Buckley's music is dreamy, too

The Oregonian, May 10, 1995

By Marty Hughley of The Oregonian staff

  Rumor has it that sales of Jeff Buckley's "Grace" have shot up in the past week, equaling about one-tenth of the total from the album's previous eight months in the racks.

  If you're looking for a reason, you'll probably find it at your grocery checkout. Buckley, the 28-year-old son of the cult hero folkie Tim Buckley, has been annointed as one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."

  On the one hand, Buckley deserves the attention-for his music as much as for his cheekbones. On the other, fans attracted by his dreamy eyes might be daunted by the challenges of his dreamy yet unpredictable music. As Buckley's Monday night performance at the Aladdin Theatre showed, he's not for the faint of attention span. Buckley has described his work as "part quagmire, part structure" and at times his songs seem to wander in place, as if that quagmire were home. But when he does throw out a good hook, it's enough to pull his performance up to peaks of crystalline beauty and intensity that make it worth waiting through the lulls.

  Standing off to the side of his three backing musicians, the singer-guitarist built his songs from moments of aching delicacy to peaks of bold declaration and paroxysms of noisy release. Covers of Leonard Cohen's bittersweet, elegiac "Hallelujah" and MC5's proto-punk "Kick Out the Jams" served as stylistic bookends.

  In between he traced his own distinct musical vision in a remarkable high tenor informed by Indian microtones, soul melisma and the honey-dripping jazz phrasing of Nina Simone. Sliding in and out of his smooth falsetto, he drew phrases out like streamers, especially on "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," "So Real," and "Grace."

  He gives these romantic reveries a yearning intensity, a dark sensuality that seems to feed off introspection as much as connection. Whereas even the most enlightened rockers seek transcendence in the heights of carnal knowledge, Buckley seems to touch grace in the afterglow.

  After all, it's that kind of sensation that lingers long after this week's People is off the racks.

  The opening act, a Los Angeles quartet called Soul Coughing, made an odd match with Buckley's dusky passions. Using drums, double bass, a sampler keyboard and occasional guitar, the band pressed out a dense blend of hip-hop, funk, rock and jazz as both cushion and launching pad for M. Doughty's oddball hipster raps. A lanky cross between a junior beat poet and a suburban B-boy wannabe, Doughty trades in inspired non sequiturs and vaguely disquieting images of modern social dislocation.

  But the smart use of the sampler for thick textures, colorful riffs, and comic asides, and the rhythm section's balance of warmth and wallop, created a consistent and engaging musical character for Doughty to inhabit.

Undated journal entry

Another recent release from the estate 🙂❤️✨

Florent le Veil poster

From the Classical Festival show with autograph

HMV Toronto

Newly unearthed footage of Jeff and the boys on October 27, 1994 at the HMV in Toronto, Canada...enjoy!

Buckley takes on the world

(submitted by Lex Frumpy)

In just over two and a half years the enigmatic Jeff Buckley has risen from relative obscurity to the top of the cult ladder. He talks about life on the way up to Ray Purvis.

  JEFF BUCKLEY has grown from being a sensitive, expressive, New York cafe performer to a...sensitive, expressive, worldwide auditorium performer.

  And he has done it without compromising any of his innate charm and essential musical perversity.

  Buckley defies easy categorisation. A listen to his one-and-only full-length CD Grace or the extended live workouts on the B-side of his singles shows that he is totally out of whack with almost all of today's formatted guitar-based rock.

  He believes in just letting things happen. As his bass player Mick Grondahl describes him, "he is a person who wants to just fall into the abyss and trust that he'll land on his two feet-just like a cat."

  Leaving aside the obvious comparison with his legendary father-the late Tim Buckley-the handsome singer, who has the same taut, wild good looks as the actor Matt Dillon, has few peers when it comes to vocal gymnastics.

  He is blessed with a unique and marvelously intricate voice. Imagine something like a cross between Nick Cave, Van Morrison and Maria Callas.

  Besides having the reckless affrontery to tackle covers such as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Alex Chilton's KangaRoo and Benjamin Britten's Corpus Christi Carol, the 29-year-old Buckley has the ability to write complex and subtly structured songs.

  Born in 1966, Buckley was raised by his Panamanian mother Mary Guilbert in California. His biological father, the legendary singer Tim Buckley who recorded eight jazzy, ahead-of their-time records in the 60s and 70s and died of an accidental drug overdose at about the same age Jeff is now.

  When Buckley Jun. was about eight he spent a week with his natural father "I met him one time and a couple of months later he died," Buckley explained two years ago to a songwriting magazine. "But between that he never wrote and never called and I didn't even get invited to the funeral. There is no connection really."

  Speaking from New York on the eve of the Hard Luck Tour of Australia that brings the charismatic singer to Perth for concerts at the Belvoir Amphitheatre on Saturday and the Sandringham Hotel on Sunday, Buckley is quite willing to sketch in the background to his rise to fame, including his early years in suburban Los Angeles.

  "I wrote songs when I was in high school and I had had a band in my room almost every day but we didn't play out, we just played. The first band I had was in northern California and we played a few dinky places." Buckley joined various hard rock and reggae bands in California and studied guitar at the LA Musicians' Institute.

  "I went through this period where I couldn't find my own voice. I was chewing myself from the inside and I didn't know why. I laid off for maybe like two years...I got this huge depression or something. I didn't do anything, I was like this kind of tumbleweed guy. So I went to New York... actually I went twice...and when I got there I got these ordinary jobs but I always got fired for sleeping or being accused of stealing something when I hadn't."

Queen's Hall Autograph

Courtesy of Kev White on FB

Paradiso autograph

"My treasure [1995 July 11]"-Wim Lintsen via FB

"Women disobey"

Love this ❤️✨ (thanks to Gabby for finding)

Band autographs

Thanks to Gabby for finding 

Buckley's Cafe Society

The Toronto Sun

Tue Oct 25 1994

BY JAMIE KASTNER

(Submitted by Steven)

Some people do yoga to unwind. Others do drugs.

  Jeff Buckley, singing/songwriting son of tragic folkie Tim Buckley, makes cappuccino in his favourite cafe, the Sin-e in New York's East Village.

  "When my head gets tight, I go down there and wash dishes or make cappuccinos," he says from his Manhattan pad. "I used to handle the money, but that was going too far. Now, I just make cappuccinos."

  Occasionally, Buckley steps out from behind the Gaggia and straps on an electric guitar. In fact, his debut EP released early this year was called Live At Sin-e.

  On Grace, the full-length CD which came out in August, Buckley blends his octave-scaling voice with everything from solo guitar to full band. The songs range from from Buckley originals to his take on Nina Simone staple Lilac Wine. He'll be dispensing in person Thursday at the Trinity Centre.

  Now, on that cappuccino question. You might figure a cafe for a relaxing enough hangout without actively having to sling foam. Apparently not the Sin-e.

  "It's more relaxing behind the counter than in the audience. Sometimes we get these acoustic bands playing really loud. They're like: 'We're not faggots - it takes a real man to play an acoustic guitar!' It's what's said that should intoxicate, not how loud it's said."

  Buckley's had to prove his volume theory beyond the Sin-e's familiar brick walls.

  "At one of the best shows I've played, in Iowa of all places, the Damn Builders and the Grifters opened up for me. They came out and really rocked the house - they do this rockabilly thing.

  "And then we get on and we're like a down pillow in comparison. We had to draw people in with our playing alone - although we did play loudest we've ever played."

  Musically, Buckley's attention to dynamics can be traced back to influences ranging from Gershwin to Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. (He never knew his musical father, who died in 1975, and has little to say on the subject). Buckley also draws inspiration from the printed page.

  "I've got a real Ginsberg head-groove on. I'm also into really weird fiction - I'm reading this novel called Turtle Boy." A five-minute summary of the travails of Turtle Boy ensues.

  "And do you know Ayn Rand?" A 10-minute lecture on the life of Ayn Rand and the philosophy of rational self-interest.

  "I'm really into biographies too. I read Nina Simone's recently. Amazing. I like knowing what happened in other people's lives. I guess it's a way of getting away from my own."

© 1994 Sun Media Corporation. All rights reserved.