Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3) [Paperback]

Daphne A. Brooks (Author)

Book Description

Series: 33 1/3 | Publication Date: April 28, 2005

The power and influence of Grace increases with each passing year. Here, Daphne Brooks traces Jeff Buckley’s fascinating musical development through the earliest stages of his career, up to the release of the album. With access to rare archival material, Brooks illustrates Buckley’s passion for life and hunger for musical knowledge, and shows just why he was such a crucial figure in the American music scene of the 1990s. EXCERPT: Jeff Buckley was piecing together a contemporary popular music history for himself that was steeped in the magic of singing. He was busy hearing how Dylan channeled Billie Holiday in Blonde On Blonde and how Robert Plant was doing his best to sound like Janis Joplin on early Led Zeppelin recordings. He was thinking about doo-wop and opera and Elton John and working at developing a way to harness the power of the voice…In the process, he was re-defining punk and grunge “attitude” itself by rejecting the ambivalent sexual undercurrents of those movements, as well as Led Zeppelin’s canonical “cock rock” kingdom that he’d grown up adoring. He was forging a one-man revolution set to the rhythms of New York City and beyond. And he was on the brink of recording his elegant battle in song for the world to hear.

Editorial Reviews

Review

feature in Princeton Weekly Bulletin 10/18/04 mentioning Jeff Buckley's Grace

“Such inspiration is seen in Brooks’ current book project, ‘Jeff Buckley’s Grace,’… The book will examine the legacy of the singer-guitarist, who only released one full-length studio album but had amassed a cult following before he drowned at the age of 30.” –Eric Quinones, Princeton Weekly Bulletin, October 18, 2004

“…Daphne Brooks reveals and obsession- so intense it’ll make you blanche- with the late Jeff Buckley.” –Philadelphia Weekly

About the Author

Daphne A. Brooks is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Duke University Press, 2006).

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Product Details

• Paperback: 157 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (April 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826416357
• ISBN-13: 978-0826416353
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,078,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As an arrogant musician, I loved it., August 17, 2005

By 

Marc A. Berger (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3) (Paperback)

Thomas Lhamon's review (July 5, 2005) criticizing GRACE for its technical inaccuracies and flowery prose is misguided and evinces the writer's immature taste. To be more direct, it's just plain wrong.

I am a musician--a guitar player to be exact--of the worst kind. At rock shows, I'm the guy who stands next to the stage passing judgment on everything from the year an amp was made to the gauge of the strings a guitar player uses (Blackface Twin reissues don't sound as good as the originals; .09s are just terrible). I feign a kind of meta-expertise that permits me to shrug off other people's opinions about the music I listen to. Ever want to recommend a new record to me? You'd better expect a response in line with, "Oh, that?!? It's okay." The more I like the record, the more apathetically I talk about it.

As such, you might expect a person like me to share Mr. Lhamon's opinions, the reviewer is no doubt a card-carrying member of my pseudo-club (after all, no one but a club member would harp on the differences between a Mexican-made Telecaster and a American one). We're both musicians, we both fiend for those obscure factoids that we can feel cool dropping at parties with our arrogant musician "friends." We should be besties.

Too bad he completely misses the ball.

Daphne Brooks is not a member of our club. She's not even a musician. Rather, Ms. Brooks is a scholar of literature, and her writing is beautiful, nuanced, and evocative. Somewhere along the way, she shared in the experience that many of us musicians hold close to our hearts--Jeff Buckley's transfixing swansong entered her life and she fell in love. With exquisite clarity, brutal honesty, and language so awesome the word "transcendent" underestimates its power, Ms. Brooks' writing redefines Buckley's astral soundscape using an arsenal of metaphors and images that humble even the most diehard club members.

I'll let her speak for herself. Here are a few lines from a description of the one and only night she saw Buckley perform:

"The voice of movement and metamorphosis, disruption and reinvention, transgression and collaboration, revolution and cultural hybridity rearranged the landscape of our tiny rock universe in the hall that night.... Summon every rock and roll cliché that you like--the d.j. who saved my life last night, the boy who strummed my life with his words--Jeff Buckley destroyed and rebuilt my musical world in one fell swoop" (11).

I love "Grace," it's as simple as that. I've listened to the record more times than I can count. I know it so well I can tell you exactly how many seconds elapse between each song. And yet, Ms. Brooks' book gave me an entirely new way of loving "Grace," a work of art that has defined, to a great extent, the way I listen to music. Read it with an open mind, it will do the same for you.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Translating Music into Words, December 15, 2005

By 

E. Weed (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3) (Paperback)

I got out of music school some 25 years ago, and I'm still in love with the electric guitar, and great music made with it. It's a pleasure to see Brooks' focus on Buckley's terrific record. But her efforts to translate the poetry of the music into the written language demonstrate how hard it is to do. Phrases like "swirling guitars," "crunching power chords," "resonant swirl of punked out romance and passion," become tired and vague after awhile. I'd rather see some more objective analysis of the music...for example, a chapter could have been written on the peculiar--and brilliant--cliche-busting structure of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over"--not to mention the complexity of the recording process in that and many of the other songs. Brooks touches on these issues to some extent, although I think she tends to tie Buckley too closely to his influences, rather than focus on the amazing way that he ultimately transcended them all, and recreated himself and his music into something magnificently unique. I respect Brooks' effort to describe his uniqueness in poetic terms, but, in the end, some of us (I think) would like to see greater objective, technical analysis. I guarantee the material is there.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful exploration of Jeff Buckley's musical development, August 1, 2005

By 

Matthew Christensen (Edinburg, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3) (Paperback)

As a relative newcomer to Jeff Buckley's music, I was thrilled with Daphne Brooks' excellent book on the genealogy of his album Grace. Well-researched and passionately-even lovingly-written, her book 33 1/3 Grace offers long-time and would-be Buckley fans a way to make sense of the musician's wildly diverse musical influences, which include Led Zeppelin, Mahalia Jackson, Judy Garland, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, to name just a very few. Combining description of how Buckley developed his singer-songwriting craft with close readings of individual songs, Brooks shows very concretely how Buckley drew from these influences to create a music that was simultaneously an homage and entirely new. Not only did this make me listen to Grace a wholly new way, it also sent me back to Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, and even Buckley contemporaries like Nirvana with a new ear to their music.
One of the things I most appreciated about Brooks' book is its attentiveness to what it means to be a fan of Buckley's music. Too often writing on rock musicians like Buckley-especially those who die young as he did-plays on the tired clichés of tortured genius, a la Kurt Cobain, or mystic masculine rock god, a la Jim Morrison. This kind of cliché-driven writing does little more than offer the fan-constituted as young, male, and white-the opportunity to vicariously live out the fantasy of a mythological rock stardom. Brooks, in contrast, not only avoids those clichés but begins and ends with a meditation on what it means for her, an African American woman from the Bay Area with a PhD, to be a fan of Jeff Buckley's rock music. This self-reflexive intro and outro, combined with the way she traces Buckley's diverse influences, challenges the dominant paradigms of rock criticism and rock history and serves as an important reminder that rock fans are not a singular monolithic mass. That Buckley's album Grace provokes such a challenge to the way we might think about rock music is ultimately is what makes it such a great album, and is what makes Brooks's book about that album so terrific.