Mojo magazine February, 1995 by David Hepworth.
Contributed by Sai
Perversity, musical courage, a true sense of the skewwhiff. Even in his dad's day they weren't popular qualities in an artist. But the son has arrived in a different age-one that more than ever needs someone prepared to sing out on a limb...
THE FIRST GENERATION OF ROCK STARS GREW UP IN unremarkable suburban houses. Their fathers drove buses, managed general stores, worked as book keepers. Their mothers shopped and kept house. They went to school and pretended to study, but what they craved was escape into a wider, hipper world, the world of rock 'n' roll. They knew normal life and didn't want it back.
Scott Moorhead, on the other hand, was born in 1966 and was, by his own admission, "raised on marijuana and rock 'n' roll". His mother Mary Guibert, a Panamanian by birth, moved around a lot before marrying a motor mechanic and settling in Orange County, the Croydon of Los Angeles. When he was eight he went to spend a week with his natural father, a not very successful musician called Tim Buckley. Two months later Buckley was dead of an accidental overdose.
When Mary divorced, Moorhead looked at his birth certificate and decided to adopt the name thereon, Jeffrey Scott Buckley. His early life was clearly far from archetypal, and since the 1994 release of his critically-acclaimed first long player, Grace, he has sketched it for interviewer after interviewer. Trailer park trash, moving frequently, possessions gathered in paper bags, bullied by the jocks who took exception to his bohemian demeanor (and although he doesn't offer this himself, who probably also sensed that girls adored his liquid brown eyes and ski-jump cheekbones).
He says he never decided to become a musician. In fact he doesn't believe in deciding anything at all. When adults would ask what he was going to do with his life he tell them music. He aped the music around the house. His mother's copy of Court & Spark, the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album, Led Zeppelin II, Stevie Wonder, Sly & The Family Stone...
"...the soundtrack to Grand Prix with James Garner, Magical Mystery Tour, Hendrix In The West, Barbra Streisand In The Park, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, West Side Story, blah blah blah..."
Nursing a tequila with a slice of lime in the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta, Jeff Buckley studs his conversation with references to the records that inform his music, no matter how unlikely. You could describe his habit of breaking off in the middle of a sentence, holding up a finger for silence, cocking an ear to the background music and inquiring "Debussy?" as mildly undergraduate, but you have to admire such a voracious appetite for input. You will interview quite a lot of rock stars before coming across one who describes Dame Janet Baker as "rockin'". The aforementioned remark comes when he describes how he came to include Britten's Corpus Christi Carol and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah alongside his own songs on Grace.
"That's a gift of my friend Roy who turned me on to Benjamin Britten. He's an old friend from California, we've known each other since we were 15 and he's probably one of the wisest people I know. Roy's one of the few people I've kept with me through the years because I've always moved away and let people go. I tell him that Bono loves Grace and says that Buckley's cover of Cohen's Hallelujah is better than his own. (Buckley please John cale's slightly altered version of the song from the I'm your fan tribute album to Cohen.) Buckley slumps back in his chair, as he does when on the defensive, and curls his lip in a manner that accentuates his resemblance to Matt Dillon.
"I don't think I did that right," he sighs, passing over the compliment without comment. "I hope Leonard doesn't hear it. The way I do it live is better. I did it all live in the studio, there's no overdubs at all, but I pop it in unexpectedly in the show and it works better. The way I did it sounded more like a child and sometimes I've sung it more like a man."
Whether through shyness or arrogance Buckley is not good at taking compliments, and his resentment at being compared to his late father is getting to be legendary. He describes the older fans who come to see him as "baby boomers expecting the Second Coming, and I never fail to disappoint", and his recent response to a particularly persistent bunch of Parisians who were chanting for material by Buckley père was to perform a pantomime death by overdose on stage.
"They're lost in their own past, refusing to grow up, refusing to let go, refusing to see me as I am."
This seems a churlish response to a bunch of people who will, quite naturally, go to see a performer initially out of curiosity and only return if they like what they find. Most of his contemporaries who are starting out without the benefit of a cultishly famous surname employ publicists to drum up precisely the kind of curiosity that Jeff Buckley finds distasteful.
"They really come to me insisting that I worship the corpse, and it's a great affront to them that I wasn't a part of it and I don't seek to use it and have no understanding of it. Everything I know about that man is through strangers. It was my Mom that raised me. It's a laboratory rat maze that leads nowhere.
"And with journalists," he announces, leaning back and sucking the handle of a knife in a sulky show of indifference, "it's just a pop oddity. The cult around a dead person is ravenous, irrational, and to a point I detest nostalgia as a leading punch. Now's the time. Now."
But had Grace not impressed those people on its own merits they wouldn't still listen to it as they do.
"Good," he says, and then unsmilingly puts the knife down.
AFTER LEAVING SCHOOL IN ORANGE COUNTY, JEFF BUCKLEY tried to get started as a professional musician on both coasts, studying at LA's Musician's Institute and attempting to find sympathetic players. In 1991 he turned up at an all star Tim Buckley tribute concert organized by Hal Willner, and sang a version of his father's Once I Was which stopped the show. Near the end a string broke and he finish the number a capella. For an untried musician making his debut in the spotlight this was akin to an apprentice deciding to dribble the ball out of his own penalty area during a relegation decider, but it's this combination of fearlessness and exhibitionism that makes Jeff Buckley unique. Willner was the first of many to decide that "he just absolutely had it. It's definitely a voice from heaven."
Buckley spent a year playing the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit at clubs like Fez, Bang On and most prominently Sin-e, where he made his first record for the UK label Big Cat-a live EP which featured just him and his electric guitar covering Van Morrison's The Way Young Lovers Do and Edith Piaf's Je N'en Connais Pas Le Fin alongside two originals, Mojo Pin and Eternal Life. Those major record companies who found his music difficult persuaded by his looks, and he had meetings with everyone from Clive Davis to Seymour Stein before deciding to go with Columbia, thanks, he says, to the strength of his personal relationships with various individuals.
But wasn't this move from Big Cat to the biggest of the multi-nationals a betrayal of the independent ethic?
It wouldn't have happened with an indie label. I'm not alternative right?"
Why not?
"It's just been decided. It's probably just the fact that I was working on a different flavor. Something that was tremendously me, journalists would say 'idiosyncratic'; just something that spoke from every fibre of my being, and I got this opportunity for the upteenth time and I thought I should take this and just parlay what I can and afford as much time as I can, because I'm not having anyone pick my band for me. And the ideas were coming at a time when I thought I could make something of it and live doing music, and find out how deep it goes and what's to be learned"
There must have been some music that came along when you were younger that you recognize as speaking to your generation rather than to any other.
"I've always been willfully out of step. I've always been on the outside. The only thing that came out and I liked immediately was Patti Smith. I got onto it right when it was happening. First time I saw her I was faking off from school for the 17th time and she was on the Mike Douglas show, just after the Soaps on daytime TV-very mellow, very staid. Radio Ethiopia had just come out and there's Patti Smith with no shoes and just smacked. Dirty, black-soled feet and just from looking at the TV you could smell her. I know that tour look. She was like a wild animal.
"I was rapping during the show in Portland and I was saying Everybody's dying when we're on tour-Cab Calloway, Carmen McRae, Burt Lancaster. And a voice in the audience said, Fred Sonic Smith. And I went what?
"I wanted to go to her house and do a show for her and Fred and the kids, with my band, free of charge. Just half an hour of their time to say, Thank you, I love you, even if you hate my music, this is in part what you've given me. Not Grace but the live experience. And he died. I'm just so sorry."
Once signed to Columbia, Buckley was allowed a substantial amount of time to put together a group and make a first full-length record.
"I wanted to have a situation that would have a lot of longevity to it. I've been in a lot of bands, just trying to make a living, purely because I've always fought shy of straight jobs and of the music business. I wanted to find like-minds that would be independent souls, otherwise the music would be sterile. I don't know how anyone could be in a band with a total dictator. The people that I play with have a lot to offer.
I attracted the guys in the band through the solo shows Michael Tighe has been my friend for three years and he's seen almost all my solo shows. Mick Grondahl was the first one to come up to me and say he'd really like to work with me. He was just so forthright and honest and soft I knew I had to give him a call. We got together one late, late night about twoo'clock in the morning-and a good bass player is very hard to find, someone who's strong and melodic and yet simple. It may only have four strings but the stuff I like is very involved. And he turned out to be very elegant. Raw, but very elegant, strong and wild. And usually when you get young guys they just want to rock-rock rock-rock-rock-rock and get bored if anything has a slow tempo to it. But if you can burn at a slow tempo that's everything.
Then I got Matty the drummer. He was recommended and we just got stoned one evening and went and played with Mick, and the very first night we came up with the music for Dream Brother. I already had an existing poem called Dream Brother, about a friend about whom I was worried. And all the music came from the guitar, and all the ideas I put out made it into the arrangements immediately, so that's how I knew."
The sound of Grace is impossible to precisely place. What's most often cited is the singer's ability to find an overdrive in the top register, a falsetto that can wander at will, a general vocal flexibility that makes it impossible to imagine anyone else even trying to sing his tunes. But it's not a matter of empty technique; the technique is only interesting because the personality is so distinctive and the songs abjure the obvious. At its best, as on The Last Goodbye or Grace, it's a sound that seems to be perpetually leaning forward, only staying upright by virtue of its momentum.
The Last Goodbye was the hardest to record because of the temple and because we just didn't understand it together as a unit. Mid tempo is really hard. To keep something like that it's got to be right on because in the song nothing repeats. It's like those Chinese love songs that only had one melody for five minutes. I put it where it was on the record because Mojo Pin and Grace were so heavy and ceremonial. It's like coffee cleanses the palate between courses. Sequence is really important. I'm an inveterate, annoying DJ at people's houses. I'm trying to get a flow but if you're not careful it's just your flow."
"My mom and I had a turntable that didn't work very well because it would go backwards even though it wasn't supposed to. I'd use anything I could find, like One Of These Days by Pink Floyd, play it forwards, play it backwards, record all the titles of all the songs I had, even those horrible Dan Fogelberg records that I despised and my mother loved, repeat things, make freak out tapes. There's a Birthday Party song where Nick Cave screams before the start of the song, and I put it on there like 23 times over and over again. I was just obsessed with music.
"My generation, a lot of them don't like my music at all. People come to songs that they need and I would say that my generation that I read about...I don't know if their values include mine. Although I love lots of stuff that's out there. It's actually the best pop scene I've seen in years. The fact that at the time Nirvana was so popular and Beck and Liz Phair, I think that's kind of a triumph because they actually can write.
"I know I must appear to some songwriters to be pretty shallow. I've heard as much but it's because I don't dig stanzas. I like all different kinds of metres. I've heard all different kinds of songs I've heard verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-end for so long that I don't identify with it any more. I like to come from a freer vantage point."
Who are the songwriters who have managed to do that?
"Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. He's still writing the rules of what a modern rock career should be and he is until he dies. I've nothing but praise for the things he's done. He made it possible for you instead of poring over Rimbaud, which is basically a diagram for you to fill, a poem on a page, he made it so poetry lives in the mouth. That's why I love the Beats so much. Other poets set up the art form, but they completed it. For the first time America has ecstatic poets and Dylan made it something you have in a musical setting.
The academic take on Dylan is that he can't sing, that he'd be all right if he stuck to the poetry.
"I'll lay my blood down on this, it's all complete ignorance. On Blonde on Blonde he is Billie Holiday-hatefully Strange and beautiful. It's a beauty to be envious over. Everything from Whistling Pete to Lord Byron, from Woody Gurhrie to Verlaine.
"I met him one time. He played the Supper Club and I needed therapy directly after I'd touched him he said, I know you, you look like your Dad. I said, You look like yours too-but he didn't hear me. He was pulling my pigtail so I knew he liked me. He was very gracious and I was terrified and elated because I had been pouring over Don't Look Back with my friend Michael for ages."
Buckley's speech is pitted with outbreaks of mimicry, most of it rather good, and he performs the whole scene from Don't Look Back where student reporter Terry Ellis is shredded by Dylan.
"Oh my God! I would cry if I had one of those guys."
But Dylan has only managed to keep his position and his independence by being cussed enough to apply the torch to his own myth, and by making the records that nobody expected and, very often, even less people wanted.
"Yes," he enthuses. "It's deliberate disorientation. Having a new moment makes the old moment even more sacred. Continuing to ride the same horse until it falls down dead is just cruel. To yourself and to the horse."
The next night at the dressing room meet-and-greet he is surrounded by admirers many of whom are female and have been standing front centre, rapt throughout the show. He signs autographs. One young woman who looks as if she's never engaged in this kind of thing before, pulls up her sweater and ask him to sign her stomach. He obliges with a short missive in felt-tip. Because such things turn heads, I enquire what he's learned from the last hectic year.
"I've learned not to do two things at once. As much work as you can do on your own, do yourself. And that the world music is way huger and more life-giving and permanent than the music business will ever be. The real world of music. And that gives me a comfort."
