Jeff Buckley - Mystery White Boy

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Music reviews of Mystery White Boy

Music Review: an album for fans only
Rating: 3 Stars

What most folks don't know is that a rock God is really the last thing Jeff Buckley seemed to want to be. Jeff wanted to be an artist, not a pretty face or even a pop star. At the moment of his career in which he could most easily have found himself on the cover of Rolling Stone, he more or less disappeared. For two years he wrote and toured (primarily abroad, where more receptive audiences afforded him a level of stardom that Sony Music seemed to be grooming him for back in the U.S.), putting off the much-awaited follow-up to "Grace" as long as possible. He relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, and started playing solo in local clubs, constantly challenging both himself and his audiences with both originals and unusual reworkings of covers that ranged in quality from transcendant to downright awful. He began work on "My Sweetheart the Drunk," a deliberate departure from the more listener-friendly sounds of "Grace," but ultimately scrapped it and went back to the drawing board. At the time of his death, Jeff was working on an even more eclectic and complex set of tunes than he'd gone into the studio with only months before. Jeff seemed to be doing everything in his power to avoid becoming 'succesful.'

Though the tracks on "Mystery White Boy" are all drawn from the tours before his move to Memphis, they are indicative of Jeff's real drive rather than the expectations of his supporters in the music industry: rarely conventional, never boring, occasionally puzzling, and sometimes not very listenable. Of course, Jeff didn't care about being "listenable"; he cared about stretching both the boundaries of his vocal, musical, and compositional talent and the readiness of his listeners to engage his more abstract, avante-garde work. The album was produced both by Jeff's mother Mary Guibert (who is evenly either reviled or deified by Jeff's friends and fans) and Michael Tighe, Jeff's close friend and band-mate, and it is clearly a labour of love in which the primary concern is a faithful offering of the sort of performance that pleased Jeff the most rather than a "Greatest Hits Live" compilation. The album features most of Jeff's more popular tunes ("The Last Goodbye" was Jeff's only legitimate 'hit'), but almost never are these tunes conventionally presented. Jeff constantly noodles around on the songs, shifting octaves and employing the Qawalli vocal techniques he developed through his friendship with the master of Islamic praise music, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. His voice climbs and wails, and the band tends to rock out more than one might expect from listening to Jeff's studio albums. Jeff's sense of adventure on-stage is clearly evident, but it is often demonstrated in failed attempts to link a particular phrase of notes together or to improvise lyrically or vocally. The band is admirably tight on every track, flawlessly shifting and adjusting to Jeff's experiments with the songs, but even a tight band can't fix some of the goofs or make atonal and dissonant ideas sound palatable to a pop music fan.

Basically, this album seems aimed not at a wider audience for Jeff's music but at his loyal fans, who, since his death, have been worshipfully waiting for every bit of his music to be released by his mother (who, love her or hate her, seems intent on allowing his fans the privilige of every bit of the music she feels is strong enough to see the light of day). It captures the essence of a Buckley show pretty well - he flies and he flops. "Eternal Life," one of Jeff's more popular rockers, is overwhelmed by a pointless shriek-fest and too much guitar feedback - he turns a powerful rocker into a speed-metal explosion that hurts to hear sometimes. "Grace" is well-performed, but lacks the sense of depth and mood that the original studio track delivers so powerfully. Sometimes Jeff reaches and misses so badly that you almost feel sorry for him. On the other hand, the album also contains tracks in which Jeff goes for the impossible and achieves it. "What will you say?", a previously unreleased track, is astonishing both in its musical brilliance (Jeff delivers world-class vocal and instrumental performances on this track) and the chilling depth of its lyrical content - particularly given the context of Jeff's relationship to his father, whom he barely knew and who died when Jeff was a young boy. When Jeff cries out, "Father do you hear me? Do you know me? Do you even care?", you can't help but suspect that he was a bit dishonest when in interviews and conversations he denied his father's influence. Even more haunting is the tune's theme - the dead father being confronted by his son after years of separation. Though all who knew him described him as happy-go-lucky and rarely morbid, his lyrics almost seem to anticipate an early death. It is nothing less than awe-inspring to hear a dead man predict his own demise.

The bottom line here is that if you know Jeff and you dig him, or you know enough about him to want to go straight to the meat of his career, this album is a must. If you are new to Jeff or prefer his pop songs and ballads to his darker, moodier music, content yourself with "Grace," which is a satisfactory summation of a career cut short. Jeff Buckley might have saved rock'n'roll from itself, and his death was a greater tragedy for music in America than anyone will ever fully realize. "Mystery White Boy" offers a profound insight into his genius, but it is best heard either as a devotional or as a scholarly text, not as the sort of safe, easy-to-hear pop Jeff so desperately wanted to avoid making.

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