| There may be 2 versions of this circulating. 1) complete, and 2) from 'Lover You Should've Come Over' onwards
Jeff Buckley - Dec 17 1995 on WXPK (K-Rock), NY with Vin Scelza.
I met Jeff during the time when he was doing shows in NYC with guitarist Gary Lucas. The night we met they were performing at some benefit show at Tramps. This was before the release of Live at Sin-e (EP, 1993) or his debut album grace (1994).
I had heard reports about Jeff's performances, but have never heard anyone sing like he did that night (except for the inevitable eerie comparison to his father, Tim Buckley, who died when Jeff was still a very young child). When I was introduced to him by Gary, for some reason I expected he would be painfully shy or terrribly cocky. He was neither (well, maybe a bit shy). He was warm, gracious, funny and very humble about his talent (all of which is evidenced in this archive recording). I asked him to come up on the show, but it took almost two years - and major changes in Jeff's professional life - for this visit to happen.
Before coming into the studio on this December night, I invited Jeff to thumb through my record and CD collection and pick out some things for us to play. Everything up to thi Nina Simone recording was Jeff's pick - some fun stuff!
He only perfomed two songs, the second being an untitled "work-in-progress" that he had jotted the lyrics to in a notebook, a song which would see release on the posthumous live album Mystery White Boy, in 2000. He peformed alone.
Listening to this recording for the first time in 8 years, as I prepared it for the Be My Guest archives, I found myself both delighted by this man's boyish humour and ebullience and saddened once more by the loss so many of us still feel when thinking of Jeff... how his life was cut so short by the cruel fate of his drowning accident in Memphis, May 1997. Vin Scelza |
