Songs To No One 1991 - 1992

In April 1991, Jeff Buckley arrived in New York with no arse in his trousers to perform at the Greetings From Tim Buckley tribute concert to his father in St Ann’s Church, Brooklyn. Organiser Hal Willner (the man behind an amazing series of albums based on the work of everyone from Charles Mingus to Kurt Weill to Edgar Allen Poe to Burroughs and Ginsberg, and more recently producer of Lou Reed’s Ecstasy and the soundtrack to Scorsese’s forthcoming Gangs Of New York) was taking a chance on the kid, having no idea if Buckley Jr. had a note in his head. He entrusted the youngster into the care of Gary Lucas, a gifted ex-Beefheart guitarist paying the bills as an ad copywriter with Columbia.

When young Buckley sang, jaws dropped. Lucas, who’d had a bad luck streak of lead singers walking out on him, knew a gift horse when it opened its mouth, and promptly asked Jeff join his band Gods & Monsters. They played a couple of full band shows before Buckley left to hone his solo act in Sin E. However, the brief partnership yielded a considerable cache of songs, most notably ‘Grace’ and ‘Mojo Pin’, twin peaks of Buckley’s near-classic Grace album, (Lucas later added his spiralling guitar lines to those sessions). Songs To No One samples a handful of these songs, and with the project approved by Buckley’s mother Mary Guibert and remastered by Willner, these are no scrapings from the bowels of the cash cow.

Buckley was the original crazy mixed-up kid, a brilliant dilettante who could flit from jazz fusion to classic hard rock to vocal stylists like Nusrat and Nina to lo-fi garage rock to French chansons/chanteuse. In a way, Lucas succeeded in anchoring him to a couple of discernible streams of consciousness. On ‘She Is Free’ you can hear how his playful, lyrical rhythm guitar complemented Buckley’s velvet-leatherette croon and wild poeticism, rooting his netherworldy tones in Memphis soil. Similarly, the title tune is a jumpy rag somewhere between Dylan’s last album – weighty lyrics lending ballast to whimsical melody – and Led Zeppelin II. Recorded off the board in CBGB, Pat Kelly’s ‘How Long Will It Take’ catches a similar mood, Jeff trying on suave Sam Cooke silks while his partner sews a line between doo-wop and blue beat, using a humble guitar loop and whining Hawaiian overlays as needle and thread.

That’s the light stuff. Then there’s the heavy. The embryonic ‘Grace’ is here in all its glory, replete with fiery arpeggios and ululating vocal melodies punctuated by blasts of blues harp. Ditto ‘Mojo Pin’, with its ‘Achilles Last Stand’ chord changes and exquisitely tormented phrasing.

But if one song only were required to justify the cult of Jeff, and indeed the existence of Songs To No One, look no further than the version of Edith Gassion and Marguerite Monnot’s ‘Hymne a L’Amour’, an 11-minute voyage into deep space blues, sacred chant and ancient avant garde; Judy Garland backed by Spiritualized singing PJ’s ‘To Bring You My Love’.

If Buckley was still learning the tricks of the song-writing trade at the time of his death, there were few interpretive singers under 50 who could hold a candle to his torch.

Hearing these tapes, one can only speculate as to how it broke Lucas’s heart when Jeff Buckley lit out for other pastures. With the release of Songs To No One, a secret history has been documented.