You had to see Jeff Buckley to believe him.
Jon Pope, a veteran of the Australian music industry, was tour manager for the singer on his first visit to Australia, in 1995. Three days after Buckley’s first show at the Metro in Sydney on 28 August, the road crew were preparing for a much more intimate gig at the Lounge in Melbourne for an audience of a few hundred.
Pope had an unusual request to make, per Buckley’s management. “You know those old cash registers that would go ‘ping’ when the tray would pop out? I had to tell them to turn them all off,” he remembers, laughing. The bar manager was aghast. “You’ll understand why when he starts playing,” Pope tried to reassure him.
When Buckley and his band took the stage, the effectiveness of the edict became apparent. Buckley’s voice, and his band, soared and swooped. It was a masterclass in dynamics: in the silences between and sometimes during songs (the brief drop-out in So Real, for example), you could hear the proverbial pin drop.
It is now 30 years since that first tour by Buckley to Australia (where his career first began to gain international traction) and 31 years since the release of his only finished album, Grace. The anniversary coincides with a revival of interest in Buckley, with a documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, showing first at Sundance and the Melbourne international film festival earlier this month. And in September, singer Katie Noonan is touring a 20-date Buckley tribute show, with shows at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall and Sydney’s Enmore theatre already sold out.
As an 18-year-old, Noonan saw Buckley for the first and only time on his second and last tour of Australia, in February 1996. “I had never heard a voice used that way – never before, never since,” she says. “He was a once-in-a-lifetime.”
Buckley’s death in 1997 at the age of 30 (an impromptu swim in the Wolf River in Memphis ended tragically when he was dragged underwater by a passing tugboat and drowned) has left a difficult legacy. A contentious unfinished album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, was released in 1998, followed by a seemingly endless stream of live recordings and assorted barrel-scrapings.
Those live recordings are almost all variations of the songs Buckley recorded for Grace, one of the most acclaimed albums of the last three decades. Buckley simply didn’t live long enough to fulfil his enormous talent. Overfamiliarity has bred a degree of contempt. So too the many pale imitators, not to mention the buskers laying waste to his version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on seemingly every street corner.
As a witness to those shows though, I can confirm: Buckley was the real deal. A few days after his performance at the Lounge, I drove 13 hours from Brisbane to Sydney to see the last gig of the tour at the Phoenician Club, recorded by Triple J for Live at the Wireless. (I still give thanks to my then-partner, who brazenly purchased our tickets before we were officially an item.)
He had it all. He could sing like a bird, he was a great guitar player, he was a superb bandleader, he had the songs (Lover, You Should Have Come Over sounded like an instant standard). He was also a gifted interpreter of other artists’ material: no one else could tear through the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, then slip effortlessly into Nina Simone’s crushing Lilac Wine. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he was terribly good-looking.
Warwick Brown, who runs the Melbourne record emporium Greville Records, was an early convert. Already a fan of Buckley’s father Tim, he’d heard Jeff’s first release, the EP Live at Sin-é, before Grace appeared in August 1994. “The day it came in, we stayed back after work to smoke a joint and lie on the floor and listen to it,” he remembers. “It just blew our minds.”
Brown points out that if Buckley isn’t exactly a hip name to drop now, he wasn’t at the time, either. Coming at the tail end of grunge, Buckley was covering Van Morrison, Édith Piaf, even Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Alongside Hallelujah and Lilac Wine, Grace also featured a rendition of Benjamin Britten’s Corpus Christi Carol as delicate as gossamer.
But it wasn’t an instant hit. “It was the sort of record you had to turn people on to, which is hard to believe these days,” Brown remembers. The Lounge show was full of hardcore music nerds, so perhaps Buckley was preaching to the choir, but once the show finished, “everyone was a fanatic”. By the time his Australian tour finished at the Phoenician Club, he was a star.
Six months later, Buckley was back in Australia, playing more shows to much bigger rooms. “We tripled the audience,” Pope says. It was unusual for an international artist to return to Australia within such a short time frame, but Australia (and increasingly France) remained his stronghold. Back in the United States, he was still a cult act.
Noonan drove from Brisbane down to Seagulls, a sports club on the Gold Coast, to see him: “It was a hugely transformative event in my life. I just went, whatever this band is doing, I want to do that, whatever that is.” But to Brown, Buckley looked exhausted at this point. “I heard someone say ‘It’s great to have you back,’ and he said, ‘I haven’t been home since last time I was here.’”
After Buckley died, he says, “It was so painful that I don’t think I could listen to him for a long time without that sadness that came with it. I just couldn’t believe it. It was such a tragic, silly way to die, and I wish we were talking about his fifth album, not his first one. He was a phenomenal artist.”
It is the younger music fans who come through Brown’s shop who are the acid test of Grace’s longevity. “We’re all jaded old men, but then 20-year-olds come in and go, ‘What the fuck is this?!’ That’s a sign of good music. Grace is a record that just never stops selling. We would sell a copy of that record every single day.”
Really, though. You had to be there.
