Jeff Teaches Guitar

 Described as "circa 1989, Los Angeles?", a fun, cute little clip of Jeff having a bit of fun on the guitar...enjoy! ☺

Mimi_2012 · Jeff Teaches Guitar

Sony Promo Interview

Promo interview cited as "Manchester, '95" for Sony. As ever, delightful and insightfiul 😊❤

Mimi_2012 · Jeff Buckley-Sony Promo Interview

Agony and Energy

 The Age: February 29, 1996

Jeff Buckley may not wish to be adored, but try telling that to Tuesday night's crowd, writes Wendy Tuohy.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE commercial radio has elevated Jeff Buckley to the status of Rock God since he came here last year, perhaps because the fans who flock to him-in bigger venues-on this tour seem groupie-like, this otherworldly artist has had less than favorable reviews this time.

  Sitting in the Palais Theatre, being transported, riven, lifted and dashed by a voice as shimmeringly ethereal as the notes that pour off a saw blade when it's played with a violin bow, it was hard to understand how anyone who hears Jeff Buckley could be anything but moved.

  A fragile figure with a boy's white arms told us wrenching stories of loss, pain and aching. He used a musical language so beautiful-and sang at times in a voice as rich but tortured as a male Nina Simone-that the pain became a thing of beauty.

  We do not know the exact origins of Jeff Buckley's intensity, or what causes the compressed tension that sometimes makes him rigid at the microphone, but the "lots of bad things" he speaks about to journalists, the "lots of irreparable damage...the agony of learning all over again" certainly came through in his coiled-spring stage presence.

  The musical influence of his father, the revered 1960s folk artist and poet, Tim Buckley, who met his eight-year-old son only once before his death by overdose, was also felt. Buckley modulated the emotional and musical tenor of the evening with waves of sound from gentle finger-strummed riffs to crashing explosions of guitar noise.

  Those who saw Buckley here last August say he has gained stage confidence and become more rockstarlike since then. This is not surprising since he has become used to larger audiences by playing many of the big European music festivals.

  It did not matter that this 28-year-old had nothing new on show. With the exception of the medley he did around Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman as an encore, and a cover of MC5's Kick Out the Jams, the material Buckley and his band played was from their lauded release of 1994, Grace. The sensation of being swept up by waves of Jeff Buckley's energy made the night new.

  Contrary to his stated wish: "I do not want to be adored," Buckley wrote his name on the hearts of the people who saw him on Tuesday night.

Jeff Bukley plays the Palais Theatre again tonight.

Buckley's burden

 The Age: February 23, 1996

  For those who saw him late last year, the waiting is over. But can Jeff Buckley, the man who whose talent enraptured Melbourne audiences, do it again? He spoke with Dugald Jellie.

  THERE IS a certain precedent wth Jeff Buckley. The precedent of last year's whistlestop tour, in which the New York-based singer-songwriter mesmerized those who saw his shows and heard those aching, soulful vocals. His three Melbourne performances were rightly lauded by the music press, with tags such as "gig of the year" tossed about freely.

  In Buckley, audiences across Australia were seeing something new-a story that was being told for the first time. His visceral voice, his hymnal tunes, his haunting elegance, all captured on his 1994 album Grace, struck a deep and resonant chord.

  And then there is the precedent of his father. Jeff Buckley is the son of the venerated late-1960s Los Angeles fringe folk singer, Tim Buckley, who possessed one of the most distinctive and lyrical voices of his generation. His live performances were such that the rock music critic Lillian Roxon once wrote: "There is no name yet for the places that he and his voice can go."

  The story of father and son is tragically short. Jeff Buckley only met his father once, when aged 8, before he died of a heroin overdose. He was to spend most of his childhood singing with his mother, a classically trained pianist and cellist, in the car, bundled around the white trash settlements of Southern California.

  Perhaps because of the legacy, the burden, of his father, Buckley, 28, baulks at any discussion of his bloodlines. It is a connection riddled with mystique and, yet so important, with his vocal style echoing that of his father's, albeit with other strongly original elements. "I've accepted that this is my life," he whispers. "I wouldn't change it. Lots of bad things have happened and lots of irreparable damage has been done. It's the agony of learning all over again."

  It's a heritage that has given Buckley so much strength and inspiration. He personifies the maxim that those who bleed the deepest give the most love and joy through their art.

  His days at school, for instance, were unhappy, and much of his youth was spent on the road. "I always felt I was born into an environment that had no use for me until I moved some place I chose, like New York. I was born into circumstances, either surrounded by the Disneyland Nazi youth of Anaheim, California, or being moved around, dealing with whatever."

  The past is history, with Buckley embarking on yet another tour of the Antipodes, presumably still on the strength of Grace, the hype surrounding his shows late last year, and possibly even the resurgent interest in the music of his father. Melbourne's Shock Records has recently released a back catalog of five Tim Buckkley CDs, including the live recordings Honeyman and Dream Letter.

  But for those who saw him in September, here's the rub: the man has no new material since he last played, or given any indication where his writings in New York are taking him. "No direction really. It just sounds like the music sounds now," was his only suggestion. If that's the case, expect more of the poetry of Leonard Cohen and Allen Ginsberg and the politics of Noam Chomsky and Bob Dylan.

  His recent shows in Sydney, by all reports, suffered because the material sounded stale, the voice tired. Only rarely did his famed voice soar and swirl and dive. Was it the awful acoustics of the venue, or just that you can only sustain vitality for so long when playing the same core of eight songs?

  So for those who saw him first time around, how can the second coming be any better, especially when the sound is likely to be lost in a bigger venue? "Even if we play a song again it will be a very different experience," he says. "If you put your all into it's kinda hard not to get people's attentions."

  Hopefully, that will be the case, and Buckley will be back with all the raw passion of his performances last year. He will, he promises, put on a solid show.

  "I don't want people to love me," he says. "I don't want them to fall in love with me. I don't want them to adore me. What I wish, is for them to be free to enjoy that weird thing that happens to people when they're in a room hearing a story for the first time that they'll never hear again.

  "There's a love, a mutual appreciation, that happens. But it has nothing to do with my name, or my body, it's just a real essential human thing. That's what I hope to happen."

Jeff Buckley plays the Palais Theatre, 27 February with the Dambuilders; 28 February with the Grifters; and the Palace, 29 February, with the Grifters and Crow.

Music Comes From His Mom's Side

 Los Angeles Times: September 11, 1994

By Steve Hochman

  It's obvious that music comes naturally to Jeff Buckley. Strolling around McCabe's guitar shop in Santa Monica before a recent performance there, he plucked, strummed or struck with a loving touch virtually every instrument he passed.

  Not surprisingly, the young singer-songwriter credits genetics for these talents. With his stunningly accomplished debut album, "Grace," Buckley, 27, shows the same kind of experimental jazz-pop edge and poetic touch associated with his father, the late cult hero Tim Buckley, who died of a drug overdose in 1975 at age 28.

  But it is a surprise that it's not his father whom he cites.

  "My mother's side of the family has always been musical, the Guibert family," he said a little later at a Mexican restaurant. "My mother sang to me and my grandmother taught me songs in Spanish."

  And his father? 

  Buckley's gentle eyes turned steely and he tersely said, "Next question."

  Asked about the common quests and textures his music shares with that of his dad, who separated from his mother when Jeff was an infant, he said only, "I met him once."

  Buckley spent his youth shuttling around Southern California with his mother, who, he said, "would fall into good luck and bad luck and have to move a lot."

  That roaming life, with a soundtrack ranging from Led Zeppelin to John Cage, translates into the into the serpentine, Zen-like quality of Buckley's own music.

  "Music is the only thing that really understood me," he said of his youth. "Human music is just an expression of the heartbeat and blood beating in your ears."

  After playing in various teen garage bands, he left home at 17 and settled in Hollywood, where he dabbled in everything from rock to reggae to jazz. In 1990, he moved to New York and gradually started performing on the coffeehouse circuit. He signed with Columbia Records in October, 1992, but wanted to hone his musical vision before making an album.

  He feels that "Grace" fulfills his search for a musical language suiting his ambitions. But he also says it's just a first step in tapping into the full spectrum of music he carries with him.

  "I have things ready for gestation," he said. "Now I have a way of getting my material ready so it grows up right."

Son of '60s folk legend curses genetics

News Record: May 18, 1995

By Rex Rutkoski

  He may be the son of the late '60s folk legend Tim Buckley, but Jeff Buckley very quickly lets you know he's his own man.

  In fact, the record company biography for his critically-acclaimed full-length debut album, "Grace," does not mention his famous father.

  Buckley performs his own music Sunday at Metropol in the Strip district on a bill headlined by Juliana Hatfield.

  Tim Buckley died in 1975 at 28, Jeff's current age. He only met his father once, when he was 8. He was raised by his mother, a classical pianist, and his stepfather.

  Buckley did perform his dad's song, "I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain," which mentions Jeff and hus mom, at a memorial tribute in Brooklyn. But Buckley suggests there are unfair expectations placed on what he calls " '60s offspring."

  "I can't tell you how little he had to do with my music," he says of his father. "Genetics be damned, I have completely different musical choices."

  As one national magazine opined, "Buckley is aiming for a higher plane, musically and spiritually, than any other singer-songwriter right now, he succeeds enough to matter."

  Talking with Buckley, it's easy to understand that he clearly is struggling with distractions such as attending to the business side of music that take him away from what matters most to him-making music the way he wants to make it.

  He was in no hurry to be signed by a record company. "You only really fall from integrity with yourself if you just lose your way, if you get too tired, too disillusioned," Buckley says.

  While it's not easy to play the game, "it's an excruciating talent you must develop," he says. "The whole machine is not set up for art. It's set up for commerce. It doesn't recognize it. It's like a visitor from a beautiful foreign country who has no knowledge of the customs."

  Buckley tries to create a special place with his music and then transport the listener there. "I love that experience of being transported. That's the best effect of music," he says.

  Life motivates him. "Not always the pain of life, but also the amazing, blinding joy that's also hard to take, and there is a lot of it," he says. "And there is a lot of difficulty in taking it in."

Jeff Buckley: On the move and loving it

Calgary Herald Sun: December 4, 1994

By Tom Harrison

  For four years, he was able to settle down in New York and hone his talent in bars and coffeehouses such as the Sin-E.

  Then he released an EP entitled Live at the Sin-E and then he put a band together and released an LP called Grace and soon he was a nomad again.

  "This is like my childhood on PCP," Jeff Buckley says softly. He's making a mild joke but, like everything this quiet-spoken singer-songwriter says, there is a serious truth at the root.

  In this case, Buckley is referring to his youngest days, when he was growing up with his mother and moving from pplace to place in southern California. Now, at 27, he is the leader of a band and it is he who is doing the moving.

  "It's hard, but it's something I'm used to," he says. The same can't be said for the friends and musicians who are in his band. For Mick Grondahl, Matt Johnson, and Michael Tighe, the recording and being away from NYC are relatively new experiences.

  But Buckley and his pals all started from the same creative point with Grace, a flowing, personalized hybrid of rock, folk, and pop, and are learning to grow together and find ways to develop the songs from Grace a little more with each show.

  "Unconditionally yes. In subjective ways and objective ways. In every way," Buckley says. "We've come through a lot of different experiences already and it's different every night. Moody. I sometimes feel guilty that I brought them into this.

  "But whatever we do, we never want to lose the song; we never want to be contrived."

  Jeff Buckley never really knew his father, the late singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, but he inherited his swooping, elasticized, soulful voice and, it would seem, a similar deterination to break the bonds of conventional pop music genres.

  In the latter he has also had reinforcement from various collaborators, such as ex-Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas, and outside influences such as Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen that has made him come to regard singing and writing as spiritual and mystical processes.

  "What I like about songs is that they find their own life that exists apart from that of the creator, Buckley says. "Songs need their own moments in order to be born, and for those you need to have experiences. Melodies come to me spontaneously and when I hear a certain melody I know in my heart the voice that has to come through."

Nothing's sacred anymore

Chicago Tribune: February 9, 1994

By Greg Kot

 Guitarist Jeff Buckley offers up his secrets in a dynamic debut

  Trudging out of a blizzard, heads fogged in by the weather, listeners found sanctuary, hot coffee and a lot more at a Wrigleyville hole in the wall called Uncommon Ground Monday.

  It was at this unlikely location, in front of a pastry counter and accompanied by the whir of a cappuccino machine, that Californian Jeff Buckley made his Chicago musical debut, and it was a stunner.

  The singer, 27 going on 17 judging from his boyish appearance, paused only to regale a hardy band of listeners with a rambling tale of his first night in a tough part of town a couple of years ago.

  It was the one moment when Buckley came up for air. Otherwise, he was a study in rapture, riding a spectacular multi-octive voice and an electric guitar from one musical peak to the next.

  The son of the gifted folk-soul singer Tim Buckley, who died of a drug overdose in 1975, Jeff Buckley shares with his father an almost shameless willingness to share his most intimate longings and secrets. His voice breaks into androgynous squeals and erotic moans as though as though possessed, and he's got lyrics to match.

  But even though the music seemed utterly spontaneous, as though it were being made up in the moment, Buckley also brought an unerring pitch and dynamic control to his performance. Clearly, he's no newcomer.

  Indeed, after moving to New York from California in 1991, Buckkley has been a fixture in the East Village coffee club scene, where he was recently signed by Columbia Records (his debut album will be released in the spring).

  Over two hours, the singer's catholic taste became readily apparent. In an original like "Eternal Life" he pushed an ancient blues riff hard, wailing in torment. Even better was "Forget Her," in which the singer rushed from whispers to falsetto pleadings over the girl who "was heartache from the moment you met her."

  In two songs associated with Edith Piaf, "Je n'en connais pas la fin" and "Hymn to Love," Buckley's tender voice was caressed by the harp-like gentleness of his guitar playing. And on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," not just the singer but the entire room seemed lost in reverie.

  Buckley can be heard again Wednesday at Schubas, opening for Joe Henry.

Out on the edge

Chicago Tribune: November 4, 1994
By Greg Kot

  When Chicagoans first encountered the music of Jeff Buckley face to face, he was sitting with an electric guitar in front of a pastry counter at a Rogers Park coffee shop last winter, slipping into the mystic despite the whir of a cappuccino machine and a blizzard outside.

  Buckley's astonishing voice, with daring falsetto leaps and fractured, jazzlike phrasing, and equally adventuresome taste in cover material-Edith Piaf, Leonard Cohen, Big Star, Nina Simone-made a startling impression. But it was only a beginning.

  Buckley recruited a band from his Lower East Side base in New York and within a month had them in a recording studio, banging out his first album, "Grace," for Columbia Records. A few months ago, Buckley stormed through town again, this time with his new recruits, and the music became even more expansive and risky. On Tuesday and Wednesday, they return to play the Green Mill, normally a jazz club but well-suited to Buckley's rarefied musicality.

  "I like to play places where people actually go, someplace whete I teally have to deliver, with no escape," Buckley says. "My personal aesthetic is to be affected directly by everything about what you're seeing...

  "It's what I like when I go see a movie or a play. I want to be freaked out, I want to be ripped apart, I want to see something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I don't mind being dashed on the rocks."

  That's where Buckley found himself a few years ago, adrift in California. The son of mercurial jazz-folk singer Tim Buckley, who overdosed fatally in 1975, Jeff Buckley had met his father only once but found himself always compared to him.

  "Moving to the East Side from California was the most extreme and successful self-rescue operation I'd ever implemented," he says. "Otherwise I was going to rot from the inside. It was do or die. I've always done music, been in bands, but at the time I was staring at the walls, with no hope and no confidence. New York is stinking with industrial waste, but it's also stinking with purpose."

  After a brief stint with guitarist Gary Lucas in Gods and Monsters, Buckley began forging a reputation as a solo act, getting "to a place where I could let my deepest eccentricities out. By that, I mean I just see things a little differently and I express myself a little differently and I think it's because I haven't been in one place for very long (in four years, Buckley attended three high schools). So I was seen from my childhood as hyperactive, homosexual, weird, insane, obnoxious, offensive, funny...It's a tremendous point of pain, my inability to relate to the status quo."

  But Buckley learned to turn that into a strength, finding a line of soul that connected everything from Edith Piaf to Robert Plant, and exploring that connection in his loosely structured music, which has the power of rock but the feel and intimacy of acoustic jazz.

  "I've always been more a party to girls' record collections, because boys tend to like their one thing, whether it's Slayer and the odd Cannibal Corpse album, or whatever, while with girls you get the soundtrack from 'Days of Heaven,' an old Styx album, Siouxsie and the Banshees, something they feel," Buckley says. "Music is something that makes you feel and girls have always been a bit better about knowing their emotions. Boys know who, what and where about all their albums, which is fun, but it's mostly a distraction and most boys I know play like that. Fortunately, once in a while you see some weirdos that get through. That's the best music."

Musician's gifted son grapples with fame

Asbury Park Press: February 22, 1994

By Matty Karas

  Jeff Buckley is working overtime to avoid being noticed. He has a model's good looks, with a sharp face that could easily draw comparisons to Matt Dillon or Jason Priestley. But his record company, Columbia, won't distribute any photographs of him in closeup. In his publicity shots, Buckley is almost in the backround. Interview offers from fashion magazines are routinely rejected.

  He has his father's voice, which is a stroke of fortune when you're a singer and your father is the late Tim Buckley. Tim Buckley's angelic, high voice, and odd taste in songs made him a cult hero in the 1960s and '70s. But he was no hero to Jeff Buckley, who never met the father who abandoned him and his mother in pursuit of a singing career and died of a drug overdose in 1975.

  The ground rules for talking to Buckley are that you are not allowed to mention his natural father unless he does first, something he apparently doesn't do very often.

  But now, at least, he's talking. When he made his Jersey Shore debut at T-Birds Cafe in Asbury Park late last year, Buckley refused an interview on the grounds that he didn't have a record out and there was therefore nothing to talk about.

  The irony is that in his performances-wild, rambling affairs in which Buckley, at least for now, is accompanied only by his own electric guitar-he just about begs to be noticed. He's loud, emotional, and almost otherworldly when he plays. And he is constantly chatting about formative experiences, things that happened today, or about other musicians. He is a gifted, funny storyteller. "It's not schtick," he said recently. "I tell you exactly what happened."

  On the other hand, most of his performing experience has been in small cafes in his hometown Manhattan, places like Cafe Sin-e, where, Buckley said, "I talk 'cause I know everybody there."

  Now, with a four-song EP-recorded live at, appropriately, Sin-e-in record stores and a full album due in May, Buckley is in the process of figuring out how to deal with people he doesn't know. His first tour, in which he traversed the country playing in small clubs after a year and a half of building his reputation around New York, is in its home stretch; it brings him back to T-Birds Cafe Friday. He's talking more to interviewers, and less to audiences. 

  He desperately wants people to listen to him and his electric guitar, not just to look at him.

  When asked about his unusual solo-electric approach, he said the electric guitar is "more tied up" in rock history than the acoustic guitar. "Every time you play electric guitar you're tapping into all the music made on electric guitar, everything from one-drop reggae to James Brown to Metallica to Louis Jordan. It carries more range than acoustic. There's nuance to the touch."

  Buckley plays his guitar cleanly, with no external effects except some amplifier reverb. That's not to say there's anything gentle about it; he's in love with the raw sound of a guitar, and he's a dextrous player who can leap from a Led Zeppelin riff to an Edith Piaf cabaret tune without blinking.

  That is what his material calls on him to do. His EP includes a Piaf song, a 10-minute-long improvised take on Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" and two originals. His shows are improvised affairs, too, with Buckley darting from genre to genre, from soft to loud, from fierce to sweet. They're more easily parsed according to emotions than according to specific songs, which sometimes seem to blend into one another.

  The key moments, the 27-year-old singer believes, are when "it shouldn't work but it does. It's out of tune, it's out of rhythm, it's out of context. It's angry when it should be tender."

  Buckley's album will include a classical piece by Benjamin Britten, but will otherwise be mostly original material. If he's been pegged more as an interpreter than a writer, it's because he was in need of material to fill two-hour gigs in New York. "Also," he said, "I got stuck in a hero worship with Nina Simone," another multi-styled interpreter.

  Buckley was raised in southern California by his mother a classical pianist and cellist, and stepfather. He always loved music, a vocation that he said "is not something that you work up to it's just something that you are."

  When he was 12 he decided he wanted to move to New York. "I mentioned it to my uncle and my grandmother, and they were against it. And I just learned to not tell anybody."

  He actually left when he was 22-"I told (my family) right before I left"-and played in a series of New York bands. His last before going solo was Gods and Monsters, led by by Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas. He wanted his own band, but decided to lay alone first. "I knew I had to do cafes," he said, " 'cause then I would know what the band was gonna sound like. All the dynamics of the band would emerge from that."

  Indeed, he said his current tour will be the only one he does without a band. He recorded his album with bassist Mick Grondahl and drummer Matt Johnson, who will join him permanently once the tour is over.

  Buckley says he wants in a sense to be the next Bob Dylan because he loves the model of Dylan's up-and-down-and-up career path. But isn't it a bit too early for the next Bob Dylan to go electric, as it were?

  "Everybody in North America made a great mistake," Buckley said, referring to the howls of disapproval that greeted Dylan's first band. That band "was the greatest band that ever lived. I don't want to hear about Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. They should...put a statue of  (Dylan) everywhere," he said.

  "Have you heard 'World Gone Wrong' (Dylan's new solo-acoustic album)? 'Love Henry' is the heaviest song of the year. People should look at the careers of him and Neil Young, 'cause they went away for a while. Neil did 'Trans' and all those things. And Van Morrison as well. From now on you will see that that is gonna be the the career as an archetype. You peak, you fall down, you get back up, and when you get back up everything you do should be completely reevaluated.

  "My generation, it's a lot less inventive, it's a lot less literate. We have no interest in the past, no ties."