The artist who completely devastated Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley once described himself as “the warped lovechild of Nina Simone and all four members of Led Zeppelin”, which probably falls a bit short of capturing his essence as a performer, but does showcase his willingness to talk enthusiastically about his influences.
Buckley’s singular voice, while most easily traced back to his famous father Tim Buckley, was really a creation built from his own keen ear as a kid in the 1980s. He seemed to enjoy his favourite artists on a spiritual level, absorbing subtle elements from each of them and channelling them through his own remarkable pipes.
Buckley was never shy about paying direct tribute to his heroes in the form of a cover song, either, with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ being the titanic example that almost unfortunately dwarfs all others. The first cover track on Buckley’s celebrated 1994 debut album, Grace, appearing two slots ahead of ‘Hallelujah’, is ‘Lilac Wine’, an old Broadway tune from the 1950s that was penned by James Shelton and recorded by everyone from Eartha Kitt to Elkie Brooks. It was Nina Simone’s 1966 version of the song, however, that most directly inspired Buckley’s take on ‘Lilac Wine’. To Buckley fans, this would come as no surprise, as there were few artists he was ever more effusive about than Simone.
“Most of Nina Simone’s songs completely devastate me, although she didn’t write [most of] them,” Buckley told journalist Tony Gervino in 1994, just weeks before the release of Grace.
If Buckley viewed himself as being one-half Simone in his DNA (or one-fifth if we’re counting all the members of Led Zeppelin equally), it’s certainly the side that takes the reins when he’s at his most soulful, vulnerable, and intimate. The challenge of trying to tap into that part of himself didn’t seem to be as intimidating to Buckley as it would have been to most male singers in the testosterone-heavy 1990s. Along with ‘Lilac Wine’, he regularly covered several other Nina Simone songs during his early performances, including ‘If You Knew’, ‘That’s All I Ask’, ‘The Other Woman’, ‘Be Your Husband’, and ‘Wild Is the Wind.’
Despite having a father with an otherworldly soulful and expressive voice of his own, Jeff actually spent very little time with Tim Buckley, who was separated from his mother and died in 1975 at just 28 years of age. Instead, Jeff grew up as a self-described “trailer trash” in Orange County, California, raised by his mother, Mary and a stepdad, Ron. They were the ones who helped provide the foundation for Jeff’s musical taste, including Simone and Led Zeppelin, as well as the Who, Pink Floyd, and Bob Dylan.
“A lot of things that Dylan did are so impressionistic,” Buckley told Gervino in that same interview, “even though his originals are supposed to be folky. Like ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’: If I was a woman and he sang that to me, I’d be like, ‘Whatever you want, Bob. You want casual sex whenever you want it and still be with your wife? I don’t care.’”
When asked if there was a specific song from the past that he wished he’d written, the 27-year-old Buckley responded with similar exuberance.
“I’d like to write something like ‘Moanin’ for My Baby’ by Howlin’ Wolf, and I’d also like to write something like [Gerry and the Pacemakers’] ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ I have schoolgirl crushes on a lot of songs that never seem to go away. Lots of Cocteau Twins. . . . and the Smiths! [stands up abruptly, then sits back down] I wish I’d written half the fucking Smiths catalog. There are so many: ‘I Know It’s Over’; I wish I’d written ‘How Soon Is Now?’ I wish I’d written ‘Holidays in the Sun’ by the Sex Pistols. I could go on forever, and I know you don’t have forever.”
Sadly, we didn’t.
