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

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Speaker 1: 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 falls of facts, your major lifts of learning, your cold and broken hallelujahs of hilarity.

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Speaker 2: But we'll let you.

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Speaker 1: Choose which one is which.

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

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:02:04
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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, 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.

00:03:50
Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 it's really I don't know. I mean that's my hyperbolic take on him.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

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Speaker 2: About this type of stuff.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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 he's a new book out, a great oral history on the Greenwich.

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Speaker 2: Village, which is due out soon, as everybody checked that out.

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Speaker 1: 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 referencing some of the diary entries and notebook entries and stuff a little while ago.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:11:34
Speaker 1: That was how they identified the body. I guess it was several days until.

00:11:42
Speaker 2: Several days in the water. Too much information, That's one of them.

00:11:50
Speaker 1: 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 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, This one makes me sad.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 vett and his character walks into the ocean to die. Spoilers.

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: It was a river.

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Speaker 1: 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 come of that.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:15:41
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:16:29
Speaker 1: 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.

00:16:34
Speaker 2: But no, he might have known Gwen Stefani's older brother.

00:16:38
Speaker 1: Another tragic, unfulfilled talent of Yeah, what did they do to the kids in Anaheim in the seventies.

00:16:48
Speaker 2: That's a real two roads diverge. In a wood moment.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: Wow, I'm just picturing young Jeff Buckley and young Gwen Stefani in the shadow of the matterhorn.

00:16:56
Speaker 2: 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.

00:17:15
Speaker 1: How does anyone like I need to google this now?

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

00:17:27
Speaker 1: 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. We went to visit him and he was working in his room, so I didn't even get to talk to him.

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Speaker 2: And that was it.

00:17:53
Speaker 1: 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.

00:18:08
Speaker 2: Into the future for us both awful awful, yes.

00:18:14
Speaker 1: 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. 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.

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Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: 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.

00:19:47
Speaker 2: 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.

00:19:57
Speaker 1: 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.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: 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?

00:20:21
Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: 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. 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.

00:21:34
Speaker 2: With his dad.

00:21:35
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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.

00:22:40
Speaker 2: Who the Frights their diary at twenty nine? You know?

00:22:45
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 died an inspired Temple of the Dog. They had so many terrible band names back then, was that Mother Love Bone?

00:24:32
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:24:33
Speaker 2: 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.

00:24:52
Speaker 1: It's got to suck to watch a subpar movie biopic being made of your life.

00:24:55
Speaker 2: That's also true. Yeah, was it Franco got play him? I don't remember that, but why not? Yeah?

00:25:02
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.

00:25:43
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: 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 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 Nino Rota, famous for the Godfather theme and Fellini films.

00:27:37
Speaker 1: Stormy Weather, the music of Harold Arlen Wow.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:28:12
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 to his wife and the infant son that he.

00:29:18
Speaker 2: Was leaving behind.

00:29:20
Speaker 1: 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 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. It was like the second coming.

00:30:47
Speaker 2: 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.

00:30:58
Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 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?

00:32:14
Speaker 2: Forout the days when we're smile? And how is that when word and the magic of a and the silence surp sometimes sun, Oh, do you ever remember me?

00:33:19
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

00:34:15
Speaker 2: Back when you could do it. Yeah.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:36
Speaker 2: 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.

00:35:09
Speaker 1: 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.

00:35:22
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: 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 it sound like I have it in for Gary Lucas.

00:36:50
Speaker 2: I don't.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: 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. 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.

00:37:32
Speaker 2: For the performers. That's cute. I like that. That's a good meet cute.

00:37:37
Speaker 1: 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?

00:37:46
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:00
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:14
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:30
Speaker 1: On Orror Horror.

00:38:32
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:43
Speaker 1: I mean, like the Great Man once said, if you'd like that sometimes fair, can I say that?

00:38:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can say that. Okay, yeah, it do be like that. So yes.

00:38:55
Speaker 1: 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 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 so slow. And I had somebody who loved me in New York a lot, and it was amazing, poignant.

00:39:47
Speaker 2: Ouch, yeah that hurt.

00:39:51
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:40:25
Speaker 2: 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.

00:40:41
Speaker 1: 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.

00:40:51
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: Friend Sarah friend Sarah's who was a listener of Tamas.

00:41:39
Speaker 2: 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 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 he just kind of how offensive of an Irish accent? Do you think I should do? Oh, I'll go for it.

00:42:27
Speaker 1: We've already butchered the language.

00:42:28
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:49
Speaker 1: So maybe the tape wasn't that great.

00:42:51
Speaker 2: 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 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 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, 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.

00:44:06
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, like a short list of people who have four octaves, right, yeah, three is pushing it.

00:44:12
Speaker 2: 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 your falsetto range or your belt range, there's like you sacrifice control for some of those notes.

00:44:38
Speaker 1: 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.

00:44:52
Speaker 2: 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.

00:45:11
Speaker 1: 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.

00:45:30
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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?

00:49:48
Speaker 1: 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 the guy and he recently appeared on an episode of the Paul and Katok show Our Way that I Produce.

00:50:16
Speaker 2: He was last week's guest.

00:50:18
Speaker 1: 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?

00:50:27
Speaker 2: 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.

00:50:37
Speaker 1: And Don Einer he was I think he was the president of Sony. I believe these big old, all heavy dudes.

00:50:43
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:51:48
Speaker 1: That's what they use on Lover. He should have come over too, right? Is that the first sign You're here?

00:51:52
Speaker 2: 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.

00:52:04
Speaker 1: 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, bass drums, dulcimer two, but anything anyway that the band would work out.

00:52:33
Speaker 2: I love it. I love the enthusiasm.

00:52:36
Speaker 1: 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, and Jeff did everything he could to keep them at arm's length. This didn't really go well.

00:53:01
Speaker 2: One thing execs don't like, yeah.

00:53:03
Speaker 1: 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 at Columbia University that summer. Just leave that one there as one does.

00:53:29
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:53:30
Speaker 1: 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.

00:53:48
Speaker 2: I think it's how you say.

00:53:49
Speaker 1: 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 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, who would oversee the Gray sessions.

00:54:37
Speaker 2: Was also scared.

00:54:38
Speaker 1: 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 doing Bearsville's Studios, ninety miles.

00:55:03
Speaker 2: North of Manhattan in the.

00:55:05
Speaker 1: 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 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 parts and backwards parts and extra drum parts.

00:55:51
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:56:30
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:57:18
Speaker 2: The Michael Bolton incident.

00:57:19
Speaker 1: Were you familiar with the Michael Bolton incident?

00:57:21
Speaker 2: Not before reading this, but totally understandable. Yes.

00:57:25
Speaker 1: 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 emotion and technique, eventually relying on sheer voice of will over singing and flaking out. How do you feel about.

00:57:56
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:58:27
Speaker 1: Voice both former metal guys.

00:58:29
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, but no, that's a stupid, facile comparison, and I want to find out who did it and yell at them.

00:58:36
Speaker 1: 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 that for reasons of diplomacy.

00:58:59
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:59:46
Speaker 1: 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 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 his word it's not mine but also mine, and also heigels.

01:00:31
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:00:59
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

01:01:55
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

01:05:18
Speaker 1: 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.

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

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

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

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

01:05:44
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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.

01:07:01
Speaker 1: 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.

01:07:18
Speaker 2: 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 he died, but contemporaneously. For someone to listen to that and be like mid.

01:07:46
Speaker 1: 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, 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.

01:08:19
Speaker 2: 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.

01:08:27
Speaker 1: 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.

01:08:39
Speaker 2: 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 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.

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

01:09:21
Speaker 2: 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 think too many people sing.

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

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

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

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

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

01:10:14
Speaker 2: 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. Sandler's version contained numerous references to Hurricane Sandy and contemporary events in local culture, sports, and politics.

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

01:10:48
Speaker 2: 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?

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

01:11:04
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:11:30
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 seals at you and throw millions at you.

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

01:12:42
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

01:13:17
Speaker 2: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

01:13:49
Speaker 2: Is it?

01:13:49
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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, 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.

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

01:15:31
Speaker 1: 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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.

01:17:29
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:17:46
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:18:11
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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.

01:19:37
Speaker 2: You know.

01:19:38
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

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

01:20:51
Speaker 1: 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 think he envied that freedom he had in the beginning at Hine, when he wasn't being judged by the specific point of view.

01:21:18
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:21:30
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:21:58
Speaker 1: Uh.

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

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

01:22:11
Speaker 2: 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.

01:22:30
Speaker 1: 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.

01:22:42
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:23:04
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:23:24
Speaker 1: 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.

01:23:33
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:23:44
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:24:03
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

01:24:33
Speaker 2: 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.

01:24:44
Speaker 1: 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.

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

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

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

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

01:25:15
Speaker 2: 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.

01:25:32
Speaker 1: Um.

01:25:34
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

01:27:31
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:27:47
Speaker 1: 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 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?

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

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

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

01:28:36
Speaker 1: 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.

01:28:57
Speaker 2: 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.

01:29:08
Speaker 1: 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 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, the one time medalhead who grew up worshiping led Zeppelin, the most meaningful praise came from Jimmy Page himself.

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

01:30:00
Speaker 1: 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.

01:30:14
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:30:52
Speaker 1: 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. 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. 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. 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.

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

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

01:32:29
Speaker 2: 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.

01:32:39
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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

01:33:21
Speaker 1: 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?

01:33:29
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

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

01:34:01
Speaker 1: 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 iHeartRadio Apple Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.