The Observer: January 8, 1995
Jeff Buckley is following in his father's footsteps but, on the edge of stardom, is definitely HIS OWN MAN. By Dimitri Ehrlich
Jeff Buckley is sitting in the back office of a Tower Records in lower Manhattan, near midnight on a Friday in late December. Rising star of the lower east side alternative rock scene, and son of the late jazz/folk singer Tim Buckley, he is preparing for an in-store performance in support of his striking debut album Grace.
But first he needs to do something: he insists on listening to "The Man That Got Away" by Judy Garland, a crackly old recording remastered on CD, that the store manager has just given to him. Buckley wants to demonstrate its beauty. He has also been given CD re-issues of vintage Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone as well as two albums by the devotional Pakistani sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But it is Garland's delicate, vulnerable warble that provides the missing link between Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant in the mystery that is Buckley's voice. On most of the songs on Grace, Buckley's vocals spiral into a blissed-out falsetto that is entrancing because it seems equally spiritual and sexual.
As befits his indie rock credibility, Buckley is an unglamorous star. Tonight he's wearing a wretched pair of weathered combat boots-the sort you occasionally see homeless men selling-a super-frumpy grey cardigan, open to reveal a V-neck sweater hanging from his slender frame, and jeans that haven't been washed in a fortnight. Ditto his hair. In an oddly white-trash bit of accessorising, Buckley's wallet is attached to his belt by a chain, in the style favoured by motorcycle gangs. Three days of beard growth complete his anti-coiff. But his sex appeal is intact: a girl approaches to ask if he is, as she suspects, a Scorpio. Another presses a poem she has written for him into his hand.
Buckley, 28, is at an odd moment in the trajectory of his career. Having moved to New York two years ago from California, where he was raised by his mother, he crawled his way up through the ranks of the insular lower Manhattan music scene. He is now a mini-star in a highly proscribed microcosm, and on the cusp of national and international success. Tonight that line seems very thin-about the width of one of George Bush's lips.
On one hand, Grace, released last summer, has sold almost 200,000 copies (only 25,000 of those copies were sold in the United States with the remaining sales spread across Europe). And there's a throng of photographers and autograph-seekers pressing around him. On the other hand, he's not above hauling his own gear on stage, appearing more or less indistinguishable from the hall dozen stringy-haired sound men and roadies who have been putting in place a remarkably extensive sound system, considering the cramped dimentions of the Tower store.
Buckley's father who died in 1975 from an overdose of heroin and morphine, released eight critically acclaimed, but commercially disappointing albums during his lifetime. Buckley, who was recently named Best New Artist by Rolling Stone magazine and whose album, Grace, was Mojo magazine's album of the year, seems destined not to experience that kind of career frustration, despite his almost total lack of cooperation with the record industry. Largely due to his own insistence that people judge the music on the way it sounds before he'll suply them with an accompanying image, he has no video in heavy rotation on MTV. For the same reason, he refused to press or even suggest a single to radio DJs. He insists on letting the cards fall where they may. "What I'd love," Buckley says, "is if a DJ had a line up of songs and in order to make the night go better he'd use one of my songs as part of a really nice evening. But that's the way I would DJ. That's not the way they do it, they usually have playlists."
For the son of a folk singer, Buckley has assembled an arsenal of rock guitar effects you'd be more likely to see on stage with Pink Floyd; his amp is set at cat-spaying volume. (In fact, he was raised on Led Zeppelin and Kiss records.)
In the Tower Records store several dozen more stringy-haired white people with assorted rings in their lips and noses materialise. As he gets on the makeshift stage, Buckley has the slightly startled look of a recently awakened mouse. The set begins with a ghostly wail and a mildly middle-eastern guitar line. He sings with a vibrato as sensual and quavering as the tongue of a snake. It's all so dreamy and atmospheric that you hardly realise the band is rocking their tits off. That's the tension: Buckley is howling in falsetto, the band whirling blues like mid-Seventies Led Zep. Buckley's voice ululating like an Arabic woman at the birth of her first son. He is a strangely ethereal cherub in the midst of all this visceral thrash.
After the show, Buckley signs autographs, taking ten or 15 minutes with each of the 50 or so fans who have lined up for an audience. He writes a personal note to each person. Almost everything about him seems to place poetry before commerce, but one can't help wondering if it's all an elaborate ruse, a crafty stance for those disenchanted with a different, slicker kind of pop posturing. Doesn't Buckley, after all, want to make a lot of money and sell records?
"If it happens it'd be great," he says later that night, over omelettes and wine at an all-night eatery. "We just play to express. It's our mission to continue. I want to live my life playing music, so that we can be immersed in this thing. In order to learn how deep it goes, you have to be in it."
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Jeff Buckley plays 14 Jan, the Tivoli, Dublin (010 353 1 45 44 472); 15 Jan, the Fleece 'n' Firkin, Bristol (0272 277150); 18 Jan, LA2, London W1 (071-434 0403); and other dates
Grace is on Columbia Records
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