by Alan Light
Ben Schafer, now an executive editor for Da Capo Press, was working as Allen Ginsberg’s assistant in the early 1990s. He went with the poet to a low-scale benefit for a food co-op in the East Village, at which one of the performers was Michael Portnoy, who would later rise to infamy as Bob Dylan’s Grammy stage crasher “Soy Bomb,” and whose routine that night consisted of shooting a carrot out of his ass.
Portnoy was followed by a young singer Schafer did not recognize, “with close-cropped hair and model-like good looks.” He started to stomp and clap, building a beat, and eventually broke into a cover of Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband.” An audience member began to hoot along with him, and Buckley thought that the guy was making fun of him. “In the middle of the song,” said Schafer, “he seethed in the man’s direction, ‘You don’t have to like it, but you don’t have to be a dick about it.’ ”
Buckley then played two more covers, “Lilac Wine,” another Simone song, and “Hallelujah,” which Schafer recognized from Cale’s I’m Your Fan version. “I was absolutely floored,” he said. “I felt my hair stand up, nearly shaking, breathless, couldn’t believe the vocals and the guitar playing. Bear in mind that I did not even know Buckley’s name at this point—I didn’t know he was Tim Buckley’s son, nothing. It remains perhaps the most single and pure musical experience of my life. I was actually spooked, in a way—it was that otherworldly.”
Ginsberg read a poem and invited Buckley to accompany him. “He was reacting to the lines with little musical hiccups and accents,” said Schafer. “He was listening intently to the words and letting them inform his improvised music. It was extraordinary, and it breaks my heart that this impromptu collaboration wasn’t recorded.”
After the show, Ginsberg and Schafer went to the much-beloved Kiev diner on Second Avenue, and ran into Buckley having dinner with Penny Arcade from Andy Warhol’s Factory, who had been the MC at the benefit. “Allen had a funny, sometimes inappropriate way of asking very direct questions,” said Schafer, “and he immediately lit into Jeff—‘That guy hooting during your first song wasn’t making fun of you. He was enjoying it, doing a call-and-response kind of thing. You seem very edgy. Are you on amphetamines?’ ”
Schafer felt that Buckley was already feeling the pressure, the sense that all eyes were on him. “Throughout the dinner,” Schafer recalls, “Jeff seemed distracted, nervous, edgy, like a guy with a lot on his mind. I felt like you needed to be careful with him.”
• • •
It didn’t take long for word to spread through the music industry about Jeff Buckley. Soon, every Monday night, limos and town cars blocked the traffic on St. Mark’s Place—at the time, still perhaps the global epicenter of cool—and tiny Sin-é was packed with label execs, journalists, and hangers-on. Everyone knew that something special was happening; critic Tom Moon wrote that Buckley’s voice was “kissed with equal helpings of angelic purity and demon lust . . . a singer forever in search of unattainable ecstasy,” and with his virtuosic, swooping tones and smoldering sexuality, Buckley and his eclectic musical sensibility became the subject of an intense bidding war among several record labels. In October 1992, Buckley signed with Columbia Records—the home of both Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.
As the time came to go into the studio, though, it wasn’t immediately evident what kind of album Buckley should record. “We were not certain what the album was supposed to be,” said producer Andy Wallace. “He didn’t have a band—he was the darling of the East Village as a solo performer. A lot of people thought the album should capture that, but I didn’t feel that way, and neither did Jeff. He wanted it to be a band record.”
The choice of Wallace was an indication of Buckley’s intention. The producer had worked almost exclusively with heavy rock bands; he’d helmed records by Slayer and White Zombie, and had mixed albums by Rage Against the Machine, the Cult, and, most notable of all, Nirvana—on their earth-shattering 1991 breakthrough, Nevermind.
In addition to continuing to write, so that he had enough material to actually make an album, the former metalhead Buckley also needed to settle on a band that could help make his rock dreams come true. Bassist Mick Grøndahl and drummer Matt Johnson were the eventual choices, with Gary Lucas on a couple of tracks and rhythm guitarist Michael Tighe joining later, for the record’s final sessions.
In the fall of 1993, the Buckley team went into the famed Bearsville Studios, located outside of Woodstock, New York. Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, had opened the rustic Bearsville facility in 1970, and it had been the site of work by such legends as the Band, the Rolling Stones, and R.E.M.
Though the band had been playing shows and rehearsing to get in shape for such ambitious, big-screen Buckley compositions as “Grace” (which would become the title track) and “Mojo Pin,” everyone also agreed that the album should retain some connection to the solo work that first attracted such attention. To allow for maximum spontaneity, Wallace had set up an “acoustic area” separate from the band placement in the studio, which was ready to go whenever Buckley felt the urge to wander over and play by himself.
“After dinner or whenever, Jeff would just come in and run through his set,” said the producer. “We tried to have some semblance of an audience, maybe six or twelve people around, so there was no temptation to stop, but just to play it all through. I wanted to record him as intimately as possible, so it felt like you were sitting two feet in front of him, which was the best place to see him in those tiny clubs.”
“We didn’t do ‘recording sessions,’ ” said Steve Berkowitz, who was the executive producer overseeing the making of the album that came to be called Grace. “Jeff played the songs, and they got recorded. We tried hard not to have a barrier, just let him play, just be in it. To give him an atmosphere, an immediacy—like Dylan or Miles Davis, just to make music. Andy can make himself invisible, so when Jeff would go over and start to play, he wouldn’t say anything, just, ‘Get the mic into position and let’s go.’
“The process was so developmental, no one knew what the record was going to be,” said Berkowitz. “There was such a deep well of possibilities to choose from, it was such a tough task for Jeff.” As the sessions continued to evolve, it was clear that Buckley needed to keep things going in the studio longer than planned. He left for a while to tour, returning for final sessions in early 1994, now with guitarist Tighe as part of the studio band. A four-song EP, recorded live at Sin-é, was released in December of 1993 as a stopgap to buy some more time.
Buckley continued to accumulate more and more material, but there was never any doubt that “Hallelujah” would be a leading contender for the final album. “There were a lot of these solo songs to sort through,” said Wallace, who didn’t know the song prior to his work with Buckley and had not heard the Cohen recording, “but there was never any question about this one going on the album, that it was something special. It had a magic to it, and that was there from the beginning.”
Buckley returned to the song again and again in the studio; by some accounts, he recorded more than twenty takes of “Hallelujah” over the course of the sessions. Wallace recalls one version that began with an extended minor-key introduction. The final recording is actually a composite created from multiple takes, though memories differ as to how extensive the patchwork actually is: The producer thinks it was “pretty much straight-ahead,” mostly one version with some fixes, while Berkowitz remembers a more elaborate process that stitched together a bunch of parts. “Even when we thought it was done, and we were doing the final mix, Jeff decided he needed to do one more overdub,” he said.
The variations and refinements weren’t dramatic; they represented Buckley searching for the subtleties and nuances he wanted, for a precise shading in the ultimate delivery of this song that he had come to inhabit so fully. A pause here, a breath there, a guitar fill—he was teasing out the slight changes that would express the feelings he was striving to communicate. “He didn’t rearrange the words,” said Berkowi
tz. “He simply Buckley-ized them.”
“By the time he recorded it, he’d sung the song a hundred times, maybe three hundred times,” said Flanagan. “He knew what he was going for; he knew what was in it. I think in a lot of ways it was the song he was struggling to write himself, and here he found that someone had written it for him.”
The nearly seven-minute-long recording of “Hallelujah” that appears on Grace opens, unforgettably, with the sound of Buckley exhaling, immediately establishing a romantic sense of drama and intimacy. (Berkowitz noted that the breath came from Buckley’s exhaustion after playing for several hours, not because he was just sitting down and starting cold.) He begins with a gentle, rolling introduction on his guitar that establishes a mood instantly, a riveting sense of focus and intensity; on the BBC, Guy Garvey noted that Buckley’s instrumental introduction “moves from sorrow and uncertainty into confident, joyful chords before he has even sung a word.” Sticking with Cale’s five-verse structure, Buckley’s guitar accompaniment slowed down Cale’s piano arpeggios and built a subtly propulsive arrangement that was tender yet powerful: A full decade after its initial recording, “Hallelujah” was finally given a melodic framework to match its masterful lyrics.
Buckley’s magnificent, soaring voice radically altered the feel of the song; he himself called the song “a hallelujah to the orgasm . . . an ode to life and love.” Where the older Cohen and Cale sang the words with a sense of experience and perseverance, of hard lessons won, this rising star delivered the lyrics with swooning emotion, both fragile and indomitable. By balancing this slightly melodramatic reading with the simple, stripped-down sound of a solo guitar, he also avoided having the whole thing become too over-wrought and risk collapsing under its own weight.
In Buckley’s hands, “Hallelujah” was transformed into a youthful vision of romantic agony and sexual triumph. (Buckley actually expressed some doubts about the emotional liberties taken by his rendition, saying that he hoped Cohen wouldn’t hear it.) In her book examining Grace as part of the 33⅓ series, in which each volume is dedicated to the consideration of a single rock album, Princeton professor Daphne Brooks called Buckley’s performance “gospel music with sex, desire, and love tangled together and representing the keys to existential revelation and resurrection.”
“When you hear the Jeff Buckley version,” said ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, “it’s so intimate it’s almost like you’re invading his personal space, or you’re listening to something that you weren’t supposed to hear.”
“It’s a hymn to being alive,” Buckley said in 1994. “It’s a hymn to love lost. To love. Even the pain of existence, which ties you to being human, should receive an amen—or a hallelujah.”
Glen Hansard—a lifelong Cohen fan, who remembers going to a Cohen concert when he was a teenager in Dublin—compares the two interpretations by way of a 1978 prose piece by Cohen titled “How to Speak Poetry.” Closely paraphrasing the original text, Hansard said that Cohen’s instruction was to “deliver the line and step aside. Don’t lift your shoulders when you say the word butterfly—you are a vessel that’s about delivering the words.”
“So Leonard’s version is typical of what he would do, but Jeff gave it wings, he lifted his chest. He gave us the version we hoped Leonard would emote, and he wasn’t afraid to sing it with absolute reverence. Jeff sang it back to Leonard as a love song to what he achieved, and in doing so, Jeff made it his own. Leonard penned it, but Jeff owned it.”
This interpretation came with a price, though. The dry humor of Cohen’s original was gone; there was no room for this sardonic maturity in such an earnest performance. (Seattle-based music writer Michael Barthel would later lament the “sad-sack miserabilism” of Buckley’s interpretation.) Buckley was exactly half Cohen’s age at the time they each recorded the song, at a stage where “all I ever learned from love” added up to a very different set of lessons.
“Jeff was a very unironic guy, and Leonard’s very ironic,” said Flanagan. “So Jeff may or may not have thought about the fact that some of the lines had been intended ironically, or with some humor, but it didn’t matter. Not when he did it. Jeff’s version was—I don’t want to say naïve, but it had an innocence to it.
“Leonard’s reading was kind of an old man looking back, but when Jeff did it, it was turned around,” he continued. “It was suddenly like a young man’s first discovery of the power of sex and the power of love, and the connection between sexuality and spirituality, which is David’s theme, isn’t it? That’s the theme of the Psalms. And so you have a song that really was transformed.”
Even if Buckley’s “Hallelujah” didn’t deliver all of the layers that Cohen’s words contained—maybe no one else’s rendition could—the passion and power of his performance are undeniable, irresistible. He polished the song to a perfect shape, in a way that allowed it to connect with a much different kind of listener than the cult of sophisticates who were devoted to Cohen’s less inviting sound.
“Jeff made more of a Fabergé egg out of the song,” said Janine Nichols. “It’s so focused and beautiful—nothing repeats, it’s so full of ideas, just an incontrovertible thing of beauty. . . . It’s like the song was lying there, waiting for someone to see what it could be.”
• • •
Jeff Buckley’s Grace album was released by Columbia Records in August 1994, amid a flurry of hype. The final song selection included seven songs written or cowritten by Buckley; three of his wide range of covers also made the cut, illustrating his sprawling tastes and influences. The album’s fourth track is Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine,” a staple of his live show. A version of Benjamin Britten’s “Corpus Christi Carol” comes near the record’s end. Right at the album’s center sits “Hallelujah,” the set’s longest track.
For all the high expectations, though, and the mystique it would later acquire, Grace was a flop; it didn’t make the Top 100 on the U.S. charts, and only one single, “Last Goodbye,” made any kind of dent on rock radio. (Buckley did, however, make the list of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People in 1995.) Like Leonard Cohen before him, Buckley made more of an impact overseas: Grace nicked the Top 50 of the charts in the UK and France.
Even within the limited attention that the album did receive, “Hallelujah” was far from being the focal point. Four songs were eventually released as singles from Grace (the title track, “Last Goodbye,” “So Real,” and “Eternal Life”); there was actually talk of releasing “Hallelujah” as yet another single, but by that time, sales had slowed to the point where Columbia decided instead to drop its promotional efforts. Feature stories and interviews with Buckley hardly mentioned the song, and its reception by the critics was mixed.
In Rolling Stone, Stephanie Zacharek wrote that “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.’ ” A year-end wrap-up in the New York Times offered a different perspective, though. Stephen Holden (who had covered the St. Ann’s show for the newspaper) wrote that the recording “may be the single most powerful performance of a Cohen song outside of Mr. Cohen’s own versions.”
Some reviews for Grace were downright negative: The influential “dean of American rock critics,” Robert Christgau, listed the album in his 1994 “Turkey Shoot” in the Village Voice, writing, “It’s wrong to peg him as the unwelcome ghost of his overwrought dad. Young Jeff is a syncretic asshole. . . . Let us pray the force of hype blows him all the way to Uranus.” But, despite its commercial failure, when the smoke cleared, Grace appeared on many critics’ lists of the year’s best albums in the U.S., the UK, and France.
More significantly, Jeff Buckley was celebrated by the rock and roll elite: Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Elvis Costello, and Eddie Vedder were among the stars who raved about the young singer. If he didn’t quite turn into the pop star he was supposed to be, Buckley was at least a top-shelf underground celebrity. And among young listeners, es
pecially those who were dreaming about making music themselves, “Hallelujah” was a song that was attracting some notice.
Almost a decade before her debut, Come Away with Me, sold ten million copies and won five Grammy Awards, Norah Jones stumbled across Grace as a high school student in Texas. “I went to the CD store, it was on display and it looked interesting,” she said. “But I remember thinking, ‘Is this a Christian album? It’s called Grace, it has songs called “Hallelujah” and “Corpus Christi Carol” on it—that’s not what I came here to buy.’ But I listened to a little and it sounded kind of cool. This was when it first came out, and nobody really knew about it—hey, does that make me cool?”
She soon discovered “Hallelujah,” and couldn’t stop listening to it; in 2012, it was her answer in the category “First Song That I Was Obsessed With” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It’s just stunning, it’s one of the most beautiful things ever recorded,” she said. “I believe every word he says. I had a boom box with a CD player and a repeat button, and I’d play it over and over. I’d fall asleep to it, but when he hits that high note, every time it would wake me up, so I’d wake up every four minutes.”
For Brandi Carlile, growing up in Washington State, the religious overtones of the song had a more specific resonance. “It was really the song from Grace that most jumped out,” she said, during a conversation in her Manhattan hotel room, a few hours before a sold-out show at Town Hall. “Somebody played that song for me and I fell head over heels in love with it. I was having really complicated faith struggles during that time. I just had an instant connection to it based on that.”
So there was the substance of the song, and for some listeners, that was the key. But there was also that indescribable essence that Buckley was trying to conjure in take after take during the sessions. The fans that reacted so strongly to this song were connecting directly with Jeff Buckley, to an intangible intimacy that certain recordings convey and a clarity that he seized on and never let go.