... in Words: Tributes "Doing The Right Thing," by Russell Baillie This interview was originally published by New Zealand Weekend Herald, 9-10 May 1998.
On the eve of the release of Jeff Buckley's posthumous album, Russell Baillie reflects on a chat with the artist about life and death and music. Jeff Buckley joked about his own death. The one time we talked he wisecracked that his rock'n'roll diet would hasten his demise. "It was the pizza that got him," he warbled in a funny voice one New York morning a few years ago while polishing off said health-risking dish for breakfast in his apartment. "Cheese just clogged his brain. He ceased to function. But he smelled good!" Of course, Buckley died long before the ravages of his profession could leave their mark on this handsome young man. In Memphis a year ago recording his second album, the follow up to his critic-wowing debut Grace, Buckley drowned while swimming in the Mississippi River. He was 30. His passing didn't make headlines the way the 90s rock deaths of Kurt Cobain and Michael Hutchence did -- Buckley was still languishing in the statues of best-kept secret. For those who had been entranced by Grace or seen Buckley live (he played a stunning show with his band at Auckland's St. James Theatre in early 1996), it was heart wrenching news. Much was made of the fact that Buckley's father -- eclectic 70s folk singer Tim Buckley, whom Jeff barely knew -- died young too, of an overdose in 1975. But what made Jeff Buckley's death all the more tragic was that he was so astoundingly good. One destined to make his mark. On the evidence of one album, a live EP and a few guest appearances, it's easy to conclude that he was a distinctive talent. Firstly, there was that exceptional singing voice -- one which had been described variously as "Robert Plant meets Maria Callas" or "Smack between Freddie Mercury and Art Garfunkel" -- which swooped across his churning rock songs or trilled effortlessly through hushed ballads. He was a rock rarity in the mid-90s - an artist who came as genuinely spiritual in a time when all around him were fashionably angry. Perhaps the reason for that was that his musical interests stemmed from sources outside rock. On Grace he covered Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol"; On the Live At Sin-é EP there were versions of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" and Edith Piaf's "Je N'en Pas La Fin"; he was a fan and vocal supporter of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, the Sufi singing star from Pakistan. With all those influences, his outsider status, that voice, you might say Buckley could have become the 90s white-rock answer to Prince. Sketches (For My Sweetheart, The Drunk), a posthumous double CD of tracks he had been working on at the time of his death and self-recorded demos, is released this week. The sprawling collection has been assembled under the guidance of his mother, Mary Guibert, helped by Buckley's band members and others, including former Soundgarden frontman, Chris Cornell. "Everything about how long it has taken to release this album has to do with everyone involved wanting to do the right thing as opposed to the most expedient or commercially advantageous thing," Guibert has said. The collection doesn't necessarily draw to a close any further Buckley releases. There may well be out-takes from Grace and Live At Sin-é and live recordings from his Australian-New Zealand tour plus new songs that couldn't fit on Sketches. While listening to the new album (which is very good), I dug out the transcript of that interview. Some of it made resonant, if not prophetic, reading in the light of what was to come. It also reminded that Buckley was funny, thoughtful, self-deprecating to a fault and -- as you'd expect from his music -- just a touch cosmic. The subject of celebrity-in-death came up late in the encounter as talk turned to the connections being made to him and his father and the long shadow of Cobain's death, which had turned him into something of a rock martyr. Buckley spoke with sarcasm about aging fans of his father who saw him as a second coming. "What they really treat me like is a ghost and that is the basis of my disgust with the whole thing. Instead of someone looking at the present as it is, which I am a part of, and accepting it or leaving it alone, they just refuse to grow up and grow out of the past. Of course, I have been thinking about death since I was 8 and I think about it very differently now. "Really, I wish to grow old. That is a definite difference between the way I live my life and the way Tim lived his. He was convinced he wasn't going to live past 30. That was the second-hand information I was given and all the things pointed to it... I think he would have made a really fabulous old man. "I'm pissed at the whole 'messianic artist' bullshit. There is no reason why young men or women shouldn't find happiness and escape their cannibals. the whole congratulation of a death is old hat by now. "I'm sure the media is very appreciative they had their Hendrix of the 90s when Kurt died. And all I saw was someone who had his brain squeezed so tight and his heart so empty of self-love... anything else from that, any deification, is a total insult and has nothing to do with him at all." Earlier, Buckley had talked down his debut album. "It was totally to the hilt of my meagre powers as a songwriter and performer. I was so stressed out. Grace is like a collection of mementos of the past that were kind of dear to me... the songs just marked a certain moment from my life with friend's or lovers or something... it's like a gravestone... it's like a child's grave, you'll never see that person again, that Jeff." But he could talk music like someone addicted to the good stuff. He talked of Duke Ellington arrangements, old Ska music, Motown, James Brown, Otis Redding and Bob Dylan. And of the diverse influences of Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin -- Robert Plant and Jimmy Page's new album Walking Into Clarksdale echoes Grace in parts -- on his guitar approach. He enthused about his alternative rock contemporaries like Slint, Shudder To Think, the Grifters and Helium. "Mostly boys go through real Muso-Nazi periods. Just when you reach a certain age you must come to Dylan or when you reach a certain age you must come to Bad Brains. You must approach Bowie. It's very individual for each person. Maybe it's Air Supply, in which case I fear for your life," he laughed. He had a fascination with how songwriting works. "Pop music is a huge textbook. If you have a cynical, unsympathetic mind and you are a musician, you can open up the book of pop buttons to push. But I am quite fascinated by the thing beneath that, the thing that pop music doesn't want to know about." And he joked that his rock'n'roll diet made him impervious to harm. "It's something from childhood -- I've never really eaten right as a result. I am able to survive the holocausts, no matter what comes I can always survive. When we tour the States I am inoculated from the grease pit of America. I have an amazing survival capacity." [Photo Caption: EPITAPH; Singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley felt his father's fans treated him like a ghost. He died before followers had much chance to appreciate his music.] ©1998 by New Zealand Weekend Herald. All rights reserved
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