Jeff Buckley - New Year’s Prayer

Feel no shame for what you are

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When I walked into the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco the evening of November 20, 1994, to see Jeff Buckley and his band perform in concert, I only partially realized I was in the presence of a rare musical talent. His now legendary debut album, Grace, had been on sale to the public for less than 3 months at the time, and although I did own it and considered myself a fan, I wasn’t sure what to make of his quite adventurous yet meandering reworkings of the songs I’d thought I was familiar with.

The Noe Valley Ministry was (and still is) a church tucked away on a side street in the tony Noe Valley neighborhood of the city — an area more known for overpriced boutiques and shi-shi restaurants than rock and roll concert halls. But The Ministry (what we all called it) hosted live music of a wide array of genres, from rock to punk to West African highlife, Cuban salsa, folk, classical and more. It was one of those community venues where the secular and the spiritual could gather and have profound religious experiences together.

NVM main chapel, today

It didn’t take long for this music-obsessed, non-religious 27 year-old to become captured under the other-worldly Jeff Buckley spell that would ensnare millions more soon enough. I could be remembering this wrong, but I am pretty sure the venue was general admission, and that I had started off standing in the back, admiring the show from a distance, but by the third song of the setlist, “So Real,” I was beside the stage, within spitting distance of Jeff, who stood at his mic-stand, guitar slung over his narrow shoulders, his greasy hair hanging in front of his face as he fell under the same trance as the 200 or so of his adoring congregants.

While searching for the exact date of the show, I discovered that uber-fan Mercedes Beene had created a website dedicated to the words, art and music of Jeff Buckley.

She had gathered together many bootleg concert recordings and videos from Buckley’s first tour in 1994-1995. Many of the shows are posted on YouTube as well.

If you are a Jeff Buckley fan I highly recommend checking her website out. I know I will be exploring it much deeper in the coming weeks.

The Noe Valley Ministry show was indeed one of the shows recorded and archived on her site, and I — and you — can now (re)live the priceless experience for free.

I’m listening to it for the first time, right now, as I type this. Tears of joy are streaming down my face as the band finishes the epic song “Last Goodbye.” And now Jeff is telling the audience a story of how a girl at the Seattle show a couple days prior had come up to him and said that she’d taken her name off his mailing list because he was a rock star now and was too big for his britches for her to give him the time of day.

The way he tells the story is very funny and it reminds me of how not a rock-star he was. How unassuming he always seemed, yet at the same time, so completely present and embodied, both within the music he was performing and the audience he was performing for.

How present and alive he still seems.

And how fucking sad it still is and how deep the sense of loss still sits, remembering that he was taken from us so young.

Jeff had an innate ability to lose himself in every song. It didn’t matter that the band’s sets would often include the same 10 songs — 7 of them originals — no two shows would even remotely sound the same. This ability to self-reinterpret at such a high level was rare for artists with 20 years under their belt. That he could do it after a single album, was and is unheard of.

I’m half way through the 90 minute concert now and I’m truly impressed with how good the audio quality of the mix is! I’ve heard my share of bootlegs in my day, and, especially considering that this was 29 years ago (damn!), you can clearly make out Buckley’s inter-song banter without straining too much. Nothing is distorted. I assume it was a mixing board recording but maybe not. There is a bit of hiss, but that could be from copying the original tape. Maybe one of you audiophiles can listen to it and have a better sense. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

The only part that is surprising to me is how quiet the audience is. Though when I think back, I do recall it being a fairly reverent crowd. We weren’t sleepy or subdued — we simply were in awe.

I am pretty sure I attended this show alone. I have asked my friends that I’m still in touch with who might have gone with me, and all of them said they weren’t there. I suppose this is possible, I did go to shows by myself on occasion, especially if everyone else was busy.

I do recall leaving the Noe Valley Ministry on a profound high, and feeling that same euphoria emanating from the other patrons.

Listening to this concert again 28 and a half years later, I am brought right back to that magical night, when I attended church with my new ministry-going music friends.

There are only a handful of deaths in the music world that immediately made me break down sobbing.

Prince.

D. Boon, singer and guitarist of 80s punk band The Minutemen.

Jeff Buckley.

There’s probably a couple more, but that’s who comes to mind first.

D. Boon was killed in a car accident in 1985 and I was a semi-formed eighteen-year-old so my emotional maturity to process it was a few years away. After 38 years I’ve since processed it, but it still bums me out, as The Minutemen were at their peak when he tragically passed.

I’ve tried to write about Prince’s death at least a dozen times and nothing came even close to capturing how I truly felt. It still feels too soon. Maybe I’ll try again sometime later this year.

The song “New Year’s Prayer” is the 7th track on Jeff Buckley’s posthumous 2nd album, Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk.

It’s the album he was in the studio recording when he went missing the night of May 29, 1997. He’d wandered off to swim in the Mississippi River and never came back. His body was found a week later.

This song was on my mind because I’d been listening to a lot of New Year’s related music and the song was in the mix. I hadn’t played it in at least a decade and I marveled, once again, at how exceptional it was. Like most of Buckley’s best work, there’s a hypnotic, trance-like, ecstatic quality to the song.

Ooh, fall in light
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light

Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you were
As the marrow in your bones
Fall in light
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel it as a waterfall
Fall in light

Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing

He chants these words as much as he sings them. They are less lyrics than mantras. I listen to this and it’s hard to imagine the song being written by a man in crisis, who was overwhelmed by the pressure of his new album measuring up to his acclaimed debut, Grace. But by all accounts, this was how Jeff was feeling at the time.

The songs on the album are labeled “Sketches” because they were not finished. Adding “Sketches From” was a way of honoring Jeff, by letting people know that these sketches were just that. Rough drafts.

But the thing is, in a way, even the songs on Grace were sketches.

Maybe they were more “complete” from a studio recording sense, but Jeff was always reworking his songs in concert, exploring their crevices, their nooks and crannies. Finding more sonic jewels to excavate.

It was this quality that made him such an entrancing, dynamic presence on stage. It was this quality that leaves him an enigma in the hearts and minds of so many fans.

Watching old interviews of Jeff this past week (one of which is below) and listening to his early concerts reminds me that as enigmatic a figure as Jeff Buckley presented, he was also a sensitive, deep-feeling man craving connection and a moment or two of transcendence.

I’ll end this with a couple of video clips I found last week, during my Jeff Buckley YouTube wormhole.

The first is an excerpt from a MuchMusic interview from Vancouver on November 16, 1994. Four days before I would see him in concert. Though the YouTube poster thinks it was actually filmed in Toronto on October 28. Either way, it is very close to the time of the audio recording of the show I attended.

According to the notes, this is an edited sample of a longer interview from a MuchMusic DVD of which the title is not given.

I feel like it captures Jeff in such a natural, playful, expansive, vulnerable place. Also, he looks so friggin’ young! He exudes a sort of awkward, goofy, natural wisdom that I hope he also saw in himself.

The second video is a fairly technical breakdown of Jeff’s vocal prowess, skill and style by Elizabeth Zharoff, opera singer and host of The Charismatic Voice, where she reviews songs she is hearing for the first time.

I wrote about her in my piece all about Song Reaction YouTube Channels, which you can check out below.

Flirting With Disaster - The Song, The Film and the Concept

Recently Zharoff started a new channel, The Singing Hole, focused on breaking down the vocals of a particular artist with exceptional or unique vocal qualities. One of her first videos focused on Jeff Buckley. I felt like I learned a lot about Jeff’s approach to singing in this video, even if I do wonder if he would call bullshit on some of her readings and interpretations of his stylistic quirks.

So that’s it! What is your experience with Jeff Buckley? Were you late to the Buckley party? Did you get into him during his small, 3-4 year window when he was alive and recording/touring?

And which musician/artist’s tragic death knocked you to the floor when you found out? Amy Winehouse? Kurt Cobain?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feelings and experiences in the comments!