Fame is a buoy that raises you up and it’s a weight that brings you down. Jeff Buckley was beautiful to behold, a blast to be around, a singular talent. He seemed strong enough for fame. His core bubbled with energy, an excitement that sometimes overpowered him. Talking about his dad in the bar, he bent to his drink and gnawed on the glass with his teeth. Though he could wrangle his power, like when he made music, he seemed most at ease letting it pour forth: A rush of comic routines. Impulsive actions. His wardrobe. Swimming in the river.
The day after the rain, I saw a furniture rental truck unloading beds at his house; Jeff’s band was arriving.
A British magazine editor called the next morning asking me to confirm that Jeff had died of a drug overdose. “Let him work!” I said. “He wants to be alone.” The editor assured me that this news was based in fact, that someone at Microsoft News had—but I cut him off and told him to leave the guy alone. Ten minutes later a friend at Jeff’s label called to say reports were that Jeff had drowned, and what did I know about it?
My wife said if I’d been called about another of my neighbors having an accident, I’d have run to their door and knocked, made sure everything was okay. I did walk down to Jeff’s house and stood in front of it, dumbly—his house looked like his house—but I wasn’t about to disturb him with rumors of himself. An hour later, back home, I glanced out front and an image of his bandmates, their stooped backs, the shade of the magnolia tree, red Converse high-tops on asphalt—seared into my brain. Death. I’d never seen them before, but their dyed hair and disheveled look announced them as Jeff’s guests, and their dazed walk and stupefied manner instantly confirmed the worst. It rained for four days after that.
The first daylight hours passed as we waited for the phone to ring—for Jeff to tell us that a current had swept him away and deposited him, tired and delirious, in a forsaken corner of a cotton field and he’d walked for hours between rows to dirt paths to gravel and was finally calling from a gas station near a stupid Tunica casino, could someone please come pick him up right away and bring dry clothes, he was miserable. But that call didn’t come. His mother came, his girlfriend, an aunt, a lawyer, and some record company people.
When Jeff Buckley immersed himself in that inlet of the Mississippi River, he swam out on his back, looking at the stars, singing a Led Zeppelin song. A tugboat passed and left a wake. He swallowed unexpected water. The shadow was heavy. The refraction was blinding. His boots were full.
It’s said about Robert Johnson, the blues singer, that he lived a compartmentalized life. That to some he was Robert Dusty, to others Robert Spencer, and that his personae were as varied and as independent as the people to whom each was known. Jeff had a life in New York I knew little about, and his family was in California. But his absence broke down those partitions, and we survivors clung to each other in his house, surrounded by his belongings, waiting for our own different versions of the same person.
The tide of gossip rose in Jeff’s absence. He staged his death for publicity. Or for solitude. He was on drugs. Suicide. Black magic. Fame worship always conceals a mean-spirited envy, a rooting for the lions over the gladiator. And Memphis is a city that reveres obscurity, is especially hostile toward success.
On the fourth day, before his body floated up, his mother called his friends to his house for a wake. His beautiful photograph was propped on the table, along with a candle and maybe a flower. She wanted to celebrate her son’s life and she made a toast, reminding me how little we can each know of even the ones we call friend. She raised her glass, and we raised ours. Her words startled me: “To Scotty.”
His singing was magisterial, like a pipe organ, natural like the northern lights. Jeff’s voice made me want to build shrines—though now I see Jeff Buckley was the shrine to his voice. His sudden end has seeped into my memories of his passion and vitality, and I can’t separate the purity of his tone from the tragedy of his fate.
My second child is floating off to sleep in my arms. She has learned to crawl, is beginning to understand spatial relations. The puzzle that is everything she sees is beginning to have pieces and the pieces are beginning to fit. Her dreams have become more lifelike, and as she is momentarily disturbed into consciousness, her eyes open. She can’t tell the worlds apart, and since the dream feels so much nicer than the coldness of reality, she doesn’t fight the return. She drifts off.
BOBBY “BLUE” BLAND
Of all my interviews, this one contains my favorite exchange. Bobby Bland was all about presentation—in his music and in his person. Though he came from dusty rural Rosemark, Tennessee, he didn’t sing dirty gutbucket blues; he fronted a sophisticated big band. Raised in clothes made from sacks, he’d assumed a cosmopolitan flair as soon as he could afford to, and probably before; since his first recording in 1950, he was always debonair, usually finished with a nice cap and a pocket square. He bore no rural accent, his airs entirely urbane. You knew shoes were a rare blessing in his childhood, but to see him as an adult, you’d think he’d always had a personal tailor.
As much as I knew all this, I still blew the second interview with him. The first one, below, was held, per his request, in the Peabody, a distinguished southern hotel. The second was on video for “The Road to Memphis,” an episode of Martin Scorsese’s series The Blues. I thought it would be great to interview Bobby at a surviving juke joint that his original manager, Sunbeam Mitchell, had established. He arrived at Earnestine & Hazel’s with a scowl on his face. “We should be doing this at the Peabody,” he said. Bobby Bland didn’t connect with juke joints.
My favorite exchange? About the clothes and socks—it tells so much about the person. And it was the first cut Rolling Stone made. That was hard to let go of. I told myself that was exactly what was wrong with music magazines: They adhered too closely to music and not enough to the person and context. I hoped that one day I’d be able to present my own edit of the interview.
Love Throat
Rolling Stone, May 28, 1998
Bobby Bland’s people seat me in a quiet corner of the Mallards bar in the Peabody, “the South’s Grand Hotel.” They make sure I’m comfortable. The chairs are plush, the décor is subdued; businesspeople make deals here during the daytime, jazz cats play heavy tunes at night. My back is to the wall, the easier to observe Bobby’s arrival: An effective entrance demands the proper setup.
While waiting, I contemplate the country boy from Rosemark, Tennessee, who became the king of the blues ballad, Mr. Suave, the soft man, Bobby “Blue” Bland. Born about twenty miles from Memphis on January 27, 1930, he developed a cool, sophisticated, and smoky blues style. He prefers a bigger band and a classy joint over performing in a juke house, though he can handle both. A Duke Records artist for nearly two decades, his steady hits began in the late 1950s. He developed a trademark vocal sound, a kind of emphatic grunt—he calls it a “squall.” It’s a sound familiar both from the pulpit and from a bordello.
Since 1985, he has recorded for Malaco Records: nine albums, hits like “Members Only,” “Midnight Run,” and “She’s Puttin’ Something in My Food.” Midnight Run stayed on Billboard’s Top Black Albums chart for more than fifty-two weeks, earning a special achievement award. Eric Clapton covered his “Farther Up the Road,” the Grateful Dead covered his “Turn on Your Love Light.” Whitesnake and Tom Jones have sung his songs. In his autobiography, B. B. King says of his lifelong friend, “He’s my favorite singer.”
And then from among the patrons, Bobby “Blue” Bland emerges. He is a big man, and he looks sharp in his gray suit, black turtleneck shirt (to protect his vocal cords from the chill), and black Kangol hat. He has long, manicured fingernails and what writer Peter Guralnick has described as “sad, liquid eyes.” When he wipes his face with the gray hand towel he carries, his wrist flashes a gold watch with diamonds inset.
ROBERT GORDON: Is it true that you got your start as B. B. King’s valet?
BOBBY “BLUE” BLAND: He had been a good friend of mine f
rom day one in Memphis, before his first record came out. I idolized him, and I still do. And I said, B, Why don’t you let me help you with your stuff—to drive or whatever. So he’d take me with him to small towns near Memphis if I didn’t have anything to do, which was all the time.
RG: How did y’all meet?
BBB: My mother had a restaurant down near Beale Street, the Sterling Grill. And B used to eat there. All the musicians coming through would stop at Mrs. Bland’s place. And we were on amateur nights together on Beale Street.
RG: Tell me about these amateur nights.
BBB: I won so often there they had to keep me off for a while. I knew all the new tunes because my mother had a jukebox in the place and I’d get everything first. First place was five dollars. Two-fifty second.
RG: What was the third-place prize?
BBB: I didn’t have to find out.
RG: What was the first music you heard?
BBB: Spirituals, actually. It was church all the time for me. Church every day of the week, and Thursday night there’d be a prayer meeting in somebody’s home. Sundays was church—all day.
RG: Did your religious background create any conflicts for you about singing the blues?
BBB: No, I talked that over with my mother when I first started getting into blues. She is very religious. I found the flavor of blues was so close to spirituals, and I always used “Oh Lord” in everything that I would record. If you have it in your heart, then the blues and the spirituals serve the same purpose.
RG: How did you get exposed to the blues?
BBB: We lived out in the country until I was about fifteen. This fellow named Mutt Piggee was a friend of my parents, and summer months he’d be drinking on the porch and he’d start to sing and play acoustic guitar. I was about eight years of age. He sang Blind Lemon Jefferson and Big Boy Crudup, Walter Davis, and Big Joe Williams.
There was no black music on the radio in Rosemark, Tennessee. I grew up on country and western: Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You.” Hank Williams had the most understanding stories. He wrote things pertaining to love life and life itself. I loved Red Foley doing the hymns. That’s the kind of stories that I come up around.
RG: Did you hear field hollers in the country?
BBB: Yeah, I did it myself. That’s to make the time pass, to keep your mind off what you were doing that you didn’t want to do. I didn’t like to pick cotton or chop cotton, it was just too hot in the field for me. I used to sing on the grocery store porch out in Rosemark, Friday and Saturday. I had my Jew’s harp and I had my tin can and I’d have it full before I’d leave. So I gathered that there was profit to be had if I could do it on a bigger scale. And my mother said, ‘No, I’m not going to keep you out here, we’re going to Memphis.’ And that’s why I got a chance.
RG: When did you get comfortable with a style of your own?
BBB: I had told B. B., “I can do everything you ever recorded,” and he said, “Good, Bob, I love that, but you got to get some identification of your own.” The ball just started rolling in 1957 with “Farther Up the Road,” “I’ll Take Care of You” in 1959, and then “Turn on Your Love Light” [1961] crossed over from the chitlin circuit. It got, if I can say, the white people to listen.
My approach is different from the average blues singer. I tried to do as well as I could with the diction. I studied Nat King Cole from front to back to upgrade my speaking ability and singing qualities. I’m not saying that it’s perfect now, but it’s a long way from Rosemark.
RG: Your speaking voice has the same exciting timbre as your singing voice.
BBB: Well that comes from your parents and God. You’re born with it.
RG: Was there anyone you knew in the country who you thought was suave?
BBB: The first clothes that I got attached to was my uncle’s, we called him Dude. He was a sharp dresser. He’d come down from Chicago and I’d see the threads he’d have on. He was wearing those shirts that buttoned diagonally across your chest, and I thought that was so sharp.
RG: Do black shoes go with black socks?
BBB: Sure, only.
RG: Only?
BBB: Only. My colors were gray, black, blue—and brown maybe. And when you wear brown, you wear brown with brown. Some people can wear black with brown, but I wouldn’t feel right.
RG: What’s the deal with that sound you make? And what do you call it?
BBB: It’s been called several things. In England, they described it as “a love throat” and I can live with that. I got the idea from Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. I played a sermon that he had, “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” over and over and over. They build bigger cages for the eagle as it gets bigger, but when her wings hit the cage, they have to turn her loose, and that’s when Reverend Franklin would do the squall. I had to work with that a long time before I got it to perfection.
RG: Earlier you mentioned the chitlin circuit—
BBB: All-black circuit. Racism was out there. Period. From day one and it’s always been there. It’s a thing you have to learn to live with, because The System has a certain way to project things to you, and it’s left up to you to understand that. They made the blues seem as if it was only for black people. But they never listen at how much blues they have in a country and western song.
RG: Have you ever wanted to fight The System?
BBB: That thought may have come across my mind, but why cut off your nose to spite your face? Things have been this way since day one. You’ve got people out there who like that particular fight. Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, they are trying to get things better for everybody, black and white. So I’m going to let people do what they know best. If I can help, do a benefit, sure.
RG: How do your shows now differ from a show you might have done on the chitlin circuit?
BBB: My shows are not any different. I talked to B about it. I said, I’m kind of nervous about a white audience. He said, Did they book you here on what you’ve done? I said, Yeah. Well then you sing what you know to sing, don’t do anything different. You wouldn’t be there if they didn’t understand you. And that helped me in Japan too. A little Japanese boy came to the back door while we were going into the auditorium and he had an armful of my LPs and he wanted them autographed. I saw this and wondered if he really understood? He said, “I got the brues,” he couldn’t say blues. “I got the brues.” That left the door open for me.
RG: What sort of rooms are you playing now?
BBB: I do clubs and auditoriums, and my audience is mixed, which I’m very happy about. It’s a good feeling to look out across the house and think about what you came up with and how it is now. It’s a big difference. But I’ve cut down on touring. I had a triple bypass in 1995, so I’m only out like twenty-five, thirty weeks. I was on the road from 1955 constantly, way into the 1970s.
RG: Would you rather play to an audience that’s dancing or listening?
BBB: Listening, man! Because I have something to say. Dancing, that’s for people spinning records.
RG: What did it mean to you being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
BBB: I enjoyed it, but I thought it should have been labeled as rhythm and blues, not rock and roll. But I was happy that it happened in my lifetime. These things usually happen after you’re gone. “Rock and Roll” Hall of Fame, that’s The System again, whatever label they have.
RG: Why do you think the blues survives?
BBB: Because it’s true. It’s something that everybody goes through one time or another. The blues is just life, disappointments, mishaps. After everything we’ve been through, the plantation when we couldn’t do anything about it, we had to make the day pass. That was The System [he raps his knuckles on the tabletop]. So you just kind of roll with the punches. I learn from mistakes and then I learn about life. That’s why I sing about life period. Love and life.
TAV FALCO
Tav looked at me and said, “Our show was great. We clea
red the room.” A pal of mine was at the smallish San Francisco club where Tav was playing, said that the anticipation prior was palpable. My guess is the audience thought they were seeing a revivalist, a rockabilly band from Memphis, the real thing playing the real thing. They didn’t know how right they were, but not like they expected.
Tav Falco’s Unapproachable Panther Burns are an art action wrapped in a juke joint bundled in an enigma. Witnessing the Panther Burns is always a surprise—from the personnel to the set list to the range of styles. Besides funked-up versions of R. L. Burnside’s one- and two-chord blues drones and keening takes on early rockabilly, tangos are in their DNA and sambas are a recent addition.
Tav came to music in a physical way. “It was the feeling and aesthetic that mattered, more than musicianship or virtuosity,” he told me. “I didn’t feel hindered by my lack of conventional guitar knowledge. I just went into it full tilt.” An admirer of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, he brings a strong sense of drama to his stage. You know how blues players can play out of tune and keep their own sense of time? Tav applied the aesthetic to a band, and it worked even when it didn’t work. His early shows were prolonged unhinged explosions, caterwauling spectacles, forces to yield to. Later, through skills learned over time, the band could lock into a groove and hold a dance floor with a hypnotic Mississippi riff, sending feet, hips, and arms all akimbo. But their hold on the groove was tenuous; the next beat was not assured. A Panther Burns gig was like that bad starter that sometimes cranks the old car—inexplicable and unreliable. It was not the neat and tidy act that San Francisco anticipated.
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