Jeff Buckley, “Grace” turns 30

We already proposed in June an excerpt from the book by Dave Lory with Jim Irvin published by “Il Castello”. Today, thirty years after the release of the only studio album by the late singer-songwriter, we propose by kind permission of the publisher a selection of the fifth chapter of the volume, dedicated precisely to “Grace”.

In hindsight, it’s a given that “Grace” works great, but honestly, it’s an unlikely collection of mismatched material, ranging from “Last Goodbye” to “Lilac Wine” to “Corpus Christi Carol” to “Eternal Life.” Not to mention everything that happens in the evolution of the individual songs. Some sound mournful, almost suffocated and empty; others are teeming with ideas, between guitar textures, Mick Grondahl’s melodic bass lines, the jazzy inflections of Mattie Johnson’s drums, and then a truly unexpected touch of strings that on “Last Goodbye” sound like the orchestra of a Bollywood movie.

Jeff’s head was exploding with ideas – like those eighteen albums he was anxious to make – such a mess that figuring out where to start was his biggest challenge in approaching the record. He raised the bar. He said he wanted a record that hit harder than “Led Zeppelin II.” Knowing him, there was no doubt he was capable of that. He continually surprised us with what he could do.

“Grace” could have been a crazy outburst of intertwined influences and technique, a sort of Frank Zappa on speed. Instead, it is a balanced artifact to the gram. Some people who knew Jeff well were initially disappointed.
from the fact that the album didn’t release that skin-deep intensity, the ecstasy that Jeff was able to transmit on stage during his performances.

But perhaps an entire recording made like this would have been excessive. Exhausting. Between emotional highs and lows, he created the right breath in which each listener could find his own story. Avoiding contemporary trends, he created an album that has remained in time and in the affection of the public, compared to many other records of the 90s praised as soon as they came out: he gave us a timeless masterpiece.

Steve Berkowitz hit the ground running with the project when they only had four original songs, plus a bunch of covers. It was again a classic “you packed a parachute, right?” move. As Andy Wallace, who co-produced the album with Jeff, said, “I wasn’t worried. I had complete faith in the team.”
“The whole process of making this album was a total slog,” Jeff gushed in his interview for the EPK (electronic press kit) distributed to the media to introduce “Grace.”

“A date was chosen, a studio was chosen, a producer was chosen, but I didn’t even have a band yet. I thought I could get a band together in time. ‘Last-minute’ is my middle name, hyphenated. It all worked out in the end, though. I knew I was going to work with Andy after I spoke to him at Sony. We talked about Sun Ra and Little Willie John, how to record, how I wanted to record. I wanted a studio that was big, with the band and everything set up, twelve microphones, live recording, and that’s basically what we did.”

Any one of Jeff’s more or less regular Sin-é tracks, about a dozen in total, could easily have ended up on the album, and he actually tried them all.
“The basic idea was to capture a complete body of work and then pick the best,” says Andy Wallace.

“Usually in the evening, after dinner and a few bottles of wine, Jeff would come back to the studio and sing a little more: from those sessions came the album covers plus some extra songs, like ‘Satisfied Mind’, ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Alligator Wine’ released later. Whoever was there became the audience, and it was all very casual. No direction or precise directive. ‘Alligator Wine’ sung in the style of Screaming Jay Hawkins was a big surprise for me, as for everyone else. And yet, so engaging. I liked the fact that those songs brought out the humorous element, which was a really cool interlude in his solo shows. He did ‘Night Flight’, the Led Zeppelin one, and a beautiful version of ‘Calling You’ from the soundtrack of the film “Bagdad Cafe”. Now, that last one I really wish we had included on the final album; there was something magical about it.

Jeff never sang the same song twice. To the point where on some tracks it was nearly impossible to get the vocals to dub. If a track was about 90% done but needed a little tweaking here and there, he would sing it in such a different style from the original that I would be like, “You’re not helping me here!” To which he would reply, “Well, the new track is better though,” and I would reply, “Well, maybe not!” I remember well
that wicked little game, it came up often! We never really clashed, but sometimes I felt frustrated.”

And then there’s “Hallelujah.”

“A Leonard Cohen song,” Jeff says in the EPK. “But I did a version of it with different verses, the ones Leonard didn’t sing on “Various Positions.” I first heard it in the John Cale remake on “I’m Your Fan” (a tribute album to Leonard Cohen). That’s my favorite. I learned it on the fly the night before a concert at Sin-é where I started singing it. Someone suggested putting it on the album. And I said okay. No.
I totally wanted to though, because, I repeat, it comes from Sin-é and I just wanted to look forward. But it’s a fantastic song. I wish I had written it.”
Jeff’s reinterpretation of this beautiful, multi-layered song has become the definitive standard version for many, and his reinterpretation has been covered many times since. The explosive mix of sexual tension and altar-boy purity made his cover practically perfect. He had fully grasped that duality and exploited it to the fullest. He always loved singing
that crescendoing melody, and certainly benefited from the surprise effect on an audience that had never heard it before. I don’t know if Jeff was aware that Cohen had written – in number, it seems – “maybe as many as 80 verses for the song over a period of at least four years,” filling several notebooks with them. He did note, however, that John Cale’s version differed from the original in style and register.

Grace was finally released on August 23, 1994.
From my point of view, it was already a classic.

Yet it was anything but a triumph at first. The reviews were generally great, save for a couple of overblown ones. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called Jeff a “syncretic asshole” (yes, I had to look that up myself). Considering that this was basically the main local paper where Jeff lived, it would have hurt him to read that description in our paper. Luckily, we were in the Kingdom.
United when the album came out and the reception was much more positive there, although, despite peak sales in the first week, we failed to reach the Top 30 of the album chart.
Not exactly a hit, then. Was Columbia worried? “Columbia was a hit company. It always has been,” Berkowitz explains. “But everyone immediately realized that Jeff was an exception in every way the first time they saw him play.
“(For Jeff) breaking in through the side door of the music business was a good idea. Breaking in through the front door was not for him or like him, because he would have risked getting burned in a blaze.”
We knew the deal was solid and that Columbia had already made a significant investment; in other words, we knew they would never drop us. Dylan and Springsteen had both made debut albums that had been flops. Again, it was a matter of giving them time to grow. Christgau and his ilk could go fuck themselves. Jeff knew that trying to please the critics at all costs was a waste of time. In his heart
he also knew that one day he would make the record that would make everyone’s jaw drop. The fact is, according to most of the people we met, he had already released that epochal record.

“I loved ‘Grace,’ regardless of my involvement in it. I thought it was a huge hit right away. But I wasn’t shocked that it didn’t become an overnight success,” says Andy Wallace. “It was a first album, after all, and it didn’t have any instantly irresistible radio hits. It takes a few listens to be mesmerized. But once you get to know it, there’s so much depth and passion that you become addicted to it.”