Grace: Legacy Edition

Ten years after. A decade of the rosy crucifixions, self-inflicted by ugly Bucklings, some of who evolved into swans. Jeff Buckley might’ve had his own dark father’s shadow to escape, but the one he cast was even longer. This remastered Legacy Edition of Grace is a beautifully packaged artefact with an extra disc’s worth of contemporaneous out-takes and rarities, plus a DVD documentary about the making of that extraordinary debut album.
The extras are of course optional. There’s a take on Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Alligator Wine’ that takes its cue from Screamin’ Jay but adds Skip James’ brawn. Leon Payne’s ‘Lost Highway’ (erroneously attributed to H. Williams on the sleeve) sounds like the future ghost of Jeff being haunted by the past ghost of Hank. Bukka White’s ‘Parchman Farm’ is rendered as a respectable period piece before slithering into a chilling and thrilling Robert Johnson. Alex Chilton’s ‘Kanga Roo’ is a fractious indulgence that tries for No Wave improv but is spoiled by rehearsal room Rock School chops, while an amped up ‘Eternal Life’ is a portrait of the young artist subjecting his voice to a flinch-inducing self-harming process, as though ashamed of its beauty, with crap widdly-widdly solos rubbing salt on the nodes. But the grab-bag nature of these cannot detract from the main feature. Jeff Buckley was a class act, we all know that, and the band assembled for the Bearsville sessions were more than capable (hear how the players get under those slippery dream-to-nightmare changes in ‘So Real’). But you can’t downplay guitarist Gary Lucas’s input, specifically the brace of tunes that survived the short-lived Gods & Monsters project. His co-writes of the wild and mercurial title tune and ‘Mojo Pin’ remain the cornerstone of the album: huge, majestic Presence-era Zep dynamics, the guitarist’s neo-baroque arpeggios acting as the perfect backdrop to Buckley’s Plant-goes-Hindu castrato vocal. But then, Buckley was a beautiful boy who could somehow play the hard rock cocksman and the pubescent girl entertaining Viking stud fantasies a la Tori Amos – not so much homo as narcissus-erotic. And the reason Grace still towers over its host of imitators like a great citadel is the labyrinth of musics contained within its vaults. Not only did Buckley inherit his father Tim’s fascination with French chanteuse, he also possessed far more than a working knowledge of Van, Nina Simone, Nusrat, Delta blues, Memphis soul, Bulgarian sacred chant and This Mortal Coil. He was that rare thing, a fine writer who took the art of interpretive singing deadly seriously. On that level, ‘Lilac Wine’ mated the Simone template with Edith Piaf and John Paul Jones’ mellotron strings from ‘Rain Song’. It’s a callous man or woman who can hear him sing, ‘I drink much more than I oughta drink/Because it brings me back you’ and remain dry around the eye. By the same token, his reading of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ was a shimmering and shocking boy soprano recital the cassocked villain from Almodovar’s Bad Education might recognise all too well, while his ‘Hallelujah’ is the definitive interpretation of El Cohen’s scripture, perfectly pitched between lust and liturgy. As for his own ‘Last Goodbye’, this tune will evermore be mourning song and last rite for young lovers playing out their own Paris-in-spring/Prague-in-autumn mythologies. In this case, hindsight is kind. Grace remains holy music.

The Legacy Edition of Grace is out now