Jeff Buckley Interview Excerpts (or something like that)

Ninakaw ko lang to kasi interesting:


1.

JB:

G.I.T. was started by Howard Roberts, the guy who played the wah-wah guitar on the theme to Shaft. And this other guy named Pat Hayes. I don't know. It just seemed like a racket, really. John said a lot of things to me that stuck in my mind. He said that there was nobody who stopped you, sat you in a room and said, okay, we have all these artists that you're learning the licks from, you have your guitar heroes, your virtuoso lust objects. But there's nobody who can make the kind of music you can make now except for you. And you can make it now. You don't even have to know how to go fast. And that makes all the sense to me in the world. It's also kind of an unseen process, that concept, originality. It's like that in all the education systems; there's never any real...identity education, self-generative identity art sort of thing, to be yourself. If everybody in Melbourne had a Wurlitzer organ and had the passion to sing something or make something, you'd have hundreds of thousands of different styles, if they were coming exactly from only their DNA, only their makeup, and their emotional percepts, their idea about what art is. You could have way-removed genres from what is already accepted, avante garde country-rock-punk-folk-whatever. It's unlimited. But for some reason, the conventions always take over and there's a very ready and powerful formula to step into...



2.

JB:

That's what CDs are for, though. They're for you to get acquainted with a personality, or to scoff at it or spit on it. Sooner or later, a song will mean something to you. He's taking it as a package, as we all do as consumers. But music, songs find meaning elsewhere. They're sort of like picnic flies ; they buzz in and take your shit.
That's funny. God only knows what he thought of the packaging of Grace. "Hi, I'm Jeff Buckley, I'm a syncretic wanker."



3.

JB:

Exactly. I don't recognize that sensibility at all. I don't recognize anything that doesn't recognize a bloom. You were talking about Anne Sexton and her rhythm. The thing missing from your written poetry is [points to his chest] this, the body that gives it meaning and shoots it out into the air. Poetry comes from the people who make it; the books are just books, blueprints. Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, all dark, all romantic. When I say "romantic," I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn't know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song.
And there's that pretentious label we were talking about before. People say, "Why dress it up? It needs to be a song. Why all this froo-froo stuff?" Well, why art? Why painting? Why sculpture? It seems as if the world has done away with art altogether, any concern or any relationship with it. So many easy things seem to be over the public's head. But really, if they just came at it a certain way, it would hit them right in the guts; it's so easy.
Smith's and Dylan's and Cohen's power lies in their ability to tell that story so well, and all the stuff on Blonde on Blonde and on [Smith's] Horses and Radio Ethiopia and [Cohen's] Songs From a Room, even Death of a Ladies' Man, which is a sleazy-ass album; it's a real jewel, for someone to be able to sing that, to say that. Dylan had no ornamentation whatsoever. He had pure feel and pure language coming out of him, and that did all the work. He had such affectation! [starts imitating Dylan singing "Visions of Johanna"]



4.

JB:

There's nothing wrong, in my mind, with criticism. But there's something sinister about critics who are outside the process ferociously trying to legitimatize an art form into their sensibility. Can you imagine living in that kind of world? You would listen to a shitload of Billie Holiday, Satchmo, Fats Waller. You'd concentrate on the 30's, 40's and 50's, and then you'd write about PJ Harvey because she's sexy and she reminds you of Howlin' Wolf. I like a lot of their tastes. It's just that the way they speak about music obviously illustrates some real sour soul.