AMAZING GRACE Jeff Buckley Pt. 1

May 24, 2010

As 1993 unfolded the singer's career was shifting from cruise control to hyper speed. Within four years, he'd be dead.

BY JEFF APTER

Buckley died 13 years ago this week, on May 29, 1997, in a tragic drowning accident in Memphis. We hereby pay tribute to the late troubadour via this book excerpt from A Pure Drop: The Life of Jeff Buckley, written by Jeff Apter and published in March of 2009 by Backbeat Books. This excerpt originally appeared last summer in the second print edition of BLURT. This is the first of two parts - Pt. 2 will appear tomorrow. - The editors.

Jeff Buckley wasn't a prolific songwriter. In fact, throughout his all-too-brief career he suffered from a sort of creative inertia, writing only a handful of great tunes - co-writing, in some cases - and even they were along time coming. Many of his Sin-E peers doubted his ability to create anything truly original, even though they had total and utter respect for his heaven-sent musicality, on-stage charisma and humble personality. Even Columbia staffers weren't so sure how many tunes Buckley actually had up his plaid-shirted sleeve: Leah Reid spent one night at Fez, sitting alongside Rebecca Moore, asking her after each song, ‘Was that a cover? Or was that an original?' Others suspected that the younger Buckley was always comparing his few originals with those of his father, a prolific, freewheeling artiste who pumped out nine studio albums in roughly the same time it takes Axl Rose to hire a drummer. Lee Underwood, Tim's guitarist, who'd had two tumultuous ‘sitdowns' with Buckley back in 1989, clearly felt that was the case, but sensed there was also a deeper dilemma within Buckley.

‘Jeff felt uncertain of his musical direction, not only after signing with Columbia, but before signing, and all the way to the end,' Underwood wrote in an email in 2007. ‘He did not know himself - which musical direction he might want to commit himself to, because taking a stand, making a commitment to a direction, or even to composing and then successfully completing the recording of a single song, was extremely difficult for him. On the one hand, creativity was his calling. On the other hand, any creative gesture that offered the possibility of success terrified him. Hence, his creative inertia, his inability to write very much or very often, his inability to make a commitment to any given take in the studio; his inability to keep appointments, show up on time, respect corporate officials, or even to complete a second recording successfully.'

Columbia's Mike Webb had a different, though equally valid, opinion. ‘He was a great mimic, and maybe that came more naturally to him,' he figured. ‘He could perform someone else's songs and you felt like he wrote it himself - he could get all the emotions out. But if he's doing it himself, maybe he was touching places that were too painful.' Buckley cast some of those chronic doubts aside, and possibly said his goodbyes to Rebecca Moore, when he casually strode into Sin-E on a spring afternoon in June 1993. It was the occasion of yet another recording for Nicholas Hill's ‘The Music Faucet' program, broadcast live. Hill had invited Glen Hansard, who was on one of his many trips to New York, and iconic, wheelchair-bound singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt. He also asked Buckley to turn up and play, although, as he told me, ‘It was not a sure thing he would show', which was hardly out of character. ‘It was afternoon,' Hill recalled, ‘and there were more folks on the street than in the room.' This was also the first time that WFMU had broadcast from Sin-E, so it turned out to be an afternoon of firsts.

Hansard opened the show, followed by Chesnutt. Then Buckley started to play, singing ‘Sweet Thing' with Hansard, just as they'd done during their one-night stand while moonlighting from The Commitments. ‘Glen's harmonizing was not a real solid thing,' said Hill, ‘but the idea was nice.' Buckley then sang ‘Lilac Wine' before springing a huge surprise on the few people in the room and gathered outside: he started strumming a completely new song, entitled ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over'. Hansard, for one, was completely gobsmacked. ‘Back then Jeff was slightly weakened in my eyes,' he admitted, ‘because he didn't write his songs fully.' (Hansard told me that his ‘holy trinity' of songwriters is Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, all hard acts to follow.) ‘I couldn't understand why this guy couldn't go off with a guitar and write his own tunes. But when he sang "Lover, You Should Have Come Over", it was fucking incredible. That was the first time I went, "OK, dude, you can write songs". Maybe subconsciously I was measuring him against Tim, who was amazing.'

Mark Geary, Buckley's Irish buddy and fellow Sin-E regular, had similar misgivings. ‘I always wondered about the quality of his actual songs,' he said. ‘But he was so good at what he did at Sin-E that it took a long time to separate myself from that and recognise his songwriting talent. One is being incredibly picky, though, to say, "unbelievable guitar player and singer, but are the songs up to it?" ' ‘Lover', at least for the time being, dispelled any misgivings Buckley's peers had.

Nicholas Hill knew that he was witnessing a moment of history, because Buckley had been extremely reluctant to play any new tunes since the derailment of Gods And Monsters. (It was also further proof, as Hill says elsewhere, that Buckley ‘very much used the airwaves' to his advantage: what better way to debut a song than to a radio audience?) ‘The whole time he was woodshedding at Sin-E, and throughout the whole courtship thing with the record labels, he didn't perform any of his own material, at least for a year,' said Hill, who believed Buckley was using the music of others to find his own voice. Hill was ecstatic about getting all this down on tape - he'd already recorded the brief sets of Hansard and Chesnutt - but just as Buckley began to sing ‘Lover', he struck some technical difficulties. ‘Oddly, out of hundreds of shows, this is the one that got away,' he shrugged. When he saw that his recorder wasn't picking up a signal, he tried to record the song off a radio in the café's kitchen, but the reception was poor, with another station's signal bleeding through. Hill was ready to slash his wrists when Waterboy Mike Scott then strolled into Sin-E, also with a tune to debut, a ‘really great topical song', according to Hill, called ‘Going Down To Waco'. ‘Mike wasn't booked,' Hill added, ‘he just happened to be walking by. These were very casual affairs.'

As potent as Scott's protest song undoubtedly was, the debut of Buckley's ‘Lover', historically speaking, overshadowed everything else heard that afternoon in Sin-E. Even in its bare-boned acoustic form, devoid of the heavenly gospel choir and lush arrangement that can be heard on Grace, this was clearly a great song, a bittersweet valentine, an outpouring of emotion, beautifully expressed and sung in a voice rarely heard this side of, well, his father. Buckley, as always, would be cagey when pushed for an explanation of the lyric. ‘I wrote this song while lying [and] listening to the telephone in my apartment,' he said on-stage in Italy during 1995, revealing very little. ‘But she never called.'

If the woman in question was Moore, which certainly could be the case, maybe she'd caught wind of Buckley's nocturnal adventures in the East Village. There was definitely a heavy serving of guilt in Buckley's lyrics, especially when he sang: ‘Sometimes a man gets carried away/When he feels like he should be having his fun/And much too blind to see the damage he's done/Sometimes a man must awake to find that, really/He has no-one.' There's enough pathos present in the lyrics of ‘Lover' to fill several Morrissey purges.

Yet when Buckley finally agreed to record something for his debut Columbia release, it was a flashback to his Sin-E woodshedding. July 19, 1993 was locked in as the day that Buckley would return to the venue and try to recapture some of the magic of his Monday night sets, for release as a live EP. The theory was sound: as Berkowitz stated, it would ‘diffuse' the expectations surrounding his major label debut, and it would also (hopefully) document a key moment for someone Columbia believed would become the next Dylan and/or Springsteen. A live EP was also a throwback to an era when ‘artist development' meant more than a big budget, an MTV-ready video and a hefty promo push; there was something authentic and rootsy about the concept. According to Leah Reid, ‘It allowed us to tell his story, you know, this is who he is, this is where he came from, this is how it worked in New York. There was no commercial expectation, it was just a great setup and in hindsight the only way it could have worked.'

***

Photographer Merri Cyr was one of the few Buckley confidantes to know about the planned Sin-E recording. But Cyr was doing her best to avoid getting involved with the project, despite repeated requests from Columbia's new star. For several days, she'd come home to her apartment and find yet another message from Buckley on her answering machine: ‘Merri, Merri,' he'd implore in a sing-songy voice, ‘you have to call me right away about this Sony thing on Monday.' She was pissed off at Buckley at the time, but finally caved after he'd left something like 10 messages in a row, all with the same request: ‘Please come to Sin-E', followed by what Cyr described as ‘all this gooey shit'.

They'd known each other for less than a year, but already their relationship was taking some weird turns. She'd photographed him for Paper magazine the year before; Rebecca Moore, who had some connections at the mag, helped set up this very early coverage of her then boyfriend. Straight away, Cyr was taken by Buckley, not because he was a serious music talent - she hadn't seen him play yet - but because ‘he was a big ham,' she laughed. ‘[At that first shoot] we had a lot of fun, he was very energetic and was really engaged with me. He was sort of challenging me in a way sometimes.' This was unlike so many other musicians that Cyr had shot. Typically, they rated being photographed with having a tooth pulled or lugging their own gear. Cyr's curiosity was piqued enough to go and see Buckley play at Sin-E. She was totally overwhelmed by the intimacy of the experience, especially when he crooned ‘Hallelujah'. ‘I'd never seen any performance like that before,' she said. ‘I had to stop myself from sobbing.'

But it wasn't just this career-maker of a cover version that impressed Cyr. Buckley was truly unique; he could move seamlessly between musical styles and could also alter the mood in a room quicker than you could say ‘Hello, Sin-E'. ‘In the course of one performance he could be soft, accessible, angry - and sometimes his anger, which he had plenty of, would pop up,' she said. ‘I [also] saw a lot of performances where he wouldn't try and overpower rowdy crowds. Instead, he'd start with a just barely audible, really light tone, and it would increase very slowly. I've never seen an audience shut up so fast. They could hear this weird sound and they'd shut up trying to work out what it is. Sometimes, within 20 seconds, a rowdy crowd would be turned into this gathering where you could hear a pin drop.' Buckley wouldn't walk on stage and start singing immediately; instead he'd scan the audience ‘and sort of sniff them out, like a dog smelling the wind,' Cyr said. ‘He'd pull you into his space,' she said. ‘That's how he'd rein an audience in and take them where he wanted to go.'

By the time of the Sin-E recording (and requisite photo shoot), Buckley had alienated Cyr, for reasons that she's long since forgotten. By now she'd learned that he was volatile and provocative. ‘You'd have conflicts [with him]; he'd have those in his personal relationships with people. He'd piss you off and you'd be like, "Fuck off, I'm not going to talk to you anymore, you dick". That was how I felt about him at the time it came to shoot the Sin-E cover: "Ah, fuck that guy, he's an arsehole".'

It's not surprising that Buckley displayed the many sides of his temperament to Cyr early on; the relationship between a ‘star' and a photographer can be both intimate and highly volatile. And, as Cyr admitted to me, her friendship with Buckley was a little unclear, intimacy-wise. ‘I wasn't his girlfriend or anything, but that line was a little fuzzy sometimes. And I didn't want to be seen like a groupie.' Buckley liked to challenge people, pushing them until they either told him to go fuck himself (as Cyr had done) or bend over and let him have his way. ‘You were being tested,' Cyr said. ‘Then it was a challenge for him to win you back. This was a process I went through with him a lot.' But Cyr admits that Buckley's ample supply of charm and charisma made him almost impossible to hate forever. ‘He respected you only if he thought you'd stand up to him. If you rolled over he wouldn't give you the time of day.'

There was an additional complication with the Sin-E shoot: Columbia had already hired a photographer. When Cyr did return Buckley's call, he told her to get to the label's office straight away. First up, Columbia staffers wanted to see her portfolio, and if they were happy with her work, Buckley needed to get someone at the label to ‘un-hire' the other photographer. And quick. ‘I had to watch this guy fire her over the phone,' Cyr recalled. ‘That was on Friday and Monday was the day of the shoot.'*

* Cyr was puzzled by her brief trip to Black Rock, Sony's imposing HQ: she spotted one of her images, framed and hanging on the art director's wall, yet he'd never bothered returning her calls until she started working with Buckley. Like her subject, she was learning a lot about the machinations of the corporate world.

It was a day of firsts: it was Buckley's initial foray into the world of a major label and it was Cyr's debut shoot for a multi-national. Sin-E owner Shane Doyle was bemused, to say the least, as various Sony staff arrived in the morning, and a mobile recording unit was set up in the bar a few doors down. There were cords and cable running in all directions, as a few locals started to drift in, wondering what the hell was going on. ‘The recording was never acknowledged,' insisted Leah Reid. ‘It was more a case of we press the buttons and you do what you do.'

At one point, Shane Doyle grabbed Buckley and asked: ‘How does this work? I'm supposed to get paid for this, right?' Quick as a flash, Buckley replied: ‘Charge whatever you like, Shane, it's Sony Records.' When it was decided that a second day of recording was required, Doyle put in a call to Berkowitz. He said: ‘What's the story with this? I guess I'll have to charge you the same amount.' When Berkowitz challenged him, saying that the exposure was surely worth far more, Doyle replied: ‘I don't need it. You'll have to pay me for another gig.'*

* Today Doyle admits that he had no idea how significant an artist Buckley would become, or how his name would be forever linked to Sin-E. ‘In any event I never capitalised upon it, you know?'

Interestingly, Doyle had never considered recording any of the Sin-E action before. The way he saw it, that ran contrary to the spirit of the venue. ‘There was no playing for the camera or a recording device,' he said. ‘No one had any inhibitions; you could act the clown, you could be any way you wanted, you didn't have to think about it.' In some ways, Live At Sin-E marked the end of an era for Buckley and the venue. Both were now public property.

***

Even though Buckley had played enough shows at Sin-E to sing the setlist in his sleep, something didn't gel on the first day of recording, which comprised an afternoon and an evening set. It may well have been a simple case of jitters: after all, as Cyr recalled, at the start of the day she was the only person in the room not employed by Sony. ‘He was scared of the company, he was scared of doing this first project, there were a bunch of business people there breathing down his neck,' she said. ‘It was one of the biggest days of his life. And he was really afraid of failing. It was a very intense experience.' (Leah Reid disagrees with this. ‘He wasn't being pressured to do anything,' she told me. ‘At that point he realised it wasn't so much about a label as the people inside a label, people he could trust. It wasn't until later on that the pressure of Columbia Records became more of his day-to-day. Back then they gave him the time to be nurtured.')

During the first set the room was virtually empty, but by the evening Sin-E was packed with Buckley friends and fans. ‘There were people spilling out the doors,' recalled Cyr. ‘At that point he'd developed quite a following,' added Leah Reid. ‘The afternoon shows were really just warm-ups, so it wasn't full by any means, just random people, but each night the shows were packed. There were more Columbia people than ever before, but there were also punters there, too.' Between the two sets, Buckley retired to Anseo, the bar two doors down from Sin-E, spread himself across a couple of stools and duly fell asleep, with his head resting in Cyr's lap. ‘I remember feeling very protective of him,' said Cyr. ‘I'm only a year and a half older than him but he just seemed so young and vulnerable.'

All the time, Cyr kept snapping away, documenting everything. During a break, the two walked to nearby Tompkins Square Park, where Cyr shot some images of Buckley that are now rated amongst the most candid portraits ever taken of the man. (And around which Cyr has built a formidable photographic career.) The one shot that summed up Buckley's first attempt to document his ‘café days' was the image eventually used for the EP cover, another clear statement from Buckley that he was doing his best to stay in control of his career: the shot was incredibly revealing and laugh-out-loud funny. Early in the day, Cyr somehow found herself inside the venue, perched on a ladder - to this day she has no idea where it came from - while cradling a panoramic camera and a very wide lens. A soulful Buckley, strumming Janine Nichols' Fender (still on loan), appeared to be looking to the heavens for divine inspiration. A huge Sin-E banner was positioned behind him. So far, so obvious. But on closer examination, you can spot a Sin-E regular, within arm's reach of Buckley, flicking through his morning newspaper, totally oblivious to whatever, or whoever, this skinny white guy was channelling.

‘It's hysterical,' Cyr said, ‘he didn't give a shit. That was very brave of Jeff to pick that shot, but it also reflected how he felt. He saw himself as this dweeby guy. I think that changed later when he realised he could manipulate people, and get what he wanted, sex and stuff like that, but at that moment he was wide-eyed, a real goober, you know? He didn't want to be a Chris Isaak lookalike. He was this fucking goofball.' (To Cyr, Buckley was a mass of contradictions: he was a control freak, musical marvel, friend, employer, and a constant source of frustration. ‘Musically, he was very mature, but emotionally he wasn't. That was confusing in relating to him because you would assume a certain maturity that he didn't possess.')

Amongst the cuts Buckley attempted during those two sets was a pair of originals - ‘Eternal Life' and ‘Unforgiven' - plus the usual slew of covers, including ‘Strange Fruit', Morrison's ‘The Way Young Lovers Do' and Dylan's ‘Just Like A Woman' and ‘If You See Her, Say Hello'. The latter pair were revealing choices for a guy at the end of his first ‘real' relationship; one a savage putdown, the other a heartbreaking post mortem of a dead romance.

In the liner notes for the expanded Legacy edition of Live At Sin-E, Berkowitz wrote how Buckley was ‘in pursuit of a lot of things... the pursuit of beauty, communication, sex, coffee, laughs, music, the pursuit of self.'¹But Berkowitz didn't necessarily feel that much of this wild beauty was caught on the tapes from the original sessions. He convinced Buckley to return to Sin-E and try again, on a Tuesday, August 17, just to see what happened, even though the label - and Buckley, of course - was already many thousand production dollars down the drain. But Buckley also knew something was amiss; he told Hal Willner that he thought the Sin-E tapes stank. He said something similar to Kathryn Grimm, his old Group Therapy bandmate. ‘Sin-E, well, he wasn't really thrilled about it,' she said. ‘He was so critical of himself that he could hear every note that was out of tune.'

***

It was a vastly more confident and assured Buckley that was caught on tape the second time around. Barely taking the time to ‘smell the room', he launched into a driving, sexy version of Nina Simone's ‘Be Your Husband', powered by nothing more than his mad-dog howl and stomping Doc Martens. There was no chirpy hello, no nervous patter, no jokes - he truly let his voice (and boots) do the talking.

Buckley proceeded to work through what could best be called a Sin-E's ‘greatest hits' set, including almost all of the songs he'd attempted three weeks back, as well as Dylan's ‘I Shall Be Released', and ‘Dink's Song', a hangover from his Gods And Monsters days, plus a much-improved run-through of ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over', a lean, stunning ‘Mojo Pin' and his reading of ‘The Man That Got Away', ‘borrowed' from Judy Garland's version first heard on the film A Star Is Born. He also produced a stark rendition of ‘Strange Fruit' and dazzling versions of Van Morrison's ‘Sweet Thing' and ‘The Way Young Lovers Do'. Led Zeppelin's ‘Night Flight', a hidden gem from their Physical Graffiti album that Buckley had actually shelved a few months back, was another standout, ditto ‘Calling You', which now actually sounded more like a valentine to Sin-E - ‘coffee machine that needs some fixing/at a little café just 'round the bend' - than a lift from a popular ‘fish out of water' indie flick.

Once he'd set the mood, Buckley quite visibly relaxed, and the ‘human jukebox' switched on. He searched for a missing chord to a Duane Eddy tune (helped out by an audience member), and experimented with reverb, which led to a quick strum through The Doors' ‘The End', delivered Nico-style, where he playfully swapped the ‘mother' of the lyric with ‘Sony' (as in ‘Jeff?' ‘Yes, Sony?' ‘I want to aaaahhhhhhh you'). This could have turned very ugly, but Buckley managed to avoid turning a cheeky piss-take into a very public slap in the face. Possibly there was some antipathy simmering under the surface, or maybe it was just another of Buckley's tests: how far could he push his new bosses until someone told him to back off? This he'd find out soon enough.

Buckley also toyed with the faithful when he went into his usual ‘Nusrat is my Elvis' spiel. Initially, the crowd thought it was another example of Buckley's playfulness, but then he dropped into a near-flawless impression of the almost-impossible-to-impersonate Pakistani. (The piece was called ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai', in case you needed to know, Buckley's first introduction to Nusrat.) When he finally stopped wailing, several bewildering minutes later, you could almost hear the sound of numerous jaws dropping to the floor. It was that powerful.

Columbia's Leah Reid, who was looking on, knew that the Sin-E recording, when it finally reached the stores, was the ideal introduction to the label's new signing - and it would also provide the breathing space Buckley needed to write and find the band that he was so desperately seeking. ‘We did get to capture the moment, but we also took the pressure off [his first studio recording],' said Reid. ‘We were able to work more organically, more grassroots. It's not like the radio promo department [was going] to get a song from the Sin-E record on the radio.' Sony's president Don Ienner, however, nixed Buckley's plan to name the Sin-E EP Café Days, as a nod to a line from his beloved Joni Mitchell's ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard'. When a mock-up crossed Ienner's desk, he put a large slash through the proposed title, and declared that it should henceforth be known as Live At Sin-E. Clearly Buckley's creative control didn't extend into marketing. (Incidentally, the round coffee mug stain on the Sin-E cover is real; it was scanned from a coaster saved by a Sony staffer who was at the show.)

Buckley held back ‘Hallelujah', now the centrepiece of his set, until the very end of that second recording. The version that would be heard on 2003's complete Sin-E, while lacking the sonic bells and whistles of the ‘definitive' Grace take, was near-flawless, Buckley wringing every last drop of emotion from both his almost-spent voice (and a guitar that drifted in and out of tune) and Cohen's wise, witty, occasionally baffling lyric. It was the perfect song with which to sign off his café days. ‘That's all, man,' he managed to utter at the end. ‘Let's go drink and sleep.'

***

Buckley may have struggled with songwriting and fidelity, but he was always moving forward, seeking out new sensations and directions. Cyr was amongst those who felt it confirmed Buckley's suspicion that, just like his father, he wasn't destined for a life of ‘three-score-years-and-ten'. ‘I believed that he felt he had a limited time. I think he was trying to shove a lot of stuff into his short life, to get as much experience as he could,' she said. ‘He wanted to have all these relationships in a full intense way, but in a short time, so I think when he was with somebody he was totally with them.'

With that in mind, and the Sin-E recording finally in the bag, he started to seek out a band in earnest. After several months of scratching around, Buckley was now operating in fast-forward. As Buckley himself admitted in the EPK that helped promote Grace, ‘I was dying to be with the band, dying for the relationship. You know, the chemistry, people, warm bodies, male, female, you know, bass, drums, dulcimer, tuba, anything, anyway that the band would work out - marching bass drum, whatever.'²

In June, he and Berkowitz had met with producer Andy Wallace, who'd first broken through with his work on the 1986 Aerosmith/Run DMC rap/rock crossover smash ‘Walk This Way'. He was best known for his mix of Nirvana's Nevermind, an album that had transformed three straggly-looking punks into unlikely solid-gold superstars (at Sin-E, Buckley had somehow managed to turn their ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit' into a qawwali chant - Nusrat Nirvana). But the bearded, avuncular, 46-year-old Wallace was anticipating a Buckley record along the lines of Sin-E; a vocal showcase, in short. As a solo act, he found Buckley ‘magnetic and magical'. But this wasn't what Buckley had in mind, because he'd just kissed his one-man-band days goodbye. Wallace confessed his uncertainty. ‘It was very tempting to say, "Yeah, it's got to be all about that", but Jeff, thankfully, was very convinced about doing the band and moving to the next place he had to move to.'³

To be continued.

[Photo Credit: Merri Cyr/courtesy Backbeat Books]

Notes:

1. Berkowitz, Steve: Liner notes, Live At Sin-E, Legacy Edition, 2003 Columbia Records

2. Fritz, Ernie: Columbia Records: Grace EPK

3. See note 2

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