Jeff Buckley

THE VOICE OF ANGELS

by Salvatore Setola

The greatest quality of Jeff Buckley was that he never drew from the repertoire of his father Tim, one of the greatest singer-songwriters of the last century, avoiding letting his art crystallize under the weight of his surname. Unlike his father, Jeff Buckley was primarily an interpreter: his writing and arranging skills were modest, and it's no coincidence that his best tracks are either those composed with the help of guitarist Gary Lucas, or covers of other people's songs. Jeff Buckley was a Midas of rock: everything he touched, with that voice of his, turned to gold. He still had room to grow, despite the towering debut of "Grace", but unfortunately, along with his vocal gifts, his father had also passed down to him a malevolent fate, and so, at the age of thirty, he drowned in Memphis on May 29, 1997.

"Grace" is the only complete album he left behind, and yet it has already carved a deep groove into recent music history.

The album's ten songs are split between liturgical pieces of powerful spiritual impact and pop/rock/soul ballads that catch in the throat. The opening track, "Mojo Pin", winds through Gary Lucas's celestial arpeggios and Jeff's angelic whispers, which build gradually until they overflow like a river in flood. The title track is a bittersweet ride between heaven and hell, dominated by Buckley's immense vocal progressions. "Last Goodbye" is a simple pop ballad that, sung by anyone else, would seem little more than mediocre, but in Jeff's hands inevitably becomes heart-wrenching.

"Lilac Wine" and "So Real" couldn't be more different from each other. The first has an almost religious intensity, with the faint, tenuous crescendo of the vocals over Lucas's enchanted guitar arpeggios; the second gives off a claustrophobic atmosphere, with the heavy tolling of bass and drums and the dark notes of the guitar.

With his version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", Jeff reaches levels of interpretive intensity almost as high as those his misunderstood father achieved on "Song To The Siren". The difference between father and son lies mainly in the nature of their spirituality: Tim's "Song To The Siren" seemed to belong to an otherworldly realm, while Jeff's "Hallelujah" is made of flesh that burns and suffers in search of relief. In practice, where Tim placed himself on a transcendent plane, Jeff descends into the pains of mortals. His weakness for sweet pop is picked up again on the following track, "Lover, You Should've Come Over", while "Corpus Christi Carol" is another liturgical piece, composed by Benjamin Britten, sung here in falsetto.

At the tail end of the tracklist come a couple of no less compelling tracks: "Eternal Life", driven by a rock-solid rhythm section and jolts of guitar that recall the grunge sound dominating the charts at the time, and "Dream Brother", which closes the album under the banner of exotic mysticism.

As you can see, it's hard to talk about Jeff Buckley without inevitably comparing him to his father Tim, but it's worth stressing once again that the two shared very few affinities - not just in songwriting and attitude, but in interpretation and use of the voice. Compared to his father, Jeff Buckley adopted registers that, however vivid and imaginative, were more conventional, but this doesn't diminish in the slightest the absolute value of his performances, which would go on to have an enormous influence on later generations of vocalists. Perhaps the crux of the matter lies precisely in that word: interpretation. For Jeff Buckley, interpreting a song means revealing what lies hidden in its essence, unveiling its very being; in this sense, without a trace of intellectualism, and indeed with a disconcerting naturalness, his approach turns out to be almost ontological.

"Grace" thus teaches us that the great albums in the history of rock haven't been written only by the great innovators (Velvet Underground, Faust, Pere Ubu), by the visionaries (Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd) or by the experimenters (Beefheart, Zappa, and Tim Buckley himself), but also by those who, like Jeff Buckley, without any pretension managed to hand down to posterity an album beyond fashion and beyond time.

***

WAITING FOR DEATH

by Pasquale Reccia

When he saw him perform at Sin-é, Don Ienner, Columbia's stout president, said: "This kid is pure talent, he has to be ours! The question is: what kind of album can we get out of him?". Get nothing out of him at all - "Grace" isn't just Jeff Buckley's album, "Grace" is Jeff Buckley. It's candor, it's purity, it's tragedy. It's taking genres that seem irreconcilable and joining them through that thin, invisible thread that binds them all together: the sacredness of music. Because for Buckley, it's not enough to trot out a handful of songs just to show off his eclectic musicianship - he does more than that, he weaves the fabric, he sculpts the piece from the most disparate materials, and then he brings it to life, gives it a soul. A rare case of crystalline talent paired with fully realized artistic intelligence. This is Jeff Buckley, a 27-year-old torn by a thousand feelings, often contradictory ones, who somehow, at some point, manages to reconcile them all and find a balance. And for Jeff Buckley, balance means living one more day. For Jeff Buckley, balance means: death is right there watching you, don't be afraid of it.

"Grace" is the album of someone waiting to die. Jeff Buckley doesn't consciously seek death in exchange for myth. He doesn't want to kill himself just because life is rubbish. He doesn't "hope he dies before he gets old", because in the end "it's always better to burn out than to fade away". Nor does he buy into the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" equation, the idea that yes, I'm destroying myself, but at least I'm going out in style. Jeff Buckley goes further than that. Jeff Buckley is a man out of step with the world, a young man who lived his whole life in solitude and introversion. Others like him would have let themselves die within their own solitude (Nick Drake), but Jeff, despite everything, has a fierce will to live - he wants to search for meaning, he feels he must find that something worth living for. And at the end of his journey he finds the answer to his restlessness: woman. She's the only lifeline that keeps men anchored to life. And if for Dante woman was something whose angelic perfection purified men of sin and thus allowed them to ascend to heaven, for Buckley woman is an angel too, but an earthly one, who fights and prays so that men will stay with her, here on Earth, amid this hell that is life ("Wait in the fire"). But it will all be in vain, and that's where the tragedy lies. Even if you don't seek it, death will come to claim you anyway, whether you like it or not, and it will all be over. It's the fate of the last rocker - he doesn't crave death, but he senses it will come for him soon, because fate has decided so. The only thing he isn't allowed to know is when.

"Grace" revolves for much of its running time around one woman: Rebecca Moore. She's the muse behind at least half of the songs. And when Andy Wallace (yes, the very same one from "Nevermind") scolds Jeff for being unable to make final decisions about the arrangements, it's the death of her father that gives him the strength to finish the record. In this sense Buckley is obsessive: he listens second by second to every single tape (the contract he wrangled from Columbia gives him decision-making power and total control over the tracks), writes out sheet music for the songs to study them thoroughly with the musicians brought in for the string section, studies multiple versions of the same track, and works out the cuts and edits together with Wallace.

Tim Buckley thought of himself as a jazz musician - he improvised, experimented, and recorded. Jeff, on the other hand, is an eclectic rocker, raised on albums spanning the most disparate sounds and genres (just think of his overwhelming passion for Pakistani "qawwali"), and with that typically postmodern irreverence, he spends countless hours searching for the right synthesis of different influences. The result is a meticulously crafted work "somewhere between metal and angels" (as "Rolling Stone" put it).

One fine day, guitarist Gary Lucas presents the young Buckley with two odd instrumental pieces. Jeff pulls out a couple of poems and sings over them... two songs are born. Record executives don't want to hear about it. A friend of Jeff's tells him bluntly, "they're rubbish, they're masturbatory!". Anyone who's had the chance to hear those versions can only say, "well, yes, it's true". But things change. A couple of years go by, you put together a band with friends of yours who have no experience (driving the people at Columbia to distraction), you discover the drummer is actually a champion (a certain Matt Johnson, who has nothing to do with the singer of The The), you get a producer who smooths out all the rough edges in the mix, you spend whole months working out the arrangements, and above all, you pour your soul into every note you sing.

The two masturbatory songs become two psychedelic masterpieces. "Mojo Pin" is the preview, the prelude to what's about to happen. It introduces us to the quintessential Buckley song: a slow, whispered, controlled beginning... then a slow and steady crescendo... and finally the closing explosion, marked by the famous cathartic scream in which Jeff pours out his entire being. The song was born from a dream in which a Black girl shoots up heroin during a voodoo ritual. The lyrics, however, take a different direction (according to them, it's actually Jeff who's the one using drugs). "Grace" is one of the most beautiful songs of all time. It's Jeff speaking to Rebecca. And he's telling her what's about to happen. The famous opening lines go: "There's the moon asking to stay/ long enough for the clouds to fly me away,/ it's my time coming, I'm not afraid, afraid to die...". Buckley pauses. Then he hisses: "afraid... to die"!

But we're only just getting started. And we're left stunned listening to the apparent serenity of his voice as he utters those words. In his imagination, Rebecca weeps in despair, clinging tightly to his arm, begging him not to go. He lets himself be moved and tells her that maybe there's a chance, that maybe he can put off the moment, together, with her. Or maybe it's the girl trying to convince Jeff to stay by whispering to him "we both might go tomorrow". It's not clear. What is certain is that it doesn't depend on him. "I believe my time has come", and in saying it he shows a wise, and at the same time sorrowful, acceptance of his fate. But the memory of what he's leaving behind begins to stir within him, and a whirlwind of anxiety and pain slowly builds up inside him.

The music grows heavier and faster. His voice grows more anguished. Jeff is on the verge of unleashing all his despair, a vessel about to be uncorked. What's driving his restlessness? If the idea of death didn't frighten him before, if the vision of his girl in tears wasn't enough to make him rail against fate, what is it that makes him cry out now? Was everything he'd been telling us a lie, then?... No, and ten words are enough to make it clear: "I'm not afraid to go/ but it goes so slow", Jeff cries out in anguish.

That's enough, nothing more is needed. Jeff Buckley managed to distill into a single line what countless artists have tried to say over an entire career. It's the ne plus ultra, a tombstone; beyond this line there's nowhere left to go. And like a condemned man waiting on death row for his execution, praying for it all to be over quickly, Jeff lets out one last terrifying, cathartic scream, one of the most important in rock history. A liberating outburst that lets him empty himself out, that gives him the strength to wait at least one more day.

Faced with this monument, the other tracks can't help but pay a toll. But looking closely, deep down, all the songs that follow are really nothing more than a restatement of "Grace", broken up into its various parts. "Last Goodbye" is another song in which he bids farewell to Rebecca. It's perhaps the only weak moment on the record, since the strings (so precious on the title track) here feel a bit too saccharine. Heard live, with just the band behind it, it flows much better. "Lilac Wine" is the kind of voice-only piece that any great singer's album needs. And then there's "So Real". His friend Michael Tighe (guitar), lost in thought, absent-mindedly plays a small chord progression. Jeff tells him to keep going, sits down at the drums and starts singing "Oh... that was so real". The rest of the lyrics, somewhere between restless and delirious, would come later. If at first the track seems like filler, you soon realize something doesn't add up. Like a small stroke of genius, halfway through the song a metallic distortion arrives that disrupts its hypnotic atmosphere, wrong-footing the listener. "I love you, but I'm afraid to love you," Jeff whispers. And the mood shifts again. The final sequence is built from a series of "So Real"s, so mechanical, so repetitive, that they become almost alienating. And just as it starts to sound like a ghost is singing, a piercing scream cuts in on the overdub, from God knows where. It's acceptance and despair rising and crossing paths. Shivers down the spine. Then comes "Hallelujah", one of the greatest covers ever recorded. The difference between the original by Leonard Cohen and this Buckley version is so stark that you'd almost doubt they're the same song.

It's a funeral-mass organ that opens "Lover, You Should've Come Over" instead. The opening lines are strange, entirely disconnected from the rest of the song. "Looking out the door I see the rain / fall upon the funeral mourners / parading in a wake of sad relations / as their shoes fill up with water." What is this? An omen? A premonition? These are the lines that have most fueled fans' morbid curiosity about the legend. Jeff would go on to die mainly because of his boots, which filled with water and dragged him down into the river! The song, though, moves on to other territory: "Lover" is Jeff Buckley's love song, a magnificent performance doing justice to poetic lyrics that reward repeated listening. "Corpus Christi Carol" and "Eternal Life" are opposites of each other. The first is sacred, the second almost blasphemous. The first is barely whispered, the second is one huge cry of pain. Buckley himself summed it up this way: "it's just a song that says life is too short to waste trying to screw up somebody else's existence... I couldn't put it any better." Either way, the sense is that the contrast between the violence of this track and the calm of the one before it, embodying Buckley's two souls, closes things off like a circle, as if the album were already perfect as it stands.

Instead, tucked at the end, comes another gem, perhaps the only song truly able to rival "Grace": the mysterious "Dream Brother". Of all Jeff's songs, this is the one most haunted by a certain paternal echo. Not only in its Eastern-tinged music, but above all in its words, the looming figure of Tim Buckley casts a long shadow. "Don't be like the one made me so old / Don't be like the one who left behind his name / 'cause they're waiting for you / like I waited for mine / and nobody ever came." Addressing a childhood friend, Jeff begs him not to let himself die, because otherwise his children would meet the same fate Tim left him with. The words sound like a ghost appearing to you in a dream. No screams, no cries, just voices fading into the distance. The song was meant to close the album with music alone. But at the last moment, Jeff decided to write one final, now-famous verse: "I feel afraid and I call your name / I love your voice and your dance insane / I hear your words and I know your pain / Your head in your hands / and her kiss on the lips of another / Your eyes to the ground / And the world spinning round forever / Asleep in the sand / With the ocean washing over."

These are Jeff Buckley's final words, a direct farewell to the father everyone talked so much about. Perhaps a desperate attempt to finally make peace with his memory.

Singer-songwriter, psychedelic, pop/soul/gospel, punk/wave, indie/alternative — over the years, definitions of "Grace" have piled up endlessly. The best came from Rolling Stone: punkadelicalternative, a phrase worth framing for its sheer comic value. An album beloved in equal measure by rock's old dinosaurs (across every genre, without exception) and by a new generation of young, casual fans alike.

Jeff Buckley's music still casts its spell today. As fate would have it, he, the last great myth of rock, drowned in Memphis, the very place where it had all begun. Jeff Buckley is "Grace" and "Grace" is Jeff Buckley. It's about taking the music that came before, burning it down to forge something whole, and then sitting there watching the ashes as they scatter, carried off by the wind.

N.B. "So Real" replaced a track called "Forget Her" in the tracklist, written after a breakup with Rebecca Moore. Columbia intended to release the song as a promotional single, probably because it was the only track with an easily identifiable chorus. Buckley was adamant about cutting it from the record. In newer editions, it has been added at the end of the album as a bonus track.

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17/05/2007