Jeff Buckley 5: You And I

In the first ten years after his death, the estate issued what they could by Jeff Buckley, but were limited to one posthumous studio collection, two expanded reissues, a couple of live releases, and reshufflings of the usual B-sides and CD single tracks. While 2013 brought a pointless “very best of” in Sony’s redundant Playlist series, his survivors had shown comparative restraint.

His rabid fans also had two decades already to scrape up whatever bootlegs are out there, so the announcement of any “recently discovered” recordings will have to pass their muster first. As it turns out, most of You And I had indeed been unheard, in this format anyway. Here are ten tracks, mostly covers, recorded at his first rehearsal session for the label that signed him. Performed solo with just his electric or acoustic guitar, it’s basically Live At Sin-é without an audience. (In fact, while recorded first, this album shares four tracks we’ve already heard from those appearances.)

As ever, the real enticement is the songs heretofore unavailable in any form. Those would be covers of “Everyday People”, “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying” (the Ray Charles hit, not the Gerry & The Pacemakers one, and ending with the riff from “Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress”), the old blues standard “Poor Boy Long Way From Home”, and The Smiths’ “Boy With The Thorn In His Side” (who also close the set via “I Know It’s Over”).

This would all suggest that he didn’t have any original material at this point. Only two songs written by him are here—“Grace”, which would of course be the title of the debut album, and “Dream Of You And I”, a lovely acoustic sketch without words, save his spoken description over the chords of what he wanted the song to be. It bears only the slightest resemblance to the track of the similar title he would reject for his second album.

As a mere fraction of an alleged total of five 90-minute DAT tapes filled with performances like these, You And I is not a lost album. Nor will it change the fact that we’ll never have a chance to know what would have become of Jeff Buckley. But it’s a nice way to spend an hour with an old friend. (The streaming version offered longer takes with further conversation excerpts, and a 2019 Record Store Day exclusive called In Transition consisted of similar demos of “Mojo Pin”, “Last Goodbye”, and “Strawberry Street”, plus “Hallelujah”, and three other covers from the same tapes.)

Jeff Buckley You And I (2016)—3

Jeff Buckley 4: Mystery White Boy

The only known performance by Jeff Buckley in Connecticut was at Toad’s Place in New Haven in 1995. He and his three-piece band played most of Grace, along with spirited covers like “Kick Out The Jams” by the MC5, “Kanga Roo”, an absolutely gorgeous medley of “Hallelujah” and Bob Dylan’s “Mama You Been On My Mind”, and even a brief, silly stab at “Christine Sixteen” by Kiss. One professional reviewer seemed to think he phoned it in, but that wasn’t obvious to this observer, who felt Jeff seemed to really enjoy himself and wasn’t at all irritated by the a-hole who yelled "YEAH!" at a really quiet moment. (This is why we don’t get invited to nice places.)

With his studio archives fairly limited, it made sense for the estate to go through the dozens of tapes that had piled up from Jeff’s live performances in the wake of promoting Grace. Rather than concentrate on a single show (although a concurrently released DVD presented a Chicago show performed four days before New Haven), Mystery White Boy compiles twelve songs from a year’s worth of gigs, edited seamlessly and cohesively. A handful of Grace songs are interspersed with rare material, such as the otherwise unrecorded “I Woke Up In A Strange Place”, “Moodswing Whiskey” and the phenomenal “What Will You Say”. As a demonstration of his re-interpretation skills, we get covers of “The Man That Got Away”, a ten-minute “Kanga Roo” and a medley of “Hallelujah” with the Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over”. (In Australia, where many of these tracks were recorded, his mesmerizing interpretation of Nina Simone’s “That’s All I Ask” was included as a bonus track; it’s since been added to the streaming version.)

It’s a well-paced set, if a little muddy in places. There was talk for a while of making individual shows available on a subscription basis, but to date the estate appears to have decided that fan-shared bootlegs are just too prevalent to stop. It would be another two decades before four full shows from the first Grace promotional tour would be released on digital platforms, including the audio from the Chicago DVD.

Instead, they pushed a handful of further releases, some more appealing than others. The import-only Live À L'Olympia, recorded at that Parisian theater, is definitely the best, and well worth seeking out. The Grace EPs box set collected some promotional and international singles with rare tracks (some of which would appear on the Grace Legacy Edition), with some repetition. The tenth anniversary of his death was commemorated by the So Real “hits collection”, which offered further rare live performances depending on which online version you downloaded, while Grace Around The World stitched together various live performances of all the songs on the album on DVD and companion CD. All of which only underscores what a shame it is that he didn’t have the chance to chase his muse much further than one album and ideas for a follow-up.

Jeff Buckley Mystery White Boy (2000)—3
Jeff Buckley Live À L'Olympia (2001)—3½
Jeff Buckley So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley (2007)—3½

Jeff Buckley 3: Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk

In the last week of May 1997, the entertainment world was reacting to the news that Bob Dylan had been hospitalized with a potentially fatal heart condition. Our relief at his full recovery turned out to be a distraction, for while we were gazing furtively in Bob’s direction, Jeff Buckley was reported missing, and then dead, having drowned during a moonlight swim in the Mississippi River. He was 30 years old.

He had gone to Memphis on a quest to jumpstart ideas for his second album; in fact, his band had arrived that night to rehearse some of his new material. Unfortunately, nothing was ever recorded past the demos he’d made in his rented Memphis house, and the aborted sessions from the previous fall, produced by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which, again, had been deemed sub-par by the artiste.

It was inevitable, but not a given, that his last recordings would be distributed, and both estate and record label were wise to make it happen before bootleggers did. They also made sure not to make it anything it wasn’t, such as finished. Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk presents two discs worth of those studio tracks and home demos of the songs attempted for the album he never completed.

The album is, in the end, something of a disappointment; how could it not be otherwise? The studio sessions sound pretty complete to these ears, though one can see that he might have found them not quite worthy of release; after all, he had set the bar pretty high with Grace. “The Sky Is A Landfill” makes an excellent opener, musically gripping if a bit thick on lyrics. The slow and sultry “Everybody Here Wants You” was pushed as a single, with the hope it would become a slow jam classic. “Opened Once” is even quieter, and more effective. The edgy “Nightmares By The Sea” has an infectious pulse, while “Yard Of Blonde Girls” (a cover) is nice and trashy.

“Witches’ Rave” doesn’t quite catch fire despite a pretty opening melody, but leads well into “New Year’s Prayer”, something of a chant. “Morning Theft” fills the “Hallelujah” role here, a softly sung ballad with lightly strummed electric guitar until some keyboards add atmosphere. “Vancouver” had been played instrumentally by the band at a few gigs already; here the sinister 12-string riff gets a set of lyrics. “You & I”, a long, vocal-only meditation, closes the first disc.

The second disc is a little more, well, sketchy. Alternate mixes of “Nightmares By The Sea” and “New Year’s Prayer” set up a final band recording, “Haven’t You Heard”, which shows some potential. From there, the bulk of the disc is devoted to the demos he was hoping to flesh out with the band. Most teeter between dissonance and polish, and it’s difficult to imagine how the band might have changed them. A one-man-band recreation of “Back In N.Y.C.” by Genesis is fascinating if only for his reproductive ability. A 1992 radio performance of “Satisfied Mind” ends the program. (Two other demos appeared on various international versions of the album; “Thousand Fold”, which the Japanese got, is better than everything on disc two. These are now included on the streaming version of the album.)

Every death is sad, no matter how long the person was alive. In this age of hyperbole and mangled language, it’s common to put labels where they don’t belong, like referring to all movie stars as actors. The loss of Jeff Buckley, however, when he was teeming with creativity, was and remains a tragedy.

Jeff Buckley Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk (1998)—3

Jeff Buckley 2: Grace

He wasn’t easy to label: folk, rock, metal, alternative, jazz? In the era of Hootie and Pearl Jam and Green Day, the only way one might describe Jeff Buckley was “male vocal”, comparable only to someone as singular as Freddie Mercury. And what a voice he had. Not being able to pigeonhole him so easily was a strong sign that this was a talent whose further development would be something to watch.

Grace begins as tentatively as the Sin-é EP, with “Mojo Pin”, expanded here to incorporate drums and multiple guitar parts. The title track is nearly as long but a little more uptempo, supplemented by an Arabic melody and string parts. The last minute or so, where anyone else would have put a guitar solo, is devoted to his own vocal acrobatics, which astound more than grate. “Last Goodbye” would be a wise choice for a single, with an emotion and delivery threatening to make him a heartthrob. His cover of Nina Simone’s version of “Lilac Wine” is soft and seductive, and the dreamy mood is wiped away by “So Real”, a complicated little tune involving odd meters and chordings, with a wonderful mid-song freakout featuring the chainsaw effect of acoustic guitar feedback.

One of the unlikeliest draws of the album is his solo arrangement of John Cale’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, which has certainly made it one of the most-covered songs in TV talent competitions and worse. His performance sounds perfectly live, beginning with a diminished variation on the chorus, before the song falls into place capoed high on the neck. For nearly seven minutes he follows the verses through Biblical and sexual imagery, ending softly and sweetly. A harmonium brings in the masterful “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”, built mostly around a D-Em9 pattern, and vivid in its portrait of a room on a rainy day. The dynamic build in the second pre-chorus and delayed resolution of the final chorus still cause goosebumps. The last “cover” on the album is a gorgeous rendition of “Corpus Christie Carol” as arranged by Benjamin Britten. Delivered in the same style as the other two covers, it has a few embellishments for a gentle recording. “Eternal Life” gets a decent rock backing to improve on the solo EP take; others have called it a Zeppelin homage, which is plausible. The final seconds of debris lead seamlessly into “Dream Brother”, a positively hypnotic finale that just hints at anger towards the father he never knew.

An album like Grace is tough to describe in words; therefore it must be experienced directly by the listener. That’s pretty much what happened, too—it didn't sell that much nationwide at first, but world-of-mouth and in-store play made it a success. At the time, it was truly different, and refreshing, and it will get under your skin.

A decade later, the album was given the deluxe Legacy Edition treatment. The bonus CD sheds a little more light onto the sessions, beginning with “Forget Her”, a highly personal song removed from the album at the last minute. A few alternate takes of “Dream Brother” and “Eternal Life” show how those songs grew, both before and after the album’s release. A handful of covers continue the café vibe from the Sin-é set, capped by the epic 14-minute jam on Alex Chilton’s “Kanga-Roo”. (A stab at “Strawberry Street” with a different rhythm section predating the album sessions was included in some overseas copies; it’s since been added to the streaming version.) The DVD offers his videos, plus a 28-minute documentary expanded from the original EPK. All of which is nice, but it doesn’t trump being able to listen to the original album sequence on a loop, as the last hums of “Dream Brother” become the first strains of “Mojo Pin” all over again, mixing with the ambient sounds of a warm summer night.

Jeff Buckley Grace (1994)—4
2004 Legacy Edition: same as 1994, plus 12 extra tracks and DVD

Jeff Buckley 1: Live At Sin-é

Jeff Buckley was the son of ‘60s folk singer Tim Buckley. Although he said he never knew his father, he’d certainly inherited the gift of a unique, keening voice and an esoteric, original songwriting style. Both Buckleys had talent, but it was Jeff who arguably made the biggest impression, and in a shorter amount of time.

The sound he became known for was developed over a couple of years bouncing around quirkier downtown hangouts of New York City, so it was wise of whatever A&R guy that agreed to it to make his first Columbia Records release a simple snapshot of a performance during what Jeff would later refer to as his “café days”.

At Sin-é, an East Village coffeehouse and bar started by a couple of Irish guys, he would set up in the corner with a Telecaster, amp and microphone, and proceed to sing and play for a few hours. Eventually, a couple of sets were professionally recorded. The four-song Live At Sin-é EP contains performances of two songs destined for his soon-to-be-recorded studio album debut, and two unique covers—one an Edith Piaf song, sung in French and English, and the other, a ten-minute exploration of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do”, with a lengthy a cappella scatted midsection showing off his multi-octave vocal range.

It’s an authentic artifact, showing the listener where Jeff Buckley was at. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves, nor did it rock the world, but a substantial article by Bill Flanagan in the February 1994 issue of Musician magazine helped spread the word, and stoke anticipation for the full-length album. (To this writer, the idea of an edgy walking jukebox with a Telecaster was very appealing.)

Ten years later, his estate conspired with Columbia to release an expanded Live At Sin-é, offering two full CDs (plus a DVD of interviews and clips). Geared specifically at fanatics, these two-and-a-half hours present a wider picture of where he was at, playing only a few originals (“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” before he finished the lyrics, and an early draft of what would become “Last Goodbye”), leaning heavily on covers associated with Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and more Van Morrison. As a guitarist he was encyclopedic; as a vocalist he was stunning. It takes a lot for a snotty white kid to cover “Strange Fruit”, and follow it with a faithful run through Zeppelin’s “Night Flight”. The between-song patter is indexed separately, but gives excellent context for how and why he performs a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song. Bum notes and bad jokes are left intact.

And this is just what happened to be captured on two summer nights. Stories abound of the dozens of other songs he’d pull of out of the notes in his head, and the mind reels at the possibilities were he still around to dazzle tiny crowds in his own special way.

Jeff Buckley Live At Sin-é (1993)—3
2003 Legacy Edition: same as 1993, plus 30 extra tracks and DVD