From an interview in 2016 while in Vienna, Austria.
1. Is it fair to say your relationship with Jeff was initially more personal than musical — at what point did you discover his musical talent?
Yes, absolutely, though only for a short time. The way Jeff and I met really blows my mind to this day as it was so beyond subtle, and totally out of our control. It was predestined. We literally bumped into each other three days in a row, in three completely different areas of Manhattan. It was crazy. By the third time, we acknowledged that meeting each other was obviously meant to be and we set up a coffee date. He called the next day and asked where I was living, and when I told him, he freaked and laughingly asked me to stick my head out of my window to see if I could see him. I pulled the phone over and continued talking to him as I stuck my head out and I said no, I can't see you, where are you? He said that he was living a block and a half away from me. We were both on Stanton just south of Houston though I was one building or so up from the corner of Stanton on Allen, and if I had been just one building over, I could've seen him. That was shocker number four. We had a great chat and met the next day at his girlfriend's and walked over to the Jones Diner, which became one of our favourite hangouts. It was at that first meeting that I mentioned that I was a musician with a background in theatre and dance and that I'd been busking all over Canada and Spain and writing songs and was working five part-time jobs and one of them was at First St. Cafe. He laughed and said he had just agreed to sing there the next Thursday, and couldn't believe that additional coincidence, that I worked there, and I promised that I'd be there whether I was working or not. It was during that first real hang that we realized how much we had in common, almost like twins, although he was almost five years older. It was like looking in a mirror. We even dressed the same. Wool pants and boots, suspenders, loose white t-shirts, Pendleton shirts, sometimes a fedora or beret. Very Beat. Kerouac. We loved the same music, Nina Simone, Zeppelin, Cohen, Dylan, The Smiths, it was uncanny. We were both raised by mechanics. I still didn't know about Tim although I was already aware of every other significant folk singer-songwriter of Tim's era, something that really impressed Jeff. My mother was Maria, his was Mary. Needless to say, I didn't care if this guy was going to be any good at that gig, he was definitely my instant brother. He called me 'Gussie'.
But I was at that First St. gig a few days later. There was no p.a., all acoustic, and maybe 20 people there. Some listening, some not at all. The espresso machine, added to the din coming off Houston, was louder than Jeff, and it was hard to hear him but you could tell he was the real thing. He was a bit moody that night, struggling to be heard. I could tell that he sang really well but it wasn't coming through like it should. At the end of that night he mentioned to me that he was starting a new gig on Mondays that he was excited about, at a place called Sin-e at the end of St. Mark's and a few nights later I saw him blow the roof off the place. I wept profusely at times. I couldn't help it. Of course he had us in stitches as well. Jeff was so funny! The place was half-full. It was beyond belief. I had never seen anything like what I saw that night. It was everything I had ever loved being pulled in and synthesized into one guy who was my instant best friend. From that night on it was On. I barely missed a Monday after that until I split NYC the following spring with some help from Jeff.
2. Do you think it was in his destiny to make a record such as Grace?
3. Did you ever hear any of the songs that ended up on Grace? What impact did they have on you? (He was working with Last Goodbye and Lover around the time of Sin-E, if I have my facts straight.)
As far as tracks from Sin-e that ended up on Grace, I mostly remember Mojo Pin and Eternal Life, which were always sung. Maybe I heard pieces of Last Goodbye, which wasn't quite completed yet. And of course the covers that ended up on Grace, those songs were staples in his sets.
You know, the Jeff that I knew was really struggling with songwriting. I don't mean that in any derogatory way at all. I mean, the writing was happening and it was flowing, but I think the tunesmith thing was a struggle. We never went anywhere without our journals, even long before we met. That's just what you did. We would talk about our struggles with that, but Jeff, I don't think was incredibly confident in that aspect of himself, and neither was I. For myself, I had an inkling that I would need about another decade of work to get anywhere near the kind of writing I was shooting for. I think that as far as our friendship went there was nothing that was too out of bounds to talk about. We would eventually talk at length about his father, for example, but he was a little secretive about his writing. This was way before any perceived record business pressure or anything that people talked about later. It was just the natural hunger to get close to the bone with the writing itself and that true artistic ambition that never lets up, and as I had it myself, it was totally normal. We all hid some of our stuff from one another to a certain extent, that's just the game, not wanting to 'spook the horse' I guess.
As far as the covers, there's an old saying that maybe belongs more to a generation like ours, that inherited these ideas about paying your dues by playing covers as a rite of passage, when that idea of apprenticeship in the trade of rock and roll was still alive. This was something that Jeff and I believed in one hundred percent. Guys like us knew thousands of songs inside and out. But the saying was 'sing your covers like originals and your originals like covers' and Jeff did that, you know? He embodied that with the utmost humility and dedication and that was something we bonded on. If some of his songs weren't where he wanted them to be, he bravely workshopped the heck out of them in that public lab that Sin-e became for him. He'd nestle them between these carefully chosen, specifically-curated masterpieces that showed his greatness as a player and singer, and spoke to his soul so deeply that they came out the other side to you. He wasn't pissing around in there.
To me, now, the whole initiation process into musicianship feels totally lost and it's so easy for people to think of Jeff as someone who just woke up one day and was the monster guitar player and singer that he was. He worked at it all of his life in addition to having that innate talent. And one of the major things that I took away from our time together was the blessing of being a part of that passion. Meeting someone who matched mine and showed me that it was beyond ok. That it was the only way. At a tender time in my young life when I really thought I had to reinvent the wheel, one of the major things Jeff taught me was to wear my heroes on my sleeve, he told me that they would eventually lead me to myself, and he was right.
By the late spring of '93, I was twenty years old and I had been in NYC about a year, and I was coming apart at the seams. A lot of people I knew were all junked up and I was creeped out by it. I wasn't doing well, my fatigue was catching up with me. I was feeling really lost and Jeff put me up for a bit and then gave me five hundred bucks to take a week-long Greyhound trip back up to Canada's arctic. I'd basically been away from home since age thirteen and needed to reboot. We were both convinced that I'd be back within a few months and I was certain that I was going to be his guitarist for a while but it just never happened. I ended up moving back to Spain and I got healthy and kept writing. I even wrote an album's worth of songs for him to sing that was a kind of a continuation of some jamming we'd be doing in his new apartment before I left. We kept missing each other and I never saw him again. He never heard that stuff in the end. Live at Sin-e came out the next spring in Canada, and Europe I think, and within that, in the liner notes at the very bottom, awaited the last message I would ever receive from him in the living flesh. It was very moving. Our friendship felt immortalized by those 2 sentences and still does. It marked me.
That Sin-e record proved that he could go in any direction in just 4 songs. I was incredibly proud. Then a year a half later came Grace. I don't know how many tears I cried when I finally heard that. For the both of us. Because he did it! He made the great masterpiece. And I was a part of it. That's how it felt. I didn't stop playing it for a few months straight. After his passing, I didn't listen to any of it for years. A lot of years.
4. How big an influence was Jeff on your own musical career — was that something you discussed with him?
Well, I was immensely influenced, and incredibly reinforced in what I was doing by our friendship, and by my time with him, but I was also, unfortunately, greatly affected by the nature of his passing, and the whole aura around it, and the huge loss, and the massive fame, and you know, all of that stuff that came after, and those are two different Jeff Buckleys.
Jeff got me my very first gig, not only in NYC, but ever, in a real club. I was 19. I had been performing all of my life, and in front of some very big crowds, but never as myself, with my own songs. He really pushed me to do that. He sat right in front of me and never took his eyes off me. He whispered encouragement between songs. It was a terrifying experience. He was so generous with me. Just being with him was so inspiring. It was fire. I moved to NYC to get that answer and I believe that Jeff was one of the angels and messengers for me in my life. I found out that yes, this is what I wanted to do, and I also found out that I wasn't ready. I just wasn't.
It really hit me hard when we lost him. It destroyed me for a long time. I wanted nothing to do with the music business for years after all of that and by the time I was ready for it, it had all changed so much anyway. I was very hurt, and very uncomfortable with everything around it. Confused I guess. Jeff wasn't the only famous friend I had, but certainly the most. I just kept writing and improving, pretending like it never happened. I wasn't chasing anything beyond that. Eventually I found my way in and started making records of my own.
I've never been a real fan of the word career. I'm not sure Jeff was either. I mean, you're an artist! You've dedicated your whole life to something you would probably do for free and people dangle words like that around. Success, that's another one. What did Leonard Cohen say? Success is nothing more than survival? Tom Waits once said, 'It's not enough to go out on a limb, you have to be willing to saw it off'. I mean, some people do that and some don't. I don't know. Jeff did. I did. Obviously, yes, it was something we discussed daily, but not in the way you would suppose. It's just your whole life, because it's the only thing you've got. Like my song 'Travel On' says, 'if you do it, it'll kill you, and if you don't, you'll die inside', so how much choice is really involved? Like Leonard said 'I guess you go for nothing if you want to go that far'. You don't go for nothing, but you have to risk the chance of that. And now, with it all being so DIY, it seems really hard to juggle being the artist with the careerist, more than ever. I've never been any good at the latter. We're from a different time. The heroes that we had in common were the Beautiful Losers and real poets, not conventioneers. For what it's worth.
5. Why do you think Grace has proved to be such an influential — and important — album?
What are my thoughts on Grace now? It came out during that whole bullshit MTV grunge and alternative rock scene that we both despised and didn't feel a part of whatsoever and it kicked ass. It blew minds. It succeeded at everything it was supposed to succeed at. I mean, what can you say about Grace? Can you imagine the combined amount of sheer ambition and pressure that must have been a part of that? To reach as many people as it did? To cut through and compete with all of that endless white noise that was being shoved down our throats and surpass it? And to still have the Art side as well, to appease all of that simultaneously, made it an artistic and commercial masterpiece. It put Jeff on the map. It also successfully married so many things and that took a lot of guts. It was almost too much for one record. Grace really accomplished what it set out to do and I would salute everyone involved with that one. It was really bold. Bold art. Bold business. A really rare combination. Was it Jeff's destiny to make it? Yes. Was it the be all end all for Jeff? I don't think so at all. It was a start! It was a key to everything that would come in the future, and everything Jeff had been holding onto for too long. What a great record. A testament to one of the greatest human beings. A golden soul. It may sound like empty words, but Jeff was exactly what you think he was when you hear and feel that light coming through. That vulnerable and honest sweet purity of heart. His kindness and capacity for love matched his great gift. It was more than the music. Try wrapping your head around that. I don't know the significance of it all. I don't know why I was so lucky to be there, to be that close, and to have him touch my life the way he did. Someday it will be revealed to me.
6. What's the genesis of your song 'Other side'?
Well I wrote it maybe three years after he passed away. It was my first attempt at writing something about him and I had a huge sound in my head. I wrote it on an old Gibson acoustic but heard huge electric guitars in my head like Crazy Horse, like that. It was written extremely quickly, within a night. I guess the song comes from the point of view of the survivor, you know? The one left behind to face real life, or the real world, or whatever you want to call it, with the aging and responsibility and shedding of skins and all of that 'great compromise' that inevitably comes. I hoped that the song would be fairly sublime and honest, you know? Without over-glorifying anything. I think it leaves plenty of room for the imagination but obviously leaves you wondering who got the better deal, because the singer of the song isn't even sure. The whole thing is a complaint and a question and a salute and postcard to this brother you love and miss so much. The 'Other Side' thing has more than one meaning in the song. There's always that possibility you see these people again, you know, on the Other Side, and sometimes that notion is all it takes to get through. It's a nice notion. It's always been my wish to write another song about our time together. Maybe someday. A lighter one maybe.
additional:
One of my major regrets is not trying harder to get a hold of him after Grace, but we were both constantly on the road. It was impossible. His phone was cut off or changed, I couldn't locate him and I didn't even have one. This was pre-internet. I would've had to go back to NYC and he wasn't even there. I was in my own pain as well, my own battles with depression and poverty, and that constant continental drift in my life. How badly I wished I could have been there in those Memphis days, or been around to give him back some of his own positive and nourishing medicine, the kind he had given me, around that time when they were trying to make the follow-up, you know? I mean, I can't even put that into words. All those stories of frustrated rage. Smashing things maybe. That need for perfection. Jeff and I used to stomp on and smash CDs we had just paid money for in fits of anger just to prove a point. Just because the need for the perfect thing was so great. I like to think I could've helped. I don't know. I wish he had been given the chance to live in a paradigm where the weight wasn't all on one or two records, and he was able to record and release all the time. Maybe not tour so much. I don't know enough about that whole time in Jeff's life. I had to stop thinking about all of that and get on with mine at some point. I'll never know the pressure he was under. Not from without. And from within, well, it's just the heartbreak of destiny isn't it? Jeff soldiered through it and gave and gave. I mean, didn't he? He didn't have to do that. We have to be thankful for the light that made him what he was, and the light he gave back to the world.