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."
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