By Tim Perlich
Submitted by Karen Pace/Steven Bodrug
Jeff Buckley, with Wind May Do Damage, and Rory McLeod, at Ultrasound (269 Queen West), Sunday, February 13, 8 pm. Free. 593-0540
Jeff Buckley, at C'est What (67 Front East), Monday, February 14, 8 pm. Free. 867-9499
Ever since Elvis enlisted, there has been an opening for a young free spirit to step forward and take over as America's larger-than-life celebrity saviour.
For the past three decades, Columbia Records has led the star search. Bob Dylan looked like a shoo-in before the motorcycle mishap. And for a minute, Bruce Springsteen was a solid contender-except those three-hour concerts never did translate in the video age. But Columbia may have stumbled upon a winner in Jeff Buckley.
It's still too early to tell, but the handsome 26-year-old singer/songwriter, who grew up in "white trashvilles across California," appears eminently qualified for the job of cross-generational musical icon.
Before he ever set foot in a recording studio, the myth-making cogs of the music industry machine were already turning his way. The fact that the son of the hauntingly voiced Tim Buckley, who died tragically in 1975, was showing a musical inclination was all legend starved rock writers needed to know to christen the kid Next Big Thing.
In the midst of all the hoopla, no one thought to ask the young Buckley if he had any interest in being king.
"I've never approached a record label in my life," says Buckley from his hotel bed during a stopover in Austin. "I never thought about signing a record deal, I never even thought about being a musician-it's just something I did from the time I was a child. Now I'm beginning to go deeper and deeper into it. I haven't really achieved anything significant.
Folk label
"I've been in bands since I was 13. I was playing with a band in New York but it wasn't making any money, so I had to start doing solo gigs to pay my bills. But I've never been into the Bob Dylan thing. I don't consider myself a folk singer, although people have been calling me that lately. Anytime somebody stands on stage by himself, people want to call it folk music. It's just music-my music.
"Playing solo was important for me because I needed to listen to where my music was heading. I knew that in such a setting I would find the voice leading me back to the origins of a sonic philosophy from which the rest of my music would come. I didn't want to be just another dickhead with a guitar singing about his stupid life."
It was Buckley's stint with Gary Lucas' Gods and Monsters that first brought the out-of-towner some downtown New York Street cred, but it was his solo shows at Café Sin-é-a hip East Village hole-in-the-wall where artists like Sinéad O'Connor slip in for impromptu acoustic shows-that led to his Columbia deal and the four-track Live At Sin-é foretaste of his Andy Wallace-produced debut extravaganza.
Truth beneath covers
Recorded over the month of August, Live at Sin-e's stripped-down covers of Van Morrison's The Way Young Lovers Do and Edith Piaf's Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin are perhaps more revealing than the two originals included.
Not only do the cover choices confirm Buckley's refined taste, they also show off his considerable interpretive skill and his versatility. And his unself-conscious scatting and the ease with which he spontaneously tacks on an extra verse to an etched-in-rock Van anthem shows he's not opposed to taking risks for the sake of greater achievement.
"There's nothing about the EP to give you a clear indication about what's to come," he says. "There'll probably be critics who'll take it to show I'm a zero and have nothing to offer while others may accept it for what it is. The whole thing was an immediate, instinctive experience. I just decided to do some scat singing. It's not about trying to imitate Ella Fitzgerald-its just a matter of finding a way of improvising."
So far Buckley hasn't had to deal with much negative criticism-if any. Whether it's out of guilt for the recognition his talented father never received, or the simple thrill of the grandiloquent"I have seen the future of rock and roll..." stroke, the journalists who have covered Buckley seem determined to create a legend, whether he's willing to play along or not.
" I can't protect myself against writers," he grumbles contemptuously. "I don't know why, for example, Bill Flannigan took such a myth-making approach in that (February 1994) Musician article. You know that part where he made a big deal of my staying on stage alone for the encore as the rest of the band left? The whole incident was so very ordinary.
"The show was being broadcast live on a radio station where a friend of mine is a DJ. He said, 'come out and do another song,' so I played a song we did early on in the set. That was it. I can't defend myself against writers who want to inject their own flourishes.
"I really don't know why music critics exist. They don't fit into the context of what I'm doing. If you weren't there and you didn't taste the experience, you ain't gonna get it. I don't see how the music I make can be accurately expressed in literary terms. Instead they focus on what I look like or my record deal.
"To any real people who might be reading this, I submit, don't listen to writers. Either come and see me perform or ignore me-but listen to your heart."
