Label: Columbia Records
I remember seeing Jeff Buckley in clubs ranging from the tiny Sine Cafe to the loungey Fez Bar where he introduced his band for the first time, from the hippie Wetlands to the Supper Club where he played with the Tindersticks. Each show was as unique and inspiring as the last. Jeff Buckley was a songwriter and performer who appears only once in the bluest moon. But like so many of the rarest, most talented musicians of the rock era, Buckley was denied the opportunity realize everything that he seemed destined to create. Unlike his father, folk-singer Tim Buckley who also died at aged 28 but had already released a large body of work, Jeff was a studio perfectionist who took longer to get started as a musician had just started his career.
Most will argue that neither Buckley nor his band members were even remotely satisfied with the tracks produced by Tom Verlaine for the scrapped album “My Sweetheart The Drunk.” But in the end, Buckley’s zealous fans just wanted to hear more Jeff Buckley. Understandable — I am one of those fans. What we are left with is a CD worth of Verlaine recordings, another filled with demos, and other unfinished “sketches.”
I don’t love this record, but I like it a bunch. In its defense, it has more to do with the brilliance of his prior work than it does with these twenty songs recovered from the vault. There is certainly nothing wrong with the always other-worldly vocals of Jeff Buckley, but what seems askew is the selection of songs. Much of what earned Buckley his stellar reputation was his lushly falsetto voice and his wonderfully creative renditions of modern classics. He could take a Nina Simone or Van Morrison song and craft it into a masterpiece of his own without ever having to hear the word “cover” associated with it.
There are moments of sublime vocalism on songs like “You & I” and “Vancouver,” and driving Zeppelinesque power and instrumentalism on songs like “Yard of Blonde Girls” and “New Year’s Prayer.” For many this record will seem sloppy and lacking the intensity usually associated with Jeff Buckley, but if allowed to gradually soak in, “Sketches” will become a collection worthy of the artist.
On “Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk,” the problem seems less the production direction of Tom Verlaine or the performance of Buckley and his band, but more the songs he was working with. To have spent as much time as I did absorbing the EP, LP and promo-only single that Columbia Records released in his short lifetime, it makes me sad to only have these unfinished masterpieces as the finale of such a promising future. But, alas, under the surface of a troubled project, the beauty and genius of one of our generation’s most important songwriters still shines. For many, Buckley has left us with what he best described as “eternal life.”
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I have to admit to being incredibly envious of Michael Chabon. At the age of twenty-four he was both motivated and talented enough to write and a find a publisher for the widely popular and critically esteemed “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” — a kind of post-collegiate “Catcher In The Rye” set in, you guessed it, Pittsburgh. Granted, like most first novels, it feels hugely autobiographical, Chabon uses his undergraduate experience at University of Pittsburgh and real post-graduation uncertainty as the backbone, the book is full of countless razor sharp observations about living in Pittsburgh during the early 90s. Although not exactly great writing, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” made it clear that Chabon was destined to deliver better and better fiction as he grew through his 20′s.
