Grace notes

April 26, 1991: the Greetings From Tim Buckley tribute concert at Saint Ann’s Church, Brooklyn Heights, New York. For Jeff Buckley, it was a night of Oedipal ritual meets Shakespearian drama. It was the night the 24-year-old unknown simultaneously acknowledged his father’s legacy and set about eclipsing it. “In a way, I sacrificed my anonymity for my father, whereas he sacrificed me for his fame,” Buckley later told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Certainly, after the show, he was the talk of downtown.

By the early 1990s, the music of Tim Buckley, ’60s cult legend on a par with Nick Drake and Tim Hardin, was undergoing something of a renaissance following the release of the posthumous live album Dream Letter, plus a remarkable cover version of his ‘Song To The Siren’ by This Mortal Coil.

When Janine Nichols, director of the St Ann’s arts programme, approached ex-Saturday Night Live musical director and noted producer-hipster Hal Willner (architect of albums honouring Mingus, Kurt Weill, Poe, Ginsberg and Burroughs among others) about putting on a Buckley tribute night, few knew he had a son, let alone one with potential equal to his father.

The first Nichols heard of Jeff was when she contacted Tim Buckley’s old manager Herb Cohen for a publicity photograph. Out of courtesy, she extended an invitation to the youngster to appear at the concert, and Hal Willner suggested he be partnered by his friend, guitarist Gary Lucas.

“I’d known Hal since I came to New York,” Lucas explains. “Hal actually booked Captain Beefheart, my former employer, to do a Saturday Night Live show. He was a friend, so he rang me and said, ‘Look, I’m doing a tribute to Tim Buckley and we’ve been contacted by his son.’ And I said ‘I didn’t know Tim Buckley had a son’ and he said, ‘Well neither did we, but he’s come forward and I think he might be a good person to collaborate with.’ So I went down to the church for the rehearsals and that’s when I first met Jeff.”

At this point Lucas had been under contract to Columbia for a couple of years. Quite a few talented singers had served time with his band Gods & Monsters and then moved on, earning him a reputation as the Art Blakey of the downtown scene. He’d also held down a job copywriting for CBS (one of his most memorable slogans being The Clash catchphrase “The Only Group That Matters”). Lucas was a Tim Buckley fan, although that didn’t necessarily go over well with Jeff, who was still coming to terms with his old man’s legacy.

“I think he really wanted to pay his respects to Tim, I think it was kind of closure for him,” remembers Lucas. “I went down there with an open mind. He looked a bit like Tim; he just looked really electric, very charismatic, like he was about to jump out of his skin. He came up to me and said, ‘You’re Gary Lucas. I love your guitar playing man, I know you from Captain Beefheart, I read about you in Guitar Player.’ So I was flattered. Hal had suggested that we work up this tune ‘The King’s Chain’ from the Sefronia album, part of a suite of two or three songs on that record. So I invited him back to my flat in Greenwich Village and set up a digital delay of a figure and started to play the chords along with that, and he started to sing and my jaw dropped. And when I was done I just said, ‘You’re the fucking star man, that was amazing.’ He was really shy and sweet and innocent and humble, like, ‘Really? You think so?’

“So I took him out to lunch at the White Horse Tavern and started to sound him out, what his influences were, what music he liked, ’cos I’d been thinking of having a permanent singer in my band, I was more attracted to doing sort of an update on classic rock of The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths variety, taking it up a notch. And he said, ‘I love all those groups’, that Oliver Stone movie The Doors was playing, he was really taken with that. So I said, ‘You’d be great to be in this band’ and he loved the idea, loved the name Gods And Monsters, so that’s how it started.”

According to Jeff’s mother Mary Guibert, his decision to appear at the Greetings… concert was not taken lightly.

“We talked about it at length before he accepted the invitation,” she says. “I was living in Orange County at the time and I drove into LA and we got dinner together and sort of hashed it out. And the bottom line for him was he was now fully convinced he wasn’t just going to be a guitar player, he was starting to explore his own voice in these demo sessions that he was doing and was beginning to write his own music. Before the Tim Buckley concert Jeff had already written ‘Eternal Life’ and ‘Last Goodbye’ and had the lyrics for ‘Mojo Pin’ already sketched out in a three-verse poem. The pot was just about ready to boil anyway. So when we talked about going to this concert, he said, ‘You know, this would be a way of making up for the fact that we were never invited to the funeral.’ He knew that he was going to be compared to his father, but it was like the most personal thing he could do, to sing his father’s songs there.”

The first half of the Buckley concert was unremarkable, even dull, save for the odd anomalous performance by the likes of Richard Hell. After an interlude, Jeff, Gary Lucas and a number of other musicians took to the stage. Jeff stood with his back to the audience, tuning up, as people strained to see his face. Legendary publicist Danny Fields recalled first catching a flash of his profile and recognising the Buckley cheekbones. As Lucas lay down an ambient wash of guitar sounds, Jeff began playing his father’s ‘I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain’. Halfway through the song, a spotlight illuminated the stage from behind and it looked, as Hal Willner later recalled, like Jesus himself had arrived. It was quite an entrance. Jeff later returned to the stage to sing ‘The King’s Chain’, ‘Phantasmagoria In Two’ and at the finale, a solo ‘Once I Was’, during which he broke a string and sang the last line unaccompanied: “Sometimes I wonder for a while/Do you remember me?”

Here’s where the Irish connections start to kick in. Jeff’s grandfather, Tim senior, was the descendant of a hedgemaster from Cork. As he noted in a journal entry from August 1995:

“My grandfather had a beautiful voice. Irish tenor. Beautiful. Too much of a military hardass to deal with his own and his son’s talents. I wish it were otherwise. I love you, you poor bastards… With a father like this man, it is no wonder that Tim Buckley was afraid to come back to me. So afraid to be my father. Because his only paradigm for fatherhood was a deranged lunatic with a steel plate in his head…”

“That was such a sad household,” recalls Mary Guibert, “his father was just so scary. I was 16 and he was 17 when we met, and I can remember going over to have dinner with his family, and going into his room, and the door jamb around his bedroom door was literally kicked off of the hinges because his father would go mad. He’d hear his bedsprings creaking and accuse him of masturbating and kick in the door. When he was around it was just a very scary place to be. Not that he was mean or anything; you just didn’t know what he was going to do. From time to time he would shave his head and put on his army fatigues and load up his gun and patrol the neighbourhood. He was a Screaming Eagle commando fighter, a Korean War hero.

“We were two kids suffering from the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of disassociation from our parents. Being married and having a pregnant wife expecting a child was really very overwhelming, especially for an 18-year-old kid who was suddenly discovered and ready to make a name for himself. Tim went off and continued in this crazy business, which didn’t make his life any more enjoyable I don’t think, and I had to stabilise myself, I had some realities to face, I had to give up dreams of being an actress or a musician and get a little job somewhere and pay the bills.”

Jeff Buckley was born on November 17, 1967. Two days later, Tim’s eponymous debut album was released on Elektra. Contact with his father was minimal throughout his early years, but when Guibert split with her second husband Ron Moorhead, she took Jeff to see Tim in concert in the spring of 1975.

“It was a little club that Tim was playing at, Easter vacation, late April early May, just two months before he died. And Jeff hadn’t seen his father, didn’t have a memory of him, my second marriage had broken up the year before, and so I was having some feelings about how this boy was missing out on his father and vice versa, so when I opened the newspaper and saw that he was playing one night I just did a dangerous thing and called up during soundcheck and asked if he might want to see us, and he said yes. So we went to that performance and Jeff ended up staying with his dad for three or four days after that, and then the following June his dad was gone.”

And so, like so many of his generation, Jeff Buckley plugged the Dad-shaped hole in his soul with music.

“Jeff knew he wanted to be an artist of some kind from a very early age, eight or nine years old,” his mother says. “He was just a very bright young boy. I think what he had his heart set on (was) not to be too famous, but to be able to have his audience, do his work and make a living from his work.”

By the summer of 1991, Jeff was closer than ever to that objective. After the success of the Saint Ann’s gig, he longed to return to New York. He got the chance through his friend Carla Azar (drummer with Wendy & Lisa, The Waterboys) when he scored a job playing guitar behind Andrew Strong in The Commitments touring band put together to play premiere parties in LA, Chicago and New York – $2,000 for a week’s work and a first-class plane ticket to NYC. Once back in town, he hooked up with Gary Lucas to work on songs like ‘Rise Up To Be’ (later ‘Grace’) and ‘And You Will’ (‘Mojo Pin’).

The two rehearsed a full set with a rhythm section, but the Buckley/Lucas Gods & Monsters inaugural gig, again at Saint Ann’s, was not an unqualified success.

“There were problems sound-wise within the theatre, ’cos it’s a church and we were a loud electric band,” Lucas recalls. “I think we were a bit sabotaged by bad acoustics, in retrospect maybe had we done it as a duo he would’ve been happier. But even despite the bad acoustics we got a resounding hand at the end of the full two hours. Then when I was listening to the DAT tape of the show back the next day I was jumping up and down, my wife was here in my apartment, and we’re going, ‘It sounds great, the lyrics are great, he’s singing his ass off!’ I just thought, ‘He’s the best collaborator. I can’t tell him anything anyway, he’s gonna fit perfect parts to these songs.’

“Next day he called me while I’m listening to the tape, it was one of those weird coincidences, and he says, ‘I can’t really go through with this’. And I was like, ‘Please, we’ve got so much potential, and he’s just like: ‘I wanna work on developing my singing more, I’m not ready for this.’ And I was of course disappointed to put it mildly, but you can’t force anybody to do anything. I think he was thinking about a solo career even in the period he was working with me because he had a tape that he had (made) in LA that he’d been shopping around that summer and he was getting a lot of support from people in New York, like, y’know, ‘You could do this solo’.

“(But) it’s like Beefheart used to say, ‘There’s no point in getting into the bullshit to find out what the bull ate’. We had fun working together is the truth. But I think the big band thing kinda spoiled everything, it was too much too soon. We had one more show a week later at The Knitting Factory, and that was great, that was the last appearance with him with the band, although he continued to perform with me as a guest in the duo format for at least three or four more shows, and a lot of the stuff is on the record.”

The record Lucas is referring to is Songs To No One, the Hal Willner-produced collection of unreleased material dating from the Lucas/Buckley era, which stands as an essential companion to Grace, documenting his ease with blues, soul, Zeppelin-style dynamics, the troubadour-poetics of Van Morrison or Patti Smith, sacred singers like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (an element later realised on the sublime cover of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Corpus Christi Hymn’), plus Nina Simone and the chanteuse tradition. Fascinatingly enough, he got turned onto Edith Piaf independent of his father, resulting in a stunning spacerock take on ‘Hymn To Love’. Songs To No-One makes a valid case that Buckley may have written off Gods & Monsters too soon, spooked by his lack of experience, experience he would later garner in the informal solo shows of Sin É legend.

Again, the subliminal Paddy influence. Established by Irish emigrant Shane Doyle in Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, Sin É café was a regular haunt of ex-pat Irish artists like Sinéad O’Connor, Welsh/Breton singer Katell Keineg and the Hothouse Flowers (Jeff once asked the staff to turn off a Flowers CD, mistaking Liam O’Maonlai for his father). Grace would go on to perform disproportionately well in Ireland, finding favour among the Whelan’s/No Disco cognoscenti, who were busy making acts like The Frames, The Mary Janes and David Gray an underground phenomenon.

“I think one of his first gigs in ’91/’92 was the Trinity Ball,” Mary Guibert remembers. “Somebody had heard Jeff singing at Sin É or something and booked him, they flew him over and put him up with some friends. And he says, ‘Mother – they drink beer with everything! I come downstairs in the morning and they say, ‘Well Mr Buckley, will you be having beer with your Cheerios this morning?’ And then I go to this ball and there’s everybody in their tuxedos and beautiful evening gowns and I’ve never seen people drink so much beer, as the evening went on you’d see them out the back bending over, hiking up their ball gowns and puking on their shoes.’”

In the meantime, Gary Lucas had watched his former collaborator’s progress with interest, although he wasn’t yet completely out of the loop. Jeff had invited him up to the Grace sessions in Bearsville, upstate New York, to play guitar on ‘Grace’ and ‘Mojo Pin’.
“(When the record came out) I was happy because it represented this collaboration which to me stands still as just about the best result I ever got working with another player,” Lucas recalls.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll know the coda. By the time Jeff Buckley started thinking about a second album, the debut had sold nearly three quarters of a million copies – not bad for a record so diverse and hard to market. He’d also gained the admiration of peers like Bono, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

However, the wayward streak and attention deficit disorder that sometimes made the Grace writing sessions fraught with anxiety also plagued preparations for My Sweetheart The Drunk. It was as if the multiple strains of music available to Buckley only made things more difficult; he was paralysed by options. After several abortive demo sessions, he and producer Tom Verlaine decided to decamp to Memphis.

Of course, he never came back.

On the night of May 29, 1997, accompanied by roadie Keith Foti, he went for a swim in the Wolf River, which intersects with the Mississippi just north of downtown Memphis. He was still wearing his boots, doing the backstroke and singing ‘Whole Lotta Love’. He drowned, the victim of a treacherous undertow.

The last time Gary Lucas saw him was at a Knitting Factory show in New York a couple of months previously, where the two played an ad hoc ‘Grace’ in front of an audience that included Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Tom Verlaine and Lenny Kaye.

“It was magical,” Lucas recalls. “The place went nuts; people said to me ‘I’ve been waiting years to see you two guys play together.’ I went up to shake his hand when his concert was over, thanked him in the dressing room, and he said, ‘I’m going to Memphis tomorrow.’ Then I heard reports that the sessions weren’t going so well, and his A&R guy came to a gig I did in New York a few weeks afterward and said, ‘You may get the call to go down to Memphis’. Jeff had asked me to give him some music for that next record, I gave him three or four instrumentals, he was unclear if he was gonna use ’em.

“And then some weeks later they phoned me up and told me he was missing and I just started to cry. And then for about a month I cried every day. I wish I’d had a chance to say, outside of, ‘Thank you for having me play with you’, to just tell him how much he really meant to me. I think he knew, but I wish that we could’ve been closer at the end.”

Fine art of interpretation
Five jeff buckley covers you can’t live without

‘Hallelujah’
Arguably Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece, much beloved of Bob Dylan, also covered by everyone from John Cale to Bono. Buckley milks the exquisite lyric for every nuance of meaning, making it an elegy to carnal love and the divine nature of music. It also popped up at a crucial moment in Shrek, trivia fans.

‘Corpus Christi Hymn’
This ghostly version of the Benjamin Britten piece still has the power to still a room. Here, Buckley unwittingly recorded his own funeral mass. You can almost hear the frost breath of winter in his voice.

‘Hymn To Love’
In much the same way as Mary Margaret O’Hara suggested Patsy Cline on Mars, this one took Edith Piaf into the deep space normally inhabited by Spiritualized. Never a man to shirk from the grand gesture, producer Hal Willner insisted this ten-minute epic should open Songs To No One.

‘Lilac Wine’
Aching with regret, longing and loss, this was Jeff’s tribute to the crushed velvet tones of Nina Simone by way of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rain Song’

‘Kangaroo’
On the Grace tour, Buckley and band frequently extended this Big Star classic into a 15-minute end-of-show freak out, on one memorable occasion earning him a reprimand from his record company on the grounds of wanton self-indulgence.