace with crunching guitars and thrashing rhythms. He goes back to his agitated state, pursed lips, knitted eyebrows, and revives the earlier Rivera/Manson discussion. "I've been obsessed ever since I was a kid with the attrocities. Yeah, really fucking heinous shit. [The song] had to be heavy. It had to be very heavy. It wasn't even half as heavy as it should be," Buckley explained. Mick nods.
"I've had run-ins with it on the very street level, just kids. Like, going to school with kids that are highly, highly diluted. I had a friend, for a long time, and we rode the bus together at high school and she said something about there were only two black people in the whole school and I'd been to so many different schools and lots of situations and finally, by some twist of fate I end up in Anaheim behind the Orange curtain and there were like two black kids in the whole school, two or three. And this girl said something that made me smell that she was kind of prejudice and I said, 'do you actually think that black people are inferior to white people?' and when she said 'yes,' I called her something I've never called any woman ever. I called her a 'cunt.' 'You stupid, fucking, blah blah blah. I can't believe that you...' and it wasn't her fault at that point, she was very young.
"At some point you really have to look at what it does. In every human being, in everything someone tells you, either they tell you they love you or they tell you they think that you're stupid or that you're ugly or you're wrong. And you can defend youself by saying, 'well, I'm not, you know. I'm worthy. People love me and there are people I love in my life,' but there's something that always listens. Something in there. So people that are hurling racial epitaphs, it still hurts on both sides, on any side. Wasp, spick, kike, whatever, faggot, john, bastard, every single human being and nobody's exempt. Not one person, not even Ghandhi. But he saw it in himself. The thing is, in order to be affected by it in other people you have to have it in yourself. Everybody has the same components it's just that certain things take the stage at certain given times in their character. So, a prominently, hate-oriented family is going to breed a real violent kid. There's honor in him and there's love in him but it's just that it's squanched down in the mix." Buckley strode into The Point earlier that afternoon with a barrage of Sony people and promoters. Sitting comfortably on a barstool in the main room surrounded by music biz types didn't stop Buckley from quietly flirting with an admirer - something he probably is not at a loss for. Later, when he steps on stage a young girl hands him a bouquet of roses which he whisks up and promptly places individual buds on various pieces of equipment and throws one to another young lady in the audience.
It's not a wonder he attracts such a response. Grace is filled with sexual innuendo - the loss of love, the discovery of another, sexual awakening. The album is so sensual it prompted one interviewer to ask Buckley if he sings while making love. "Ask me later," was his response.
The album opens with Buckley's erotic mourn on "Mojo Pin," the title itself a talisman Buckley uses as a metaphor for obsessive love, like a drug addiction. "It's derived from juju which is African for magic. Mojo pin, it's a euphemism. It's a needle with smack that you stick up your arm. It can be anything you want. Or something just as good. No matter how much you love somebody, somehow there's always something that can take them away and that's usually people's fear - that's usually why people try to control other people in love and it happens all the time."
He sings "I love you, but I'm afraid to love you," in "So Real." An elicit love affair I ask? "All those lines are derived, except for the first line, from a time when I was about 5 or 6 and my mother and my stepfather were divorcing and I noticed 'I love you but I'm afraid to love you' is all about them. What I came away from in my older years is that people are just afraid to love each other and always want to come out of things right and wrong. Between men and women it just has to be accepted that part of their relationship is a power struggle."
He croons over this power struggle repeatedly on Grace in an array of vocalizations including Nina Simone's "Lilac Wine" to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelulah," which Buckley magnificently out-Cohen's Cohen - a hard feat to accomplish. Buckley utilizes harmonium and dulcimer to offset his fretful guitar playing but at the bottom of it all lies the passionate plea of a scorned lover seeking solace. And there's a connection, for Buckley at any rate, between lover and the act of love that his songs try to embellish. "There's no separation. I'm not talking about sex with parts. Every relationship I've found between male and female is a sexual energy. Not the prurient, but the psychic."
In the end, after deciphering Rivera, Manson, sex and love, music critics, and anything else that stream of consciously skidded through our conversation, Buckley summed up his intent. "I think about the fact that by any power of mine to communicate and convince people of my ideas, not against their will, but in a dialogue, that I shouldn't be handed over like Special K or Cheerios. That's why I tour before each release - so the people can either turn away and leave and go have coffee down the road from the gig, or stay there and be with us and we'll have a good evening together. But for them to make their own mind up, for them to come to the gig, because this is where the music happens."
By Hilary Meister
"Alternative Press thinks I sound like Whitesnake," said Jeff Buckley while we sat upstairs at The Point in Atlanta on a blustery September day. "They don't think I'm alternative. They think I'm some sort of metal boy!" he grinned. I had the music of Grace, Buckley's first full-length album for Columbia, playing in my head. There have been comparisons to Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant, but overall...
"Waking up and finding out you're actually not alternative...You and I both know - I could take "Psychic Powerless, Another Man's Sack" by Butthole Surfers and clear the fuckin' room. That's alternative! Or Bartok or Ornette Coleman or Captain Beefheart - that's some stuff that will annoy parents anywhere." Buckley was visibly agitated at the thought.
We began our conversation, though who can remember what set us off, discussing Geraldo Rivera interviewing Charles Manson. That got the 28 year old Buckley off and running for quite a while, postulating on the nature of evil that is Manson, and the buffoonery of Rivera. "He's got this commercial - he's the father of two, a loving husband, and he's crassly on camera kissing his kids, kibitzing with his wife, totally politician because he's been such a neanderthal, artificial fake all his life!"
Eventually, Buckley leads the discussion to music critics, still maintaining his firey attitude, quick-draw response, and New York savvy. "It's easy to be a music critic. It's a strange past-time and it's a strange job to have. Everybody can do what he's doing, but he can't do what I'm doing. I suppose that job has to exist but not so much power put upon it. The music and the experience of it is so individual." He proceeds to narrate tales of criticism heeped upon himself and others such as how one writer in Toronto took offense to Buckley's quiet demeanor on stage, calling him arrogant and here, Buckley impersonates the writer, "'his arrogance belies the passion of his music.'" Jeff's face twitches as he nasally expells the words etched into his memory. Jeff Buckley took most of us by surprise during his '94 solo tour across America and the big pond. There were few people at those shows, little hype behind the singer, and little radio airplay. He was going for the throat touring Live at Sin-é, a 4-song live acoustic solo performance recorded at New York's tiny Club Sin-é. Buckley had been performing in New York for several years while record company mongrels stood drooling in the aisles. He wanted the chance to hone his craft, something so few musicians these days are willing to take. He had already rejected his Southern California upbringing, the connections that his famous avant-folk father, Tim Buckley, left behind after his drug overdose in the early '70s, such as a manager who kept tabs on Jeff waiting for the right moment to pounce. And Buckley tried it all - hard rock, reggae, session work, guitar school finally giving in to the call of the East - New York. "I knew I would fit. I knew I would thrive. There's great stuff that happens in California but as far as living there I'm better off in New York," Buckley exclaimed.
Though Jeff would rather not discuss his father, and constantly fights off comparisons and mere mentions, the genes are still there - the good looks, the voice, the pension for unusual sounds and musical hybrids. "Some things he did were great and some things were embarrassing," said Buckley of his father. "Like, Star Sailor I will hold up to any fucking album and say that this is really something. I have a very intimate relationship with the whole story and it has nothing to do with me. I have my own life. I make my own money. I make my own music. I have my own friends."
It's ironic that while Jeff began on a journey to stake his own territory, to claim his piece of the musical rock and to shed any remaining attachments to his father's music that he would perform at a Tim Buckley tribute concert. It was one of Jeff's first major appearances in New York at St. Ann's, a church in Brooklyn that sometimes holds hip concerts, organized by producer Hal Willner. He was so swamped with Tim Buckley fans, music business people, and others wanting to bring the ghost of Tim back with Jeff that it caused the young Buckley to forage deeper into the underground confines of New York in places like the Knitting Factory and the new Thread Waxing Space. He had a brief and shining near-to mainstream moment when he joined forces with Gary Lucas, ex-guitarist for Captain Beefheart, bassist Tony Maimone and Golden Palominos' eclectic drummer Anton Fier in a project called Gods & Monsters. The band dissolved allowing Buckley to wander off and explore his voice as his main instrument.
He wanted to pay his dues by performing in coffee shops in Greenwich Village learning the craft of songwriting by listening to some of the greats - Bob Dylan, Van Morrison. In reading stories about Buckley the tales of limos leaving off record company execs, swarms of A&R suit and ties, leaches, and musicians is enough to break anyone's doubts that Buckley definitely had something going. He held them all at bay, keeping to his ideals of a slow climb upwards, leaving room to meet the musicians that would eventually form his rhythm section in a natural setting, and escaping the hunt with only a few scratches. He lived on his own merits at this time, soaking up the underground culture, music, and life experiences that would ultimately lead him into a deal with Columbia and the promise that Buckley could basically create without pressure.
So, here sat Buckley on his first run through America with his band made up of Mick Grondahl on bass, Matt Johnson on drums and Michael Tighe on second guitar. He's already thinking of things to come. "The next album has this song that we're working on called 'Chocolate' that's all about sex - having the person," Buckley explains. "I dig joy. The thing about Grace, on my end, on one part it's me, Mick, and Matty gaining each other, but the material is a lot of me putting things to rest so we can go on. I'm not really all that attached to the debut-just the thing we're going to come up with later. Stuff like 'So Real' and 'Kanga-Roo' is more pointing to the future and even beyond." Buckley said, referring in one part to his take of Alex Chilton's "Kanga-Roo" on the teaser Peyote Radio Theatre EP released prior to Grace. "We don't really rehearse, we just create, which is better. The guitar sort of lead the arrangement but Matty started doing this thing on the tom soloing and then Mick started hearing this bass line-I thought it sounded like an old man snoring, just like this weird thing. And I remember my step father snoring and having it scare me. That's what it reminded me of."
Buckley shifts position on the torn couch when Mick comes upstairs and sits down. I ask him about "Eternal Life," the most rambunctious song on Grace with crunching guitars and thrashing rhythms. He goes back to his agitated state, pursed lips, knitted eyebrows, and revives the earlier Rivera/Manson discussion. "I've been obsessed ever since I was a kid with the attrocities. Yeah, really fucking heinous shit. [The song] had to be heavy. It had to be very heavy. It wasn't even half as heavy as it should be," Buckley explained. Mick nods.
"I've had run-ins with it on the very street level, just kids. Like, going to school with kids that are highly, highly diluted. I had a friend, for a long time, and we rode the bus together at high school and she said something about there were only two black people in the whole school and I'd been to so many different schools and lots of situations and finally, by some twist of fate I end up in Anaheim behind the Orange curtain and there were like two black kids in the whole school, two or three. And this girl said something that made me smell that she was kind of prejudice and I said, 'do you actually think that black people are inferior to white people?' and when she said 'yes,' I called her something I've never called any woman ever. I called her a 'cunt.' 'You stupid, fucking, blah blah blah. I can't believe that you...' and it wasn't her fault at that point, she was very young.
"At some point you really have to look at what it does. In every human being, in everything someone tells you, either they tell you they love you or they tell you they think that you're stupid or that you're ugly or you're wrong. And you can defend youself by saying, 'well, I'm not, you know. I'm worthy. People love me and there are people I love in my life,' but there's something that always listens. Something in there. So people that are hurling racial epitaphs, it still hurts on both sides, on any side. Wasp, spick, kike, whatever, faggot, john, bastard, every single human being and nobody's exempt. Not one person, not even Ghandhi. But he saw it in himself. The thing is, in order to be affected by it in other people you have to have it in yourself. Everybody has the same components it's just that certain things take the stage at certain given times in their character. So, a prominently, hate-oriented family is going to breed a real violent kid. There's honor in him and there's love in him but it's just that it's squanched down in the mix." Buckley strode into The Point earlier that afternoon with a barrage of Sony people and promoters. Sitting comfortably on a barstool in the main room surrounded by music biz types didn't stop Buckley from quietly flirting with an admirer - something he probably is not at a loss for. Later, when he steps on stage a young girl hands him a bouquet of roses which he whisks up and promptly places individual buds on various pieces of equipment and throws one to another young lady in the audience.
It's not a wonder he attracts such a response. Grace is filled with sexual innuendo - the loss of love, the discovery of another, sexual awakening. The album is so sensual it prompted one interviewer to ask Buckley if he sings while making love. "Ask me later," was his response.
The album opens with Buckley's erotic mourn on "Mojo Pin," the title itself a talisman Buckley uses as a metaphor for obsessive love, like a drug addiction. "It's derived from juju which is African for magic. Mojo pin, it's a euphemism. It's a needle with smack that you stick up your arm. It can be anything you want. Or something just as good. No matter how much you love somebody, somehow there's always something that can take them away and that's usually people's fear - that's usually why people try to control other people in love and it happens all the time."
He sings "I love you, but I'm afraid to love you," in "So Real." An elicit love affair I ask? "All those lines are derived, except for the first line, from a time when I was about 5 or 6 and my mother and my stepfather were divorcing and I noticed 'I love you but I'm afraid to love you' is all about them. What I came away from in my older years is that people are just afraid to love each other and always want to come out of things right and wrong. Between men and women it just has to be accepted that part of their relationship is a power struggle."
He croons over this power struggle repeatedly on Grace in an array of vocalizations including Nina Simone's "Lilac Wine" to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelulah," which Buckley magnificently out-Cohen's Cohen - a hard feat to accomplish. Buckley utilizes harmonium and dulcimer to offset his fretful guitar playing but at the bottom of it all lies the passionate plea of a scorned lover seeking solace. And there's a connection, for Buckley at any rate, between lover and the act of love that his songs try to embellish. "There's no separation. I'm not talking about sex with parts. Every relationship I've found between male and female is a sexual energy. Not the prurient, but the psychic."
In the end, after deciphering Rivera, Manson, sex and love, music critics, and anything else that stream of consciously skidded through our conversation, Buckley summed up his intent. "I think about the fact that by any power of mine to communicate and convince people of my ideas, not against their will, but in a dialogue, that I shouldn't be handed over like Special K or Cheerios. That's why I tour before each release - so the people can either turn away and leave and go have coffee down the road from the gig, or stay there and be with us and we'll have a good evening together. But for them to make their own mind up, for them to come to the gig, because this is where the music happens."
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