Jeff Buckley's 'Grace': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the
show that brings you the little known details and secret
stories behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more.
We are your post grunge troubadours of Tedium, your minor

(00:23):
falls of facts, your major lifts of learning, your cold
and broken hallelujahs of hilarity.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
But we'll let you.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Choose which one is which.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
And today we're looking at when I think it's one
of the most unique albums of the nineties, I'm talking
about Jeff Buckley's Grace, which turns thirty in a few weeks.
The record is a tantalizing glimpse at one of the
great unfulfilled musical promises of the decade. Jeff Buckley was
a one of a kind talent who was at the
start of what seemed like a long and fascinating career

(00:56):
when he drowned in Memphis at the age of thirty.
Now is entire musical legacy rests on this, the only
album he completed in his lifetime. On its ten tracks,
you catch glimpses of all the directions he could have traveled.
With a soaring multi octave range and technical virtuosity. The
poses are all there, from jazzy chantous Chantu Shantur, what's

(01:17):
the masculine of shantou Chantu Chantu? Thank you to hard
rocking guitar hero, East Village Poet and Lower east Side
Punk and heck, there's even Pakistani quality vocalists in there.
It's an album that embraces so much but defies definition.
He would describe himself as quote the warped love child

(01:37):
of Nina Simone and all four members of led Zeppelin,
with the fertilized egg transplanted into the womb of Edith Poff,
out of which is born and left on the street
to be tortured by the bad brains.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
He had quite a way with words. Yeah, I mean,
he would have been amazing on Twitter and podcasts, Yeah,
and podcasts. His diary entries are just like bat yeah,
like I mean, but just yeah, what a talented kid.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah, I mean, this was an album. I don't know
about you, but I came to this through covers, which
is ironic because its biggest track is one of the
most famous covers in music. Hallelujah was big during our
upbringing thanks to Rufus Wainwright's version on the Shrek soundtrack yep.
And that's kind of what led me to Jeff's version,
and so did a piano version of the slightly lesser

(02:24):
known Grace track Lover You Should Have Come Over, And
that was done by the British light jazz vocalist Jamie Cullum,
who is a staple of our independent radio stations outside
of Boston in the early two thousands. Heigel, I imagine
your journey to grace and Jeff Buckley has had a
lot more grit and integrity than mine.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
It didn't It had the exact same one. Oh good,
I feel better, Okay, Yeah. I had the Shrek soundtrack
and then like downloading like seventeen mislabeled versions of Hallelujah
yep from I think I actually like here, I heard
the Rufus Waynwright ron, and then I went to LimeWire
and like looked up Hallelujah and got the Leonard Cohen
one and was like what bombers garbage? Yeah, and then

(03:06):
found the Buckley one and that just stuck in my brain.
I mean it's one of the greatest recordings of all time.
How could it not stick in your brain? But that
like stuck in my brain, And then I think I
finally heard the rest of Grace. But he's so uniquely
sad because it's just like, I mean, there's this one
thing that was just like the whole thing about sophomore albums, right,

(03:27):
is that you spend your whole life making your first record,
and then you have a year or two at best
to make your second. But like he didn't spend that
long at his first one, so not at all. So yeah,
so Grace still feels like the unfulfilled promise. Yeah, it
seems like he would have with some maturity, he would
have reined in and really honed this vision.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
So he would have had a masterpiece. I mean, not
that Grace isn't, you know, close to a masterpiece, but
he probably would have had something, you know up there
with I don't know, okay, computer.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Or and just the fact that he was so eclectic
and could do all of that crazy shit with his voice. Man,
I mean, he could have done standards records out there.
He could have been like Rod Stewart, just like Mining
the great American songbook for like a decade plus, and
it would have been better than Rod Stewart's work, but
it would have just been still so endlessly fascinating because

(04:23):
he was such a magpie and just so musically omnivorous.
You know, yeah, it's incredible. Actually, you know, this record
didn't really do like I mean, it didn't do numbers
for me. What really did was I had a roommate
in Brooklyn. I'm trying to stop myself from saying that
he sucked. But he was a huge buckleyhead and played

(04:45):
the extended is it shiny shiny? I was sinne but
I what I know, no, because it's Gaelic and so
shinead O'Connor, so it's shinee whatever. He he played the
legacy version of that with like he played me Buckley's
version of the way young Lovers do, Oh Husband, like

(05:08):
all this stuff and that is just that, like that
more than Grace. I was just like, Holy, this kid
is like a phenom. I mean he's like he's like
Nina Simone honestly in the but like no shame to
Nina obviously, like I love Nina Simone, but like a
much better vocalist in the way that both of them
were able to interact with both of their instruments like

(05:29):
voice and guitar or voice and piano, in a truly incredible,
seamless way. I mean you listen to like like the
way young lovers do, and it is just a showcase
of one singular, like incorporated bit of artistry between his
voice and guitar playing. It's really wild.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
That's interesting to me that you, in a really reductive
term as a singer songwriter, viewed him seemingly first and
foremost as an interpreter of songs. And the thing that
always blew me away was his songwriting.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
I mean he's but you know, interpreter is such a disservice.
I mean he he was like a jazz artist, like
you know the way that he wouldn't say John Coltrane
interpreted my favorite things. I mean he reinvented it, you know,
I mean I would I would argue because there's just
like a I don't know, interpretation, just sounds like a

(06:19):
cover version, and what he was really doing was like
transforming them, you know, like the way young lovers do.
When I finally heard the Van Morrison version because I
was super late to Astra weeks like when I heard it,
I was like, this is lounge jazz, Like it doesn't
have any of the like the insane power that Buckley
brings to it, not just with his the insane runs

(06:40):
and stuff that he's doing with it. But yeah, I
mean I could have listened to him do that for
the rest of his career, just like the soul I mean,
and in his own songs too. He's obviously a beautiful songwriter,
but like that distillation of voice and guitar, like I
would be hard pressed to think of another male and
maybe another female like for guitar too. Yeah, I mean

(07:03):
he might have the most like seamless control of that
idiom of just like my voice plus a guitar, Like
he may be the greatest to have done it. I
mean you could argue that like oh Dylan or like
blah blah blah blah blah, but like just in terms
of technical talent on both of those things and integrating them. Yeah,
he's not just like strumming or hacking at guitar, Like

(07:24):
it's really I don't know. I mean that's my hyperbolic
take on him.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
What you obviously already trained musician, and I am not
so for me. I think I was drawn to the
emotion of his original songs. I mean, you know, the
whole brooding, romantic thing.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Oh, I mean Lover You should Have Come Over is
like should have been like a forties jazz standard. Yeah, like,
oh my god.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
I mean, when I was a teenager, I thought that
song was the most romantic song I'd ever heard in
my life, even though I was then and am still
repulsed by the term lover. But I mean just yeah,
I mean even just the scanton. And I'm not a
lyric guy by any stretch of the imagination, but the
rhythm of the words and the way they all just

(08:05):
fell like Domino's into one another. I just was always
blown away by you know, Lonely is the room, the
bed is made, the open window lets the rain in
burning in the corner. Is the only wounded dreams he
had you with him. I mean it sings itself. My
body turns and yearns for a sleep that won't ever come.
Great internal rhyme, It's never over my kingdom for a

(08:26):
kiss upon her shoulder. It's never over all my riches
for her smiles when I've slept so soft against her.
I mean, it's everything I love and hate.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
About this type of stuff.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
I mean, I think when I was younger, I used
to think I was sensitive, and now I realize I
just like melodrama. But I mean he's like Jacques Brel.
I mean, he's like he definitely is in that lineage.
I gotta say I never was into the more like
hard rocking songs that he did that was not I
was more into the very like you know, emotional ethereal.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah, the zeppelinst is one of those things that's really
interesting because of his friendship with Chris Cornell, and like
Chris Cornell is like to me, and not just me
considered like the Air Apparent to Robert Plant of that generation,
just in terms of range and tambre. But Buckley like
he's better than Robert Plant. I mean, he has a

(09:21):
four octave range and Robert Plant had like ruined his
within like a year and a half of being a Templin.
And Robert Plant can't scat, like he can't ad lib
and invent the same way Buckley could. So yeah, it's weird.
It just feels to me like stuff like Mojo Pin
and some of the more rock and stuff might have
gotten like ironed out of his system as he sort

(09:42):
of progressed. But who's to say. I mean he he
wept when he met Jimmy Page, so I mean who
among who among us, I probably wouldn't weep. I'd probably
be like, give me your money, you old id deserve it.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
A part of my entry to Jeff Buckley that I
didn't mention was that I started digging into him because
I knew of his father, who will talk about the
Folks singer Tim Buckley, who died in the mid seventies,
and he was cited on all the VH one approved
lists of early rock casualties. So that was actually, if
I'm honest with myself, the initial entry point to Jeff.
I thought it was so spooky that there was this

(10:24):
father and son who again, as we'll talk about, barely
got to know one another, who both became singers and
both died young and tragically. So for me, he was
initially more of like a pop cultural figure than a
musical one, because when I was a tween, I bought
a book called Dream Brother by the great music journalist
David Brown, who's since become a friend of mine, and

(10:46):
he's a new book out, a great oral history on
the Greenwich.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Village, which is due out soon, as everybody checked that out.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
But he was really the first journalist who championed Jeff
Buckley in a big way. He wrote a New York
Times profile on him way back in nineteen ninety three,
long before race. And he's since gone on to do
a lot of work with Jeff Buckley's estate. And he
oversaw the scrap book style book of Jeff's notebooks and
diaries back in two thousand and nine, called in his
own voice, which is really wonderful. I think you were

(11:12):
referencing some of the diary entries and notebook entries and
stuff a little while ago.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
It's wonderful. And the rest of him, God was he
handsome and doomed? And god, what a singer? What a singer?
What else do we say about young Jeffrey? He had
a belly button piercing, did he? Oh? Yeah, that's how
they identified the body.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
That was how they identified the body. I guess it
was several days until.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Several days in the water. Too much information, That's one
of them.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Boxley. Now, last week we had a few truly TMI
moments in the Punk Stumped the Buff section involving bodily functions. Well,
it's about time to dive in. From the deeply fraught
family saga the heart of the music to the hilarious
reason Columbia executives hated the cover, to the hilariously laid
back assembly of the band, and the comparison to Michael

(12:13):
Boltland that nearly killed the album before it was completed.
Here's everything you didn't know about Grace by Jeff Buckley.
Well sadly, folks, the story of Jeff Buckley is yet
another entry in tmi's patented guys with complex issues with
their dad category. This one's this one's a real doozy,

(12:37):
This one makes me sad.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
Oh yeah, I mean it's the er dad story in music, right,
I mean not. I'm sure people had dad issues before him,
But it's just like, you know, Murray Wilson of the
Beach Buys. Yea Murray Wilson wasn't also like an incredibly
gifted singer songwriter who literally never met his son, who
who was also an incredibly gifted singer songwriter.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
You know, absolutely true? Yeah, Jeff spent much of his
life living in the specter of his late father, Tim Buckley,
a singer songwriter, of summary now and he was kind
of more of a cult figure who's gone on to
be uh, sort of a bigger presence in music these days,
you know, in a strange sense, asking in the reflected
glory of his son. He did have some success in

(13:20):
his own time. He performed I Believe in the final
episode of The Monkey's TV Show. She gets major points
with me. It's fitting because his voice is like a
more soulful Mickey Dolan's sigh. Right, sure, sure, you're humoring

(13:57):
me and I'll accept it. Yeah. His album Goodbye and
Hello on a Lecture is probably the best known because
it features the song Once I Was, which was included
in the movie Coming Home with Bruce Dern and Jane
Fonda and John Voight. And that's the one I think
this is actually the song plays underneath. It's the one
that ends with Bruce Dern. He's playing a traumatized Vietnam

(14:20):
vett and his character walks into the ocean to die. Spoilers.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yeah, it's funny this came up because I associate that
line so much with Barton Fink, because Frazier's dad's character, John.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Mulaney is playing like a loose version of William Faulkner
h yas. He has like a throwaway line which might
have been improvised, where he's like, he's like walking away
from these two carrying a ball, and he's like, I'm
just gonna walk it down to the ocean and from
there I'll improvise. I don't think it's a nod to
that movie, but you can cut that.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
I think it's a nod to because wasn't that how
Virginia Wolf dies? She has filled her pockets with stones?
Then he was in the lake.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
It was a river.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, which brings us full circle back to mister Buckley
Buckley Buckley the Younger. Yes, Tim Buckley is a whole
other episode unto himself, so we'll go light on Tim's backstory,
but he was something of a troubled soul. He has
a section on his Wikipedia that just called the sex
funk Era, So I just I assume no good can

(15:28):
come of that.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah, I mean I went and looked that up obviously,
and she sure you did. Yeah. Yeah, it's got a
pretty killer row of La Session guys playing on it,
and his cover Fred Neils Dolphins is released on one
of those.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
But yeah, Tim Buckley left his young wife, Mary Gwiebert.
I think you say her name shortly before their son, Jeff,
was born on November seventeenth, nineteen sixty six, and for
years Jeff Buckley had no relationship with his biological dad.
His mother remarried and Jeff took his stepfather's surname, and
the transformation was complete when he also inexplicably took a

(16:01):
new first name too. I think he went by his
middle name. So he was known all growing up in
southern California as Scott moorehead, Scott more Ahead.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah. I just I found a quote from him, and
he said he grew up and he spent his high
school in Anaheim. Oh, he said he was surrounded by
the quote Disneyland Nazi youth. That just might not be
super original, but just still funny and true way with words.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Oh do you think he knew Do you think he
knew anyone? From no doubt he was like probably like
four or five years older.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
But no, he might have known Gwen Stefani's older brother.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Another tragic, unfulfilled talent of Yeah, what did they do
to the kids in Anaheim in the seventies.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
That's a real two roads diverge. In a wood moment.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
Wow, I'm just picturing young Jeff Buckley and young Gwen
Stefani in the shadow of the matterhorn.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Eric Matthew Stefani born nineteen sixty seven. Yeah, basically same age,
Jeff Buckley. Yeah, same age. That's wild. I do wonder
if any of each other Laura High School noted alumni. Yes,
Jeff Buckley, they went to be at the same high
school at the same time.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
How does anyone like I need to google this now?

Speaker 2 (17:19):
Jeff Buckley plus Eric Stefani. Yeah, just a Reddit post
that says they were classmates.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
I'm glad we ended up here. I feel like we've
advanced the Jeff Buckley narrative. We don't usually do that.
Actually that's not true. We do that sometimes, but this
was a good one. But Jeff's upbringing was really sad
because he didn't know his biological father. He would tell
all the New York Times in nineteen ninety three. I
never knew him. I met him once when I was eight.

(17:48):
We went to visit him and he was working in
his room, so I didn't even get to talk to him.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
And that was it.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
And then any hopes for reconciliation were dashed two months
after this first meeting, when Tim died of a drug
overdose in June of nineteen seventy five. Tim reportedly died
in Debt, owning only a guitar and an amplifier, A
sobering glimpse.

Speaker 2 (18:08):
Into the future for us both awful awful, yes.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
And the estrangement between father and son continued even into death,
as Jeff was not invited to his father's funeral horrible
and this loss understandably stayed with Jeff. His mother would
say in a two thousand and two BBC four documentary,
he really didn't see himself linked to his father in
that way, that somehow he would inherit his father's lifespan.

(18:35):
Did we see evidence of him intentionally trying to avoid
the same pitfalls, in this case drugs, Absolutely, which makes
the fact that he followed his father to an early
grave all the more tragic. Was that I think by
all accounts, you know, I mean, he wasn't a monk,
but I don't think he you know, got into any
kind of hard drugs.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, I mean, there are people who said, especially in
the immediate aftermath of his death, I think his manager
has been saying that, oh, he was acting erradically, and
people said that he had been seen stoned like at
one point in his life. But his roadie who was
with him when he drowned, was he was like No,

(19:14):
Jeff was not an addict. He may have dabbled as
a young man in the music industry in the nineties,
may have, but he was by no means like an
addict the same way his dad was. That's something he
and his father did.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Obviously share his music, and Jeff develop an interest for
it early on. He said, I was really captured by it,
everything about it. It was my mother, it was my father.
It was my plaything, it was my toy. It was
the best thing in my life. That's a beautiful sentiment
for music. How do you feel about that as someone
who I assume feels the same way about music.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
No, Now it's an albatross around my neck. But you know,
that's a great way of describing what it feels like
in your teens to discover music.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
You know, Jef, they're old at the Musicians Institute in
Los Angeles to study guitar, where he sought to follow
in the footsteps not of his father but of his hero,
Jimmy Page.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, I think we talked about I think we talked
about musicians Institute, but it was basically just where you
went to learn how to shred on your respective instrument.
It was like a waypoint for a lot of the
hair metal guys. Did Boby go there?

Speaker 1 (20:21):
I remember it came up recently. No, it was Rivers Cuomo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just find this so funny, although I guess you
can hear elements of it on Grace. Jeff would play
in a series of unsuccessful heavy metal bands in the
eighties where his singing was relegated to backing vocals.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
I can't believe. Yeah, that's insane, man. I have to
think he was just too shy for maybe unlock his powers,
because I can't imagine anyone being like, yeah, you're the
backing vocalist after he hearing that.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, he would have been really young. I mean this
was like I saw some posters in that in the
scrap book we talked about earlier that had posts for
gigs in like eighty three, So he would have been
like seventeen eighteen. I mean that's still He's still fine
in his way, and of course, as you're interested in music,
Jeff fended off the obvious comparisons to his father Tim.

(21:13):
He would later say, I don't hate my father, and
I don't resent him existing. It's just something I've grown
up with all my life, not being a part of
a life that had so much energy. When you're a kid,
people assume you have no mind of your own, which
at a very early age I did. It's my way
of resisting people's singular vision of my music, by which
I think he means just trying to avoid comparisons.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
With his dad.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
And he would write a diary entry during his European
tour in nineteen ninety five that elaborate on his very
complicated feelings about his dad. He writes, it's not his
memory or his ghosts that I despise and avoid. It's
the fact that there's a large mass of people in
my path. His fans, critics, cultists, editors and writers of
our beloved rock press, my critics who have always known

(21:58):
to be ahead of me, to contrast and tear me
down under the shadow of my father, and sometimes in
my father's behalf, as if they have the knowledge and authority.
This is something I've known since I was small. I
almost just barely touched his life. I was so close,
but I lost him. I savor the morsel to this day.

(22:18):
The taste is almost gone. I was stuck with his cult,
his blurry memory blurred into obscurity ever after by secondhand stories, conjecture,
buried jealousies, guilt, secrets, accusations, and so much pain, so
so much, an ocean of pain. That's his diaries.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Who the Frights their diary at twenty nine? You know?

Speaker 1 (22:45):
I mean, you know? I mean if they say personalities,
who you are when no one's watching, and this is
who he was in his diary when presumably no one
was watching, that's pretty incredible. But like it or not,
Jeff Buckley's career would take off thanks in large part
to his father, or at least his family name. However,
it went down in the most cinematic way possible, which

(23:07):
leads me to ask, was there a Jeff Buckley biopic
in the works, Like because this needs to be brought
to the big screen, or it doesn't need to be,
but it will be because it's inevitable.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
There is one filmed in twenty twelve. Penn Badgely starred
as Jeff Gossip Badly of You and Gossip Girl. Yeah,
the movie is called Greetings from Tim Buckley, which sounds confusing,
But in twenty twenty one there was another one announced
that was done in conjunction with his mother and his estates,

(23:40):
So it was gonna have all of his songs in it,
and the guy from Spider Man Turn Off the Dark
was gonna be in it, and like Haiti's Town and
a bunch of other stuff. He's like a Broadway guy.
But no news since then, so I don't know, Yeah,
I don't know how Jeff would actually fit into like
the current music biopic Tamber you know. I mean they

(24:01):
just put out Amy, but like they haven't done despite
all the zoomers dressing like it's like the mid to
late nineties, Like they haven't done a grunge biopic, you know.
I think the closest thing is that depressing Gus Fan's
ant movie called like Last Days. Oh yeah, like whur
Where's Our Lane Staley biopic, Where's Our Jeff Buckley biopic?
You know, where's our the guy from Mother Lovebone who

(24:25):
died an inspired Temple of the Dog. They had so
many terrible band names back then, was that Mother Love Bone?

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (24:33):
And Andrew wood and Wood. Yeah, it's gotta suck to
just have like, I don't know if there's an afterlife.
I would be pretty pissed off if like I had
never achieved anything. And then two vastly more talented of
my buddies came out and made one of the old
time grunge bangers just because I died. I'm referring, of course,
to Hunger Strike doesn't afterlife.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
It's got to suck to watch a subpar movie biopic
being made of your life.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
That's also true. Yeah, was it Franco got play him?
I don't remember that, but why not? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (25:02):
Well, back to happier, happier topics. Jeff Buckley's musical assent.
In the spring of nineteen ninety one, friends and admirers
of Tim Buckley were putting together a tribute show at
Saint Anne's Church in Brooklyn. Jeff was initially not invited,
just as he was not invited to his funeral, since
Tim's obituaries had failed to mention him, and Tim likely

(25:27):
didn't tell his friends that he had a biological son either,
so as a result, most of Tim's friends and associates
didn't even realize that Jeff existed twentieth century parenting or fatherhood.
I should say that's crushing.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
But Tim's former manager, a guy by the name of
Herb Cohen, but latedly informed the organizers of the Junior
Buckley's existence in his talent, and an invitation was extended
to him to perform. Jeff was understandably a little skeptical
about performing a concert that he inhal he wasn't invited to,
but he ultimately accepted. He hoped that a concert would

(26:04):
help him process his unresolved feelings for his dad and
purge the grief that he'd stored up for his entire life.
He told Rolling Stone in nineteen ninety four, it bothered
me that I hadn't been to his funeral, that I'd
never been able to tell him anything. I use that
show to pay my last respects. And The show was
scheduled for April twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, and first

(26:26):
hand reports indicate that the show got off to a
slow start with a bunch of tedious numbers by downtown
musicians like Richard Hall, Eric Anderson, and The Shams. One
of the attendees would tell the aforementioned author, David Brown,
that the setlist consisted of quote avant garde versions of
stuff that was avantcarde to begin with. At times it
was pretty painful. It was not an easygoing concert.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. I mean it was produced by hol Wilner, right,
do you know about him a little bit? How Wilner
is really incredible. I mean he kind of had a
job that doesn't really exist anymore. It was just like, uh,
he would put together a bunch of these incredible tribute albums,
you know. I mean he was a regular, he was
a producer. He produced from Mary and Faithful. Yeah, but

(27:11):
he would do these these insane concept albums, like he
did a tribute to the Lonious Monk that has like
Doctor John on there. He has one to Kurt Veal.
He has one from uh that's just about Disney that
has like Disney songs covered by like Son Raw. You know,
Nino Rota. He has a whole one for Italian composer

(27:33):
Nino Rota, famous for the Godfather theme and Fellini films.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Stormy Weather, the music of Harold Arlen Wow.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Is one from Mingus. The one that's really interesting is
is Rogues Gallery. I was that it's pretty great. It's
a bunch of like old pirate and like nautical songs.
So if you've ever wanted to hear I think Tom
Waits and Keith Richards do Shenandoah. It's pretty great. He
just had juice. I mean, he like knew everyone, and
it would be like, why don't you like Brian Ferry,

(28:03):
you know, Nick Cave come in and sing a pirate
song and they would sting come sing a pirate song
bono like it's nuts.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
So okay, this Hal Wilner guy puts together some incredible
concept albums for you know, tribute albums and tribute shows.
But some of them are a little uh, a little granular,
a little uh not for not for mass consumption. So
this was not this is not an easy going concert.
But then the atmosphere changes, the lights go down, Jeff

(28:34):
Buckley takes the stage. No one knows who he's is,
his back is to the audience, he's furiously strumming his guitar,
and then he starts to sing. And now, as we said,
most people didn't even realize that Tim Buckley had a son,
and so now here they were gathered at this tribute
concert at a church and some guy comes onto the
stage and they can't even see his face, and he

(28:54):
starts singing in this incredibly similar voice, but better question yes, yes, yes.
The effect was incredibly eerie, and also the song choice
was very, very poignant. Jeff performed Tim's song I Never
Asked to Be Your Mountain, and this is one of
Tim's most personal songs. It was basically a kiss off

(29:16):
to his wife and the infant son that he.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Was leaving behind.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
Buckley was singing the tune of his own abandonment to
fans of the father that he never knew. It's heartbreaking,
it's terrible, it's cathartic. There's just so much wrapped up
in this and the song. I don't know if you
know if it's one of my favorite Tim he is
my favorite Tim Buckley song. It builds an intensity like
a runaway train. It just gets so frantic. Midway through

(30:23):
the song, the stage lights are switched on, illuminating Jeff's
face for the first time, casting his silhouette onto the
back wall very dramatically. This all made a huge impact,
although hilariously, Jeff himself did not appreciate this nod to
the theatrical, as he told a friend after the show,
my god, I stepped on stage and they backloaded it.

(30:45):
It was like the second coming.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
He's admirably self aware of, like his looks and the
way that people tried to capitalize it on it, or
just this like flair for the dramatic that people had
when it came to his image and his father. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
Yeah, But from most of the audience, this essentially was
the second coming. One person in the audience told The
New York Times, everyone was there to celebrate the music
of Tim Buckley, and here was someone who looked like him,
sounded like him, and had the same vocal range. It
was very spooky, but impressive, and Jeff later returned that
night to perform more songs backed by former Captain Beefheart

(31:20):
guitarist Gary Lucas played the song Cepheronia, the King's Chain
and Don't Make Me Say This Phantasmagoria in two, but
the finale featured Jeff alone with an acoustic guitar, singing
Once I was one of his father's best known songs,
probably the best known song by his father, as he

(31:40):
told Musician Magazine in nineteen ninety four, it was the
first song my mother ever played me by Tim. Like
what he calls his dad Tim, So I learned it.
It was hard to learn it. I couldn't really do
a full version of it at home without crying. I
almost cried on stage. I broke a string on stage
at the end of that song. They were brand new strings.

(32:00):
I was really pissed. So mine is the guitar. Jeff
sang the last lines a cappella, And sometimes I wonder
for a while, do you ever remember me?

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Forout the days when we're smile? And how is that
when word and the magic of a and the silence

(32:35):
surp sometimes sun, Oh, do you ever remember me?

Speaker 1 (33:19):
And the words hung in the air like a bruising
indictment from a lost child to an absent father, and
the audience burst into applause and probably tears. Uh. It's
a slight exaggeration to say that the performance made him
an overnight star, but not far off. The afore mentioned
Hal Wilner, who produced the concert, would later say, over

(33:42):
the course of that one show, Jeff had been accepted
by almost every musical group being in New York. Everyone
had just adopted him, and it became a natural thing
for him to want to come here. It's like he
stepped into a new life, because remember, you'd flown in
from California to play this show. Those in attendance at
the tribute show recall the sworn of people rushing up
the Jeff to get near him. Musicians and industry figures

(34:04):
would hand them cards, and women flocked to him to
offer him a shoulder to cry on, shall we say it?
And within weeks he'd relocated to New York City full time.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Back when you could do it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
But this decision to pursue a new life would leave
Jeff uneasy, as he later told the Philadelphia Inquire in
a way, I sacrificed my nominymity for my father, whereas
he sacrificed me for his fame. So I guess I
made a mistake, Jesus.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, man, he had a lot going on under the hood. Yeah.
What does it mean when to say a man has
a lot going on? Jeff Buckley? As you meditate on that,
we'll be right back with more too much information after
these messages.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Well, the most immediate partnership to emerge from this tribute
show was with his guitar companist, afore mentioned Gary Lucas,
formerly of Captain Beefheart. Lucas had a band horrifically called
Gods and Monsters.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
That's terrible. Oh your show in your ass here. Gods
and Monsters is a line from Bride of Frankenstein. Oh
I know what it is. I still think it's a
terrible name. Have you seen the movie Gods and Monsters.
It's a book too, right, Yeah, it's about James Whale.
I mean, Bride of Frankenstein is so fascinating because it's
like the gayest thing that ever came out of Universal.
And James Whale was the director, and you know, he

(35:45):
had an interesting career. He made a lot of classic whorrors.
He made the first Frankenstein, he made the Old Dark House.
He obviously Bride, He did The Invisible Man, and he
was I believe. Oh yes, he was openly gay, which

(36:05):
is insane for the twenties and thirties. And so the
movie Gods and Monsters stars I want to say, yeah,
Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser, and it is is about
his later life and it's it's quite good. So shut
up about your terrible name. Gods and Monsters a sick name.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
Fine, well, Gary Lucas invited Jeff Buckley to join Gods
and Monsters in the spring of nineteen ninety one, shortly
after the tribute show to Jeff's father, and it was
his early union that yielded early versions of the title
track to Grace and also Mojo Pinn. I think two
of my least favorite songs on the album, It's sorry

(36:49):
it sound like I have it in for Gary Lucas.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Lucas recalled in the interview with song Facts. I invited
him into my group right away. I thought he could
be the great singer I've been looking for. He said
he would do it. One thing led to another and
he was in. Then I needed to write some music,
and I came up with Grace and Mojo pin as
instrumental guitar pieces. I sent them to him and he
had perfect lyrics and a perfect melody for each instrumental.

(37:14):
The words to Grace apparently came from saying goodbye to
his new girlfriend, Rebecca Moore on one rainy afternoon at
the airport. Like Lucas, Jeff had met her during rehearsals
for the Tim Buckley tribute show, where Moore, who's the
daughter of avant garde photographer Peter Moore, was setting up
a buffet.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
For the performers. That's cute. I like that. That's a
good meet cute.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
I was playing at a tribute show for my late
father I had never met, and she was setting up
the buffet backstage. Can we get someone on the line
for that, Jamie?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
About the buffet? What was the buffet? Oh? You want
to do a rom com of this meeting? Okay, yeah,
I understand. I thought you were gonna be like, can
we find out what the catering was? And I was
gonna say, probably a bunch of really overdone chicken pacata
would be like the main thing.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
Think about it. The only two non like MCU DCU
genres that are making any money right now, music, biopics
and rom coms. You put them together, you I'm such
a grech lot.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
No, dude, Horror Are a whore is making a ton
of money right now, as it always does. That long
legs movie that they've been made like twenty three million
in one weekend and the budget was ten including marketing. Wow,
horr never loses bet the farm.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
On Orror Horror.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Sorry anyway, this bit that you're doing it it has legs.
But except for the fact that all of his saddest
songs are also written about her.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
I mean, like the Great Man once said, if you'd
like that sometimes fair, can I say that?

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, I can say that. Okay, yeah, it do be
like that. So yes.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
The words of the title track of Grace came from
saying goodbye to his new girlfriends at the airport or
New York as he was flying back to California to
basically wrap up his affairs there and relocate to New
York full time. And he was on the flight flying
back home for the last time to basically say goodbye,
and that's where all these words would come from. He
would later explain, Grace is just about life sometimes being

(39:18):
so long, which is a sad thing to hear him say,
considering he died at thirty. At the time, I was
anticipating leaving Los Angeles for New York, so I was
waiting to go. I'm not afraid to go, I'm not
afraid to die. I'm not afraid to go away from
this place or from any place. But it just goes

(39:38):
so slow. And I had somebody who loved me in
New York a lot, and it was amazing, poignant.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
Ouch, yeah that hurt.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, both Grace and Mojo Pinn were songs that Jeff
performed frequently during his brief tenure in Gods and Monsters,
and he took the songs with them following their last
gig together in March nineteen ninety two. But rest assured folks,
Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas stayed friendly after their band split,
and Jeff invited him into the studio during sessions for

(40:13):
Grace to contribute to the tracks that he co wrote,
and in Grace's liner notes, Gary Lucas is credited with
quote magical guitarists. Jeff's skill with words deserted him.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
There'd be nice to him. He died, died as he lived,
Handsome New So it wasn't long after Jeff left Gods
and Monsters that he made his debut at the Siny Siney.
We're calling it Sinay, right.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
I'm going to say Sinnay. I'm sorry to our Irish
friends out there. Yeah, I think it is shine because
of Shinead. But who's to say an Irish person would
be the person.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
I'm going to text. I'm going to text somebody right now.
Actually it comes from some idiomatic phrase. What's it mean?
The full phrase is that it means, that is to say,
in other words, it's like, yeah, all the same. See
here it is here. It is an Ulster dialect se
a konnak dialect, it's shne, and in Munster dialect it's

(41:16):
all the same, it's shne. It wasn't long after Jeff
left Gods and Monsters that he made his debut at
the Shane, which is Gaelically named East Village. I don't
think they call it Gaelic anymore. You just call it Irish. Yeah, anyway,
the proprietor is Irish. He named after it's a word
in Gaelic or Irish. Please don't cancel us. I love
the Irish.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
Friend Sarah friend Sarah's who was a listener of Tamas.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
She's from Dublin. I believe, Oh wonderful Sarah. An East
Village coffee shop and club that became He's basically incubator
for this time period. You compared it to the Beatles'
famous Hamburg period. You got his ten thousand hours here. Actually,
if you went to Musicians Institute, he definitely got his
ten thousand hours there. But and I haven't heard him
sing at that concert, but I'm presumably his voice was

(42:01):
amazing there. But what's great about the Shine period is
that we have so much of it. We have like
thirty four tracks that have been released and probably more, honestly,
but you know, it was a humble abode, had scuffed
wooden floors and chipped brick walls. The club's owner was
an Irish expat named Shane Doyle, and he would later
recall in the documentary You and I. My memory is

(42:22):
he just kind of how offensive of an Irish accent?
Do you think I should do? Oh, I'll go for it.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
We've already butchered the language.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
You might as well go. No, I'm not going to
do it. My memory is he just kind of ambled
into the place, dragging his guitar in the middle of
the day with his head half down. He handed me
this tape with some paper wrapped around it and said
he wanted to play. Bucky's tape went down well enough
to earn him a regular spot on Monday nights, one
of the deadest nights in the entertainment industry.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
So maybe the tape wasn't that great.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, I was gonna say. He had borrowed a telecaster,
a blonde one from Janine Nichols, who is one of
the people who helped put on the concerts at Saint Anne's,
and he was as we talked about at the top
of the episode. I don't know how much you're going
to keep that, but as we talked about at the
top of the episode, the shiney stuff is just amazing
for his breath taking musical influences. I mean, he plays

(43:13):
everything from Edith Poff to Billie Holiday to Judy Garland,
deep cuts from Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Elton, John Punk,
acts like Bad Brains and the MC five. He told
Rolling Stone in nineteen ninety four, I became a human jukebox,
learning all these songs I'd always known, discovering the basics
of what I do. Shane Doyle, though put it a
little less poetically. He did whatever he wanted. He might

(43:36):
play for half an hour, then he might drink some
wine and get up and he'd play some more. It
was his night, That's the way it was. He was experimenting,
and it was an opportunity to do that in front
of a very friendly audience, and if he made mistakes,
he had fun with that. So the place served him
very well in that way. And I I mean, you know,
it's impossible to pin down the chronology of his practice routine, right,

(43:58):
but like Buckley's voice live at Shane's is other worldly.
I mean, he's a four octave vocal range. That's nuts,
it is.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
I mean, I mean, like a short list of people
who have four octaves, right, yeah, three is pushing it.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
I mean he's he's basically a lyric tenor in his
chest voice, which is the same range as Pavarotti, and
then with his falsetto. I mean, somebody's pinned all the
notes of his range actually on there, but it's it's
high and he could go deep as well. Four octaves
is a lot, especially the control he has over it.
I mean like once you start getting up into the

(44:33):
your falsetto range or your belt range, there's like you
sacrifice control for some of those notes.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
But not him, just some other people who have four
octave ranges, apparently Ariana Grande, which scans Paul McCartney, which,
though I love him with every fiber of my being,
that kind of surprises me.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
Although I'm gonna go ahead and say that they're counting
his like woos as part of I don't think he
has the I've certainly never heard him span that much,
like impressively. I'm like, maybe some of the high notes
and screams he doesn't like, oh Darlin or golden slam
right now.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, Hailey Williams, Christina Aguilera, prince a prince that makes sense. Yeah,
Michael Jackson also makes sense. Freddie Mercury makes a ton
of sense. Yeah, Whitney Houston, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mariah Carey
of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. What is he's in rarefied company,
Bruce Dickinson, Kate Bush.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
That's so good. You mentioned this at the top of
the episode. But one of the things I find most
fascinating about Jeff Buckley is his love of a specific
singer in the Kali tradition. I'm probably butchering that it
is Sufi devotional music, and the guy he was obsessed
with was nus Alek Khan. He's from Pakistan, and to

(45:50):
the point where he interviewed him for Interview magazine and
he would later write a set of liner notes for Kahn.
They became friends. There's like photos of that together and stuff.
But con is like widely considered like the greatest of
all time in this tradition and his ability to spin

(46:11):
endless variations of melodic phrases off at the top of
his range, and his range, dexterity, and agility are just
like unparalleled. I mean, it's probably it's kind of a
hard cell for Western audiences because his tamber is very
harsh and scratchy, but it is just insane what he's
able to do with his voice. And Buckley was obsessed

(46:32):
with him, and he covers one of his songs. Yeah,
I'm not even going to pronounce it. He performs one
of Khn's songs and that one's released on Shane and
that is that's a six minute version, but there are
reports of him doing twenty minute versions of these songs. Wow.
There's a quote from Chris Cornell that I was looking

(46:52):
for and I haven't been able to find. But he
talks about like he was like Jeff had this fearlessness
with his false range, which was like, you know, could
be considered like an archetypally feminine thing or whatever, and
so he talks about like Jeff just spending like fifteen
or twenty minutes doing these quality style a cappella runs

(47:13):
in shne in front of like nineties East Village, like
punk grunge bikers, guys, and just like having the place
like quiet, you know, of just people being like, what
is happening? This is incredible? Yeah, it's it's insane. Anyway,

(48:12):
it was extremely laid back environment. There was no formal stage,
so Buckley just sat in a corner and played. And
you know, it was a hard road upwards because those
are not fun gigs. People don't really care. He would
later recall it wasn't easy at first. I mean when
I first walked into Shane or the Cornelia Street Cafe,
people talk their asses off. They didn't want to hear it.

(48:33):
And then, funnily enough, even when they did listen, his
songs were frequently drowned out by the buzz of a
cappuccino machine that he would later learn to mimic with
impressive accuracy. You know, but don't start bringing the sad
bells for Jeff, because he also used to wash the
dishes at these places. A former server named Tia Biassi

(48:53):
says in the U and I documentary, Jeff would come
in at two o'clock in the morning. The music would
be over and we'd be kind of cleaning up. He
would just, you know, need to clear his head, and
he would kick me out of the way and start
washing dishes. He loved to wash the dishes. We love
to let him wash the dishes. I'm going to reproduce
this in your exact writing because I love this. Before long, though,

(49:13):
this is the when the music the music turns different
in the behind the music, and the guy says. But
before long, the buzz of the cappuccino machine had turned
into metaphorical buzzz. Yes, springs turned to summer. In nineteen
ninety one, Shane attracted hordes of people to hear Jeff sing.
Soon the street outside was packed with limos carrying major

(49:34):
label execs who just had to check this guy out
for themselves. On one memorable night, Clive Davis, seymour Stein,
and Don Einer were all crammed into the tiny venue. Jordan,
do you want to run down why those people are important?

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Clive Davis, head of Columbia for a million years, champion
of I mean, Jesus, it's like almost easier to name
the people that he didn't sign Jenis Joplin, Bruce Springstan, Billy,
Joel Earthwood, Fire, Whitney Houston when he founded Arista Records,
Alicia keys, Kelly Clarks, I mean, yeah, too many. He's

(50:10):
the guy and he recently appeared on an episode of
the Paul and Katok show Our Way that I Produce.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
He was last week's guest.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
Check it out, folks. Seymour Stein was the president and
I believe founder of Sire Records. Who is all on Sire?
I only know the punk names?

Speaker 2 (50:27):
Oh, I mean he signed Ramones. Yeah, yeah, Madonna was
put stuff on Sire. I think talking Heads like a
lot of a or Blondie. I think it was Blondie
is the most famous one.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
And Don Einer he was I think he was the
president of Sony. I believe these big old, all heavy dudes.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
Buckley eventually went with Columbia Records. Like Billy Joel, he
was swayed by the fact that Bob Dylan was on
the label, as was Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. He
signed in October of nineteen ninety two and used some
of his advance to pay his grandmother back money he
owed her. He sent her a letter along with it,
writing I only think the angels I could ever send

(51:04):
this check, and then wrote a lengthy paragraph that consists
almost entirely of the words I Love You. A year
after signing Columbia would issue his first commercial recording, the
four song Live at Chaney, which has since been expanded
to like thirty four tracks, and apparently the label is
still in the Columbia vaults. Are his like you've heard
have you heard the Springsteen Hammond sessions where he's just

(51:27):
playing like stuff like Mary Queen of Arkansas and Acoustic
Guitar and Justice Royce. Those are good, They're on one
of the big box sets. But there's a there's apparently
in the Columbia vaults, like three days worth of recording
of Buckley running through his entire solo repertoire on guitar, keys,
harmonium at one point, which is hilarious and weird.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
That's what they use on Lover. He should have come
over too, right? Is that the first sign You're here?

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Yes? Yes, this was for an engineer and a Columbia
An r rap named Steve Berkowitz. So there's three days
worth of Wow, the Buckley profession studio stuff that is
still in the Columbia vaults, which I find amazing.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yeah, Steve Berkowitz comes up a lot in this episode.
First follow up to the Live at Cheney EP, the
DEBUTLP that would become Grace, Buckley decided to assemble a band.
He didn't want to go to the acoustic route. As
soon as the EP came out, I was dining with
a band, he later said. I was dying for the relationship,
for the chemistry people, the warm bodies, male or female,

(52:26):
bass drums, dulcimer two, but anything anyway that the band
would work out.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
I love it. I love the enthusiasm.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Unfortunately, Jeff didn't work out the specifics of this band
until weeks before the sessions were due to begin in
September nineteen ninety three. The band thing was a total unknown.
Grace producer Andy Wallace says in David Brown's book Dream Brother,
The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley, he
didn't have a band. The label executives were getting understandably anxious,

(52:56):
and Jeff did everything he could to keep them at
arm's length. This didn't really go well.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
One thing execs don't like, yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Yeah, he told Juice magazine in nineteen ninety six. Rather
than have anybody pick my band, I decided to stall
until I found the right people. So I stalled and
I lied nothing was really happening because I hadn't found anybody,
But gradually an ad hoc group began to coalesce. He
met bassist Mick Grondel after a gig inside a crypt

(53:24):
at Columbia University that summer. Just leave that one there
as one does.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Drummer Matt Johnson came at the recommendation of his girlfriend,
Rebecca Moore. Jeff didn't know him, but he left a
message on his answering machine. It's cold calling a drummer.
He's new to New York, I guess. And later on
in the sessions, Jeff with thicken his guitar parts with
help from Michael Tingey.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
I think it's how you say.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
It, a twenty one year old friend of his girlfriend's
who'd had more training as an actor than as a musician,
and in fact, he barely played music outside of high
school jam sessions, and he he didn't even own a guitaristtrap.
Well before long, Jeff in his rhythm section minus the
other guitarists were jamming at Jeff's rehearsal space, and it
all seemed very loose until Jeff dropped the bomb on

(54:11):
these guys that he had a deal with Columbia and
was due to record his debut album soon. These guys
had no idea. I think they thought they were just
jamming with their new friend. Drummer Matt Johnson would recall.
Within a few weeks we were recording a record, So
it was very quick, very shocking to go for meeting
someone and playing with them to recording in about two
or three weeks. It was really scary. Jeff's producer, Andy Wallace,

(54:35):
who would oversee the Gray sessions.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Was also scared.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
He attended one of the group's East Village rehearsals and
was not thrilled with what he heard. He would say
they would start a riff that would turn into a jam,
eventually abandoned the riff, and then it would go on
for ten minutes. It was interesting, but my impression was,
wait a minute, I thought you guys were learning songs.
We've got studio time booked, and just six weeks after
his band's first rehearsal, Jeff and his rhythm section were

(55:01):
doing Bearsville's Studios, ninety miles.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
North of Manhattan in the.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
Rural artist enclave of Woodstock, New York. They planned to
meet at Jeff's East village apartment on the morning of
September twentieth and carpool up together, but they were running behind.
Jeff left the message on his girlfriend's answering machine, it's
twelve thirty and nobody in the band is ready. Of course,
eventually the rhythm section finally arrived and together they set

(55:27):
off on the two mile track to Bearsville and the
sessions at a promising start. The afore mentioned Columbia An
r man Steve Berkowitz would describe the first weeks as
quote a volcanic eruption of artistry from Jeff. He was
fond of trying endless arrangements of his songs. Burkowitz would say,
it was hundreds of ideas and guitar parts and vocal

(55:48):
parts and backwards parts and extra drum parts.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
Yeah. Andy Wallace would tell tape off that the biggest
challenge of the record was just keeping Jeff focused. He
said he had so many ideas, he was so diverse.
The album, though, never would have gotten done if he
didn't have someone there to pull the reins in. So
they did two and a half to three months at Bearsville,
and then Jeff went out to la for a while
and worked on some more songs after he came back
from La So all told, Wallace said, they probably spent

(56:14):
about six months on Grace for a debut. That's like,
that's a lot, it is, Yeah, I mean it just
kind of shows I guess the high hopes that they
had for him and the major label budget that well. Yeah,
early in the mid nineties.

Speaker 1 (56:30):
The in studio experimentation sounds like a special sort of
torture for his extremely green band, but also for Jeff himself.
The thought of capturing the quote definitive version of his
songs was it deeply at odds with a spontaneous personality,
not to mention his perfectionist tendencies, He would say while
promoting Grace, the nature of recording is excruciating. It's obsessive

(56:54):
because you're dealing with ultimate things. It's not like a
live show where you play and it just disappears in
the air like smoke. It's like painting sound painting. It's
in a crystallized form, So it's very nerve racking. Which
brain cell do I put down here forever and ever?
And this makes me so sad. His anxiety was kicked
in the overdrive following what we'll refer to as.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
The Michael Bolton incident.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
Were you familiar with the Michael Bolton incident?

Speaker 2 (57:21):
Not before reading this, but totally understandable. Yes.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Jeff read a review of the Live at shinne ep
in News Day, and it unfavorably compared it to Michael
Bolton's latest album. The two releases were paired together with
the phrase two white vocalists with affecting voices drawn directly
from black idiom. The critic wrote that quote both Jeff
Buckley and Michael Bolton awkwardly reached for a balance of

(57:48):
emotion and technique, eventually relying on sheer voice of will
over singing and flaking out. How do you feel about.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
That, critics? Should it should be fired? I mean, yeah,
Jeff Buckley does have a large amount of songs by
black artists and his repertoire, but a lot of them
are women. Actually it's okay to rip women off, no,
but it's a little more forward thinking than Bolton. And
also they don't have the same voice Jeff Boltons or

(58:16):
Jeff Pulton. Michael Bolton's whole thing is like heroically straining,
so he sounds like he's having a hernia. He has
like absolutely zero of Buckley's ability to invent and utilize his.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
Voice both former metal guys.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Yeah yeah, but no, that's a stupid, facile comparison, and
I want to find out who did it and yell
at them.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
I left it out of a lot of what I'm
citing in this episode is from a deep dive I
did for Rolling Stone Into the Making, Now Grace, I'm
telling them, well, don't do that. Well, no, in case
somebody from Rolling Stone here catches me. Is a review
a news Day, Yes, I left the name of the
person out of that, and I'm wondering if I did

(58:57):
that for reasons of diplomacy.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
So it might have been a cent famous writer. Well
that's a stupid thing that they said. So New York
news Day review by Charles Aaron This is a savage review.
He calls Buckley a rising alterna hunk. They shamelessly appeal
to their audiences, Buckley wailing and scatting folky blues for
wounded bohemians, while Bolton succeeds feebly on a grand stage

(59:21):
and Buckley fails grandly on a small stage. He's a
leather lunged louden rainwait a slacker, Robert Plant, a loopy Chanson,
and finally a hyper jazz bo using his voice to
mimic his guitars, whale, a horn solo, the Ghost of
Van Morrison. In fact, he does everything short of human beatboxing,
and he does it passionately. Wow you, Charles Erin.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
But this critique sent Jeff into a tailspin, and he
reportedly postponed work on Grace for two whole days while
he pondered this criticism. According to producer Andy Wallace, Jeff
was almost apoplectic. It stopped him cold. He says in
dream brother, if somebody had thought, who can I use
to really get his goat, you could have chosen somebody

(01:00:07):
better than Michael Bolton. Jeff was clearly still bothered by
it months later when he sat for a Q and
a with Interview magazine. When they asked him about the review,
he said, that's really disgusting. The thing is, I'm not
taking from that tradition. I don't want to be black.
Michael Bolton desperately wants to be black. He also sucks

(01:00:27):
his word it's not mine but also mine, and also heigels.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
But I think that's correct, Like I think it's too
he's too eclectic to be tarred with this brush of
like I want to be black, like he also wants
to be Pakistani. He also wants to be If you're
just if you're taking his absorption of these styles as
just reducing it down to I want to be X,
that's false. That's stupid. Like you take all of those

(01:00:51):
influences and you put out something and the guy died
before you could put out like half his corpus is covers.
So I mean it would be.

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
Like if you know, John Lennon and Paul McCartney died,
you know, mid nineteen sixty three, when they had one
LP complete and half of you know, the second one done.
It was either recordings done from clubs, which were mostly covers,
or please please me their first album, which was you know,
probably half covers. It's not a fair assessment. But in

(01:01:19):
a hilarious slash poignant coda, years later, when Jeff was
working on his intended follow up to Grace, he surprised
friends by buying a pile of cheap cassettes from a
street vendor in Memphis, and this pile of tapes included
the dreaded Michael Bolton. When they asked him why he
just bought some Michael Bolton cassettes. He replied, do you
know how much blank tape is? I just got ten

(01:01:41):
tapes to record on. And so then after Jeff died
and friends were coming through his demos, they were amused
to find that his musical fragments were interspersed with Michael
Bolton power ballots.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
That must have been a truly dizzying experience. Yes, now
you have to talk, of course about Hallelujah, the track
on Grace that everyone knows. Jeff didn't think he had
enough strong original material to fill a full album, and
so instead he revisited his days as a quote human
jukebox at Chiny and called through his formidable repertoire of

(01:02:18):
cover songs. But don't call them cover songs, which is
exactly what I said earlier, said Columbia A and R
man Steve Berkowitz. Jeff didn't play cover songs, he explained
in a twenty sixteen interview with Uncut. He played other
people's compositions and made them his own. He consumed the
idea and the feel. He really was a blues singer.
I think he had that religious depth of feeling that

(01:02:41):
blues music has or that Billy Holliday had. I think no,
I mean, Billy Holliday is obviously tremendous, but I would compare,
I would honestly compare him more to Ella Fitzgerald, like
in the ability just the ability to extemporaneize and like
with because Billy Holliday, like God bless her. I don't
think she was known as an especially agile vocalists because

(01:03:04):
you know, since her first recordings were with big bands,
they didn't really have a ton of opportunity for vocalists
to just step out in front and wail or like
scat to extended. And then by the time she had
stopped doing that and was recording in like, you know,
you think of her later period where like some of
the stuff is recorded with the realist orchestra and her
voice straight up sounds like garbage, but she's able to

(01:03:25):
impart such feeling and beauty in these phrases, whereas people
like Ella and Sarah Vaughan are just like insane virtuosos
with their voice, and I think Jeff falls more into that.
But anyway, this is just me on other people's takes.
I understand why people hate me Grace contains three cover songs,
which Jeff curated to show off his multiple musical moods

(01:03:47):
great alliteration. There's Lilac Wine, a jazz standard recorded by
the likes of Earth a Kit, and Buckley's version is
based on Nina Simone's. He does an uninarrowingly good cover
of good version of Nina's Simones be My Husband. At Shane.
He also performs the Benjamin Britten arrangement of the Middle

(01:04:08):
English hymnal Corpus Christy Carroll. And then, of course there's
his interpretation of Leonard Cohen's epic Hallelujah. He'd first heard
the song about how sitting for the aforementioned Jeanine Nichols,
who had loaned him the guitar that he recorded this
so on and was a program director at Sant Anne's church,
and she got a thanks in the liner notes to

(01:04:30):
live at Shane for her efforts. So he was staying
at her apartment in Park Slope and taking care of
her cat. He came across a copy of the Leonard
Cohen tribute album that how Wilner had produced, called I'm
Your Fan, and he especially like John Cale's reworking of Hallelujah.
Jeff was not familiar with the original, and this is
important because Cale's version differs greatly from the Cohen's dirge

(01:04:52):
like original. Leonard Cohen's original for this has like eighty
verses that he whittled down and would interchange. I guess, however,
his feeling and when Cale went to cover it, he
recalled later that he was watching his fax machine with
a sort of amused stare, because more and more just
kept coming. All eighty verses came out, taking up fifteen pages.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
Well, because Denny asked Cohen the like send He's like, yeah, can.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
You send me the lyrics?

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
The lyrics and then yeah. There's a great book by
a wonderful music journalist, Alan Light called The Holy, the
Broken Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Assent of Hallelujo.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
It's just all about the.

Speaker 1 (01:05:33):
Long storied history of this song and it's a really
cool book.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
Come out fairly recent.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
I think they're making a documentary of it too. Thirteen
twenty thirteen.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
Buckley revisited this song frequently during his sessions for Grace.
He recorded over twenty takes of it, and Andy Wallace
would later say there was never any question about this
one going on the album. It was something special, had
a magic to it, and that was there from the beginning.
The finish recording was actually comps from a bunch of
different takes, which I think is interesting because it sounds

(01:06:05):
so seamless. It really sounds like it's done line. His
guitar playing is so beautiful on there, the fingerpicking. You know,
it's it's Jeff's song. It's not anyone else's song anymore.
It's Jeff's song. Now it has three hundred and sixty
five million streams on Spotify, and the runner up, Lover
You Should Have Come Over has a third of that. However,

(01:06:27):
Rolling Stone was not impressed. In her review of Grace,
Critic Stephanie Zacharak writes that the young Buckley's vocals don't
always stand up. He doesn't sound battered or desperate enough
to carry off Leonard Cohen's Hallelijah, Yeah, you idiot. He
sounds like a goddamn angel. He holds one of those
falsetto notes for something like twenty three seconds. Jesus, I

(01:06:50):
can't imagine anyone listening to that and be like, n Yeah,
what the these people? Why did we give them music.
Criticism is a mistake. These people never have had this
much power.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
I mean, here's an unfair question. Then there is no
right or wrong answer to this. How much of this
feeling is now that Jeff is literally an angel, We
imbue this song with a certain significance that it maybe
didn't have in nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
Now I disagree, I mean just from I'm obviously I'm biased,
but like I cannot understand how someone heard that recording
and went eh, like that is really mind boggling. It's
an astounding vocal performance. The guitar playing is beautiful. No,
I mean, yes, obviously it has added resonance now because

(01:07:39):
he died, but contemporaneously. For someone to listen to that
and be like mid.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Stupid, it is interesting to me, though, I am hard
pressed to name a song that's not just like a
jazz standard or something that has so many I mean,
obviously I think Buckley's version is the one that triumphs
over all of them, but I mean, yeah, so many
extremely well known versions, from Leonard Cohen to John Kyle's version,

(01:08:09):
to Jeff Buckley's version, to Rufus Wainwright's version, which I
think in some Circles is probably the most famous of
all of them. I mean, that's that's kind of I mean,
I guess, but Winwright is just is.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Just doing the Kale version from his live record Fragments
of a Rainy Season. I mean, it's just that's the
most straightforward possible cover.

Speaker 1 (01:08:27):
Oh yeah, you're right. But I just think it's interesting
that I can't think of a non standard that has
had you know, so many lives. I mean, I guess
that's why Allan wrote that book about it and they're
doing documentary about it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
Oh yeah, I mean it regularly climbs the I mean
now that singing competitions aren't really a thing anymore, but
it would regularly like climb back up the charts whenever
somebody would do it there, I mean justin Timberlake covered it,
and I want a charity thing furiously Googles. It's weird.
It didn't really escape containment until Shrek. And it's funny

(01:09:01):
because I think this is one of those weird instances
where Cale is singing it in the movie but the
sound yeah yeah, yeah, so that's even that's a weirder
thing too.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):
Is there another like big cover that I'm oh, Katie
Lang Lang did a big version Pansatonics.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
That sounds awful that I would rather kill myself than
listen to an a cappella group do a version of
that song, especially like an acappella group that's so like
self consciously virtuosic. Ugh, that's my two thousand and nine
Cohen said, I think it's a good song, but I

(01:09:42):
think too many people sing.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
It, says the man, I would assume earning checks every
time somebody sings it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
Yeah, well he's not earning anything anymore. But yeah. Timberlake
performed it during the Hope for Haiti Now, which wasn't.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
This Oh, it was the one that y Cleft why
cuff Jean Ye.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
This wasraud to be an enormous defrauded situation by y
Cleft Sean.

Speaker 1 (01:10:10):
Allegedly allegedly allegedly for legal reasons, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
No, I think he was actually convicted. I don't think
we have to say that anymore. They sang it after
Sandy Hook Boy Jesus Christ, This is gonna make me
have a stroke. Adam Sandler performed an off cuddler parody
of Hallelujah at Madison Square Garden as part of the
concert for Hurricane Sandy Relief with Paul Schaef from piano.

(01:10:34):
Sandler's version contained numerous references to Hurricane Sandy and contemporary
events in local culture, sports, and politics.

Speaker 1 (01:10:42):
It was also the Senate live call open after the
twenty sixteen election, with.

Speaker 2 (01:10:48):
Hilar racing Yeah yes, yes, aw Man Lincoln Park front
Manchester Bennington saying Hallelujah at Chris Cornell's funeral in Hollywood.
Forever did they die of the same year?

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
Seventeen I think so Christmas seventeen.

Speaker 2 (01:11:04):
July and Cornell mess yeah, so like two months afterwards,
and they were friends. I know they talked a lot
about this kind of stuff. But that is tough, huh
olia oh Man. Adam Sandler has has to answer for
that elaborate for turning it into a parody song about
Hurricane Sandy. Like, good lord, I'm not like, I'm not like.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
How do you turn something into a parody song about
a disaster?

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
That's the thing I don't understand. I'm gonna let I'm
gonna let you and the listeners discuss. No, that's all right,
I'm I will never listen to that. I'm so I
gotta hate Adam Sandler. Red Letter Media did this whole
breakdown about Jack and Jill about how his movies are
probably not money laundering but basically embezzlement schemes because there's
they look so shy, and they're shot so poorly and

(01:11:52):
so badly, and they have these enormous budgets that he
has got to be pocketing way more than his quarter
un quote nominal fee for because it's all through his
production company. That's interesting, Yeah, And also like he puts
out like a movie every like four years that people
have to obligatorily be like, well, actually, I'm Sandler's a
good actor. Have you seen uncod Gems? And I just

(01:12:14):
I want to scream it was a good movie. We
used to let white people go so far on making
goofy voices, like it was so easy for them, Mike Myers,
Adam Sandler, a Jim Gaffigan, Like it was just you
had to have like two funny voices, or in Sandler's case,
one in your arsenal, and people would just bark like

(01:12:34):
seals at you and throw millions at you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
What's the what's the funny voice? Women did that back?

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
I mean even on SNL, Like none of his characters
like maybe Opera Man or like Cajun Man, but none
of those like escaped containment. He's all in all of
his movies. He only did that stupid voice and everyone
was like, my god, comic mastermind of the nineties.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
Can I tell you a secret. I knew the silly voice.
I just wanted to hear you do it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
Oh, you son of a BITCHU.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
So that is the extremely abbreviated story of Hallelujah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
For more check out It goes blinding rage, rage towards it,
not towards it as no, not towards the song.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
No, the song is innocent, except for the Leonard Coen version.
That one that's a tough listen.

Speaker 2 (01:13:40):
It is affair with synthesizers was really tragic one.

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):
Yeah, how long is his version?

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Like? Because he didn't sing like eighty verses, did he
that's a good question. Yeah, it's only four minutes thirty
nine seconds. So moving on from a Hallelujah, there's one
song that didn't make the final cut of the album,
and it's called Forget Her, and it came just days
before sessions were due to end. Jeff brought the song
in half finished and they work up a quick arrangement

(01:14:10):
on the spot, and producer Andy Wallace and A and
R man Steve Berkerwitz were blown away by what they heard.
Even though Jeff said the lyrics weren't finished, he was
persuaded to take a shot at the vocals on the spot,
and the lyrics that came out I presumably extemporaneously were
extremely and uncharacteristically venomous about a woman who was quote

(01:14:32):
heartbreak the moment you met her. All assumed this was
about his rapidly deteriorating relationship with his girlfriend, Rebecca Moore.
The record executives, showing their trademark sensitivity and compassion, seems
not to care. They felt like it was a hit,
and they were thrilled upon hearing it. Forget Her was
included on early test pressings of Grace, and it was

(01:14:53):
even earmarked to be a single, But still Jeff felt
uneasy about it, and weeks after the sessions for Grace
wrapped in the spring of nineteen ninety four, he and
his band gathered once again to record some B sides,
and Jeff decided to finish a new song that would
becomes so Real, a title that always cracked me up,

(01:15:13):
with a backing track for so Real Complete. He took
a walk around the block to finish the words, and
much like forget Her, it came very quickly that one
I produced live.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
Oh. I was just thinking of the Jennifer Lopez song
like uh Real, oh wow, so Real.

Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
That one I produced live all one moment, Buckley told
Juice magazine in nineteen ninety six. We recorded the vocal
in one take, all in one take. It was three
o'clock in the morning. Jeff ultimately decided to swap so
Real in for forget Her on the track list, a
choice that led to much hand ringing at Columbia and
our man Steve Berkowitz says in David Brown's book Dream Brother,

(01:15:53):
Obviously I did not share Jeff's feeling. I thought forget
Her was the song the largest mass of people would
be able to identify with. Label chiefs took Jeff to
dinner at a fancy Upper West Side Italian restaurant and
attempted to change his mind. Jeff was unmoved. I'm just
imagining that meme of the guy sitting at the table
at the sign that says changed my mind in a big,

(01:16:13):
dry yeah yeah, Jeff said, if I hear that song again,
I'm gonna throw up. Not a whole lot anyone could
really say to that, so the matter was dropped soon after.
Jeff never spoke openly about his exact reasons for switching
the songs, but most believe it was because he felt
Forget Her was much too personal and he didn't wish
to put his ex on blast in such a way.

(01:16:34):
Others believed he hated how much the studio executives loved
it and was turned off by how chart friendly it sounded.
Uh be kind of touched on this earlier. Jeff's suspicion
of major label attention is something that he never really
got over, and it's articulated in many notes that he'd
written to himself and others that were compiled into the

(01:16:54):
scrap book Jeff Buckley his Own Voice in twenty nineteen.
One memorable note read, I don't write my music for Sony.
I write it for the people who are screaming down
the road, crying to a full blast stereo. There's also
music I'll make that will never ever ever be for sale.
This is my music alone. This is my true home

(01:17:15):
from which all things are born, and from which all
my life will spring, untainted and unworried, fully of my
own body. Okay, Buddy, I was waiting. I'm amazed it
took this long in this episode to get.

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
To that point with you. Yeah, I just I mean,
it's impossible for me to have anything but retroactive scorn
for people griping about the music industry, throwing the millions
of dollars like.

Speaker 1 (01:17:43):
They didn't know how bad it was gonna get.

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):
Yeah, they sure didn't. I mean, God, there's like, if
Buckley was like alive today, there would be like four
thousand kids like burying him on TikTok before he even
made it to Shane, like they yeah, never mind.

Speaker 1 (01:17:59):
To like coffee shop musicians. Still even is that still
even a thing? I like to hope it is.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
It's certainly the only economically viable thing anymore. We are
you gonna take a band on tour?

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
True, So Columbia hated that he edged out forget her
for so real, And another thing Columbia hated was the
cover for Grace, or rather Jeff's choice for a cover
portrait for those of you who don't remember. It depicts
Jeff clad and a woman's sequin jacket, with his eyes
soulfully closed, clutching a vintage microphone. It was shot by
his friend Mary Cyril, who recalls Jeff showing up at

(01:18:33):
her Williamsburg studio at the end of nineteen ninety three.
She recalled in Jeff Buckley from Halleluja to the Last Goodbye.
We shot it in this loft belonging to my friend Billy.
The loft had weird architecture, vaulted ceilings and a lot
of natural light in the stairwells, which is beautiful. Billy
had made a small stage area inside the loft. He
actually did little events there with cabaret acts. Jeff had

(01:18:56):
brought this Duffel bag full of his clothes, all smashed
in there, none of them pressed or even clean. There
was a giant bed, and Jeff emptied his bag onto
it and spread his clothes all over the bed. I
selected items from what he'd brought to go with each setup,
and the jacket that he wore what ultimately became the
cover photo was obtained from a local thrift shop, and
he called it his Judy Garland Glitter Jacket. Photographer Mary

(01:19:20):
Seel added to author Jeff Apter, there was one point
when he was eating this banana and I went, okay,
it sort of sid Vicious meets Leonard Cohen meets Elvis
or something like that. Even the ones where he's looking
so broody from a comic series of pictures, he was
just rown.

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:19:38):
He's actually listening to a playback of the song dream
Brother in the cover shot, which is ultimately what drew
him to it. When I presented with an assortment of
potential images, Jeff immediately pointed to it and said, this
is the one. I love it because I'm listening to music.
It basically showed him at peace. Label executives, however, were
not at peace. It's the theme of this section. They

(01:20:01):
were disturbed by his lack of eye contact, not to
mention his glam rock attire. Sonny had Don Einer was
very much not pleased, apparently shouting he looks like a
found singer. Upon seeing the photo, he toned it down
a bit. When being interviewed for the book Dream Brother.
A few years later, after Jeff's death, Sparkley Jacket sent

(01:20:22):
a different message than we wanted. He said it was
a little flashy, we thought, compared to the earthiness of Shine.
We tried to steer him away from it. Others at
the label thought it made him look like adam ant
the eighties new wave, slightly ridiculous skin Oh, you're right,
you're right, you're right, new romantic, that was the term
they preferred, kind of more ridiculous than new wave.

Speaker 2 (01:20:46):
It is yes, okay because of the makeup, makeup, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:20:51):
Jeff fought for days, as co manager said, it was
like pulling teeth, but eventually he got the photo that
he wanted, and photographer Mary Ceyl had a very interesting
take on the choice. She said it captured his quote
split personality. He wanted to be on this major label
and get all this worldwide exposure, but he also wanted
to act like he was on an indie label. I

(01:21:11):
think he envied that freedom he had in the beginning
at Hine, when he wasn't being judged by the specific
point of view.

Speaker 2 (01:21:18):
I don't know. He was so handsome, like who's gonna
do who? I don't know. Speaking of Jeff Buckley's handsomeness,
now we have to talk about the movie and the
Kmart ad.

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
One of ESOPs less successful fables.

Speaker 2 (01:21:30):
Like most creative people who are super attractive but want
to be taken seriously, Jeff had an uneasy relationship with
his handsomeness because he feared it distracted from his art.
He was, for example, mortified when People magazine named him
one of the fifty most Beautiful People of nineteen ninety five,
and when a fan asked him to sign the issue,
he said about playfully defacing it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
The funny part is, we know the people who would
have been choosing.

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
Yeah, those people when we were there, were there in
nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:21:59):
But when Jeff was young and hungry, he used his
face to help pay the bills, his face if he
was lucky.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
And I wrote that too, and it didn't even occur
to me. Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
While competing with the cappuccino machine at Schenet, he tried
out for acting gigs, even auditioning to play a kmart
shopper in an ad. He was turned down, but then
the Gap approached him the following year. Then some he
turned them down, apparently because he'd been fired as a
clerk at Banana Republic, part of the Gap family of
brands years earlier.

Speaker 1 (01:22:30):
For being inaccurately accused of shoplifting apparently. Oh fascinating. I
thought when you're attractive, he can just take things. He
probably thought so too.

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):
Following the release in success of Grays, Though, Buckley started
to get better acting offers. According to co manager Dave Lorie,
he was asked to play the role of the student
in the nineteen ninety six Barbara Streisen film The Mirror
Has Two Faces. Jordan tell us about The Mirror Has
Two Faces.

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):
I have no idea, but I believe that part went
on to be played uncredited by Eli Roth.

Speaker 2 (01:23:04):
That's sickening. He got offered that role, and that was
one of many. Laurie says a wished for song. He
turned out a lot of money to write the theme
song for a Quentin Tarantino film, It's wacky.

Speaker 1 (01:23:18):
Yeah, So wait a minute, I mean it could really only.

Speaker 2 (01:23:22):
Be Stu a little let's do it's got it? Yeah,
go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:23:24):
It could only be pulp fiction, which came out in
ninety four, which means that they would have asked him
when he was like a young upcoming or Jackie Brown
in ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
It must it has to be Jackie Brown by process
of elimination because pulp fiction is all like found sounds.
I don't think there's an original song in there.

Speaker 1 (01:23:40):
No, you're right, but jack I just can't imagine.

Speaker 2 (01:23:44):
And it would have been Jackie's reduction in ninety if
that was in production in nineteen ninety three, I don't
think he would have. Yeah, there's no way that he
would have been in contention for that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
But Jackie Brown, I just can't imagine a Jeff Buckley
song in a blaxploitation parody.

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
Actually, now that I'm not that Yeah, now that I'm
looking at it, Jackie Brown doesn't have doesn't have contemporaneous
music either. Oh wait, I lied. It has Slash's snake
Pit Slash from cunsin Roses Solar Project.

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
Can you guess the name of well, name the song?

Speaker 2 (01:24:22):
Yes, I'll just stop you right now. It's an instrumental
track called Jizz de Pit.

Speaker 1 (01:24:29):
What's the middle word duh oh lowercase da. He can
say that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):
Though. This has to have been some kind of like
Mirrormax thing where they were like, let's get so, let's
get a hot young guy to write this song. I
have no idea. I can't find any.

Speaker 1 (01:24:44):
Maybe it was unrealized. Maybe Quentin was like, oh, man
Buckley doesn't want to do a song, Well, all right,
well I guess I'll do Jackie Brown.

Speaker 2 (01:24:53):
H that is funny. I wonder what unrealized? Does Quentin
Tarantina have a bunch of unrealized projects.

Speaker 1 (01:24:58):
I almost could see him not I could see him
just being like, this is what I want to do,
and then yeah, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:25:04):
No, there's a Wikipedia for unrealized projects. Untitled Luke Cage
film that makes sense, The Man from Uncle.

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
Oh wow, well that got made eventually.

Speaker 2 (01:25:15):
Yeah, a remake of Luccio Fulci's Gallo movie. An untitled
Silver Surfer film, untitled Green Lantin film, untitled Iron Man film.
Maybe it was for this film The Killer Inside Me.
I don't know, this is gonna haunt me. This is
like really gonna haunt my life.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Um.

Speaker 2 (01:25:34):
Instead, Buckley would throw himself into a new album. He
tapped Tom Verlaine of television to produce The Fallow Up
to Grace, overseeing tortured sessions that dragged on for months.
We should mention also that in between this, Buckley and
his band went on tour for like a year and
a half, and I think relationships between the drummer and

(01:25:54):
the rest of the band broke down around that time,
so that was also an issue that he was facing.
Why did that happen? I don't know. I just saw
that sighted as like a complicating factor in the time
between the tour and his follow up. And so he
was living in Memphis in February of nineteen ninety seven.
He was performing there under a lot of unassumed nay are,

(01:26:15):
a lot of fake names, and had a little shotgun
shock that he liked so much he offered to buy
it from the owner. And you know the quiet part
out loud is that that's where he died. He waded
into a channel of the Mississippi called what is it?
It's called something Wolf River. Yeah. In May of nineteen
ninety seven, Buckley waded fully clothed into a channel of

(01:26:36):
the Mississippi River called the Wolf River, and his roady
Keith Fody, told Rolling Stone then as Buckley waded in,
he said, you can't swim in there. Buckley was cold, sober,
as toxicology reports would later reveal, and in Fody's recollection
of this event in The Rolling Stone, he said that
he saw a boat coming down the channel and was

(01:26:57):
trying to warn Jeff to swim back to shore, and
as the boat passed, Jeff was caught in its wake
and undertow, and he vanished from sight. His body washed
up five days later at the feet of Memphis famed
Beale Street. His final recordings would be released as a
posthumous record called Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk in

(01:27:19):
May of nineteen ninety eight, a year after his death,
in a project that was largely shepherded along by Chris Cornell,
but one that may have pissed off Buckley, who was
a known perfectionist. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:27:31):
Jordans Grace was released in August nineteen ninety four. It
didn't exactly set the charts on fire. The string laden
Laskabie cracked the top twenty of Billboard's Alternative Song Charts.

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
I didn't write that, thank you for adding yes, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:27:47):
But still it earned critical acclaim from some of the
most respected names in the industry. David Bowie, speaking to
paulse sighted the album as one he'd take with him
to a desert island. High praise. Paul McCartney visited Jeff
backstage during a show at New York's Roseland Ballroom. Rip
Bono declared the singer quote a pure drop in an

(01:28:09):
ocean of noise in the YouTube fan magazine Propaganda, and
later dedicated numerous shows on the PopMart tour to Jeff
following his death. Is that the one where they would
bring like cars and stuff?

Speaker 2 (01:28:23):
And yeah? Is there no one cool that Bono won't
attach himself to in an effort to seem cooler?

Speaker 1 (01:28:29):
What were we just talking about? Somebody who was like, yeah,
oh no, it was Boby. Moby was like Bono said
it was cool.

Speaker 2 (01:28:34):
Right, maybe yes, yes, yes. Day.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
Around this time, Tom Yorke reportedly recorded his vocals for
the Ben's track Fake Plastic Trees after witnessing Buckley perform
at the Garage in London. Radio Head producer John Lecky
later observed it made Tom realize you could sing in
a falsetto without sounding dripping. Think of that which you will.
That's a bit of British slang.

Speaker 2 (01:28:57):
I don't know that performance of Fake Plastic Trees is
incredible on the record or is there a live one?
Yeah on the record. I mean that's one of my
favorite Radiohead songs. Actually, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
In the weeks after his death, Jeff's mother told Now magazine.
Even Bob Dylan, in an interview with the French magazine,
named Jeff as one of the great songwriters of this decade.
This is hilarious to me because Jeff once pissed Bob
off with an on stage impression of him in November
of nineteen ninety three, leading him to write his Columbia
label mate a contrite letter, which is featured in the

(01:29:31):
aforementioned scrap book that was published a few years back.
He writes, in part, the truth is that I was
off on a tangent on a stage, my mind going
where it goes, trying to be funny, and it wasn't
funny at all. And I shop the letter you can
see it in full. It's pretty funny. But for Jeff Buckley,

(01:29:51):
the one time medalhead who grew up worshiping led Zeppelin,
the most meaningful praise came from Jimmy Page himself.

Speaker 2 (01:29:59):
I love this.

Speaker 1 (01:30:00):
Early collaborator remembers asking Jeff about his professional five year
plan when he was like probably seventeen eighteen, and he said,
I want to make an album that makes people forget
about led Zeppelin two. So this was part of the
plan from early on.

Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
It's interesting though, because I think he said that led
Zeppelin two was the record that his stepdad gave him
that like blew his mind as far as heavy music went.
But he later said led Zeppelin three was really his favorite.
And you can hear it because like that's their quote
unquote weird one that has like a lot more drone
and it's when Jimmy Page like had heard John Fahee

(01:30:35):
was playing in a bunch of like fingerpicking and open
tuning stuff, and it's just a wider ranging record. I
think you can hear that. Tangerine is like such a
pretty one, and I think that's like the pretty Zeppelin
album to me. Yeah, like Gallow's poll that's the way.
Hats off to Roy Harper.

Speaker 1 (01:30:52):
Anyway, Well, this all worked out for Jeff because Jimmy
Page turned out to be as big a fan of
him as he was of led Zeppelin. Page called Jeff
the best technical singer that's appeared in two decades. I
started to play Grace constantly, he said in a two
thousand and two BBC documentary, and the more I listened
to the album, the more I appreciated Jeff's talents in
Jeff's total ability to which he was just a wizard.

(01:31:16):
It was close to being my favorite album of the decade.
And when Jimmy and Jeff cross paths in person, they
apparently cried upon meeting each other. Friend Chris Dowd told
uncutt in twenty fifteen, they actually cried when they met
each other. Jimmy heard himself and Jeff, and Jeff was
meeting his idol. Jimmy Page was the godfather of Jeff's music.

(01:31:38):
A lot of people thought Tim Buckley was an influence
on Jeff, but it was really Zeppelin. Jeff also said
he cried when he met Robert Plant at a Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner around the same
period too, And this is so sweet. Not only was
Jimmy Page a big fan, but let's say, you know,
you're the best kind of fan. He was evangelical Bob Buckley.
He took his friend Robert Plant to one of Jeff's concerts.

(01:32:00):
This went down when they were touring together as Page
and Plant in the mid nineties. Jimmy Page continued, we
actually made a point of going to hear him play
and it was absolutely scary. One of the things that
was a little frightening was that I was convinced that
he probably did things in tunings, and he didn't. He
was doing things in standard tunings. I thought, oh, gee,
he really is clever.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
Isn't he.

Speaker 1 (01:32:21):
He quite clearly had his feet on the ground and
his imagination was flying, flying, way way out there, beyond beyond.

Speaker 2 (01:32:29):
That must have been so humbling for Robert Plant, like, Wow,
this guy is better than I was at my peak,
which was thirty years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:32:39):
He was a huge fan. He called the performance mind altering.
In a twenty ten interview with QTV Spectacular Singing, he said,
and so much conviction. And this is where the behind
the music soundtrack shifts into a minor key. Jeff was
cheerfully singing a whole lot of love to himself on
the night of May twenty nine, nineteen ninety seven, when

(01:33:01):
he went for that swim in the Wolf River, floating
on his back and taking in the evening summer sky.
He spent his last moments alive, joyously celebrating the music
that had provided his creative spark. As his mother would
later reflect, if that's not a state of grace, I.

Speaker 2 (01:33:19):
Don't know what is.

Speaker 1 (01:33:21):
And honestly, I think that's probably the best ending we
could possibly have, So I think we'll just leave it there. Higo,
what do you think I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:33:29):
Yeah, that's that's it. Just go check out Jeff Buckley
if you want to hear the limits of what a
voice and an instrument can do. My name is Alex
Heigel and my name is Jordan Runtag. We'll catch you
next time.

Speaker 1 (01:33:48):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Rundog.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:33:57):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalg
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:34:01):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Jeff Buckley's 'Grace': Everything You Didn't Know