Jeff Buckley's Grace

Daphne A. Brooks

• Editore: Continuum
• Anno: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781441128584
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoria: Musique rock

The power and influence of Grace increases with each passing year. Here, Daphne Brooks traces Jeff Buckley's fascinating musical development through the earliest stages of his career, up to the release of the album. With access to rare archival material, Brooks illustrates Buckley's passion for life and hunger for musical knowledge, and shows just why he was such a crucial figure in the American music scene of the 1990s. EXCERPT:
Jeff Buckley was piecing together a contemporary popular music history for himself that was steeped in the magic of singing. He was busy hearing how Dylan channeled Billie Holiday in Blonde On Blonde and how Robert Plant was doing his best to sound like Janis Joplin on early Led Zeppelin recordings. He was thinking about doo-wop and opera and Elton John and working at developing a way to harness the power of the voice...In the process, he was re-defining punk and grunge "attitude" itself by rejecting the ambivalent sexual undercurrents of those movements, as well as Led Zeppelin's canonical "cock rock" kingdom that he'd grown up adoring. He was forging a one-man revolution set to the rhythms of New York City and beyond. And he was on the brink of recording his elegant battle in song for the world to hear.

CHAPTER ONE

Guided by Voices

Looking for Mr. Buckley

[It’s like a] low-down dreamy bit of the psyche.… do you ever have one of those memories where you think you remember a taste or a feel of something … maybe an object … but the feeling is so bizarre and imperceptible that you just can’t quite get a hold of it? It drives you crazy. That’s my musical aesthetic … just this imperceptible fleeting memory. The beauty of it now is that I can record it onto a disc or play it live. It’s entirely surreal. It’s like there’s a guard at the gate of your memory and you’re not supposed to remember certain things because you can only obtain the full experience by completely going under its power. You can be destroyed or scarred … you don’t know … it’s like dying.¹

Not too long ago one of my best friends unearthed a famously depressing photo of me. Sullen and histrionically serious, I’m slouching my way down New York City’s St. Mark’s Place in Rockport boots a half size too small for me. All bundled up in loudly mismatched, non-New Yorker winter décor, I’m wandering the streets of nighttime Manhattan. It’s my twenty-seventh birthday, and I am looking for Jeff Buckley, on the night before what happened to be his thirtieth. In the photograph I am standing in front of the then just-closed-down Sin-é Café, the site of Jeff’s daring evolution as a solo artist, looking surly and fatigued. I had missed him again. And I had been searching for that perfect voice since I’d first heard him live in Los Angeles a year and a half earlier.

Everything about Jeff Buckley’s music—the way he sang, the gospel hooks and choir-boy falsettos, the swooping leaps in time signatures, the hushed cathedral hymn-like melodies, the ululating scale-climbing and the smoldering, unbridled balladeering—everything was like “fleeting memory” to my ears from the moment he opened his mouth and sang at LA’s American Legion Hall in the spring of 1995. If Buckley was, himself, aware of his music’s density, its uncanny ability to summon pop music’s rich and eclectic past as well as its wild and unpredictable future, then imagine what it was like to receive the sound, to hear an artist who merged what were seemingly the most disparate elements of post-World War II popular music. Using the astonishing instrument of his voice in conversation with uncharacteristically elegant rock arrangements, Buckley could at once fearlessly conjure Robert Plant, Nina Simone, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Edith Piaf, and Smokey Robinson; Van Morrison, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday; Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan, and Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins—and the list goes on and on. It was a voice that was of the moment and yet imperceptibly from another time and place. It was a voice made of the stuff of history and built for a fearless future. It was a voice that broke the sound barrier in the mid-1990s world of grunge and gangsta rap.

I loved seeing it happen to people. I loved people not knowing who he was and then at the end of the show being transfixed and transformed. I loved that. I watched the rabidity of the fans develop. He had the ability to make every person feel, even if it was for one second, that they were the most important person in the universe. It was his way of being able to reach out and touch somebody for one second and thank them, by a touch or a glance, for being a fan and appreciating his music. It was how he gave something back to them.—Leah Reid, Sony Product Manager²

Before the noise, before the bombast, before the beautifully textured arrangements and artfully protracted jam sessions it was that voice that first shook up the crowd on May 2, 1995, in a modestly sized concert hall just down the hill from the Hollywood Bowl. In a gutsy move to begin the evening, Jeff emerged on stage without band or splashy fanfare. Looking small and fragile in a white tank top and black jeans, he stood still and composed, focused and meditative, enraptured and serenely lucid before unleashing a high tenor that pierced the noisy chatter of the crowd. Wild and untamed, wise and controlled, running a cappella up and down scales, clinging to sharp high notes and venturing bravely to the depths of lowdown registers, the voice that I heard that night evoked the sound of a childhood lived in the swirling, mixed up, helter-skelter popcultural madness of post-Civil Rights 1960s, 70s, and 80s America.

This voice of movement and metamorphosis, disruption and reinvention, transgression and collaboration, revolution and cultural hybridity rearranged the landscape of our tiny rock universe in the hall that night. No longer moshing, we stood transfixed, seduced into the ecstatic pleasure of listening to an artful and transcendentally image-busting performance, evolving and exploding in our midst. Summon every rock and roll cliché that you like—the d.j. who saved my life last night, the boy who strummed my life with his words—Jeff Buckley destroyed and rebuilt my musical world in one fell swoop. Unafraid to lead with both the severely intense instrumentality of voice and guitar, that night he revealed to us the depths of what the great rock writer David Fricke refers to as “his punk rock soul” in the passionate throes of songmaking.³

This sound. This music. I turned, at the drop of a hat, into Richard Dreyfuss’ crazed and bleary eyed hero in Close Encounters, frantically and obsessively building indescribable images, struggling desperately to shape and mold ineffable feelings out of mashed potato dinners so as to try and express what this music had done to me. There is perhaps nothing so eloquent as drummer Matt Johnson’s keen and poignant observation that Buckley “could awaken people’s sense of who they were in their own passions. There’s so much longing in [the music]. There’s so much deep yearning for a connection to the source.… And you feel like doing something you never, never do when you listen to this music.”⁴

I had been waiting and looking for this sound all of my own life in the San Francisco Bay Area. A magical metropolis just up the 101 stretching all the way over the bridge and into the nation of Oakland and across to planet Berkeley. A rock and roll Mecca strewn with revolutionary petunias. Hustler preachers, assassins, and cult leaders. A machine-gun toting newspaper heiress. A queer wonderland. A black nationalist matrix of fisted pledges and socialist breakfasts. A field of dreams with giants like Mays and McCovey. I seeped up the mysticism of this aching lament and imagined that I could click my heels and return to my land of milk and honey. Call me Tania, Angela, or Huey. And find me tickets to Bill Graham’s next Day on the Green.⁵

I had been waiting and looking for a sound that might capture everything of that past and that might point me toward a mad, colorful new future. And so from the moment that the lights went up in that smoke-filled Hollywood auditorium, I went looking for Jeff Buckley—in Edinburgh and London, in Paris and New York, in Boston and San Francisco—always just missing him, always trying so desperately just to hear that crazy voice one more time and to make sense of the sound of “a dreamy bit of lowdown psyche.”

Jeff Buckley Remixed: The “Mystery White Boy” and the Ballad of Post-Civil Rights Memory

Jeff Buckley is a singer songmaker who hails from the white-trash suburbias of sunny California, but never really felt quite right until he slipped into the loving but brutal arms of New York City three and a half years ago.

Usually reluctant to define himself, he’ll tell you that he’s a “torched singer,” that he’s the warped lovechild of Nina Simone and all four members of Led Zeppelin with the fertilized egg transplanted into the womb of Piaf out of which he is borne and left on the street to be tortured by the Bad Brains. Then he developed a schoolgirl crush on handsome Robert Johnson but he’s ignored and runs into the arms of Ray Charles. Mumbling his woes until he falls asleep wasted and completely destroyed.—⁶

No one summed up Gen X dreaming more magically than Jeff Buckley. In his playful, pre-Grace “press release,” a handwritten statement offered up before a small solo gig, he whimsically mapped out a musical genealogy that hovered invisibly in the background of 1990s culture. Few of his rock peers, it would seem, were imagining themselves the rightful heirs to Edith Piaf and Nina Simone, but then again Buckley was different. He was a Gen Xer who re-defined the label altogether.

In his oft-cited 1992 book Generation X, Douglas Coup-land famously unveiled the sardonic disillusionment and free-floating disorientation of post-baby boomers. A gaggle of disaffected youth and irony-laden souls, this generation embarked on a futile search for a history as well as a future all its own. In the wake of the early 90s Seattle grunge boom, the “Gen X” label caught on like wildfire. But there was always a racial divide. African Americans were never the face of Generation X. Instead, as downtown cultural critics Nelson George, Greg Tate, as well as Trey Ellis and Mark Anthony Neal, would dub them, they were the “post-Soul” babies, a motley crew of black folks who were born in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Not “blank” but black, this group of individuals weathered and withstood the dizzying ironies of life in the decades following busing and housing integration, voting rights, and “legislated racial equality.” They were shaped, in short, by “the velocity of promise.”⁷

But the mythical divisions between the (white) youth of Generation X and the post-Soul people of color who, despite their supposed differences, all grew up in the shadow of King and Kennedy’s assassinations, Watergate and Patty Hearst, are, of course, too clean and clear cut. It was popular culture that mixed up the divide, bastardized the boundaries of memory, and forged a uniquely diverse cultural space where film and particularly the domesticated cultural worlds of music and television each produced their own mythical versions of racial and class integration and transgression.

I was born in 1968, one year and 364 days after Jeff Buckley, and I feel as though our memories collide in the strange brew of sound and images that came leaping off the vinyl and jumping off the screen in the 1970s: Al Green and the Eagles. Big Bird and Laugh-In. The Jackson Five and David Bowie. Free to be You and Me and Morgan Freeman on The Electric Company. Elton John and the Spinners. Carol Burnett tugging her ear and Diana Ross all decked out in mink at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Froot loops and land sharks. Pam Grier and Diane Keaton. Jackson Browne and Thelma Houston. Earth, Wind, and Fire and the Fonz. Sammy Davis Jr. and Jose Feliciano. Stevie Nicks and Stevie Wonder. President Nixon and Fat Albert. Jimmy Carter and Chic. Schoolhouse Rock and Parliament Funkadelic. The Mod Squad and the Sunshine Band. Kasey Kasem and the Sweat Hogs. Linda Rondstadt and Jerry Brown. Jim Jones and Chico and the Man. The Jerry Lewis telethon and Steve Martin on SNL. Spielberg matinees and Quadrophenia midnight runs. Rocky Horror and The Wiz. Sweet, Sweetback and Sybl.

In this moment when the mad explosion of film, television culture, and rock and roll reached new heights of mass marketing, this self-consciously diversified generation watched everything unfurl, collide, and mix up in the world of popular culture—often before the mixing made it to one’s own neighborhood. No surprise, then, that Gen X cultural nostalgia runs so deeply along racial fault lines. Witness, for instance, Conan O’Brien’s obsession with the African-American comedian Nipsy Russell and the late great Whitman Mayo (“Grady” from Sanford and Son), the Beastie Boys and Beck’s fixation on the soundtracks of 70s black sitcoms, the drinking game scene from Reality Bites built entirely around Good Times trivia. Like one particular character in the 2000 film Bamboozled would proudly proclaim, “Weezie and George [Jefferson]” were perhaps the “first black people” they knew.

If this was true for so many white Gen Xers, the reverse could certainly be said of black folks like me as well. I was the daughter of “King”-size parents, the youngest of three who crossed over the AM/FM dial from R&B institutions like KSOL and KDIA to the then bastions of AOR like KMEL and KOME. Musically, I was following the rhythms of integration and experimentation unfolding in my schools, in my Bay Area neighborhood, on television, and in the record store. Jeff Buckley was apparently on a similar journey.

I remember Ted Nugent blasting from Chuck’s car in nowhere California / I remember Nixon on Television / I remember K-Tels 52 Party-Hits / I remember falling asleep at 13, at 25.…⁸

Buckley shuttled across this cultural universe as well and in interviews often recounted the power of this electric mix of culture. “I would be excited,” he once described to Steve Tignor, “by music that I saw on television—American Bandstand, rock bands on Wonderama, the Ray Charles Show, Laugh-in, the Flip Wilson Show. But I would be COMFORTED by records I played on the stereo, because I supplied my own visuals, and it was my own body reacting.”⁹ Television and music—two cultural forms experienced privately in one’s home—opened up a broad, expansive universe of imagination, shelter, and longing for Jeff Buckley, but his relationship with that culture and those memories remains singularl...