... in Words: Tributes "A Legend Lost," by Tom Moon This interview was originally published by Sunday Mail, 29 June 1997.
Torch Singer Jeff Buckley was on a rocket ride to the top with his exquisite voice and music when tragedy intervened, an eerie echo of the untimely death of his father, Sixties singer Jeff Buckley. Jeff Buckley only made one album. He only toured his native land, America a few times. Only a few songs found their way onto the radio. But his career was taking off like a comet when he visited Australia twice within six months to a rapturous reception. Fans snapped up tickets for his two Queensland concerts in February last year, one at Festival Hall, Brisbane, the other at Seagulls on the Gold Coast. Because he wasn't an established star, his May 29 disappearance in the Mississippi River and the discovery of his body six days later got middling media attention. Radio reports misidentified him as a folksinger. Even MTV did only a cursory segment. He deserved better. Buckley, whose death came just weeks before he was slated to begin recording his second album, was a voice with tremendous potential, the artist many considered the hope of alternative rock. He was an original in an age of sound-alikes, he found middle ground between the fanciful wordplay of the romantic poets and the angst ridden, emotion-first outbursts of grunge. Buckley had been working on about 60 songs just before his death and had come to Memphis to begin recording his second album. He had already completed seven new songs with producer Tom Verlaine in New York. Laughing and in high spirits at a party on the banks of the Mississippi, he walked fully clothed into the treacherous 20m deep river, and was singing as he swam out into the night, floating on his back. It was the last time he was seen alive. Buckley was 30 when he died; he outlived his father singer Tim Buckley, who died of a drug overdose at 28 in 1975, giving his album Greetings From LA cult status. The son resisted comparisons to his father and went out of his way to denounce the old man's indulgences, but he struggled with some of the same traits. He spoke in wildly elliptical sentences and was prone, in interviews, to ramble stream of consciousness style. He battled substance abuse. He was impulsive. Jeff Buckley linked elements of rock's past to something that sounded like it could have been its future. The music on Buckley's 1994 debut, Grace, contained echoes of Gershwin and Led Zeppelin, traces of Indian raga and suggestions of French chanson. In his voice was the anger that everyone who picked up a guitar after hearing a Kurt Cobain tried to summon. But he was never monochromatic; also in his voice was the sound of a lonesome drifter, a heartsick angel, a dreamer. He insisted on spontaneity the creative process, as he explained in a 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer interview: "It's not something that you can contrive. You just have to allow it to happen. You read the river as you go. The soul that comes through is the magic that people call chaos." That spirit drove everything he did and was especially evident in live performance. Buckley didn't simply sing; he applied his crystalline, liquid voice to songs that were miniature theatrical productions, pageants of the impulsive, scat style reinvention unlike anything else in rock. He'd start out by delivering the expected melody, but before long, a word would catch his ear, and the rest of the tune would have to wait. He'd repeat it incessantly, prowling around its syllables, developing a mantra. By the time he'd finished, the raw material had been completely exhausted, tapped for every scrap of revelation. Buckley's source material was itself endlessly fascinating. He emulated the grandiose chants of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the resigned whispers of Leonard Cohen (whose "Hallelujah" he covered brilliantly). He could suggest the attitude of Van Morrison (whose "The Way Young Lovers Do" was a staple of his live set) and the deep physical yearning Robert Plant made famous. Yet Buckley never surrendered his identity. He communicated intensity without relying on the packaged whines of grunge. In the era of punishing averageness that followed Nirvana, his songs strove to take you to the ledge at the moment of the jump. He sent postcards from the depths of torment and from the heights of ecstasy -- whether he was enthusing over an experience that was "So Real" or expressing the simple regret of "Lover, You Should've Come Over." The carefully developed moods of Grace felt like the work of a veteran, someone who knew how long to stir the sauce before serving it. "The whole secret in searching for your own voice," Buckley told the Los Angeles Times in 1995, "is to have faith in your deepest banalities, your epic romanticism. Accept what's inherently inside of you without fear. If you don't find that voice as an artist, you are leading a life that is a secondhand life, basically a mild form of torture and decay." After Grace, Buckley grappled with a different kind of torture -- the task of creating a follow up to his critically acclaimed debut. He'd arrived with a flourish an took what many thought was a long time to return to the studio. Though he admitted battling writer's block, he wasn't exactly inert. He contributed instrumental touches to Patti Smith's Gone Again and collaborated with Nymphs singer Inger Lorre on "Angel Mine," one of the spoken word pieces on the tribute to Jack Kerouac, Kicks Joy Darkness. In the second half of last year, he toured solo under an alias to try out new material. His instructions: none of the people who'd praised his debut, indeed no one in the music industry, was to be tipped off about the shows. When he played La Taza coffeehouse in a Philadelphia neighbourhood, few of the approximately 20 patrons knew who he was. The subversive tour must have done him some good. Buckley was scheduled to begin recording his second album in Memphis this month, with Andy Wallace -- who produced Grace, and contributed to the success of Nirvana and others -- at the board. It's impossible to guess what that music might have sounded like. But the seven songs he did record on Grace and the 60 or so he was working on remain for his broken hearted fans as a sensational untapped legacy for the future. ©1997 by Sunday Mail. All rights reserved
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