Gary Lucas's "Touched By Grace: My Time With Jeff Buckley"

As someone who spends way too much of his (limited) free time reading books about music and the music industry, Gary Lucas’s “Touched By Grace: My Time With Jeff Buckley” was a no-brainer. As a friend and fan of Gary Lucas and an admirer of Jeff Buckley’s considerable talents and his too limited output due to his all too brief time on Earth, I figured this would be a welcome addition to my growing library of rock and roll reads. What I didn’t know beforehand was once I started reading it I could not put it down; I think I tore through it in something like three days. Had I not had other things to do, like go to a job, for example, or sleep, I can see myself having read it all in one sitting. It is that engrossing. Lucas’s words flow with the same eloquence, passion, and lyricism of his extraordinary (and very underappreciated) guitar playing, and the vicissitudes of the story mirror his career as an artist. Several famous and noteworthy musicians make appearances and are referenced throughout the book (including my uncle Maestro John Mauceri, who Lucas namechecks early on when writing about his “first major professional experience” as a member of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, for which he was featured solo guitarist when they performed the European premier of Leonard Bernstain’s “Mass,” and received high praise from Lenny himself!). He leaves it all there on the page, and we readers are the beneficiaries of his tale of the  sparks that ignited, and subsequently imploded, one of the great but unfulfilled musical collaborations of the late 20^th century.

The joining of forces of these two formidable, but ultimately incompatible talents – due to the typical power struggles and ego trips that seem to go with pursuing a music career, rather than creative differences – is a tragedy of near Shakespearian proportions. Being the astute and erudite musician Gary Lucas is, he of course knew Tim Buckley’s music well at the time of his fateful encounter with Tim’s estranged son Jeff in preparation for a tribute concert for the elder Buckley in Brooklyn, NY, and he was quick to pick up on the younger Buckley’s obvious talent and potential. Lucas himself had only fairly recently at the time thrown caution to the wind and decided to follow his true calling as a professional musician (at age 35), giving up a secure but soul-destroying career in the music industry itself as an ad copyist for CBS Records (he coined the slogan “The Only Band That Matters” for The Clash). As a solo guitarist, he helped put famed NYC avant-garde institution The Knitting Factory on the map with his concerts there and as part of their tour packages throughout Europe. Prior to this however, he had himself arrived on the musical map as a member of the last incarnation of musical innovator Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, joining as a full-fledged member for their last official album release Ice Cream for Crow. Unsurprisingly, Beefheart’s challenging and uncategorizable brand of blues-poetry-polyrhythmic-psychedelic-freak rock was not destined for any commercial success (the fact that a major label actually signed them seems miraculous given the state of the music industry in recent years; today a major label wouldn’t give an artist like Beefheart the time of day, let alone an actual deal).

Being the astute and erudite musician Jeff Buckley was (despite his GIT background and apparent ability to duplicate Rush guitar solos note-for-note), he was well aware of Lucas’s Beefheart credentials, which commanded instant respect in the young musician, and the two started hanging out and writing together in Lucas’s West Village apartment after performing together at the Tim Buckley tribute concert, with Lucas taking on a mentor-like role to the budding rock star. Lucas had his own band, Gods and Monsters, which had a revolving cast (including alt rocker Matthew Sweet) and Buckley eventually became the de facto lead singer. Lucas’s vision was for Jeff and he to become the modern equivalent of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, and he cites the almighty Zeppelin as a primary influence on his band, showing that his and Buckley’s musical tastes, as refined and protean as they were, were not above artists who had achieved massive commercial success.

This is basically the setup for the ensuing drama of Lucas’s and Buckley’s creative/professional relationship. We all know what eventually happened to Jeff Buckley but this book details what has to be considered a key and pivotal partnership in his brief career. Case in point: the very first two tracks on the one and only official Jeff Buckley album, Grace – “Mojo Pin” and “Grace” – were co-written with Lucas and were staples in Gods and Monsters’ set during Buckley’s tenure in the band. Lucas describes in striking, intimate detail the head and soul space he was in when he came up with the music for these two groundbreaking compositions, offering us a rare glimpse into the mysteries of the creative process. I remember several years ago when I interviewed Gary for the newsletter of the company I worked at (The Harry Fox Agency), he described these two compositions as “templates for a new kind of pop song.” Early on in “Touched By Grace,” he references “Strawberry Fields Forever” as emblematic of what his ultimate vision was for his band: taking pop music into new directions while still maintaining its accessibilty.

But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be, as Jeff Buckley wanted ultimately to be a solo artist and not to have to share the spotlight with anyone. Whether or not he intentionally used Lucas as a stepping stone to further his own career remains conjecture, though it seems highly plausible given how events unfolded in this story. He seems to have had an innate ability to manipulate people to do his bidding, especially a major record label, which ended up giving him a deal that most artists would kill for, allowing him all kinds of creative freedom and, especially, plenty of time to figure out his artistic vision. Clearly the surname “Buckley” came with perks, not to mention also being handsome, charming, and charismatic. Lucas relates one particular incident involving two other more established Gods and Monsters members that I found particularly shocking (and about which I will not write anything further so as not to spoil any more than I already have).

Jeff Buckley was also most likely influenced by the industry contacts he and Lucas shared as a result of their affiliation, some of whom in all likelihood convinced him to break away from Lucas and go solo. While this may be understandable on one level, at the same time it seems unfair and ungrateful and it is hard not to sympathize with Lucas over his disappointment and heartbreak when Jeff quits Gods and Monsters right at the time they seem poised on the verge of breaking.

It is clear after reading the book that Jeff Buckley was filled with a host of contradictions. For starters, he wanted to completely dissassociate himself from his father’s legacy, understandable given he hardly knew him, but then he chose music as a career. And even a perfunctory listen of Tim Buckley reveals that Jeff Buckley’s vocal stylings were clearly heavily influenced by his father. He also wanted to maintain a certain hipster/alternative cred yet ended up signing a recording contract with the biggest record company in the world: Sony. He wanted to be his own solo artist yet had to rely on the songwriting of others to have a full length album (of the ten tracks on Grace, only three are solely credited to Jeff Buckley, four are co-writes, and three are covers). As he was working on his follow up to Grace, we learn in the book that Buckley had a dearth of new material and asked Lucas for more songs. We also learn that towards the end of his life he had apparently been more than dabbling in that cliche of maladjusted rock star recreations: heroin.

All this is not in any way to undermine the extraordinary talent that was Jeff Buckley or lessen the fact that his tragic early demise was indeed a huge loss to the music world. Nor does Lucas begrudge Buckley his immense talent at any point in his book; he acknowledges him as one of, if not the, most important of all his collaborators (a huge statement considering how many he has had in his career). Lucas paints a portrait of a talented but terribly confused, malcontented young man who ends up in a situation in which he finds he has very little control. It is sad and heartbreaking to read about how unhappy Jeff Buckly was toward the end of his life. It’s a shame he couldn’t embody the lyrics of one of his better known covers: “Satisfied Mind,” by Joe “Red” Hayes and Jack Rhodes. It has even been suggested that his accidental drowning in the Missisippi River was in fact a suicide, but such speculation seems to ony serve the whole myth and legend making aspect of his tragically short life. Who knows though? (As a side note, in the leader of the band Soul Coughing Mike Doughty’s funny and poignant memoir “The Book of Drugs,” about his days wallowing in the throes of drug addiction and subsequent recovery, he comments on Jeff Buckley’s premature death with something along the lines of “Great! Now you’re a legend!”) It has often been said that dying prematurely can sometimes be an artist’s best career move. But there definitely was something unique about Jeff Buckley and there is no question we lost someone special when he waded into the banks of the Wolf River that fateful day never to return alive again. 

Despite the disappointment and pain Lucas endured over the fallout of his and Jeff Buckley’s partnership, the music they made together endures, both as band mates in Gods and Monsters and on the album Grace, which to this day is considered one of the hallmark rock albums of the ‘90’s. And although he considered himself at the time of Jeff Buckley’s departure from Gods and Monsters as “condemned . . . to indie hell for the rest of my career,” Gary Lucas, through hard work and sheer determination, has risen above tremendous obstacles to carve out a brilliant career for himself. Indie artist or not, his work – whether as a solo guitarist, band leader and songwriter, composer of soundtracks to old silent movies, or collaborator with other major creative talents around the world – is always of consistently high quality and uncompromising. If anything, he is  one of those artists who I feel safe categorizing as “too good for his own good” (two other great artists like this who come to mind, and of whom I am a huge fan, are Richard Thompson and Mike Viola). At the end of the day, it is about the art and not the numbers. Gary Lucas and Jeff Buckley were unquestionably kindred spirits and they created magic together. For Jeff Buckley fans, “Touched By Grace” is an absolute must read. But more importantly, it is a must read for music fans

The 33 1/3 for Marquee Moon

As a self-confessed music geek, I am obviously quite enamored of the whole 33 1/3 series (originally published by Continuum but now apparently Bloomsbury? - http://333sound.com/) and own several, (though not nearly as many as I want/need!). This past Xmas someone quite near and dear to me gave me Bryan Waterman's contribution to the series: Television's Marquee Moon. This record is definitely one of my "Desert Island Discs," and I agree with something Waterman writes early on about how it's an album that really sounds like it came not from any particular time period, barring any sonic nuances/limitations more expert ears might pick up on that betray when it was recorded. Of course, it is hard, if not impossible, to listen to it, or any album for that matter, without placing it in the context of when it was recorded. Waterman devotes a lot of his book to this, giving us the whole setting for how the CBGB's mythology was seemingly created by two Rimbaud-inspired white dudes loitering around the Lower East Side in the mid-70's (probably not the greatest idea at the time) and happened upon a guy hanging up a banner for his club, asked for a gig, and then the rest being history. Whether or not it really happened that way, as Waterman points out, is really beside the point. The fact is Television, though not the first rock band (or band) to ever play CBGB, nevertheless became the band that brought it to prominence, resulting in the scene it became and the legend it spawned. And their whole back story, about which Waterman goes into considerable detail, is kind of essential as far as informing what eventually became the album Marquee Moon, i.e., the friendship/creative-spiritual partnership/falling out between co-founders Richard Hell (Myers) and Tom Verlaine (Miller). (Verlaine mentions his former collaborator in the last verse of the second song on the album "Venus.") 

So what about the book itself as a critical analysis/love letter to one of (IMHO) the greatest (debut) albums in rock? Again, not wanting to be hypercritical, I would say I really enjoyed it on the whole. Being a university professor and scholar, Waterman did an amazing amount of research for it. The bibliography is a veritable smorgasbord of resources about those halcyon days. It's amazing to me how much is written about this stuff, and how good the writing was back then, (and how the quality of music criticism seems to have gone way downhill ever since). He also approaches the analysis part as you would expect from an academic, at times perhaps a little over the top, although I think this music warrants it. A lot of these books are written by scholars and academics, so this is to be expected. (I know there are some blatant exceptions, e.g., the one for PJ Harvey's Rid of Me and Joe Pernice's one for The Smiths' Meat Is Murder, neither of which I have read yet.) As a musician, it seems a little more could have been devoted to the music itself, perhaps from a technical standpoint. Waterman does have an entire chapter where he writes something about each song, but at times it seems there is so much more one can say (inevitable for any such book though, especially one for this series). And, being a drummer, I have always felt that Billy Ficca's playing on this record is extraordinary, and never receives enough credit or attention. He does stuff on every track that to me is so creative and interesting and that I imagine most, rock drummers anyway, wouldn't think of. One can clearly hear his Tony Williams/jazz influence throughout the record.  One of my favorite moments is at the 3:14 mark on "Friction." Of course, the guitar interplay between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd is stellar and defines their sound, and Fred Smith's melodic, supportive bass playing completes the sound of the quartet. I also think the book ends kind of abruptly, with Patti Smith at the closing of CBGB in 2006 essentially telling the crowd that Verlaine, unable or unwilling to be present, is there in spirit. I guess it makes sense though that any book about Marquee Moon is inevitably going to have CBGB as one of its focuses. 

Look, sure there is a lot that Waterman could have done differently, but there is really no way that I am not going to enjoy a book about Marquee Moon from the 33 1/3 series. And his suggestion to listen to the album on headphones while trolling through the Lower East Side of Manhattan at night is one I hope to be able to do someday. 

Hello 2014 and Big Star movie

As the credits roll at the end of what is arguably the greatest human achievement ever, upon which civilizations, religions, philosophies, etc., can and should be built - "This Is Spinal Tap" - Michael McKean, in his hilarious portrayal of the fictional band's lead singer and guitarist David St. Hubbins (the patron saint of quality footwear) responds to the question of what he would be doing with his life if it weren't for rock and roll with "I dunno. Probably be a full time dreamer." Well, that is definitely a sentiment I (and I would venture many more of you out there) can relate to very well. I mean, isn't the thing that grabs us at a young age and leaves its indelible footprint on our souls, like when concrete is first poured and is beginning to harden, the thing that makes the most lasting impression, regardless of whatever else we go on to do with our time here on Earth? Isn't each and every one of us, to borrow another wonderful Tap moment, (also from that same series of interviews during the credits), part preserved moose?

Well, in this spirit, and as another middle-aging Gen X-er whose love/obsession for all things rock and roll - with a focus on the "Golden Age" of the middle 1960's through the middle 1970's - I submit to you another music blog and welcome you to the inaugural post. 

Perhaps in this age of information overload and mass media saturation, wherein each of us can only realistically access a tiny fraction of what is out there as far as music, film, books, etc., it seems more likely than ever that more and more of the "worthy" ones are going to fall through the cracks, i.e., remain in relative, if not total, obscurity, perhaps to be "discovered" eventually someday. This is of course nothing new in art (look at folks like Mozart and Van Gogh for crying out loud!). As far as rock and roll/popular music bands/artists, it seems more and more similar stories are popping up and gaining notoriety, e.g. the Oscar winning "Searching for Sugar Man" http://www.sonyclassics.com/searchingforsugarman/ documentary about the discovery and resurgence of Sixto Rodriguez, and the much less acclaimed but no less worthy documentary about singer-songwriter Emitt Rhodes "The One Man Beatles" https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-One-Man-Beatles/194683281519. We love stories like this, about people who deserved more success during the time they were doing whatever it is they do and, at least on the surface, seem like victims of circumstances beyond their control (although perhaps they also had a role in how things turned out), and then are discovered later on and given their due recognition. For those who have passed on, this is their way of achieving immortality, perhaps small compensation for what they had to endure while alive, but redemptive and vindicating nevertheless.

In rock and roll, there are countless stories like this, and there are going to be more and more books, movies, etc., made about these bands/artists (I happen to know at least one very well). A whole cottage industry either already exists, or is in the works, of stories about bands/artists who, in a parallel universe, are well known, appreciated, and adequately compensated for the amazing work they do. 

One of my Christmas gifts this year was the DVD of the film about, as its tag line reads, "the greatest band that never made it." This is of course Big Star, the name of the documentary "Nothing Can Hurt Me," http://www.bigstarstory.com/  which is a line from the Big Star song "Big Black Car," from their third album, which never had an official title, but has been dubbed "3rd" and "Sister Lovers." I first saw this film last April, when it had its Southeast premier during the Florida Film Festival http://www.floridafilmfestival.com/, and, as a big fan of the band ever since the early '90's, when I, along with countless other Gen-X indie rockers, discovered and shortly thereafter came to revere them, I absolutely loved the film. In fact, it exceeded whatever expectations I may have had about it. In fact, such was my mania for it that I resolved to wake up early on Record Store Day a couple weeks later so I could procure the limited edition yellow vinyl version of the soundtrack on Omnivore Recordings, http://omnivorerecordings.com/ (an endeavor which ended up being a five hour wait on line just to get into Park Ave CDs http://www.parkavecds.com/ in Orlando, an experience I vowed not to repeat). 

In the main film, we get the whole backdrop of the late '60's Memphis music scene which ultimately led to Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel, and (only surviving member) Jody Stephens, working together at Ardent Studios to craft their perfectly realized power pop confections. We are then taken through the making of and circumstances surrounding Big Star's three official albums, all of which are different from each other, but brilliant in their own unique ways, to main songwriters Bell and Chilton's post Big Star careers/endeavors, to the creation of the Big Star cult. Along the way we hear from friends, classmates, collaborators, critics, fellow musicians who continue to carry the Big Star torch, and, most poignantly, family of the band, all of whom contribute important, insightful commentary. One of the most touching and sad moments in the film for me is toward the end when Chris Bell's brother and sister are being interviewed and his sister is tearfully trying to articulate her mixed feelings about her brother's contribution to music at the cost of his no longer being with us, which her brother is able to say for her, something like "You'd rather have him than his music." 

Like so many great stories, it is ultimately about triumph over tragedy (although I can see Alex Chilton's two outstretched middle fingers aimed directly at me from beyond the grave as I write this). Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, and Andy Hummel may be gone forever as physical manifestations, but we will always have the music they made while they were with us. I am not a critic either. I am not going to expound on what the filmmakers could have done "better" with this picture. I have read a few what I consider unfairly lukewarm at best reviews of "Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me," including one from my local rag Orlando Weekly at the time of its Florida Film Festival screening, as well as a recent one in Rolling Stone. In my humble opinion, the film is as worthy an addition to the increasing canon of great rock docs as its subject matter is to the increasing list of great bands/artists whose work deserves all the recognition it never rightfully received during its time and place. I loved it! I learned a lot about one of my favorite bands of all time! I will watch it again and continue to listen to and derive immense pleasure from the music of Big Star.