Green Mill Letter

By now, I'm sure many of us are familiar with Jeff's lovely reply to a fan in Chicago who attended the infamous Green Mill show on November 8, 1994...however, thanks to Steve Lafreniere, who was friends with the fan and inherited it, we can now see the rest of the letter, and it's absolutely wonderful I think...😭💞

 

Gracefully changing the family fortunes

 The Observer: January 8, 1995

Jeff Buckley is following in his father's footsteps but, on the edge of stardom, is definitely HIS OWN MAN. By Dimitri Ehrlich

  Jeff Buckley is sitting in the back office of a Tower Records in lower Manhattan, near midnight on a Friday in late December. Rising star of the lower east side alternative rock scene, and son of the late jazz/folk singer Tim Buckley, he is preparing for an in-store performance in support of his striking debut album Grace.

  But first he needs to do something: he insists on listening to "The Man That Got Away" by Judy Garland, a crackly old recording remastered on CD, that the store manager has just given to him. Buckley wants to demonstrate its beauty. He has also been given CD re-issues of vintage Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone as well as two albums by the devotional Pakistani sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But it is Garland's delicate, vulnerable warble that provides the missing link between Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant in the mystery that is Buckley's voice. On most of the songs on Grace, Buckley's vocals spiral into a blissed-out falsetto that is entrancing because it seems equally spiritual and sexual.

  As befits his indie rock credibility, Buckley is an unglamorous star. Tonight he's wearing a wretched pair of weathered combat boots-the sort you occasionally see homeless men selling-a super-frumpy grey cardigan, open to reveal a V-neck sweater hanging from his slender frame, and jeans that haven't been washed in a fortnight. Ditto his hair. In an oddly white-trash bit of accessorising, Buckley's wallet is attached to his belt by a chain, in the style favoured by motorcycle gangs. Three days of beard growth complete his anti-coiff. But his sex appeal is intact: a girl approaches to ask if he is, as she suspects, a Scorpio. Another presses a poem she has written for him into his hand.

  Buckley, 28, is at an odd moment in the trajectory of his career. Having moved to New York two years ago from California, where he was raised by his mother, he crawled his way up through the ranks of the insular lower Manhattan music scene. He is now a mini-star in a highly proscribed microcosm, and on the cusp of national and international success. Tonight that line seems very thin-about the width of one of George Bush's lips.

  On one hand, Grace, released last summer, has sold almost 200,000 copies (only 25,000 of those copies were sold in the United States with the remaining sales spread across Europe). And there's a throng of photographers and autograph-seekers pressing around him. On the other hand, he's not above hauling his own gear on stage, appearing more or less indistinguishable from the hall dozen stringy-haired sound men and roadies who have been putting in place a remarkably extensive sound system, considering the cramped dimentions of the Tower store.

  Buckley's father who died in 1975 from an overdose of heroin and morphine, released eight critically acclaimed, but commercially disappointing albums during his lifetime. Buckley, who was recently named Best New Artist by Rolling Stone magazine and whose album, Grace, was Mojo magazine's album of the year, seems destined not to experience that kind of career frustration, despite his almost total lack of cooperation with the record industry. Largely due to his own insistence that people judge the music on the way it sounds before he'll suply them with an accompanying image, he has no video in heavy rotation on MTV. For the same reason, he refused to press or even suggest a single to radio DJs. He insists on letting the cards fall where they may. "What I'd love," Buckley says, "is if a DJ had a line up of songs and in order to make the night go better he'd use one of my songs as part of a really nice evening. But that's the way I would DJ. That's not the way they do it, they usually have playlists."

  For the son of a folk singer, Buckley has assembled an arsenal of rock guitar effects you'd be more likely to see on stage with Pink Floyd; his amp is set at cat-spaying volume. (In fact, he was raised on Led Zeppelin and Kiss records.)

  In the Tower Records store several dozen more stringy-haired white people with assorted rings in their lips and noses materialise. As he gets on the makeshift stage, Buckley has the slightly startled look of a recently awakened mouse. The set begins with a ghostly wail and a mildly middle-eastern guitar line. He sings with a vibrato as sensual and quavering as the tongue of a snake. It's all so dreamy and atmospheric that you hardly realise the band is rocking their tits off. That's the tension: Buckley is howling in falsetto, the band whirling blues like mid-Seventies Led Zep. Buckley's voice ululating like an Arabic woman at the birth of her first son. He is a strangely ethereal cherub in the midst of all this visceral thrash.

  After the show, Buckley signs autographs, taking ten or 15 minutes with each of the 50 or so fans who have lined up for an audience. He writes a personal note to each person. Almost everything about him seems to place poetry before commerce, but one can't help wondering if it's all an elaborate ruse, a crafty stance for those disenchanted with a different, slicker kind of pop posturing. Doesn't Buckley, after all, want to make a lot of money and sell records?

  "If it happens it'd be great," he says later that night, over omelettes and wine at an all-night eatery. "We just play to express. It's our mission to continue. I want to live my life playing music, so that we can be immersed in this thing. In order to learn how deep it goes, you have to be in it."

Copyright reserved

Jeff Buckley plays 14 Jan, the Tivoli, Dublin (010 353 1 45 44 472); 15 Jan, the Fleece 'n' Firkin, Bristol (0272 277150); 18 Jan, LA2, London W1 (071-434 0403); and other dates

Grace is on Columbia Records

Jeff Teaches Guitar

 Described as "circa 1989, Los Angeles?", a fun, cute little clip of Jeff having a bit of fun on the guitar...enjoy! ☺

Mimi_2012 · Jeff Teaches Guitar

Sony Promo Interview

Promo interview cited as "Manchester, '95" for Sony. As ever, delightful and insightfiul 😊❤

Mimi_2012 · Jeff Buckley-Sony Promo Interview

Agony and Energy

 The Age: February 29, 1996

Jeff Buckley may not wish to be adored, but try telling that to Tuesday night's crowd, writes Wendy Tuohy.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE commercial radio has elevated Jeff Buckley to the status of Rock God since he came here last year, perhaps because the fans who flock to him-in bigger venues-on this tour seem groupie-like, this otherworldly artist has had less than favorable reviews this time.

  Sitting in the Palais Theatre, being transported, riven, lifted and dashed by a voice as shimmeringly ethereal as the notes that pour off a saw blade when it's played with a violin bow, it was hard to understand how anyone who hears Jeff Buckley could be anything but moved.

  A fragile figure with a boy's white arms told us wrenching stories of loss, pain and aching. He used a musical language so beautiful-and sang at times in a voice as rich but tortured as a male Nina Simone-that the pain became a thing of beauty.

  We do not know the exact origins of Jeff Buckley's intensity, or what causes the compressed tension that sometimes makes him rigid at the microphone, but the "lots of bad things" he speaks about to journalists, the "lots of irreparable damage...the agony of learning all over again" certainly came through in his coiled-spring stage presence.

  The musical influence of his father, the revered 1960s folk artist and poet, Tim Buckley, who met his eight-year-old son only once before his death by overdose, was also felt. Buckley modulated the emotional and musical tenor of the evening with waves of sound from gentle finger-strummed riffs to crashing explosions of guitar noise.

  Those who saw Buckley here last August say he has gained stage confidence and become more rockstarlike since then. This is not surprising since he has become used to larger audiences by playing many of the big European music festivals.

  It did not matter that this 28-year-old had nothing new on show. With the exception of the medley he did around Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman as an encore, and a cover of MC5's Kick Out the Jams, the material Buckley and his band played was from their lauded release of 1994, Grace. The sensation of being swept up by waves of Jeff Buckley's energy made the night new.

  Contrary to his stated wish: "I do not want to be adored," Buckley wrote his name on the hearts of the people who saw him on Tuesday night.

Jeff Bukley plays the Palais Theatre again tonight.

Buckley's burden

 The Age: February 23, 1996

  For those who saw him late last year, the waiting is over. But can Jeff Buckley, the man who whose talent enraptured Melbourne audiences, do it again? He spoke with Dugald Jellie.

  THERE IS a certain precedent wth Jeff Buckley. The precedent of last year's whistlestop tour, in which the New York-based singer-songwriter mesmerized those who saw his shows and heard those aching, soulful vocals. His three Melbourne performances were rightly lauded by the music press, with tags such as "gig of the year" tossed about freely.

  In Buckley, audiences across Australia were seeing something new-a story that was being told for the first time. His visceral voice, his hymnal tunes, his haunting elegance, all captured on his 1994 album Grace, struck a deep and resonant chord.

  And then there is the precedent of his father. Jeff Buckley is the son of the venerated late-1960s Los Angeles fringe folk singer, Tim Buckley, who possessed one of the most distinctive and lyrical voices of his generation. His live performances were such that the rock music critic Lillian Roxon once wrote: "There is no name yet for the places that he and his voice can go."

  The story of father and son is tragically short. Jeff Buckley only met his father once, when aged 8, before he died of a heroin overdose. He was to spend most of his childhood singing with his mother, a classically trained pianist and cellist, in the car, bundled around the white trash settlements of Southern California.

  Perhaps because of the legacy, the burden, of his father, Buckley, 28, baulks at any discussion of his bloodlines. It is a connection riddled with mystique and, yet so important, with his vocal style echoing that of his father's, albeit with other strongly original elements. "I've accepted that this is my life," he whispers. "I wouldn't change it. Lots of bad things have happened and lots of irreparable damage has been done. It's the agony of learning all over again."

  It's a heritage that has given Buckley so much strength and inspiration. He personifies the maxim that those who bleed the deepest give the most love and joy through their art.

  His days at school, for instance, were unhappy, and much of his youth was spent on the road. "I always felt I was born into an environment that had no use for me until I moved some place I chose, like New York. I was born into circumstances, either surrounded by the Disneyland Nazi youth of Anaheim, California, or being moved around, dealing with whatever."

  The past is history, with Buckley embarking on yet another tour of the Antipodes, presumably still on the strength of Grace, the hype surrounding his shows late last year, and possibly even the resurgent interest in the music of his father. Melbourne's Shock Records has recently released a back catalog of five Tim Buckkley CDs, including the live recordings Honeyman and Dream Letter.

  But for those who saw him in September, here's the rub: the man has no new material since he last played, or given any indication where his writings in New York are taking him. "No direction really. It just sounds like the music sounds now," was his only suggestion. If that's the case, expect more of the poetry of Leonard Cohen and Allen Ginsberg and the politics of Noam Chomsky and Bob Dylan.

  His recent shows in Sydney, by all reports, suffered because the material sounded stale, the voice tired. Only rarely did his famed voice soar and swirl and dive. Was it the awful acoustics of the venue, or just that you can only sustain vitality for so long when playing the same core of eight songs?

  So for those who saw him first time around, how can the second coming be any better, especially when the sound is likely to be lost in a bigger venue? "Even if we play a song again it will be a very different experience," he says. "If you put your all into it's kinda hard not to get people's attentions."

  Hopefully, that will be the case, and Buckley will be back with all the raw passion of his performances last year. He will, he promises, put on a solid show.

  "I don't want people to love me," he says. "I don't want them to fall in love with me. I don't want them to adore me. What I wish, is for them to be free to enjoy that weird thing that happens to people when they're in a room hearing a story for the first time that they'll never hear again.

  "There's a love, a mutual appreciation, that happens. But it has nothing to do with my name, or my body, it's just a real essential human thing. That's what I hope to happen."

Jeff Buckley plays the Palais Theatre, 27 February with the Dambuilders; 28 February with the Grifters; and the Palace, 29 February, with the Grifters and Crow.

Music Comes From His Mom's Side

 Los Angeles Times: September 11, 1994

By Steve Hochman

  It's obvious that music comes naturally to Jeff Buckley. Strolling around McCabe's guitar shop in Santa Monica before a recent performance there, he plucked, strummed or struck with a loving touch virtually every instrument he passed.

  Not surprisingly, the young singer-songwriter credits genetics for these talents. With his stunningly accomplished debut album, "Grace," Buckley, 27, shows the same kind of experimental jazz-pop edge and poetic touch associated with his father, the late cult hero Tim Buckley, who died of a drug overdose in 1975 at age 28.

  But it is a surprise that it's not his father whom he cites.

  "My mother's side of the family has always been musical, the Guibert family," he said a little later at a Mexican restaurant. "My mother sang to me and my grandmother taught me songs in Spanish."

  And his father? 

  Buckley's gentle eyes turned steely and he tersely said, "Next question."

  Asked about the common quests and textures his music shares with that of his dad, who separated from his mother when Jeff was an infant, he said only, "I met him once."

  Buckley spent his youth shuttling around Southern California with his mother, who, he said, "would fall into good luck and bad luck and have to move a lot."

  That roaming life, with a soundtrack ranging from Led Zeppelin to John Cage, translates into the into the serpentine, Zen-like quality of Buckley's own music.

  "Music is the only thing that really understood me," he said of his youth. "Human music is just an expression of the heartbeat and blood beating in your ears."

  After playing in various teen garage bands, he left home at 17 and settled in Hollywood, where he dabbled in everything from rock to reggae to jazz. In 1990, he moved to New York and gradually started performing on the coffeehouse circuit. He signed with Columbia Records in October, 1992, but wanted to hone his musical vision before making an album.

  He feels that "Grace" fulfills his search for a musical language suiting his ambitions. But he also says it's just a first step in tapping into the full spectrum of music he carries with him.

  "I have things ready for gestation," he said. "Now I have a way of getting my material ready so it grows up right."