LAST GOODBYE the lost Jeff Buckley interview
One of the most revealing – and spine-chilling – interviews of Jeff Buckley’s short life was conducted for a fanzine with a small readership. Phil Smith resurrects it here, with thanks to Andrew Truth for the interview and extensive contributions
In 1995, fanzine journalism was giving the established music press a run for its money. Andrew Truth had been producing Plane Truth since 1988 but issue 15 (circulation: 500) was to be his last. It had interviews with the usual unusual selection of bands, some fondly remembered and some largely forgotten.
Lurking at the back of the fanzine was an encounter with Jeff Buckley, son of Tim and on the way to becoming a legend in his own right. Andrew had conducted the interview on 3 September 1994, before Buckley’s show at what was then The Hop & Grape (now part of Manchester Academy). Buckley had only just released Grace and started touring with a full band, which Andrew remembers him enthusing about. The album was yet to slow-burn its way into the hearts of millions. He had been recording a Mark Radcliffe session and playing Reading Festival and likened the part he played at the latter to being “a circus performer”. He was about to leave for the continent for further dates. His father’s reputation preceded him and for that reason, Andrew steered away from questions about family. They got on like a house on fire, Buckley rambling excitedly about his favourite music, playing live, his choice of cover versions, songwriting and immortality.
Buckley introduced himself by impulsively diving onto Andrew’s cafeteria table. He launched unprompted and with a distant air into part of one of his favourite interview topics, a solo LP by Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, as if transmitting thoughts from a superior galaxy and with a mischievous glint in his eyes. He dabbed sandalwood oil behind his ear while mimicking a cockney accent and singing jauntily: “‘Now we’ve made it, I’d like to do my orchestral piece called Gemini Suite about the signs of the zodiac.’ [Lord’s LP is] Great! It’s partly Bonanza, partly every horrible cliché. Like in Warner Brothers cartoons, Bugs Bunny music. It’s the funniest shit alive, all that 70s stuff. I can’t listen to it for long [though]. There’s a difference between indulgence and exploration.”
It had been Buckley’s questing approach in addition to his poetic soul and natural vocal talent that had drawn Andrew towards him at this early stage in his international career. Buckley settled into the interview, describing his nomadic upbringing as “a preparation and a curse, but everyone’s childhood is. It’s made it easier [for me to tour]. You’re the stranger constantly. People will find occasions where they’re readily accepted but other times, equally [the] weight of hostility comes towards you for no reason at all. I still attract the same things from childhood. People come to the shows and either run away screaming or really like it.”
Andrew expressed his contempt for middle-ground mediocrity in music. Buckley was more nuanced in his response, describing its fleeting effect: “Nothing [from the middle ground] comes to mind, that is ’cos I’ve forgotten it already. I’ve forgotten the effect and which art it was that gave me the effect. Either you remember Bob Dylan or you remember Michael Bolton.” Bolton was another Buckley interview hobby horse and appears to have been the bane of his life, and he was arguably a collective figure of hate for all alternative music fans at the time.
At the gig, Andrew described Buckley as bouncing about in a style that induced cries of “Kangaroo!”, his face dramatic and furrowed in anguish, seeming to curse injustices with disbelief. “People project tremendous amounts of personal low self-esteem and high self-esteem upon the stage, in equal parts sometimes. That’s the catharsis of going to a live show. If the performer is right, this is very co-dependent, but people go there to unload. There is this loud person who has come to a few of my gigs and her friends insist that she’s a very nice person but she can’t help but shout at me up on the stage. It’s something I just accept. It’s not like when Murphy’s Law played at The Plaza and four or five fights erupted within the space of 46 minutes. I don’t look out to see whether I’m connecting because it’s not up to me. I look out to see where the music should go. If the crowd is hot because their skin is hot due to the temperature, the set will be different. Or if it’s very cold outside and still, I’ll want to be the fireplace as best I can though sometimes I can’t accomplish it. I’m aware of the energy in the room. Moods and music fly about of their own will and they have no order and you can be either open or closed to them and that’s how the gig will go. Either from the stage or the audience, people open to emotions, movement, stories, feeling and dancing.”
Andrew asked Buckley about the unusually high number of cover versions on his first couple of releases. “It’s usually everything about [the song that attracts me], not just one thing. It’s different in the case of [Van Morrison’s] The Way Young Lovers Do. That came about because my friend Michael, who eventually joined the band, had a dream about me and him singing [it]. On a whim, I got it together and performed it one night. Then it became something else because the tempo I liked, the feel of it; the words and the song got into me. Any time I take a cover and wear it on my sleeve, it’s because it had something to do with my life and still marks a time in my life when I needed that song more than anything ever.”
Andrew expressed some shock at how good a rescue job Buckley had done with his Lilac Wine cover, as he previously disliked the Elkie Brooks version. Buckley said: “The version I’ve heard is Nina Simone’s. I’m not even sure who Elkie Brooks is. I don’t think it’s always a fair decision to have homogeneity for its own sake. I think that human beings contain many people… I do believe that there’s this one soul that lies directly through Edith Piaf and the Sex Pistols, I really know that exists: Joni Mitchell and John Cage; Billie Holiday and Bad Brains. An album in itself is a moment and the music may require for me to make an album that’s totally homogenised but not as a rule. It’s good to be varied because without knowing what sides there are to you, knowing your depths, you pretty much die. You never change and you stay in the same unbeatable format but, sooner or later, you become obsolete.”
Failure to evolve is to stymie yourself, suggested Andrew.
“That’s true. I’m not even that concerned with changing,” Jeff replied. “Just with discovery, because through discovering you may stay on one thing for a long time. Just evolving is important. Deliberately changing all the time is like making off with somebody who must change position in order to get into every [sexual] position and you never get anything started. ‘Would you please keep still, throw away the Kama Sutra and love my ass!’”
Buckley confessed to a couple of songs to which he would feel unable to add anything: “Parchment Farm Blues by Bukka White and Well I Wonder by The Smiths because I always end up doing it exactly like Morrissey does. The impetus for having covers was necessity. In the middle of a show taking people into a world that was completely my world, ‘boom’, right over there we’re into I Know It’s Over from The Queen Is Dead.”
In a segment of the interview which Andrew admits makes him a little queasy now, he picked up on Buckley’s Eternal Life and asked him if he desired immortality. Tim Buckley died young of a heroin overdose and his son was to tragically drown in 1997, only a few years after the Plane Truth interview.
“It is possible and it happens all the time, but just not in the way you want or expect it,” Buckley Jr said. “Beyond death, I know nothing but in human life… some people have a love for people around them that is so powerful and carries so many gifts with it that even when they die, people are still accomplishing things through this person’s love in them, because this person said, ‘I see you’re a writer. I see this postcard here and you’re killing me in this, you’re a great writer.’ And he’s saying, ‘I never thought about writing before. ‘But anyway, you’re a great writer and this is a great piece of work. I don’t even want to touch War And Peace, this is it,’ and, ‘boom’, he gets hit by a car and this person goes on to be a great writer or remembers that belief, against his own hope. It’s very strange, in that way, he’ll become immortal, he’ll always be remembered. He’ll be alive in people’s hearts, inside people.
“Then there’s books, records, movies, images. Here’s immortality in a nutshell: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. They’re all around you but they don’t exist. That’s immortality in my cynical world. That’s Tinsel Town immortality, which is bullshit. They’ve lost immortality because they’ve lost their appearance as mortals. They’re symbols, gods, tools and puppets for people. There’s a fine line between being a god and a puppet...The Bible is used as a puppet and it’s untouchable and sacred but people use it as a pair of roller-skates or joke toilet paper with a psalm on every sheet. Being mortal and rooted in the earth is a very excruciating joy and not a lot of people can take it. Sometimes they just want to be famous, with no substance underneath, no work, no reason. To be famous and known and loved. They think it’s being loved but it’s just being worshipped and idolised and that’s not even being understood. It’s not even in the ballpark. It’s better to have people around you who understand you and when you come up to people in the street and talk about bagels and talk about the game, to have that connection there, it’s very important to me.
“If I wanted to be famous, I’d assassinate the President. There’s no life in it. There’s nothing wrong with being famous for something you do well or uniquely like if I invented the cure for AIDS, I wouldn’t mind being very famous. It’d be a great achievement. Or if I wrote a song that everyone loved, I wouldn’t mind that. It wouldn’t mean everything. That wouldn’t be the object or I’d be a junkie for fame, ‘I wasn’t famous for my orange juice song. It’s a great song but nobody likes it! I must suck!’ I have to be attuned to that and must have an everlasting relationship with this particular thing that there’s a public and then there’s me. At any given time, I am the public and Evan Dando [Lemonheads] is him and I understand that exchange. It’s a very strange arena and lots of people get thrown to the lions. Lots of people come away victorious for a time but then they’re out of the arena, that’s the end of it.”
Andrew ended the interview by asking about whether Buckley regularly wrote songs based on dreams, as Mojo Pin had been. “Dreaming, both waking and asleep, [is] a reservoir of mine. The thing is, there’s no difference for me between dream states and living. They both carry truth to them. I can read them both. I feel things in my dreams and I feel all the things that human beings’ lives bring them, except sometimes there are purple monsters or a chocolate dog trying to wake you up, but it’s still all very valid to me and I read situations in waking hours just like I read them in my sleeping hours, my sleeping hour, my lack of sleep world.”
