Buckley and Son

Libération: August 19, 1994
By Barbarian
Translated by me 

Son of Tim Buckley, a little "cursed" boy from the folk years, Jeff tries to perpetuate the tradition while liquidating the father. A neurotic disc, its analysis.

One can imagine the faces of Tim Buckley's friends and faithful on that day in April 1991 when, as part of a tribute to the legendary singer-songwriter in St Ann's (Brooklyn Church), they saw Jeff Buckley arrive. Same angelic traits, same flexible voice, he interprets "Once I Was".
  Yet the legacy is purely genetic: in 1966, the year Tim released his first album and left his first wife Mary Guibert, Jeff was born. He was only to see his father Tim Buckley eight years later, a few months before his death-by heroin overdose+morphine+alcohol, etc. Today, Jeff doesn't want to hear about the one he didn't know -Today, Jeff doesn't want to hear about the one he didn't know-"or invited into his life or his funeral" -, to the point of giving up the inheritance, for the benefit of the grandmother he found three years ago.
  Jeff, Tim's son, grew up with his mother, a pianist and cellist, a mechanic stepfather, who made him hear the Who, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, bought his first record, Physical Graffiti, when he was nine years old, and saw the country: "I was born on the road. We kept moving. When I was 17, I got tired of it, I moved in. To Los Angeles."
 There, Jeff comes and goes between various small reggae and hard rock groups, learning that "we shouldn't be in so many groups at once; but that it is also good to disperse, to be chaotic, undecided and pushed. The only way to be authentic, is to follow your nature. I thought these bands would make me a better musician. At the time, I wasn't singing. I was depressed, I didn't approach my guitar. Finally, I got rid of everything. I wanted to make some money, but normal jobs weren't for me. I'm only good at music. I was not even able to fill out the forms asking which schools I had attended-they are so numerous that there was never enough space. No, I didn't suffer from it, but I'm scarred for life."
 With no luggage, Jeff kept the habit of moving. To meet people, but also to leave them behind. In 1990, he abandoned LA, "city of isolation", for New York, "city of contact, of the world, the great singers of Pakistan or France pass, where Lou Reed goes through the garbage to build sculptures, where Allen Ginsberg and Quentin Crisp are walking around." At first, it's a mess. He left for LA, then came back, Jeff meets Gary Lucas, ex-guitarist of Captain Beefheart, whom he joins in Gods and Monsters.
  "With Gary, I came across a special being. I felt like him, isolated. The Gods & Monsters were my last group."
  Then starts an initiation period, cemented in the summer of 1992 by small recitals in bars in the lower New York area, mainly in Sin-é (an Irish club in the East Village). "I was obsessed, I wanted to play, play, play and play again, until I could no longer think. Go home to sleep and start again the next day. Work on the songs I liked, to enter them and, in this way, learn to sing again. Around 18 years old, I had completely stopped. I couldn't align a note. It was too painful for me. I still don't know why."
  He covers Ride or the Smiths, Bad Brains, Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, Hank Williams, Bob Marley, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn...With a predilection for the last ones, "since the important thing is that the songs came to me at a specific moment." The common point is "soul". "Everyone has one. No one can really lie. The voice is the vehicle of personality, whether you're Bon Jovi or Serge Gainsbourg. I also appreciate the way in which it can be disguised as a cover-up, like the singer from Devo."
 During this interview, in the bar of a London hotel, Buckley Jr. cannot help but put CD's in his K7 player. Edith Piaf for example, if you will, "Je n'en connaît pas la fin" on a live Big Cat EP. A whim, or a fondness?
  "Genius! She's from the street, punk. Edith Piaf is one of the reasons why I performed in front of strangers who came for a drink to forget their daily worries. I sing with all my heart to touch them. She had this extraordinary voice, with an incredible vibrato, thanks to the street where she was supposed to be heard. I understand her. To be psychologically in the middle of nowhere, lost in a sea of despair, I know what it's like."
  But, according to the principle that "to pay tribute to the things you love, you must become yourself", Jeff Buckley does not forget his compositions.
 Lover You Should Should Have Come Over, his favorite, talks about waiting, capturing the moment before it disappears. Is it for these provisions, or for obvious ones, cynical, name reasons, that the labels fought over the right to sign him? Prudent, aware of the danger, attentive to his father's shadow, Jeff Buckley took his time to choose...Columbia at the end of'92.
  Recorded with Mick Grondahl (bass player) and Matt Johnson (drummer), "guys who see me as I am, that is, a guy forcing himself to strip away as much as possible," produced by Andy Wallace (Soul Asylum, Guns N' Roses, Nirvana), the album is released this summer. Illustratively unknown again, Jeff Buckley's on a little bit of a roll in Europe. For example, in London: at the Borderline, he was recently the first part of an unknown group.
  A Face between Tim Buckley and Jimmy Dean, the style still indeterminable but which has already made him compared, wrongly, to this season's loser hero, Beck, run by New York concerts, he has a relative ease that is hardly arrogant, so fragile.
  His voice, "the oldest instrument in the world", is elastic, with acute tendencies that are a little stressful. "My name is Jeff," said this smiling son of no one to the audience. Forty-eight hours later, it's the garage, greeted acoustically. Word of mouth has already worked, Chrissie Hynde and John Mac Enroe came to see the bird, stuck again between two insignificant combos and apparently served by an imperfect sound system. Intense, sincere, indisputably marked by an ambivalent past, which poisons him but on which he feeds, he closes his eyes.

Buckley Dreams

Liberation, February 11, 1995
By Lauren Rigoulet
Submitted by Sai
Translated by me

SONG. At the time of the Parisian stage enthronement (after two false entries), a return of the American "sensation" of the season: the son Buckley, from the origins to the present day.

Buckley dreams: JEFF BUCKLEY, in concert Saturday at 8 pm at Bataclan, 50, bd Voltaire, Paris XI (complete). Another date is scheduled for July 6 at the Olympia.

New York, Special Envoy - He arrived in New York from the top. He crashed at Central Park, in the latitudes of 90th Street, and spent some time in Harlem. But it did not make sense for him to live there. It's downtown that Jeff Buckley's character is "made". His apartment is located on the edge of the "Lower East Side", a hotspot for bohemian life in the lower parts of Manhattan. According to the visitors, he burns incense there and has for furniture only an unmade bed, disks and collections of poetry in bulk (Rilke, Rimbaud, Kerouac...). A few minutes from here, is Tompkins Square, where the young folk scene moved in the early 80's when it was snubbed by the expensive Greenwich Village clubs dear to Bob Dylan (and Tim Buckley). The singer's other house is on St Mark's Place, under a modest sign: Sin-e cafe, a cozy place-two tiny pieces painted in a creamy yellow-that speaks volumes about the young phenomenon.

That's where everything started. Where the career took form. It is also where Buckley returns as soon as a break in the multiple tours allows him to land in: New York. "The last time he came here he said let me do the dishes, please, I need it..." says Emer Nagle, who is working slowly behind the cramped counter. He spent hours to discuss, to take notes, nothing hurries him, he is at home. "I have trouble with this success," commented the person, met this week, between Japanese concerts and European tour, in a quaint hotel in the Latin Quarter. "I do not understand it very well. It happened too fast. I do not feel so far from the time when I was passing the hat at Sin é." In support of these remarks, he says he refused the first part of the mega-tour of Page-Plant that was to launch his career in the US "for a quiet stay in New York, find time to mature and write."

When he left Los Angeles for Manhattan, the young man had in mind a certain romanticism about New York: "Lou Reed posing with a syringe, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, Truman Capote..." In his new neighborhoods, it could have pushed open other doors than that of Sin é, go to CBGB and "visit the ghost of the Ramones" or, at 50 meters, take a chance at the Sidewalk Café, area of ​​the "anti-folk" scene which has Brenda Khan, Beck, Mike Rimbaud...emerged. Oddly, the cheeky Jeff did not feel up to it. Not ready to face the crowd of neo-Dylans  who weigh every word of his acid and committed texts: "I did not have enough confidence in what I wrote," he says. Neither in what I had to say." Today, the choice seems to make perfect sense. Sin-e is an Irish cafe where it's easy to focus on emotion, where the boss, who sorted the tapes, loves the exalted. When they're in town, Sinead O'Connor, Gavin Friday or Shane Mc Gowan are happy to carry a tune near the old stove where the speakers are placed.

The young Buckley, who likes to give substance to things, talks about the time spent in Sin-e (over a year) as an almost mystical learning. He says he has entered it brand new. Ready to become what experience would make him. Before coming to this point, in 1991, he tackled the very troublesome problem of his father during a tribute concert to Tim Buckley at a church in Brooklyn Heights. "I sacrificed a little by agreeing to do that," he says. After a long media silence, he told the American press this fall: "At first I did not want to play it," he says in Interview. But I was not invited to my father's funeral and it did not leave me alone. I thought that if I went to show my respects, I would be done with all that. I sang 'I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain', where he talks about his desire to leave the routine for a bohemian life and where he refers to my mother and myself. It was a song that I loved and hated at the same time." The impression left at this famous concert could have served as a springboard for the New York rock scene. But he prefers the "passage" alone. "I wanted to start all over again. I needed to anchor myself somewhere, to become a child again, to sing as one scribbles. To find my style and magnify my voice."

At first, Sin seems inaccessible. Too many candidates. An endless waiting list. Then a guy who had his place every Monday night passes the torch almost by chance. "It was perfect," says Buckley, "Monday is probably the toughest night, the atmosphere is a bit soft." Armed with his notebook, where there are dozens of songs, his angel's mouth and his porcelain complexion, some stories, an enthusiasm for teasing (apparently he's very talented for imitations), and an immoderate penchant for trance and pathos, he commands attention. "I played as much as I sang, I learned to free myself. To the point that some reproach me for submerging them with my emotions." He sings in a cathartic way. In bulk and in judgment. Van Morrison and Dylan, the Smiths and Ride, Piaf and Judy Garland, Mahalia Jackson and Robert Johnson: "My initiatory journey," he says, "Slip into the skin of my idols to find myself. Trying to touch people by saying things like Ray Charles did it for me. Today, this education is over."

Sin-é Café and Buckley grew up together. We are in a hurry nowadays to hear who's performing, overflowing extensively onto the sidewalk. After a few Mondays, word of mouth started and record companies began to make the trip. "I saw Jeff one night when there were supposed to be seven people in the venue," said Steve Berkowitz, a former Cars manager who signed Buckley's youngster on Columbia, the Dylan and Springsteen label. "His voice was amazing, but he had a way of singing Bad Brains like Billie Holiday, making them sound like Jeff Buckley. And he seemed ready for all risks. He experimented constantly. Over the evenings, I saw him singing Strange Fruit several times: he never performed it the same way. He changed everything, even the arrangements." One of the rare idols that Buckley did not cover during the New York initiation was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the master of sacred Pakistani music, whom he claims to worship more than anything ("My Elvis"): "He has a major influence on the way I play. But covering his songs would be an insult. The way I would like to approach him would be to make the American musical legacy as profound as he did with the memory of his people."