Jeffrey Karma
New Musical Express, UK, March 19 1994
by John Mulvey
"I'm a loser baaay-beee!" JEFF BUCKLEY is staggering
down a freezing New Jersey street, swathed in a huge furry coat,
scaring small children and turning Beck's dumb-ass anthem into a
bellowing operatic aria. He's not a loser by a long way, but he
is an incredible misfit.
Buckley doesn't fit any comfortable stereotypes of what either a
singer -- or a human being, come to that -- should be. Watch him
live as, accompanied only by himself on electric guitar, his
voice swoops and sobs with an extraordinary passion. It's like
Mark Eitzel possessed by the spirit of Otis Redding. His natural
father, Tim Buckley, re-invented folk music on his own terms in
the late 60's and early 70's, flying off on wild jazz tangents
with a nerve-damaging voice. And now Jeff is scrambling
expectations as a post-punk troubadour. When he sings, it's
remarkable as anything you'll hear all year. Honestly.
Meet Jeff Buckley offstage -- distant, lost, swinging from an
idealistic hippy intensity to a parallel universe sense of humour
-- and you'll find a weird, wired loner totally out of step with
the world : "Not even behind,
or ahead... just not... in sync," as he puts it in his own charismatic,
pause-punctuated way. He's a star... by accident.
Buckley grew up in southern California, shunted from school to
school and town to town by his wandering mother and stepfather,
when he was six or seven, towards the end of Tim's maverick life.
"He left before I was born, and
he never wrote or called or anything. I met him for a week, and
he sat me on his knee but we really didn't talk. I didn't really
go to him for inspiration or instruction, but, yeah... I've got
the same parts..."
By his mid-teens, Buckley had been to over a dozen schools,
including a spell in Anaheim, home of Disneyland and a place he
calls "A wellspring of hatred
for me, because of its straightness and conservatism and how
debilitating that is to any artistic soul [Ahhhhh - Ed]." And at every school he was a misfit.
"Maybe it's because I just have
a different experience of people. When I see them I see... their
mothers and fathers, I see how old they are inside. It's strange,
it's like seeing ghosts everywhere. I don't go on what people say
so much, I go on their voice, I go on their energy."
"And sometimes, when I talk," he says, completely deadpan, "I just don't make any sense."
What do you see when you look in the mirror
"A little geeky kid. Er, an old man... Both. Sometimes I
see... a really sexually obsessed woman."
Does that even come out?
"Oh yeah, when I sing. I just
see sex in everything, it's the energy that surrounds everything.
I appreciate sex like I appreciate my skin, and my teeth, and my
dreams."
Meanwhile, back in the material world... Buckley left California
in his late teens, arrived in New York's arty East Village,
dumped the bands that were dragging him down and picked up a vast
and suitably eclectic selection of influences -- "The
typical holy trinity of Beatles, Hendrix, and Zeppelin. Billie
Holiday, Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, Bob Dylan, the Pistols, Duke
Ellington, the Velvets, Pixies, I'm a Patti Smith freak --
f-reak!"
He also picked up a mad and ragged band of followers, thanks to
his status as s freak magnet.
"My identity, my soul,
welcomes... extraordinary, possible dangerous, possibly stupid
experiences. And New York is full of beautiful, strange people.
Like Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, like The Tree Man, a street
guy who's a good luck charm. If you're ever in New York and you
see him, tip him and you'll have good luck for the rest of the
evening. He walks around with various shubbery strapped to his
back that shoots out over his head like a crown of ferns, or huge
palm fronds, or flowers."
Buckley's about to leave all this behind for a while to bring his
mesmerising show to Britain for a few low-key dates. His album --
with a band -- is just about finished and set for a June release,
and a live EP, that goes some way to catching all this fantastic,
pretentious, ambitious, endlessly beautiful music, is out any day
now on Big Cat. Don't miss any of it.
Do you want to be a star, Jeff?
"That's secondary. No, I wanna
find these things that I smell in the distance, I wanna dig to
them, I wanna swim down to them, I wanna drown in them."
Do you think you take things too seriously?
He pauses then stares intently, with his father's eyes. "I don't know what that means."
