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mused-amused · 1 year ago

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Jeff Buckley: Knowing Not Knowing

From Inside the Music: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians about Spirituality, Creativity, and Consciousness

©️ 1997 Dmitri Ehrlich

Early in the spring of 1997, singer and songwriter Jeff Buckley headed down to Memphis to begin pre-production on what would have been his second full-length album. A few weeks after Buckley arrived, his bandmates flew in from New York to join him. He was in high spirits: the songwriting was going well, and he was reunited with his group. The same night his band arrived Buckley went out for a late-night stroll to a Memphis harbor and waded into the river. He had always admired Led Zeppelin, and was singing "Whole Lotta Love" when a boat passed in front of him. He lost his footing, perhaps dragged into the water by the boat's wake, and was never seen alive again.

He was thirty years old, two years older than his father, the folksinger Tim Buckley, had been when he died of a drug overdose.

I first met Jeff Buckley and saw him perform about two years before he passed away. It was near midnight and Buckley was sitting in the back office of a Tower Records store in lower Manhattan. Buckley had become a scion of the Lower East Side antifolk scene, and was preparing for an in-store performance in support of his album Grace.

But first he needed to do something: he insisted on listening to a crackly old recording of "The Man That Got Away" by Judy Garland, on the pretext that he wanted the store manager, who had given the CD to Buckley, to un derstand how magnificent a gift it was. Buckley needed to demonstrate the album's beauty. He had also picked up gratis CD reissues of vintage Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone records, and two albums by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who had a major influence on Buckley's singing. While Buckley could occasionally summon the same kind of ecstatic vocal power that was Khan's trademark, his singing had more in common with Garland's delicate, vulnerable warble.

Buckley was an unglamorous star. That night he was wearing a wretched pair of weathered combat boots-the sort you occasionally see homeless men selling-a frumpy gray cardigan sweater, and jeans that hadn't been washed in a long time. Ditto his hair. In an oddly white-trash bit of accessorizing, Buckley's wallet was attached to his belt by a chain, in the style favored by motorcyde gangs. Three days of beard growth rounded out his anti-coif, but his sex appeal remained intact: a nervous girl approached to ask if, as she suspected, he was a Scorpio. Another pressed a poem she had written for him into his hand. He folded it carefully and put it in his pocket, as though he would cherish it forever. Maybe he did.

Buckley was at an odd moment in his career when he died. Having moved to New York several years before from California, where he was raised by his mother, he crawled his way up through the ranks of the insular lower Manhattan music scene. He had become a mini-star in that highly circumscribed microcosm, perched on the cusp of national and international success. That night at Tower Records the line between Lower East Side local hero and international stardom seemed pretty thin. On one hand, his debut album sold several hundred thousand copies (al-though more in Europe than in America), and there was & throng of photographers and autograph-seekers pressing around him. On the other hand, he wasn't above hauling his own gear onstage, more or less indistinguishable from the half dozen stringy-haired sound men and roadies who were putting the sound system in place.

Buckley had no video in heavy rotation on MTV, largely because he insisted that people judge the music on the way it sounded before supplying them with an accompanying image. For the same reason, he refused to even suggest a single to radio deejays. "What I'd love," Buckley said, "is if a deejay had a lineup of songs, and he'd just use one of my songs as part of a really nice evening. But that's the way I would deejay, not the way they do it. They usually have playlists."

For a guy with folksinging in his blood, Buckley had assembled an arsenal of prog-rock guitar effects you'd expect at an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer show and had set his amp at cat-spaying volume. (In fact, he had been raised on Led Zeppelin and Kiss.) Several dozen more stringy-haired people with assorted rings in their lips and noses (his fans) materialized. As he stepped onto the makeshift stage, a grumpy security guard began clearing some fans from a stairway, but Buckley interjected: "Wait! Those are my friends! Can they stay there? I give them special permission." What started as dispensation for four friends ended up being extended to anybody who wanted to stay.

The set began with a ghostly wail from Buckley, and a mildly Middle Eastern guitar line. He sang with a vibrato that quivered like the tongue of a snake. It was so atmospheric that you hardly realized his bandmates were rocking their tits off. That was the tension: Buckley ululating in sensual falsetto, the band churning out mid-seventies Led Zep knockoffs. He seemed a strangely ethereal cherub in the midst of all that visceral thrash.

After the show, Buckley signed autographs, taking several minutes with the thirty or so fans who lined up for an audience with the tousle-haired singer. Rather than just scribbling an autograph, he wrote a personal note to each person. Everything he did seemed to place poetry before commerce, but I couldn't help wondering if it was all an elaborate ruse, a crafty stance aimed at those disenchanted wich the slickness of pop posturing. Didn't Buckley, after all, want to make a lot of money and sell records?

"If it happens it'd be great," he said later that night, over omelettes and wine at an all-night eatery, "but we just play to express. I want to live my life playing music, so that we can be immersed in it. In order to learn how deep it goes, you have to be in it."

As to why he took so much time with each of the fans who asked for an autograph, Buckley articulated his basic anti-rock-star stance: "The way I experience a performance is that there's an exchange going on. It's not just my ego being fed. It's thoughts and feelings. Raw expression has its own knowledge and wisdom." He trailed off, as though humbled by the mere thought of his audience wanting to hear him play, or asking him for an autograph.

"I’ve been in their position before and all I wanted was to show my appreciation to the performer. So I feel like it's kind of generous of them to even be asking me for an auto-graph.

"It's true that there's also the people who want a piece of you," he conceded. "But it's pretty hard to keep feeling protective all the time, because there's really nothing to protect yourself against. Sometimes people shout at me on the street, and they feel they know me through my music. But that doesn't substitute for a real personal rela-tionship. I don't feel like people know me, I just think we share a love for music in common, and for some reason they key into the way I play. I feel appreciative when people come up to me, and I feel good when we connect. Usually, it serves as a nice comedown after a performance. Any other conduct would bust the groove, because I'm buzzing when I get offstage, and I'm consciously protecting that connection because that's what got me through the performance in the first place. It's an invocation and worship of this certain feeling, this direct line to your heart, and somehow music does that more powerfully than anything else. It's like a total, immediate elixir."

By all appearances Buckley conformed to the stereotype of the poetic artist: largely lacking the practical, thick-skinned psychic barrier that separates most of us from the harsh realities of life. With a rabbit-like nervous disposition and a hypersensitive vulnerability that bordered on tragicomic, he looked like he was about to burst into tears at any moment. His face was contorted and slightly tortured-looking during most of the interview, though I got the impression that it wasn't so much the experience of being interviewed that was torturing him but the pain of grappling with his own thoughts and the world around him.

Relationships were at the heart of Buckley's world.

Although he was marketed as a solo artist, the attitude he had toward his listeners mirrored the relationship he formed with his three-piece backing band. "Playing with a band is all about accepting a bond, accepting everything the way it is. It takes a lot of patience and a lot of taking chances with each other. It takes seeing each other in weak and strong lights, and accepting both, and utilizing the high and low points of your relationship."

It wasn't only interpersonal relationships that Buck-Ley held sacred - he was aware of making his music in relation to all the sounds around him. The environment was Buckley's co-composer: to his ears, no melody or rhythm was separate from the sounds going on in the background.

“It’s not like music begins or ends. All kinds of sounds are working into each other. Sometimes I'll just stop on the street because there's a sequence of sirens going on; it's like a melody I'll never hear again. In performance, things can be meaningful or frivolous, but either way the musical experience is totally spontaneous, and new life comes out of it, meaning if you're open to hearing the way music interacts with ambient sound, performance never feels like a rote experience. It's pretty special sometimes, the way a song affects a room, the way you're in complete rhythm with the song. When you're emotionally overcome, and there's no filter between what you say and what you mean, your language becomes guttural, simple, emotional, and full of pictures and clarity. Were you to transcribe it, it might not make sense, but music is a totally different language."

"People talk all day in a practical way, but real language that penetrates and affects people and carries wisdom is something different. Maybe it's the middle of the afternoon and you see a child's moon up in the sky, and you feel like it's such a simple, pure, wonderful thing to look at. It just hits you in a certain way, and you point it out to a stranger, and he looks at you like you're weird and walks away. To speak that way, to point out a child's moon to a stranger, is original language, it's the way you originate yourself. And the cool thing is, if you catch people in the right moment, it's totally clear. Without knowing why, it's simply clear. That sort of connection is very empirical.

It comes from the part of you that just understands imme-diately. All these types of things are gold, and yet they are dishonored or not paid attention to because that kind of tender communication is so alien in our culture, except in performance. There's a wall up between people all day long, but performance transcends that convention. If pop music were really seen as a fine art or if fine art were popu-lar, I don't know what the hell would happen this wouldn't be the same country, because if the masses of people began to respect and really open to fine art, it would bring about a huge shift in consciousness.

"Music is so many things. It's not just the perfor-mer. It's the audience and the architecture of the song, and each builds off the other. Music is a setting for poi-gnancy, anger, destruction, total disaster, total wrongness, and then—like a little speck of gold in the middle of it-excitement, but excitement in a way that matters. Excitement that is not just aesthetically pleasing but shoots some sort of understanding into you."

Buckley's songs were composed with made-up chords, bright harmonic clusters that seem too obvious not to have been written before, yet they rarely feel formulaic. There's a lot of open strumming, suggesting that the songs were written largely for the sheer physical pleasure of playing them. He and his band modified the arrangements during each performance, playing with an elasticity and openness typical of Buckley's personality. "Hearing a song is like meeting somebody. A song is something that took time to grow and once it's there, it's on its own. Every time you perform it, it's different. It has its own structure, and you have to flow through it, and it has to come through you."

Buckley's entire career reflected his outsider's approach to the music business. When he arrived in New York, rather than recording a demo or finding an agent, he simply began to perform for free. He played at a small café on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and before long, crowds were lined up out the door. As a result, representatives of record companies sought out Buckley, rather than the other way around. "There is a distinct separation of sensibility between art as commerce and art as a way of life. If you buy into one too heavily it eats up the other. If instead of having songs happen as your life happens, you're getting a song together because you need a certain number of songs on a release to be sold, the juice is sucked out immediately. That approach kills it."

Still, it took a strong belief in one's art to sit in a small café and trust that the world's record companies would come calling. Buckley played down his seemingly effortless approach to career as though it were common-sense. "I just wanted to learn certain things. I wanted to just explore, like a kid with crayons. It took a while for me to get a record contract, but it also took a tremendous amount of time for me to feel comfortable playing, and that's all I was concerned with. And I'm still concerned with that, mainly.”

"I don't think about my responsibility as a musician in terms of any kind of religious significance. I don't have any allegiance to organized religion; I have an allegiance to the gifts that I find for myself in those religions.

They seem to be saying the same thing, they just have different mythologies and expressions, but the dogma of religions and the way they're misused is all too much of a trap. I'd rather be nondenominational, except for music. I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It's the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real. But I don't believe in a big guy with a beard on a throne, telling us that we're bad; I certainly don't believe in original sin. I believe in the opposite of that: you have an Eden immediately from the time you are born, but as you are conditioned by your caretakers and your surroundings, you may lose that origi nal thing. Your task is to get back to it, so you can dam responsibility for your own perfection."

Buckley considered the development of awareness to be the main goal of his life. "I think of it as trying to get more aligned with the feeling of purity in music, however it sounds. I think music is prayer. Sometimes people make up prayers and they don't even know it. They just make up a song that has rhyme and meter, and once it's made, it can carry on a life of its own. It can have a lot of juice to it and a lot of meaning: there's no end to the different individual flavors that people can bring to the musical form.

"In order to make the music actual, you have to enable it to be. And that takes facing some things inside you that constrict you, your own impurity and mistakes and blockages. As you open up yourself, the music opens up in different directions that lead you in yet other directions." Asking most pop musicians if they're satisfied with record sales is like asking models about the aging process: they say they don't care, but it's hard to believe. For commercial recording artists, sales are the only objective indicator of whether they're doing things right—that fans are sincerely motivated to walk into record stores by the tens or by the millions, pull out their wallets, and pay for the music. But with his quiet, unaffected voice nearly a whis-per, Buckley steadfastly maintained that he really didn't want to sell a million records and it was strangely believ-able. When he talked about multiplatinum-selling bands who felt "disappointed" by a mere five million copies sold, the disgust he felt for commercialism was palpable. "The only valuable thing about selling records, the only thing that matters, is that people connect and that you keep on growing. You do make choices based on how many people you reach, meaning, now that I have a relationship with stangers worldwide, I have to try not to let it become too much of a factor and just accept it. The limited success we've had in the past is definitely a factor, it's just there. It justis. The whole thing is such a crapshoot, you can't really control what your appeal is gonna be. My music ain't gonna make it into the malls, but it doesn't matter. I don't really care to make it into the malls.

"Whether I sell a lot of records or not isn't up to me. You can sell a lot of records, but that's just a number sold-that's not understood, or loved, or cherished.”

"Take someone like Michael Jackson. Early on he sacrificed himself to his need to be loved by all. His talent and his power were so great that he got what he wanted but he also got a direct, negative result, which is that he's not able to grow into an adult human being. And that's why his music sounds sort of empty and weird.”

"Being the kind of person I am, fame is really over-whelming. First of all, just being faced with the questions that everybody faces: Do I matter? Should I go on? Why am I here? Is this really that important? All that low self-esteem shit. You're constantly trying to make sure that your sense of self-worth doesn't depend on the writings or opinions of other people. You have to wean yourself off acclaim as the object of your work, by learning to depend on your own judgment and knowing what it is that you enjoy. You have to realize what the difference is between being adored and being loved and understood. Big difference.”

“I don’t really have super pointed answers to the big questions. I’m in the middle of a mystery myself. I’m not even that developed at having a real psycho-religious epistemology about what I feel. All I can tell you is that I feel. It's just the same old fight to constantly be aware. It's an ongoing thing. It'll never be a static perfect thing or a static mediocre thing, it just has its rise and fall."

Pics from the book. Amazing that Jeff is in the same section as Allen Ginsberg and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He would have been so honored.

#what I wouldn’t give for one conversation with him #jeff buckley #jeffbuckley #90s aesthetic #90s nostalgia #music #spirituality #consciousness #philosophy #dream brother #manic pixie dream boy #are you a Scorpio

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mused-amused · 1 year ago

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5 weeks into my Jeff Buckley deep dive: what was dormant has been awakened.

Time to make art.

I’ve picked up my guitar. I’ve written. I’ve drawn. More to come. ❤️

Be My Husband - Purple Clover

I was 24 years old and living in a small Chinatown apartment on Mott Street in New York City. During the day, I wrote advertising copy for a small agency owned by the late great Jo Foxworth. (I’m sure you remember my “Dances With Cold Cuts” ad for D'Agostino’s, right?) By night, I worked at making a name for myself, plastering the Lower East Side with homemade posters made by my friend Maura, writing songs into the wee hours and playing them to handfuls of people.

Over those years, I saw many shows, and one of the most memorable was one that I had no intention of seeing, one that came to me out of the blue like an unexpected gift.

It was late October 1993 and I had finished playing a late-night set at this tiny venue in the East Village called Sin-é. I had only several months ago dropped off a demo tape (yes, cassette) and felt lucky to have landed my first real gigs in NYC. After I packed up and friends had said their goodbyes, I gave myself a minute to sit alone at a table by the window and have a cup of tea before heading home. At this point it was after midnight and only a few other people were still there. It was quiet, even for a weeknight.

The café door opened and I heard the brief clamor of the street outside and turned to see a slim, handsome guy about my age enter the room. He had dark hair and was bundled up in a wool jacket, carrying a guitar case slung over one shoulder. He made his way to the “stage” (a few feet of floor space at one side of the room) and plugged in his amp without saying a word.

After a quick line check, he stripped off his coat and stood there in jeans, white T-shirt and beaten-up combat boots. I had never seen him before and felt foolish because I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had a dignity and self-possession about him — a rumpled majesty — and I wondered if it were possible he could sound anywhere near as good as he looked, wearing his electric guitar like a coat of arms.

When he launched into a song recorded by Nina Simone called “Be My Husband,“ I could barely stay in my seat. He sang quietly at first, his voice snaking into the room and shaking with vibrato, the tone somewhere between Billie Holiday and Robert Plant. He was making a plea to an unfaithful husband, a capella, taking on the woman’s point of view. It’s a badass song that lays bare the sometimes raw, blind need to be loved and to love, at whatever price. What struck me as much as his voice, was his delivery. He was lost in it, on the verge of being out of control at times, spontaneous and present, taking on the character and telling us the story, giving himself to the song.

“Be my husband, I’ll be your wife,” he sang, stomping his boot intently on the wooden floor, holding his guitar against him. “If you want me to, I’ll cook and sew,” he offered. “Stick to the promise that you made to me.” With sorrow and defiance: "Stay away from that Rosalie.” And finally admitting, “You’re the meanest man I’ve ever seen,” coming back each time to pierce the simple heart of it with the refrain: “Oh, Daddy, love me good.”

I felt myself starting to rise out of my seat at the end of it, a genuine standing ovation, but given it was only the end of the first song (and no one else had leaped to their feet), I suppressed my exuberance and sat back down, blinking away tears.

It was this one song, this authentic delivery, that stays etched in my mind. A stranger to me, he had walked in off the street and stirred up in just a few minutes all my longing and loneliness, my desire, weakness and magic power (sorry, I don’t know what else to call it).

It made me want to give myself to music, to love another, to live my life and get lost in it all. It was the kind of performance that makes you want to stop being the audience and get up and do something with your life. The waitress told me he was coming from the studio that night, where he was working on his first album.

"That’s Jeff Buckley,” she said.

Amy Correia is a singer-songwriter whose latest album “You Go Your Way” can be found on iTunes.

#jeff buckley #art #music

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