Jeff Buckley Classic or Dud?

I'm with you Mark, i can tolerate the ballads but the "rock" songs are just grating. Best thing he did was the Leonard Cohen cover, which is sublime. The rest i can pretty much take or leave.

a lot of unexpected people seem to like Jeff Buckley... but I listened to Grace for the first time a couple months ago, and thought it was pretty middle-of-the-road.

Yeah, that's what I thought the first time I heard it, too. ;)

see, i thought it was average on first listen. then it got worse.

Tried and tried. And tried again.

Didn't get it.

Prefer pops

I opened up Mojo Pin on the big hi-fi yesterday afternoon and pretty much loved every second.

To be fair to that song, the lyric "I'm blind and tortured" is a good summation of my feelings upon hearing Jeff Buckley at any time. Mark Richardson had it correct upthread: Jeff Buckley is like David Cook in disguise.

chix diggit

Sick Mouthy was right

"BLACK BEAUTY/I LOVE YOU SO..." I haven't heard Mojo Pin in over ten years, this is wild.

http://photos-b.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v336/157/40/710515316/n710515316_4235041_452.jpg

http://hartree.raunvis.hi.is/~jensba/thoughts/images/grace.jpg

There once was a man called Jeff Buckley
He could sing but had very bad luckley
One day at the vicar's
He took off his tickers
And said "Do you fancy a fuckley?"

Yes I know but HE WOULD HAVE APPRECIATED IT

"Tonight, Matthew, Henry K Miller IS Jeff Buckley."

*tumbling tumbleweeds from audience*

*interspersed with who he when's Jim Reeves coming on murmurs*

http://www.popjustice.com/images/stories/j/jeffbuckleyalbumsleeve.jpg

http://www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3334&Itemid=9

Yes, but does it have "Hallelujah" on it?

so i just downloaded this lil live ep thing of jeff covering his dad's songs

fuck

wait, what songs are they? i've heard his versions of "i never asked to be your mountain" and "once i was" from a tim tribute concert in the early 90's, but did he do others? there's so much drama in those songs, it's great. the chorus of "once i was" -- "sometimes i wonder just for a while, do you ever think of me?" -- is suddenly about an abandoned son addressing his dead father, instead of a man addressing an ex-lover. and when he breaks a string at the end and has to sing a capella he's got nowhere to hide, and you can hear it in his voice.

is this that tribute? just went up today -- http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=220

yup!

yeah that's the one, there's also Sefronia/The King's Chain and Phantasmagoria in Two

So Lonely [arr. Mazzacane/Langille]

Am I missing something? The Jeff songs are the ones I can't download

i never asked to be your mountain fucking SLAYS

just fucking kills me

i've literally listened to it like 12 times in a row and i'm watching the sun come up right now what a fuckin life this is

Sadly I don't think I've even heard that one, but hey, I'm feelin' ya.

weird, I was just listening to mystery white boy yesterday

I can get people not digging buckley but there are some great moments on that

i never asked to be your mountain fucking SLAYS

it's funny how he imitates some of tim's vocal tics on that song, going into that throaty low register and then getting really keening and nasally. like i said upthread about "once i was," there's some great drama in that performance, too: "she says, your scoundrel father flies /with a dancer called a queen...oh the child dreams to be his hands /in the counting of the rain /but only barren breasts he feels /for her milk will never drain." remember this was at a tim tribute concert, so i feel like jeff's caught in this really sticky position of wanting to honor the music and the audience's love of that music, but he's also got some rightful bitterness toward tim. in a song like this, it seems like he's tapping into tim's own self-recrimination in order to express his own anger.

the drowning references are pretty eerie, too, in hindsight.

yeah the drowning references gave me chills the other night

the Tim/Jeff bio Dream Brother is not great but really gets into Jeff's whole uncomfortable relationship with his dad's music/legacy in an interesting way -- like he would really squirm and get uncomfortable about Tim's fans coming to his shows, hated the comparisons in reviews, but then there'd be friends who said he really studied TB's records a ton and learned things about his voice from singing his dad's songs, etc.

plus he was raised scotty moorhead and adopted jeff buckley as a stage name so yeah, quite a bit of ambivalence towards his legacy

from el wiki

Buckley flew back to New York early the following year to make his public singing debut at a tribute concert for his father called "Greetings from Tim Buckley".[38] The event, produced by show business veteran Hal Willner, was held at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn on April 26, 1991.[38] Buckley rejected the idea of the concert as a springboard to his career, instead citing personal reasons regarding his decision to sing at the tribute.[39] With accompaniment by experimental rock guitarist Gary Lucas, Jeff performed "I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain", a song Tim Buckley wrote about an infant Jeff Buckley and his mother.[40] Buckley returned to the stage to play "Sefronia – The King's Chain", "Phantasmagoria in Two", and concluded the concert with "Once I Was" performed acoustically with an impromptu a cappella ending, due to a snapped guitar string.[40] Willner, the show's organiser, later recalled that Buckley's set closer made a strong impression.[41] Buckley's performance at the concert was counter-intuitive to his desire to distance himself musically from his father. Buckley later explained his reasoning to Rolling Stone: "It wasn't my work, it wasn't my life. But it bothered me that I hadn't been to his funeral, that I'd never been able to tell him anything. I used that show to pay my last respects."[19] The concert proved to be his first step into the music industry that had eluded him for years.[42]

speaking of creepy drowning imagery, the end of "dream brother" is kind of freaky

asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over, over, over

I found an old tape of Jeff and band doing a session on the Mark Radcliffe show on 22 August 1994, which I put onto mp3 last night. The quality's pretty good I think, though it wobbles a little in places and does get a bit hissy towards the end. Also, 'Lover, You Should've Come Over' has to be in two parts as my poor player can't make it through the whole thing in one go. The session doesn't appear to exist anywhere else that I can find, so enjoy:

Mojo Pin
So Real
Grace
Lover, You Should've Come Over
Lover, You Should've Come Over part II

thx a ton for this!

No problem. I haven't owned a tape player since I sold my car, so I didn't think I was ever going to hear it again myself - it was nice to get a chance to put in on mp3, might as well share it with the world.

You should sell these recordings to the Buckley estate. Seems like they'll put anything out on CD for a buck these days, his fans will totally eat this shit up.

i never asked to be your mountain fucking SLAYS

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 11:05 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark

the droning modal thing goes on for fuckin 9 minutes and the weird backwards guitar lines and the ghostly little feedback howl when he says 'feel the water touch my skin'

fuck

i'm always kinda embarrassed by it, but dude is basically classic. of course my best friend/girl i was in love with at age 16 is the one who get me into him, so you know

but really mystery white boy is kind of amazing in parts, like E3 said

So I was browsing The Wire's 50 best albums of 1994 list and came across Buckley's Grace on the list(?!???!!) and thought, hey, why not pull this out for what's probably my first spin in 5-6 years. And it's not half bad. I don't have any of the post-death releases which I've always imagined consist of Columbia raping Buckley's corpse over and over for a profit, but Grace is, well... it's pretty good.

but really mystery white boy is kind of amazing in parts, like E3 said

― mage pit laceration (gbx), Monday, January 25, 2010 11:04 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark

so if you're curious go there

I like some of the stuff on Sketches, too -- "Vancouver", "Morning Theft", and "The Sky Is a Landfill" stand up to any of his other work imo

Hunt down the Glastonbury bootleg if you can - it was recorded for radio by the BBC so the sound's perfect, and everything on it is spot on - way better than Mystery White Boy or Live á l'Olympia. Includes the best version of Dream Brother. Plus no Hallelujah in sight.

I've always been a big fan of the song "Jewel Box" off Sketches. Perhaps the sweetest melody he ever composed.

So I was browsing The Wire's 50 best albums of 1994 list and came across Buckley's Grace on the list(?!???!!) and thought, hey, why not pull this out for what's probably my first spin in 5-6 years. And it's not half bad. I don't have any of the post-death releases which I've always imagined consist of Columbia raping Buckley's corpse over and over for a profit, but Grace is, well... it's pretty good.

― ilxor has truly been got at and become an ILXor (ilxor), Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:37 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

"Grace" also has a great sense of melancholy in the style of Poe, Swinburne, and Baudelaire. The album is so eerie to me. It's cool that The Wire put it on their list!

It's actually as much jazz-influenced as by pop and traditional singer/songwriters. Which is something that all of Buckley's legion of imitators have never gotten right, and is why they all bore the shit out of me.