#jeff apter

25 Years Of Grace: Christopher Dowd On His Friend Jeff Buckley

This outtake from the Grace photo session offers up Buckley in a playful mood, whilst also paying homage to Leonard Cohen, whose career Buckley was soon to revive thanks to his cover of “Hallelujah.”

  Twenty-five years ago today, Jeff Buckley released his debut/swan-song masterpiece, Grace. A forthcoming book entitled 25 Years Of Gracepays tribute to this beautiful album with a lush coffee table…

PART 1

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

BY JEFF APTER

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

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

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

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

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

was amazing.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

his space,’ she said. ‘That’s how he’d rein an audience in and take them where he wanted to go.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amongst the cuts Buckley attempted during those two sets was a pair of originals – ‘Eternal Life’ and ‘Unforgiven’ – plus the usual slew of covers, including ‘Strange Fruit’, Morrison’s ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’ and Dylan’s ‘Just Like A Woman’ and ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’. The latter pair

were revealing choices for a guy at the end of his first ‘real’ relationship; one a savage putdown, the other a heartbreaking post mortem of a dead romance.

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

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

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

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

Buckley also toyed with the faithful when he went into his usual ‘Nusrat is my Elvis’ spiel. Initially, the crowd thought it was another example of Buckley’s playfulness, but then he dropped into a near-flawless impression of the almost-impossible-to-impersonate Pakistani. (The piece was called ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai’, in case you needed to know, Buckley’s first introduction to Nusrat.) When he finally stopped wailing, several bewildering minutes later, you could almost hear the sound of  numerous jaws dropping to the floor. It was that powerful.  Columbia’s Leah Reid, who was looking on, knew that the Sin-E recording, when it finally reached the stores, was the ideal introduction to the label’s new signing – and it would also provide the breathing space Buckley needed to write and find the band that he was so desperately seeking. ‘We did get to capture the moment, but we also took the pressure off [his first studio recording],’ said Reid. ‘We were able to work more organically, more grassroots. It’s not like the radio promo department [was going] to get a song from the Sin-E record on the radio.’ Sony’s president Don Ienner, however, nixed Buckley’s plan to name the Sin-E EP Café Days, as a nod to a line from his beloved Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’. When a mock-up crossed Ienner’s desk, he put a large slash through the proposed title, and declared that it should henceforth be known as Live At Sin-E. Clearly Buckley’s creative control didn’t extend into marketing. (Incidentally, the round coffee mug stain on the Sin-E cover is real; it was scanned from a coaster saved by a Sony staffer who was at the show.)

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

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

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

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

PART 2

Buckley’s first move was to recruit bassist Mick Grondahl, whom he’d met briefly in March, after a show at Columbia University’s Post Crypt Café. Though born in Denmark, the 25-year-old Grondahl had grown up in New York, where he was raised by his divorced mother, who owned a cosmetics business. Although Grondahl was never so crass as to talk about wealth, there were suggestions that he came from a ‘monied’ family. And he wasn’t the most upbeat of characters; he was described to me as ‘gripey and complain-ey’ and ‘snobbish’. ‘Mick… was a little bit of a shit. He was a little too cool for everyone, he was more of a snob than the rest of them,’ said Mark Naficy, Buckley’s long-time soundman. (During our lengthy interview,it would be fair to describe Grondahl as polite yet detached.) Just like Mary Guibert, Grondahl’s mother was an avid music fan, and introduced her cherubic-faced son to what would now be called ‘world music’, which Grondahl described as ‘bazuki, flamenco, Middle Eastern music’. At the same time she would also play him Talking Heads’ groundbreaking LP Fear Of Music. ‘She had a very open ear to new stuff,’ he said.4 Grondahl started playing the drums at 12, and shifted to bass when he was 16. He’d met a lot of wannabe guitarists, so he figured that there had to be vacancies for reasonably skilled bassists. Influenced by such classy players as jazzman Stanley Clarke, it also didn’t take him long to figure out that ‘there is a whole range of things you can do with the instrument’. Almost immediately he was playing in high school bands, but most of them stayed in the garage. ‘We couldn’t get into bars, not even in New York,’ he said. While studying fine arts at college in Saratoga Springs, majoring in art history but also dabbling in sculpture (especially stone carving) and photography, Grondahl continued playing, mainly in a band that mixed funk and reggae standards with covers. Already he was showing the type of anything-goes musical spirit that would prove useful when backing Buckley. His attitude, even then, was: ‘Have fun with it, improvise, let’s see what happens.’ But music was still a hobby for Grondahl; it wasn’t until he returned to New York, after graduating, that he considered it as a possible career, answering some ‘bass player wanted’ ads in the Village Voice. But nothing gelled for him. ‘I would be in the band for a while,’ said the softly spoken Grondahl, ‘and if I wasn’t happy with it, I would immediately quit. I was kind of disenchanted.’

At the time he met Buckley, Grondahl was in another dead-end band named Glories, who shared rehearsal space with Daniel Harnett’s group Glim, who were also on the Columbia University bill with Buckley. Grondahl tagged along, primarily to see his friend’s band play. He watched Buckley’s set for around an hour, more out of curiosity than anything else. ‘I knew nothing about him,’ Grondahl told me in 2007. He didn’t link Buckley to his famous father until they met again, soon after, at a party. But even Tim Buckley didn’t register that strongly with Grondahl. ‘I knew him a little bit from sightings in the record bins and stuff,’ he said off-handedly. And Tim Buckley certainly wasn’t a point of discussion between him and Jeff at the party. Grondahl recalled how they chatted about ‘Howling Wolf or something’.

In July, Grondahl spotted Buckley’s name in the Village Voice; he was playing a solo set at Fez as part of the New Music Seminar. Although he didn’t have any cash, Grondahl dropped by the venue, with his friend Cynthia in tow. His luck was in: Buckley saw Grondahl and snuck him into the gig. ‘Jeff just popped out of nowhere,’ he recalled, ‘recognized me and we exchanged numbers.’ This time around, Grondahl was far more impressed by Buckley’s one-man-and-a-Fender approach. ‘He’d improved enormously in that time; he’d made huge advances. It was better than the first show; I was knocked out.’ In 2007, when asked what was his most vivid memory of Buckley, Grondahl cited this Fez set. ‘He walked out with such determination,’ said Grondahl, ‘and got to the mic and started pounding his feet and doing this rhythm, while singing “Johnny Lee”. And he kept pounding his feet and singing. There was nobody talking; nothing. It was just so powerful.’

Grondahl made the next move, calling Buckley a few weeks later and suggesting a jam. (In 1995, Buckley admitted that Grondahl was ‘so honest, frank and sincere that I knew I’d have to call him back’.5 They got together very late in Buckley’s apartment for what turned out to be the most inspired jamming of Grondahl’s career. ‘It was magical,’ he told me. ‘I really felt, without sounding too airy-fairy, that there were angels present in the apartment while we were playing.’ What amazed Grondahl was the fact that they barely knew each other yet ‘there was this strong connection that I’d never felt with anyone else. It just seemed like a dream, mythic.’ The pair recorded their noodling, on a new Mini Disc recorder that Buckley had scammed from Sony. Known in Buckley folklore as ‘The Angel Tape’, Grondahl still has a copy, even thought it’s barely audible. (Buckley was wary of the neighbors, it being the middle of the night and all.) ‘It ended up on really low volume on the tape,’ recalled Grondahl, ‘and I still wonder whether it did really happen at all, without sounding too strange or obscure. It just had this huge impression on me.’

Speaking in June 1994, Buckley was just as enthused, describing their jam as ‘two-o’clock-in-the-morning-type-music’. ‘He had all the qualities I dug,’ said Buckley. ‘There are bass players all over the city that can play rings around him in terms of technique, but nobody else could ever make the music he makes. And that’s more powerful.’6 According to Grondahl, Buckley admired his ability to keep things ‘low key’. ‘He said he’d experienced a lot of busy bass players and he liked the fact that I was more simple, more methodical in constructing bass figures. When I started out with Jeff I felt that he needed to stay “in front”, there was already so much in his voice and guitar. I tried to stay out as much as possible, but when I did come in, I felt that it was mostly to support him. Once that was established I could meander a bit and explore the tonal range.’

The hiring of Grondahl typified Buckley’s attitude towards his band. While he could have easily hired road-hardened ‘cats’, who could match him note-for-note, he seemed intent on finding players that he could connect with personally and musically – and, although he didn’t say it out loud, he was probably also looking for musos that would give him the necessary room on-stage to let him work his magic. These guys weren’t likely to compete with Buckley; they were there to support him, not challenge him. Gary Lucas considered them to be some ‘hand-picked band of young acolytes’. Leah Reid, for one, could see that these guys weren’t quite on Buckley’s level as players. ‘Mick wasn’t the greatest songwriter or musician and he felt that maybe he would never get this chance again. Michael [Tighe] would never become a road-weary session guy, and Matt [Johnson] wasn’t the best drummer. But it

worked.’ And it must have pleased his label enormously that the group of 20-somethings he hired all possessed brooding good looks, making them an easier, if not necessarily easy, sell.

Grondahl may have been turned on by the chance to play alongside Buckley, but when he was hired, and then told that he had all of six weeks to get in shape for the Grace recording sessions at Woodstock, he started to doubt himself. On two separate occasions he said to Buckley, ‘I don’t know if I can do this, you may need to get someone better.’ Buckley paused, and in a gesture that dispelled all of Grondahl’s fears, looked him straight in the eyes and stated: ‘No, you’re the man.’ ‘He could tell I was down for the ride,’ said Grondahl, ‘and that’s what he was looking for in musicians.’

Grondahl, however, remains unsure whether Buckley’s choice as drummer, Matt Johnson – the first tub-thumper to audition, incidentally – was totally ‘down for the ride’. Described by Leah Reid as ‘ warm and kind and generous, [with] this great smile,’ Johnson was a Hollywood-handsome 22-year-old Texan, who’d been living in New York for only four years, playing in a band called the Choosy Mothers and also drumming for singer Dorothy Scott, who’d helped Buckley score his Sin-E residency. A friend of Rebecca Moore had recommended him to Buckley. After finding a message on his answering machine from ‘a raspy-voiced Jeff Buckley’, as he recalled in The Making Of Grace EPK, Johnson first met with Grondahl and Buckley in Context, a New York rehearsal space.

Though not as ‘magical’ as the ‘angel jam’ between Buckley and Grondahl, there were sparks, nonetheless: the framework of the track ‘Dream Brother’ came to them within the first couple of hours of playing. (Buckley had a knack for writing songs during first meetings: he’d also done this with Gary Lucas and later on with Michael Tighe.) It began when Buckley turned to Grondahl and asked: ‘Do you have any grooves?’ The bassist started to play something he’d actually discarded from a previous jam, and Johnson settled into what Grondahl described as ‘this really nice cymbal and snare and bass drum kind of figure’7 Buckley then began to play a ‘snakelike pattern’. Grondahl, for one, wasn’t sure that the song was flying – his initial reaction was ‘Oh God, this form sounds really bad’, partly because he was using a ‘crappy’ amp and was also having trouble muting his strings – but they continued, and the jam, in Grondahl’s words, ‘started to take off more and more’. Straight away, Buckley knew he’d found his guy; as the instrumental wound down he told Johnson he should join the band. ‘I asked Matt what he was doing the next few months,’ Buckley said in The Making Of Grace, ‘and he said nothing was going on, which wasn’t quite true. Maybe nothing special, but he had this whole life that I was upsetting. So was Mick. Things were happening fast and I kind of ruined their lives and made a new one.’

The Grifters’ Dave Shouse, soon to become a Buckley insider, recalled hearing a story from Johnson about that jam. ‘[Johnson] said that the first time all three of them played, Jeff didn’t play any songs or sing, he just did these weird guitar pattern things, because he wanted to make sure that he took a person’s safety net out of play,’ he said. ‘Sometimes being a really good musician doesn’t always cut it. Jeff wasn’t sure who he was playing with and kind of said, “Let’s all be green at once.” Intuition, that’s what he was looking for.’

A few days after that night at Context, Leah Reid collected Buckley to drive him to a gig in Philadelphia. ‘He had a mini disc,’ she said, ‘and he told me, “I jammed with Matt Johnson.” And in my head I was thinking, “The guy from The The?” I didn’t want to not be cool, but I just couldn’t understand why he’d be playing the drums with Jeff.’ This just went to show that while Johnson may have been a drummer of repute in certain dark corners of New York, he was no Keith Moon.

Yet almost immediately, Grondahl, at least, sensed that Johnson’s attitude towards the band differed to his. ‘Part of the situation with Matt Johnson,’ he said to me, ‘was that he wasn’t necessarily down for the ride in the long term. He was more focused on doing this for a while and then moving onto another thing.’ (In hindsight, Grondahl was spot on: Johnson has since played with Rufus Wainwright, Joan Wasser, Beth Orton and many others andis now one of the most in-demand timekeepers in modern rock.) Grondahl’s attitude towards Buckley was different. ‘We wanted to be like The Beatles and continue on and on,’ he said. ‘So that was an issue.’

Grondahl, however, stressed that Johnson was ‘super talented’ and ‘easy to work with musically’. And even though they came from very different places on the map – Europe and New York in Grondahl’s case, ‘trailer trash’ California with Buckley, and Texas and Ohio, in the case of Johnson – they ‘shared the same sense of humour,’ according to Grondahl. ‘There were some differences, but we related really well, laughed a lot and felt good about each other’s playing.’ He emphasised that the ‘deeper part’ of their connection happened through music, not some craving for chicks and dope, like so many bands (although Grondahl would have trouble with the latter in the near future). ‘[Music] was the thing that stitched us together,’ he said.

One thing that Johnson did share with Grondahl, at least at the start of their Grace odyssey, was a sense of panic: the trio was now only weeks away from heading to Bearsville studio in Woodstock and starting work on Buckley’s ‘proper’ debut. ‘It was very, very quick, very shocking,’ he said in The Making Of Grace, ‘to go from meeting someone to playing with them and then recording a few weeks later. It was really scary.’ If anything, Columbia’s Berkowitz was relieved when Johnson was hired. ‘[Until then] I was concerned a lot as to where he would find a drummer that could hang with him,’ he confessed.9 Mike Webb, Berkowitz’s assistant, gives due credit to his boss for allowing Buckley to hire such a bunch of greenhorns. ‘Within himself he knew Jeff could choose better guys but within his heart he wanted Jeff to make the album he wanted to make.’

Grondahl once described their six weeks shut away in New York’s Context Studio as a ‘kamikaze mission’, but he tones that down today. ‘I think what I meant by that was that it was too strong; we were just very full-on, we lived and breathed that music for six weeks. [But] it was exciting to work with him. We were all constantly discovering new things and new approaches, new ways to attack the songs, and that kept us going.’ Producer Andy Wallace dropped by Context two or three times a week. ‘We’d be blasting away, jamming, and he’d be taking notes,’ Grondahl recalled. At one stage, Wallace turned to Buckley and asked: ‘Is this song meant to be 15 minutes long?’ Buckley smiled and replied: ‘Well, could be, right?’ Wallace admitted that it very well could be the case, but he didn’t hear the structure. Not yet, anyway. ‘It was clear after talking with Jeff about it that they were just jamming. He was, at the same time, I think, really trying to grab things that worked arrangement-wise.’10 Wallace was too polite – or possibly too scared of the possible response – to ask the key question: ‘Where are the songs?’

Within a few months, Jeff Buckley’s career had shifted from cruise control to hyper-speed: he’d gone from a Monday night residency at Sin-E hanging with Tree Man to near boiling point. He barely had times to shake hands with Grondahl and Johnson before they were to be shut away in one of the most renowned (and expensive) studios in the USA. And it’s worth bearing in mind that Johnson and Grondahl were as ‘green’ as Buckley when it came to working in a major studio like Bearsville. ‘We weren’t seasoned professionals,’ said Grondahl. ‘I’d had some experience, but more home-made studios and what not, not 24-track studios.’ Established in 1969 by the imposing figure of Albert

Grossman, Bob Dylan’s first manager, Bearsville studio had been instrumental (pun intended) in the creation of such albums as R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People and Green, The Band’s Cahoots and Get Close from The Pretenders. It wasn’t the kind of space that was used by novices. It was a massive risk on the part of Columbia: there was every chance they’d be kissing several hundred thousand dollars goodbye, and if it fell apart it could have spelled the end of very brief musical careers for Buckley, Grondahl and Johnson. And Buckley certainly didn’t have an album’s worth of new material ready for recording; he was incredibly fortunate that the nucleus for ‘Dream Brother’ emerged from his

first jam with Johnson.

Nonetheless, Buckley’s stock was very much on the rise within the corridors of ‘Black Rock’. Leah Reid witnessed that first hand during one of Buckley’s regular visits to her office. It was her birthday, and a cake had been organised. ‘He came and got me from my office – and everyone swarmed all over him. It was like, “ooh, that’s weird”.’ The key-jangling guy who until recently had been studiously ignored by staffers was suddenly a very hot property. According to Mike Webb, ‘The women at Columbia were all giddy about the guy.’ It was like Sin-E all over again.

Late September 1993 wasn’t too bad a time to be alive. Execs at Columbia, for one, were chuffed; no less than three of their hit-makers – Billy Joel, Mariah Carey and scruffy rockers Soul Asylum – were riding high in the US Top 20 with ‘River Of Dreams’, ‘Dreamlover’ and ‘Runaway Train’, respectively. And the scrawny 26-year-old who could well be their next superstar was unpacking his bags and taking the country air in Woodstock, a rural retreat with a weighty musical history. Bob Dylan, who had broken his neck there, had made some of his finest music with The Band at Big Pink, their Woodstock HQ (as heard on the legendary Basement Tapes). There was also the music festival at nearby Bethel in 1969, ‘three days of peace and love and joy’, as the heady, epic Woodstock rockumentary informed those who weren’t amongst the half-million or so mud-caked hippies who witnessed career-defining sets by Joe Cocker, Santana, Country Joe McDonald, The Who and many others.

But the area’s musical past wasn’t necessarily the reason that Bearsville Studio was chosen for the Grace sessions, at least not in the case of Buckley. ‘Somebody Jeff ‘s age and temperament,’ producer Andy Wallace told me with a very significant pause, when we spoke in 2002, ‘well, there was bound to be plenty of distractions in the city.’ (Buckley backed this up in The Making Of Grace. ‘I’m an easily distracted person,’ he admitted, as Ernie Fritz’s camera tried to keep up as he wandered along some rustic Woodstock back road. ‘So this is great.’) Wallace, who’d worked at Bearsville with R.E.M., also had more traditional reasons for choosing Bearsville. ‘There’s a real music history there,’ Wallace said. ‘And the main building is huge; it has two studios and a residential apartment. Studio A has a huge live room – airplane-hangar huge. It’s a beautiful sounding room.’ Buckley summed it up neatly when he sat down, looked around him, uttered a few words to test Studio A’s acoustics and said, simply: ‘This room is awesome.’

Producer Steve Addabbo, who’d recorded a solo Buckley in New York, wasn’t entirely sure that Bearsville was the right choice. ‘It’s a very big studio and it can be very impersonal, the room is about 40 by 80 with this huge ceiling. Very cavernous. It’s on a grand scale and to go up there for your first record… The thing that is great is that you’re living there all together. I love that atmosphere, that woodshedding, an isolated, concentrated environment.’

For the band, Bearsville and Woodstock, despite its distance from New York, was actually a relief after the intense sessions at Context. This type of cabin fever was far preferable. ‘It was late September,’  said Grondahl, ‘and the leaves were changing, we were living together, getting to know each other, listening to The Cocteau Twins and whatever music we liked. And we were sharing time together, which we hadn’t the time to before, when we were really thrown together. It was good to have a change of scene,’ he added. ‘Going to Bearsville was fantastic.’

Buckley, Johnson and Grondahl would record with Wallace on weekdays, while at the weekends, the producer left Bearsville to see his family, so they’d either check out their surroundings or return to New York. ‘It was a really fun time,’ said Grondahl. ‘We were trekking around, seeing the deer walking along the creek. It was quite cosy, a welcome change. It was perfect for where we were at then: we could focus on the music but we were close enough to New York to resume our social life.’

The ever-savvy Wallace worked hard to create the right mood in the studio, so he arranged to have several distinctly different ‘set-ups’ available to Buckley at all times. ‘There was a loud, electric set-up,’ said Steve Berkowitz in The Making Of Grace, ‘an acoustic set-up and like a one-person folk club set-up. And everything was miked.’11 The concept was ideal: Buckley could either work out songs with the band and Wallace – most of the writing and arranging took place in Woodstock – or cool off by playing covers and curios, just as he had at Sin-E. And Buckley’s attitude was definitely anything goes: one morning Wallace clocked on for duty and Buckley was tearing a hole through ‘Hocus Pocus’, a chaotic collision of yodelling and soloing from Dutch prog-rockers Focus.

All up, Buckley recorded at least an album’s worth of covers while in Bearsville, including numerous stabs at Dylan’s ‘Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind’, ‘Just Like A Woman’ and ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’, along with takes on Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ (also in several different flavours), Led Zep’s ‘Night Flight’, the blues chestnuts ‘Parchman Farm Blues’ and ‘Dink’s Song’, plus his gravel-and-sand assault on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘Alligator Wine’, a rave-up that clearly gave Buckley the chance to blow off any built-up steam. Most of the covers were done in the morning, before Buckley attempted to nail vocal takes on the album’s ‘proper’ songs. ‘He’d do that more or less to warm up and get his voice started,’ said Grondahl. (Or, in the case of ‘Alligator Wine’, discover if it really was possible to cough up a lung while singing.) ‘He did a lot of covers,’ said Wallace, ‘and a couple of very funny things, [including] a take of an old Delta blues that had us cracking up.’12 (It wasn’t all laughs in the studio, though; Wallace was nicknamed ‘The Fist’ for his habit of illustrating a point by thumping the console.)

A few weeks in, Leah Reid swung by Bearsville, with director Ernie Fritz and his film crew in tow. As she recalled, her luck was in: Buckley was attempting to cut definitive vocals for ‘Grace’ and ‘Hallelujah’. ‘It was a good day,’ she laughed. Buckley’s perfectionist streak was on full display; after swooning and crooning his way through a remarkable ‘Hallelujah’, he turned to the awestruck production crew, who were filming everything for the Sony EPK, shrugged and said: ‘It was OK.’ Reid laughed it off as typical Buckley. ‘These guys are blown away and he thought it was OK,’ she said. ‘It was an incredible opportunity to experience him doing that in the studio but at the same time, with the camera crew there, he felt the presence of “the machine”. He was very aware. There were uncomfortable moments for him, where he thought, “Oh, oh, it’s starting.” So it was a day of mixed blessings. He performed this magical song but then we’d be strapping a microphone on him so we could walk up this gravel road in Woodstock and do an interview.’

Another Bearsville drop-in was guitarist Gary Lucas. Buckley, in another demonstration of his almost over-powering sense of loyalty, invited his former bandmate to place his avant-garde stamp on ‘Grace’ and ‘Mojo Pin’, despite the messy falling out they’d had at the end of Gods And Monsters. (Admittedly, Lucas co-wrote both songs, so there was also some payback involved.) While Lucas was in the studio, Buckley began working on the vocals for the album’s title track. ‘He came out of the booth with this sheepish, little boy look, like “Did I do good?”‘ Lucas recalled. ‘He knew it was fucking great.’*

* King Buzzo, of psychedelic grunge band the Melvins, became an unlikely friend of Buckley’s when he dropped by the studio.

Karl Berger, an acclaimed Woodstock-based jazz composer, arranger, pianist and vibraphonist, also dropped by, adding sweeping string arrangements to several Grace tracks. Buckley was in awe of the 58-year-old peer and pal of jazzman Ornette Coleman, whose greying temples and glasses suggested a college professor rather than a jazz great. As Buckley declared, ‘It’s like having a regal visitation, having someone arrange for strings. He can do, you know, a chord progression with strings that makes [a song] completely different. It was a really great treat.’

The recording of ‘Mojo Pin’, which came about three weeks into the sessions, was a key moment for Buckley and the band: it finally seemed that, after a few hit-and-miss weeks, some sonic sparks had started to fly. But this discovery didn’t come to them in the studio; instead, it sunk in as they motored around Woodstock in a rented van, listening closely to a cassette (their preferred method of reviewing works-in-progress). ‘It was such a privilege,’ Grondahl said, ‘because you could drive around listening to it in such a precise, acute way. You could just hear it so much better – it was a really good gauge of what the song was doing, whether it needed anything more.’ Grondahl recalled how they felt that ‘Mojo Pin’ – which was cut in one take – ‘was the point when all of a sudden things turned into something more. Before that it was coming along, but now you could hear a certain potential for how other songs could be defined.’ Steve Berkowitz agreed. He was amazed how this song that stretched to almost five minutes felt anything but drawn out. It was almost Dylan-esque.

Speaking in Everybody Here Wants You, Berkowitz felt that this was really the leaping-off point for the making of Grace (although Grondahl felt that Berkowitz was exaggerating when I repeated the following statement to him). ‘This volcanic eruption of artistry came booming out of him, that was just wild,’ said Berkowitz, with the type of fervour usually reserved for political rallies. ‘It was hundreds of ideas, guitar parts, vocal parts, backwards parts, extra drum parts and tablas – baboom!’

Drummer Johnson didn’t share Berkowitz’s unbridled enthusiasm, as he admitted in the same documentary. ‘As I was playing I was thinking, this is so over-the-top, this has got to be sucking. Then I’d listen back and think, this is kind of garish, that voice going up really high like that at the end, dragging along with this outro, with these descending chords and this high vibrato on the voice. Then I went, no, this is really great.’16 ‘Mojo Pin’ may have been a major moment for Grondahl, but Johnson felt that ‘Dream Brother’, even in its vocal-less, lyric-less form, was his personal turning point. ‘I thought it’d never make the record,’ he confessed. ‘It was this droney, Eastern thing, like a backing music for a mantra or some big Led Zeppelin thing. When he came up with that melody, I heard it over the headphones and I thought it was amazing, so beautiful. I never would have thought of that melody in a million years.’

Five weeks in, though, as the Grace sessions drew to a close, something unspoken lingered in the air at Woodstock: Buckley simply didn’t have sufficient material to fill an album; certainly not enough originals, anyway. (By this stage they’d recorded ‘Mojo Pin’, ‘Grace’, ‘Last Goodbye’, ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’, ‘Eternal Life’ and ‘Forget Her’, which failed to make the final cut.) As Johnson reflected, ‘We didn’t have enough songs to make a, you know, “Jeff Buckley wrote every song kind of record”. At least he didn’t have enough songs that he liked. He might have had them but he didn’t pull them out.’

Buckley’s stump-speech, when the album was finally done, was that he decided to include the numerous covers – ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ and ‘Lilac Wine’ – in a concerted attempt to ‘link this album to my past’. While there’s little doubt that Columbia always intended for some Sin-E era songs to make the record, the reality was more likely that Buckley was either reluctant to unveil any new songs he had – or possibly he had nothing left, just as Johnson suggested. The mixture of his stifling creative inertia, and relentless perfectionism, which would really come into full view a couple of years later when attempting a follow-up to Grace, was obviously a problem for Buckley as early as 1993. Lee Underwood believed that Jeff suffered a sort of ‘neurotic inner division’ when he wrote; in short, he feared being compared to his father. Underwood wrote about this in private notes for his book Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered. ‘It seems to me that if Jeff paid his respects to Tim and did it honestly, opened his arms to Tim, embraced Tim with love and acceptance and appreciation, that he would heal this terrible wound that is dividing him and setting him at war – not against Tim – but against himself. If he does acknowledge his biological and musical influences, he reunites himself with his father, stops alienating everyone who liked Tim, and, most importantly, frees himself from this rather sad, self-destructive, neurotic inner division.’19 (Underwood, nonetheless, remains a huge admirer of Buckley’s work, praising his voice, ‘his intensity’ and his ‘improvisational courage’. ‘He’s not getting all this recognition for nothing,’ he wrote while Buckley was still alive. ‘He’s a first-rate contemporary artist and deserves every ounce of respect and appreciation he receives from audiences and the press.’)

The closest that Buckley ever came to addressing this turmoil was when he referred to the overall album as ‘an elegy, sort of a child’s coffin… full of past ghosts, exorcised in song’.20-22 Certainly none of his bandmates were bold – or tacky – enough to ask about the impact, positive or otherwise, his father had on his work. ‘I had the suspicion that to talk about that would have been bad taste,’ Grondahl figured. ‘I wouldn’t feel inclined to go up to Ziggy Marley and go, “Rastaman Vibration is the greatest album”.’ A few years later, though, Buckley did sit down with Grondahl and talk through his ‘father issues’. ‘He forgave his father and didn’t want to hold this anger, this weight, against him,’ Grondahl told me. ‘He was very sincere about that.’ Grondahl wasn’t so sure that Buckley had resolved his concerns with his mother, however. ‘I feel like he still had some difficulty with her, right up until he passed away.’

Though still a song or two shy of a completed album, the Bearsville sessions had been rewarding enough for Buckley and his new band, as they packed away their gear in late October and returned to the city. Wallace had added the necessary brawn and brain to Buckley’s originals, especially the emphatic ‘Eternal Life’, at the same time keeping most of his covers in a relatively pristine state. Meanwhile, back at Black Rock, Sony boss Don Ienner was impressed by the rough mixes being sent down from Woodstock. ‘He was always supportive of Jeff,’ said Leah Reid, ‘but that’s when he sensed there was a commercial potential. It was a genius move to get Andy Wallace for that record. So it was at that point that Donny got vocal. It was one of those things that people sensed; he’d mention Jeff ‘s name in a meeting and you’d go, “That’s who he likes.” Once Donny was in, everyone wanted a piece of it.’

Not everyone at Columbia HQ shared this opinion, though. Mike Webb, who’d listen to the rough mixes with Berkowitz, could see what Wallace was doing with Buckley’s songs: he was giving them a radio-friendly sheen. The first thing he and Berkowitz heard were rough tapes of Buckley playing solo, followed by basic band recordings, ‘and that was great stuff. Then we heard the Andy Wallace mixes and we went… hmmm. He clogged the sound right into the middle [of the mix], for radio. What I heard before was much bigger and better than what Andy did.’ He cited the removal of a guitar part from ‘Eternal Life’ as one example of Wallace’s sonic intervention. ‘Andy should not have done what he did,’ Webb said. (He nominated Daniel Lanois or Hal Willner as producers who might have done a better job. ‘Jeff needed someone very creative, someone who could make sure the tape was rolling and then encourage him: “Go for it! Go for it!” ‘)

Prolific rock writer Jeff Apter has recently published the first biography to focus exclusively on Angus Young. If you dig AC/DC and are a fan of Australian rock, ‘High Voltage’ is an essential book to add to your rock n roll library. Jeff joins us on episode 84 of The Australian Rock Show to talk about the book, the recent passing of Malcolm and George Young, AC/DC and a whole lot more. Tune in…