The singer Chris Cornell called a rare treasure of music: “Truly captivating”
You don’t get legends like Chris Cornell coming around very often in rock and roll.
The ideal rock and roll frontman has yet to be made, but Cornell certainly got as close to musical perfection as anyone else other than Robert Plant in terms of raw grit and musical complexity whenever he performed. But for all of his musical credentials, he was quick to give out praise to those who he thought were able to reach far beyond anything he could do.
Because when looking at the Seattle scene, no one was looking to get famous. It was all well and good that they were able to create fantastic music together, but who was putting their money on Seattle being the next big thing circa 1987? It wasn’t even a possibility to most people, but stranger things have happened in the music world, and by the time that Nirvana blew up, everyone realised that they had an alternative rock answer to Led Zeppelin in the Pacific Northwest.
Cornell would have proudly worn his Zeppelin influence on his sleeve, but he wasn’t looking to be a straight copycat, either. The biggest lesson that Plant and Jimmy Page had to teach was that anything was possible in rock and roll even if it didn’t make the most sense, and while Cornell took that idea to heart when making strange songs like ‘Burden in My Hand’, there were also more than a few hopefuls looking to get their start by mining a few Zeppelin riffs.
But whereas a band like Kingdom Come could have turned into a decent Zeppelin cover band, Jeff Buckley had the same spectral power of Zeppelin in one person. Page and Plant usually had to play off each other before finding the perfect balance of musical styles, but on one listen to Grace, everything is there. The musical complexity, the gorgeous vocal leaps, and the raw power of hard rock is accounted for before the rest of the band storm in, and that’s all down to what Buckley was listening to.
He was never some fly-by-night pretty boy looking to make a quick buck. He had gone back and studied all of those classic records, and whether that was spending hours listening to Patti Smith or working on his songwriting chops by playing Leonard Cohen, he was always trying to find new ways to expand his craft. So once he passed away, Cornell figured that the world had lost a true innovator of the genre.
The grunge wave had already crested by the time Buckley passed, but the idea of not getting any new music from him was heartbreaking, with Cornell recalling, “Jeff Buckley’s voice was truly captivating and he was an outstanding singer. His music and songs have left an original and impressive mark on the music world. My admiration for Jeff Buckley’s music cannot be fully expressed in words about his music and vocal style. A talent like him is one of the rare treasures of the music world.”
And what makes his death even more heartbreaking was knowing what he was going through in the background. Buckley had already been trying to get his sound exactly right on his debut, but when listening to Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, he was clearly on a path to go even further down the musical rabbit hole, especially with tunes that would have absolutely destroyed any live set like ‘Yard of Blonde Girls’ or ‘Vancouver’.
Since Cornell isn’t here anymore, either, though, both he and Buckley seemed to be on parallel paths as disciples of classic rock. Each of them had a hell of a lot of beauty to give the world, but by the time they passed, it didn’t feel like the rest of the world was quite ready for them to stop.
