The Class of '94

Spin, February, 1994
By David Shirley
Submitted by Niella

  Sprawled on the floor of a mid-Manhattan recording studio, Jeff Buckley is showing off the newest addition to his instrumental repertoire: an antique harmonium. An elegant contraption of hand pumps, varnished wood, and ivory keys, the instument was purchased as a tax write-off, to offset the advance from his 1992 signing to Columbia Records. But Buckley has grown attatched to his new toy: "I first saw one of these on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood when I was a kid," he laughs, his fingers dancing across the keys, "and I knew I had to have one someday."
  Buckley usually plays the electric guitar, accompanying himself as a solo vocalist in the small, dingy lower-Manhattan clubs and coffeehouses where he's been a mainstay since 1992. There's something disarmingly innocent about Buckley in performance. With his cherubic face, head full of curls, and shy, apologetic manner, he's the closest thing the East Village has to an alternative heartthrob. Buckley's real draw, however, is his voice, a pure, multi-octaved tenor that cn glide from the anguished hysteria of a scat-singing Robert Plant to the lilting, serpentine moans of qawwali sensation Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn-in one effortless motion.
  The son of the late folk singer Tim Buckley (with whom he claims to share little more than a famous last name), Jeff was raised by his mother, a classically trained pianist and cellist, and his step-father, an auto mechanic who turned him on to Led Zeppelin. For years, he avoided singing in public, performing instead as a guitarist in a series of fusion and reggae bands. "I used to lie to people and tell them I had nodes on my throat to avoid singing," he now confesses. In 1991, he recovered his voice and moved to New York, playibg in the avant-rock band Gods and Monsters with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas, before setting out on his own in 1992.
  Even if Buckley's debut studio recording, due in early '94 and featuring both a bassist and a drummer, hits big, he plans to continue playing alone. He traces his passion for solo performing back to his heroes, blues singers Robert Johnson and Son House, and their rowdy "barrel house" shows during the early days of country blues. "It was just the singer, his voice, the guitar, and this tiny shack," Buckley sighs, "and people dipping their cups in a big barrel of whiskey. If you sucked, nobody danced. So I decided to perform in very small, inescapably intimate pkaaces-to see if I could make big magic in a really small place."

Spin Magazine Review

Jeff Buckley - Grace - Spin magazine, October, 1994, by Byron Coley.

One of my favorite sorts of music has no real generic handle by which it can be carried into the marketplace. Informed by jazz, rock, and folk traditions, it is not specifically aligned with any of them, vibrating in the air like a mahogany hen's egg held in the grip of unseen forces. Performers capable of producing this stuff include Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, Michael Chapman, Karen Dalton, Roy Harper, Tommy Flanders, Cassandra Wilson, Tim Hardin, Bob Brown, and others. One new name to add to this list is Jeff Buckley.

Jeff is the son of the late master singer Tim Buckley, and one assumes (from the fact that his bio doesn't mention his father) that theirs was not a close relationship. On his debut, Live at Sin-e, whenever Jeff's singing became too similar to his dad's, he'd head off into that quivery direction that Robert Plant used to, singing about things like "Silver and golden carrots / Fighting for a dead dog's love." This is an incredibly annoying tendency, but it's one that Buckley seems to be utilizing less and less.

As evidenced by Grace (and a great promo EP called Peyote Radio Theatre), Buckley is feeling a bit more self-confident these days. Some of this may come from the grounding his material has been given by the extraordinary guitarist Gary Lucas, with whom he works on some tunes here. Another layer of luxuriously creative loam is put down by the arrangements of Karl Berger (best known as an avant-garde vibraphonist), and Buckley seems to flourish in this particular garden.
The songs on Grace range from the perverted pop moves of "So Real" (a composition that could have been lifted from Big Star's Third), to a pigeon-wide cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," to the exquisite tongue-pressure of "Dream Brother" (a masterpiece of pseudo East-meets-West formalism). Obnoxious tendrils of Plantism surface here and there, but Buckley follows his natural vocal inclinations more often than he tries to subvert them.

If Buckley continues to evolve in the direction that Grace indicates, only good things can result. Perhaps he can find a worthy musical doppelgänger (as his father did, in Lee Underwood) and convince Karl Berger to actually play vibes on his next album. If he can do these two things, it won't be too long before he's ushered into the halls of greatness. Perhaps then he and his father can make peace.