Gambler runs out of luck

The Sydney Morning Herald: February 19, 1996

By Bruce Elder

Jeff Buckley, Enmore Theatre, February 15

  THE average rock concert is like an old poker machine in a suburban RSL club. You pay your money, you pull the handle, and God knows what's likely to come out. Every few pulls, you get a reasonable payout and, far too rarely, you amaze yourself when the aces come up and the machine disgorges pure gold.

  When Jeff Buckley toured Australia at the end of last August, he was like "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo." Every night the aces came up. He played both The Metro and the Phoenician Club and audiences staggered away amazed at the concentrated power and intensity of his performance. His voice was a wonder to behold-a great soaring instrument which could roar and whisper and bring tears to the eyes of those who listened. His songs were all so passionate and his guitar playing ranged from wild, fiery chunks of neo-punk agression to a delicacy and sensitivity worthy of his late father.

  So, one wondered about halfway through his rather tedious performance at the Enmore, what's happened in the past six months? Did the gambler run out of luck? You can offer many plausible explanations.

  1. The Enmore is always a crappy venue and not even Buckley could conquer its awful acoustics and its shabby ambience.

  2. Buckley and his band have been touring on the back of their debut Grace which they recorded two years ago and which contained 10 songs, two of which-Hallelujah and Corpus Christi Carol-they never perform live. They are just sick of playing the same old eight songs and throwing in a version of the MC5's Kick Out the Jams for good measure.

  3. They're in the middle of writing new songs for their second album and their collective mind isn't really on the task at hand, playing a halfway decent gig to a bunch of enthusiastic fans.

  4. They average a great performance about one time in five (reasonable odds for a gambler) and Sydney just got lucky last time they visited.

  Whatever the reason, this was not a great concert. There is little doubt that, when the circumstances are right, Jeff Buckley is amazing. At points during this concert, that wonderful voice soared and swirled and dived. At other points, the urgency and intensity was almost palpable.

  Grace was delivered with memorable feeling and there was an almost a capella version of Lilac Wine. But, for most of the night, this was a concert played by numbers. The bass player got to sing a song (who cares?). Buckley talked, or rather mumbled, at the audience a couple of times. In the end this was a performance without focus or commitment. The sub-Sonic Youth encore was a suitably forgettable ending to  a very forgettable night.

  I'll see him next time he comes to town but he better be much better. In the interim, those who can remember will have to live with memories of last August.

Forging old rock sounds into new

The Sydney Morning Herald: August 30, 1995

By Bruce Elder

Jeff Buckley, Metro Theatre, Aug 28

  It is likely that after 40 years, rock 'n' roll as a genre has played every card in its limited pack. All that is left for young musicians is to reshuffle the deck and try to win the game with interesting new strategies. Thus, Jeff Buckley, one of the hottest and most interesting of all the new talents to emerge in the past 18 months, doesn't offer anything particularly new. Rather he pulls together a combination of influences and comes up with a performance which, through sheer dint of his emotional commitment and on-stage charisma, establishes him as one of the most significant and innovative performers to have emerged in the past five years.

  Buckley's influences are both rich and incongruous. Not surprisingly, his primary influence comes from his late father, Tim Buckley. His father's music was strange, often unsuccessful but never uninteresting, mixture of  jazz, folk, and rock 'n' roll. In a very real sense Buckley junior has taken up this baton and pushed the possibilities further.

  But his influences are much more complex than just a family tradition. At times he swerves off in the direction of New York punk circa 1978. At one point he offered a sizzling, and highly eccentric, version of the MC5's punk classic Kick Out the Jams. At other times his approach to guitar playing-everything from barely touching the strings to forcing ear-bleeding feedback from the speakers-hovers in a world explored by guitarists as diverse as Robert Fripp and Fred Frith. At other times, when his band of Mick Grondahl (bass), Matt Johnson (drums) and Michael Tighe (guitar) unleash their fiery, pent-up energy, he is reminiscent of those forgotten avant-garde west coast bands who inhabited San Francisco in the late 1960s.

  Like his father, Buckley understands the importance of sonic textures. He whispers and wails. His guitar roars one minute and drops into silence the next.

  Songs build from almost folky introductions to become great walls of guitar intensity. At times, conventional shape and form dissolve. He has an instinctive understanding of light and shade and of the dynamics which will keep a performance interesting.

  Buckley's debut album Grace was a deeply flawed, love-it-or-hate-it, hotch-potch of experiments and sublime, emotional singing. Any reservations the album may have created are swept away by his live performance. His stength lies in the way he has brought together old rock elements and forged them into something something new, challenging and successfully experimental. The  result is a performance of great power and integrity from an immensely gifted performer who effortlessly seduces and mesmerises his audience his audience. Not surprisingly, as the capacity audience drifted off into the night, there was a feeling that this was one of those performances that will be long remembered and treasured.

Jeff Buckley's State of Grace

Sydney Morning Herald: August 25, 1995
By Sacha Molitorosz
Submitted by Sai

The critics adore his debut album. His tour is the hottest non-stadium gig of the year. Will the 90s belong to Jeff Buckley?

A very fine line divides passion and pretence. The brooding artist, inspired and inspiring, is always a mere breath away from unwitting self-parody. Singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley is one of those most in danger of crossing that line.
  Appropriately, Buckley's songs are full of breathy suggestion. His debut album, Grace, includes a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (we are on dangerous ground here) built upon a gentle, vulnerable vocal track that finishes with an impressive run of quivering falsetto notes.
  "That's not a hallelujah of chasteness and piety," Buckley explains. "It's more menstrual. It has more to do with the hallelujah of orgasam, of pain, of joy, of flesh, of being tied to the earth. Not of invisible angels in heaven who may or may not come down to tell you how good or bad you are, or Santa Claus."
  Buckley is a spiritualist. He worships love and sex. Humanity is his idol. He challenges "the weird sort of monopoly the Church has over certain words, over certain feelings and morality and belief"-even in his song titles: Corpus Christi, Eternal Life, Hallelujah and the title track, Grace.
  "I see many other colours of sacredness," he says. "And grace is a quality in people that I just enjoy. It's a very human quality."
  Like many artists, Buckley plays God. And in the universe he creates-that is, on Grace-he seeks to communicate the most touching human experiences in the most profound terms: altogether an implausibly ambitious undertaking.
  He aims high; and thereby exposes himself to a dizzying fall. In interview, it is the same story.
  "I don't need much time to daydream into a notebook," Buckley muses. "I just do it when I have a notebook-and I always have one with me. But to have that coalesce into music, I need space, stillness...and no telephones.
  "And even if I write it takes a long time for a certain language to emerge. Because it's sort of like quitting smoking when you first start writing-it takes a while for the nicotine to leave your system, until you're totally pure. Then you start."
  He perceives his art as a zealot would his faith, going so far as to describe Grace as an "exorcism."
  When Grace was released last year, the critics were instant converts, ready-made disciples. Superlatives fell at the American's feet. The Herald's rock writer, Shane Danielsen, was moved to dub it Album of the Year, "without question."
  Predictably, a swag of father/son comparisons were made. Jeff's father, Tim Buckley, was himself a songwriter in the Dylan mould who recorded a number of lauded albums before dying young. Jeff was six months old at the time.
  Despite the comparisons, however, the consensus was that here was a talent in his own right, a major artist. Even so, Buckley doesn't play down the influences from the '60s and '70s. He simply speaks of them-Led Zep, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell-in push/pull terms.
  "The only way that I can possibly pay tribute to the people I idolize from afar is, in order to be just like them, I have to discard their work and totally jump into myself with my eyes closed and my nose plugged, totally empty handed," he says.
  "That's the only way you can really pay tribute to the people who have given you something. That is, to come from the thing that is very individual but you, and come from every fibre of it.
  "But, you know, it is great to imitate. How else do you learn? Children do it all the time. And some artists just bring out something in you and give you a key. I'm not talking about separating yourself from input, because then you die. But I'm just talking about when it comes to saying what I've got to say, it has to be from either my deepest eccentricities or just my every day face-but at least it's got to be me.
  "I mean (and here he imitates Bob Dylan), 'I can't keep singing like this all the time'."
  Buckley feels the same attraction/aversion towards his lifestyle. "I suppose that I've learned that I have a lot of license as a young man-a lot of insane freedom," he says.
  "But the only way that you can protect your freedom is a real strong knowledge of your own responsibility to protect it...otherwise you blow your head off in a hotel room somewhere or you end up dying in a f---ing Parisian bathtub. You can get into so much trouble. But it's part of being a male, I think, and everybody goes through it."
  The pop icon even more so. A case of the Jim Morrison syndrome: death by adoration and indulgence. Surely the temptation must be strong for a moody rock star on the rise? Buckley agrees. On the one hand, he acknowledges the dangers of diving into his freedom; on the other, he fears the converse dangers (for an artist, these are even worse) of resting in the shallow end.
  "I don't know any artists that are really emotionally well adjusted. In fact, I think we're all pretty much insane. We're just safe. Yeah, you know, because we don't actually come to your house-you just go to the record bin. You're better off like that, I assure you. And so are we."
  If Buckley in conversation is interesting and visceral, musically he is even more so.
  Grace moves from wall-of-sound interludes that affront with their power-guitars on overdrive accompanied by relentless drumming-to passages in which acoustic strings and a whispered voice barely conspire to hold off the silence; from aggressive desire to tenuous longing.
  His only tools are his voice, his guitar and his band. And his brooding, photogenic good looks.
  "I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is," Buckley says. "You can't be, like, smashing guitars against Marshall stacks all the time. As a matter of fact after a while it just looks like posing-it never really gets down to any message or any real expression."
  In the end, Buckley is no poseur. Depending on your perspective, he is either profoundly insightful or painfully self-indulgent. He would probably admit to both.
  The discussion returns to Buckley's secular spirituality, the antithesis of organized religion.
  "One thing's for sure: you really cannot learn about the earth or the world or about people by living in a building that you stay in all the time in robes with some kind of weird cone on your head and giving up sex. It won't work. It's like preaching-it just doesn't make sense. It's not evil and shouldn't be abolished, it just doesn't make sense for me."
  Buckley himself doesn't preach. Instead, he is charged with a vision he is trying to communicate. Whether or not you believe is a question of faith.

Jeff Buckley plays at the Metro on Monday and at the Phoenician Club on September 5 and 6.