FEATURE:
Eternal Life
Thirty Years Ago: Jeff Buckley’s Remarkable Time at Sin-é, New York City
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WHEN it was originally released…
IN THIS PHOTO: Jeff Buckley in New York City in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Merri Cyr
on 23rd November, 1993, it was as an E.P. With performances taken from 19th July and 17th August, 1993, Jeff Buckley’s Live at Sin-é was his first commercial release. It would not be until later in the 1993 that Jeff Buckley would step into Bearsville Studios, Woodstock to record his only studio album, Grace. Of course, Buckley was not new to live performance when he released Live at Sin-é. He had performed at this particular venue/coffeehouse in New York City’s East Village quite a bit. The crowds eventually grew bigger and bigger. On the four track E.P. that went into the world in November 1993 – when he was just starting to record Grace – was Mojo Pin, Eternal Life, Je n'en connais pas la fin (I Don't Know the End of It) and The Way Young Lovers Do. With those two originals – which were close to the album versions but were still taking shape – sat alongside a couple of covers, it was ca chance to see Buckley’s incredible interpretive skills take flight. He also put out two incredible original songs that highlighted his songwriting brilliance. Accompanying himself on a Fender Telecaster, Buckley was playing and jamming in a great neighbourhood where he had made his home. I will get to a review of the expanded version of his sets at Sin-é soon. The reason I wanted to write about the E.P. and his performances at Sin-é is because of a big anniversary. The E.P. captures him playing songs from two different nights at the coffeehouse – the second of which happened on 17th August, 1993 (the first was on 19th July, 1993).
Thirty years ago, Buckley was playing out to a small but receptive crowd who were listening to this young artist taking his first steps in professional music. Buckley had signed to Columbia on 29th October, 1992. The deal was already done. One big reason why he was signed is because he was doing such spectacular live performances. Including his multiple gigs at Sin-é, Buckley was gaining buzz around New York City. Even though he was born in California, he seemed to find greater opportunity, excitement and comfort in N.Y.C. The Greenwich Village was once a haven for Folk artists back in the 1960s and ‘70s. The nearby (just under two miles away) East Village would also have seen and experienced a lot of great Folk music at this time. I think that is a factor in Buckley playing there. Perhaps less enamoured and attracted to the Punk scene of the city, you feel Folk artists such as Bob Dylan were more firmly in his mind. A chance to walk in the same neighbourhoods they would once have done. Artists, back in the day, would have just played with a guitar in some club or coffeehouse. Buckley’s 1993 sets at Sin-é remind me of the Folk artists in the '60s and '70s. If one is to compare him to Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley is more like the genius going electric. I am sure Buckley played acoustic guitar, but he was thrilling the locals with his Fender Telecaster.
Maybe trying to marry some of the strands of Punk and Rock together with a more Folk setting. Whatever the reasoning and plan, this was a young man playing his music to those who showed. I can imagine the audiences at Sin-é in the earliest days were quite modest. Eventually, more and more people showed up, so that some gigs would see record label bosses’ cars and limos lining the streets; people maybe hanging outside the door, trying to hear what was going on inside. I don’t think Buckley had any idea that, thirty years since that incredible second night set that would go into his Live at Sin-é. E.P., would be talked about to this day. Before getting to a review for the expanded version Live at Sin-é., it is interesting contextualising his August 1993 performance. As this Uncut feature from 2017 illustrates, this was a time when Jeff Buckley was still honing his craft. The feature discusses Buckley’s early Columbia recordings and the time he was at Shelter Island Sounds – a small studio in New York’s Chelsea district –, where he had a handful of other people’ songs. Those records were released into the world. In fact, as this article explains, they appear on the You & I (Expanded Edition):
“February 1993. JEFF BUCKLEY, a hyperactive music junkie just finding his feet in the New York clubs, enters Shelter Island Studios and records 40 songs in three days. As the session’s highlights are finally released, Uncut hears the inside story of how a genius singer-songwriter learned his craft via an eclectic songbook. “The goal,” says his A&R man, “was to allow him the time and space to find out which Jeff Buckley he was going to be…”
Steve Berkowitz likens Jeff Buckley’s first solo recordings to a journey undertaken without any map or clear destination.
“It was a musical exercise in self-discovery,” says Berkowitz, who signed Buckley to Columbia in the autumn of 1992. “There was no plan. It was very loose, like a conversation in someone’s living room. Jeff would move around. Start, stop, start again. I remember he played a Curtis Mayfield song, and then I said, ‘Know any Sly?’ He sighed and said, ‘I don’t really know any Sly,’ but even as he’s saying it he’s forming chords and, I swear to God, what comes out is the ‘Everyday People’ that’s on this record. It was breathtaking.”
Almost a quarter of a century after the private “conversation” that took place at New York’s Shelter Island Sound studios in February 1993, some choice extracts are being made public. The third LP of archive recordings to emerge since his death in May ’97, You And I captures Buckley when he was 26, living in a “crappy walk-up apartment” in the Lower East Side with girlfriend Rebecca Moore, consuming music by day and performing in the city’s cafés, clubs and bars by night. “The creativity was just pouring out of him at that point,” says his manager, Dave Lory”.
“STEVE BERKOWITZ (A&R executive at Columbia): We signed Jeff in the autumn of 1992 with the understanding that he would have complete control of his music. That was in the contract. He was capable of doing so much, the initial goal was to allow him the time and space to find out which Jeff Buckley he was going to be: are we going to wait for this flower to bloom, or are we going to cut it off? My job was to give him time to bloom.
MICHAEL TIGHE (friend; guitarist in Buckley’s live band, 1994-1996): I can remember Jeff holding this thick record contract in his hand on the night he was doing a show at [Brooklyn arts venue] PS1. He was a little scared, but it was also pretty exciting. He knew Columbia could get his music out there, but he also knew he was very green as far as songwriting and developing his sound went.
BERKOWITZ: By early ’93, the record company is asking, “So, what are you doing?” Not much! We hang around a lot. He comes to my house for Christmas, he mimes Warner Bros cartoons with my son. We go to a lot of gigs, play a lot of music, drink a lot of coffee. He’s playing every bump and hole in the wall in the city, but four, five, six months after he signed, there are no plans to record. So I suggest to Jeff, “Why don’t we go into this nice studio with this guy I know, relax for a couple of days, play everything you know, and at the end you can pick out three or four things that can be the beginnings of an idea for an album?” And he said, “OK, let’s do that”.
That gives you some background and lead-up to his sets at Sin-é. He was definitely a known musicians around New York City, though he was still largely unknown to the wider world. August 1993 was that period where he had done a lot of live gigs and been in a studio. He was about to – or he might have already spent time in Bearsville – head into Woodstock to record his debut album. It was such an important and wonderful time. Being in the audience when Buckley was on stage and performing these covers and originals in a small coffeehouse! SLANT reviewed the Legacy Edition of Live at Sin-é:
“Jeff Buckley was much more than the tragic rock god he has become. He was a soul singer who incorporated a passion for the blues and jazz into his folky brand of rock music. No Buckley release since his death in 1997 has captured this soulful essence the way his 1993 EP, Live at Sin-é, did (and does). Reissued by Legacy Recordings with an additional 17 tracks, Live at Sin-é, in its new form, is what 2000’s Mystery White Boy (and the second disc of Sketches: For My Sweetheart the Drunk, for that matter) should have been: a private yet very public glimpse into the evolution of one of the most promising artists of the ’90s. The album captures the folk movement of the East Village that was still flourishing in the early part of the decade—it’s an artifact left over from when there were more artists on St. Mark’s than fast food joints. The performances found here—recorded at the Sin-é Café in the summer of 1993—find Buckley disarmed, challenged, inspired and, above all, graceful.
Only a handful of songs on the album are original compositions (“Mojo Pin” and “Eternal Life,” both of which appeared on the original release, along with “Grace” and an early version of “Last Goodbye”), but the covers Buckley chose to perform seem tailor-made for him. He makes Dylan his own (“Just Like a Woman,” “I Shall Be Released”) and even manages to fit his little white-boy feet into Billy and Nina’s shoes (“Strange Fruit,” “Twelfth of Never”). And, of course, there’s Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” a song he transformed into something wholly unique on his landmark full-length debut Grace. The listening experience is at once disturbing and comforting—the double-disc set includes many amusing interludes, one of which is an impromptu impersonation of Jim Morrison while another nods to one of Buckley’s contemporaries, Kurt Cobain. For fans of Buckley (both casual and hardcore), this new version of Live at Sin-é will be nothing short of a treasure. The album’s liner notes read: “He was the Montgomery Clift of singer-songwriters, beautiful and bruised, struggling so hard to communicate you could feel it.” One might call communication you can feel “music.” And Live at Sin-é is beautiful communication indeed”.
I will wrap up with my impressions and feelings around the thirtieth anniversary of the August 1993 set he delivered at Sin-é. First, from Jeff Buckley’s official website, we get to hear what happened in the period after the E.P. was released into the world:
“By the time of the EP’s release during the fall of 1993, Buckley had already entered the studio with Mick Grondahl (bass), Matt Johnson (drummer), and producer Andy Wallace and recorded seven original songs (including “Grace” and “Last Goodbye”) and three covers (among them Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, Benjamin Britten’s “Corpus Christi Carol”) that comprised his debut album Grace. Guitarist Michael Tighe became a permanent member of Jeff Buckley’s ensemble and went on to co-write and perform on Grace’s “So Real” just prior to the release of the album.
In early 1994, not long after Live At Sin-é appeared in stores, Jeff Buckley toured clubs, lounges, and coffeehouses in North America as a solo artist from January 15-March 5 as well as in Europe from March 11-22. Following extensive rehearsals in April-May 1994, Buckley’s “Peyote Radio Theatre Tour” found him on the road with his band from June 2-August 16. His full-length full-band album, Grace, was released in the United States on August 23, 1994, the same day Buckley and band kicked off a European tour in Dublin, Ireland; the 1994 European Tour ran through September 22, with Buckley and Ensemble performing at the CMJ convention at New York’s Supper Club on September 24. The group headed back into America’s clublands for a Fall Tour lasting from October 19-December 18.
On New Year’s Eve 1994-95, Buckley returned to Sin-é to perform a solo set; on New Year’s Day, he read an original poem at the annual St. Mark’s Church Marathon Poetry Reading. Two weeks later, he and his band were back in Europe for gigs in Dublin, Bristol, and London before launching an extensive tour of Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, and the United Kingdom which lasted from January 29-March 5. On April 13 1995, it was announced that Jeff Buckley’s Grace had earned him France’s prestigious “Gran Prix International Du Disque — Academie Charles CROS — 1995”; an award given by a jury of producers, journalists, the president of France Culture, and music industry professionals, it had previously been given to Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Yves Montand, Georges Brassens, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell, among other musical luminaries. France also awarded Buckley a gold record certification for Grace”.
I remember my first time hearing the Live at Sin-é (Legacy Edition). When I heard that, I was compelled to find out more. I discovered Jeff Buckley when I was a teenager. I had already bought and fallen for Grace. That 1994 album has its anniversary later this month. The Live at Sin-é release was one I got when it came out in 2003. Marking ten years since Buckley delivered those incredible songs to patrons in the East Village, I was casting my mind back and wondering what it must have been like watching Jeff Buckley play in the summer of '93. You listen to the 1993 E.P./2003 expended reissue and you can feel and hear that brilliance. This was someone still largely unknown to the world. Almost a local secret, the Legacy Edition gives us more insight and context. His interaction with the audience is great! So charming, silly and sharp, there is this tangible aspect. You imagine yourself sat there at the back, watching the man blow people away with his incredible talent.
That between-songs chat where he would do impressions, talk to the crowd or just riff and see what came out It is said that, after sets, he would hang around and make coffee. He felt comfortable in this space. I always feel like Buckley assumed big tours and fame was what was needed so he could be remembered and endure. Whilst he might not have ever been known worldwide if he just played smaller venues, it is clear he yearned to return to them later in his career. He died in May 1997 at the age of thirty. In the final months of his life, he was still trying to put together his second studio album – My Sweetheart the Drunk was never completed; a posthumous album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk came out in 1998. Rather than mourn and feel sad, I wanted to mark thirty years since Jeff Buckley performed a second taped night at Sin-é. That would go into an E.P. (in November 1993) that was many people’s first experience of Buckley’s music. It is the sound of a remarkably talented young artist just about to head into the studio to record his debut album. We were so lucky to have Jeff Buckley in the world! His legacy and influence will live forever. We are all so grateful for…
ALL of the incredible music he left us.