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."