Dream Brother (Book)
The autopsy report of Jeff's emotional life
Memphis lore had it that at least one person a year drowned in the Wolf, and events continued to bear out that horrific statistic. In 1995, an eleven-year-old boy who had jumped into the water to untangle a fishing line had been pulled under, turning up dead two hundred yards away; a year later, a man sitting on the riverbank had taken off his shoes and jumped in, presumably to crash the H.O.R.D.E. hippie-rock festival taking place in full view of him at the Mud Island amphitheater. His body washed up three days later. Everyone knew why he thought he could make it: The distance from the downtown side of the Wolf to Mud Island was less than one hundred feet and appeared to be easily swimmable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Brother:_The_Lives_and_Music_of_Jeff_and_Tim_Buckley
“Born, wrote, sang, changed, changed, grew, grew, grew, ignored, rejected, revolution over evolution, gotta move, don’t have much time, critics, rejected, dead…revered. You fucks.”
“I’ve tried to really believe it, that he really loved me,” he wrote to an inquisitive fan of Tim’s that summer. “I question that. He longed to see me, I believe that. He regretted not seeing me, yes. But he was too afraid for a very long time, ‘just a young kid going down his own road,’ right, I understand, but I don’t get it. It seems so overromanticized, all of the accounts of his actions… How does a baby keep you from making records?… I don’t know—he just didn’t want to be stuck with Mary, so typical, no frills, no big deal, I totally understand. But, love me? I don’t know what that means.”
Indeed, Jeff threw himself into hardcore punk and reggae bands, and through his Harlem roommate, he discovered qawwali, the devotional music of India and Pakistan. In particular, he became obsessed with its greatest proponent, a serene fortysomething Buddah named Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Built around group chants with interweaving, trancelike voices, the accompanying rhythms tapped out by tablas and harmoniums, qawwali was unlike anything Jeff had experienced. Both secular and overtly religious, it was music as mystical, elevating experience, designed to lift both qawwal and listener into what one critic called “mystical love, even divine ecstasy—the central experience of Sufism,” a mystical movement within Islam. As Jeff wrote in his liner notes to a later Nusrat compilation, “My roommate and I stood there, blasting it in his room.… [Nusrat’s] every enunciation went straight into me.… I remember my senses fully froze in order to feel melody after melody crash upon each other in waves of improvisation.… I felt a rush of adrenaline in my chest, like I was on the edge of a cliff, wondering when I would jump and how well the ocean would catch me.” The concept of total immersion in melody, wordless chant, and improvisation resonated profoundly within Jeff. It validated the concept of music as everything, a pure, ululating form of expression unconnected to anything crass or trendy.
Unforgiven (Last Goodbye)
In September, he returned to the city he had grown to loathe. Having given up his apartment, he crashed at the Hollywood apartment of his friends (and former band mates) Kathryn Grimm and Mark Frere. When he wasn’t sleeping on the tattered beige couch in their living room, he was using it as a workstation to prepare for his recording debut. He put the finishing touches on “Eternal Life,” a scorched-earth raver he had begun writing in New York. He would later say the song was inspired by thoughts “about having a kid;”; Michael Clouse, though, recalls Jeff saying it was about Tim:
Eternal life is now on my trail Got my red glitter coffin man, just need one last nail… And as your fantasies are broken in two Did you really think this bloody road would pave the way for you? You better turn around and blow your kiss hello to life eternal
On the couch, Jeff also wrote a new song, “Unforgiven,” a forlorn farewell to a lover that, according to sources, was at least partly inspired by a relationship he had had in Los Angeles with an older German woman, possibly a nurse.
He was, by then, deep into British pop—not surprisingly, the sulkiest and most sensitive of it, bands like the Cocteau Twins, the Smiths, and the Cure.
Jeff referred to Underwood’s talk as “the mantra,” and added, “I just can’t be a disciple to my own father.” He said more when he reunited with Dan Gordon, Tim’s pal from junior high. Seeing Jeff show up at his West LA office was, Gordon recalls, “like seeing Tim walking through the door.” Gordon, by then a successful screenwriter, found his own head reeling. “His posture was the same,” he recalls of Jeff. “He would sit in the same positions Tim would sit in—a slouch with elegance, like a yoga move. The hand gestures when he spoke were the same. He carried himself like Tim did. I told him that, and he didn’t like hearing it.” For the better part of a day, Jeff grilled Gordon about his father’s life. He asked basic biographical questions and why Tim had never called nor visited. Gordon didn’t know what to say other than to agree that Tim had been self-centered and that his actions were unforgivable. They talked about Jeff’s bitterness, and to placate it, Gordon suggested Jeff delve into Tim’s recordings as a way of communing with his father. “Yeah,” Jeff shot back, “maybe we’ll be together in the [record store] bins.” Jeff was also annoyed when he heard he and his father shared a love of French chanteuse Edith Piaf, whom Jeff had discovered while watching public television at age thirteen.
St. Ann's Church debut 1991
Suddenly, before the last chorus, a string broke on his acoustic guitar, and Jeff sang the lines “Sometimes, I wonder for a while/Do you ever remember me?” unaccompanied. If that weren’t dramatic enough, his voice spiraled up on the last word—“me”—like a thin plume of smoke, holding on for a moment before drifting up to the ceiling. He took a quick bow, said “thanks,” and trotted offstage, and the concert ended. It would not have been a more perfect finale if he had planned it.
Another important reason to stay was Rebecca Moore. On the cusp of turning twenty-three, Moore was literally the daughter of the art world. Her father Peter was a photographer and a contributor to Fluxus, the underground, anti-gallery art community that sprang up in the early ’60s. Encompassing visual artists, sculptors, painters, and musicians (including Yoko Ono in her pre-John Lennon years), Fluxus embraced “a certain irreverence toward the idea of rarefied art and commercialized control of the art movement,” says visual artist Larry Miller, one of its early members. Peter Moore not only photographed artists at work but created animated works of his own, like a table whose top was a laminated photograph of…the top of a table. In their brownstone on West 30th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, Peter and Barbara Moore raised their daughter Rebecca on a steady diet of Fluxus art and events. Her own interests drifted toward acting and theater, yet despite what would appear to be an intimidatingly arty background, Moore had an open, innocent quality, a demure naïveté very much like Jeff’s. Not surprisingly, they were instantly smitten with each other. A few days after “Greetings from Tim Buckley,” Moore called her friend Penny Arcade, a proudly confrontational downtown performance artist. Moore was, Arcade recalls, “very, very excited because she told me she met this special boy.”
“He didn’t feel particularly deserving of someone’s love, and here was this person that had this unconditional love for him”
Grace & Mojo Pin
Singing along, Jeff retitled it “Grace,” inspired by the time he and Moore said their goodbyes at the airport on a rainy day. “The rain is falling and I believe my time has come/It reminds me of the pain I might leave behind,” Jeff sang. With its images of a woman crying on his arm and of his contemplating mortality, the song equated love with pain, rebirth with death.
The same process transformed the rippling guitar chords and more languid structure of “And You Will” into “Mojo Pin,” a song that could have easily been about a drug addiction or, most likely, the addictive, feverish pull of love. The song tossed together strings of images—“pearls in oyster’s flesh,” “whips of opinion down my back,” a mane of hair that resembles “black ribbons of coal”—that were jumbled but visceral. Jeff told Moore the song was inspired by a dream in which he saw a young black woman shooting up heroin between her toes. (Later, he told Art & Performance magazine that the phrase “mojo pin” was “a pin with black magic in it”; pressed for more detail, he said, “Plainly speaking…it’s a euphemism for a dropper full of smack that you shoot in your arm.”) Whatever the connotation of the phrase “mojo pin,” both that song and “Grace” tapped into two subjects Jeff, thanks largely to his father, had grown to accept as part of life: drugs and death.
Scratchy & Butterfly
Very much the young artistic couple in love, Jeff and Moore scraped by, dining on omelets and scouring thrift shops for used vintage clothing. Discovering he could buy used clothes right on the street, Jeff returned home one day with a one-dollar pair of wool pants so smelly that a horrified Moore instantly threw them into a plastic bag for cleaning. “I’m buying old-man clothes,” he would tell her, “so I’ll have them when I’m old.” Every morning, they watched the television game show The Price Is Right, cheering on the underdogs who competed for prizes and often crying out of delight when, say, an elderly woman from the Midwest took home the cash. In the small workspace room, they painted a poem on the window pane in blue stained-glass paint. Alluding to the nicknames they had for each other—Jeff was “Scratchy,” Moore “Butterfly”—it read: “The tip of her wing grazed the water lightly where only moments before she had seen the shadow move. She heard the rumors about a lone scratchy fishy. Possibly the only one of its kind. Roaming the dark water with his eyes to the sky. With each careful swoop she moved close to the swirling, beautiful blue.”
His hair was still short, buzzed close on the sides. But when he opened his mouth, out came the delicate vocal caress of a sorrowful altar boy—an achingly pure, almost virginal, tenor that could just as easily give way to a punky snarl or dirt-beneath-the-nails blues grit. It was the voice he had debuted in his solo spots at the Gods and Monsters St. Ann’s show, now magnified.
“He wasn’t just playing a song someone might know and love,” Shaner recalls. “He was doing his best to create a total sonic environment with one guitar. And it was the way he phrased it that made it completely alive. It wasn’t just a folk song about a guy in jail singing about how he did wrong. It sounded like an emotional crisis coming from someone filled with incredible regret. Most of us would play it like a two-step, like the original. But to make it a slow elegy was a remarkable choice.”
Often, Doyle and his coworkers would turn off the tea and cappuccino machines so as not to disturb him; if they were kept on, though, Jeff would just as easily imitate the foaming and grinding of the coffee machine. (He could also pull off an uncanny imitation of a nearby car alarm that would go off during a set.) At Sin-é, he learned that singing softer and with more subtlety would catch the attention of especially noisy patrons, like the jocks and frat boys who would drop by and serve as distasteful reminders of his childhood. Most important, there would be no Tim Buckley covers. One day, Doyle was playing a Hothouse Flowers CD. Thinking it was his father’s voice, Jeff shot Doyle a sharp look until he realized who it actually was. That spring, Jeff began playing other downtown venues, including Skep and the Cornelia Street Café. In April, he partook in avant-jazz eccentric John Zorn’s Cobra, a performance piece in which a group of vocalists were given instructions onstage (on pitch, sound, or lyric) and had to improvise on the spot. When his turn came, Jeff sang as if his voice were emanating from a Thomas Edison phonograph. Still, it was Sin-é that became his regular haunt. Some nights, he would drift in and, if no one was performing, sing a few songs; other times, he would help the small staff wash dishes at the end of the night. To everyone, it seemed he treated the coffeehouse not as a workplace but as a home, as if he hadn’t had one in a very long time.
Even as Jeff grappled with the idea of committing himself to a huge record company—and thereby committing himself to becoming a singular “Jeff Buckley,” rather than the freeform, amorphous person he had been up to that point—everyone around him sensed a major-league record deal was inevitable, that Jeff was on a path over which he had little control.
Jeff took the call and, as musicians accompanied him in the miles-away studio, sang an impassioned version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” over the phone. His newfound reverence for Dylan was in full swing, and many say it was the sight of a Dylan poster in the Columbia hallways that made Jeff finally decide to link up with the company.
Repeatedly during the film, Lee, who died at an early age, is haunted by a demon, and at the end, the monster chases after Lee’s son Brandon. In an eerie echo of his father’s life, the real Brandon Lee—young and on the verge of major stardom—had died more than a month earlier in an accident on the set of his latest movie. Jeff emerged from the theater looking as if he had seen a ghost, and he and Moore walked home in silence.
“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”
Sin-é take two
Almost a month later, on Tuesday, August 17, the tapes rolled at Sin-é once more. Starting with a hot-blooded “Be My Husband,” done a cappella Nina Simone style, Jeff sang many of the same songs as a month earlier, as well as Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” his stunning version of “Calling You,” and Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man That Got Away,” made famous by Judy Garland in A Star Is Born. But this time, with less pressure in the air and fewer Sony employees in the house, Jeff nailed it. His voice was looser, the performance less uptight—evident when someone half-jokingly called out for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, leading Jeff to launch into a six-minute imitation of the qawwali singer. (The performance was initially greeted with chuckles, as if it were a put-on, but the laughter soon stopped when everyone realized it wasn’t.) Highlights included an exquisite “Lilac Wine,” a tighter, nine-minute “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” and a version of Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello” that took on additional significance in light of his apparent split with Moore. Everyone, Jeff included, felt happier.
Forget Her & Dream Brother
It was, according to Berkowitz, the beginning of “the moment.” Over the next few days—literally the end of the session—the ideas for instruments, vocal textures, and overall shaping burst out of Jeff. “All of a sudden,” Berkowitz recalls, “we were on this roller-coaster ride.” The fully produced opus he and other Columbia executives had thought Jeff would make on his second or third album was suddenly materializing. Berkowitz hurriedly received authorization from his bosses to spend an extra week of studio time. Rather than a mere recreation of Jeff’s solo and cabaret side, the music began to incorporate Zeppelinesque furor, tunings associated with Pakistani music, and anthemic, windswept rock guitars. For his part, Grondahl feels Berkowitz’s perception of a last-minute rush of creative juices “is coming out of his anxiety or misunderstanding of what was going on. There were some sparks happening six weeks before that.” There was no better example than the evolution of one particular track. On the first day of band rehearsals in New York City, Grondahl had played a two-note bass line that Jeff and Johnson picked up on and began building into a denser, swirling instrumental, with suggestions of Indian modality. The piece of music continued to evolve at Bearsville.
Merri Cyr’s cover photo, taken during the warm-up for the July 19 afternoon set, depicted Jeff tuning up in front of a few patrons who were pointedly ignoring him. “The fact that he chose that shot shows his sense of humor and how he saw himself,” Cyr says. “He thought he was just this goofy kid—he couldn’t understand why people were going crazy for him.” For extra authenticity, Columbia art designer Nicky Lindeman used her coffee-mug-stained napkin from the taping night for the cover art. The publicity materials cited Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and George Carlin as influences, and as in the Sony convention newsletter, the name of Tim Buckley was nowhere to be found. As a twenty-six-minute condensation of Jeff’s developmental period at the club, down to the sounds of clattering silverware and glasses, Live at Sin-e serves its purpose. Even years after its release, Jeff’s choir-boy voice and unaccompanied guitar sounds like nothing else released in the aftermath of Nirvana. His version of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas la Fin” (“I Don’t Know the End of It”) implies the enchantment of attending a carnival as a child, down to Jeff’s carousel-style guitar, and “The Way Young Lovers Do” captures him at his most rhapsodic, scatting, ululating, and rolling his tongue for ten rapturous minutes.
But it was also a microcosm of his personality. He had spent his life on the move, reinventing himself along the way, afraid or unwilling to commit to one style or even relationship. The concept of finishing a song, a final take over which he would have no further control, his style and music forever cemented, spooked him. It meant a commitment to a singular sound, personality, and image, and few things in life were so foreign to him in the winter of 1993.
Jeff seemed so fragile and vulnerable, and he was about to enter a business not known for tolerating either trait. Norrell couldn’t put his finger on it, but joining a growing list of people—from Jeff’s friends in New York to Tim’s old manager Herb Cohen—Norrell had an unsettling feeling that someday “something was going to happen” to Jeff, and that that something wouldn’t be pleasant.
On schedule, he returned with finished lyrics and, in only a few takes, recorded them. The “brother” in the title now referred to friend Chris Dowd, who was considering breaking up with a woman pregnant with his child. It was a scenario that reverberated deeply within Jeff, reminding him of his own childhood and his father’s early departure. Although one phrase (“I love you and your dance insane”) referred to Dowd’s manic presence, the lyrics found Jeff pleading with Dowd not to do what his own father had done to him:
Don’t be like the one who made me so old Don’t be like the one who left behind his name Because I waited for you like I waited for him And nobody ever came
After the session, Norrell was, like so many before him, floored by Jeff’s focus in the studio and his vocal and instrumental command. Still, the engineer was haunted by the experience. Jeff seemed so fragile and vulnerable, and he was about to enter a business not known for tolerating either trait. Norrell couldn’t put his finger on it, but joining a growing list of people—from Jeff’s friends in New York to Tim’s old manager Herb Cohen—Norrell had an unsettling feeling that someday “something was going to happen” to Jeff, and that that something wouldn’t be pleasant.
So Real
On the first day of a full band rehearsal, Tighe brought with him a gently descending chord progression he had composed. Jeff heard it, liked it, and, as Tighe played the riff, took a seat behind the drums and began singing and playing along to it. Tighe thought he was singing “sorry”; in fact, the phrase was “so real.” Although the lyrics weren’t finished, the complete song tumbled out effortlessly.
“So Real” became a composite of various female relationships in his life. It’s said the “simple city dress” line referred to Moore, while other parts of the song may have been inspired by a dancer with whom Jeff had a brief fling shortly after his separation from Moore. “I love you, but I’m afraid to love you,” Jeff spoke in the middle section, somewhat in the tradition of spoken-word parts dating back to Elvis Presley’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” He also brought up his mother Mary, who was still back in Orange County:
I never stepped on the cracks ’cause I thought I’d hurt my mother And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare that sucked me in And pulled me under, pulled me under
The track was finished at dawn, and in a cab flying downtown as the sun rose, Jeff and Tighe listened to it in the backseat. To Jeff, who didn’t say a word, it was affirmation of his idea of a band based on feeling rather than virtuosity. “It showed us we could be a sound,” says Grondahl, “but not a type of music.”
He brought along a duffel bag of clothes, all of them unwashed and rumpled, as well as one of his latest acquisitions, a woman’s gold-sparkle jacket he had found at a thrift store. Loosening up, Jeff goofed around with a prop microphone, took the glitter jacket on and off, and, for one shot, posed with a half-eaten banana in homage to Leonard Cohen’s similar pose on the cover of his I’m Your Man. When it came time to inspect the potential covers, Columbia’s Reid visited Jeff in Philadelphia in late February, during the Live at Sin-é tour, and showed him various mockups. Jeff instantly gravitated toward one: a moody, sullen shot of himself staring to the side, several strands of hair falling in his face, the sparkle jacket and prop microphone in full view. He told her he wanted that photograph because he was listening to a rough mix of “Dream Brother” when it was taken; to him, the photo embodied his immersion in music. Within the halls of Columbia, the photo was met with not so much enthusiasm as confusion. Given Jeff’s penchant for wearing used clothes and his disdain of showbiz trappings, the choice seemed contradictory. “Jeff was quite vocal about not coming across as a pretty boy,” Berkowitz says. “When I saw the cover, I said, ‘Oh, come on, you don’t mean this one? This is exactly what he said he didn’t want!’” Others at Columbia complained that Jeff looked “too gay” or “too much like Adam Ant.”
Whether Jeff intended it or not, the photo was an accurate embodiment of his contradictions. He was suspicious of the record business yet had signed with one of its biggest companies; he griped about the star-making machinery yet was drawn to it. And he complained about people focusing on his looks instead of his music, yet selected a photo that made him look as glamorous as a James Dean-style movie star.
Marketing Plan 1994-95
“…We do not want Jeff to appear as being too self-absorbed or personified as a ‘tortured artist.’ We want to keep the mysterious persona and mysticism of Jeff Buckley to [have it] come out naturally.” The plan also argued for breaking Jeff internationally, which fit in with Sony Music president Mottola’s new goal of global crossover for his acts. As with the Grace cover photo, the marketing strategy laid bare many of the contradictions that lay within Jeff. He and his managers stressed a low-key campaign, yet they required “sniping” (industry lingo for posters plastered on the sides of buildings, construction site walls, and so forth) in each major city in which he would perform. But the most striking aspect of the plan was the way it demanded Columbia act like a small, independent label—and, in the words of the plan, “avoid the generic marketing approach utilized by most majors.” The plan is filled with references to keeping Jeff’s image and presentation close to “the street” and “the street level,” and to “create more of an ‘indie vibe.’” On the Grace tour posters, the Columbia and Sony logos were conspicuously absent, as if Jeff were trying to convince himself he wasn’t really recording for the same label that had given the world Mariah and Bolton.
The idea of rolling out different songs for different radio formats was not uncommon in the music business of the ’90s, but “previewing” two songs for different formats and then releasing an actual single was. The idea was to introduce audiences gradually—via the integrity-associated college radio—to Jeff and his challenging album. It was anti-hype that was also subtle hype. The plan was not to have a Top 40 hit right away, since that approach could lead to Jeff being perceived as a one-hit wonder. He was not meant to be a flash in the pan, but an artist who would lead Columbia into its second century.
Even amidst that barrage, the forty thousand copies of Grace Columbia shipped to stores distinguished themselves, not merely during that week but for the year as well. At a time when the throbbing, anguished groan of alternative music was setting the pace for rock and roll, Grace stood apart like a priest in a brothel. From the sirenlike drone of Gary Lucas’s guitar loop that opens it to the hypnotic, cathartic crash of “Dream Brother” that brings it to a close nearly an hour later, the album unabashedly sets out on its own course.
Grace (Album)
“Mojo Pin” is more deliberate and dreamier than the original Gods and Monsters rendition, with much more vivid dynamics; the shift from its instantly engrossing circular guitar intro to the thrashing riffs and screams at its climax is the sort of leap few in rock were attempting at the time. “Last Goodbye” has likewise matured from its earlier, 1990 incarnation into an anthemic, sweeping lament, tinged with wistfulness and longing. Berger’s Eastern-style strings ride the melody but never overwhelm it, an achievement in itself. “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” remains a confused, and confusing, lyric that opens with a reference to attending a funeral and then, abruptly, finds Jeff somewhat rationalizing the breakup of his relationship with Moore. (During the sessions, Berkowitz asked Jeff to change the song’s shift from third-to first-person, but Jeff declined.) Nonetheless, as a piece of music it is a languid beauty, a picturesque stretch of musical hills and valleys that truly becomes Jeff’s very own Led Zeppelin ballad. “Dream Brother” is a shadowy labyrinth of spidery guitars and eerie, wordless vocal chants, propelled by the controlled fury of Grondahl’s bass and Johnson’s drums to an emotional zenith. There are nods to the Sin-e period, and to the desires of management and Columbia to simulate that sound. Jeff’s version of James Shelton’s “Lilac Wine,” popularized by Nina Simone, is tender and sensual, his voice sounding as if it is millimeters away from the microphone.
Although grounded in rock rhythms and sensibility, Grace seemed to float above the earth, scouring the landscape for spiritual fulfillment. The wide-screen expansiveness of Grace came as a shock to many of Jeff’s friends in New York. They had grown accustomed to bare-boned voice and guitar, and now were confronted with drums, strings, and layers of guitars. His former Musicians Institute friends in California were stunned by the singing voice they had never heard. “I didn’t like Grace initially when I heard it,” admits Willner, a commonplace reaction among Jeff’s early supporters. “My reaction was, ‘That’s it?’ It came across small to me. But it grew on me. It was a sneaky little record.” Some were stunned by the cover photograph alone—what was with the sparkly jacket? In one regard, though, Willner was onto something. In an increasingly faster-paced pop environment, Grace was a rarity: an album intended to be absorbed over time. (To nurture that process and add to the music’s mystique, Jeff demanded the song’s lyrics not be included in the packaging; he wanted everyone to listen.) Everyone knew Grace was not the type of album that would make an instant splash onto pop radio. Its first-week sales of two thousand copies made that situation glaringly clear. There was only one way to ensure Jeff and the album connected with the masses, and that meant taking to the road.
Engaging in intense one-on-one conversations with women (and men), Jeff conveyed enormous empathy; as Moore says, “He made you feel as if he understood you completely.” (Rebecca)
“I was completely blown away,” Wasser recalls. “When you get attention from someone like that, you feel like a queen.” (Joan)
On August 19, Jeff flew to London by himself, where he spent time with one of his musical heroes, the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. In addition to carrying on a brief relationship, the two wrote and recorded an impassioned paean to romantic connection, “All Flowers in Time,” at a London studio. The band reconvened in Dublin in late August and began a month-long European tour.
Backstage before the show, Jeff was introduced to the Dambuilders’ violinist, Joan Wasser, and the two instantly connected. Raised in Norwalk, Connecticut, before relocating to Boston to attend college, the twenty-four-year-old Wasser wore her hair in thick dreadlocks that obscured her dark, exotic features. From her extroverted and intense demeanor (her face could switch from an intimidating stare to a warm grin within moments) to her mutual love of Led Zeppelin and classical music, Wasser projected an aura very different, and far more rock and roll, from that of Rebecca Moore. Wasser had never heard Jeff’s music before, but when he performed “Lilac Wine” that night, “it pretty much blew my mind,” she recalls. “He was such a ham. But it was so beautiful to see someone who had such a love of music and was unafraid to go the distance.” Wasser and Jeff danced together during the Grifters’ set, and Jeff, who was just beginning to plug into harder-edged indie rock, was smitten with both bands.
Moore, who was still very much in touch with Jeff, was seen sitting on a staircase, her head in her hands. She wasn’t alone in feeling Jeff wasn’t merely waving good-bye to his one-time creative base but to his previous life, and that he was about to enter a larger, scarier, and potentially more overwhelming world.
When word got back to Jeff, he was so devastated he called Rebecca Moore in tears: How could they have taken his remarks as a dis? He loved Dylan!
In the back of the bus, he hung up a photo of Kurt Cobain, whose pre-suicide balancing act of integrity and commercial success was a path Jeff himself sought to take.
Unlike Cobain, though, Jeff seemed to attract more women than men to his shows. The girls who clustered upfront, screaming during the inevitable moment when Jeff would pull off his overshirt and reveal his lithe, T-shirted frame, revealed he was becoming a cult sex symbol. In Austin in November, female fans threw underwear at him onstage, to which Jeff bemusedly responded, “You don’t even know me.” His charisma was proving to be stronger than perhaps he himself had ever imagined. “There was something insanely vulnerable about him, which made him really attractive to people,” says tour mate Brenda Kahn. “That worked against him at Columbia, because people were always wanting something from him and he was vulnerable to it. He didn’t have an easy way to say no.” As much as he responded to all the attention, it wasn’t long before Jeff began to grow suspicious of it. Did all of these women or company employees like him for his music and talent, or for his looks and power? Were they listening to the music, or just responding to his cheekbones? As the months dragged on, it was growing harder to tell, and his worldview became a split screen, purity on one side and abject evil and temptation on the other.
Other incidents were nowhere as amusing. Later in the tour, at a club in Denver, Colorado, a phalanx of Tim fans gathered at the front of the stage and yelled out Tim song titles throughout the show. Finally, exasperated and angered, Jeff succumbed. “You know what—I’ll do it,” he spat out. As he began strumming the chords to “Once I Was,” he continued addressing the crowd: “I’m about to sacrifice myself right now. You all love that kind of stuff, I know. Check this out—to show all the hippies how good I can do this song. So they can all go and masturbate naked to their copy of Hello Goodbye [sic]. And leave the rest of us normal people alone!” He paused, perhaps realizing the harshness of his words. “I just want you to know one thing. I don’t hate my father. Sometimes yes.” There were a few giggles from the crowd. “But check this out—my father is sort of like that T-shirt: ‘I went through the ’60s and all I got was this stinking T-shirt,’ I was somebody’s son, and I was somebody’s stinkin’ T-shirt. But let me show you how cool this song is okay? It’s the only time you’ll see it, I swear to fucking God, all right?” Although he forgot some of the words, he sang the song—and gently, like a lullaby. After it was over, he looked in the direction of the Tim acolytes: “Are you satisfied now? Are you really? Now shut the fuck up for the rest of the night. Love and kisses, from the living one, Jeff Buckley.”
As the show demonstrated for all to see, whether they wanted to or not, the almost virginal, untainted Jeff of a few years before was gradually being altered by the rules of the road. He began smoking cigarettes and developed a love of vodka and tequila, and pot was never far away. “It’s very alluring for a teenager to have a cigarette, and it’s like he was having that experience for the first time,”
Such widely disparate impressions were a sign of the increasing compartmentalization of Jeff’s life.
...he would often leave each group with a different impression of himself and his state of mind, as if he were accommodating their idea of who he should be. It wasn’t uncommon to find him huddling one-on-one with a friend, making that man or woman feel as if he were revealing his utmost secrets to him or her alone—before doing exactly the same thing with someone else at a later time.
“So Real” video
The fact that Tim had been linked with heroin didn’t deter Jeff’s own instinctive curiosity; if anything, it may have been the last step in Jeff’s journey to understand the inner workings of his father’s mind. “A force in him sometimes wanted to commune with that,” concurs Tighe. “If your father or mother was buried under an avalanche, someone might go to the place where they died. That’s what it felt like he was doing sometimes.”
He looked haggard and acted peculiar, such as the night he was spotted alone, distracted, and talking to himself at a downtown club. He seemed more insular than before, rarely, if ever, introducing friends to Wasser, as if he was wary of media gossip. “He was very gregarious before that,” says Wasser. “Suddenly it was much less. He was a little paranoid, and he wanted to have his private life totally private, to the point where I didn’t know many of his friends.”
“Nothing more attractive to the outsider than a human being who exudes the seed of lust and depravity and the mountainous drama of life itself locked in a sticky blowjob with death”
Though not a cross-dresser, Jeff prided himself on his ability to tap into his inner sensitive female. As Wasser says, “Because he grew up with all women, a lot of times he felt like a woman. He would often say I was the man and he was the woman. He was very sensual in a way a lot of women are. He was a diva.”
Ulalume
By coincidence, Allen Ginsberg was also in the studio, and the Beat poet took Jeff through the reading, instructing him on how to stress certain words and phrases. “It was so beautiful to watch,” recalls Willner. Afterward, Ginsberg launched into a hilarious reading of a piece by writer Terry Southern for another of Willner’s projects, leaving everyone, Jeff included, in hysterics. To Willner, it seemed to snap Jeff right out of his doldrums; the kid he had met nearly six years before had returned. In the early morning, Jeff headed home; he had to catch a plane to Memphis in a few hours. Later, Willner listened back to the tape of Jeff’s performance. A morbid meditation on lost love and death, “Ulalume” was rife with images of “scoriac rivers” and a tomb. Toward the poem’s end, Jeff read, “It was surely October/On this very night of last year/That I journeyed, I journeyed down here/That I brought a dread burden down here.” At the time, Willner didn’t think much of it, other than feeling Jeff had given a riveting performance.
Wasser recalls. “He realized he had manicdepressive tendencies, chemical things that mess with your head. He was so excited to tell me: ‘Joan, guess what I realized!’ He didn’t feel as burdened. It was as if he opened the door for good, completely, and could see everything—that everyone has certain tendencies to certain degrees, and your chemistry has so much to do with your emotions and how you feel toward life. He was bubbling over with excitement over these realizations.”
“Good luck figuring him out,” Joan Wasser told me after our first of several interviews. She said it not with recrimination or anger but with a sort of rueful melancholy. It was a phrase that stayed with me during the entire course of the book, as I attempted to be journalist and analyst, and grappled with the continually contradictory impressions and images Jeff Buckley left in his wake.