... in Words: Tributes "Goodbye... and Hello"
This interview was originally published by New Musical Express, 2 May 1998.
When the word filtered into the NME offices on Monday June 2, 1997, that Jeff Buckley had gone missing the previous Thursday (May 29) and was presumed drowned in the Mississippi there seemed to be a ghoulish inevitability about the news. Jeff Buckley, the extravagantly gifted singer/songwriter, had died tragically before his time, aged 30. He was two years older than his extravagantly gifted singer/songwriter father Tim was when he died tragically, before his time. There seemed to be some ghastly, grisly symmetry about the affair. The timing of Jeff's death, however, was particularly cruel because unlike his father he'd only just started to reveal what he could do. He'd delivered one magnificent album, Grace (a more complete and consistent album, possibly, than any of his father's), as well as an acoustic EP, Live at Sin-é, and was on his way to the studio to take a second shot at his follow-up to Grace (he'd binned one session with Tom Verlaine) before he drowned. It didn't seem right that he'd just die without leaving something new to hear. It wasn't just that he was a great, emotive singer and that he wrote rich, deep songs, it was the spirit that coursed through Grace and his live shows. Here's one tribute that is typical of the many that has flooded the NME office from fans since his death. "I bought Grace after hearing 'Hallelujah' and realised that Leonard Cohen's original was half the song that Jeff Buckley had turned it into," says James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers. "Soon after I saw him in Dublin Tivoli in 1994 and it was as close to spiritual as I'd ever like to get. Since then he has been and will probably continue to be my favourite singer." So it's a cause for much relief and joy that next week Columbia release Sketches (For My Sweetheart The Drunk), a compilation of the work he did with Verlaine, alongside other demos he made for the second album - although not everyone agrees. Some band members are adamant that Buckley wanted the Verlaine sessions destroyed, although they are pleased that the demos that they made with Andy Wallace (who produced Grace) are to be released. Neither Mary Guibert, Buckley's mother, nor his manager/attorney George Stein reckon that anyone has the right to suppress these last Buckley recordings. Columbia, not surprisingly, have agreed with Jeff's mum. Having heard the likes of the explosive "The Sky Is A Landfill" -- as good as anything on Grace -- and the tense, troubled "Nightmares By The Sea," and the sweet, melodic phrasing of "Everybody Here Wants You," and the hymn-like "Opened Once," NME reckons they were right to let us hear his last work.
In next week's NME we will review Sketches (For My Sweetheart The drunk). As a fitting prelude, this week we chart Jeff Buckley's life through the eyes of some of those closest to him, and we also print for the first time the full transcript of his first, most revealing British interview. Here is the Jeff Buckley that many who met him will remember: a self-conscious, sweet, funny, pretentious, charming young man, far removed from the haunted individual that some describe towards the end of his life in our oral history. It's a fascinating story, but it's not a satisfying one. How could it be? Jeff Buckley died aged 30.
Jeff Buckley was born to Mary Guibert on November 17, 1966. His father, singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, had already left Mary at the time of the birth. Jeff was raised as Scott Moorhead, the second name belonging to his stepfather, the first to a young surfer Mary knew who had died the year before. He was to meet his natural father just once, backstage at a concert in April 1975. According to Mary, Tim was reduced to tears by the meeting and begged her to let him take his son home. Jeff spent four days with Tim. Two months later, on June 29, Tim Buckley died of a heroin and morphine overdose after snorting what he believed was cocaine.
Mary Guibert (Mother): "It was a little hospital in Anaheim. I was 18 years old and I was scared. I was in a lot of pain and I thought it would never be over. But he was the cutest little thing. He had white sideburns on either side like a little old man. They put him in my arms and I said, 'Oh hello, Jeffrey Scott!' and he proceeded to sneeze on me 12 times. [...] After a brief bidding war, Jeff Buckley signed to Columbia Records in 1993 - partly, he said, because of the total creative control offered by the label's head of A&R, Steve Berkowitz, and partly because he liked the photograph of the young Bob Dylan in the company's reception. At the end of the year, the UK independent label Big Cat released the four track Live at Sin-é EP, a live recording of a solo Buckley show at a coffee bar in New York's East Village. George Stein (Attorney and manager): "Jeff was worried about signing to a major label and losing his soul. He was very traumatised by that. If you look at the signing photo that Columbia placed in Billboard magazine, it's almost amusing. Jeff looks absolutely tortured. Everybody else had big smiles. It symbolised visually what he felt. He had conflicts his whole career about commercialization. He was worried about selling a lot of records. Would that by definition make him a star? And what did stardom mean? These were all things that bothered him terribly. He had real reservations." [...]
Gary Lucas (Collaborator and friend): "The first time I ever heard that there was a Jeff Buckley was when I got a call in the Spring of 1991 form producer and impresario Hal Wilner. He said that he was organising a tribute to Tim Buckley at St. Anne's Church in Brooklyn, and asked me if I might want to work with Jeff. I invited Jeff back to my house, set up some guitar patterns on the computer and Jeff started to wail. I thought, 'My God, this kid is amazing!' Nicholas Hill (Radio DJ at WFMU, New Jersey): "I hosted a programme called The Music Faucet. Jeff used it very much as a workshop. There was no guest that I ever had on more than once a year bit with Jeff it was anytime he was around." Mary Guibert: " One of his very first gigs was at the Trinity Ball and he came home chattering in this Irish accent saying, ' Would you like beer on your cornflakes Mr. Buckley? We drink beer with everything here.' He'd never seen so many people in gowns and tuxedos puking on themselves." Gary Lucas: "We did the Tim Buckley tribute at St Anne's. I went up onstage with Jeff and he launched into singing 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain' and shock waves went through the audience. Here was this skinny kid with this unearthly voice, just wailing. I was next to him playing guitar but I was really just watching the audience, who were really turned on by it. Then he came out at the end and did a song by himself that just brought the house down. It was electric." [...] Buckley's debut album, Grace, was released on August 13, 1994 to universal critical acclaim. The album had been recorded the previous year at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, upstate New York, with a full band. Jeff's mother, Mary, said the musicians on it - bassist Mick Grondahl, drummer Matt Johnson and guitarist Michael Tighe - were chosen as much for the fact that each one reflected a different characteristic of Jeff's personality as for their musical ability. Following the release of the album, Buckley hit the road for a world tour that was to last the best part of two years. Isabel Monteiro (Singer, Drugstore): "We supported Jeff two and a half years ago, on the Grace tour. I think a lot of people don't realise that although there was this incredible depth of sadness in his songs, he was actually a very funny guy. He had a fantastic sense of humour and was really good at impersonating people. He could do any cartoon, he was hilarious. He hung out with us throughout the tour and entertained us immensely. I think that he was a very sensitive person and carried a great deal of sadness inside his heart, but he was a very easy going, very friendly, very sexy guy." Mary Guibert: " If you ever spent any time with him you thought you were the only person in the world. He was a very focused person when it came to relationships. He was there looking in your eyes telling you whatever was on his mind that day. But he became much more serious and totally exhausted as time went by." [...]
Elvis Costello: "In 1995 I was the director of a festival at the London South Bank, and I was looking for voices that I liked, doing music that they wouldn't usually do. It was clear from Jeff doing Benjamin Britten's 'Corpus Christi' on his record that he'd be the ideal man to come and surprise everybody, and work with musicians that he wouldn't normally work with. We had a closing concert which was called Glad To Be Unhappy, and people could do whatever song they felt would fit under that title. Jeff came up with some amazing ideas.
Bernard Butler: "The soundscapes of his songs were very intense. With Tim Buckley, the drums are kind of patterning, and the guitar is very mellow and very jazzy, but with Jeff Buckley, they were really quite noisy. He was a great guitar player and he used to do a lot of stuff with open string tunings on his guitar which I was only just starting to find out about: maybe his stuff was a bit more complicated in structure than Tim Buckley's songs. When they used to both go off there, with their voices, that's where they met musically. Mary Guibert: "When he went back to New York from Australia he plunged into all these side projects. He was everywhere: the Edgar Allan Poe project [a spoken word CD of Poe poems and stories recently released by Phonogram], things with John Cale, something with Patti Smith." [...] Jeff began recording songs for his next album in New York with the band a new drummer, Parker Kindred. Matt Johnson had left after friction between him and Buckley on the Australian tour. Former Television guitarist Tom Verlaine was brought in to produce the sessions. However, as time went on, Buckley told Columbia's Steve Berkowitz the recordings were not gelling quickly enough. Buckley told the band he was going down to New Orleans where he rented a small cottage in the mid-town area and began writing new songs and demoing new four-track versions of material already recorded with Verlaine.
Gary Lucas: "I don't know why he was taking so much time over the second album. He was one of these guys who's really obsessive and perfectionist. He had accumulated a backlog of songs that he would play live, but he wanted to make the right statement at the right time and maybe some of the stuff he discarded he just didn't feel was right for the zeitgeist. George Stein: "When he did the Verlaine sessions, he didn't feel that he captured it. But the Verlaine record was just test masters. Jeff wanted to work with Tim Verlaine and it was about letting Jeff follow his own instincts and try things out. No one necessarily thought that recording session was going to be the record. What came out of it was more than what he went in expecting to make. He was just going to make a couple of tests to see if the chemistry was right between him and Tim and it became a bigger session. But it was just an experiment and when it was over he wasn't satisfied with the results." [...] Mary Guibert: "He never said, 'I've got to be better than my dad.' He was confident enough about his musicianship. He was waiting for everyone else to get over that link. But I think as someone coming into manhood and thinking about what it would be like to be 18 years old and at the beginning of what could be a stellar career and thinking that you had to risk it all to stay at home with that girl and child Well, I think he was beginning to understand how Tim could do that and live with himself thinking he had the rest of his life to find his son or for his son to come looking for him. When you stand in someone's shoes like that, you get a totally different aspect." Gayle Keleman (Unofficial JB web page Webmaster): "In early to mid-December 1996, Jeff played under such names as Possessed By Elvis, Topless America, Martha And The Nicotines. He said he had to do that in order for the music to survive. He had to test the material. He was trying to find an audience without expectations." [...] Mary Guibert: " In those last few days before he died he literally called everybody. He called old buddies from elementary school just to say hello and apologise for not returning their phone calls and letters. He literally caught up with everybody 'cos he knew the next thing he was going to do was go into the studio and shut himself out from the rest of the world and come out with an album that he would then have to promote."
Gayle Keleman: "I was at the last show he played at Barristers in Memphis on May 26, 1997. There were probably about 50 or 60 people there. He was wearing a grey dress suit with a tie. He went behind the bar and we couldn't see what he was doing. Then a couple of songs into the set he said, ' There's some red wine over at the bar.' He'd been pouring the wine into little plastic cups for the audience. [...] On May 29, 1997, Buckley was en route to a rehearsal studio with is roadie, Keith Foti. He had just opened a bank account and had bought a car. Prior to this he had used a cycle to get around Memphis. They stopped off at the Wolf River Channel of the Mississippi river where Buckley said he was going for a dip. He was singing Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love' as he floated in the water. Foti remembers a barge going by. He then lost sight of Buckley. [...] Mary Guibert: "Sgt. Mary Grace Johnson of the Memphis Police Department called me and said there had been a terrible accident and that she was very, very sorry. I packed a suitcase. I threw in my bathing suit first, jeans and a pair of tennis shoes. I was gonna go get him. That was 11 o'clock California time on the Thursday. It wasn't until the following Sunday that I was willing to accept that what we were doing was dragging the river for a dead body, not looking for my son."
Penny Arcade: "There he is, he's taken the wrong turn. He doesn't know how to get to the recording studio. He's with a 23 year old roadie who he barely knows. The guy's in awe of being with a rock god and Jeff does what every artist does who's insecure. He put on a big show. 'Ok, I don't know how to get to the studio, so let's take the boom box and guitars down. Let's play this Led Zeppelin tape.'
Mary Guibert: "When they found him, Sgt. Johnson waded into the water and she followed the body to the coroner's office, shielding his face. She slapped her shield and gun on the counter and said, ' Now y'all are just gonna make sure that there's no press in there.' And by God they listened to her. There are no photos. Upset by Mary Guibert's decision to have Jeff privately cremated, his friends organised an unofficial memorial service for the singer in St Mark's Church in Greenwich Village, New York. Mary Guibert and Columbia Records later organised an official memorial at St Anne's Church, New York. [...] Nicholas Hill: "Jeff was a strange guy. He had a lot of different groups of friends and he made a point of keeping them all separate from one another. When he died, everyone came out of the woodwork feeling that they were really close to him and there was resentment from other people who felt they were really close to him." [...] Elvis Costello: "I went to the [second] memorial. Jeff's family invited me and said he would have liked me to be there, but everyone was so inside out and torn up, and at first I didn't feel that I knew him well enough to justify being there with his family and band people who saw him every day. But Marianne Faithfull and I sang some songs that we thought he would like, which gave everyone some breathing space, and I think that in doing that we did our job as friends." Mary Guibert: "I asked people to wear white or spring colours because I knew I was going to be getting up in that big cathedral and looking out on red-eyed faces perched on black was more than I could stand. I didn't want a sea of black at my son's memorial. It was a whimsical, purely selfish request and they looked lovely as I stood in that pulpit in that church." A double CD, Sketches (For My Sweetheart The Drunk), is to be released by Columbia on May 11. It features the material recorded with Tom Verlaine as well as some of the four track recordings Jeff was working on when he died. The recordings were mixed by Andy Wallace, who Buckley was planning to work with at the time of his death. The inclusion of the Verlaine songs has been criticised by a number of Jeff's friends, as well as by the band's drummer, Parker Kindred, who said they were going to have a 'burning party' when the band arrived in Memphis.
Elvis Costello: "I know that the release of Sketches is very difficult. It's still such a raw time for his mother, the band members and the record company. I know that they went back and forth about whether or not the material should be released, but it's all we've got. And I love it. I even like the Genesis cover ('Back in New York City' from 1974's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway). Can you imagine how much he must have loved that record in order to learn it? It shows so much about his curiosity. He's the only singer who can do that kind of sexy rock'n'roll without making me embarrassed to listen to it. When he does 'Yard Full Of Blonde Girls' it makes me want to laugh, whereas if you think of some metal guys doing it you just want to look away. [...]
Mary Guibert: "I can't tell you how many people came forward from all corners to say that they and they alone knew what Jeff wanted. A lot of folk were transferring their thoughts of how it would be of they died and their mother took over. Nobody who knew my relationship with my son and how we related musically and spiritually could possibly judge whether I was equipped or not. In the end I always had to make a decision that I could live with since I was the only person in charge of the legacy. George Stein: "Jeff didn't know he was going to die. He didn't know that those were the last masters he'd be able to produce. It changes everything. There's no way of knowing if Jeff would say from the beyond, 'Now that I'm gone, go ahead and put it out', or if he wouldn't.
Mary Guibert: "I would hate this stuff to turn up in 30 years' time, like all the Hendrix tapes. None of us know how long we have. Tim put off finding his son 'cos he thought he had time to do that later. I've now lost both of them and I ain't waiting to do what is my purpose in life. So let me, the person with the most love in their heart for Jeffrey Scott, do it purely and make sure nobody screws with it. ©1998 by New Musical Express. All rights reserved
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