Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Photo by Ebet Roberts/Getty Images
What if we finally did away with this notion of Jeff Buckley as a seraphic being who briefly graced our earth from on high? At this point, more words have been poured onto page about the life of Buckley than some of our more pious saints. In addition to a deluge of anniversary essays, numerous books have been published about his life including several exhaustive biographies, a remarkable 33 ⅓ on his debut LP Grace, and many dubious pieces of fan fiction.
In his book Killing Yourself To Live, Chuck Klosterman wrote pointedly about Buckley’s ascent to martyrdom: ”He was a well-regarded but unfamous avant-garde rock musician when he drowned on May 29, 1997. Almost instantly, he became a Christlike figure, and his 1994 album Grace evolved from ‘very good’ to ‘totally classic.’” I’m inclined to agree.
Yet this hagiography is something Buckley tried to avoid. He thought himself a total goofball despite his saccharine ballads, and a total punk despite his love of Édith Piaf. He was also the guy who sang “Hallelujah.”
At every other turn, he faced some leaden ascription of tragic holiness. Jeff Buckley’s first public performance in New York took place on the pulpit at St. Ann’s Church in 1991, performing a tribute concert for his father Tim Buckley, who abandoned Jeff when he was a small child. It was already lousy with metaphor. But as Jeff sang “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,” a song Tim wrote rather explicitly about Jeff and his estranged mother, those in the pews watched in awe as a ghost appeared out of the lyrics. How could you not see him as a kind of supernatural presence who breathed life into this unknown spirit? The scripture all but wrote itself.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Buckley performing with Gary Lucas and Julia Hayward at the '91 St. Ann's tribute. Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
His lifelong publicist Howard Wuelfing says that Buckley was aware of this martyrological perception of himself. ”Jeff had the opportunity to look at his father’s story from a very different viewpoint,” Wuelfing says. “Here’s this cool, tragic, jazz-loving junkie who dies gloriously young. Meanwhile he left his first-born without a father. So [Jeff] knew that these things were kind of false. He was not looking to create a Jeff Buckley persona, per se. He was just honest and in the moment, and really unpretentious.”
Another reason we place this religious baggage on Buckley is his many posthumous releases, as if he’s leaking these from some SoundCloud in the afterlife. He has another one out this week called You And I, a collection of studio demos featuring some unreleased covers and one new original song called “Dream Of You And I.” It would be an event if it weren’t already for the exhaustive cataloguing of every last Buckley demo, B-side, radio performance, and one-off gigs across various blogs, fan sites, and official releases, which is done with the kind of anthropological skill reserved for religious figures about whom little is known and to whom congregations would devote themselves.
I’ve listened to Buckley’s music for years now, even once while drinking wine on a roof in the rain, extremely alone and clichéd. Descriptions of him as some bohemian angel or immortal musical prophet always distanced me from his songs, not least because no one in music is actually worthy of deification. Across his entire catalogue, his set recorded at New York’s Sin-é in the summer of 1993 best captures my idea of Buckley. I hold this album close to the heart as my Buckley text. He is at his most human — a self-described “ridiculous human” — and if we’re eager to heap symbolism on Buckley, let it be that he was in flux and eclectic, full of the mortal notions of risk, love, and very dumb jokes.
A couple months after the St. Ann’s gig, Buckley moved from Los Angeles to New York and began playing Monday nights at this tiny cafe in the East Village. The owner of Sin-é (pronounced shin-ay), Shane Doyle, recalls first seeing Buckley when he jammed on a Van Morrison tune in the cafe one night with the Frames singer Glen Hansard. “Later he came in with his guitar slung around his shoulder holding a demo tape,” Doyle says. “He was a youngster trying to find his way in all aspects of his life. The East Village was a perfect place for him. You could be anonymous there and still you’re surrounded by celebrities.”
The no-frills vibe of Sin-é was a magnet for bohèmes plugging their ears to the death rattle of St. Mark’s. Everyone from Allen Ginsberg, Iggy Pop, Paul Simon and Edie Brickell all stopped in at one point and would sometimes would hop up on the mic for a set. Doyle fostered an improvisational vibe: If a band was in town, sure, they could play, why not, we’ll set something up. Many times Doyle would go home in-between his morning and afternoon shift and come back to see a crowd outside and say to himself, “Hmm, wonder who’s playing tonight.” It was a perfect home for Buckley to amplify is wayfaring spirit. He soon got a standing gig every Monday night.
It was at these gigs that Buckley took advantage of the low-stakes, try-anything energy around him. His sets would be long and digressive, full of covers from Led Zeppelin and Van Morrison, to Nina Simone and the Pakistani Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was like watching someone be overwhelmed with the entire history of music every night. “He was so at ease with himself, totally exploring, obsessed with music,” Doyle says. “Jeff was a sponge, he wanted to know everything.”
Soon the dozen or so girls watching Buckley play these slack-genius sets transformed into limousines full of label executives, craning their necks to get into to see the son of Tim Buckley lean against the wall of a tiny cafe and play his voice as nimbly as he did his Fender Stratocaster.
“I was dubious of this guy because he came at the height of children of famous musicians getting record deals,” Wuelfing says. “It wasn’t even John Lennon’s kid. It was Tim Buckley, who wasn’t a success, never had hits, and died of an overdose. It seemed a little desperate. But he made me a believer first time around, at Sin-é, performing solo electric.”
When Buckley inked his deal with Columbia, the first thing the label wanted to put out was a slice of Buckley in his environment. It became Live At Sin-é, a 26-minute EP, which was was expanded in 2003 to include a two-and-a-half hour marathon set recorded over two nights. Until that point, Doyle had never recorded anyone in his cafe, even though The Wallflowers, PJ Harvey, Sinéad O’Connor, and U2 had all graced the tiny stage. All Doyle had was a beat-up six-track mixer and a microphone. He thought that recording would ruin the transitory vibe that made the cafe such a safe space for musicians. “I couldn’t have recorded,” he concludes. “It would’ve changed everything.”
This adds a shade of voyeurism on the Live At Sin-é album. You’re listening to Buckley lead this one-man burlesque cabaret like a boy performing in the mirror. He could be Robert Plant, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday— he tries on each song and barrels or slinks his way through, whichever was called for. He’s not languishing inside them, he’s working to align his voice and guitar with the soul of the original, tip-toeing around Simone’s “If You Knew” as if in a grand ballroom.
“When you were with Jeff, he was totally focused on you, and he was genuinely interested in you as a person,” Wuelfing says. “It didn’t matter to him who you were. You could be Jimmy Page or someone serving him coffee, he was equally fascinated by human beings. And that’s a pretty heady thing to encounter, because we don’t encounter it that often in the world. During the solo performances, he was listening, watching, and feeling the audience, responding to them in a really vital and respectful and playful way.”
Perhaps this is what makes Buckley so malleable in our mind, or even immortal. All these posthumous recordings could never define the true path of Buckley with certainty. Wuelfing tells me that his favorite Buckley moments were when he played with the band he formed after recording Grace; Doyle tells me it is “forever the Leonard Cohen cover.” Everyone has their own Buckley text.
In his Sin-e performance we hear possibility, someone so earnestly in love with the large-format spirit of music at time when Gen-X subversion laid like a choking fog over pop culture. What kismet that Buckley existed in that moment, and maybe against the cultural ennui of the ‘90s, he was a kind of prophet for some. But this religiosity myth of Buckley ignores that even at the time of his death, he was a perpetual work in progress. His life was a quest for this perfect thread that could trace a line through the history of music, something that would make sense of it all. Such an endeavor ranks among the most ancient of human pursuits.