Okay, I'm almost
not sorry about this one. We like historic dates here, don't we?
Today is exactly 20 years since Jeff Buckley's legendary performance at Glastonbury, on the 24th of June, 1995.
I lied before, when I said he looked dreadful during this concert. He didn't.
So... I promised I was going to give a good, *~*scientific*~* explaination of what it is I actually find so fascinating about this bloke. This post will hopefully be more along the lines of what I actually wanted to write on the last page, when I ended up just posting a timeline of his hair-styles instead. You know, a closer look at the becoming of a fan-girl (or -boy), while the process is still happening. Because I
promise that it's not the way he looked that got me interested. There are lots of good-looking singers and actors that I have no interest in what so ever. Neither is it the fact that he's dead, or even the combination of dead and cute, although that undeniably adds a touch of mystery. We'll never know how his life and his career would have turned out, what his songs would have sounded like, and what sort of guy he would have matured into, 20 years down the line. He's a memory, who exists at a certain point in the past, and will never change from that. But that's true of many people I still have no interest in.
Oh, would you look at that... I had more pictures of him. Well, scientific articles need a bit of illustration.
I think that maybe, for me personally, a part of the appealing mystery is that I
don't remember him from that periode. He was at the height of his career at the time when I was most obsessively into music, read all sorts of magazines, and watched any and all feature on musicians that was broadcast on our sad Norwegian TV-stations. I remember Beck, Meredith Brooks and Fools' Garden. I even remember
The Presidents of the USA (Whoa, annoying!), but I have no recollection of Jeff Buckley, what so ever. Apparently he was this huge phenomenon all over Europe, and kept coming back to play concerts, and yet I managed to blissfully ignore him. I'm pretty sure that if I had indeed come across him at the time, the shallow teenager that I was would have
remembered someone who was that handsome and cool, and who played what I back then would have thought was the
worst music I had ever heard.
The combination would have struck me as hilarious.
I'm starting to like his music, actually, so maybe I can stop feeling shallow soon. (Except
Eternal Life, which is an ugly song no matter how he performed it.) Honestly, I liked the song
Grace the first time I heard it.
So basically, Jeff strikes me as this huge, missing piece of a place in time I actually remember very well. I keep getting lots of dejá-vus when I look at the concert footage and the documentary material I've found. Everything else makes a lot of sense, from what people are wearing, to the stuff they keep mentioning as being "mainstream". It's just the actual guy who seems to suddenly have appeared in the timeline. (No, not going into "Mandela"-territory here.
)
From watching and reading interviews, I've also gotten a sort-of impression of what Jeff was like. As I've mentioned before, he was
incredibly complex. There was "So many sides to him, he was almost round", someone said somewhere. His personality was probably as important to his (relative) success as his actual music. People keep mentioning that it was surprising that he could get away with a lot of the things he did - the jazz, the occasionally weird clothes, and covers of super-uncool things like Leonard Cohen and Edith Piaf. He was no doubt extremely talented and versatile as a performer, but he was also clever and hilariously funny. People liked him because he struck them as very cool despite it all. From the things he's recorded saying, I keep getting the impression that this was a guy who was really quite intelligent. I'm actually very impressed with the way he had with words. (It also made me pretty sad to read the transcript from his last show in NY, when he was stoned out of his head and barely coherent, because he was so much better than that.)
Remember when everyone wore lumberjack shirts and biker-boots?
Oh, and Jeff Buckley was
crazy. I'm not talking about his drug-benders (which seem to have been a periodic thing), or the fact that he may have had Bipolar Disorder. He was simply loopy by nature. Like this.
Now, the thing is... WM kinda
likes crazy. Heck, everyone who knows me knows that I
am crazy, myself. You know that feeling, when you find out that someone exists who has a similar brand of crazy as yourself, except they seem to have about 5 to 10 times the amount of it?
Yeah. So while other fans relate to JB because he was all deep and sensitive, and stuff, WinterMoon relates to the fact that he was sometimes two sandwiches short of a picnic. There's an interview (possibly two) where he talks about the kind of dreams he had, especially the nightmares. It was a really creepy read, because he described them so vividly, and they sounded sooo much like dreams I've had myself. And I don't know
anyone in real life - or on the internet for that matter - who has the sort of dreams I have, sometimes. I was really happy to discover that there was indeed someone, who's generally regarded as a kind and gentle soul, whose subconsciousness could dream up similar insanities.
I'm obviously still pinching only good photos from Tumblr.
So, are we any closer to an enlightening conclusion, yet? I think it's obviously his personality that intrigues me, more than his musical expression. Then again, his music
is part of his person, and though we should ideally like artists only for their art, art can't be fully separated from the mind it was born in. I've actually stopped listning to a couple of musicians I used to like, because they said or did things I thought were so ethically questionable that the knowledge of it sort of polluted their music. Honestly, I like the way Jeff sings. I like his actual voice, it's gorgeous! It's the arrangement of many of his songs I have a hard time getting used to. This is probably the first time I've actually taken time to get used to music I didn't like right away. I'm kind of proud of myself, because this might mean that I'm getting more mature, instead of just going "Ew. Awful!" and turn it off, like I've always done in the past.
Still, I think the thing that fascinates me the most is how complicated and contradictory he was. Most people do have pretty wide emotional ranges, but Jeff seems to have lacked a few of the filters that's usually in effect for most of us, so he showed it off a lot more. He could make the audience laugh by doing an impersonation of someone, and then he'd make them (and occasionally himself) cry by singing a heart-breaking ballade. People who knew him said he was generally very good at manipulating people's emotions, and that he wasn't necessarily consciously aware that he was doing it. And yes, I can see that! What he was doing with his music, is basically the exact same thing I'm trying hard to do with my story-writing, which is to manipulate the audience's emotions, and take them on a roller-coaster. (I've gotten feedback from people who have read my stuff that I've made them ROFL, but so far I haven't managed to make anyone cry.) So yeah, in a sense, I do relate to him on an artistic level.
To round off, I just want to say that I do recognize there was a dark side to him. I've seen a lot of people on the net describe him as an angel, too good for this cruel world, and things like that. His frienemy,
who wrote a book about him (I haven't read it), said he was "both angelic and demonic." I definitely don't think that he comes across as an "angel." To me he comes off as
very human, if anything. On the other side, I think maybe describing him as a demon is a bit over the top. Fair enough, this guy knew him, but I still think that for someone to be "demonic" they would have to do something actually terrible, something far worse than anything Jeff Buckley ever pulled. I watch a lot of crime-drama, that's my reference point.
And with that, the Buckley-essay is complete.
For now...