i've always been wilfully out of step

I've always been wilfully out of step. I've always been on the outside. The only thing that came out and I liked immediately was Patti Smith. I got on to it right when it was happening. First time I saw her I was faking off from school for the 17th time and she was on the Mike Douglas show, just after the soaps on daytime TV - very mellow, very staid. Radio Ethiopia had just come out and there's Patti Smith with no shoes and just smacked. Dirty, black-soled feet and just from looking at the TV you could smell her. I know that tour look. She was like a wild animal.

Jeff Buckley - Mojo Magazine - 1994

i appreciate that, and i'm happy

I'll always be a slobbering idiot for people I love: 

The Grifters, Patti Smith, the new Ginsberg boxed set, MC5 totally pulled out that one. I listen to Sun Ra. I listen to Kiss. Anything. Led Zeppelin. Bad Brains. Shudder to Think. Tom Waits. Lou Reed. De Niro.
And Dylan. 

People who have had an actual life, have come through flame after flame, either on their own flame, or other flames of people hating them, or completely elevating them to god status, and them still being around. The last two things Dylan did are great. He is beautiful still. I appreciate that, and I'm happy. He hasn't lost any of his...shock.

Interview with Toby Creswell for Juice Magazine - February 1996

he exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain

In the beginning of March, Robert got a temp job as an usher for the newly opened Fillmore East. He reported for duty in an orange jumpsuit. He was looking forward to seeing Tim Buckley. But when he came home he was more excited by someone else. "I saw someone who's going to be really big," he said. It was Janis Joplin.

....

We didn't have the money to go to concerts, but before Robert left the Fillmore he got me a pass to see the Doors. I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison. Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. 

He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert.

 "Just Kids" by Patti Smith.

Copyright © 2010 by Patti Smith.

Published  January 19, 2010 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

i dont recognize anything that doesn't recognize a bloom

  JF: It's the same thing we were talking about before -- it's conventionality, western music, pitch, being in tune.

  Jeff: Exactly. I don't recognize that sensibility at all. I don't recognize anything that doesn't recognize a bloom. You were talking about Anne Sexton and her rhythm. The thing missing from your written poetry is [points to his chest] this, the body that gives it meaning and shoots it out into the air.

       Poetry comes from the people who make it; the books are just books, blueprints. 

Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, all dark, all romantic. 

When I say "romantic," I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn't know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad.

 It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song.

        And there's that pretentious label we were talking about before. 

People say, "Why dress it up? It needs to be a song. Why all this froo-froo stuff?" Well, why art? Why painting? Why sculpture? It seems as if the world has done away with art altogether, any concern or any relationship with it. So many easy things seem to be over the public's head. But really, if they just came at it a certain way, it would hit them right in the guts; it's so easy.

        Smith's and Dylan's and Cohen's power lies in their ability to tell that story so well, and all the stuff on Blonde on Blonde and on [Smith's] Horses and Radio Ethiopia and [Cohen's]Songs From a Room, even Death of a Ladies' Man, which is a sleazy-ass album; it's a real jewel, for someone to be able to sing that, to say that. 

       Dylan had no ornamentation whatsoever. He had pure feel and pure language coming out of him, and that did all the work. He had such affectation! 

[starts imitating Dylan singing "Visions of Johanna"]

2-29-96 - DoubleTake Magazine Interview, by Josh Farrar

I have no concern for the fear of music

Steve Harris: Actually it now occurs to me that the one negative thing that I read about you was a review of a concert, it said up to the end it was magnificent, then you did the long version of Kanga Roo then it sort of  turned off that particular viewer--

Jeff Buckley: --Which uh, was it the London was it with the--

Steve Harris: I think it was the New Music Express

Jeff Buckley: Can I say something? This is not bragging; every fucking person that was in front of me at the beginning of the show that I saw - and I'm aware of my audience - was still there, and we, the place was silent while we were playing Kanga Roo.

He just got impatient. He just doesn't care. That's cool. Or he thinks that songs should be longer than you know three minutes. Or I don't know maybe he just plain thought it was bad but that was one of the best Kanga Roos we ever played.

Oh, it was the first time it ever happened like that.

But that's okay, some people think that, you know, Patti Smith is a fake. Some people thought James Dean was a fake. Who knows? It's art. But we had a good time. We played some really stinky Kanga Roos though. Some of those've been 12 minutes. It's hit or miss, and thats well, that's the whole point you know. It could happen, it could not. We don't know what's going to go on, that's the thing with that song, we don't know what's going to happen ahead of time. We don't plan that shit out. It's pure interaction; I'm leading it and maybe there might be some text that I make up or text that I've mast over a few days or maybe I sing it all, and it's mostly, it's suppose to be Matty propelling the rhythm with the drums but uh lots of reviewers are you know waiting for this "perfect show". But that's because they've got their own expectations all over it. And I have no concern for that, or I have no concern for the fear of music.

INTERVIEW

this interview from 1994 is amazing.