It's practically become a cliché (or possibly a cult) to state what was lost when 31-year old singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River, but it's true nonetheless. In the dying days of grunge, with a massive void left by Kurt Cobain's death, Buckley seemed poised to take American alternative music in a new, more hopeful direction. He had the talent, the looks and the songs, but it was not to be. Certainly it's very easy to look at everything with the benefit of hindsight; yes, a flower snipped in the bud doesn't have a chance to blossom, but neither does it have to fade. The new DVD Grace Around The World is the latest Buckley posthumous release as it compiles a plethora of unseen home movies, interviews and concert footage as well as an hour long documentary, Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley.
By this point, posthumous releases are a cottage industry of their own. Some performers have had more longevity in death than they ever did in life. While Buckley doesn't approach Tupac levels of postmortem releases, it amazes me that there's still video footage to be had over 12 years after the singer's death. Upon viewing the nearly three hours of Grace Around The World, it occurred to me that Buckley seemed to have an almost pathological willingness to be filmed and recorded, almost like the man couldn't board a tour bus without a camera rolling. Not that this is a bad thing: it's too easy to mythologize a nearly-mystically talented performer in death, and seeing him put on weird, vaguely European accent after accent to poke fun at himself is refreshing.
But the real meat of the two DVDs (and one CD) is the performances; only one, a take of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" has been previously released on the Live in Chicago DVD. Buckley was a confident and charismatic performer, and both his legendary vocals and underrated guitar skills are on fine display here. Unfortunately, the poor visual quality of most performances undermines all of that. Filmed in a variety of locales (largely Germany, Japan and the UK), the songs suffer from both the sharp, stark video stock popular in the 1990s and the frantic editing style of the time. In particular, the 1995 MTV performance of "Eternal Life," already one of his lesser songs, grows nearly intolerable by the camera crew's seeming inability to keep a shot steady for any duration. Midway through the song, I stopped paying attention to the music and focused on counting the length of cuts: about four seconds each, for a nearly five-minute song. Too bad I had just eaten sushi.
But it's not all seasickness and blunt lighting. The band's performance of "Mojo Pin," with a lengthy muttered intro, is strong and bold, highlighting Michael Tighe's metallic, echoing guitar, while the ever-popular "Last Goodbye" is both a tearjerker and a complex and melancholy piece of music. It's a pity that Buckley's dynamism so often overshadowed his band; in every performance, they're spot on, as tight as only a band that toured constantly could be. Each song is bookended with snippets of interviews (some of which are repeated on the documentary DVD) that range from fatuous to intriguing. Buckley's insistence that he never "feigns anything" while deploring his own lack of good looks comes off as overly rebellious, James Dean-style, but his ramblings of the nature of grace and music's infatuation with death are remarkable for a performer so young. Shorn of the visual elements, the performances on the CD are not quite as impressive. They're certainly not on the level of 2000's compilation live album Mystery White Boy, but are still interesting enough for the dedicated fan. The sound quality is consistent throughout, but it's simply not as arresting without Buckley's strained face behind the music.
The documentary film Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley suffers from a similar problem: it's invaluable to fans but somewhat impenetrable to newcomers. Instead of starting at the beginning, the film jumps straight into the middle of Buckley's life, with his arrival in New York City and eventual residency at the famed Sin-é café. The movie is even more replete with interview footage than the performance DVD, again sometimes intriguing but often distracting in its juvenile aspirations. Interviews with Buckley's mother and friends (including Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and, bafflingly, Sebastian Bach) reveal the singer as something of an overgrown teenager. I don't mean that in a disparaging sense; in Buckley what can be seen as complexity can also be seen as childishness. His chafing against major label restrictions is noted, but so is the fact that he basically had his pick of recording companies. Notably, he claims at one point that signing to Columbia Records was a move of romanticism, even though he was aware of its nature as a subsidiary of Sony/BMG. Similarly, his abandonment of the early sessions of lost follow-up album My Sweetheart the Drunk can be seen either as the perfectionism of an artist or as petulance.
Grace Around The World is a collection of remarkable footage about one of the great losses of the '90s, a musical decade already steeped in tragedy. It reveals a character more layered than idolization or mythology would lead one to believe; certainly as a dedicated fan, I was rapt the whole time. It's questionable whether the same would hold true for someone not already under Buckley's spell. Such is the nature of a cult, I suppose. Even if you couldn't get into the voice or the songs, the VH1 bonus feature exploring the band's tour bus and Buckley's humorous bloodlust directed toward Geraldo Rivera has got to make you chuckle.
by Nathan Kamal