The bands Jeff Buckley was forever grateful touring with: “Absolute angels”
Was there ever a time where Jeff Buckley would have felt most at home?
His music never sounded like anything else, and while the 1990s may have been like the Wild West, he probably could have held his own in the 1970s next to people like Led Zeppelin if he had the opportunity to play during that time. But even in the age of grunge, Buckley was able to make a couple of friends along the way.
If you look at the music that turns up on Grace, though, it’s hard to put everything into a neat box. There are plenty of moments that sound like they would fit right in next to the other hard rock bands of the day, but there’s also the jazzy chords on a song like ‘Lover You Should’ve Come Over’ and ‘So Real’ that sound like something Steely Dan would have come up with if they suddenly had a massive fixation on hard rock. It wasn’t normal by any stretch, but not being normal was the flavour of the day in lots of ways.
Think about it for a second. If someone had told industry insiders that one of the biggest bands in the world would arrive in the 1990s donning flannel shirts and a frontman that sang gibberish on a song called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, they would have probably laughed in your face. That simply didn’t happen, so when that door was smashed open, getting Buckley into the mainstream was going to be no trouble at all.
It also helped that every song on his debut was fantastic. While ‘Hallelujah’ may have been the one tune to become the staple of alternative rock cover songs, everything from the title track ‘Grace’ to ‘Eternal Life’ are classics in the same way that Pearl Jam songs are from around that same time.
But even when Seattle was quickly becoming the mecca of all things rock and roll, Buckley did have an affinity for bands like Soundgarden. Not only did both acts have a singer whose voice could soar into the highest ranges anyone had ever heard, but after Chris Cornell heard Buckley sing on tour, they struck up the kind of friendship that is all too rare among musicians. It’s a cutthroat industry, but Buckley only remembered them being accommodating when he first began.
It was certainly a risk going out with bands like Soundgarden and Tad back in the day, but Buckley felt like they were sent from the heavens, saying, “Soundgarden and Tad were a pretty weird sight in Milwaukee when we opened up for them. All of them turned out to be absolute angels. I always knew that Chris, Matt, Brad, and Kim were great, but it was especially great that Tad was a honey. The crowd was surprisingly nice to me, and they adored Tad, and they worshiped Soundgarden. I’m sure they couldn’t wait for me to get off, but they were very polite.”
Then again, there’s a good chance that not many people understood what they were seeing yet. It was already a culture shock for people to listen to tunes like ‘Outshined’ back in the day, so when you have an opener that throws in tunes like ‘Dream Brother’ into the mix, it’s definitely going to be a change of pace by design. But when Buckley reached up into the stratosphere, most people knew that he was the real deal before the song was even over.
While Cornell was shattered when learning about Buckley’s death, it’s best to remember the kind of musician that he was while he was still here. We might still have sketches of where he might have gone later in his career on the posthumous material, but even if he couldn’t finish them, you can still hear something incredibly pure whenever listening to his voice on those tapes.
