Customer Reviews

Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3)

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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.

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.

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.

Daphne A. Brooks was originally supposed to help with the liner notes of Jeff Buckley's Grace Legacy Edition CD released late in 2004. When Sony decided to use another's opinions, Brooks decided to compile her information and use it to write this book. Because of this, the information is obviously opinionated. However, these opinions often get in the way of deciphering which parts are opinion and which parts are cited facts. The book is basically a repetitive compilation of information from other sources with opinions thrown in. Some of the quotes are new because of the author's access to materials that have not been officially released, but most of the information is recycled from previously released albums, DVDs, and books. This makes the book unnecessary for avid fans, but perhaps still desirable for the opinions of a fellow fan.

Although the book is titled "Grace," it discusses songs that did not make the album like "Forget Her" and songs sang during the Mystery White Boy tour like Judy Garland's "The Man That Got Away" and Edith Piaf's "Je N'En Connais Pas la Fin."

Brooks is obviously a devoted fan who visited St. Ann's Church where Jeff first sang his father's songs and where a memorial was held after his death. She was also fortunate enough to attend the performance in which Jeff sang his now famous "Chocolate Mojo Pin," a version explained as highly sexual, but unlike mainstream sexuality of the time. Brooks' explanations of the songs on the album and what they meant to her are interesting and offer a different perspective than what one might have concluded.

Strangely, Brooks manages to misquote several song lyrics including So Real on more than one occasion and dialogue from the Live at Sin-E CD. For one that claims to be a giant Buckley fan who wore out Grace by playing it so much in her car, Brooks does not know the songs well. She also falsely states that Jeff sang two songs at St. Ann's Church's tribute to his father, Tim Buckley. Brooks credits Buckley of covering "Once I Was" and "I Never Asked to be Your Mountain" when in reality, he covered those two and "Phantasmagoria in Two" and "Sefronia." These mistakes are somewhat unforgivable and make one wonder what other information in the book is untrue.

Overall, Daphne A. Brooks' book is a mediocre tribute, a "love note" to Jeff just like his Live at Sin-E CD was a "love note" to the building in which he played, but from a lesser talent.

Daphne A. Brooks' GRACE, part of the "33 1/3" series of influential album histories, is a overview of the work of Jeff Buckley, whose debut album launched a career of great passion cut short by his untimely death. Brooks had been hired to write the liner notes for the tenth-anniversary edition of "Grace", though ultimately another writer's work was used, and she made use of many interviews with Buckley and his circle, and reviews of his work.

Those expecting an indepth study of the recording process will be disappointed by Brooks' book, since in spite of what one might expect from the title, it is not limited to the making of his debut album, and instead covers pretty much his entire career. The actual album's tracks are interspersed among reminisces of his live performances, his early days in New York, and so forth. Many things are missing. For example, the addition of strings to "Eternal Life" during the recording process was a major improvement, yet Brooks doesn't cover this or Buckley's thoughts on strings. The book also suffers from some major problems of general writing style. For one, Brooks interjects her own experiences into the text left and right, talking about the first time she heard this song, the first time she met that person, etc. The word "I" shows up so many times this ceases to become an interesting study and more a fan's account of how the music changed her life. Brooks also enthuses too much about the music, calling every single song "sweeping" or "glorious"; chances are, anyone reading this book has already fallen for Buckley, so there's no need to hype the album. At the same time I read this book, I was also reading LUTOSLAWSKI STUDIES, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Oxford University Press, 2001), which showed how far Brooks' writing was from serious scholarship.

If you are a committed fan of Jeff Buckley, you might want to give this book a look, but unfortunately it does not fill the need at all of a well-written account of Buckley's early career and the making of his heavenly debut album.

I love Jeff Buckley and have for quite some time. The 33 1/3 series is a marvelous chain of books with varied authors, all of them taking a different approach to explaining how an album is important to them. I bought this with a batch of other 33 1/3 books, and this one is the weakest by far.

I began reading it and quickly grew tired - it isn't that Jeff Buckley doesn't deserve praise, but the third time I read "oceanic" regarding his vocals, it really started to grate on me. This book is less facts and much more a breathless rush of fawning adjectives. The writing veers into what reads like an intro college-level paper at times. By the end of the book, the author's adoration of him is evident, but little else has been gained.

This type of communication as to why an album is important to someone isn't a bad thing. Colin Meloy's (lead singer of the Decemberists) 33 1/3 book on the Replacement's Let It Be is almost exclusively a personal exploration of Meloy's life as a boy, gradually leading up to the inclusion of the album in his life. The resonance of why it means so much to Meloy is apparent in a much more graceful conclusion to his tale, as opposed to a constant blast of praise, over and over again, as this book practices.

There's a lot of feeling here, but no traction for it to move beyond that.

Jeff Buckley's music is a relatively new discovery for me, but within the last year I have become passionate about his music. This book is a guide through the "Grace" album--it provides wonderful insights into Buckley's musical influences, and how he has influenced other musicians. For most listeners, it should be easy enough to hear the Plant/Page influence on "Grace," but not as easy to pick up on the influences of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Edith Piaf, or some of the others discussed in the book. The song by song narrative was particularly satisfying if you are interested in the whole album, not just the most well-known song, "Hallelujah" (a Leonard Cohen cover that has turned up on a number of recent television shows, including "The O.C."). The author gives a brief etymology of the development of the music and lyrics of each song, relative to Buckley's own artistic journey (the title track is my favorite). If you want to know how and why Buckley wails as he does in strung out, pitch-perfect tones, you will find out here. In that way, the book reads like liner notes--but longer, more personal, and with footnotes. The evocative imagery of Jeff Buckley in the prime of his too-short life, performing in New York, and creating what would become his one and only masterwork, is what makes it a worthwhile read. On the strength of this book, I plan to read more of the 33 1/3 series.

I love this book and when I had time read it on Jeff buckley !
Great for Jeff Buckley fan on a good book to read !

For those who already love Jeff Buckley's album, or simply wish to enhance an appreciation of a certain line of rock music, this book will surely ring true.

However, if you don't like Jeff Buckley, or if you believe that a lot of writing about rock music (and a lot of rock music, for that matter) is not much more than an immature exercise in self pity and self indulgence--teenage tears set to music--this book will either prove virtually intolerable for more than two paragraphs...or provide the perfect kindling for your desire to look down on people who don't share your taste. It will make you angry.

The writing is the most self-indugent, feeling-driven drivel imaginable. The analysis of the music itself rarely rises above the "swirling guitar anthems echo endlessly and wrap themselves like a big warm blanket around the dizzying vocal syrup as I touch myself tenderly in this dark corner of my lonely room" variety that one would hope to encounter only in a college newspaper or the diary of a 15-year old goth chick.

Brooks places Buckley's music in the context of rock history and traces his influences, much in the fashion one would with a legitimate author (here, Brooks's literary training is a bit more evident). Well, whoopty doo. Everything has a context within the history of something--that doesn't make it worth paying attention to.

I was really excited when I saw this hoping I would get some behind the scenes info on the actual recording of "Grace." What I received instead was a rehash on information already available and the author's own thoughts. If this is the FIRST book you read about Jeff Buckley, you may like it. Most fans have already culled all the info they can on him, so this is not for them. This book is the author listening to CD's, reading other books, watching the videos and DVD and visiting the exhibit at the R&R Hall of Fame (all of which I've done) and talking about how great they were. Not a real exposition. There were some pretty big errors too (Jeff's borrowed Tele was NOT a Mexican Standard, but an early 80's American). Sorry to be such a downer, but this is not a book for a true Buckley fan, but a casual read for someone starting out.