Jeff Buckley With Sean Fennessey

Yasi is joined by The Big Picture’s Sean Fennessey to dive into the brief, brilliant career of Jeff Buckley. They cover his rise on New York’s café stages and the making of his only studio album, 'Grace,' and they discuss how his singular voice, his wildly varied influences, and his tragic and untimely death helped to shape one of the most enduring myths in modern music. Episode Playlist Listen to the Jeff Buckley playlist HERE CREDITS:Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Sean Fennessey @seanfennesseyProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever. I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 0:45Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite on an expert guest to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about Jeff Buckley. If you've never heard Jeff Buckley, this is your last goodbye to that part of your life. And thank God, honestly, you're gonna be better for it, or worse. I'm not well right now.

• 1:14Yasi Salek?

  My guest today, the host, the esteemed host, you might know him from The New Yorker magazine, host of the Big Picture Podcast, and my grand boss, Sean Finacy.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Hi, hello.

• 1:26Yasi Salek?

  Welcome to the pod, Sean.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Grand boss.

• 1:28Yasi Salek?

  Well, now that we've done some org, some org reorging, you are now my grand boss.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Should we put the org chart for the entire company up on the screen here?

• 1:37Yasi Salek?

  I think that Bandplain listeners are deeply interested in that.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  There probably would be several Reddit threads about it.

• 1:42Yasi Salek?

  There's definitely a Reddit, yeah, absolutely. Sean, thank you so much for coming on, coming on the pod.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for inviting me on the pod.

• 1:49Yasi Salek?

  And just so you guys know, this is not Craven marketing for the...

• 1:55Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Buckley documentary that also comes out today.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  It's Never Over.

• 1:59Yasi Salek?

  It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley, directed by Amy Bird.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:02Yasi Salek?

  You guys should watch it. Um, this is just a coincidence, just a beautiful coincidence.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  This is a coincidence?

• 2:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Is that why I've carved out this period of time?

• 2:09Yasi Salek?

  Coincidence that 60 Songs That Explain the 90s Call on the 2000s has gone back to the 90s to do Jeff Buckley this week and that we are doing Jeff Buckley this week.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  What are you implying about the way that our organization works?

• 2:20Yasi Salek?

  I was simply, I was simply saying, that's all.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Okay. It's so strange though, that you would even make this joke because you love Jeff Buckley.

• 2:28Yasi Salek?

  I do. No, I, I was, I jumped at the chance to have a peg.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32Yasi Salek?

  I love to have a peg.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  You do love to have a peg.

• 2:34Yasi Salek?

  You guys, don't do, don't do that.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  I mean, you've been doing this show for years though. And this is-

• 2:39Yasi Salek?

  We're coming up on five. Can you believe it?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Congratulations. It's very exciting.

• 2:43Yasi Salek?

  My youth has squandered away into Google Docs.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  I certainly can relate to that. I, but I, I, I'm a little surprised that you haven't covered his work, in part because it's a very, in theory, a very conquerable subject.

• 2:55Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  You know, his life was short, his output was limited. And he is someone who has made a very big impact. The people who love him.

• 3:03Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  They love him.

• 3:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I don't know if it's because the show is called Band Display.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:08Yasi Salek?

  And so we tend to veer towards bands and not solo artists, although we've done some solo artists.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  It's interesting that you frame it that way though, too, because Jeff Buckley is that very specific figure who is identified as a solo artist, but who lived within a band.

• 3:24Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  And was kind of, at his, at his peak, was a band guy.

• 3:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  You know, it was, a lot of his stories about his band members kind of orbiting him and how he was feeling and how he communicates with them. So, and there's a long tradition of that, you know, David Bowie is like a guy like that, right?

• 3:38Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Bowie's got a series of bands over the years and interesting characters.

• 3:42Yasi Salek?

  Mike Ronson has a word. Well, Sean, can you tell me before we- Dive headfirst into like the 20 pages where I just speak about the backstory. What your personal history is with Jeff Buckley.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:56Yasi Salek?

  You were a sad guy.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  I continue to be one. I think my reputation is one of distance, but I'm a very emotional person, as my wife will tell you. And yeah, I discovered him as a teenager, like so many people our age did. And my very close friend, Ryan Dombel, who I went to high school with, who went on to become a-

• 4:15Yasi Salek?

  Ryan Dombel writes for Pitchfork.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yes, a music writer of some renown. And he works for Hearing Things Now, worked at Pitchfork for many years. He and I were kind of both in-

• 4:23Yasi Salek?

  I didn't know this piece of your lore, that you had a fellow music journalist-

• 4:27Speaker 02

  He was my best friend in high school.

• 4:28Yasi Salek?

  Best friend.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we loved movies and music and he taught me so much about pop culture. And he definitely was a Buckley fan before I was and put me on to Jeff. And I just kind of slipped into his world. And I think it was probably around the time that he died that I really started getting into his music. Cause I was not up on Grace when it was released, so.

• 4:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because we would have been 12. I don't think I was either. I remember listening in high school, which, because I do think his, and well, this is spoiler alert, he died. His profile rose kind of exponentially after his untimely death.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  It did. And, you know, I'm sure we'll get through, sort of like Grace did not sell through the roof when it was released. And upon his death, I think a lot of people discovered his music. I was one of those teenagers. You know, I think Grace is one of the albums of my lifetime. I think it is incredibly special. And then, so Ryan and I, I think, kind of started going a little deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole with him over time. And I remember very vividly in 99 and 2000, we went to the Angel Orsans Foundation, where there was, there were like an annual celebration of his birthday. And-

• 5:44Yasi Salek?

  It's just past November 17?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yes. And so they would like gather, you know, Michael Tye and band members and they would perform as Black Beatle. Like Beth Orton would perform there, like people who didn't even know him. And you would just go to this church situation in downtown New York when I was 16. And we would just watch these people perform and talk about Jeff. And Mary, his mom, would come and talk about Jeff. And it was like one of the first cults I was a part of, I would say. Like, it was really an unusual thing for a teenage boy to get into, but- I think if you have a hard time like expressing your feelings as a teenager, he's a really powerful vessel.

• 6:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, great conduit. I guess like it makes me think that why I was so excited to do Jeff Buckley is because this is a type of subject that I'm deeply interested in is a figure who has such a mythology built because they had an untimely death or something to that extent. And thus their selfhood is flattened by the storytelling that sort of like takes over and sands off all the rough edges, leaves off parts that don't fit with the narrative. And I kind of like feel it's like my duty, because I hate when people are flattened,

• 7:05Yasi Salek?

  to like bring back all of the texture of a person because that is, that is who they were, you know? So this, I got a little deep into the Jeff Buckley story.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  You did. I think you're trying to perform an act of social reconstruction, right? Which I think is really challenging with someone like this, where there's a lot of media, you know, a lot of interviews. There are several books written about him. You can find clips. We've now, this is, you know, this new documentary is probably the longest piece that's ever been made about his life.

• 7:39Yasi Salek?

  There's that French documentary that I think might be around the same length.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  But the thing is, is like, he definitely has a Cheshire Cat quality.

• 7:46Yasi Salek?

  A hundred percent. It's a bit of a Hall of Mirrors.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he's like hiding things and you can feel him utilizing some of the strategies of his heroes in terms of how he presents himself. So I guess we'll do our best, right? There's only so much that you can do as someone who can't speak for themselves.

• 8:01Yasi Salek?

  We're simply reconstructing based on all available information, which I do feel that often books and documentaries don't really do because they're just trying to tell a story.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  The clean narrative.

• 8:12Yasi Salek?

  Right. And as you know, we don't fuck with clean narratives on this program. All right, let's get started.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  I'm excited.

• 8:19Yasi Salek?

  Jeffrey Scott Buckley, once called himself a shantus with a penis, love. He was very funny. That's, we need to get that out of the way first and foremost. This is the first thing that seems to happen with figures like this, like an Ian Curtis of Joy Division is a great example of Jeff Buckley, because they made such powerful, emotional and serious music that nobody ever wants to talk about how they were extremely hilarious clowns. Because it doesn't, it doesn't jive, right? But they both were very funny. And then my favorite, he called himself an ultra-violent romantic. Same, Jeff Buckley, also very funny, also oceans of darkness inside. He is the son of Tim Buckley, which we'll get into, but not to too much of an extent,

• 9:03Yasi Salek?

  who was a cult figure folk artist in the 60s.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of a folk pop artist.

• 9:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I don't, I don't have any real relationship with Tim Buckley's music. Past Song of the Siren, This Mortal Coil cover. And I've, I didn't spend too much time going back into it, kind of honestly, because it didn't, that was, that was Jeff Buckley's whole thing, his whole career is like, I am not that, like that has nothing to do with me. So I kind of honored that in a way, also literally didn't have time. Do you have a relationship with Tim Buckley's music?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  I, I know it, you know, I, I've certainly listened to Happy Sad and Star Sailor. And I think when you're going through the like, learning process of what were the 60s and 70s about in terms of pop music, I wouldn't say it made like a huge impression on me. He does have this kind of like ethereal melodramatic flair to his music that his son also has.

• 10:00Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  They, they share something. I find their voices to be quite different. And so when, when you hear people making comparisons to them in the 90s, when Jeff is rising, I've always found it a little bit strange because. They seem to be interested in different forms of music.

• 10:14Yasi Salek?

  Hunter, well, yeah. And I think also, what's interesting about Jeff Buckley is that it's almost hard to place what his true voice is, because he can do any voice, right? He said it in an interview. He was like, I can do what Tim Buckley did. But that's not what I do. But he, it was very clear, like, I can do that. Whereas I don't know that Tim Buckley could have done all the things that Jeff could do.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  It's hard to know. Tim Buckley also died young. I think he died at 28. And he showed a, like, a flair for the avant-garde as well.

• 10:44Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Just like his son. And he was interested in jazz. And he probably would have also evolved into some newer strands of exploration. But he happened to be getting popular at a time in, like, the Donovan, you know, Dylan time, where that kind of distant-seeming, pretty boy with a acoustic guitar could kind of transform lives. And so he was in that mode.

• 11:08Yasi Salek?

  That's definitely not ruined my entire life. Did that stop at some point?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 11:14Yasi Salek?

  When the distant-seeming man with the guitar and...

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Does that still work? Like, if you bring an acoustic guitar to a high school party, and you're a high school boy, and you've got some faraway eyes.

• 11:24Yasi Salek?

  I have not.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  And you start playing. Does that work?

• 11:25Yasi Salek?

  I think you might be happy to know that I don't attend high school parties.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  What? I've been led to believe otherwise.

• 11:32Yasi Salek?

  As it's frowned upon.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  What about if you go to a party for a middle-aged media members? If you bring an acoustic, if I bring an acoustic guitar to your holiday party?

• 11:43Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if it would work from you, but...

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Why?

• 11:46Yasi Salek?

  I know too much about you. You're mysterious. I don't know. For me, it works. Geese is seemingly working on plenty of girls.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say that's folky.

• 11:56Yasi Salek?

  It's something.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:57Yasi Salek?

  Cameron Winters is kind of folky.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  See, I heard, the reports I heard from the Geese show was that it was, like, 90% men.

• 12:03Yasi Salek?

  If you get on my algorithm, there's plenty of women

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:06Yasi Salek?

  debasing themselves for Cameron Winter.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 12:09Yasi Salek?

  I do think that it is, as much as like, I absolutely respect and admire Jeff Buckley's complete distancing from I am myself, that's my father. DNAs and genetics are so strong. I mean, you know, my dad made jokes with waiters and waitresses and everybody we encountered my whole life, and I would cringe. And now that's me. I'm using the first name, that's right, Betsy. How's your, that's me. And I'm like, oh, God, the apple does not fall very far from the tree.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Honestly, it sounds like me and your dad would get along great. That's also one of my moves.

• 12:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I turned into him.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Love to chat up a server.

• 12:45Yasi Salek?

  Can't help it. Let's chat up everyone. I follow two Starbucks baristas on Instagram. We are, one doesn't even work there anymore. It's been three years. I've followed his life. He has two beautiful children, and I'm really happy for him.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  That seems unnecessary.

• 12:58Yasi Salek?

  I guess you are not a community-based person. Okay, Jeff Buckley was born in 1966 on November 17th. He is a Scorpio. In Jeff's own words from his interview for the EPK for Grace, "I was born in Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles, California on November 17th, 1966 at 6:49 a.m. I think I'm a Scorpio with Scorpio rising, your place or mine." I'm glad that he said this. Thanks to his birth time, I was able to go and do his chart. That's right, I did Jeff Buckley's astrological chart. It's an insane chart. A Scorpio with a Scorpio rising and a Scorpio Venus, but then a Capricorn moon. Okay, Scorpio is the sign of death and rebirth.

• 13:42Yasi Salek?

  It's the like, it is the skull candle in my room sign. It's the sign of being preoccupied with the darker aspects of life. It's a water sign. There's a lot under the surface. It's about mystery. Scorpios tend to be really mysterious, really passionate, really loyal, determined.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  My wife is a Scorpio, for the record.

• 14:03Yasi Salek?

  It's a wonderful sign. And Taurus and Scorpio get along really well. Scorpio risings are known for their intense, mysterious, and magnetic first impressions, exuding a powerful charisma that draws others in. Sounds very Jeff Buckley to me. Strong sense of justice. We'll get into Jeff Buckley's strong sense of justice. And a desire to connect with others on a deeper, sometimes hidden level. But then he has a Capricorn moon. And Capricorn is, that's the worker sign. That's the hardworking, ambitious, driven, kind of regimented, like, will work 15 hours a day. What's a vacation? I'm not interested in that. And the moon is kind of your subconscious, right?

• 14:44Yasi Salek?

  So like underneath all this like conscious sexuality and darkness is like a very like organized desiring of stability person. And also very critical of themselves, very, can be very pessimistic. And knowing that, when we think about and get into Jeff Buckley's upbringing, knowing this desire for stability is like so heartbreaking. Okay, so that's his, that's his chart. He is a son of Mary, is it Gibert?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  I think so, yes.

• 15:16Yasi Salek?

  Gibert and Tim Buckley, as we said. So Mary Gibert was born to a mother who was of Greek descent, but she was born in Panama. And her father was half American, half Panamanian. They moved to America when she was a child. She grew up playing cello and piano and she had perfect pitch. So the genetics are already popping. She met Tim Buckley in high school in Anaheim. Tim Buckley was born in Washington DC to an Italian-American mother and an Irish-American father, who also was a tenor and had a beautiful voice. They moved to Anaheim and then later Bell Gardens. This is a total kind of aside, but I thought it was so interesting. Bell Gardens is an area of Orange County where at this point, after the Depression,

• 16:00Yasi Salek?

  really attracted households from where the Dust Bowl had hit in the Midwest. Because I think it had, I don't know, a similar, maybe... Thing to do farming or something. I'm not really sure why.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Topographical.

• 16:14Yasi Salek?

  Topographical. But so a lot of people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas moved out there after the Dust Bowl struck and it was more rural than the rest of Orange County. It was called the Billy Goat Acres. And because of that, it had a ton of bars and they all played country and honky tonk. And that's how Tim Buckley got into Johnny Cash and country music because he lived in this specific part of Orange County that had a lot more country music and honky tonk brought over from the Midwest.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 16:43Yasi Salek?

  That was so interesting.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Well, I find that still to be true in California, that there are certain pockets

• 16:46Yasi Salek?

  Bakersfield, obviously.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Of California that feel very much like they're in the middle of Alabama or something.

• 16:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  And not just topographical. I mean, kind of like the character of the people there.

• 16:55Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. Oh, yeah. I mean, we don't have to get into.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  And I don't just mean politically. I just mean that's sort of like what their lifestyle creates.

• 17:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, much of California was farmland, you know? So they meet in high school, Tim and Mary. They start dating. Tim is a senior and Mary's a junior and Mary gets pregnant. This is from the David Brown book, Dream Brother. They get married because she is pregnant, but it turns out she was not pregnant. She didn't know that. She, there's, this is a thing. It's called pseudocytosis, hysterical pregnancy, imagine, you get, you show the whole thing, but in the end, there was no baby. And so they're already married. They stay together. They kind of grow apart. Tim's really getting into his music. He's

• 17:44Yasi Salek?

  trying to get his career popping. He gets a manager, moves up to LA and the manager's like, well, Mary, why don't you move in with me and my family? Tim is living in an apartment with a roommate. And according to Mary in David Brown's book, Tim is having various other relationships, but they are still having relations and she gets pregnant for real this time in early 1966. And this is Jeff. By this time, Tim is in a fairly serious relationship with a woman named Jane. And Mary's mother remembers Tim giving Mary an ultimatum. Divorce or abortion. This is just Mary's mother's recollection. I don't know what happened. And then some of Tim's friends say that it was actually Mary who gave the ultimatum. Career or baby? Probably it's somewhere in between. Nobody, they really probably shouldn't have gotten married. They were too young.

• 18:29Yasi Salek?

  And what happens is they get divorced. Mary names her son Jeffrey, after her last high school boyfriend before Tim. In her words, "My last pure boy-girl relationship, my last pure moment." And then middle name of Scott was in honor of a neighbor and close friend of her family named John Scott Jr., who had died in an accident at the age of 17. Which is, in my opinion, just kind of a weird thing to name your child. But after a dead, a young death person, but I don't have children.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  No judgment?

• 19:01Yasi Salek?

  No, no judgment, just, you know, it just piqued my eyebrow raised. She wanted to call him Scott as his first name, but she thought Scott Jeffrey didn't sound as good as Jeffrey Scott, which is true. And so they named him Jeffrey Scott, but he went by Scotty.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Is Jeff Buckley the most, the coolest person of all time whose name is Jeffrey Scott?

• 19:22Yasi Salek?

  I don't know anyone else.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Is he the coolest Jeff ever?

• 19:25Yasi Salek?

  What about Jeff Beck? I don't know anything about Jeff Beck.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  I like Jeff Beck. He's a wonderful guitarist.

• 19:30Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Amet, pretty cool. Great hot collection.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Jeff Amet is a crucial member of one of my favorite bands, but is he cooler than Jeff Buckley?

• 19:38Yasi Salek?

  No. Well, I don't know.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  A long history of Jeffs.

• 19:42Yasi Salek?

  You're right.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Jeff, I mean Jeff is just an odd name.

• 19:45Yasi Salek?

  It's a rough name.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  You know?

• 19:46Yasi Salek?

  It's true. You don't see that many Jeffs anymore.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  I have plenty of friends named Jeff.

• 19:49Yasi Salek?

  All love and respect to Jeff Chow, who signs our checks.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Jeff Chow, first of all, but Jeff doesn't spell his name in the, the J E F F.

• 19:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Is, is an odd, I mean Jeff Bridges, he's, he's cool.

• 20:01Yasi Salek?

  He's cool. That's spelled with the regular J E F F. It's still Jeff Buckley, though. He's at the top of the pile.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Okay, great.

• 20:08Yasi Salek?

  Scott Buckley?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  That would be completely disorienting. And we almost got that.

• 20:13Yasi Salek?

  We did almost get that. But actually, his name was not Buckley. It was Guebert. So we're gonna get into this.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And then it was something else.

• 20:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So young Jeffrey Scott, Scotty, lived with Mary and her parents until 1968. And then Mary gets a job in North Hollywood. And for like a year and a half. This is the beginning of an absolutely unstable childhood. Little Scotty is spending his weekdays with his grandparents and his uncle, and the weekends with his mom. Jeff said in that same EPK interview, "My Uncle George sings, and he had a big influence on me. He was the first guy I ever saw sleep late, have a band in the garage, and the killer girlfriend, and the killer car." Formative for young Jeff. So that fall, Jeff's, I don't know, two. Mary does take Scotty to meet Tim. And then

• 21:03Yasi Salek?

  Tim starts paying child support at this time. It was $80 a month back in 1968. The next year, Mary marries Ron Moorhead, a 21-year-old car mechanic who was super into rock music. According to Mary in the David Brown book, two weeks before this wedding, Tim called and asked if they could reconcile and get back together. And some of his friends claimed that this is also around the same time that he got into heroin. And I think the implication is that he was so distressed by losing his child or family that... So I don't know if that's true or not, but this is what the friends were thinking. Mary said, "No, thank you. I'm marrying Ron Moorhead." And Ron kind of becomes Jeff's first real father, his only real father.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I think he really is. He's the person he identifies as his dad, as his functioning dad.

• 21:51Yasi Salek?

  Yes. He would take him to the park, play ball with him. Like, he was, by all accounts, an extremely loving and wonderful father figure. Also, thanks to him, while Scotty grew up hearing the Moody Blues, Grand Funk Railroad, Cat Stevens, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Zeppelin, The Doors, and Chicago, great band, Chicago, amongst others. Did your dad play any of these for you?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  All of them. Literally all of them.

• 22:14Yasi Salek?

  Super dad music.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's just a very similar generationally. I wasn't born in 66. I was born in 82. And yet somehow, all that music made its way to me in the exact same way. My dad would tell me stories about going to see Zeppelin. My dad saw Zeppelin at the Comac Roller Rink in 69.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  And he never listened to Zeppelin when I was a kid. He never played Zeppelin for me. So I think he just kind of lost touch with that side of his taste. And I discovered it as a teenager and fell in love the same way Buckley does.

• 22:40Yasi Salek?

  We know that you're a known Led Zeppelin stan.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  That's very important. Probably one reason why I like Buckley. But I, uh, I didn't have exactly the experience that Jeff had, basically.

• 22:52Yasi Salek?

  My dad was actually not really into American music, so.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  What did he listen to?

• 22:56Yasi Salek?

  He liked Anne Magnuson and Iranian music that's like funeral dirges.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Sounds fun.

• 23:02Yasi Salek?

  And my mom was into Hadaway and Madonna and Pa.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Hadaway?

• 23:08Yasi Salek?

  She loves Hadaway.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 23:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Hadaway's What Is Love?

• 23:13Yasi Salek?

  What is love?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 23:20Yasi Salek?

  Okay, and then Mary would play Barbra Streisand, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell. And also would constantly be playing Bach and Chopin on the piano.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  And this is also, that's my mom's taste.

• 23:31Yasi Salek?

  Does your mom play piano?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  She doesn't play piano, but Carole King and Joni Mitchell are her two favorite singer-songwriters. She played, she always played classical in the house, yes.

• 23:40Yasi Salek?

  Grandma, Giber, had an acoustic guitar that Jeff surmised that she had purchased in the hopes that one of her children would pick it up and play, but they didn't. And so young Scotty found it and would play with it. He was like maybe five, six, seven. And he once wrote to a friend in a letter, "Man, I even performed a piece I had made up when I was in the second grade. All the piece was, was me plucking the first four strings in arpeggio in three-fourths time." Okay, he's seven. "Very slowly, and the change was substituting the D string with the A, all open strings." It was so nothing technically, but when I played it, I was completely mesmerized. This is his first and most enduring love is music.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Confirmation that all talent is hereditary?

• 24:22Yasi Salek?

  I cannot play one single instrument. Can you play any instruments? No. Not for lack of trying. Also, in an early interview with Martin Aston, Aston asked him, when did the music first hit you? And this was his response. As a child, there was my mother's breasts and then there was music. It felt like another person in the house that floated with me everywhere.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I think if you grow up in a house in which music is being played all the time, you also have that feeling.

• 24:47Yasi Salek?

  There is, yeah, I think there is probably a nurture aspect as well as the nature aspect.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  I have this with my child and I had it as a kid growing up. There was music was on every day, all the time.

• 24:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I did too. That's probably why I love music so much.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  It really helps.

• 25:02Yasi Salek?

  Can I do it? No.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  But I think that's, I think that's a secondary concern. I think actually just being exposed to it is incredibly powerful.

• 25:08Yasi Salek?

  Right, okay, thank you. And then Scotty's little brother Cory was born in 1972. It was one of those sort of like, let's have a baby to save the marriage situations, but it didn't work. And in 1973, Mary and Ron get divorced. Soon after this divorce, around 1975, Mary meets a new boyfriend named George Vandergrift.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Suss.

• 25:27Yasi Salek?

  It's a real nominative determinism name.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  It's got like James Bond villain written all over it.

• 25:33Yasi Salek?

  Vandergrift, the grift is in your name. And they move, all of them with the two children, to Riverside. A real tour of like, respectfully, some of the worst places in California. In the spring of 1975, Mary took young Scotty to see a Tim Buckley concert. It's a big moment. Big moment. We're nine.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Must be a head trip.

• 25:57Yasi Salek?

  What he remembers is he sat in his dad's lap after the show and he said he was hot and sweaty. I was very embarrassing, doing my George Carlin impression for him for no reason. He was super into George Carlin as a child. He smiled the whole time, I know. But like, at nine?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  It's probably around when I discovered him, yeah.

• 26:15Yasi Salek?

  So good. See, he was a funny, he was a funny clown child. Judy, Tim's wife, and Tim asked if Jeff could come stay with them for that week. And it was Easter vacations and Mary was like, okay. And he stayed with them for like five days and then they put him on a bus home. Jeff wrote in 1990, I went over for a week or so and we made small talk at dinner, watched cable TV. He bought me a model airplane on one of our outings. Nothing much, but it was kind of memorable. And then three years later, he said, he was working in his room, so I didn't even get to talk to him, and that was that. This is the only stretch of time he ever spent with Tim Buckley, because he dies about two months later. There's an incredible bit in the 2001 BBC documentary, which we can talk about to

• 26:59Yasi Salek?

  more extent later, but where this British guy is interviewing him, and I don't know if it's for the documentary, or it's an old, no, it's the documentary, it's an older interview. And he's like, oh, you know, Tim, he says something about, he's talking about Tim Buckley. He's like, oh, Tim Buckley had that same sort of abandon with his music. And Jeff goes, yeah, he abandoned me. The comedic timing, just perfect.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:21Yasi Salek?

  It's so good.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  I would also say, in terms of locating things that I related to about him, he's got real divorced kid energy.

• 27:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, except even like for, it's like divorced kid, like squared. It's abandoned child, and then multi-level divorced.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:42Yasi Salek?

  Well, it clearly had some impact this time that he spent, because that fall, when he was filling out registration for his new school, he decided, I don't want to be called Scotty Gubert anymore, I want to be Scotty Buckley. So he changes his name. And then, this is around the time he gets super into Kiss. Hell, yeah. Kiss Alive and Destroyer. And Yes, Styx and Rush. Can't relate personally, but I understand that if you have a musical mind, prog rock that is extremely complicated is probably very interesting to you.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think also those bands that you mentioned are also pop.

• 28:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  You know, they're not, they're not impenetrable.

• 28:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  You know, Yes was a huge band.

• 28:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. All right. In 1979, Mary and George Vandergrift, very on again, off again at this point. And when they were off, she and the kids would move into a small cottage that was attached to a greenhouse that he had purchased for her, so that he, she could have a plant business that was pretty failed. And they would go back and forth for a while. I can't imagine like how incredibly destabilizing this must have been for a child, for these children.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:51Yasi Salek?

  And then sometimes you would drop them off at Ron Moorhead's for the weekend, with, he had remarried. At Christmas of this year, Mary's family gets their money together and buys Scotty a copy of a Black Last Paul guitar, so this is a big moment. He's got an electric guitar. First song he learns is "My Sharona" by The Knack.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Simple chord structure, right?

• 29:10Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  So it kind of makes sense.

• 29:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Yasi Salek?

  Summer of 1980, Scotty and Cory move in with Ron Moorhead's family in Willets, which is north of San Francisco. So Jeff's like 14. I'm like, try to imagine, like, you're 14 years old. You have to leave what's about to be high school and move to a completely different part of the state with your dad, who's not your blood dad, and his wife and your half brother. And it's only for about a year because then Mary and George break up for good and then they come back to Riverside.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  This is a wayward teenager.

• 29:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  This informs, I think, a lot of the way that he kind of floats through his adulthood.

• 29:58Yasi Salek?

  100%. And then again, imagine that Capricorn moon just wanting stability and getting none of it. He had found his birth certificate at some point, also during this stretch. So when he comes back to Riverside and goes to high school, he decides to go as Jeff Buckley. This is when his name is around 19.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  At 14.

• 30:14Yasi Salek?

  At 14, 15, yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  14, okay.

• 30:16Yasi Salek?

  Mary then takes the kids. They move back to Orange County. Money is very tight. They apparently got evicted from at least one apartment, if not more. She was working long hours at a sales job, driving back and forth to LA a ton. And this is when Jeff sort of just becomes the man of the house. He's 15 years old. Like, he's making coffee and breakfast for his mom and for his brother, making sure dinner was ready for when she got home. And Mary admits in the book that the boys felt the most abandoned during this time. Jeff said in an interview with The Times in 1994, "It was a dislocated childhood. My mother moved us from area to area quite frequently, and I was the man of the house from a very, very young age, looking after my younger brother.

• 31:01Yasi Salek?

  I was mean to him. I took a lot of things out on him, which I regret very much. But man, I was so young, I didn't know not to."

• 31:09Yasi Salek?

  That was hard to read.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  It's very hard to be a single mom.

• 31:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Again, she's doing her best and poor Jeff. He starts attending Loara High School. That's the same high school Tim and Mary went to. So he goes to the same high school as his parents. He joins the jazz band. He gets super into prog rock, even deeper, starts learning songs by taping them off the radio classic. This is when friends start to notice that he had whatever is the equivalent of a photographic memory, but for music. Like, he could just hear a song once, be able to play it note for note. I knew a guy like this in middle school. His name was Todd. Very impressive. I don't think he became a professional musician, but he should have. He was very good. He joins a band in high school. It's called Mayor Buckham. That name

• 31:56Yasi Salek?

  comes from all the combinations of their last names.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  I've heard better band names.

• 32:01Yasi Salek?

  Sure. Listen, it's their first band. They played four gigs. Like, leave them alone.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:05Yasi Salek?

  Then Mary gets a job before the start of the next school year, and she moves. And Jeff is like, enough's enough, babe. I'm not moving anymore. I'm staying at this high school. And he moves in with his grandmother. So he stays there, I think, throughout high school. Gets great grades. He's on the debate team. Apparently had a Hesher haircut. I thought that was amusing. He later wrote about his classmates that they hated him and called him the F-word and that he was not popular. But through his first crush, Holly Jones, through her best friend, Roy, Roy put him on to a recording by a British mezzo soprano named Janet Baker of Benjamin Britten's chorale piece Corpus Christi Carol.

• 32:51Yasi Salek?

  It's a very important moment in the formation of the Jeff Buckley or the Grace album anyways. So after high school, Jeff's like, I want to go to Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, specifically for the guitar program. It was $4,000. And Mary was like, we don't have $4,000. There was a fund that had been set up after Tim Buckley's death that was earmarked for Jeff after he turned 19. It feels like a random age. Wouldn't you feel like it would be 18?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  18, yeah.

• 33:17Yasi Salek?

  But it said 19 in the book.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:18Yasi Salek?

  It's about $20,000 and she breaks into it so that he can go to this school. So he starts that fall, just before he turns 18. He's spending 17 hours a day in classes, rehearsal rooms. He's practicing guitar, he's learning sight reading, is getting really into jazz fusion. Like, it's all happening. I've never sang one note in this entire year. His classmate, Barrett Taglariano, said, "You never had the sense he'd turn out to be a frontman or a singer. Just wasn't giving that energy." He graduates, it's just one year, works as an electrician's assistant to pay rent while he's looking for work as a guitar player. And his friends from that time were like, "He literally did nothing but eat, sleep,

• 34:03Yasi Salek?

  and play guitar. That was his whole life." This is also interesting. At different points while he's living in LA, in this like, one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood, Mary and Cory would come stay with him because they were struggling financially and didn't have a place to stay and they were fighting with her parents. At some point in this year after, he links up with this musician called Michael Klaus, who had started a demo tape business for up-and-coming musicians. And he recruits Jeff to help him start arranging songs and playing instruments on these demos while Klaus did the engineering. And it was called "The X Factor." This is like, kind of formative because this is really when Jeff first starts writing songs.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:43Yasi Salek?

  They are shitty knockoffs of like, power ballads and hair metal songs or whatever, but you're doing arrangements, you're using what you learned. And he had made a friend through school, a drummer named Carla Azar, who went on to form one of my favorite bands in college, Autolux.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:02Yasi Salek?

  She was the drummer's coolest. We used to go see her play all the time at the Echo in Autolux. I thought she was so cool and hot.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  And she drummed for former my appearance on Band Splain guy Jack White, right? Wasn't she one of Jack's drummers?

• 35:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Post-Meg?

• 35:16Yasi Salek?

  Yes. And she also, early on, drummed for Wendy and Lisa.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:20Yasi Salek?

  Prince.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  I feel like she's been in the music business for like, 40 years.

• 35:24Yasi Salek?

  But she said she remembered going to his house and seeing a note on his fridge that had like, a schedule for his day. Like, 8 to 8:30 a.m., you work on string arrangements. 8:30 to 9:00, yeah, it's very Capricorn Moon. So he starts writing songs, Jeff Buckley, of his own. He makes his first demo, it's called "White Boy Music."

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yes. That's not anywhere to be found.

• 35:44Yasi Salek?

  No, I couldn't find it anywhere. These tracks are called Agidhi. I don't know what that word is. Promise Ring and Grave Stone Man. They are jazz fusion instrumentals.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  And this is very I'm in music school stuff. He's experimenting and exploring the shape of what a sound can be, right?

• 36:00Yasi Salek?

  And I think also, if you're that good at guitar, you're gonna want to do things like jazz fusion because it's difficult, right?

• 36:07Speaker 02

  And show offy and virtuosic and all those things.

• 36:10Yasi Salek?

  Here's where things get interesting. He joins a reggae band, the AKB Band, the singer Pablo Black. They called him Scalpecuta because he had sick reggae riffs. He made $50 a week. I presume this is when he learned his Jamaican patois, which we'll get into later. He also plays with a roots rock band called Wild Blue Yonder and also, more importantly, a heavy rock and metal band called Group Therapy that was fronted by a woman called Katherine Grimm, who we do hear from in the documentaries. That band kind of really got him back into straight up rock music. Led Zeppelin. He's also very into Jane's Addiction, who is sort of an up and coming LA band.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 36:49Yasi Salek?

  Totally makes sense. Carla Azar is dating at this time Chris Dowd from the band Fishbone, and they put Jeff onto funk music. And she also puts him onto Rimbaud. She gives him a Rimbaud book, The Poet. Several people mention that they believe Jeff Buckley was quite in love with her. Chris Dowd says this, and so does his later manager, Dave Laurie. She said that she walked into his apartment once when he wasn't expecting her and she heard him singing what turned out to be, "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain," but she didn't know what it was.

• 37:25Yasi Salek?

  I kind of wrestled with this bit that I'm gonna do right now, but I think I landed on an okay place. So his journals are published. The book is right there. I don't know to what extent. I assume they're somewhat edited. A lot of them were lost in different scenarios. I don't know how I feel about publishing someone's private journals as a journaler.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  I was gonna ask you if you keep a journal. You do keep a journal.

• 37:52Yasi Salek?

  I do. You know what? I burned them all.

• 37:58Yasi Salek?

  By accident.

• 38:00Yasi Salek?

  I got the tiny violin, you guys.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  They burned.

• 38:02Yasi Salek?

  They burned, yes. I didn't do it.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  You didn't burn that.

• 38:03Yasi Salek?

  That didn't make it sound like I set the fires. I didn't set the fires.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  You didn't start the fire.

• 38:08Yasi Salek?

  I didn't start the fire. So they...

• 38:12Speaker 02

  You don't want to make more light of your new bit? Like, the literalization of your bit?

• 38:17Yasi Salek?

  I think, I mean, the tiny violin will come back, babe. There's a lot of tiny violin-ing. I know you've moved on from me losing all of my personal possessions that I've ever owned.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  I have. I will never move on from that.

• 38:26Yasi Salek?

  You think about it every day.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  I have empathy for you every day.

• 38:30Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much. But I've started new journals, and I wouldn't love it if they were published. That being said, I picked out parts that, to me, and this is through my lens, felt not as private.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:48Yasi Salek?

  So I'm gonna read those bits. Because I just felt they really, like, if anything, made me feel more understanding of this person and their impulses, and less like I was like looking under their pants or whatever. Here's August 5th, 1989. "The deeper you go, the higher you fly. The higher you fly, the deeper you go. So come on, come on. The music is the thing, the key, but you must be straight up. No pretension, and no Oscar Award mugging, no bullshit, because that shit is just too shallow to get your feet wet. You know what I'm saying? I love the "you know what I'm saying" to yourself in a journal. It's like so cute.

• 39:29Yasi Salek?

  And that's the kind of garbage that so expertly fucks everything up. The music, your mind, your whole life. Faking anything in life has a subtle, friendly, comforting way of killing your soul. So does cynicism, pessimism, passivity, fear, worst of all, I think. All of that stuff can rot your heart into a black sponge that desperately tries to suck and absorb life from every source but its own. Then you have lost. Then you are dead from the inside out." I love that.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  It's a nice thought. That is very much the thought of somebody at the very early stages of their life, who has a strict, rigorously philosophical perspective on things, having not lived through a lot.

• 40:12Yasi Salek?

  You always do this. You always go straight into I am dad mode and like-

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Well, I love Jeff Buckley and I-

• 40:18Yasi Salek?

  You will, you'll understand-

• 40:19Speaker 02

  His purity is special, but-

• 40:20Yasi Salek?

  Nothing is, nothing of that is, is less true with time. Well- Not one word of that, of fake, how faking things will corrode your soul, and how you, you must resist cynicism, pessimism, passivity and fear. That is all still true, no matter what your age.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Completely agree. It's just easy to communicate that feeling when you haven't gone through the steps that you even seen as his life plays out, that he's holding on to this rigor and it is biting him. You know, like his philosophy is, is, is actually wounding his ability to, to create in the way that he wants to, because he's very, very specific about how he sees the world. Now, it makes him a great artist. I'm not saying it doesn't make him a great artist.

• 41:03Yasi Salek?

  I would correct you. I think his rigor is wounding his ability to create in the way other people wanted him to, not in the way that he wanted to.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  I think we could debate that.

• 41:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  I think we could debate that about the final stretch of his, of his creative life.

• 41:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I don't know. I, this really resonated with me. I felt I really needed to hear it. It was, I was real in the, I was real in the depths of like Instagram psychosis and like ego Olympics and feeling like LA is the most disgusting place on earth and I do not want to be part of this. And feeling the like weird twin tension of like, oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not cool enough, but also like, I hate everything that I like, real Groucho Marx hours, you know?

• 41:48Speaker 02

  I, trust me, I relate. I'm not, I'm not trying to say I'm better than that, that comment. I'm not better than that. I'm worse than it, but I- I'm always a little suspicious of someone who's 20 saying that because they haven't been confronted with like

• 42:02Yasi Salek?

  23, first of all.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  You know, can't pay the rent and like flame down on my dreams.

• 42:07Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  And like, that's a real thing that hits most people who try to get into the arts. And so it feels very saintly from someone who's passed, who achieved something extraordinary. But I always, as a guidepost, I'm always a little, I'm always made a little queasy by it because

• 42:23Yasi Salek?

  Because you feel indicted.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Well, certainly, but I never tried to be an artist.

• 42:28Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I think that for artists-

• 42:30Yasi Salek?

  Podcasting is art, we disagree on this, but I believe I am an artist.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  I respect your perspective on that, and I believe it is firmly not. I'm fascinated by the late stages of his creative life, and we can talk about that quote when we get to that part.

• 42:42Yasi Salek?

  In 1990, so we're 24, almost 23 and a half, Jeff travels to New York for the first time. It's a bit unclear why. There's some speculation that it was the result of a brief East Coast tour with the reggae rapper Shinehead.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Tough one.

• 42:58Yasi Salek?

  Ross Jeff. In any event, he gave up his apartment and his car and he goes. He later told the Philadelphia City Paper, "It was the most extreme and successful self-rescue operation I'd ever implemented. Otherwise, I was going to rot from the inside." This actually might have been about the second time he went, but I think it was the first time he went. This is the time where he moves in with his friend, Brooke Smith, who you might know as-

• 43:22Speaker 02

  The woman who's abducted in The Silence of the Lambs.

• 43:25Yasi Salek?

  Potential seventh victim, Catherine Martin in The Silence of the Lambs. She had actually just filmed that in LA, and he worked at the Magic Castle Hotel.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  One of my favorite places, yeah. Trying to imagine Jeff at the Magic Castle.

• 43:36Yasi Salek?

  He was the clerk at the hotel, which I don't know if they have a hotel anymore.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  I believe they do.

• 43:41Yasi Salek?

  And also, I'm sorry, but more pertinent to my interests, Brooke Smith was later Dr. Erica Hahn on Grey's Anatomy. So they became friends, and then he lived with her in New York when he went there with Shinehead. So he was working a bunch of random jobs, including one at Banana Republic, where he got fired later for allegedly stealing a woman's blouse.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  I see. That tracks based on some things we've learned.

• 44:09Yasi Salek?

  But I don't think he did it. You think he stole it?

• 44:11Speaker 02

  You think he was framed?

• 44:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Did you ever work retail?

• 44:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Where did you work?

• 44:17Yasi Salek?

  I worked at The Reed Space.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  I don't know what that is.

• 44:21Yasi Salek?

  You're familiar with Jeff Staple?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:23Yasi Salek?

  Hi, Jeff Staple, if you're listening.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  New York?

• 44:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Lower East Side.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  That was, that's retail?

• 44:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was a store that sold streetwear.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:31Yasi Salek?

  I also worked here on Fairfax at Reserve, which was the Fresh Jive store. Do you mean in high school?

• 44:38Speaker 02

  You're way too cool. This is like, I'm talking about like, did you ever work in a mall?

• 44:42Yasi Salek?

  No, in high school, I worked in, I was a waitress.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I wanted so desperately to work at Pacific Sunwear when I was like 14 years old. They wouldn't hire me.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  That would have been a...

• 44:51Yasi Salek?

  Did you work retail?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  I did, I worked at J. Crew.

• 44:53Yasi Salek?

  That makes so much sense.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  For two years and...

• 44:56Yasi Salek?

  It's still honestly giving.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Of course. That's my vibe, right? I, it is soul killing.

• 45:04Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  It's really, really hard work. It's, it, it's the exact wrong job for Jeff Buckley.

• 45:09Yasi Salek?

  Most hourly wage jobs that are forward facing, customer facing are hellish.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Particularly when you're trying to...

• 45:16Yasi Salek?

  Make art.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and yeah, when your job is to sell something.

• 45:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  That you have no emotional tie to.

• 45:23Yasi Salek?

  Chinos, he wasn't really into the chinos. He wrote a letter to a friend about working at Banana Republic and it said, "I gotta go to work in about five minutes," he was on his break. "I never talk to anyone because if I try to make a joke about anything, they just go, 'Okay, um, whatever you say.'" Like I'm a bloody maniac. They did not get his, his jokes. "When will I stop folding shirts? When will I leave my loser job and stop being a loser job wad?"

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:49Yasi Salek?

  Relatable.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  It breeds that.

• 45:51Yasi Salek?

  I also worked at a record store. You're right, I had really cool jobs.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Good for you.

• 45:54Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so this summer, while he's living with Brook Smith in New York, he, I don't understand how this happened. I'm just reporting what I read in Dream Brother. But he replied to a Tim Buckley fan who had sent him a letter. I don't know how this Tim Buckley fan got a letter to him. I don't know how they knew he existed. I don't know any of this. But this is what the letter said. "I've tried to really believe it, that he really loved me. I question that. He longed to see me, I believe that. He regretted not seeing me, yes. But he was too afraid for a very long time. Just a kid going down his own road. Right, I understand, but I don't get it. It seems so over-romanticized, all of the accounts of his actions. How does a baby keep you from making records? He just didn't want to be stuck with Mary.

• 46:39Yasi Salek?

  So typical, no frills, no big deal. I totally understand. It does not sound like he understands. But 'love me', I don't know what that means." You know what I think, actually? It probably wasn't a fan. It probably was one of Tim's friends. There's actually multiple letters, and we'll get into later, how he actually starts seeking them out to like, learn more about his father. So, this was very interesting to me personally. While he's in New York during this stretch, he gets really into punk and hardcore in particular.

• 47:05Yasi Salek?

  And apparently, auditions to play guitar in Agnostic Front.

• 47:11Yasi Salek?

  A hardcore, very hardcore New York band. And Murphy's Law, another very hardcore New York band. That one I was able to corroborate because on Live from Seattle, the Jeff Buckley live album, when he's doing some chit-chat, he says it.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  After that job, I chatted out for Murphy's Law. But Todd Hughes got back in the band, and it was fun, anyway.

• 47:32Yasi Salek?

  And then he wrote a letter to a friend and was like, "Imagine me with a band of Hulk and Skinhead 30-year-old, stage-diving dudes who could probably chew me up for breakfast with beer." Can you imagine Jeff Buckley and Murphy's Law?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  My counterpoint to this is how many Jeff Buckleys are there in bands like that right now who've never had the courage or the opportunity to emerge as the beautiful songbirds that they are?

• 47:54Yasi Salek?

  That's a great point. It's tough being a man.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  I didn't say that.

• 47:58Yasi Salek?

  There's a real male crisis, a male epidemic I've been reading about.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  There is. What do you make of these incels?

• 48:04Yasi Salek?

  Just generally speaking.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, just the whole wave.

• 48:06Yasi Salek?

  I think they're cool.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Good hang.

• 48:09Yasi Salek?

  I respect their right to exist.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 48:11Yasi Salek?

  Um.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Those are called men's rights.

• 48:13Yasi Salek?

  Is it hashtag men's rights? I mean, they don't have a lot to do with me, as is implied in the name there. He also, at the same time he's getting into New York hardcore, gets really into Kuali, which is devotional Sufi music.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:28Yasi Salek?

  This is a mystic body of religious practice found within Islam, which is characterized by a focus on Islamic purification.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 48:36Yasi Salek?

  Namely, Nosrat Fatah Ali Khan, because he had a new roommate in Harlem who put him on to Nosrat Fatah Ali Khan. He later wrote in the liner notes for a Nosrat compilation, "My roommate and I stood there blasting the music in his room. Nosrat's every enunciation went straight through me. I remember my senses fully froze in order to feel melody after melody crash upon each other in waves of improvisation. I felt a rush of adrenaline in my chest, like I was on the edge of a cliff, wondering when I would jump and how well the ocean would catch me."

• 49:06Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 49:08Yasi Salek?

  There's a lot of, I don't want to say foreshadowing, because I don't think that's the right word, but there are a lot of metaphors and allusions to drowning in bodies of water in his writing.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  It is, for what it's worth, a very common metaphor use.

• 49:31Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, that's what I'm gonna say.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Especially for artists who are kind of like plunging themselves into something.

• 49:34Yasi Salek?

  I'm certainly not saying it means anything. I'm just saying, in retrospect, it tends to jump out, unfortunately, you know?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  It does.

• 49:42Yasi Salek?

  I love this connection to the Kuali music, because one thing in Jeff Buckley's music, and we were texting about this at some point, to me, one of the most connective things between myself and Jeff Buckley's music is that this is a person actively seeking

• 50:02Yasi Salek?

  A relationship with God.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 50:03Yasi Salek?

  Talks about it. You can hear, the music is like borderline worship music, you know?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  But not in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense or anything like that.

• 50:12Yasi Salek?

  No, no, no.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  More of a higher power.

• 50:13Yasi Salek?

  Much like Leonard Cohen, honestly. And there's so much about Leonard Cohen was about him trying to, you know, unearth it and, and recontextualize his faith, you know?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Metaphysical poetics and the usage of art to transcend.

• 50:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, but also he says the G word that no one likes it when I say it. He says God all the time in his writings.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Why does no one like it when you say it?

• 50:34Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. It, I talked about this in my interview with Ian Shelton of Military Gun. I think we, we are so, the society has become so secular because so much fuck shit with religion happened. Obviously rightfully should be, you know, maligned and disregarded. But now it's a trigger word. So it's like, oh, if you say God, you must be one of those religious nuts. You know, you, you have different values than me.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  I think I'm really more with you. I'm, I'm, I'm interested. I'm, I'm very God curious. I'm not very, I'm not very organized spirituality curious.

• 51:08Yasi Salek?

  Me neither. Although I, I also, I believe that organized religion was poisoned by people. But in and of itself, the idea of having a dogma of faith is quite beautiful, you know? As long as you don't twist it, as long as you don't use it.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  I agree. I find it to be an impossibility.

• 51:29Yasi Salek?

  Yes, because people ruin everything. We, people are a virus, right?

• 51:32Speaker 02

  That's my, that's my own perspective.

• 51:33Yasi Salek?

  People are a virus?

• 51:34Speaker 02

  People, yeah.

• 51:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And brought it back full circle.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  But I, I hear what you're saying, and I think you're right about that Jeff Buckley was trying to commune with something beyond himself.

• 51:42Yasi Salek?

  I believe in, I've said on this podcast, that all art is God. Like that all people who make art are, are a cipher for God. I really believe that. So I think that's okay, you know? But I do think, man, it's, it's cool to have a deeper relationship with spirituality.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  I felt like it was common to sense that sensation in an artist in the nineties.

• 52:05Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  And in this century, it feels way less common to find someone grasping for something beyond their reach artistically in a way that like indicates struggle. Like there is actually this expectation of, of. Pop musicians now.

• 52:20Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  To really have it together. You know, that's like Beyonce is an absolute wall of power.

• 52:25Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  And that there's something to be admired about that. You know, impenetrable iconic force who has vulnerability.

• 52:32Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  But isn't like.

• 52:33Yasi Salek?

  Same with Taylor Swift.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:34Yasi Salek?

  I mean, they do. They have, they have relatable struggles of like romance in Taylor Swift's case or, or whatever. But like, you're so right.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Institutions you can be at war with. You can say like, I have been.

• 52:46Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Demeaned or held back in some way.

• 52:49Yasi Salek?

  Or they're thinking in a meta way about pop culture.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Right. I, I like that it's, it's clearly a part of Jeff's thing.

• 52:55Yasi Salek?

  A hundred percent. I think that was not, that was not really as much of a digression as one might think.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  I think it's intrinsic to his music.

• 53:02Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. And why he connects so much with Nostrad Fanta LA album. All right. So that's his like beautiful summer of discovery of working at Banana Republic and discovering music. Moves back to LA in September. Now he's starting to, he had started to write songs in New York with words. Eternal Life is one of his most early songs, which I think you can really tell when we get to the album. And then a new one called Unforgiven. At some point, Tim Buckley's manager, whose name I'm so sorry, I cannot remember, gets in touch. He had kind of been in touch on and off with Mary anyways.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:41Yasi Salek?

  And he's like, I'll pay for you to do a demo. So he pays.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  How much does that cost?

• 53:47Yasi Salek?

  I did not receive the receipts from Euro Sound Studio in the San Fernando Valley.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:53Yasi Salek?

  But he makes a, a demo called The Babylon Dungeon Sessions.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  It's a good name.

• 53:57Yasi Salek?

  He has a drum machine.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 54:00Yasi Salek?

  It was those two songs, Eternal Life and Unforgiven. One called Radio, which I'm the most deeply obsessed with because it's, it's absolutely, I learned about hardcore music. I love Bad Brains. Here's my version.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  I'm glad he didn't go down this, this road.

• 54:24Yasi Salek?

  I know, but I, it's important that we talk about it because it's a, it's a big part of his musical DNA.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  I agree. He like absorbs it and manifests it in some way.

• 54:33Yasi Salek?

  And he loved it. Like he didn't, he absorbed plenty of stuff that he didn't regurgitate, but he loved this.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  That's also very Perry Farrell right there.

• 54:40Yasi Salek?

  That's what I'm saying. He loved Jane's Addiction. The beginning lyrics are, "You mindless obedient cripple, mass appeal toy box devil radio. Why are you so lame?"

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:51Yasi Salek?

  It's good stuff. It's good stuff, Jeff Buckley. And then there's one called Strawberry Street, which respectfully is kind of just like a forgettable riffy rock song. I will read you a quick thing, speaking of mimicry from his journal, that was also back in 89, right before he starts writing songs. And he says, "I estimate that I've been doing this air guitar behind closed doors routine since I was in the third grade. That's 14 fucking years, okay? I say it's about time that I graduate from doing impressions of things better lived than acted out. I'm a good mimic, fine. It's been a lot of laughs, lots of energy has been utilized there, but it'll be the greatest thing to use the gifts I have to mimic and copy and hear a note for note and quirk for quirk and transform that talent into something of a musical strength somehow

• 55:35Yasi Salek?

  to invent melodies and stories and lyrics to use for songs." He was very self-aware.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:41Yasi Salek?

  He made a point to be like, "I know how to do this and that's fine, but I don't value it." You know, like, "I want to make, I want to create."

• 55:48Speaker 02

  It's ironic because he gets attention, as you'll get to, for some of that like channeling and mimicry and his, even just his comfort with other forms of mu- music you wouldn't expect to come from a guy who looked like that.

• 56:02Yasi Salek?

  Yes, yes. And the Pudwall. He makes this demo and then Tim's widow Judy reaches out to get in touch with him. And he finally meets her son, Taylor, who was 20 and who Tim had legally adopted. Judy gave him tickets to see the Cocktoe Twins. That's, I don't know if he was already up on them, probably because he's really into music, but that was a big deal. And she also gave him one of Tim's old pea coats that she had like fixed up and he would wear it non-stop.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  That's sweet.

• 56:25Yasi Salek?

  I know. And then he starts apparently actively trying to get in touch with Tim's friends, like learn about this person that, you know, he doesn't really know about. According to David Brown, "One day Jeff is in the waiting room of his chiropractor and he overhears the name Elaine Buckley called or said by a nurse."

• 56:44Yasi Salek?

  That's Tim's mother.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 56:46Yasi Salek?

  And he begged the doctor for her number, which feels to me like a HIPAA violation. I believe that's deeply illegal, but the chiropractor did provide the phone number. And she was happy to hear from him, took him to a jazz festival. And he connects with Tim's junior high friend, Dan Gordon.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:04Yasi Salek?

  Dan Gordon is interviewed by David Brown. And he said that he remembers Jeff walking through the door and it was like seeing Tim walk through the door. We should mention, they did have quite a resemblance. They don't look exactly alike, but there's definitely a resemblance.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Clearly father, son.

• 57:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I wouldn't say it's like the spitting image.

• 57:20Yasi Salek?

  No, no, it's not like seeing a ghost or something.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  But there is a kind of brooding handsomeness and, you know, the heavy eyebrows and, you know, you can see the devil could grow a mane.

• 57:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, beautiful, beautiful head of hair. He more said that he carried himself, like he was like, he moved the same way.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:36Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, I told him that and he didn't like hearing it.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's obviously got a lot of hangups about the comparisons to his father.

• 57:42Yasi Salek?

  Who wouldn't? Jeff, according to Dan Gordon, grilled Dan about like, what was Tim's life like? Why, why did he never call or visit me?

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 57:50Yasi Salek?

  And Dan Gordon said that he suggested to Jeff to placate his bitterness, in his words, that he should delve into Tim's music as a way to connect with him. And apparently Jeff said, yeah, maybe we'll be in together in the record bins.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:05Yasi Salek?

  Kind of were, kind of did.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  They are.

• 58:06Yasi Salek?

  Um.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  To this day.

• 58:07Yasi Salek?

  And then most unusually to me, he had connected with another of Tim's close friends when Tim lived in Venice. This woman named Daniela Sapriel, who, and he didn't, he did not have a place to live. And this woman was like, we have an extra room you can live with us. So he moves in with her, she was divorced and her daughter. And he would read her daughter Nicole Bedtime stories and kind of had this little family moment, which is so sweet. Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  You can see he's very comfortable as this like itinerant figure because of the way that he grew up.

• 58:34Yasi Salek?

  A hobo. So he's living at Daniela Sapriel's house and in early 1991, the phone rings. It's a long distance call from New York for Jeff. Remember long distance calls? We don't have those anymore.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:44Yasi Salek?

  Not really, right?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Cell phones.

• 58:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Free long distance, remember the, when that, when that hit, it was, it seemed like a big deal.

• 58:51Yasi Salek?

  You guys, you guys don't know that you would like call someone in another state and it would be like $400.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  It's literally true.

• 58:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I grew up, my, my father's brother, who was my godfather, um, lived in Los Angeles when I was a kid. We didn't speak very often. It was expensive to talk.

• 59:08Yasi Salek?

  It's expensive, exactly. So this woman is is calling because she is coordinating a tribute concert to Tim Buckley called Greetings from Tim Buckley in New York. That was actually put on by Hal Wilner, who you're deeply familiar with.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Legendary music supervisor coordinator on Saturday Night Live, kind of like a all time gadfly New York music guy.

• 59:29Yasi Salek?

  Bohemian, yeah, like.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  New everybody.

• 59:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. Apparently, no one actually knew Tim Buckley had a child in this milieu. And this program director, Janine Nichols, had called, oh, Herb Cohen is Tim's manager, had called Herb Cohen to be like, I need a photo of Tim for like, whatever the program. And Herb Cohen's like, oh, you know, he has a kid, right? And they were like, no, we did not know that. And he said, Herb Cohen apparently was like, oh, Jeff's even more talented than Tim. This is what Janine Nichols said. And she was like, OK, sure, whatever you say, but we should just at least invite him for the celebration of his. Apparently Jeff was very conflicted about it.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  OK.

• 1:00:10Yasi Salek?

  Mary Giber said that he called her to like, ask her advice. And she says, I said, well, where, what's your purpose? What do you want to get out of it? And he said, I always miss not going to the funeral because they were not invited to the funeral. And Mary was like, I said, there you go. There's your reason. You'll pay tribute to your father. Regardless, he goes, St. Anne's paid, that's where it was being held, covered his airfare. And they were like, listen, if you do end up performing, we can't pay you, OK? We're all the budgets going to Richard Hell. They didn't say that, but Richard Hell did perform. Can you imagine if they paid all of the money to Richard Hell?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  I think this still worked out for Jeff.

• 1:00:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Also, apparently Richard Hell's performance was very terrible, according to New York. But they're like, listen, we still, we need to hear the music. We're not like guaranteeing you a slot.

• 1:00:56Yasi Salek?

  And then they like hear the number, like, OK, we should let him play. So Hal Wilner's like, calls his friend Gary Lucas. Thirty-eight-year-old musician who had played in Captain Beefheart's Magic Band in the early 80s. And he had his own band, Gods and Monsters. And he was like, will you just come accompany Jeff? I don't know if he can do this alone. I need like a seasoned musician. So Jeff is billed as Jeff Scott Buckley. Here's what he wrote in the program. "I got my first electric guitar at 13, left home for Elliot at 17, spent some time in a so-called music school, went on the road with some reggae acts, escaped to New York City in 1990 for about seven months, got into hardcore and Robert Johnson. Right now, my band is almost complete." Feels like a bold-faced lie. There was no band.

• 1:01:40Yasi Salek?

  "I'm showing up at, uh, club jams around town, trying out new songs. My life is now complete and utter chaos." That was in the program. So he-

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  It's charming.

• 1:01:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's very nice. He performs Tim's song that was about, basically about him and Mary Gibber, "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain."

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  This is a very heavy thing to have done.

• 1:02:03Yasi Salek?

  He's like, "Okay, I'll do that one." The one that's about my father abandoning my family and how difficult that must have been for him.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:21Yasi Salek?

  It's like harrowing. He's wonderful.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, yeah.

• 1:02:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  He's Jeff Buckley.

• 1:02:28Yasi Salek?

  I know, but like, this is ostensibly his first time singing live. I mean, he had sang like backing vocals with that hair metal band. He has not-

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like-

• 1:02:40Yasi Salek?

  -performed on a stage.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  It's just the origin story moment, you know, of like someone seizing this opportunity that they were born to have literally, and they have the genes to support it. And, um, yeah, I mean, I wonder if he doesn't do this. Does it happen?

• 1:02:57Yasi Salek?

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  It doesn't seem like it, right?

• 1:02:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because this, I don't think so, but who knows? He's so talented. Maybe it would have anyways. I mean, many people say that like just hearing him at Shinnai was like life-changing. So if he had just done enough open mics around town, I mean, you can't hear that. I assume it probably would have happened. It might have been slower. Might have been better for him if it had been slower.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Possibly.

• 1:03:23Yasi Salek?

  He does change one part in the song where it's, um, "I'm sailing all my sins and I'm climbing all my fears and soon now I'll fly." And he sang drowning all my fears.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:32Yasi Salek?

  Um, he also wrote his entire own verse for the song. It goes something like this. My love is the flower that lies among the graves. My love is the thousand souls that you have saved. And all the insane mad men tell me I'm not as well behaved. Something, something spread my ash along the way. I want to feel the tide pull through me like a woman drunk in sin. I want to feel the fish swim through me. Let the water take my skin. Wrapped around the pebble that you chose to warm your hand. Just as I dream every day, as I pray you'll understand. Saying there's a lot of references to the water taking my skin. Um, later on, like a couple of years later, Interview Magazine asked him about singing this song. And he said, I sang Tim's song, I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain. It was about him having to take the gypsy life over a regular one.

• 1:04:17Yasi Salek?

  I mentioned the song, as is his girlfriend at the time, my mom. It's a beautiful song. I both admired it and hated it. So that's what I sang. Scorpio, real Scorpio shit to do that. To be like, this song is about me. I fucking hate this. I hate this man for doing this, but I love him and I'm gonna sing it for you all right now. And I wrote a whole other verse for it. Apparently he's also like, like, there's like, all this talk about how the way he was lit, he looked like Jesus Christ or something. It was like a really like dramatic moment. I wish there was video.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  He does look like Jesus Christ, or at least the, you know, the, the modern kind of the Western vision of Jesus Christ.

• 1:04:55Yasi Salek?

  Probably looked more like a Mysrat Fatale. If we're being, if we're being honest, but.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  He looks like Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ.

• 1:05:01Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. Hot. He, he performed a couple of other songs, Sephora, The King's Chain, and Fantasmagoria of Two.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:05:10Yasi Salek?

  When Buckley was doing drugs. When he came on stage for the finale, Jeff said, he came alone and he said, "A long time ago, when I was a little kid, my mom sat in bed and she put this record on. And it was like the first song where I ever heard my father's voice. I must have been six. I was bored. I was bored, I'm sorry. But you know what can you expect from a cat who's into Sesame Street at the time?" And then he started singing Once I Was. Then he cried backstage and everyone showered him in praise.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  So did it happen like right away after that? What happens?

• 1:05:43Yasi Salek?

  No, um.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  What year is this?

• 1:05:46Yasi Salek?

  This is nineteen ninety one.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Ninety one, okay.

• 1:05:49Yasi Salek?

  He meets someone important at this, I mean, multiple important people, I'm guessing, but he meets Rebecca Moore, who's an actress and the daughter of Peter Moore, is that her father's name? He was a photographer and artist, part of this like fluxus avant garde art scene. She falls in love with her. Um, so he returned, he stays a little bit longer to spend time with her and then he returns to LA in May of nineteen ninety one. While he's back in LA, he starts making music with Carla Azar and Chris Dowd, under the name The Insouciant Inbreds.

• 1:06:22Yasi Salek?

  I don't think they ever, uh.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  It's not a bad name.

• 1:06:26Yasi Salek?

  Difficult to pronounce.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 1:06:28Yasi Salek?

  Chris Dowd, this is so great, Chris Dowd's very funny. He remembers that when Jeff got back from the tribute, he was like, okay, well, how was it? What did you do? What did you sing? And Jeff was like, I sang, I never asked to be your mountain. And Chris said, and I'm like, okay, what's that? I don't, I didn't really know Tim's stuff. The only time I'd ever heard Jeff use his voice was when he was mimicking things. He could do Robert Plant, all that. Carla and I wondered if he could do Prince stuff, but he used to say he couldn't really sing. He was always being really weird about his voice. Then he busted out, I never asked to be your mountain. And I'm like, the fuck you mean you can't sing? Newsflash, motherfucker, you can sing. It's gonna be okay. I think you might have a grasp on that singing shit.

• 1:07:08Yasi Salek?

  It's not wrong. In fact, the, the, the wondering about Prince is interesting because his speaking voice is quite high.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:07:16Yasi Salek?

  He has a kind of a unexpected, I guess, maybe not unexpected, but.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  He's borderline soprano.

• 1:07:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like when he's speaking, because he's a tenor in his singing, but his speaking voice is quite, it's quite high. It was a David, real David Beckham moment, you know? So they're making music, they're really pushing him to improve his songwriting. Chris Dowd said, he had all the gifts to be a great artist, but he didn't know why a song worked in a certain way. A lot of times we did cross the line with him in terms of being overbearing, like that fucking guitar part doesn't work. Don't you know how to write a hook? We were hard on him. Not a hook-based writer, really, Jeff Buckley anyways, but, and then again, he's still homeless, unhoused. And Chris Dowd is like, well, I'm going on tour because Fishbone just put out an album, You Can Stay At My Place. And they kind of lived together and then Chris, uh, Chris went on tour.

• 1:08:06Yasi Salek?

  And he said, he was an awesome housemate. We just had fun, man. Had a good time, being open, honest, talking for hours. The Jeff I knew was funny as hell, but completely socially awkward at times. You know, like, Jeff, this may not be the best time to say that, dog.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  It was funny.

• 1:08:24Yasi Salek?

  Jeff, this may not be the best time to say that, dog.

• 1:08:29Yasi Salek?

  If you've listened to any of the live stuff, you get what he's saying because he is, he's a total clown. Like, he's constantly kind of filling the space with like weird little, I can really relate. As like a class clown type person who just wanted to draw attention away from vulnerability.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Well, that's what it is. I mean, yeah, it's totally about protecting himself.

• 1:08:53Yasi Salek?

  Of course. But it's like, you can really see him saying the wrong thing or whatever and like, and, or like, me and my friend Alana call it doing pizza party, when you just like burst, you want to come to a pizza party? You know, like, it's a thing, it's just like something to diffuse a situation.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  That's sweet.

• 1:09:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  I think it's ironic though with him, or just odd, because he exposes himself so much as an artist. But it's like, almost like when he's not in the middle of the exposure, he has to be like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know?

• 1:09:24Yasi Salek?

  Sure. Cause I think when you're performing, you're in it, right? You're, you're doing the thing that you're good at and you're kind of communing with this like spirit or whatever. But when you're not, you're like, oh my God, everybody's looking at me. Oh my God, they're thinking I'm stupid. Chris also said, but he was one of the most, those people who was loyal to a fault until it hurts. And as far as his legacy goes, if he'd known how it played out, he would have given away every fucking thing with his name on it. That's how he was. He was a truly selfless person. So he's in LA, he's working on music with Chris and Carla. He's constantly thinking about Rebecca Moore. He's calling her and leaving messages of himself singing to her on her answering machine. And Gary Lucas, who he had performed with, had been super impressed

• 1:10:09Yasi Salek?

  by him and really wanted to start a collaboration. So he mails him a tape of two instrumentals called Rise Up and Be and And You Will. These are horrible names, respectfully. Gary Lucas, like, why are we writing in complete sentences? Rise Up and Be, sounds like a church song. I don't understand. And then a twist, a beautiful twist of fate, pertinent to your interests, happens where Jeff ends up being able to go back to New York, thanks to Carla and Chris, who were friends with the guy that did the music for the film The Commitments, Paul Bushnell was his name. The producers needed musicians to play behind the film's star, Andrew Strong, at these various premiere parties. They got him a job doing that. I haven't seen The Commitments in a really long time.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  I remember it being quite fun.

• 1:10:52Yasi Salek?

  Me too.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  I liked it, but it's a little bit lost to time these days.

• 1:10:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. One of the guys in The Commitments was Glenn Hansard, who's the Irish guy who ended up writing Once, one of my favorite

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  It's a great film.

• 1:11:01Yasi Salek?

  Things of all time. I don't really like musicals, but that thing is fucking god tier.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  The songs in it are insanely beautiful. And Glenn, I think, is kind of in union with Jeff in terms of like, the way he writes songs, the relationship between, like, the vulnerability, love, God, the searching for something. Like, they're all, they're kind of intertwined.

• 1:11:18Yasi Salek?

  Totally. So they meet on that.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Super sincere, insanely sincere.

• 1:11:22Yasi Salek?

  Very earnest.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Yasi Salek?

  Very earnest.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  What would two irony-poisoned elder millennials like us, really, what would we do if we were confronted by the stone-cold beauty of those people writing songs face to face? Would we turn ourselves over to them?

• 1:11:35Yasi Salek?

  I would.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  You would?

• 1:11:37Yasi Salek?

  I do.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Okay. In person? Or would you deflect?

• 1:11:42Yasi Salek?

  In what way?

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Out of embarrassment.

• 1:11:44Yasi Salek?

  Like, I, like, rip my shirt open? Oops. I was not supposed to hit that, right?

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  I don't think you should hit the camera, no.

• 1:11:49Yasi Salek?

  It's too close, then. What if I gesticulate? Yes, I would love to, I would love to surrender.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  You would rip your shirt open in front of them?

• 1:11:56Yasi Salek?

  Is it Jeff Buckley? Yeah.

• 1:12:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  I guess I would too.

• 1:12:02Yasi Salek?

  I've ruined my life for lesser musicians. There's no reason.

• 1:12:07Yasi Salek?

  And he's like, is that related? Is that the Banana Republic family?

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  As long as it's not Banana Republic, he's okay.

• 1:12:13Yasi Salek?

  So yeah, he gets back to New York City, babe. The Big Apple.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can I? There's something specific about that. He moves to the Lower East Side of New York.

• 1:12:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  And Lower East Side of New York is obviously legendary for artists and it's still in a time when it's still the Lower East Side.

• 1:12:30Yasi Salek?

  You need to like.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  It's been transformed into this hub of, you know, like capitalism.

• 1:12:35Yasi Salek?

  I think it has like an Allo Yoga store now. It's a whole different situation. Even when I lived there, it was still.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  When I was there, it was just changing. It was just starting to change.

• 1:12:43Yasi Salek?

  Was the hat still there?

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  The hat was there.

• 1:12:46Yasi Salek?

  R I P the hat, the best. You would just pull up on your bike, get a to-go margarita. That was not legal. And it was in a Coke cup and you would just toot toot around town.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was good. All those places were good. Rosario, Rosario Pizza. Oh my God. Holy shit.

• 1:13:00Yasi Salek?

  Little cheeseburger pizza.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  I probably ate 1,000 slices of pizza from Rosario.

• 1:13:04Yasi Salek?

  Four in the morning, just absolutely crawled over from Max Fish.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  That was great. But yeah, we were, when we were living there, we were feeling it changing. And what Rebecca Moore talks about this a bit in the documentary too, but just the idea of being in New York in the early 90s, before it really starts to become a very commercialized part of the city. I think it's clearly very special and very influential and it's a great time in artistic history.

• 1:13:28Yasi Salek?

  Do you think there is any place left on God's good earth that you could move to in 2026? That has that energy?

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  It's sort of like reverse whack-a-mole where like something new comes up in the, you know, like Austin in the 2000s took on like this identity as a space. Kind of in the post Richard Linklater, pre Texas Silicon Valley thing.

• 1:13:55Yasi Salek?

  Sentient urban outfitters.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  But then you hear like, oh, Asheville, North Carolina is a great place. You know, like it's cities like that keep popping up and then they become, and then the corporations follow the young people who move there and the artists who move there. And you know, so what is that right now? I'm too old to know what the right place is for right now, but they still, they. Still come around. It's just like in the 10 major American cities. Now it's over.

• 1:14:13Yasi Salek?

  Well, yes, it's cooked, but not then. Not then it was gritty.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  It was great.

• 1:14:17Yasi Salek?

  Seedy, cheap rat. He links up with Gary Lucas and they work on those songs. Rise Up and Be, which becomes Grace, and And You Will, which becomes Mojo Pen. We'll talk about these songs in depth when we get to the album. He still goes back and forth a bit between LA and New York, but he's staying with Rebecca Moore, like you said, on the Lower East Side. Comes back in the fall and he joins Gary Lucas's band Gods and Monsters for some shows. Gary Lucas is like, hell yeah. I don't want to put words into his mouth, but it's a bit like, I found my meal ticket, you know?

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:14:48Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if he said that, but it felt that way. He sent their tape around to like some record biz people, including a woman named Kate Hyman, who I believe is in the HBO documentary.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  She's featured in the documentary.

• 1:14:58Yasi Salek?

  She was in Anard Imago, which was the label that was Amy Mann and Paula Cole and then randomly Rollins Band, uh, home to those bands. Kate Hyman was a huge Tim Buckley fan. She apparently had a photo of Tim Buckley in her office. And she loves this. She's like, okay, I'll give you a $10,000 development deal.

• 1:15:17Yasi Salek?

  At Christmas, Jeff goes back home for one last trip to pack up what was left of his belongings, which was not much because actually Chris Dowd's apartment had been robbed while he was on tour. And Jeff no longer had a guitar or an amp because everything he owned of value was taken.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Devastating.

• 1:15:29Yasi Salek?

  I know, especially for someone who like barely is, uh, you know, solvent.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Yasi Salek?

  So, top of 1982, he moves in with Rebecca Moore. Their nicknames for each other were Scratchy Fish, that was Jeff because he didn't shave, and Butterfly, that was Rebecca Moore. And in their apartment, they painted a poem on the wall. This is what it said. "The tip of her wing grazed the water lightly, where only moments before she had seen the shadows move, she heard the rumors about a lone scratchy fish, possibly the only one of its kind. Roaming the dark water with his eyes to the sky, with each careful swoop, she moved close to the swirling beautiful blue." This is interesting because as she says in the documentary, it's, it's basically about how these two things can never be together. The scratchy fish and the butterfly because they are separated by water and air.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Well, more foreshadowing.

• 1:16:19Yasi Salek?

  I know. Gary Lucas is like, here, I have a partnership agreement for you to sign. Jeff's like, hmm. And then he's like, maybe I should have my lawyer look at that Imago thing. He didn't actually have a lawyer, but someone put him in touch with George Stein. And George Stein is like, this contract is unacceptable, actually. It gives Imago the right of first refusal on anything you do after Gods and Monsters, including solo stuff. So Jeff is like, no, no. And then he makes Gary Lucas fire the entire rhythm section of Gods and Monsters. This is not as interesting, because he makes him do that to me, as to who he makes Gary Lucas

• 1:17:01Yasi Salek?

  hire, which is the Pierre Ubu bassist, Tony Mammon. Pierre Ubu is amazing. And Anton Fear, who I know best from the feelings, because I love that band. These are very cool avant-garde New York, like, early, I don't want to say alternative rock, but alternative rock bands. And obviously Jeff was like, that's who I want to play with, you know? He's already kind of showing that, like, I'm interested in having a more interesting band around me.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  That all makes sense to me about everything that he does, except for grace. So like, we should keep talking.

• 1:17:35Yasi Salek?

  You mean the song grace or the album grace?

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  The album grace.

• 1:17:37Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  So like, we should keep talking about that.

• 1:17:40Yasi Salek?

  About his interest in alternative music?

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  His bona fides around having this incredible, wide-ranging

• 1:17:48Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  taste, but specifically like, American underground, you know? Like, that, him having a sensibility around that, and English, I guess, as well. But that doesn't, I don't think that that's something that is really communicated by the surface level of his fame and success.

• 1:18:03Yasi Salek?

  No, I don't think so either. So they play a show, Gods and Monsters, with this new rhythm section in March. And unfortunately, what happens is it just shows everyone what a massive fucking star Jeff Buckley is. There's a New York Times review of this. The headline is, "A Singer With A Voice Beyond His Years." It's a band show. They do mention that he's spoken Jamaican football.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:26Yasi Salek?

  Two weeks later, after this gods and monsters show, Kate Hyman's like, hey, um, our deal is actually done. It's over because I just want to work with Jeff.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  That's what she says to Gary.

• 1:18:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Okay. Tough beat for Gary.

• 1:18:37Yasi Salek?

  Tough beat, tough beat for Gary. Another major event occurs around the tail end of 1992, which is Rebecca Moore is in a play, she's an actress, with a guy called Daniel Harnett, who was also in a band called Glim. And she's talking to him, she's like, my boyfriend has nowhere to gig. Can you recommend some clubs? And he recommends Shin A. Shin A. Okay. It's an Irish coffee shop, bar, owned by Shane Doyle. Jeff goes there one day with Daniel Harnett, who was a regular, and he's like, can I perform here? And Shane Doyle's like, I don't, can't pay you, but go nuts. I don't know if that's exactly what happened, but basically. Chris Dowd actually says that the once guy is who introduced him here.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Glenn Hanser.

• 1:19:19Yasi Salek?

  Glenn Hanser, which would make sense, but whatever, it doesn't matter. He gets introduced. So in April of this year, we're in 92, he plays there for the first time with a borrowed white telecaster, plays mostly covers. Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit, which he had discovered through the Creatures version, Suzy Sue singing it, very cool. Um, I Know It's Over by The Smiths. Nothing will ruin me more than Jeff Buckley singing I Know It's Over. That should be illegal.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  This is really like the Jeff Buckley that I know.

• 1:19:53Yasi Salek?

  You mean in terms of his inspiration?

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  Homies with the guy from Fishbone and who's hiring people from the Feelies to be in a band. Like, to me, that's not really super evident in a lot of what made him famous. It doesn't mean that it's not cool. It is cool. It's cool that he had that incredibly broad taste, that he was interested in outsider-ish artists. But the thing that made him him was that he was tremendously comfortable in his masculinity, sexuality, whatever you want to call it, that he, his idol relationship to Edith Piaf and Nina Simone and Judy Garland, these kind of like, you know, black female artists or foreign female artists or queer icons or whatever. All of the things that those artists comprise, you know, for me as a teenager, that was so eye-opening.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  That was so powerful to be like, who's Edith Piaf? And This was the thing that differentiated him from, I thought, every like faux cool New York singer songwriter guy. Is that he was like, I have an insane instrument. My instrument is best applied to songs sung by women. And what, like, I didn't know anything about the Tim Buckley tribute concert. I didn't know anything about him performing with Gary Lucas when I came upon him.

• 1:21:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  But the, one of the first things you find, once you get beneath the surface with him is live at Sine.

• 1:21:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  And this, and this being like the origin story and where all the record executives were going, right? Like that's, and that's kind of where we're headed now.

• 1:21:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  So when I think about his artistic identity, this is exactly what I think of.

• 1:21:27Yasi Salek?

  That is his legacy, but I guess I wanted to paint more because that's his legacy, because his legacy was cut very short. And who knows what was left on the other side?

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Yasi Salek?

  I think the friendship with Chris Doudou of Fishbone was important. I think he taught him how to write songs in a way, like as he was saying, you know, like, or, or at least had some influence, like.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  I'm not trying to discount any of those things.

• 1:21:52Yasi Salek?

  No, no.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  I think what I'm trying to say is, is like, it was way easier to do the thing that you were mentioning at the top of the episode, which is sort of like narrativize him.

• 1:21:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  In a very specific way. And then when we get to this stage in someone's life, like, this is how the information was delivered to me. Because the record label is working to narrativize and the journalists are working to narrativize.

• 1:22:10Yasi Salek?

  I think it's so important, the reason I'm setting the stage for it is because it's going to speak so much to his, his crisis of creativity that comes after grace. And what he was, what he wanted to do and what he couldn't do, or didn't feel like he was allowed to do or had to push against. And it'll make so much more sense knowing the backdrop. I love that you said that about his like confidence in his masculinity or his comfort in his masculinity. There's a lot of quotes where he says something to the effect of how sensitivity is actually extreme strength. You know, or that.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  And this was before a lot of those sentiments were sort of like, almost like made fun of on sitcoms on TV. Like, I was, I was young, so it felt early. So maybe there was a lot of that happening. But I don't, in 1987, there was not a lot of that happening, I don't think, in the culture.

• 1:23:01Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  He felt like really at the forefront. And you know, Kurt was like that, too.

• 1:23:04Yasi Salek?

  Definitely.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  With wearing dresses and talking about.

• 1:23:07Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Buckley also wore women's clothing.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Yasi Salek?

  Joan Wasser, his, his later partner, who was his partner when he passed away, said about him that because he grew up with all women, a lot of times he felt like a woman. He would often say that I was the man and he was the woman. He was very sensual in a way a lot of women are.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Yasi Salek?

  He's a, he was a diva.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Very much.

• 1:23:27Yasi Salek?

  Speaking to those, you know, women that he.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  The penis, yeah.

• 1:23:30Yasi Salek?

  Shantuse with a penis. I think there's a, there is an expression of pain that is so feminine

• 1:23:39Yasi Salek?

  in how he does it, you know, like, and we're talking about that, the Billie Holiday of it all, you know, like, it's a flamboyant expression of pain, you know, as opposed to an angry expression of pain. It's a vulnerable expression of pain. It's both those things. Whereas when you feel a lot of male pain, especially in the 90s, it's grunge, right?

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:24:02Yasi Salek?

  Or it's metal.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  It's anger.

• 1:24:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, or, you know, and maybe it's, it's tampered anger, it's more open-hearted anger, however you want to put it, but it's not this.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  No, there's analogs. I think a lot of it is the sound. And like, part of the reason why I really want to talk about Grace is that, like, Lain Staley is like, kind of related to Jeff Buckley in a way, like, in terms of communicating, like, incredible anguish about things.

• 1:24:24Yasi Salek?

  Chris Cornell, one of his friends, you know?

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  But they, those guys just happened to be in bands.

• 1:24:29Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  That were so heavy, that had basically metal roots.

• 1:24:32Yasi Salek?

  That were rooted, yeah, exactly. He also did, covered quite a bit of Van Morrison, because he had just recently learned about Astral Weeks.

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  I compared Grace to Astral Weeks to you a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:24:41Yasi Salek?

  And Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah, I think is so interesting, because it's actually a cover not of Leonard Cohen's original

• 1:24:55Yasi Salek?

  version that was from, I think, 1984, but from the version that John Cale did, a reworked version that came out on this 1991 Leonard Cohen tribute album called I'm Your Fan, that was put out by like a French rock magazine.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  Fascinating thing for Jeff to have his hands on.

• 1:25:12Yasi Salek?

  He found it while he was cat sitting. And thank God, because he fell in love with this cover. And this cover is very important, because if you listen to Leonard Cohen's 84 version, it has a completely different feel. It's a little more loungy. I don't know how to. It's more, more importantly, it's, it's more in the vein of the spiritual.

• 1:25:34Speaker 00

  I'll stand before the Lord of song with nothing on my tongue, but hallelujah.

• 1:25:45Yasi Salek?

  And less in the vein of the sexual, which it contained both, because Leonard Cohen wrote, like, over 80 verses to Hallelujah. And he would switch them in and out in live performances, but in the recorded version, it just had those four. Kale had asked Leonard Cohen for all the lyrics, and he faxed over like 30 pages of lyrics. And John Cale ended up choosing two of the same verses, the first two, and then three different ones, which is what Jeff Buckley took. So if you like, you know, or love, like me, like the parts of like tying you to the kitchen chair and, you know, broke your throne

• 1:26:24Yasi Salek?

  and she cut your hair, you can think John Cale. This is a cover, this spiritually horny Jeff Buckley version.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:26:34Yasi Salek?

  Comes from John Cale's version, which was coy, but not, didn't contain this like dark sexuality, I think, when the way that.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Buckley did it.

• 1:26:43Speaker 00

  Tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne, she cut your hair.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  I think he maintains that air of spirituality in the song, in part because unlike Leonard Cohen and John Cale, he has this very.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  The Christlike pose on top of the angelic voice. So like the, to this point, the best known versions of the song were not sung by an angel. And then he makes this song very much like a, this is like, becomes a singer's song. It was not really a singer's song before this.

• 1:27:18Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, respect to Leonard Cohen.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Oh, a singer I love, but I mean, not, not known for his range vocally. And that's a, that's a fascinating thing that happens. It's very rare for a song to become well-known without it being a singer. So to become a kind of modern standard, you don't usually find modern standards that are first performed by non-singer types.

• 1:27:40Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I just think it's so interesting because this is one of those rare occasions where the song found its ideal home. And this is, Leonard Cohen is a brilliant writer, brilliant lyricist. John Cale is amazing, but this song has never come more alive, in my opinion, than in the hands of Jeff Buckley. Because of how he possesses all the things that we just talked about. He possesses the voice, the musicality. He possesses the deep sexual nature and the darkness, but he also possesses the light. He possesses this deep desire to commune with spirit and God. And that is what this song is so core about.

• 1:28:23Yasi Salek?

  It couldn't be a more perfect host than in Jeff Buckley.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  It's so, so fascinating that it is the most streamed song for both Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, who covered it for Shrek movie.

• 1:28:37Yasi Salek?

  Actually, the John Cale version is in the Shrek movie, but they couldn't use it on the soundtrack.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  That's right. That is right. It's just a fascinating thing for a song that was, you know, in this, when he was performing this was nine years old and the version that he was covering was four or five years old. And now, I mean.

• 1:28:54Yasi Salek?

  Now, it is the, it's in the Library of Congress.

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:28:57Yasi Salek?

  This version is in the Library of Congress.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  It has 420 million streams on Spotify.

• 1:29:02Yasi Salek?

  The Holy Dove was moving too, babe. Love is not a victory march. Bye.

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  I mean, that's Leonard Cohen.

• 1:29:20Yasi Salek?

  He wrote all of the lyrics, but they're not in the original and not in the recorded version. Fascinating.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:29:27Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, this is what he's doing. Plus, he did play some of his originals at Shunay. Eternal Life, Unforgiven, Grace, and Mojo Pen. He's playing every Monday now, babe. He's fucking, he's on fire. They love him. He said, "I wanted to coast on these songs and learn to be a singer. I figured if I played in the no man's land of intimacy, I'd learn to be a performer." I did just see he was coasting, but actually it did take him a little while to win over the crowd. Um, he said that people weren't into it at first. I had to fight to be heard. Then I had to stop fighting. Whole months would go by where people would just be talking. I even got a headache from a performance one time. This is in Interview Magazine. An interview said, "Well, what changed?" And he said, "I learned how to use everything in the room as the music. A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it.

• 1:30:12Yasi Salek?

  So if people are talking, I let them talk. That just means they're part of the music. I even had to learn the noise the dishwasher makes at this little cafe. I had to play in B flat or it wouldn't sound right." People also said that he would do like pitch perfect impressions of like the espresso machine and stuff. He's like the guy from Police Academy.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Who's just gonna make that joke.

• 1:30:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's more covers, babe. Once he gets the audience. We're playing Pay to Come by Bad Brains. Must Must, Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, and lots of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

• 1:30:46Yasi Salek?

  Starts to really draw a crowd, many women.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Mama, You've Been on My Mind is one that he plays a lot. One of my favorite Dylan songs.

• 1:30:53Yasi Salek?

  Also, if you see her, say hello.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:55Yasi Salek?

  Okay, he does an interview in August with Martin Astin, and he said, "I guess what I want to do is to be an archetypal entertainer, an archetypal bard, a minstrel. I guess I have a romantic vision. Even though punk happened to me and Robert Johnson, I want to be a really good storyteller, and the songs I cover have great stories." To your point about... Even though punk happened to him, this is what he gravitates toward.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  So funny though, because I don't, he says that a lot and he talks about this in the, um, in the documentary as well. And I don't, I, I guess I don't identify him in that way.

• 1:31:27Yasi Salek?

  Because he didn't present that way and there was no music to that effect, but I mean, he wanted to be in Murphy's Law. You heard radio. It's there.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, it is. It is. It's, I think just the, you know, that obviously is, that's what Dylan really much like wants, still wants to represent as like the, the man who comes to town to tell you a tale. You know, that's like, that's his idea. And Buckley could totally do that, but, and if you sing Strange Fruit, you're doing that.

• 1:31:55Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  But his records, I don't, I don't feel that as much.

• 1:31:59Yasi Salek?

  I don't know how much Grace was the purest expression of exactly what he wanted to do.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:07Yasi Salek?

  In some ways.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  It feels like those were the best songs he had written up until that point.

• 1:32:11Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:32:17Yasi Salek?

  Now it's fall of 92. He gets, he's getting a little press, right? He gets a write up in Paper Magazine, which is notable. I couldn't find it, so I can't even read from it, but notable because Mary Seer is assigned to shoot him. And this sort of is the beginning of like a really beautiful artist muse type friendship and relationship. Um, she becomes one of his closest friends and also who ends up shooting most of the photos that we eat.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Yes. His iconography is created by her.

• 1:32:46Yasi Salek?

  Correct.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Yasi Salek?

  So one night, as legend has it, Hal Willner is walking down St. Mark's Place with his buddy, Steve Berkowitz, who is an A and R at Columbia, coincidentally also Fishbone's A and R. Um, and they walk past Shunay where Jeff is playing. And Hal was like, you know what? We should go, come with me. We should go check Jeff out. And they saw a kid in, quote, rags, setting up the mic and the guitar. And they thought that he was perhaps an employee of the establishment. And then he started playing and singing and they were like, oh, that's Jeff Buckley. And Berkowitz was absolutely blown away. Word starts to spread amongst ANRs in the ANR community. George Stein was also a regular at these shows, his lawyer.

• 1:33:32Yasi Salek?

  And he offers to help Jeff by like making some calls, you know, setting up some label meetings. ANRs start showing up to Sinek in limos. Jeff called this a bit of a cotillion and he would go hide after the show and wash dishes. So he didn't have to deal with them.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  Don Einer famously reportedly showed up in a limo.

• 1:33:49Yasi Salek?

  Yes, I couldn't get to the point. Apparently Don did not actually ever come there.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:33:54Yasi Salek?

  In the Dream Brother book, but then some people say he did. I don't know. Or maybe it was Clive Davis who never actually came.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Don Einer, longtime kind of chairman of Columbia Records.

• 1:34:03Yasi Salek?

  Yes. DWA was a code they had at Columbia. It stood for Donnie Wansett. Jeff Buckley was a Donnie Wansett.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:34:10Yasi Salek?

  So he starts taking meetings. I liked this little anecdote that George Stein remembers with a meeting with Arista, Clive Davis's. Jeff Buckley shows up one hour late, wearing a ratty T-shirt and carrying a plastic bag filled with like Ajax and like other cleaning supplies for his apartment. And halfway through, he goes, wait, what label are we at right now again? Who are we talking to? Later, apparently he had a new friend through Rebecca called Penny Arcade, who was a performance artist, that he knew exactly what he was doing at these label meetings. Penny said he was very proud of the fact that he was very belligerent with the record companies. He had a real chip on his shoulder about them. Okay, so since so many labels seem interested, this is interesting to people who are interested in the music biz.

• 1:34:54Yasi Salek?

  George Stein sets up a package deal that any label who wants to sign him has to agree to this deal. And it is a guarantee of three albums, $100,000 signing bonus advance, a higher than usual royalty rate, which was 28%, and creative control over his music and recordings. And the way, the reason they call this a million dollar deal is because What it costs to make albums in the 90s. Three albums plus the $100,000 signing bonus would amount to about a million dollars.

• 1:35:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:35:25Yasi Salek?

  So it's a million dollar deal. Enter Columbia, who is owned by Sony conglomerate. At the time, they're fucking killing it, babe. Why? Mariah Carey. Two words. Mariah Carey. Also, Michael Bolton. Jeff Buckley's nemesis. Harry Connick Jr. And the CNC Music Factory.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  But I found the, the, the list of the top albums from the year that Jeff's debut to be released. To be, well, just to be a fascinating snapshot of the end of something.

• 1:35:55Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  And we didn't know when that was happening, but it was the end.

• 1:35:58Yasi Salek?

  But it was the end, yeah. When, you're talking about 94.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:01Yasi Salek?

  94 is a fascinating.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  And those artists you just named were participants in that year.

• 1:36:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and they're also, the 90s is so interesting because, and I say it every time and I'll say it again until I die. Everyone thinks the 90s was like all Nirvana and Soundgarden all the time. And what it was was CNC Music Factory, Life is a Highway, Mariah Carey, so much Garth Brooks. You know, there was a lot of other stuff going on.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:25Yasi Salek?

  But they were also the home of, right, Bob Dylan and Springsteen. Is that right? And they really wanted to like, you know, get back on their heritage artist shit, something they could be proud of. Not that they weren't proud of Michael Bolton.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  They do this every 10 or 10 or so years. Where they hand pick up usually a white guy. And they say, this is the voice of a generation and we will give you the Cadillac treatment.

• 1:36:46Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  To build up your persona.

• 1:36:48Yasi Salek?

  And he could have been that. And we'll get into that. There's no.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  He basically did do it. It just happened ex post facto.

• 1:36:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  He is now in that lineage.

• 1:36:56Yasi Salek?

  That's true. That's true. But it could have been a Bob Dylan where he had 20 albums like that, you know?

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  I totally agree.

• 1:37:01Yasi Salek?

  So Steve Berkowitz brings in the label, like you said, Don Einer. Einer said, I had no idea what we could ever do with Jeff on a commercial level, but the performance showed an amazing treasure. I don't know if I, how much I believe that.

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  That feels like a little post-game.

• 1:37:15Yasi Salek?

  A lot of this.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Armchair quarterback.

• 1:37:17Yasi Salek?

  Honey, a lot of this is when, when you read these quotes through the prism of after the fact, you're like, okay, I want to hear what you said during the time.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  I mean, Jeff Buckley is a strikingly beautiful, heartthrob type who wrote great songs and had one of the greatest voices in the history of rock and roll.

• 1:37:33Yasi Salek?

  Okay, but I'll stop you there. He wrote great songs, but they were not commercially viable songs. No one was like, oh, I heard Eternal Life, that's gonna fucking rack up the, you know, Billboard charts.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  We'll talk about when we talk about Grace.

• 1:37:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  I just, I feel very strongly about this.

• 1:37:46Yasi Salek?

  I think they wrote songs too. I don't think they're commercial songs.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  I totally disagree.

• 1:37:49Yasi Salek?

  Okay, all right, great. I can't wait to fight. Ultimately, George Stein convinces him to sign to Columbia. Jeff kind of apparently pumped the brakes and was like, should I sign to an indie? Like, maybe I should sign to an indie. Good, good question, you know? And again, what conversation will we be having if he had signed to Matador? Or whatever, I don't know, that's the first time.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  I think that would've been a good fit.

• 1:38:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  I think that would've been a good fit.

• 1:38:12Yasi Salek?

  I do think so too.

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  I think you wouldn't get Grace. You'd get a totally different record.

• 1:38:15Yasi Salek?

  You might eventually get Grace, or some version of Grace.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Maybe, there's something, yeah, but, yeah.

• 1:38:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you would never get exactly Grace because this is the, this is the output of many limitations and pressures and other things.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  And they also paid for things that Matador wouldn't have paid for.

• 1:38:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, a hundred of string arrangements, yeah. According to Berkowitz, before he was signing, Jeff asked him, are you signing me because of who my father was?

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:43Yasi Salek?

  And Steve Berkowitz was basically like, your father's not that famous, babe, like, no. And Jeff was like, okay, then. But I don't think he believed him because he did an interview with The New York Times in October of 1993 with David Brown, and he's told him, I'm convinced part of the reason I got signed is because of who I am, and it makes me sad, but I can't do anything else.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  I do think that that was a checkpoint on the list of reasons to sign him, but by no means the driving force.

• 1:39:06Yasi Salek?

  That's basically what Berkowitz is like, he's like, you're not like, you know.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  It's a good part.

• 1:39:10Yasi Salek?

  You're not Bob Dylan's son, you know?

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  Nice thing to include in the nut graph.

• 1:39:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  But it's not the lead.

• 1:39:16Yasi Salek?

  The nut graph?

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  You know about the nut graph?

• 1:39:18Yasi Salek?

  No, I was a failed journalist, I don't know if you remember that.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  The nut graph is typically the second paragraph, which features the who, what, where, when, why.

• 1:39:24Yasi Salek?

  Got it. Not, it's not the headline.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  The lead is where the, sort of the catching, opening phrase, or opening question, or opening setting of, you know, the piece. So you wouldn't say like, The beloved historical icon Tim Buckley's son performed today.

• 1:39:40Yasi Salek?

  It's interesting you say that because actually in a lot of the early press, it is, it is the lead. And we'll get into that. I'll read some of it.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:39:48Yasi Salek?

  Do you think Jacob Dylan had this conversation with his ANN? Are you saying the wallflowers? Because my dad is Bob Dylan. And they were like, no, it's because one headlight is a fucking stone cold hit. And they lied. They didn't lie about the dad.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  Bringing down the horse, that was pretty good.

• 1:40:03Yasi Salek?

  Well, I love the wallflowers. I'm being genuine. I really genuinely think Jacob Dylan is incredibly talented. I love, I love those songs. Sixth Avenue Hard A.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  I think that is that, that's also Columbia.

• 1:40:13Yasi Salek?

  Makes sense. I mean, who else is gonna sound Bob Dylan's son?

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  I know, that's a good record. That's a pretty good album.

• 1:40:18Yasi Salek?

  Fucking bangs.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  It shares something with Grace, which we can talk about.

• 1:40:22Yasi Salek?

  In the BBC documentary, there is a clip where Jeff talks about, just back to this whole like, I'm not him. I'm not Tim Buckley. He says, it's just something I've grown up with. It's my way of resisting people's trivialization of my music. I have a great, great admiration for Tim and what he did and the things like that. But I respect him as a fellow artist, not my father, because he wasn't my father. Ron Moorhead was my father. There's also another, in a letter he writes to Tim Buckley's writing partner, he says something to the effect of like, I don't want to be his disciple. I'm not his disciple. You know, like, I'm not his follower. That's not who I am. Okay, so October 29th, 1992.

• 1:41:04Yasi Salek?

  Do do. He signs his, uh, deal with Columbia. An insane detail in the David Brown book, which I hope to fucking God is true because I'm obsessed with it, is that he took his $100,000 check to an ETM and deposited it. He deposited a $100,000 check in an ETM. Can you even do that? It's not wise.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  I wouldn't recommend it.

• 1:41:24Yasi Salek?

  I wouldn't recommend it. Columbia wisely leaves him alone for a while. They're like, let's let this marinate, this artist. So in the winter of 92 through 93, he's just all vibes, babe. He's vibing. He's doing avant-garde theater with the Rec Amore, did something called comb music, three-star a la carte. He has to pretend to be in a restaurant. He has to insult a plant. I don't know, I didn't see it. He takes a poetry class.

• 1:41:49Yasi Salek?

  Which is probably important. And one of the first things he did with his money was he paid back his grandma the money he owed her. And he wrote her this beautiful letter where he says, like, I love you like 25 times and talks about how important and how loved he felt by his grandparents and his uncle. 93, Jeff gets his own apartment because he didn't want to practice music at home. But also, this is kind of the beginning of the end of his relationship with Rebecca Moore. It's on, if you guys want to go pay homage, it's 12th Street between Second and Third Avenue in The Village.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:42:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  Great part of town.

• 1:42:18Yasi Salek?

  I would love to live there right now.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  I love it there.

• 1:42:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. In June, he goes down to Boca Raton, Florida to play the Columbia, or no, Sony's annual convention. He must have loved that. Maybe or maybe not related to that, but it sparked someone at Columbia to be like, we should preserve his live show because it's everything that we've been enchanted by to tape. Like, this should be caught. And that's where the idea for Live at Shanae, the EP, came out. Also, it gave Jeff more time to write songs because he didn't have that many songs. So July 19th, they decide to do this recording. It does not go well. Jeff is very anxious. He knows he's being recorded. He feels too much pressure. He doesn't perform at his best.

• 1:43:02Yasi Salek?

  And so someone has the genius idea to do it again, but not tell him. And the, and the way that they, he didn't know is that they piped in, they put the recording equipment next door, which was a bar called Ensejo that Shane Doyle also owned. And they piped in the mics through the AC duct. And most of that, most of Live at Shanae is from that second night where he didn't know he was being recorded, according to my research.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely staggering document of performance.

• 1:43:32Yasi Salek?

  It's crazy.

• 1:43:34Speaker 02

  The, the version that came out was five songs?

• 1:43:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but we, now the version you can listen to is-

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  The deluxe legacy edition that Columbia put out after he passed is the whole thing. And it's like 30 songs. I mean, it's very long.

• 1:43:46Yasi Salek?

  All of the banter.

• 1:43:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:47Yasi Salek?

  The doo doo musical chairs.

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  Kind of an epic double disc document of him right before grace.

• 1:43:53Yasi Salek?

  I think it's one of the best things that you can listen to if you want to understand Jeff Buckley. Because it has everything, right? It has- The depth and breadth of his capabilities. It has the way that he could transform music and make it his own, even though these are covers. It has his personality because of all these interstitials where he's being this little jokey clown, you know?

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:44:18Yasi Salek?

  It really has everything. And then I think it ends with Hallelujah.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:22Yasi Salek?

  I want to tell you about how many times I've listened to Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah in the past couple of weeks. Medically unadvisable, should be put in hospital, should be in the DSM five. If you listen to Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah more than like 10 times within a certain time period, you should be committed to institution. And I'm right there. You should be paying me hazard pay.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm not responsible for pay at the company.

• 1:44:45Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Chow, I need hazard pay.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  I, uh, I thought about this a few times in the last 72 hours.

• 1:44:53Yasi Salek?

  About my suffering?

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  No, I don't really think about that. I have just been thinking about that he has to do this every night, that he has to perform these songs.

• 1:45:03Yasi Salek?

  I think he would say, I get to do this every night.

• 1:45:06Speaker 02

  And I totally get that, but like doing Hallelujah and Lover You Should Have Come Over at length with, on a consistent basis must be extremely taxing. Cause he does really like slide into those songs.

• 1:45:19Yasi Salek?

  I always think that too. And then I wonder like, what is it like though? Because again, we've talked about this, like one of my ex-boyfriends is a musician that I actually thought about so many times when I was researching Jeff Buckley. Just like you learn that it's a job, like.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. But that's not how Jeff Buckley ever communicated.

• 1:45:36Yasi Salek?

  That's true, that's true, that's true. And, and how could he not be so tapped in?

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Yasi Salek?

  And to sound like that, you have to be so tapped in.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  But a lot of artists burn out because they give their whole selves to this stuff.

• 1:45:48Yasi Salek?

  Well, spoiler alert. All right, 1993, best selling albums of 1993, just to your earlier point, Mariah Carey's Music Box, god tier. Ace of Base.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Could not have been bigger in my middle school.

• 1:46:00Yasi Salek?

  Aerosmith Get a Grip, their, their triumphant comeback album with, uh, the gorgeous videos with, um, Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler. Meatloaf.

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:46:10Yasi Salek?

  Bad Out of Hell 2.

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Michael Bay videos, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:46:17Yasi Salek?

  Here are more pertinent albums, though. P. J. Harvey's Root of Me comes out this year, powerful album. She actually, apparently, when I would die to hear this, wrote a tribute song to Jeff Buckley that never came out.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  No kidding.

• 1:46:27Yasi Salek?

  Pearl Jam's Versus, Slow Dive's Sublaki, Radiohead's Pablo Honey. Radiohead plays a part in this story. Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, Nirvana in utero.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  It's literally the transition, like in my personal taste.

• 1:46:39Yasi Salek?

  It's the baton being passed.

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  I was in like January, it was CNC Music Factory, and in December, it was in utero. You know, like it just, for me personally, and one of the reasons why this is one of my artists is

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  you, literally, your adolescence is defined by realizing what the good stuff is. And we were lucky, I think we were very lucky to be adolescents at this exact time in history.

• 1:47:05Yasi Salek?

  I do wish I was 10 years older, though, so I could have actually participated instead of just watched it.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  I know what you're saying, but I actually disagree. I think it really helped me to get pulp fiction at 12, you know, to get in utero at 11 or 12. And it like, it opened up my world in such a big way that I thought was really powerful. And I could have gotten it with stuff that had come around before me, but it would have felt like nostalgia riding instead of being a part of something in real time that felt cool. I felt this way with hip hop, too, where it was like Enter the Wu-Tang came out this year, or on the verge of Ready to Die. Like, a couple of things are happening where I'm like, actually, in my lifetime, American popular culture is getting really interesting.

• 1:47:45Yasi Salek?

  Because you're a born cultural critic, and that's what you wanted to do since you were a child.

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  Not exactly, but sure.

• 1:47:52Yasi Salek?

  And I wanted to be in the mix, more than I don't want.

• 1:47:55Speaker 02

  Maybe you wanted to create.

• 1:47:57Yasi Salek?

  I wanted to create, or at least just, I wanted to be there. You know, I wanted to be in the room.

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  This is what divides us.

• 1:48:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you were happy to sit at home and watch.

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  I've been in the room with a lot of cool people over time.

• 1:48:08Yasi Salek?

  No, but I wanted to be there at a Nirvana show in 1991. You know, like, I wanted to feel it.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  You don't think about it in that way.

• 1:48:15Yasi Salek?

  I do, man. My life would be so different right now.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  I disagree. I feel like your life worked out so well because of what I'm describing. Like, you really.

• 1:48:22Yasi Salek?

  It did work out.

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  You were situated in a good moment, and it doesn't always work out that way. You could have been 11 in 1985, and that would have been a little bit less cool. You would have been a Top Gun kid. You would have been, you know, you'd have Prince and Bruce.

• 1:48:37Yasi Salek?

  But don't you think, don't you think that you would have? Because I am dispositionally suited to seek out alternative things, there's plenty in the 80s. I would have found the butthole server. I would have. I know myself.

• 1:48:51Speaker 02

  It wasn't mass culture.

• 1:48:52Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. That's why it was cooler, because you had to find it yourself and then you were part of something.

• 1:48:57Speaker 02

  To me, I like when things kind of transcend the underground and become a part of the bigger culture.

• 1:49:01Yasi Salek?

  Things are easy.

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  No, it's more like when more people are getting to understand something that we can sort of agree has like an advancement in artistry. Like, it's one of the reasons why I like the Bob Dylan's of the world, that like, that was a mainstream artist who didn't really sound like anybody else and was doing something very different from everyone else. And, you know, Buckley is like kind of in that league, but not quite.

• 1:49:24Yasi Salek?

  I mean, there was those, and we can go off on this for other, it was Depeche Mode and Susie and the Banshees and the Smiths. There's plenty that was, they weren't maybe mainstream, but they were as mainstream as PJ Harvey was in the 90s and they were reaching the right people, you know? And also, I wouldn't have had a fucking cellphone for a large year.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  I can't believe you're not happy to have been a product of this time. I'm actually shocked to hear you say that.

• 1:49:42Yasi Salek?

  I know how much you talk about that it was the best thing that ever happened to you. I'm much happier than if it had been 10, I don't want to be have been born 10, any later. It gets worse and worse.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:51Yasi Salek?

  But I would have wanted to be born 10 years later. I would have wanted to be in high school when it turned like 1989 or whatever, and I wanted to be an adult who was socializing and in the world and meeting people without a fucking cellphone with an answering machine at home, when people wrote like this and cared about things like this. And instead, I graduated in the year 2000. Rough.

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  I feel, I feel very lucky.

• 1:50:19Yasi Salek?

  Well, you married your childhood sweetheart and you have a beautiful life and I.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  You have a beautiful life too.

• 1:50:24Yasi Salek?

  I have a dog. Okay. Live at Shanae. I have a beautiful life. I'm married. I'm married to my job.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're married to the game.

• 1:50:33Yasi Salek?

  I'm married to the Google Doc. The original track listing is, like you said, I think it's four songs. Mojo Pin, Eternal Life.

• 1:50:43Yasi Salek?

  Je n'en connais pas la fin.

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:50:47Yasi Salek?

  I don't think French.

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  Pretty good.

• 1:50:48Yasi Salek?

  Edith Piaf?

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  Edith Piaf, yeah.

• 1:50:49Yasi Salek?

  The way young lovers do, none of anything else.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, just two songs from Grace.

• 1:50:55Yasi Salek?

  Yes, it's great. If I had heard this, although I don't think it was widely heard, I'd be like, I'm interested. What else do you have?

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  I, the Edith Piaf performance cover is insane.

• 1:51:06Yasi Salek?

  Insane.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Insane, it's incredible. And there's not, there's no comp. Like, I don't really know what male artist does this, has done this.

• 1:51:13Yasi Salek?

  Maybe Prince. I mean, could do this, but I wouldn't say has done this.

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  I guess like, um, some artists over time would sort of come into the space.

• 1:51:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, there's been, there's plenty of.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  This is like a template setting thing.

• 1:51:23Yasi Salek?

  Yes, yes, I agree. I totally agree. It's incredible.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  It's crazy. It's beautiful. The, the, his singing is so beautiful on the EP.

• 1:51:38Yasi Salek?

  Now, it's the spring of 1983. They put out this EP and Berkowitz is like, okay, should we? Should we make an album? Got to make an album now. Um, he tries to kind of nudge Jeff into meeting with producers and even other songwriters. So he's like, I don't know if you need help writing songs. And nothing really comes of it. And then finally he's like, okay, look, in September, we're recording the album. So that's when we're recording the album, figure it out. The producers that were thrown out for consideration were Tom Warman, very interesting. Tom Warman is a really a hard rock producer. He did Cheap Trick and Ted Nugent, and then famously Motley Crue and a lot of hair metal. Weird choice, I think. Um, but obviously very successful.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:20Yasi Salek?

  And then a friend of Berkowitz has suggested 46 year old Andy Wallace. Which is so interesting. I just have to do a quick Andy Wallace sidebar here.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:52:30Yasi Salek?

  He mixed Afrika Bambaata's Planet Rock in 1986. Bro. And then he engineered and mixed albums by Run DMC, Raising Hell and Slayer, Rain and Blood. He ended up working a lot with Slayer and Sepultura. And then most famously, or infamously, however you'd like to view it. He mixed Nirvana's Nevermind. It was handpicked by Kurt Cobain because they didn't like the mixes that were done by, um. Butch Figg.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Butch Figg, yeah.

• 1:53:02Yasi Salek?

  Because Kurt Cobain was like, hell yeah, I love Slayer's seasons of the Abyss. But then after the mix was done, they were like, no, we hate this. We fucking hate this. This sucks. Um, famously, uh, Steve Albini said that actually the Butch Figg mixes were amazing and this put like too much sheen and whatever on it. Regardless.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  Nevermind sounds good.

• 1:53:19Yasi Salek?

  I liked it. Pretty good.

• 1:53:21Speaker 02

  It sounds good.

• 1:53:22Yasi Salek?

  To me, pretty good.

• 1:53:22Speaker 02

  Rain and Blood also sounds great.

• 1:53:24Yasi Salek?

  Really fantastic.

• 1:53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Yasi Salek?

  My favorite Slayer album. Many, many, many people's favorite Slayer album. So Andy Wallace had also produced the Rollins Band and Chaos AD. And he's, he also did mixing for Shudder to Think and Fishbone. So it was kind of, Shudder to Think was another band that was friends with Jeff.

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:44Yasi Salek?

  So it kind of makes sense that Jeff would be like, okay, like this guy has worked with people I respect or whatever. So he's hired, but we have no band. It's kind of down to the last minute. In July, Jeff performs at Columbia University at the cafe and he meets Mick Grundle, a 25 year old bass player who loved punk rock. And they jammed. And he was like, hey, you're cool. By the way, I have a record deal with Sony. Would you like to be in my band? And he's like, what? Okay. Um, then maybe two weeks later, Rebecca Moore meets Matt Johnson, who's a 22 year old drummer from Texas. And is like, my boyfriend's looking for a drummer. Can I, you know, give him your number? And he's like, okay. And then hires him. He was really looking for vibes. As I think it was said, I don't have the direct quote, but like, they were like, Jeff could play everything and better than us.

• 1:54:29Yasi Salek?

  Like he could play bass better than Mick Grundle. He could play drums pretty fucking well. Like he was good at every instrument. And he didn't want incredible musicians. He wanted people that he felt simpatico with, that he could feel like he was in a band with, you know? We're rehearsing, we did a North American tour, 10 day tour of Europe, including in London where I don't remember the name of the label, but they, Sony. Europe or Sony UK refused to put out Live from Shunay.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:54:58Yasi Salek?

  And so it was put out via a. Cool indie imprint of, so that he kind of was presented there as an indie artist.

• 1:55:06Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:55:07Yasi Salek?

  And they loved him.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  The Miramax to the Disney.

• 1:55:09Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Here's a little review in Melody Maker from that tour. Despite what we read in the live pages, many gigs these days are sterile perfunctory affairs. Bands arrive, playing the roles they're comfortable with and the music that suits a career, and we applaud wildly out of numb obligation. Go see Jeff Buckley, however, and the chances are you will be left staggered, awestruck, and drained by electrifying flashes of guitar virtuosity and his amazing, heart-wrenching voice. You won't have felt so purified in years. Interview magazine asked me, he's like, you put so much feeling into your singing. Kind of back to what you were saying about, how does Jeff Buckley do Hallelujah? You know, three times a week or whatever. And Jeff Buckley said, "Words are really beautiful, but they're limited.

• 1:55:52Yasi Salek?

  Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there's nothing to hang on to. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is. I need to inhabit every bit of lyric, or else I can't bring the song to you, or else it's just words." Like, King.

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  Sort of my point, though.

• 1:56:12Yasi Salek?

  Yes, and he did.

• 1:56:14Speaker 02

  He has to channel it every time.

• 1:56:15Yasi Salek?

  You know.

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  It's not a job.

• 1:56:17Yasi Salek?

  Or else he's not being authentic. He's not being true, yeah.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Just seems exhausting.

• 1:56:23Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure it was. But also, I don't think this kind of person knows how to live any other way.

• 1:56:29Speaker 02

  I think you're right.

• 1:56:30Yasi Salek?

  This fuels them, you know? Are you ready for this moment?

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  I'm ready.

• 1:56:34Yasi Salek?

  This Radiohead moment?

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:56:36Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  I know this story, but I'm happy to hear you tell the story.

• 1:56:39Yasi Salek?

  Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about how Jeff Buckley directly impacted the Radiohead song Fake Plastic Trees. This is such a, my interests overlapping here. So in May of 1994, Radiohead were in the studio with John Leckie. They were doing The Bends. They're having so much trouble with Fake Plastic Trees. Tom York had kind of brought it in and just like kept mixing it up and trying to get it right. And he could not do it. So John Lucky was like, listen, let's, let's get out of here, babe. Let's go see Jeff Buckley is performing at the garage. And the whole band, particularly Tom, at this show were so blown away by Jeff Buckley. They left the show.

• 1:57:19Yasi Salek?

  It was either early or, or like right at the end to rush back to the studio and try this acoustic version of Fake Plastic Trees. And that's the version that's on the album. According to Johnny Greenwood, he said Tom sat down and played it in three takes and then just burst into tears afterwards. Tom later said, I went to see Jeff Buckley and it reminded me of this vulnerable part of me that I was choosing to hide. Do you want to hear the saddest part?

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  What's the saddest part?

• 1:57:45Yasi Salek?

  That apparently in, in one of Mary Sears books, she said that Jeff knew Radiohead was at the show because he was a big fan and he was so excited that they were there. But then he thought they left because they, that he sucked. He thought they didn't like him. And I don't think he ever learned the real story.

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:58:02Yasi Salek?

  That he didn't suck, that he inspired them so much that Tom York was able to make one of the most important Radiohead recordings of all time.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's also the song that kind of like breaks Tom York's vocal style through to the future, you know, like the chances that he takes on OK Computer as a singer start with that song. And like the unadornment of that song, where it's like they had no other songs that were like that.

• 1:58:24Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  So it's pretty amazing.

• 1:58:26Yasi Salek?

  All goes back to Jeff.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  JB.

• 1:58:28Yasi Salek?

  Scott Buckley.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  I'm fascinated by Andy Wallace's role in this record.

• 1:58:41Yasi Salek?

  Like you're fascinated by you don't know what it is or you?

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  No, I know exactly what it is. And the, the choice is so crazy because the albums that he mixed, the list of albums that he's mixed in his career. Explains everything to me about why I love this album so much. Even though they have like nothing to do with what Jeff Buckley is doing for the most part.

• 1:59:00Yasi Salek?

  Because you feel that he brought the sensibility that brings for the power of those.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  Yes, heaviness.

• 1:59:07Yasi Salek?

  Heavy rock.

• 1:59:08Speaker 02

  Yes, heaviness and he turning up the mix on instruments.

• 1:59:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  On the, on bass lines, on guitar lines, like he is unafraid to like abuse your senses.

• 1:59:18Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  With the like, he mixes Nirvana and Rage and like Limp Bizkit and White Zombie.

• 1:59:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, hip hop records in the eighties with Rick Rubin and he is like, he is an assaultive mixer. And I mean that in the best way possible. And it was at a time when there was not the computer digitally like washed, like cleaned. Like there's nothing clean about his records. There didn't have any mistakes in them.

• 1:59:44Yasi Salek?

  I don't know that you could do that back then, right? You didn't have the capability.

• 1:59:47Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. It was not, it just wasn't possible. So like, you can like or dislike Limp Bizkit's $3 Billy All or Silverchair's Freak Show or whatever. But the way that those.

• 1:59:55Yasi Salek?

  Who dislikes Silverchair's Freak Show?

• 1:59:57Speaker 02

  So some people think that, you know, a little bit of a Nirvana ripoff.

• 2:00:01Yasi Salek?

  Well, many such cases.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Screaming Trees records, Blind Melon Soup, you know, like all these albums where it's like the, the instruments are way up in the mix. And that's a really good choice because of what Buckley's, what his instrument, what his primary instrument is. And the needing to be this like wave, which you would not get the impression that he would make a record like this, even if you listen to Live at Chinay.

• 2:00:24Yasi Salek?

  No, not at all. And I, that's, I'm jumping ahead, but I just needed to say it. I'm so angry that sketches from my sweetheart, The Drunk, exists. It's abomination. It should not be in the world.

• 2:00:36Speaker 02

  I a hundred percent agree.

• 2:00:37Yasi Salek?

  And you are like, this was a collaboration and Jeff Buckley's songs.

• 2:00:45Yasi Salek?

  Could have been a million times better on of those songs if they had been given the chance to receive the treatment that these Grace songs did and they weren't. And it's like, don't, I don't, get those out of my face.

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  I I'm sure that like, some of the reason that he picked Andy Wallace is like, he mixed the Fishbone record, he felt comfortable with him, like there was a re-

• 2:01:05Yasi Salek?

  Well, I'm sure he loved Nirvana, everyone loved Nirvana, you know?

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  I mean, but like Sepultura, like, is that a band that he really liked? I don't, maybe, maybe it was.

• 2:01:13Yasi Salek?

  If you love Led Zeppelin, you might love Sepultura.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  I mean, he makes Sonic Youth's dirty, like, he definitely, he was there for certain things, and he probably had some, like, downtown cool guy credibility. But it, I think it is a huge, huge part of the, like, sonic success of this record, is this unlikely person sitting in the room, and he produced, engineered and mastered the record.

• 2:01:34Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  He did all that, all that stuff.

• 2:01:36Yasi Salek?

  Well, that's what I was gonna say, I think, like, what was so important about Andy Wallace is that you're bringing someone to the table who can do all of that. A lot of times, producers don't know the first fucking thing about mixing.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  They don't touch the board, yeah.

• 2:01:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And we're, and you see, there's a, there's a Grace documentary, A Making of Grace, and you see that Jeff Buckley was like, his hands were all over this.

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  In the mix, yes.

• 2:01:58Yasi Salek?

  He is not, he's sitting and everything, so like, a lot of the production, in the term of vibes, or like, that kind of thing, is probably also done by Jeff Buckley, he's actually credited as a producer. So that is kind of handled by Jeff as well, but he doesn't know how to mix, you know? Like, he doesn't, well, maybe he did, I don't know, he seemed to know how to do all sorts of things.

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  He might have, but there's incredible ambition on this album, with like, you mentioned the string sections, and you, these like, dirge-like compositions, or the Corpus Christi Carol, and that, there, it's really sophisticated, and it's really like, grown-up record label stuff, it's not-

• 2:02:31Yasi Salek?

  It's not first album indie, yeah, totally.

• 2:02:34Speaker 02

  There's an incredible polish applied to this style, which you wouldn't, just would not have guessed, given like, what his taste, what his live performances are like, all this stuff in the lead-up to it, they're like, we're making like, a Tony Silver Dollar fancy major label album.

• 2:02:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  But just with his, his instrument, his point of view, all his stuff, and that, to me, it's that collision. Is what makes it very, very special.

• 2:02:57Yasi Salek?

  And I don't think he was ever like a rough demos guy like, you know, he comes from a music institute. Like, you know, like

• 2:03:06Speaker 02

  He's studied.

• 2:03:07Yasi Salek?

  He's studied. Like, I don't think he ever wanted to make music like that. But you perform live, it's gonna, you're gonna perform live, it's you and a guitar, you know?

• 2:03:14Speaker 02

  It might just be because every other recording of him that we have is messy.

• 2:03:17Yasi Salek?

  And it's just, that's just circumstance. Yeah. Here's what Jeff said just broadly about Grace. Also, what a perfect title. Grace is like a lot of this stuff. I don't know how to describe it to you. It's just a bunch of things about my life that I wanted to put in a coffin and bury forever so I could get on with things. And he also said this, "You can achieve a real state of grace through somebody's love of you." That's a real guiding principle for Jeff Buckley. And it's, this is sort of the thesis of the song Grace, but you can kind of feel like it's the thesis of the entire album. Okay. We're making the album.

• 2:03:57Yasi Salek?

  We talked about Andy Wallace. Gary Lucas comes up to play guitar on Mojo Pen and Grace, the songs that he contributed to. We talked about the strings. That's via a string arranger who lived in Woodstock named Carl Berger, who came from the jazz world and was hired to write those orchestral parts. Could not imagine this album without those. They are, they play such a huge role.

• 2:04:18Speaker 02

  Completely agree with you.

• 2:04:19Yasi Salek?

  Just incredible.

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  And it's, it's a counterintuitive instinct to not just put strings on this record at this time of like heavy rock. But to choose who he chose and the instincts that he has as an arranger. Like, he doesn't have a lot of pop music credits. He doesn't have the traditional instincts, you would think, of like, like those Aerosmith songs that were starting to take off in the 90s that had that kind of like schmaltzy Diane Warren feel. Like, these songs are not like that at all.

• 2:04:48Yasi Salek?

  No, no. They're, Carl Berger, you'll always be famous to me in my heart.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  Likewise.

• 2:04:55Yasi Salek?

  Also, I love this, that one of the sessions Jeff just surprises everyone by writing out notation for their parts. Because he had not mentioned to anyone that he had attended music school and knew how to do that. That he knew how to read and write music. They were like, huh? According to Matt Johnson, the mood of the sessions was very stir fried, very quick and a lot of things being thrown together without a lot of time to stew. Because he hadn't written all the songs yet.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:05:21Yasi Salek?

  Right? Like, we went up there and we hadn't written all the songs. Forget Her is something that he came in with. Um, Forget Her is actually, just to be clear, not technically on Grace. Um, but he had come in with that new, that new song near the end of the sessions. It's a, it's a great song. You can see why Jeff Buckley actually very famously insisted it not be included on Grace because it's absolute. It would have been a hit and it would have been a hit in the wrong way. It would have been a hit in maybe an adult oriented rock.

• 2:05:51Speaker 02

  Right, in the Sean Colvin kind of way?

• 2:05:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay, listen, Sonny came home with a list of names is a fucking stone cold banger and how fucking dare you. Sonny came home with a vengeance, but yes, I see what you're saying. It would have been, it would have been more in a Michael Bolton vein.

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  What about Sean Mullins?

• 2:06:06Yasi Salek?

  That song is really rough, um, where it's like Ray's Hawk singing, rockabye. Yeah. It's a really rough song.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  There was a, I know what you're saying though, that there was a kind of AOR.

• 2:06:17Yasi Salek?

  I could have heard that on Coast 103.5, which was like the Phil Collins station out here. You know what I mean? It would have been Bryan Adamsy. It has that, my mom would have liked that song. Not that my mom has bad taste or like, you know, it's a parent friendly, like.

• 2:06:40Yasi Salek?

  Bringing in this song though does start this like really fertile period in the studio where like a lot of songs start gelling and also being written. Dream Brother is born from this, uh, part. It's just a funny side story is that after they leave Woodstock to come to New York to finish the album, they had to cease work for two days because a, um, review came out in the New York Daily Newspaper Newsday that compared Jeff Buckley's, uh, Live at Sinead to Michael Bolton's album, The One Thing.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  First of all, Newsday was my childhood newspaper on Long Island. It was the, the dominant paper in the nineties and two thousands. Um, second of all, that's unsurprising that that would appear in that newspaper.

• 2:07:19Yasi Salek?

  And the negative, it was negative. They said that both white vocalists, uh, had affecting voices drawn directly from black idioms. And both awkwardly reached for a balance of emotion and technique, eventually relying on a sheer force of will over singing and flaking out.

• 2:07:36Speaker 02

  I think. In the, in the main, there's truth there. In the execution, there's a dramatic difference.

• 2:07:46Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Buckley was very mad, who's furious, he's ceased work for two days, how fucking dare you? And then later he told Interview Magazine, the thing is, I don't want to be black. Michael Bolton desperately wants to be black. He also sucks.

• 2:07:59Speaker 02

  I don't even know if you can really say that about Michael Bolton.

• 2:08:01Yasi Salek?

  I am just quoting Jeff Buckley. I'm not saying that about Michael Bolton. Said, I love you, but I lied, kind of a, kind of a banger.

• 2:08:08Speaker 02

  Jeff Buckley is very self-aware about this. His first demo is like White Boy. His live album is Mystery White Boy, like he-

• 2:08:15Yasi Salek?

  I mean, he played in a reggae band.

• 2:08:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, he's like, he's knows about, he knows. I do think that he would not be able to quote unquote, get away with this in 2025.

• 2:08:24Yasi Salek?

  You don't think so?

• 2:08:25Speaker 02

  I, I think it's a lot dicey here to be like, I'm singing Nina Simone songs and like profiting from them. There's, I think culturally, we're in a slightly different place.

• 2:08:34Yasi Salek?

  That's interesting. I mean, Nina Simone didn't write the songs.

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

  She did not. Her husband wrote some of those songs, including Be My Husband.

• 2:08:40Yasi Salek?

  Made famous by, so I don't know if he's-

• 2:08:43Speaker 02

  I think the point is more so that those songs belong to Nina Simone culturally.

• 2:08:47Yasi Salek?

  Right, I see, I see.

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  And that he is sliding into the costume.

• 2:08:52Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  Um, I'm not questioning his like integrity or sensitivity or any, that's not my point. It's more like the way we receive this stuff now, it felt novel at the time. At the time, it was like, what, this guy's singing Wild Is The Wind? That's crazy for a man to sing a song like that. That's a song-

• 2:09:08Yasi Salek?

  And he, and he can.

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  Yes, and he can.

• 2:09:11Yasi Salek?

  And he can, you know?

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  This album, I feel like the, one of the unspoken things about it is, is just that he's really good in a band setting. And he's really good with people in the room. And it seemed like he knew that about himself and he gets away from that as, after this album.

• 2:09:26Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:09:27Speaker 02

  And that maybe is working against him a little bit. You could see like him being in the room with Michael Tye, him being in the room with Mick Rondall, like- He's real more comfortable like swinging for something, you know, and doesn't get caught up in his own mind.

• 2:09:37Yasi Salek?

  Did we introduce Michael Ty yet? We didn't even introduce Michael Ty.

• 2:09:41Speaker 02

  Michael Ty, his guitarist, a buddy of his, actor.

• 2:09:44Yasi Salek?

  An actor who barely knew how to play guitar. I mean, he did kind of know, but he was not a skilled guitar player.

• 2:09:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was like, he was his homie.

• 2:09:51Yasi Salek?

  That was his boy, yeah. But also came up with the gently descending chord progression that became so real.

• 2:09:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:58Yasi Salek?

  I love.

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he's, he's been a very familiar figure to Buckley fans over the years.

• 2:10:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 02

  He's very present whenever there's like a tribute of some kind or something like that. And he's pretty consistently been just like, I really loved this guy. And it was really, uh, the most special thing that happened to me was to be in his life.

• 2:10:15Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna talk a bit about his inspiration and then we can go track by track.

• 2:10:19Speaker 02

  Great.

• 2:10:20Yasi Salek?

  He said to the NME in 1994, "The words come from here," touching his top pocket, "from memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. The music comes from within and outside. Within is the big mystery of life. We've all got it. The outside bits are easier. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, man, I'd fight for their honor for the words of Morrissey and the music of Johnny." Me too, babe. Edith Piaf, My Bloody Valentine, James Brown, Lush, Mickey was at my gig in London. You know, I was at that gig in London, Sean Vanacy, Chrissie Hynde with John McEnroe, together.

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  I mean, Chrissie Hynde is the coolest person of all time.

• 2:11:00Yasi Salek?

  They were dating.

• 2:11:01Speaker 02

  I don't love that.

• 2:11:02Yasi Salek?

  It's weird. I'm interested.

• 2:11:05Speaker 02

  If she was happy, I'm good with it.

• 2:11:06Yasi Salek?

  I'd like to know more about it.

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  I have nothing against John McEnroe, but I just feel like she's cooler than that.

• 2:11:13Yasi Salek?

  Jeff said of John McEnroe, "We spoke quite deeply about some things he's been going through, things I understood. I told him he was the Johnny Rotten of tennis."

• 2:11:21Speaker 02

  He did have, he had the soul of an artist, John McEnroe.

• 2:11:23Yasi Salek?

  He was a Johnny Rotten of tennis, a punk genius, according to.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:27Yasi Salek?

  He was why I watched tennis. There was an art in what he did.

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  That's what Buckley said?

• 2:11:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Speaker 02

  Okay, cool. I mean, great tennis player and obviously an extravagant personality.

• 2:11:36Yasi Salek?

  All I remember about him from my youth is that he screamed at people. He was a yeller.

• 2:11:40Speaker 02

  He was a yeller, yeah.

• 2:11:41Yasi Salek?

  Kind of cool. Much Music asked him, what does grace mean to you? This is interesting to me, so I'm gonna read it.

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:11:45Yasi Salek?

  He said, "Everything that the word carries, grace is what matters in anything, especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death, about people. That's what matters. That's a quality I admire very greatly. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly, keeps you from destroying things too foolishly, and sort of keeps you alive, and it keeps you open for more understanding." You know, people say grace for dinner. God is great. God is good. But I see an invocation when I hear that word. My fucking guy.

• 2:12:11Speaker 02

  I agree with you that it's a perfect name for this album.

• 2:12:14Yasi Salek?

  Also, before we get into it, it's a perfect name. It's a beautiful cover with the gold sequin jacket that he had bought at a thrift store and a prop mic. And Mary Seer took this photo, and the label hated it. He chose it because he said he was listening to a mix of So Real. I think it was So Real. And he was like, "That's what I look like when I'm absorbed in my own music. That's what I want to be the cover." And the label was like, "You look too gay." I think they would say now they wouldn't say that, but that is the quote in the David Brown book, and also that he looked too much like Adam Ant. That part I can kind of see.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  I think it's a somewhat kind of fabulous and concocted image relative to what you see from him in the world, especially in the documentaries.

• 2:13:00Yasi Salek?

  And from the image that was...

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  Artifice. There is something mannered and artificial to me about this photo shoot.

• 2:13:08Yasi Salek?

  Which is interesting, though, because I think that to him it wasn't, because he was like, "I just put on the jacket as a joke, and I was literally listening to the music." Just because you read it that way doesn't mean it's artificial.

• 2:13:18Speaker 02

  It's okay for it to be true to him. It's what I communicate.

• 2:13:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and that's what the label thought too. I mean, I can't imagine this...

• 2:13:24Speaker 02

  It's too gay. That's ridiculous, obviously.

• 2:13:26Yasi Salek?

  You said that. Off mic, you said that it was too gay.

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  I did not say that, and I would not say that.

• 2:13:30Yasi Salek?

  That's why it didn't sell.

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  That is not why it didn't sell. I know why it didn't sell. I have some strong feelings about why it didn't sell. It's got nothing to do with like men looking at it and thinking it's too gay.

• 2:13:40Yasi Salek?

  No, I don't think.

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  That's definitely not the issue.

• 2:13:42Yasi Salek?

  Men didn't look at it at all.

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  There's a reason for that though, too.

• 2:13:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I think it's a gorgeous cover. I think it's a beautiful name.

• 2:13:47Speaker 02

  It is beautiful. It is now how we see him.

• 2:13:50Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  When we think of him, that is what we see.

• 2:13:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:53Speaker 02

  But it's not, I don't think it's quite who he was, which is why I'm a little bit suspicious of his like reject cynicism and the artifice and like a lot of his commentary. He still has this very understandable showman quality to the way that he executes things.

• 2:14:09Yasi Salek?

  That's who he was. That's who he is. That's a showman right there. That's a shantou with a penis.

• 2:14:14Speaker 02

  Certainly.

• 2:14:15Yasi Salek?

  That's a diva. He's a diva.

• 2:14:16Speaker 02

  He's a diva. He's a diva.

• 2:14:18Yasi Salek?

  Start you from the top, babe.

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:14:19Yasi Salek?

  Grace.

• 2:14:21Speaker 02

  Mojo Pen.

• 2:14:22Yasi Salek?

  Oh, sorry.

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  Mojo Pen is the first one. That's one of the ones.

• 2:14:25Yasi Salek?

  Start with Mojo Pen.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  That was, what's that, what was the original, "And You Will"?

• 2:14:30Yasi Salek?

  What even kind of fucking song title is that?

• 2:14:33Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:14:33Yasi Salek?

  Um, well, it also didn't have words, so I think he was just naming it off of vibes, but.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  It's a scene setter. It's like kind of a psychedelic song.

• 2:14:41Yasi Salek?

  It's based on a dream that he had about a black, young black woman shooting up heroin between her toes.

• 2:14:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:14:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:47Speaker 02

  Specific.

• 2:14:48Yasi Salek?

  Mojo Pen is a reference to heroin, heroin needle.

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  Not known to be a heroin user, not known to be really an abuser of any substances really at this time in his life, right?

• 2:14:56Yasi Salek?

  Well, it depends who you ask.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 2:14:59Yasi Salek?

  There are several instances of people in interviews, obviously not in any of the documentaries, uh, saying that he dabbled in heroin. Tom Verlaine said, and I have the quote, we'll get into it later, but that he confided in him about how he had used it, but he wasn't anymore. Michael Tai even said that he didn't use it that much. At this time, there were, uh, people talking about how he during, at Sine, he could just fall asleep in between sets. It was so weird. He could just fall asleep anywhere and you're like.

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  I think it's because he's not really considered like a big drinker or cigarette smoker or all of these, you know, he's

• 2:15:41Yasi Salek?

  He does become that on the, on the tour.

• 2:15:43Speaker 02

  Afterwards.

• 2:15:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so I don't know about right now.

• 2:15:45Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 2:15:46Yasi Salek?

  The only place I can place it in exact time is the tour for Grace with Soul Coughing, where there is a bit in Mike Doty's book where he says that they did heroin together on that tour.

• 2:15:59Speaker 02

  But this is the first song on his first album.

• 2:16:01Yasi Salek?

  Well, I'm

• 2:16:02Speaker 02

  And it's about a girl using heroin.

• 2:16:04Yasi Salek?

  Right, but you, uh, okay.

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm, it's worth noting.

• 2:16:08Yasi Salek?

  It's worth noting.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  It's a great song. It's a great introduction into this world. It is five and a half minutes long, as are most of these songs.

• 2:16:16Yasi Salek?

  If only you'd come back to me. That first, the way he sings, that like, the like, the howl, kind of painful plea in his voice absolutely wrecks me.

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:38Yasi Salek?

  The next song is Grace, inspired by having to say goodbye to Rebecca Moore at the airport on a rainy day.

• 2:16:43Speaker 02

  It's one of my favorite songs of all time.

• 2:16:44Yasi Salek?

  It's so fucking good.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:48Yasi Salek?

  Why is it one of your favorite songs of all time?

• 2:16:50Speaker 02

  Uh, I think it's the first example on the album of the thing that I'm describing where it's like, there is something very clearly like professional and pop about the way this song is produced, but not the way that it's performed.

• 2:17:01Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  And that is very striking. It was very striking to me as a teenager.

• 2:17:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  That you could make something modern and like high toned, but also it'd just be like, kind of like leaning into its pretense so dramatically. And when you're a teenager, you're like desperate for that. You're desperate for somebody to just be like, just sweep me away.

• 2:17:20Yasi Salek?

  I just started laughing so hard because I just pictured you as a teenager, but you look exactly the same as this and you speak exactly the same as this, but you're just a teenager and

• 2:17:28Speaker 02

  I, I

• 2:17:30Yasi Salek?

  I'm floored.

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  It's, uh, Well, okay, so I did have a part where my hair was longer, right? It was like over my ears.

• 2:17:38Yasi Salek?

  Oh, like classic Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

• 2:17:40Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. You know, I was one of those boys.

• 2:17:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:43Speaker 02

  When I was fourteen, I was five two.

• 2:17:46Yasi Salek?

  Excuse me?

• 2:17:46Speaker 02

  And then when I turned fifteen, I grew to five ten.

• 2:17:51Yasi Salek?

  In one year, you grow.

• 2:17:53Speaker 02

  Eight inches.

• 2:17:53Yasi Salek?

  That's insane. It must have hurt.

• 2:17:55Speaker 02

  I was short and then I grew a lot. Um, it was very helpful for me in a lot of ways.

• 2:17:59Yasi Salek?

  I was gonna say.

• 2:18:00Speaker 02

  Very helpful with girls.

• 2:18:01Yasi Salek?

  Really informs to me your personality.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  That I was once a short king.

• 2:18:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's like when someone was a fat kid.

• 2:18:08Speaker 02

  I didn't think of myself as a short person.

• 2:18:10Yasi Salek?

  I have too, it's pretty short.

• 2:18:12Speaker 02

  When you're like, when you're a teenager, it's like, everybody's doing it at different times. I don't know.

• 2:18:16Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  But I, you know, it's pretty emotional. My, you know, my parents split up when I was eleven.

• 2:18:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  You know, you're like looking for stuff to throw your heart into. This song is very, I don't, this song and the next song we'll talk about, I think could have been huge, huge hits. Huge hits.

• 2:18:35Yasi Salek?

  One million percent.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  And there's reasons why, right? You have elucidated why.

• 2:18:39Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna talk, well, first of all, Grace, I just need to say God lives in this song. God is absolutely present in this song. It's a perfect name. And Jeff Buckley has said that this song is explicitly in his mind about not feeling so bad about your own mortality because you have true love. Like I said, he really believes that. If you were, if you were loved enough, it's okay to die.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 2:18:59Yasi Salek?

  Which, again, it's an interesting, it's an interesting premise.

• 2:19:13Yasi Salek?

  I don't want to be so basic to say "Last Goodbye" is my favorite Jeff Buckley song, but it's top two.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  It's a.

• 2:19:19Yasi Salek?

  It depends on my mood.

• 2:19:20Speaker 02

  Perfect piece of songwriting.

• 2:19:21Yasi Salek?

  It's a perfect song. It is a goddamn gorgeous, beautiful song. Pulled that out of retirement.

• 2:19:26Speaker 02

  It's like a Cole Porter, Phil Spector, like you just, it's got it all. This is, sounds like being a teenager to me, that song.

• 2:19:37Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  It sounds like it could have played at the end of any movie or TV show over the last forty years.

• 2:19:42Yasi Salek?

  In several million movies.

• 2:19:44Speaker 02

  It's, it's very licensable, it's very, the title feels like the title of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Like, there's something kind of vague and simple about this song, which is very different from the whole rest of the album. The whole rest of the album, this, this is the, I think this is, is it the only song? No, this song and Lover You Should Have Come Over and Eternal Life are the only songs that have just Buckley as the songwriter.

• 2:20:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:08Speaker 02

  And you can, that's interesting to me.

• 2:20:10Yasi Salek?

  It's fascinating, this song is literally perfect, but to your point, it also has exactly what Grace has, which to me is like, okay, the pop song, but you have Trojan horsed in this insane shit that I do not hear in pop songs.

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:20:26Yasi Salek?

  The third verse, where he's like, kiss me, please kiss me, kiss me out of desire, baby, not consolation. First of all, gorgeous lyric.

• 2:20:47Yasi Salek?

  He's a fucking genius.

• 2:20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. He didn't write a lot of songs like this, though.

• 2:20:51Yasi Salek?

  No, I know. Mike Doty says in his book that he feels this was an absolute fluke. He's like, I don't know how he wrote that song, because he doesn't-

• 2:20:57Speaker 02

  It doesn't really sound like anything else he's ever done. It, the, the sentiment is the same. The, the, sort of like the desperate yearning, the like, reflection of something that is lost.

• 2:21:06Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:21:07Speaker 02

  It's totally, and I guess, is it Carly? His R is considered the inspiration for this song.

• 2:21:11Yasi Salek?

  That's what Chris Dowd said that this was about, especially the line, kiss me out of desire, not consolation. Every guy was in love with Carly, but-

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  And it's just deeply felt, and all the stuff that you find in all the, all his best songs, but it doesn't have that insane opera feeling-

• 2:21:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:27Speaker 02

  That like Lover You Should Have Come Over has, or-

• 2:21:38Yasi Salek?

  I was wondering, I'm like, do you feel like he just like wasn't that interested in this kind of songs?

• 2:21:43Speaker 02

  I do.

• 2:21:43Yasi Salek?

  And he kind of like, was like, what if I had tried that? I can, like, again, like he said, I can do what Tim Buckley does, I just don't want to. Like, maybe he was like, okay, I can make a normal song.

• 2:21:51Speaker 02

  I think this song is way catchier than any Tim Buckley song.

• 2:21:54Yasi Salek?

  No, 100%. I'm just saying, in the sense that he can do anything, but he was like, I can do this if you want, I'll, I'll try it, but I'm, it's not something that interests me.

• 2:22:03Speaker 02

  So this is-

• 2:22:04Yasi Salek?

  I'm wondering that. He never said that.

• 2:22:05Speaker 02

  Since, since we decided to do this together, I've been waiting to talk about Grace and Long Goodbye together.

• 2:22:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  And this thing, because these two songs-

• 2:22:12Yasi Salek?

  Since you got here three and a half hours ago.

• 2:22:14Speaker 02

  No, since I was 14 years old. I'm like, why is this person not Elvis Presley? Because he can do this.

• 2:22:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  And I think ultimately, and I've learned this from reading the document that you put together, watching multiple documentaries about him, kind of learning a lot about him over time. He's very self-defeating. He was, he really could have been an artist who was extremely popular and still had integrity, but he felt that becoming extremely popular, there was a real cost to it. And he didn't want to get caught up in it.

• 2:22:40Yasi Salek?

  I think that's true.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  And him not making a video for Last Goodbye that, where he looks like this, is-

• 2:22:48Yasi Salek?

  He did eventually make a video for Last Goodbye, right?

• 2:22:50Speaker 02

  I realize I sound like an absolute asshole, but if I was a record company executive-

• 2:22:53Yasi Salek?

  Okay, Don Iner.

• 2:22:55Speaker 02

  But if I heard this song and this guy looked like this-

• 2:22:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

  And it was not on MTV non-stop every day, I would be like, why are we even doing this? Like, why are we even in business?

• 2:23:03Yasi Salek?

  Well, unfortunately, they gave him creative control.

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  I know, I know.

• 2:23:06Yasi Salek?

  And-

• 2:23:07Speaker 02

  But he didn't write like a weird art project. He wrote last goodbye.

• 2:23:11Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 2:23:11Speaker 02

  So there's something so paradoxical and fascinating, because the song now lives on in a way that, like, it is kind of a pop, if you know it, it's a pop classic.

• 2:23:20Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  It's like, you could play it on the radio now, I think it would work. And so I find this, these two songs in particular, and I, I don't love them more per se than the other songs, but they exist in this very 1994 frame of mind for me where they sound like the time. They should have been massive. They do represent something special to his fans, but they didn't totally transcend. And then the songs that did transcend to become so popular are songs that never make sense as becoming popular.

• 2:23:50Yasi Salek?

  You mean because they're covers?

• 2:23:52Speaker 02

  Just because Hallelujah is like a quiet, five and a half minute exploration of love and sex that doesn't really have a hook and, you know, they're very, and like Last Goodbye is just like pop hook. It's just a pure pop hook with a cool guitar sound. So I'm, I'm just, it's just a personal fascination of mine that these songs exist this way. And it kind of gets the album like flowing really early on.

• 2:24:16Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if I agree about Grace. Like, I don't know, I don't know that Grace would have been a pop hit. I can't see it. I think it's still a little challenging.

• 2:24:24Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 2:24:24Yasi Salek?

  But Last Goodbye is just like palatable. It's easy, you know? Again, it has incredible, incredible artistry in it, but it's also easily digestible.

• 2:24:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36Yasi Salek?

  I don't think he was wrong to not want to have some one massive hit.

• 2:24:44Speaker 02

  He's not wrong.

• 2:24:45Yasi Salek?

  He didn't want to be defined by anything, clearly, as we can see with the Tim Buckley of it all.

• 2:24:51Speaker 02

  I'm not saying he's wrong. It's just like, it's unusual for him to have even gotten away with that.

• 2:24:55Yasi Salek?

  Right. Well, again, they were, this was their Bob Dylan, right? They weren't trying to have one hit and move on. They were like, we're gonna make 10 albums with this person. This is our heritage legacy artist. Like, also, from what I can tell, they didn't hear that in Last Goodbye. They were obsessed with Forget Her. And he pushed Forget Her off the album because of it.

• 2:25:13Speaker 02

  I don't mean to overstate Last Goodbye. I think it's because it's just so approachable.

• 2:25:16Yasi Salek?

  It is the single most catchy and identifiable that is written by Jeff Buckley's song on this album. You cannot hear that and not be like,

• 2:25:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:25:29Yasi Salek?

  Let's fucking go.

• 2:25:30Speaker 02

  And he immediately follows it up with

• 2:25:31Yasi Salek?

  Lilac Wine.

• 2:25:32Speaker 02

  A 60 year old cover.

• 2:25:33Yasi Salek?

  Which, by the way, if you think Hallelujah is life ruining, I challenge you to listen to Lilac Wine 60 times like I did also. I'll never recover. I have brain damage. I have emotional brain damage. This song is about wanting to die. Pretty explicitly, right?

• 2:25:51Speaker 02

  Also kind of an overdose anthem.

• 2:25:52Yasi Salek?

  Yes, right, because you want to be with your, with your love. This was a, this song was written in 1950. Just so crazy. James Shelton, you fucking went off bitch when he wrote this song.

• 2:26:03Speaker 02

  He did. Popularized in the.

• 2:26:04Yasi Salek?

  By Nina Simone in 1966. And also was a hit by Elkie Brooks.

• 2:26:09Speaker 02

  Not familiar with Elkie Brooks.

• 2:26:10Yasi Salek?

  In the UK, I believe in 1977. Jeff said, I've only heard Nina Simone's version. That's the one that matters.

• 2:26:17Speaker 00

  I lost myself on a cool damn night. Gave myself in that misty light.

• 2:26:26Yasi Salek?

  It's harrowing. The way he sings, the way I'm like, I can see directly into your soul, you're naked. I can see it.

• 2:26:35Yasi Salek?

  Who can do that?

• 2:26:36Speaker 02

  Does this feature even any percussion in this song? Maybe just the sort of like soft, uh.

• 2:26:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  Feathery drums.

• 2:26:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:43Speaker 02

  And this kind of like very plaintive, single note guitar playing. And his vo, it's just his voice, extended period of time.

• 2:26:54Yasi Salek?

  It's a long song.

• 2:26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's about, I, song about feeling unsafe.

• 2:26:59Yasi Salek?

  It's a song about feeling abandoned and, and craving. Love, love is an addiction in some ways, right? And craving that back that you've lost to the point that you're like, well, I'd rather, I'd rather just drug and drink myself to get closer to that.

• 2:27:19Speaker 00

  I drink much more than I ought to drink.

• 2:27:24Speaker 00

  Because it brings me back to you.

• 2:27:30Speaker 02

  He's kind of telegraphing.

• 2:27:32Yasi Salek?

  I drink much more than I ought to drink because it brings me back to you.

• 2:27:36Speaker 02

  I, also, if you know anything about Nina Simone, you know what a powerful decision it is for her to cover this song and given her life and her experience. And he's, him channeling her. And what she represents as an artist is kind of a little bit of a mindfuck.

• 2:27:49Yasi Salek?

  It's a lot. And again, Scorpio, the Scorpio of it all, the, I wouldn't call Jeff Buckley a womanizer because that's not the right word, but he had many.

• 2:27:58Speaker 02

  He lived freely.

• 2:28:00Yasi Salek?

  He fell in love all the time and did and was very aware of it. He left damage in his wake, you know? He even, he even says it in Last Goodbye about a relationship that never happened. He says, "I would have just broken your heart anyway." That's not the lyric, but that's what he, something to that, you know?

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:19Yasi Salek?

  He knows.

• 2:28:21Speaker 02

  This is the first of three covers on this album. There's only 10 songs on this album.

• 2:28:24Yasi Salek?

  Well, he didn't have enough songs. And also he's known.

• 2:28:26Speaker 02

  That's, it turned out to be a good thing. And I wish that more artists would do this. This is something I felt going through his entire.

• 2:28:32Yasi Salek?

  Well, you know why they don't.

• 2:28:34Speaker 02

  Because it costs money, because you don't make as much money.

• 2:28:36Yasi Salek?

  Because you don't make money.

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  I know, but there is a long tradition in American, the American songbook of using other people's songs to elevate your, your platform and then write more of your own songs. It's interesting and I feel like it's a real short sighted, like greedy music biz shit. Like the version of it that we see now is like YouTube kids performing covers to get famous instead of you, the, the, the record business doing it.

• 2:29:00Yasi Salek?

  What you're saying is definitely true. And I think there's another pitfall, which is that, for whatever reason, once we had this sort of monoculture that I guess we don't have as much anymore. You ran the risk and it happened more often than not of being defined by that song and only that song. And the legacy of Jeff Buckley is Hallelujah and the legacy of Alien Ant Farm is Smooth Criminal.

• 2:29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:26Yasi Salek?

  That's a weird comp.

• 2:29:27Speaker 02

  I know what you're saying.

• 2:29:27Yasi Salek?

  First one that came to my mind. But if you, if you fucking pop off with a cover, that's what you'll be remembered by.

• 2:29:34Speaker 02

  I know. I always think of.

• 2:29:35Yasi Salek?

  Unfortunately, you know?

• 2:29:36Speaker 02

  The version of this conversation I always think of is, you know, the song Little Green Apples? Have you ever heard that? It's a Roger Miller song. It's like a folk song. There's a cover of the song by the Four Tops.

• 2:29:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:46Speaker 02

  On the Four Tops now, that is like one of the coolest soul songs of the 60s. And it sounds very different from the Roger Miller version. And this is something that Motown in particular was really good at.

• 2:29:56Yasi Salek?

  And I wonder if it's because they didn't write music.

• 2:29:59Speaker 02

  Possibly, although Marvin Gaye wrote his own songs.

• 2:30:01Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  Some Motown artists wrote their own songs, some didn't. Sometimes they use the in-house writers. And it would be this collision of things that Buckley has done, which is like a few originals, a few standards. Now, whenever we think of artists where like, you know, did Charlie write all of the songs on Brat?

• 2:30:17Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:30:17Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Like, it's.

• 2:30:18Yasi Salek?

  It's an authenticity thing.

• 2:30:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:30:20Yasi Salek?

  Especially that started in the 90s. Torn is a great example.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  Natalie Brilliant has torn famously a cover.

• 2:30:25Yasi Salek?

  Edna Swapp.

• 2:30:27Speaker 02

  Infamously, maybe not so famously a cover. People don't really know that Torn is a cover.

• 2:30:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Edna Swapp, a garage rock band from California.

• 2:30:34Speaker 02

  And a reinterpretation that works really well.

• 2:30:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:37Speaker 02

  What's next on Grace?

• 2:30:40Yasi Salek?

  Let's fucking go.

• 2:30:43Yasi Salek?

  So real. Where do you land on So Real? I love this song, but I can see it being polarized.

• 2:30:47Speaker 02

  No, I love it. We barely talked about Led Zeppelin.

• 2:30:50Yasi Salek?

  I don't think that we've had reason to yet.

• 2:30:52Speaker 02

  Other than for him to say that that's his favorite band of all time.

• 2:30:56Yasi Salek?

  It pops up here.

• 2:30:56Speaker 02

  This is the first Zeppelin song, right? It's not, there's a couple of other songs that are very Zeppelin influenced, but this is like psychedelic, heavy all-rock and beautiful.

• 2:31:05Yasi Salek?

  I don't know how to talk about that this is Led Zeppelin-y, but I know how to talk about that it's a fucking banger.

• 2:31:12Speaker 02

  It's him blending his two disciplines, which is like this really intimate, soft, emotional thing, you know? Oh, let me sleep tonight on your couch. Like, that's a very Jeff Buckley lyric, but then as soon as the chorus hits, it's super heavy.

• 2:31:34Speaker 02

  And you can see this is probably a fun song to play live. It kind of gets the crowd going. It's a perfect mid-album song to like, get your, to boost your energy after a lilac wine.

• 2:31:42Yasi Salek?

  This one, like you said, it has the Jeff Buckley things enough in it that I'm like, oh, I love this. I mean, the fucking interlude, when he's talking, when he says, "I love you, but I'm afraid to love you."

• 2:31:55Speaker 00

  I love you.

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  I'll just reiterate my point about the production, too, that this feels like an epic major label rock song.

• 2:32:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:10Speaker 02

  You know, it doesn't, doesn't, this doesn't sound like bad at all to me.

• 2:32:12Yasi Salek?

  No, no, no. As we've heard from the demos, I don't think he, he would have benefited from that.

• 2:32:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you mentioned the Michael Ty writing the chord.

• 2:32:20Yasi Salek?

  Someone who, yes, Michael Ty was, was playing around on the chord and it's like for his first day, I think, there and Jeff started playing drums to it and singing So Real, which Michael Ty thought he was saying, sorry. Someone with a voice like this, it's kind of criminal to give them indie rock production. Can you think of a good example?

• 2:32:37Speaker 02

  I'm glad that he didn't get it on this album. The person I always think of is Fiona Apple. The first Fiona Apple record is her voice is mixed so high up front.

• 2:32:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:46Speaker 02

  On Title, which is, those first three albums are so huge for me. But it's the same exact thing where like the machine is kind of meeting this very curious muse.

• 2:32:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  And the, what it makes is something that just scratches a very particular part of my brain.

• 2:33:02Yasi Salek?

  Fiona Apple is an incredible comp to Jeff Buckley on the flip side of being sort of a masculine.

• 2:33:08Speaker 02

  A, a, yes.

• 2:33:09Yasi Salek?

  A shantou.

• 2:33:09Speaker 02

  Very strong.

• 2:33:11Yasi Salek?

  Shantou with a vagina.

• 2:33:12Speaker 02

  Strength, shantude.

• 2:33:13Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. Shantude?

• 2:33:14Speaker 02

  Shantude.

• 2:33:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think So Real is so good. I love, I think it's quite catchy. Supposed to be a B-side, like we said, but Jeff Buckley did not want, forget her.

• 2:33:24Speaker 02

  It's a big rocker.

• 2:33:25Yasi Salek?

  It's a big rocker. Right before you're like, hey, you want to kill yourself? Here's Hallelujah.

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  Or get laid.

• 2:33:32Yasi Salek?

  Yes, but it's not, I'm glad you brought that up. It's not.

• 2:33:36Speaker 02

  All acts of sex are an act of death.

• 2:33:39Yasi Salek?

  Yes, and all acts of sex are acts of a god, of, of, like, real connection is connecting with God, right? Like, that is, that is what love is, right? Love is projecting onto another person the divine.

• 2:33:58Yasi Salek?

  And that's why you become so obsessed when you're in love, because what you are in love with is the divine, but you need another person to project it onto. That is what love is. Sex is, you know, an expression. Ultimately, or should be of that kind of love.

• 2:34:14Speaker 02

  I just realized something as you were describing this, the I think this is, I think I'm wearing this today. So

• 2:34:19Yasi Salek?

  Oh, God.

• 2:34:20Speaker 02

  The T-shirt I'm wearing today is Nilson Schmilson, which is like, I think a perfect counterpoint, not a counterpoint, is a perfect like uh, cohabitant

• 2:34:30Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 2:34:30Speaker 02

  Of what

• 2:34:31Yasi Salek?

  I'm listening.

• 2:34:31Speaker 02

  All of this is, where it's like, you've got this very wry, insanely gifted, virtuosic person who is in communion with God, who had, whose whole artistic relationship is defined by being abandoned by his father.

• 2:34:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:45Speaker 02

  And who can like, reach the absolute greatest heights of the art form, but also is like, kind of a weasel who's like, nah, fuck everybody.

• 2:34:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  And is like, very self-defeating. And they both have their, their like, hallelujah moment where there's like, a song that people know that is like, uh, like beautiful, and it's a cut like, Living Without You is, you know, the Nilson version of this. And when you listen to Living Without You, or you listen to Hallelujah, you're like, this person is, is a vessel for the, for the Lord. Like, this person is truly, is communicating something that only he can do. But then, when you like, strip that away, and you hear the, you see the person, they're not that, like, they can't live up to that, like, what they represent.

• 2:35:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:29Speaker 02

  And what they, how they make people feel.

• 2:35:31Yasi Salek?

  That's an interesting, that's an interesting one. Yeah. And

• 2:35:33Speaker 02

  A lot of, a lot of those artists are like that. Like, we think of like, our icons as not like that, but

• 2:35:37Yasi Salek?

  No human being can live up to that. It's not human, it's divine.

• 2:35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:43Yasi Salek?

  There's not one person on earth that can live up to that. That being said, like I said before, Hallelujah is the song that Jeff Buckley was born to sing. No one can do this song better than Jeff Buckley. I'm so sorry. He embodies everything that this song is meant to represent, which is the divine and sexuality. It's all in there. The intake of breath

• 2:36:12Yasi Salek?

  before the song starts, it's perfect, it's life ruining. You feel every ounce of horniness and pain in his voice.

• 2:36:22Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:36:25Yasi Salek?

  Do you know what Rolling Stone said about?

• 2:36:27Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:36:28Yasi Salek?

  Stephanie Zacharic, she said, "The young Buckley's vocals don't always stand up. He doesn't sound battered or desperate enough to carry off Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

• 2:36:38Yasi Salek?

  Bitch, are you deaf?

• 2:36:41Yasi Salek?

  Are we?

• 2:36:43Yasi Salek?

  Are we gonna have a problem?

• 2:36:45Yasi Salek?

  I'll fucking pull up, bitch. Do you know what I'm saying? How does it feel to be so fucking wrong?

• 2:36:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I'm angry about a 21-year-old review. She's wrong.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  It's obviously not something you want on your ledger as a critic to be writing that about something that becomes such a monumental recording generationally. I've written, I wrote-

• 2:37:10Yasi Salek?

  You agree?

• 2:37:10Speaker 02

  No, of course not. I think it's a terrible take, but it does speak to something, which is that he is kind of prettifying music of artists who are known for their kind of gravitas and the sort of the lack of, um, like ornamentation.

• 2:37:27Yasi Salek?

  But if anything, the Leonard Cohen version is much prettier and more palatable. This one is way more harrowing.

• 2:37:34Speaker 02

  But the voice, the vocal performance, I think just-

• 2:37:36Yasi Salek?

  Right, because Leonard Cohen can't sing like that.

• 2:37:38Speaker 02

  But it just, it redefines it.

• 2:37:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's just, I've found-

• 2:37:41Speaker 02

  And you know, doing the sort of like the diva-esque runs-

• 2:37:44Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:37:44Speaker 02

  -through the lyrics that is like kind of more of the Mariah Carey time. Like, he got slathered with a little bit of that criticism of like doing extended note stretching and-

• 2:38:06Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about "Lover, Comma, You Should've Come Over."

• 2:38:10Speaker 02

  I think this might be my favorite song.

• 2:38:11Yasi Salek?

  It's, yeah, these are my two. "Lover, You Should've Come Over" and "Last Goodbye."

• 2:38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:16Yasi Salek?

  They're, they're doing- Emotionally, they're doing similar things. It's just the presentation and the packaging is a bit different.

• 2:38:23Speaker 02

  So Lover You Should Have Come Over has 380 streams, 380 million streams on Spotify. And Hallelujah has 420 million.

• 2:38:32Yasi Salek?

  It's coming up.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  That's pretty close.

• 2:38:33Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 2:38:34Speaker 02

  And I think this song has been like TikTok-ified.

• 2:38:37Yasi Salek?

  Is that what it is?

• 2:38:37Speaker 02

  Has been like Grey's Anatomy-ified. Like, it's been clipped out. Like, I just saw this terrible movie last year called Miller's Girl starring Jenna Ortega, where there's like a critical scene where Jenna Ortega goes over to someone's house and a bad cover of this song is playing.

• 2:38:51Yasi Salek?

  I really hate when they use music in a literal setting.

• 2:38:53Speaker 02

  It's the most literal use.

• 2:38:54Yasi Salek?

  It actually makes me want to kill myself.

• 2:38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the most literal usage ever. So I do think that this song has moved way into the culture in a way that it did not. And the interesting thing about that for me is that like both of these songs, Hallelujah runs at 6 minutes and 50 seconds. Lover You Should Have Come Over runs at 6 minutes and 44 seconds. They're so uncommercial. Like, Glasgow has 4 and 1/2 minutes. It's a classic pop song.

• 2:39:14Yasi Salek?

  It's still a little long, but yeah. But they could have made a radio edit. Although he refused to allow radio edits.

• 2:39:19Speaker 02

  Right. But these are really long, immersive, expansive, emotional journeys. And they've turned out to become post-period hits. I think this encapsulates what was most appealing about him, which was this like sense of desperation that's very obvious. That's very clear. That's like understood. That like he really wants to be seen and he wants other people to, you know, he wants to see other people. He wants to connect.

• 2:39:47Yasi Salek?

  This is the platonic ideal of a Jeff Buckley song, Lover You Should Have Come Over, because, like you said, it has this like desperate yearning for connection. But there's something about it that's so familiar, right? Because he was a student of music. When you hear, "Maybe I'm too young to keep good love going on", that is a familiar, like, this could have been a cover in some ways, right? And that's a kind of a beautiful thing to be able to do, that you wrote a new piece of music that has enough things in it that remind people of great music.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could imagine Bing Crosby singing this song.

• 2:40:24Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:40:36Yasi Salek?

  Berkowitz tried to get him to change the song's shift from the third to first person, because he does that lyrically. And he was like, as always, no heart.

• 2:40:47Speaker 02

  What would that be? So, looking out the door, she sees the rain, like something like that, or he sees the rain?

• 2:40:52Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes a man gets carried away when he feels like he should be having fun, third person. It goes back, basically, from I to third to bat.

• 2:40:59Speaker 02

  I see. Just to make it consistent.

• 2:41:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Jeff, Jeff said this in his journals, and I feel-

• 2:41:04Speaker 02

  Sometimes a man gets carried away is like, boy, that's like the best line in the song.

• 2:41:07Yasi Salek?

  I agree. That's, that's one of those, like, real, like, that's an oldie song, you know? He's, that's the old soul popped out.

• 2:41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:16Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes a man gets carried away.

• 2:41:29Yasi Salek?

  Again, I think it's okay for me to read this from his journals, because it was about his intention with the song.

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:41:34Yasi Salek?

  "I want the subject in this song to be aching for his love to come over to his place, to make love, to save their love from certain death. She is off somewhere, busy. He is a fallen man, has kept her waiting late at night, has cheated on her, has disappointed her in some way, thinking that if she would only come to his room, if only they could be together tonight of all nights, when their love could be saved. But she's nowhere to be found. Outside it is raining, and just like the feeling he gets when he is inside her body, he wants it to come and overwhelm his senses, like her kisses upon his skin. But the rain will never touch him, won't moisten his aching body. He aches for her. Tonight of all nights. If he doesn't have her in his arms tonight, he fears he will lose their beautiful magic. Come to me, love me, or we'll lose it all."

• 2:42:15Yasi Salek?

  I'm fucking unwell. My kingdom for a kiss on the shoulder?

• 2:42:20Speaker 02

  If anyone could ever be seen watching, like, singing along to the song alone, you'd look like the biggest asshole, you know? But he, if, when you watch him doing it-

• 2:42:29Yasi Salek?

  Me walking my dog every day.

• 2:42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Because it's so, like I said, it's so operatic.

• 2:42:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  And so, he's just kind of twisting himself around the mic stand during the performance.

• 2:42:38Yasi Salek?

  When did we become that kind of society?

• 2:42:40Speaker 02

  Again, like-

• 2:42:40Yasi Salek?

  Where we judge people's-

• 2:42:42Speaker 02

  A little bit of a product of my, at least my upbringing, you know?

• 2:42:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, you're kind of-

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  Where you can't express yourself in that way.

• 2:42:47Yasi Salek?

  It's like your dad and you problem.

• 2:42:49Speaker 02

  I think, I think it's just everything. I think it's like- Long Island, I think it's Irish Catholic.

• 2:42:55Yasi Salek?

  I also do think like

• 2:42:57Speaker 02

  A number of things.

• 2:42:58Yasi Salek?

  One thing the 90s ushered in is, like you said, irony and like sarcasm and the idea that like, it's weird because it was so about authenticity, but also not, you know, also you.

• 2:43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in that way, it was about ethics and not feelings.

• 2:43:13Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 2:43:14Speaker 02

  And I think we're still catching up on feelings. I'm always really interested in an artist. So I don't know if you really, you don't really seem to care about that much, but I feel like Beck is a really interesting patient zero for a lot of this.

• 2:43:24Yasi Salek?

  I love Sea Change.

• 2:43:26Speaker 02

  Well, that's, so that was gonna be my point.

• 2:43:27Yasi Salek?

  Sea Change is my favorite Beck album.

• 2:43:29Speaker 02

  He is both, like he is the avatar of both things that came along at this time where he's like, what if like all this cool shit that I like, that I think is interesting was just kind of smashed up and I made some funny songs about it?

• 2:43:38Yasi Salek?

  I'm a loser, baby.

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  And then he's also like, I'm probably the most devastated person you've ever known and here are nine songs in which I very plaintively, with the most obvious metaphors of all time, explain to you how destroyed I am. And then, oh, let's go back to a new song where I'm like a goofy guy who likes to breakdance.

• 2:43:53Yasi Salek?

  Do you think Beck is Jeff Buckley to white guys who love DJ Shadow?

• 2:44:01Speaker 02

  I think that your comparison is unfair to the parties involved.

• 2:44:05Yasi Salek?

  You're feeling, you're feeling dragged.

• 2:44:07Speaker 02

  Corpus Christi Carol, what can you say?

• 2:44:10Yasi Salek?

  That Jeff was like, oh, let me stunt on these hoes for a second. Like, oh, I know you thought I could sing, but you want to fucking see range, bitch? That's what Corpus Christi Carol is.

• 2:44:19Speaker 02

  Composed in the 16th century, the early 1500s.

• 2:44:23Yasi Salek?

  It's giving. It's giving, it's giving monastic.

• 2:44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Benjamin Britten's Arrangement was composed in 1933.

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  Did you have this in the document? I'm just seeing this on Wikipedia. The Carol is a, this is a Buckley quote. The Carol is a fairy tale about a falcon who takes the beloved of the singer to an orchard. The singer goes looking for her and arrives at a chamber where his beloved lies next to a bleeding knight and a tomb with Christ's body in it.

• 2:44:58Yasi Salek?

  No, I just, I'm just seeing that now. Love that.

• 2:45:01Speaker 02

  It's a beautiful

• 2:45:02Yasi Salek?

  In that sense, it's

• 2:45:02Speaker 02

  Reading of the song.

• 2:45:03Yasi Salek?

  It's a Jeff Buckley song then. He made it a Jeff Buckley song because it is about yearning. And yearning near Christ or near, near heaven, near God.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  It operates on the album just kind of like an interlude.

• 2:45:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:45:15Speaker 02

  You know, it's just a transitional vocal exercise about pain.

• 2:45:19Yasi Salek?

  It's a weird, it's a weird one too, though. Corpus Christi Carol into eternal life.

• 2:45:27Yasi Salek?

  I would have removed eternal life from this album with love and respect.

• 2:45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:33Yasi Salek?

  And included, forget her, but in a way that it was a secret track or buried, so it wasn't a single.

• 2:45:38Speaker 02

  I like eternal life. It's not, it's not one of my favorites, but I like it.

• 2:45:41Yasi Salek?

  Eternal life.

• 2:45:42Speaker 02

  Very, it's very, it's very Soundgarden.

• 2:45:44Yasi Salek?

  Not a bad song.

• 2:45:45Speaker 02

  It's very Soundgarden.

• 2:45:46Yasi Salek?

  And it's like.

• 2:45:47Speaker 02

  Cornell, we didn't talk really about their friendship.

• 2:45:48Yasi Salek?

  Soundgarden throwaway song. Yeah. You know, uh, they became friends after this, I believe. Makes a total sense for me for them to have a friendship. There was also a set list that was printed in his journals that I think was from a tour that didn't happen. But I thought it was very interesting because it had on it flutter kisses, I believe is the name of the song.

• 2:46:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:46:10Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it's not flutter kisses, sorry. Flutter, flutter girl. Um, it was a song that he had written during that stretch, remember? That never actually came out, um, until he put out euphoria morning. But it was an outtake from super unknown. But anyways, he must've played it for Jeff Buckley because it had not come out. And he was covering it or planned to cover it in his set. I thought that was interesting.

• 2:46:33Speaker 02

  Kindred spirits.

• 2:46:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, I don't know. I don't know. They, in many ways, they seem very different to me.

• 2:46:40Speaker 02

  Well, there's this quote in the documentary that is heartbreaking from Jeff about how if he feels that Chris has really got it figured out. Like the balance of life and his artistry, which of course is, you know, in retrospect, it's very sad to think about.

• 2:46:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 02

  You know, Chris Cornell, very famously, very tortured person.

• 2:46:56Yasi Salek?

  Took his old life.

• 2:46:57Speaker 02

  And they are, they are kind of dream brothers, you know, they, they have a lot. There's a matching to this, their vocal power, their like sense of desperation and yearning in their best songs. They're like rock god qualities.

• 2:47:10Yasi Salek?

  Sexual icon.

• 2:47:12Speaker 02

  The fact that they were desired, deeply desired.

• 2:47:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I will read what Jeff said about the songs. I thought it was to your point and very like the I, again, this is one of the first songs he ever wrote. And very idealistic. Sometimes when you get too smart for yourself, you start worrying about things that everybody should be worrying about, but nobody worries about. And the weight is so overwhelming that you feel rage on a global level. It's the same thing mothers must feel after they have children. The whole world is so anti-life, especially a world ruled by men. That's right. He's an ally. Who don't want to sit, listen and understand what life is all about. There's so many countless details, just being alive, that just knowing what love is, or what pain is, or what the reason is for all this amazing wonder. And really, really hard lessons is that you've really got to be serious about it, or else you're just fucking around.

• 2:47:58Yasi Salek?

  There's too much of that to still be either psychically or physically burning crosses, or lynching people, or coercing people, or murdering people, or sending people into murder. All that useless shit. I guess that's what eternal life is about. I don't really know what eternal life is about still, even though I just read that entire quote, but I kind of get what he's like. The world is unjust. You guys are focusing on the wrong things.

• 2:48:29Yasi Salek?

  And then we go into Dream Brother. He said Chris Cornell was his dream brother in one way, but this song is actually about his dream brother, Chris Dowd. Who he felt a real kinship with. It's interesting because this song, I think on the surface, you can obviously really read it as like him singing to his situation with his father who, and, and he is.

• 2:48:52Speaker 02

  That conclusion is drawn in the David Brown book, you know?

• 2:48:54Yasi Salek?

  I mean, he is, but he is singing it through the lens of Chris Dowd as his dream brother. Who had a pregnant girlfriend and was sort of weighing what to do about it. And he's saying, don't be like the one who made me so old. Viejito. Don't be like the one who left behind his name because they're waiting for you like I waited for mine and nobody ever came.

• 2:49:15Speaker 02

  So why do we think Chris Dowd is not included in all of the

• 2:49:18Yasi Salek?

  I would love.

• 2:49:19Speaker 02

  Jeff Buckley memorial material?

• 2:49:21Yasi Salek?

  I have some speculative thoughts. Obviously, I don't know.

• 2:49:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:49:25Yasi Salek?

  I've met Chris Dowd once. I don't know if you'd remember, we did a Fishbone episode of this podcast with Joey Patel. It's really great if you guys are interested.

• 2:49:32Speaker 02

  One of the first episodes.

• 2:49:32Yasi Salek?

  It's pretty early on. I don't think Chris Dowd is a person who would be told what to say or would would censor himself.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:49:41Yasi Salek?

  Um, and I wonder if that's why, because I was, I was quite surprised to see Ben Harper in the HBO documentary. And I was like, were they good friends? And I guess they knew each other and I spoke to it.

• 2:49:52Speaker 02

  He kind of explains the context in which they meet in the documentary.

• 2:49:54Yasi Salek?

  At the, yeah, it's, it's worth, and he's good.

• 2:49:57Speaker 02

  I like that story a lot.

• 2:49:57Yasi Salek?

  The story is great. But I was like, where's Chris Dowd? Where's Nathan Larson? I think is his name from Shudder to Think, who they toured pretty.

• 2:50:03Speaker 02

  That was my question I asked you the other day.

• 2:50:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And also Mike Doty, which now, reading Mike Doty, I kind of understand why they wouldn't have invited him to participate.

• 2:50:11Speaker 02

  A lot of guys who saw maybe some real shit.

• 2:50:13Yasi Salek?

  That's what I'm saying. It's back to our earliest thing of like, if you're doing a documentary and you want to paint a portrait that is more flattering than not flattering, you probably don't include these bits. And in my estimation, it just makes someone more human and there's nothing inherently wrong with dabbling in drugs or, in fact, it's just like, you're not a godlike figure. You weren't perfect. You weren't a selfless, nobody is. So to, to hear a bit more of that, you know?

• 2:50:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's some real complexity there. And I don't know how deeply we can get into this, but what appeals to me about Jeff Buckley as an artist is not this angelic vision.

• 2:50:57Yasi Salek?

  Of course.

• 2:50:57Speaker 02

  It's like this deeply flawed guy.

• 2:50:59Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:50:59Speaker 02

  Who is able to channel something that no one else can channel. And that's true for most great artists, but I think that there isn't this feeling like, oh, if you tarnish the saintly image that somehow, well, they'll be reduced in someone's mind. But like,

• 2:51:12Yasi Salek?

  I think it would be elevated.

• 2:51:13Speaker 02

  We know that's not true for Kurt Cobain. You know, like Kurt Cobain obviously struggled in a variety of ways with a variety of things.

• 2:51:18Yasi Salek?

  But it is kind of true of Kurt Cobain because no one talks about how he was kind of mean. And there's many stories of him being kind of mean.

• 2:51:24Speaker 02

  I don't, but I feel like in the documentaries, there are.

• 2:51:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:26Speaker 02

  I feel like in a lot of the documentaries, there are that he can be really tough on people and could be really like alienating and.

• 2:51:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, maybe it's because of the kind of music that Nirvana made. Yeah, I think it's like as corny as it is to say, I'm sorry, I'm gonna say it like. It's very much like some of us are in the gutter, but we're looking at the stars like Oscar Wilde core like. That's what makes it, that's what makes his music interesting and what's making him interesting is that tension like. He knows he's in the gutter, but he's reaching for something. Better and purer and, and you know, like, that is the beautiful part of his music and to sort of like. Again, sand off those edges is like. Like, I think they try to. Premise it as like the, the entire struggle of Jeff Buckley was his creative struggle and I don't think that's true. There's a lot more struggle than just creative struggle. Creative struggle is a symptom. It's not a, it's not a cause.

• 2:52:16Speaker 02

  It's so hard for us to diagnose in the aftermath too, though, you know?

• 2:52:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's not about that, but it's just more like nobody's core wound is. I'm not the kind of artist I want to be. That is, that is a symptom of a core wound. That is not the core wound.

• 2:52:30Speaker 02

  You're right. Dream Brothers is a great song.

• 2:52:32Yasi Salek?

  It's fucking great.

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  It's a great way for this album to end.

• 2:52:34Yasi Salek?

  Unexpected. Again, very eastern melodies, back to the Namaste prayer flags of the 90s.

• 2:52:40Speaker 02

  But just the interest in the Koali music and Nosrat Fatih Ali Khan and you know, his. I think that there's like an exoticism, mysticism that is a part of his musical persona.

• 2:52:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:52Speaker 02

  Many people, if handled poorly, would balk at, but that he's able to carry.

• 2:52:56Yasi Salek?

  I agree. It's, it's a wonderful song. Quite long, trans like.

• 2:53:08Speaker 02

  This album's a banger. Sold 300,000 copies, kind of came and went. You know, he wouldn't shoot any videos for these songs.

• 2:53:15Yasi Salek?

  He ultimately did, but yes.

• 2:53:16Speaker 02

  But like, you know, after being essentially forced to.

• 2:53:19Yasi Salek?

  Because of the poor sales. Yeah, it was, yeah, it didn't, it didn't really. It didn't really-

• 2:53:24Speaker 02

  Like in 1994, this was de rigueur to just have two singles lined up, have videos ready to go for them, to have hundred thousand dollar video shoots.

• 2:53:31Yasi Salek?

  This was the peak of MTV. He did host 120 Minutes against-

• 2:53:35Speaker 02

  Very begrudgingly.

• 2:53:36Yasi Salek?

  Begrudgingly, yeah.

• 2:53:37Speaker 02

  And you can see in the documentary his kind of discontent with being in present there with with Michael Ty.

• 2:53:42Yasi Salek?

  Can you believe that that was that was the depths of selling out in fucking 1994?

• 2:53:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing that we would consider the coolest show on television right now. I don't mean to judge him for this in retrospect because it's easy because of how degraded a lot of things have become over that time. But I do think he's like, he has a little bit of a misapprehension about what is real and what is not real.

• 2:54:04Yasi Salek?

  What do you mean misapprehension?

• 2:54:07Speaker 02

  If we if we'll use Kurt Cobain as an interesting example.

• 2:54:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:54:10Speaker 02

  He was able to do the thing where he was able to participate in the monoculture but have a uh-

• 2:54:15Yasi Salek?

  At great cost.

• 2:54:17Speaker 02

  Without question. And I'm not trying to say it doesn't cost you.

• 2:54:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:20Speaker 02

  But to be able to retain his individuality and his sense of like humor and play about it.

• 2:54:26Yasi Salek?

  Think about him going on Headbanger's Ball in the yellow the yellow bald gown and and the ways in which he did participate that he kept it very-

• 2:54:34Speaker 02

  He appeared on Saturday Night Live. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

• 2:54:37Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:54:37Speaker 02

  He did those things, you know, corporate magazines suck.

• 2:54:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:40Speaker 02

  He did all those things. Now, I'm not saying he wasn't a troubled person, but I don't think that that is like. I think that there's a way to do it and to retain your soul.

• 2:54:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:48Speaker 02

  And you don't have to do it if you want to, and he certainly didn't want to. So I'm not telling him he should have. But I I think that there was something that I felt that feels a little self defeating in looking at the like dogmatic and punk way that he's looking at all these things while also like wearing a gold jacket on an album released by Columbia.

• 2:55:05Yasi Salek?

  I think probably the difference is that like, in my estimation, is that Kurt Cobain was quite ambitious, actually.

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:55:12Yasi Salek?

  In the way of wanting to succeed within the structure, even though he didn't respect the structure.

• 2:55:18Speaker 02

  And this is, I guess, the soul of an artist, but there's contradiction. You don't hire Andy Wallace and Carl Berger if you want to like be an outsider artist. You don't put strings on your debut album if you're like, you know, what I'm really into is periubu, you know what I mean?

• 2:55:31Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:55:33Speaker 02

  It's not that he isn't into those things and they don't, they do comprise part of his artistry, but he does have this yearning to do something big.

• 2:55:41Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:55:41Speaker 02

  But then pulls back at the moment when something feels too commercialized.

• 2:55:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, also, I, I think maybe his definition, his ambition wasn't to be commercially successful. It was to be artistically successful. And whatever, what that meant to him, I can't know, you know?

• 2:55:55Speaker 02

  Part of the paradox that we're talking about is would he have achieved any of this status had he lived?

• 2:56:00Yasi Salek?

  I don't think so.

• 2:56:01Speaker 02

  With this body of work.

• 2:56:02Yasi Salek?

  I don't think so.

• 2:56:03Speaker 02

  It doesn't seem like it, right? It's impossible to know.

• 2:56:05Yasi Salek?

  It's impossible to know, but I don't think so, you know? I mean, the reviews were good.

• 2:56:11Speaker 02

  Not great though.

• 2:56:11Yasi Salek?

  A lot of press, not great, but I mean, pretty good, you know, like Criscow didn't like it, gave a C minus. Kind of a crazy.

• 2:56:18Speaker 02

  The Criscow review is nuts.

• 2:56:19Yasi Salek?

  Same grade that he gave Candlebox.

• 2:56:21Speaker 02

  The Criscow review is downright rude. Now, there are a lot of Criscow reviews that are read that way. And he obviously is like a master of the, the capsule review. But I, I read that and I like, I cringe pretty hard.

• 2:56:31Yasi Salek?

  It's mean.

• 2:56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He said, I'll read it. We, we don't have to dance around it. Although Tim's vocal traces are in his jeans as surely as John's are in Julian's. It's wrong to peg him as the unwelcome ghost of his overwrought dad. Young Jeff is a syncretic, I don't know what that means.

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  Like a synthesizer, somebody who brings together a lot of things to make one thing.

• 2:56:48Yasi Salek?

  A syncretic asshole beholden to Zeppelin and Nina Simone and Chris Whitley and the Cocktoe Twins and his mama. You're a mama too, if you don't watch out. Sensitivity isn't being wimpy is a quote he avers. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. Jeff Buckley saying it. And Chris Goss says, so let us pray the force of hype blows him away all the way to Uranus.

• 2:57:11Speaker 02

  I don't like that review.

• 2:57:13Speaker 02

  It feels very personal.

• 2:57:15Yasi Salek?

  Why didn't you like him?

• 2:57:16Speaker 02

  I think he sees him as extremely pretentious and that diva quality that you're describing feels inauthentic to him.

• 2:57:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:22Speaker 02

  Um, and the idea of someone kind of just, it, it feels very, to me, we haven't, I haven't said this person's name yet, but I say this all the time when I talk about the nineties, but he's very Quentin Tarantino of his time of kind of, kind of hoarding all of these.

• 2:57:34Yasi Salek?

  Fiction, no, he already.

• 2:57:35Speaker 02

  That's true. But just all of these, like, these. Personal and deep influences.

• 2:57:39Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:57:40Speaker 02

  That to the artist, the way that like Shaw Brothers martial arts movies mean the world to Quentin Tarantino, but most people have never seen them.

• 2:57:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:46Speaker 02

  He's like, I've listened to Edith Piaf records since I was 14.

• 2:57:49Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:57:50Speaker 02

  And I know a lot about these songs and I, I learned how to sing. I know the lyrics to Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, Khan songs when I'm 21. And he's bringing all these things together. And then invariably artists who do that always get called posers or phonies or unoriginal.

• 2:58:05Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 2:58:06Speaker 02

  And Chris Kow was kind of leveling what I feel is like a really juvenile way of looking at art. And he does that sometimes. He's a great, he's arguably the greatest rock critic of all time, but you can tell when he's kind of like, ah, fuck this.

• 2:58:17Yasi Salek?

  I'm glad that this came up though, because I think what we haven't, we've sort of danced around it, but we haven't really explicitly said is that 1994, none of this shit that he was doing was cool in any way. This was not.

• 2:58:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:58:29Yasi Salek?

  The vibe, the vibe was not this.

• 2:58:31Speaker 02

  But Chris Kow doesn't look for cool.

• 2:58:32Yasi Salek?

  No, no, I don't know about, it just like gives me an, an entryway into, no. Coffee house singer standards, you know, like Edith Piaf, like, this is 1994, Green Day and Offspring are dominating the charts, you know, like.

• 2:58:47Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 2:58:48Yasi Salek?

  It is so uncool.

• 2:58:50Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:58:50Yasi Salek?

  And we can never know that again, because through the reevaluation of time, this is now considered, it's, it, it's almost like treated like the way P G Harvey was treated back then, but she was treated like that in real time. I don't know that he was. He got good reviews and I think some celebrity fans started to come out of the woodwork. We talked about Chrissy Hynde. Um, Paul McCartney famously came to meet him with Linda McCartney. He had people coming out of the woodwork.

• 2:59:16Speaker 02

  A lot of the elders really recognized him. Paige and Plant in real time, both of them would say, I mean.

• 2:59:23Yasi Salek?

  He went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when they were inducted and met them, right?

• 2:59:26Speaker 02

  He did.

• 2:59:27Yasi Salek?

  And then he like nearly passed away from the compliment that they gave him.

• 2:59:29Speaker 02

  Plant said to him, you are the greatest act, like new singer to come along.

• 2:59:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And then he disappeared for two days.

• 2:59:36Speaker 02

  Buckley, yeah, because he couldn't handle it. But there, there's a lot of tape of Plant and Paige talking about his power. And then, I think it's Brad Pitt in the BBC documentary who says he's Page and Plant in one body. Because he's this epic guitar player who had, who played, knows how to, um, play these complicated chord progressions, who also sings. This, you know, kind of feminine whale that Plant had.

• 3:00:00Yasi Salek?

  Who famously.

• 3:00:02Yasi Salek?

  Maybe not so famously, his house on the beach, the doctor, I loved it, was put on to Jeff Buckley by his then-wife Jennifer Aniston, who had the CD and loved them.

• 3:00:09Speaker 02

  Yes. Brad Pitt, one of the executive producers of the HBO.

• 3:00:12Yasi Salek?

  Women rock, babe. Women have great taste.

• 3:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:15Yasi Salek?

  We've touched on it, but also in his inspirations, especially vocally, is Elizabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins.

• 3:00:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:00:20Yasi Salek?

  Mentioned a couple of times.

• 3:00:21Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 3:00:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, very much so. He was deeply obsessed with them and we'll get into some other stuff. But he had met them in 91 and he had been listening to them for years and you can, you can a bit here, at least just like that ethereal sort of like,

• 3:00:38Yasi Salek?

  it's back to the spiritual, I guess.

• 3:00:44Yasi Salek?

  All that's happening, by the way, and I'm going to get into it a little more specifically, is that he is digging a financial hole that is

• 3:00:54Yasi Salek?

  to the molten core of the earth. He gets a ton of offers, starting in 93, when he becomes Columbia's next big thing,

• 3:01:02Yasi Salek?

  to do all these commercial things. A Gap ad.

• 3:01:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:01:06Yasi Salek?

  Could totally picture him in a Gap ad, but he said no because Banana Republic, fuck you bitch. According to Dave Laurie, he was offered a role in the 1996 Barbra Streisand film, The Mirror Has Two Faces. Have not seen this film?

• 3:01:18Speaker 02

  I've seen it.

• 3:01:19Yasi Salek?

  He was not in it. He said no. Turned down a lot of money, this is Dave Laurie, to write the theme song for a Quentin Tarantino film. Sean wrote an absolute negation of this in my doc. Do you care to explain?

• 3:01:32Speaker 02

  It's very plausible. It wouldn't shock me if Quentin Tarantino liked Jeff Buckley.

• 3:01:36Yasi Salek?

  I want to know.

• 3:01:36Speaker 02

  He just, he doesn't really do this.

• 3:01:38Yasi Salek?

  Well, again, this was early in his career.

• 3:01:40Speaker 02

  Is it possible he asked that, he asked him to cover Girl, You'll Be a Woman?

• 3:01:43Yasi Salek?

  That's what I'm saying. Maybe, maybe it was that and not, or Doverkill.

• 3:01:46Speaker 02

  The, the thing I'm bumping on is original composition. That's the thing that I.

• 3:01:50Yasi Salek?

  Maybe it was a lost in translation situation.

• 3:01:52Speaker 02

  Or it could just be complete bullshit.

• 3:01:54Yasi Salek?

  Maybe. It's not. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I'm not going to defend the honor of Dave.

• 3:01:59Speaker 02

  Veracity, you know?

• 3:02:00Yasi Salek?

  It's just his manager. I don't know. He also apparently rejected doing a Prada shoot. That, for me, was very sad. I would have loved to see a Jeff Buckley.

• 3:02:07Speaker 02

  The amount of misinformation around artists like this, especially at this time, is extraordinary.

• 3:02:11Yasi Salek?

  I'm simply quoting. So if those people lied, that's their problem. Okay, so he's turning down all sorts of shit. Then he's touring, as he put it, tours are like religious crusades. I love that. Around August 19th, right before the album came out, he flew to London by himself to spend time with Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. So, like I said, they had met in 1991 for the first time. They had been introduced to him as Tim Buckley's son because Cocteau Twins had covered Tim Song's Song of the Siren. He said that then a couple of years later, they met back up with him. Simon Raymond said this, and he said, "It was just Jeff and his little Fender guitar and amp. He sang for two hours and he knocked me sideways. Liz and I spent time with him over the next few days. He had tremendous energy and was completely into music.

• 3:02:53Yasi Salek?

  He carried this ghetto blaster everywhere to play all his favorite CDs, mostly by people with amazing voices, and he could mimic them all. He could do Liz, too. I loved him. He was an energizing sort of person." Fraser once said that she sweated like a June bride when she first met him. Handsome cat. She is in the BBC documentary from 2002. Extremely rare. I don't know why she did this. It maybe is a testament to how much she was affected by him and loved him because she's an incredibly famously private person. They had allegedly a sort of like intense love affair. She seems to corroborate it. He said in an article, maybe back in the time protecting her privacy, that they were just friends.

• 3:03:34Yasi Salek?

  They wrote and recorded a song called "All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun." Jesus fucking Christ. Have you heard this song? No. Oh! Again, I'm a little conflicted about it because it never came out, much like sketches for my sweetheart, The Drunk. It was never released, and so it does feel sort of like gross. Violating. Violating. This is what she said in the documentary. "I was having a hard time with the band I was in, so to meet Jeffrey was like being given a set of paints. Do you know what I mean? It was just like I had all this color in my life again. I mean, he idolized me before he met me. It's kind of creepy, and I was like that with him. It's so embarrassing, but it's the truth. I just couldn't help falling in love with him. He was adorable.

• 3:04:18Yasi Salek?

  I read his diary, he read mine. We'd swap. It was so personal. I've never done that with anyone else. I don't know if he has. In some ways, there was a great deal of intimacy, but then there'd be times where I'd think, oh, no, I'm just not penetrating this Jeff Buckley boy at all." I found that part really interesting. Again, it really goes back to what we were saying about him, right? On one hand, he's so vulnerable and available. On the other hand, he seemingly has oceans of stuff that you cannot access. And she even, someone close to him, said the same thing. Like, I feel like I don't even know him sometimes.

• 3:04:48Speaker 02

  Some people might describe that as boy mode.

• 3:04:51Yasi Salek?

  Musician boy mode?

• 3:04:52Speaker 02

  It's interesting. She's only three years older than him.

• 3:04:54Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 3:04:55Speaker 02

  But she's been, had a full career.

• 3:04:58Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 3:04:58Speaker 02

  Because she got started so young.

• 3:04:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. The Cockroach Twins were so just like iconic.

• 3:05:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. That first Cockroach Twins album is eighty-two.

• 3:05:05Yasi Salek?

  It's the year we were born.

• 3:05:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct.

• 3:05:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:08Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:05:09Yasi Salek?

  During this period, Jeff Buckley tours in America with The Grifters, were indie rock band from Memphis and also alt-rock band from Boston called The Dam Builders. He hits it off with both of them very much, especially with Joan Wasser, the violinist in The Dam Builders.

• 3:05:24Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:05:25Yasi Salek?

  This is a tour where they would often end with the cover of Kangaroo by Big Star. Absolutely ruined my goddamn life, this cover. Kangaroo is one of my favorite songs in general. Alex Shelton, another tortured genius.

• 3:05:36Speaker 02

  True. He, this, yeah, this was usually the show closer for this band for a long stretch of time. There's an absolutely sick version of it on Mystery White Boy, the live album.

• 3:05:43Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 3:05:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:44Yasi Salek?

  So the Mystery White Boy is a really great live album.

• 3:05:46Speaker 02

  Great live album.

• 3:05:54Yasi Salek?

  A Sony UK department head went to a London show and they played a twenty-five-minute Kangaroo to end. And he wrote his colleagues and said, I just, you know, I feel like it's too long. Basically, I don't know, people were bored. And then a vice president at Sony called Jeff to strongly suggest they stop playing the song or curtail the length. And Jeff Buckley was fucking pissed.

• 3:06:16Speaker 02

  It's tough.

• 3:06:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He was visibly upset, according to Michael Tai. Another thing that transpired during this year of touring is Jeff got into bad boy shit, babe. He's on his bad boy shit. He's smoking cigs. He's drinking heavily. He might, may or may not have been doing drugs. Again, I don't know. I think he was. Tai said when he was young with his mom, he felt very much like a guiding force in that relationship. And he said, I never got the chance to do something like that. He said it felt good to rebel in a certain way. Speaking of rebellion, he died as her black at this time. Cool.

• 3:06:43Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 3:06:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's not selling well. The label's like, please make a fucking music video. He's like, okay, they make one for last goodbye, but then he still does his Jeff Buckley shit on it where he's like, okay, my friends have to make it. Mary Seer and John Jesseron. It's an absolute disaster. He wants it to be an anti-video, the band performing with like esoteric images behind them. But he's like, we're in Europe. You have to come to France. There's two dozen edits to this video. They all have to be sent to Jeff in Europe for his notes, which back in 1995, cost $10,000 a time. I don't, what were they doing? Putting on a ship?

• 3:07:17Speaker 02

  I don't really know. I don't know how that works. It did seem like things were very expensive in the recording industry at that time, but I also think there was a lot of built in charges for things that were not necessary.

• 3:07:27Yasi Salek?

  Long distance calls costing money. So imagine trying to send a video edit across overseas. On dial up. The total cost of this video became $275,000. And it's not a good video. He's right. It ended up being bad.

• 3:07:48Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Buckley in May of 95 is included in People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People. He was mortified, but also low key flattered. Who wouldn't be?

• 3:07:58Speaker 02

  Would you like to be included in that?

• 3:07:59Yasi Salek?

  Yes, but I don't think it'll happen for me.

• 3:08:01Speaker 02

  Would you have any?

• 3:08:02Yasi Salek?

  I don't think I qualify.

• 3:08:04Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 3:08:05Yasi Salek?

  I don't think I have that.

• 3:08:06Speaker 02

  You're one of the 50 most beautiful people in America?

• 3:08:08Yasi Salek?

  I don't, I don't, but give me one or two trips to Korea, babe, and we can.

• 3:08:12Speaker 02

  Do you think that I qualify?

• 3:08:14Yasi Salek?

  Feels like a loaded question. Um, Jeff told Ron Moorhead around this time that he turned down offers to do SNL and Letterman. Do you believe that?

• 3:08:24Speaker 02

  I certainly do.

• 3:08:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:26Speaker 02

  SNL famously very good booking.

• 3:08:29Yasi Salek?

  How will there? It's right there. Your man, your boy.

• 3:08:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would be surprised if he was not asked to be a part of SNL.

• 3:08:35Yasi Salek?

  We don't have a SNL.

• 3:08:38Speaker 02

  A clip of him performing. Yeah, it would be wonderful to have that.

• 3:08:42Yasi Salek?

  He's told Ron Moorhead, that's not my crowd. The TV watching public of America.

• 3:08:48Speaker 02

  This is an example of him kind of working against himself a little bit.

• 3:08:51Yasi Salek?

  He didn't know he was gonna die.

• 3:08:53Speaker 02

  Regardless, it's not about that. It's not about him dying. It's about him reaching as many people as possible who would love his work.

• 3:08:58Yasi Salek?

  Didn't like being famous.

• 3:08:59Speaker 02

  I'm not saying that he did. Just saying, like, don't sign with Columbia.

• 3:09:05Yasi Salek?

  Well, you go tell him that. I'll bring a weed.

• 3:09:06Speaker 02

  I wish I could. I wish he was with us now. I wish you, I wish I had 15 Jeff Buckley albums.

• 3:09:10Yasi Salek?

  I know, me too. I really do. It really breaks my heart. Every time I listen to Grace, I'm like, we could have had so much more. He's feeling a certain type of way, like you said. He is not, he's feeling pressure. He doesn't want to go on Saturday Night Live.

• 3:09:21Speaker 02

  He's withdrawing.

• 3:09:22Yasi Salek?

  He's withdrawing.

• 3:09:23Speaker 02

  It's understandable. I'm not trying to say it's not, it is understandable.

• 3:09:26Yasi Salek?

  Well, okay, so like we said, the album is not performing well. He is in the hole to Columbia. Something like half a million, maybe more, maybe a million dollars. I think it's a million dollars of recoupable or whatever. He does an interview with Catlin Moran for Melody Maker on this time where he describes his nightmares. He says, "Oh, I have wicked dreams sometimes. Last night's was stunningly twisted, the king of bad dreams. There was this artist who wanted to show me his art, took me to his warehouse out in a bleak piece of desert, showed me into his barn. Turns out his art is human bodies, with the skin eased away from the bone with razors and woven into baskets, into sculptures of living skin. All of his works of art are still alive, but their vocal cords are nicked and they are blind. They writhe and writhe,

• 3:10:10Yasi Salek?

  with their bodies twisted, out of shape by this man's vision. And he's looking to me for confirmation that his art is valid and special. He keeps saying, it's shit, isn't it? But in a way that you do when you want the other person to go, no, no, it's brilliant. I tell him it's brilliant. Then he turns on me, knife glinting in his hand, and tells me he wants me to be his greatest work of all. I run." You don't need to be fucking Freud to see the symbolism in that. He is feeling not good. He is feeling like a vocal chord cut, blinded piece of meat art for Columbia. In August, Jeff had, I guess he had already befriended Lenny K a couple of years before Patti Smith's collaborator. And him and Patti Smith were in Electric Lady Studios to work on her album Gone Again, which was her first album in a long time because she had gone off to

• 3:10:55Yasi Salek?

  be a wife and a mother and was just returning. And Jeff came too. He had met Patti a bit at Lollapalooza. There's a whole video on Patti's Substack actually recently where she talks about she was struggling to sing at the Lollapalooza and she felt Jeff's like presence, like fruiting for her full of empathy. Anyways, Patti needed someone to sing a high choral part on the song Beneath the Southern Cross. And so Jeff does it. So he's on that album and they're working on the song Fireflies. And Jeff is like, oh, I have this instrument at my apartment that could work with this. An Egyptian bowed instrument called the esra. She was really into. Foreign instruments.

• 3:11:28Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 3:11:29Yasi Salek?

  And Smith was like, okay, well, go home and get it. So he goes home and gets it and he plays it on the song. According to the David Brown book afterwards, Patti Smith found Jeff sitting alone in a separate room crying because he thought he did a bad job.

• 3:11:40Speaker 02

  It's a sensitive cat.

• 3:11:41Yasi Salek?

  Another musician who played on Fireflies was 46 year old Tom Verlaine of television. You like television?

• 3:11:47Speaker 02

  Of course I do.

• 3:11:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, who doesn't? Marky Moon is too long, though.

• 3:11:51Speaker 02

  The song or the album?

• 3:11:52Yasi Salek?

  The song, it's too long. Of course Jeff loves Marky Moon. Patti Smith said that Tom is not easily impressed and he was extremely impressed with Jeff's gifts. So Jeff decides, I want Tom Verlaine to produce the next album. Verlaine had not ever heard Grace. He knew who Jeff was, but he did not know. Joan Wasser said Jeff was looking for someone with a history in punk rock. Makes sense, given what we have talked about.

• 3:12:14Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 3:12:15Yasi Salek?

  But she was like, it's not like he was looking at anyone's resume. Tom Verlaine is not a good fit.

• 3:12:19Speaker 02

  Did Tom Verlaine produce many albums?

• 3:12:21Yasi Salek?

  That's a great question.

• 3:12:23Speaker 02

  I, I find this to be very, a very curious thing in general. You can obviously see what Buckley admires in Verlaine. And that there are some, you know, he idolizes these countercultural, you know, punk, post-punk figures.

• 3:12:39Yasi Salek?

  I think that's, for many years, that's his only production.

• 3:12:43Speaker 02

  That is sort of my, I mean, you can hear this when you listen to the record that was released and I'm like, this is kind of unfinished and unmastered and it's not really any, like these, these are not done songs.

• 3:12:54Yasi Salek?

  It's the idea that like, what do you want your producer to do, right? Do you want your producer to bring vibes?

• 3:12:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:13:00Yasi Salek?

  Or do you need your producer to fucking Andy Wallace it, you know? And I think maybe Jeff Buckley needed an Andy Wallace. Okay, it's time to try to make another album. This is not going well. They rent Mick Grundle's house in Sag Harbor. This is how we learned that Mick Grundle's family is rich.

• 3:13:14Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 3:13:15Yasi Salek?

  Starting November 1st to isolate themselves and create music. It's not, it's not happening, honey. Berkowitz comes up and listens to what they've been working on and he was like, it was just tapes full of 20 minute long music rambles, sound like a constant loop, no songs. Jeff Buckley, at this point, also told Berkowitz that he was thinking maybe the next album could be credited. To the band, under the name Two Ninas, not Jeff Buckley.

• 3:13:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:13:39Yasi Salek?

  The label were like, absolutely the fuck not, babe. You think we spent 1.8 million dollars building Jeff Buckley's name as an artist to then put on a album called Two Ninas? You thought wrong, you thought wrong bitch. He's getting more into alt-rock, Polvo, Jesus Lizard, through Joan Wasser, who was very cool. And feeling a little embarrassed about his output. I say this because there's a story about, he becomes friends with Inger Lord, do you know who that is?

• 3:14:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:14:05Yasi Salek?

  She was from the legendary, for the listeners, the legendary LA punk band, The Nymphs, who was really part of that LA Jane's Addiction scene. Legendarily, she had peed on Tom Zutat's desk at Geffen, that's kind of her legacy, that was their label. Pretty cool. And she was like, oh, but your music, and he goes, oh, my music's corny, it's love songs, it's corny, you wouldn't like it. But I love The Nymphs. Like, he was very embarrassed about his thing in comparison to her cool punk credentials, you know?

• 3:14:30Speaker 02

  He's lost something about himself in his time.

• 3:14:33Yasi Salek?

  Do you think it's because Grace didn't perform well?

• 3:14:35Speaker 02

  I'm sure, I'm sure there was an insecurity around that, but also, it's all bound up in his decisions and...

• 3:14:42Yasi Salek?

  I, I wonder if it's a bit more nuanced, and it's not just because Grace didn't perform well, it's because the people are breathing down his neck about it not performing well.

• 3:14:52Speaker 02

  I, I think you're right because he's been so verified by, not just his peers, but his heroes.

• 3:14:58Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:14:58Speaker 02

  So it's not as though he doesn't have confirmation of his greatness as an artist.

• 3:15:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:15:04Speaker 02

  He literally has Paul McCartney and Robert Plant telling him, you are amazing, to his face.

• 3:15:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but if you put your value outside of yourself, it's a black hole, and there's no amount of legendary rock stars to tell you you're good, that'll make you feel good.

• 3:15:19Speaker 02

  What I find, though, in reading about this period and listening to songs from sketches... Is someone looking for something new and not being able to find it?

• 3:15:28Yasi Salek?

  And yeah, and he might have found it if he had more time.

• 3:15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm not saying that. We just don't.

• 3:15:33Yasi Salek?

  No, no, I think you're, I agree with you totally. I think he's questing, totally.

• 3:15:37Speaker 02

  And like, it, none of it really, for me personally, none of it really works?

• 3:15:42Yasi Salek?

  Well, I don't want to get ahead. Well, this is one song that's pretty good.

• 3:15:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:15:44Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Ingralor, they become great friends. She moves into his house. They work on music together. They did this song for Jack Kerouac tribute album where he makes music. Um, and she sings or talks the poem Angel Mine. This is mostly important because she is a co-writer on the song Yard of Blonde Girls, which he will cover, which actually I think is kind of a fucking banger, but it's an absolute standard alt-rock radio banger. Like, that could have been a K-Rock Buzzbin slash song, you know?

• 3:16:25Yasi Salek?

  So Grace cost $2.2 million in the end.

• 3:16:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:16:30Yasi Salek?

  So his recoup amount was 1.8 million. He's not loving that feeling, I don't think.

• 3:16:36Speaker 02

  It's understandable.

• 3:16:37Yasi Salek?

  Here's a letter he wrote to his fans in December of 95 on his website. Dear everyone, thank you for your beautiful letters. Sometimes things get my brain in a twist and reading your words of support really does my heart good. I shouldn't think so much. The band and I are in writing mode now, doing well together. They send their love. I'm sure you won't see us until summer of 96. Then we're really gonna freak out, man. Maybe we record in the spring? Don't know yet. Also, may you all find the best of happiness in the year to come. Don't feel down. 96 must rule. New positive mental attitude slogan. Dude, future. It rocks. Love that this is how he talks. Um, actually, the band was not doing well. This is a lie. The band is doing badly. Matt Johnson has become a yoga-practicing vegetarian,

• 3:17:20Yasi Salek?

  and he is not into the partying that's going on on the road. Uh, they're fighting. It's not good vibes.

• 3:17:25Speaker 02

  He basically quits.

• 3:17:26Yasi Salek?

  He does, right after this Australian tour where Jeff got so drunk on the plane, he puked all over himself. Matt Johnson leaves the band after the Australia tour. Bye bye. He's replaced by a guy called Eric Idle. Jeff's like, listen, Columbia, I would like Tom Verlaine to produce. And they're like, question mark? Um, sorry, who? And they're like, we were thinking maybe Brendan O'Brien or Butch Vig or Steve Lilly White. These are literally what they were thinking, which is so clear. They're like, we want a hit. Brendan O'Brien, Pearl Jam, Butch Vig, Nirvana, Steve Lilly White, Dave Matthews Band. My heart. Jeff Buckley said, you're trying to make me Dave Matthews and I'm not going to because of the Steve Lilly White.

• 3:18:00Speaker 02

  Did you literally say that?

• 3:18:01Yasi Salek?

  That's, that's according to Berkowitz. I don't know.

• 3:18:04Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 3:18:05Yasi Salek?

  They fought. Who won? Jeff, because he always wins. And-

• 3:18:08Speaker 02

  He has total creative control?

• 3:18:09Yasi Salek?

  Yes. And they were like, yeah, but they can just not give him money. That's how it works, right? But they're like, okay, here's the money. Go record a couple of tracks with Tom Verlaine. Don Einer said their second record was taking so long. Everyone was just waiting for him to write a song. Never mind Steve Lilly White, never mind making a commercial record, just make any record.

• 3:18:29Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:18:29Yasi Salek?

  So Tom Verlaine picks a studio in Chinatown on Mercer. It's called Sorcerer. It's the absolute opposite of the Woodstock studio. It's gritty. Verlaine, Verlaine thought all the songs were done and fully arranged. LOL bitch, you thought wrong. That's not the, that's not what's happening. They came in with nothing really sorted. Tom Verlaine was like, after the first day, I realized we could be doing takes forever. It was hard to read in many ways what he liked and what he didn't like. Should it sound like the band is playing in a coliseum, in a club, or in a crappy rehearsal space? Should it be a cheesy rock sound or a bombastic Led Zeppelin sound? You had to kind of guestify the direction, zone for the tunes. And he wasn't real forthcoming about it. I assume he didn't know at that time.

• 3:19:11Speaker 02

  Didn't know what?

• 3:19:12Yasi Salek?

  What he wanted the direction to be. Because he's saying he's like being cagey about it. And I think the whole thing is like, he doesn't know.

• 3:19:17Speaker 02

  I think you're right.

• 3:19:17Yasi Salek?

  He's trying to figure it out, you know?

• 3:19:18Speaker 02

  I think you're right.

• 3:19:19Yasi Salek?

  Also, Eric Idle was not a good drummer.

• 3:19:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:19:22Yasi Salek?

  And Tom Verlaine was quite frustrated by that. After six days, the money ran out. They had four finished songs-ish, finished Skies a Landfill, Vancouver, You and I, which is a very old song, and Morning Theft.

• 3:19:35Yasi Salek?

  He starts to change around this time, according to the people around him. I think he's slowly been changing that you noted, but like Joan Wasser is like, this summer, he was just really paranoid, really private, not gregarious anymore. She didn't meet his friends. He was just kind of like insular, you know? This is a journal entry from that summer.

• 3:19:59Yasi Salek?

  "Your thought is your right. Your art is your right. You are allowed to invent and explore your song. You are allowed to make it real through your concentration and hold on to your gift, man, and let go of anything that holds you back from that aphrodisiac. The sigs, the pot, the self-denial, the fear, the externalized voices of disapproval you know you invent." And the last line is, "Carry yourself with delight."

• 3:20:20Yasi Salek?

  My boy, I love him. Carry yourself with delight. It's still there, that little light, you know? Okay, so in September, they go back to the Sony studios to show Berkowitz the songs. Berkowitz is like, "Okay." And then everyone's like, "This drummer is bad." So Jeff fires him. In his journal, he writes, "I'm gonna lay off the band. I need to go away. I prepared my entire life to face the future, unprepared to face the future. I hope I explode from the lesson. I hope my brain splits open and then my guts blow out of either side of my body. I hope my eyes are open when I die so they can see you for the final breath. I hope that I never come back alive." I read it to show that his mental state is sort of not in the best place. Keeps working on music, really enjoying working on music with Inger Lore,

• 3:21:05Yasi Salek?

  who's sober now and I think living in his house. They get a new drummer, Parker Kindred. Goes on a nine-day solo tour with just him under a different pseudonym every night. I thought this was fun and playful, like maybe one last thing of like, "I'm having fun with this still." Mm-hmm. Here are some examples: "The Crack Robots," "Possessed by Elves," "Marth and the Nicotines," and "A Puppet Show Named Julio." That's cute. All right, they play a show in New York City. They try out some new material. They plan to go to Memphis. To record at Easily Studios, he learned about this studio from his friends and the grifters. He was obsessed, he wanted to go to Easily. The studio stuff is not going well. Parker Kindred was like, I'm like crying to myself. My headphones are falling off my little head. I couldn't even begin to understand any of the songs to any degree.

• 3:21:49Yasi Salek?

  Tom Verlaine is like, bro, what the fuck are you guys doing? And then management in Columbia are like, these songs are what is happening? The vibes are bad, all around. They play a show, the whole band at Arlene's Grocery, which did you know was owned by the same guy that owns Shinnay?

• 3:22:05Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 3:22:05Yasi Salek?

  I didn't know that, so.

• 3:22:06Speaker 02

  Arlene's Grocery around the corner from where I live.

• 3:22:08Yasi Salek?

  Same. I walked past it every single day of my life, when I live there. They put in 12 hour days at Easily Studios to work on these songs. Nightmares by the Sea, Everybody Here Wants You, and New Year's Prayer. But Jeff is not happy about how the tapes are sounding. Berkowitz comes down, Jeff tries to hide Yard of Blonde Girls from him once again. He knows that's a radio hit. Not written by him, it's a cover, but according to Berkowitz, Jeff cried to him and was like, I need more time. And also I realized Verlaine is not the right fit. So the band prepares to fly home, but Jeff's like, I want to stay and work down here. Verlaine stayed too. They had three days where they kind of worked on the recordings. Verlaine said, my opinion was that the guy was much better without the band, kind of in opposition to what you were saying. They weren't holding him back, but his desire to get stuff right with them was taking time.

• 3:22:54Yasi Salek?

  Again, this is a new band who's not very skilled.

• 3:22:57Speaker 02

  It sounds like Matt Johnson was very skilled.

• 3:22:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 3:23:00Speaker 02

  But it's not like Michael Ty was like the most gifted guitarist, but he just felt, I think there was like a comfort thing.

• 3:23:06Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:23:06Speaker 02

  That he was missing in this period of time.

• 3:23:08Yasi Salek?

  I think he was also like felt this pressure to get it right. So he's like, I'll do it, I'll do it, you know, I don't know.

• 3:23:13Speaker 02

  I think you're right. No, I think you're right.

• 3:23:15Yasi Salek?

  So the two talk a bunch. This is where I said in the, in David Brown's book, Jeff apparently discussed his experimentation with heroin with Verlaine, which Verlaine said that he said he got off it real quick because he saw what could happen, which sounds right. And they discussed the tapes and Verlaine asked him point blank, it's like, you're not happy with any of this, right? And Jeff was like, no, but it's totally my fault. I've been so lazy, it's such a Jeff Buckley thing to like, you know, self criticize. And Verlaine is like, it's fine, but like sooner or later, somebody might want to put it out. Anything in that studio can be released, they own it. So if anything should happen, you're going to have lawyers and managers and everybody arguing, but they'll just put it out. And then you'll let you sue them because they don't care. That's the nature of this business.

• 3:23:58Yasi Salek?

  So if you don't want any of that shit out, you better go in tomorrow and erase it. And Jeff was like, yeah, yeah. Just such a cra- like, I got the chill thing, yeah, that, cause like, you, I think television was also on a major label. It's like, you get the sense that like, this is not his first rodeo. And like, he wasn't thinking Jeff was gonna die. He's just thinking like, these labels own everything you ever put to tape.

• 3:24:18Speaker 02

  So it's literally what happened.

• 3:24:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so if you-

• 3:24:20Speaker 02

  Literally what happened.

• 3:24:21Yasi Salek?

  But even if you didn't die, they could have put it out. They own it. So if you don't delete it, they can put it out.

• 3:24:26Speaker 02

  That's harder, though, because when you're alive, if you, if you publicly say, I do not approve of the release of this.

• 3:24:31Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 3:24:32Speaker 02

  They, they would be way less likely to do it.

• 3:24:33Yasi Salek?

  A hundred percent, but, you know, so-

• 3:24:36Speaker 02

  Cause you need, when someone's alive, you need the promotional component there. That's like, he's technically under contract for a third album, you know?

• 3:24:42Yasi Salek?

  He had burned those.

• 3:24:43Speaker 02

  That's an interesting what if too. It's like, if he had burned them, but still passed away, and then you wouldn't even have this music, and then we would have just done this episode about grace. You wouldn't have talked about the law, you would have talked about how he and Tom Verlaine spent two weeks together holed up in Memphis, and then we would have glamorized that idea, but we would have never been able to measure against anything.

• 3:25:02Yasi Salek?

  We wish we could hear it. I still wish I could hear it. It's not this that I wish I could hear. I wish I could hear the final product, cause I do think there would have been something beautiful at the end.

• 3:25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe I-

• 3:25:12Yasi Salek?

  Might not be these songs, it might be-

• 3:25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, these, for me personally, these songs are not it.

• 3:25:16Yasi Salek?

  I just, I can't know if, until I hear them rearranged, until I hear maybe a strings, maybe whatever, I don't know. I don't know what they could have benefited from. All right, Buckley's like, I'm staying in Memphis. I'm, I rented a house near the Memphis Zoo. He has no furniture. All his Memphis friends just start bringing him like cutlery and dishes, and he sleeps on a foam egg carton. He just has a four-track recorder, a guitar, and a bunch of tapes. Doesn't cut the grass. I thought this was sweet. Joan Wasser would come down, and they would lay in the grass, and like, look up at the stars, and there was like, their body prints there. Berkowitz would come down, who's stressing Jeff out, cause he was like, every time he's here, he's like, where are the songs? He's like, I don't have songs.

• 3:25:55Yasi Salek?

  Finally, at the end of April, Jeff plays Berkowitz what he'd been working on, on this four-track, and it was Gunshine Glitter, Murder, Suicide, Meteor Slave, and Demon John. Berkowitz said, he was done, and he was a completely different person that week. The four tracks were the greatest stuff he ever did. He was on the verge of making a major record like Sergeant Pepper. I don't know how you hear that from those songs, but, okay. He's playing shows at a local club called Bearisters. In the middle of May, Andy Wallace, who was potentially gonna produce the album, flies down. Wallace is like, what are you looking for in the next record? And he says that Jeff told him he felt it should be a roadmap for people who were lost in love.

• 3:26:38Yasi Salek?

  That's where the kind of tagline of sketches from My Sweetheart the Drunk comes. Wallace said, I was expecting, though I probably shouldn't have a more finite description of what he wanted to do. I thought, oh, great, but it made sense in a way.

• 3:26:49Speaker 02

  Guy who is best known for mixing and engineering records is like, what's all this?

• 3:26:52Yasi Salek?

  Could I have a little more sonic direction? Okay, now we're gonna get into the sort of like the last week of his, last 10 days of his life. So, trigger warning, I guess. May 19th, my birthday. Jeff took an eight-hour bus ride down to Atlanta to see Joan Wasser perform with Mary Timoney of Helium. We love Mary Timoney on this podcast and we love Helium. He told Joan Wasser he wanted her to move to Memphis with him, too. It's the last time she ever sees him. May 22nd, a package arrives with tapes in New York, one for each member of the band, and I think for Berkowitz and management. They're labeled My Sweetheart the Drunk, Rough Demos for My Boys, and they're actually all different. They all have the same songs, but I think he like introduces them differently. I read this in one of the books.

• 3:27:35Yasi Salek?

  The band plans to fly down, May 29th, to finish the album. Like, okay, we have the songs. In the intervening week, this is when Jeff really starts to kind of amp up the erratic behavior from what I was reading. On May 26th, he plays a show at Barrister's, and there's a mega fan in the audience who ran an unofficial Jeff Buckley website. And she came up to him after the show, and she was like, you didn't play two of the songs I requested. And according to this fan, he screamed at her for about 10 minutes, stuff like, this is my private life. I'm not on TV. I'm a person. First of all, absolutely relatable, like, all respect to Club Chalamet over here, but like, that's so annoying. Like, why would you do that to this person? And his friend, Tammy Schuss, who is married to the guy from The Griffers, was like, he jumped down her throat pretty hardcore.

• 3:28:19Yasi Salek?

  Jeff felt like this was his sanctuary, and she had entered it, and it was off limits. I felt bad for her, but I felt bad for him, too. He wanted to make a point with her, and it was the best way he could do that. May 27th, 28th, this is where, like, you said this, I think, off mic, but nothing about the story of like, the last month or two of Jeff Buckley's life makes any sort of sense.

• 3:28:39Speaker 02

  Never added up to me.

• 3:28:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He starts calling pretty much everyone he's ever known. I mean,

• 3:28:46Speaker 02

  All hours of the day.

• 3:28:47Yasi Salek?

  At all, at 3 a.m. I'm being hyperbolic when saying everybody. It's a lot of people. It's like,

• 3:28:51Speaker 02

  There are many people who have testified to receiving phone calls and having mostly really nice conversations with Jeff Buckley.

• 3:28:57Yasi Salek?

  Beautiful conversations.

• 3:28:58Speaker 02

  But they all smack of like, was he, did he know something? What was he making a decision? What, or did he reach this moment of like, personal acceptance?

• 3:29:08Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's very strange. And it doesn't seem mythologized because there are many people have the same story.

• 3:29:15Yasi Salek?

  Okay. There is one alternate hypothesis I'd love to put forward. I don't think this, I just want to throw out. Mike Jody in his book, Surmise, that he thought maybe Jeff had gotten clean in the program before he went to Memphis.

• 3:29:29Speaker 02

  Entirely plausible.

• 3:29:31Yasi Salek?

  The idea of calling a bunch of people from your past.

• 3:29:34Speaker 02

  Reconciling, apologizing.

• 3:29:35Yasi Salek?

  Maybe you're step nining or step, I don't remember which, you know, like, I don't know if that's what, but it's, it's an alternate idea.

• 3:29:42Speaker 02

  It's possible, but not a single person has betrayed that that was what was happening in that time.

• 3:29:47Yasi Salek?

  You would think now 20 something years, someone was in the rooms with him would have said something.

• 3:29:51Speaker 02

  You're talking about like 10 people have been like, I got a weird phone call from Jeff. Like, many people have said this.

• 3:29:54Yasi Salek?

  More than 10. It was like, it was everyone. The old drummer, Daniela Satriel, who he lived with, Rebecca Moore, which was normal, Ron Moorhead. Ron Moorhead said, Jeff and I had a wonderful talk on the telephone a few days prior to the accident. He always reassured me that I was his dad and he was my son. Jeff was so happy. He told me he had stopped smoking and stopped eating meat. He was so excited about going in the studio. He felt his voice was the best it had ever been. Nothing in this world will ever take away the hurt in my heart, but the fact that I know my Scotty was so happy and full of joy softens my tears.

• 3:30:23Speaker 02

  It's a tough one.

• 3:30:25Yasi Salek?

  Hate it. Um, yeah, I don't know. Some of this stuff, like,

• 3:30:30Speaker 02

  It's almost too clean and also inexplicable.

• 3:30:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And some of it, it's like, I don't know why I'm afraid to say this. I just don't want to rub anyone the wrong way. And we don't know what happened, but like, You know, there's all, all these instances of people talk about people who take their own lives where like the prior time, like the week leading up, they're the most happy. And they're making plans and you know, and it's just like,

• 3:30:54Speaker 02

  They've come to a decision.

• 3:30:55Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if that's what happened. Obviously, no, none of us will ever know. And I'm not speculating that's what happened.

• 3:30:59Speaker 02

  I'm not suggesting it either. I'm not, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to communicate that something has always seemed strange about

• 3:31:05Yasi Salek?

  And just strange.

• 3:31:06Speaker 02

  The way that the final days of his life.

• 3:31:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:08Speaker 02

  On the verge of making a new record, having communicated about the anticipation of that experience with the producer and the band that he made the last record with.

• 3:31:16Yasi Salek?

  And communicating about the plans of wanting to buy this home in Memphis, buy a car, put down roots.

• 3:31:20Speaker 02

  He wasn't making phone calls and making amends. He was making phone calls and checking in and being like, how are you? I'm good.

• 3:31:26Yasi Salek?

  Yes, but also, but also making sure people knew that he loved them.

• 3:31:30Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 3:31:30Yasi Salek?

  Which is,

• 3:31:31Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 3:31:31Yasi Salek?

  You know,

• 3:31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:31:33Yasi Salek?

  That's also part of it, you know? Um, Eric Idle, he apologized.

• 3:31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that one is a little, is more of a red flag.

• 3:31:41Yasi Salek?

  Or maybe he didn't apologize, but he wanted to make sure he was okay after he was fired, you know? May 29th, he, he called Joan Wasser and she says that he had all these deep realizations about himself. He realized he had manic depressive tendencies, chemical things that mess with your head. She says as much in the documentary on HBO as well. He was so excited to tell me, Joan, guess what I realized? He didn't feel his burden. It was as if he had opened the door for good completely and could see everything, that everyone had certain tendencies to certain degrees and your chemistry has so much to do with your emotions and how you feel toward life. He was bubbling over with excitement over these realizations.

• 3:32:14Speaker 02

  She says something devastating in the film about how you don't realize when you're in your twenties, that there are a lot of things that are happening that will fall away. And that he never got a chance to see them fall away and feel them fall away.

• 3:32:26Yasi Salek?

  I'm surprised I didn't say this yet because I'm, you know, I'm an astrology bitch, but this is also Saturn return. There's a reason that so many people, I mean, that 27 club is like, it's every 28 years roughly is when Saturn goes around, but it depends on your chart. It can be anywhere from 27 to 30.

• 3:32:45Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:32:46Yasi Salek?

  A lot of people don't like, to her point, they don't realize that on the other side, that goes away, you know? But it's a, it's horrible, you know?

• 3:32:56Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so this is May 29th. He tries to buy a car that day. He opens a bank account at a local bank branch at a Piggly Wiggly, um, back at the house around 5:00 PM. So his tour manager, Gene Bowen.

• 3:33:08Speaker 02

  Again, these are weird things to be doing on a day when you may be making decisions like the, you're saying some people make, like I don't.

• 3:33:14Yasi Salek?

  I don't.

• 3:33:15Speaker 02

  Neither of those things make any sense.

• 3:33:16Yasi Salek?

  No sense.

• 3:33:16Speaker 02

  My point is, is that there's like 15 events in 10 days. None of them equal each other.

• 3:33:21Yasi Salek?

  I agree. It, it, none of, it's, nothing's adding up here. Um, but that's one thing, it's erratic is the only word for it.

• 3:33:27Speaker 02

  It's erratic.

• 3:33:28Yasi Salek?

  You're yelling at the fan. You want a car, but then when I say try to buy a car, he was trying to buy a beat up car that wasn't for sale. It wasn't even used. It was just not for sale.

• 3:33:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:33:37Yasi Salek?

  And then he's at the, he's wearing suits because he's like, I need to wear a suit to the bank.

• 3:33:42Yasi Salek?

  He tells Gene Bowen, his tour manager, would come down with Keith Foti, who was his helper. I need $9,000 to fix up this house. Just a random amount. And I want to buy it. He calls his accountant. I need $9,000. And the accountant's like, okay, that's weird, but it's gonna have to wait tomorrow morning. I need to get approval. Jeff misunderstood. He had Bowen taken back to the Piggly Wiggly bank to get the 9,000. And then finally Gene Bowen's like, I don't understand. And he calls the accountant. He's like, oh, there's no 9,000, but I'm gonna go. Keith Foti will pick you up. Keith Foti picks him up. They decide to go, they have some time to kill before the band gets there. And they're like, we're gonna go to the rehearsal space. Jeff wants to play drums. And Gene Bowen's like, okay, do you know where it is? And they're like, yeah, yeah.

• 3:34:23Yasi Salek?

  They do not know where it is. They completely get lost. They're like gonna call the house, but, but they know Gene Bowen's already gone to go pick up the band at the airport. There's no cell phones, right? I mean, it's nine, maybe there are, but these people don't have them. They call barristers. Maybe they know how to get there. No one answers. They go there. It's closed. And then according to Keith Foti, Jeff was like, are you hungry? Do you want to get ribs? And Keith Foti's like, I'm not hungry. And he's like, well, do you want to go down to the river? They go down to Wolf River.

• 3:34:51Yasi Salek?

  Wolf River is a, it's hard for me to understand. It's a river, but it had been kind of altered by the Army Corps of Engineers or something.

• 3:35:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:35:01Yasi Salek?

  It's not really that important, but it's something that didn't seem very deep and big, but actually was, was prone to a great deal of undertow.

• 3:35:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:35:13Yasi Salek?

  That I think is important to say. And his friend that he had made down in Memphis, who worked at the record store Andrea Liesel, she said that everyone knew in Memphis that you don't swim there.

• 3:35:25Speaker 02

  Yes, this was often uttered in the aftermath of his death.

• 3:35:29Yasi Salek?

  But he didn't know, yeah. And they brought down-

• 3:35:31Speaker 02

  I guess there was a lot of channel dredging in this space.

• 3:35:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And again, it's, it's the undertow. I don't know if you, have you ever been caught in an undertow?

• 3:35:37Speaker 02

  Certainly.

• 3:35:37Yasi Salek?

  It's the scariest thing in the entire world. So they go down to the Wolf River. They brought Foti's boombox, some tapes. Foti brought his acoustic guitar. And the next thing he knows, Jeff is in the water with all his clothes on, his boots, you know, backstroking while singing Led Zeppelin's Whole Lot of Love. It's nighttime also. It's like, it's like nearly 9:00 PM. It must've been dark. It's May. And Keith Foti's like, okay, that's weird, but all right. And then after about 15 minutes, he knows there's a tugboat coming by. And he's like, Jeff, like get out, you know, get out of the water, man. And he doesn't, but he like gets out of the way of the tugboat. And then another big boat starts coming the same way. He's like, man, get out of the fucking water. And he says he looks and Jeff had swum out of the path. And then it's getting dark, water's getting choppy, waves are coming.

• 3:36:21Yasi Salek?

  And Keith Foti's like, oh, I better grab my boombox because it's gonna get wet. And when he turns around, he can't see Jeff's head anymore. And he doesn't find him. And he calls Bowen and it's like hours have passed and he doesn't come back. And the cops call Mary Gibert and she flies in and so does Joan Wasser, Gary Stein, Steve Berkowitz, Dave Laurie. Apparently as soon as he was reported missing, which was that night, Dave Laurie ordered all his belongings, particularly the recordings gathered up.

• 3:36:52Yasi Salek?

  He was missing for nearly six days. I don't remember this, and maybe because it was 96, so I was in Singapore, but there was tons of news around that week. Do you remember this?

• 3:37:03Speaker 02

  I do.

• 3:37:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:04Speaker 02

  I don't remember following it closely because he was not a big artist to me at this time.

• 3:37:07Yasi Salek?

  But it was on the news, like singer Jeff Buckley missing.

• 3:37:10Speaker 02

  It's on MTV News.

• 3:37:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. On June 2nd, a passenger on the American Queen Riverboat spotted him on the riverbank on the slope of Beale Street. And Bowen identified the body. He had this gold belly button ring as part of the identification. And then two weeks later, the medical examiner declared that Jeff Buckley had tested negative for drugs and then his blood alcohol level was less than half that required for a person to be declared drunk. It was like one beer. The official cause of death was accidental drowning. One of the strangest, saddest, most tragic, horrible, but again.

• 3:37:42Speaker 02

  I still don't really understand.

• 3:37:43Yasi Salek?

  I don't understand either.

• 3:37:44Speaker 02

  I think it's obviously devastating. There was a part of me that has always felt relieved.

• 3:37:50Yasi Salek?

  That he wasn't intoxicated.

• 3:37:52Speaker 02

  That it wasn't some just like.

• 3:37:54Yasi Salek?

  There wasn't a letter.

• 3:37:55Speaker 02

  Alone in an abandoned house with a needle in his arm.

• 3:37:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:37:58Speaker 02

  And there was a lot of misinformation about this.

• 3:38:00Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, Rolling Stone very famously like wrote in their piece.

• 3:38:05Speaker 02

  Indicated that there was like an overdose or something.

• 3:38:08Yasi Salek?

  Yes, which was like so irresponsible.

• 3:38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but by the same token, we're on a podcast.

• 3:38:13Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 3:38:13Speaker 02

  30 years later, and we're like, what, what happened? Because I think that there's.

• 3:38:16Yasi Salek?

  But they had a position as a question. They were like.

• 3:38:18Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 3:38:19Yasi Salek?

  They even said something so fucked up where they were like, the medical examiner is the same one. God, I can't remember. It was like another person who had been falsely cleared of alcohol or drugs. And I was like, why would, like, why would you imply, you're implying.

• 3:38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think.

• 3:38:35Yasi Salek?

  We're simply asking questions.

• 3:38:36Speaker 02

  There's a desire to.

• 3:38:38Yasi Salek?

  Sensationalize.

• 3:38:39Speaker 02

  But make this fit what we understand.

• 3:38:41Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:38:42Speaker 02

  And.

• 3:38:42Yasi Salek?

  It doesn't. It isn't anyway.

• 3:38:43Speaker 02

  This lacks clarity. This whole thing lacks clarity. Also, it's an indescribably painful thing to have happened. And you also don't hear about people accidentally drowning in waters in which no one ever swims. Like.

• 3:38:55Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:38:56Speaker 02

  Is there an, I don't know if there's another.

• 3:38:58Yasi Salek?

  Natalie Wood?

• 3:39:00Speaker 02

  That is a very good comparison and that is a very mysterious.

• 3:39:03Yasi Salek?

  Mysterious, yeah.

• 3:39:04Speaker 02

  Often conspiracy theory.

• 3:39:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's like, but there's, there are even deeper layers to that one.

• 3:39:10Yasi Salek?

  Right, right, right.

• 3:39:10Speaker 02

  And there's a lot you can research there.

• 3:39:12Yasi Salek?

  The only thing I, I have is that, is to map my own experience, which is all we ever have, right? I remember a feeling of,

• 3:39:24Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna go lay in traffic. Like, I don't wanna die per se, but it's okay if I did. Do you know what it, like?

• 3:39:29Speaker 02

  I didn't feel that way in my twenties, though. Not my late twenties. He's thirty years old.

• 3:39:33Yasi Salek?

  Kind of like right around then. It was like that Saturn return time and it, it was this liminal space between like, I don't actively wanna die, but I'm okay if it happens, you know?

• 3:39:44Speaker 02

  I'm glad you didn't do that.

• 3:39:44Yasi Salek?

  I am too, very much so. And what an embarrassing way to die in a traffic, laying in traffic. Anyway, there's no point in this. There's no way any of us can know. All we could know is that this, these are the facts that happened and it, there's, to what end does the speculation bring us? He's not here.

• 3:40:00Speaker 02

  It gives us nothing. It's, I think it's just that, one, he's, he's, in the raw material text of his life, there's so much pain and desperation.

• 3:40:10Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:40:10Speaker 02

  In the songs, in the journals, in the way that he communicated with people.

• 3:40:13Yasi Salek?

  So much.

• 3:40:13Speaker 02

  But light, a lot of light.

• 3:40:15Yasi Salek?

  Light, like, live with delight, you know, like, he, there's, there's a journal entry that I, I'm gonna butcher, but it's something about how overwhelmed he is with the joy of being in this world, like how much he loved New York, like so much of that. So it's like, it's at odds.

• 3:40:30Speaker 02

  He just felt, he just clearly felt hard.

• 3:40:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, deeply.

• 3:40:33Speaker 02

  And, and so, yeah, that's a hard, it's a hard way to go through life, to feel that way.

• 3:40:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, did create an annoyingly perfect myth, you know, which I don't like this kind of myth, but.

• 3:40:42Speaker 02

  And I think it's been manicured over time.

• 3:40:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:44Speaker 02

  I find the release of sketches to be like.

• 3:40:47Yasi Salek?

  Motherf- like, we said it.

• 3:40:49Speaker 02

  Really weird and unfortunate.

• 3:40:50Yasi Salek?

  Me and all my homies, we hate sketches. For my sweetheart, the drunk. They gathered all the recordings and sat through them like pretty soon. Michael Tye said that he found it super weird and it was way too soon. Gary Stein, his other manager, maintains that it was all about, he said, tellingly, he said, in the beginning, it was all about protecting. It was never about exploitation. Parker Kindred told everyone explicitly, like Jeff wanted these tapes burned, like. Then Sony gave Andy Wallace a mastering date for August using the title and it was on the release schedule and everyone was like, what the? And then Mary Gibert resurfaced. She had not been around. She came back to hold Jeff's official memorial at August 1st at St. Anne's, which featured performances by Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, and Rebecca Moore. And so she gets lawyers and she halts the release.

• 3:41:35Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:41:36Yasi Salek?

  And she also gets Berkowitz, I think, removed from the project and replaced by another A and R. And when I first read this, I was like, yes. She was trying to, you know, but.

• 3:41:45Speaker 02

  Still comes out.

• 3:41:46Yasi Salek?

  She, she, she just sort of compromised on it.

• 3:41:50Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:41:51Yasi Salek?

  That it would include the demos as his four-track demos as well. So it has both. It's an abomination. It should not exist.

• 3:41:57Speaker 02

  I think you actually might like it more than I do. There's, I, I.

• 3:42:01Yasi Salek?

  I like opened ones. I can hear the potential.

• 3:42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:42:04Yasi Salek?

  I don't like.

• 3:42:06Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a similar thing. It's 20 tracks. It's a handful of covers. It's the raw materials of, you know, Everybody Here Wants You and The Sky Is A Landfill. The first two songs.

• 3:42:17Yasi Salek?

  What happened with Everybody Here Wants You? Why is it, it, it is 94 million streams. Something happened with it. It must have been a single or put out or put in a movie or something.

• 3:42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm not.

• 3:42:28Yasi Salek?

  It has a music video. Yeah. Maybe that's what they used to promote.

• 3:42:32Speaker 02

  Might have just been the single and then caught on TikTok or something.

• 3:42:35Yasi Salek?

  You heard of Blonde Girls' fucking bings. I mean, I don't think it's a Jeff Buckley song in, in any sense. Not even that he wrote it, but it doesn't even feel like he transformed it in his Jeff Buckley way. It just sounds like a cool alt-rock song. It was written by Audrey Clark and her sister Lori Kramer and, and Ingerlore wrote. Very interesting, actually, the lyrics that she wrote in the second verse are about Jeff.

• 3:42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just think that they don't quite have the.

• 3:42:59Yasi Salek?

  The gravitas.

• 3:43:00Speaker 02

  The weight and also the shine of the Grace recordings.

• 3:43:04Yasi Salek?

  Well, they are not produced properly or at all, if you've given one side or the other. They're not done.

• 3:43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:43:11Yasi Salek?

  Some of them would have been definitely cut away and thrown in the trash.

• 3:43:13Speaker 02

  You know, the, the song that I like the best on the album is. The cover of Satisfied Mind, which is performed on a radio station. And, you know, he's a great covers artist.

• 3:43:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:43:24Speaker 02

  And, but I, I mentioned this to you when we first started talking about doing this is the song from this kind of era of release. Because after he died, and then when this album comes out, we kind of slowly glide into the Napster era. And so a lot of the loose recordings from his career start to hit.

• 3:43:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:40Speaker 02

  Right? The one that I really loved was he calls into a radio show and he sings, I shall be released over the phone.

• 3:43:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He did that actually a lot with a New Jersey station as well. Is it something he did throughout his career?

• 3:43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so him calling into WFMU in Jersey is what, where the Satisfied Mind recordings are from. It might even be the same session.

• 3:44:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:01Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. I can't remember, but that I shall be released, which was like an unlabeled loose MP3.

• 3:44:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:07Speaker 02

  That was floating around. I was like, this is one of the greatest vocal performances you'll ever hear in your life. And he's just like, it's 10 PM on public radio and he's just sitting in his apartment.

• 3:44:24Speaker 02

  There's so much material like that from him in the world that this album feels like, almost like a rejection of that. Like he could just kind of stumble into genius.

• 3:44:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:32Speaker 02

  As well as be produced into genius. And this is neither of those things. This is like, they tried for something. It doesn't really work. He knows it didn't work.

• 3:44:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:40Speaker 02

  And they're still giving it to us and it feels wrong.

• 3:44:42Yasi Salek?

  It's wrong. And I said, immonstration, absolutely. It goes against God.

• 3:44:46Speaker 02

  We do get a bunch of live albums.

• 3:44:48Yasi Salek?

  Which are great. And I'm not going to go into them in detail, but they're, they're honestly all great. I love the mystery white boy one. I love the one in Seattle in particular. I quite, really, I quite like that one. They're all good. I mean, all, any live recording of his is amazing. Many people played tribute to him after his death. Bono, YouTube was on their Pop Mart tour and they would pay tribute at the end of shows. Bob Dylan named Jeff Buckley, one of the greatest songwriters of the decade. David Bowie named Grace, one of his 10 albums he would bring with him to a desert island and the Village Voice in 2010. Morrissey named Grace, one of his favorite albums. Many songs were written about him. Inger Lore said, Jeff was all about love. Everything came down to basically, love is the most powerful thing in the universe.

• 3:45:33Yasi Salek?

  Not turn the other cheek, but definitely love. Jeff was nobody's martyr and I don't think he would like people turning him into the tragic, young, beautiful thing. He would hate that. He was very humble. And then there's a bit in that BBC doc where they show footage of an old interview with him. And the interviewer is like, how do you want to be remembered? And he says, as a good friend, I don't really need to be remembered. I hope the music is remembered.

• 3:45:58Speaker 02

  I do think that's ultimately what has happened.

• 3:45:59Yasi Salek?

  He's pretty remembered too. I mean, you don't make a documentary about a person who's only their music is remembered. We didn't answer the question that we posed earlier, but I do think that like, had he not had an untidling death, we wouldn't have six documentaries about him. Leonard Cohen just got a documentary three years ago.

• 3:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he has a tragic death and a short life, so that's part of it. I, I think it's the songs ultimately, though. I really do. I think that the fact that Hallelujah became what it became, the fact that Lover You Should Have Come Over is hundreds of millions of streams. This is, it's a very different kind of memorialization. Cause there's not like a lot of salacious stuff. He didn't date any famous people. He didn't, he wasn't a tabloid figure.

• 3:46:44Yasi Salek?

  Elizabeth Frey, sure.

• 3:46:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, that's.

• 3:46:47Yasi Salek?

  It's not really salacious.

• 3:46:48Speaker 02

  In this shored down world of alternative music.

• 3:46:50Yasi Salek?

  Dorky loser like myself.

• 3:46:52Speaker 02

  In our universe for sure, but at large, like he doesn't. I would argue that Hallelujah is more famous than he is.

• 3:46:59Yasi Salek?

  I think so too.

• 3:47:00Speaker 02

  But you know, his, many, many, many people say they're influenced by him. You know, like there is no bony bear without Jeff Buckley. There is, there is no, you know, Adele frequently is like Jeff Buckley is my favorite. You know, Cat Power is always like Jeff Buckley, Jeff Buckley. Like the, these artists, like they all point to him in addition to Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney and Plan and Page and all the people he looked up to acknowledging his greatness. You know, Phoebe Bridgers, like all these characters.

• 3:47:26Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that he made it okay to be?

• 3:47:31Speaker 02

  Weird.

• 3:47:32Yasi Salek?

  Well, no, it was okay to be weird always. Sensitive, vulnerable.

• 3:47:35Speaker 02

  He's, he's one of the critical people who knocked that down for male artists.

• 3:47:39Yasi Salek?

  He like, yeah, he reimagined.

• 3:47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, is there a Coldplay without Jeff Buckley?

• 3:47:44Yasi Salek?

  I mean, literally no, Chris Martin said no.

• 3:47:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's definitely a question, a question worth asking. I think you were talking about Counting Crows. There was like a wave of artists at that time who were very sensitive male figures.

• 3:47:54Yasi Salek?

  But nobody, Counting Crows was a punchline. As much as we love them and they were commercially extremely successful, they were a punchline in culture. Jeff Buckley was held up as some sort of like-

• 3:48:02Speaker 02

  But Counting Crows did eventually become influential on emo kids, you know?

• 3:48:07Yasi Salek?

  Of course, but I'm saying Jeff Buckley from Jump was not considered embarrassing.

• 3:48:12Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 3:48:13Yasi Salek?

  You know, he was considered-

• 3:48:15Speaker 02

  He had the aura of a great artist. Yes, he did. He did. I think he's a critical figure. I think he's like one of the key people of the 1990s in popular music. And the tricky thing about that is, I don't say this to degrade Adam Duritz, for example, but like you could see an artist that is kind of like Adam Duritz coming along one day again and being like, "Oh, this kind of reminds me of Counting Crows." I don't see a person that is like Jeff Buckley. There's not, I mean, are there even male solo singers in the marketplace right now? Maybe I'm just being obtuse, like Ed Sheeran, you know, because it's not a common construction, you know? There's very few male solo pop stars with a rock origin-

• 3:48:56Yasi Salek?

  That's true.

• 3:48:57Speaker 02

  -who are popular.

• 3:48:59Yasi Salek?

  It's not a thing anymore.

• 3:49:00Speaker 02

  You know, like Harry Styles, maybe? I mean, Harry Styles is trying to look like Jeff Buckley.

• 3:49:05Yasi Salek?

  His music is not comparable. Yeah. Um, no, and I hope there will be one. Uh, you know, Cameron Winter. I know I ride really hard for Cameron Winter, but I genuinely feel that that Cameron Winter solo album is in this lineage. I think it-

• 3:49:21Speaker 02

  See, that to me is more Nielsen, that record. It's that like 70s piano guy thing.

• 3:49:27Yasi Salek?

  But, but I think I'm talking, and I guess you said Nielsen does too. I'm not as familiar with Nielsen, but like it's that communion with the otherworldly, the spiritual, the grasping for God.

• 3:49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get that.

• 3:49:37Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely. He does not have love and respect to Cami Winter. He does not have the vocal range of Jeff Buckley. He is not a singer.

• 3:49:44Speaker 02

  He's also just not that popular. He's really cool popular now, but I'm saying like-

• 3:49:49Yasi Salek?

  We don't live in a world where something like this would be that way. Jeff Buckley wasn't that popular. We just talked about it.

• 3:49:54Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 3:49:55Yasi Salek?

  This is our last goodbye. Sean, to-

• 3:49:58Speaker 02

  This is my last episode?

• 3:49:59Yasi Salek?

  It's just our last goodbye to this episode.

• 3:50:01Speaker 02

  What's left? What's left for me to do on this show?

• 3:50:04Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, Sean. Every artist on earth. Do you want to do Leonard Cohen?

• 3:50:07Speaker 02

  I don't feel expert enough.

• 3:50:09Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 3:50:10Speaker 02

  His catalog is so vast. I love his music.

• 3:50:12Yasi Salek?

  Should we do Nielsen Schmelsen?

• 3:50:14Speaker 02

  I would do, I could easily do that.

• 3:50:16Yasi Salek?

  Feels like he has a vast catalog, too.

• 3:50:17Speaker 02

  That'd be a lot of work for you. I wrote like 10,000 words about him 10 years ago.

• 3:50:21Yasi Salek?

  Oh, duh. I know what you're doing next. Beck.

• 3:50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:50:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:26Speaker 02

  That's a lot of work.

• 3:50:27Yasi Salek?

  It's okay. Do you think I'm scared of a lot of work? I made a 58-page Google Doc about a man who had one album.

• 3:50:34Yasi Salek?

  Thank you, Sean, for joining me on this beautiful podcast.

• 3:50:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:50:38Yasi Salek?

  We'll see you next time on Bandplain.

• 3:50:46Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guest today was Sean Fennessey. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderland and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production was by John Jones and video animation and graphics are by John Richter. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Delvac and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Christopher Ryan for letting us switch studios today, Sam Hunt, he knows why, and our editor Adrian's mother.

• 3:51:31Yasi Salek?

  Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 3:51:40Speaker 02

  I'm a tempting normal man. That's really my goal.

• 3:51:44Yasi Salek?

  You look like you could very safely valet park someone's car. And the trust is there.

• 3:51:54Speaker 02

  That's not what I'm going for.