After an intermission, and some last-minute backstage chatter and bucking up of one another, Coleman led off the second half with a strange atonal organ interlude. Gradually, Saturday Night Live

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After an intermission, and some last-minute backstage chatter and bucking up of one another, Coleman led off the second half with a strange atonal organ interlude. Gradually, Saturday Night Live pianist and guitarist Cheryl Hardwick and G.E. Smith, cellist Hank Roberts (with whom I had first worked when I produced Tim Berne for Columbia), bassist Greg Cohen (from Tom Waits's band), and finally Jeff and I climbed up onto the darkened stage and plugged in.

The lights came up, and the crowd gasped as they got their first look at Jeff—the spitting image of the youthful Tim Buckley.

We launched into 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,' a pounding, oceanic, ecstatic cri de coeur from Tim's Goodbye & Hello. Jeff furiously strummed his acoustic while I produced swooning seagull cries and whispers from my guitar using a glass bottleneck and my delay pedal, counterpoised against the whirlwind of sound whipped up by the ensemble.

Jeff started to sing, the lights threw his shadowed profile on the wall behind us, and the crowd went quietly berserk. I studied the faces I could pick out in the audience and watched their reactions intently as we played. It was obvious the majority of folk present were totally focused on, and transfixed by, Jeff Buckley.

And how ironic that his first utterance at his first major appearance in New York was a lyric that seemed to call into question his whole relationship with his father, an obviously troubled love/hate relationship—just as Tim's song had originally called into question his relationship with Jeff's mother and their young son.

Listening back now to my tape of Jeff's coming-out at St Ann's, I can easily see and hear him singing this song again, but this time, he is addressing the words directly to me:

I never asked to be, your mountain I never asked to fly

And there is this:

I'm drowning back to you

I can't swim your waters, and you can't walk my lands

And I'm sailing all my sins and I'm climbing all my fears And soon now I'll fly

The song ended to deafening applause. Jeff and company trooped offstage; I remained up there and Julia came out to join me. I quickly adjusted my guitar tuning, hit the tremolo'd slide intro figure, and brought forth the deep waters of 'The River.'

In the middle of this gutbucket blues, Julia unleashed her glottal cuckoo impression—like one of those whistles with a miniature bird perched on the end that warbles and changes pitch as you blow through the opening and press the tail down. And as we spun our spooky swamp trance, St Ann's momentarily morphed into a dense, moss-covered bayou.

We received much applause from the crowd. It was a high point of the show for sure. And then Julia left the stage.

Jeff came back out in the darkness. I started up the looped acoustic raga figure that introduced 'The King's Chain,' and suddenly it was just Jeff and me, united together. He began to sing:

I couldn't buy you with a hundred cattle

It felt so good to be up there, alone together, right up front with Jeff. It felt like two kids playing together with building blocks of music. Total ecstasy.

Just as we'd rehearsed, I wrapped up the song with a fuzzed-out guitar line mirroring the bluesy orchestral vamp that closes the song on Sefronia. My soaring, dizzying guitar loop faded away, and we went off the stage to massive applause.

Backstage, Jeff and I hugged each other, and I hugged Julia too— it was one big love-fest for a moment. Jeff, Julia, and I went hack out later to perform 'Phantasmagoria In Two,' joining an ensemble that featured Greg Cohen; Barry Reynolds and Chris Cunningham from Marianne Faithfull's band; and avant-garde vocalist Shelley Hirsch. I played minor-key soulful acoustic slide lines that swooped and curled around these sad, urgent voices—first Jeff, then Barry, then Julia, then Shelley—as the vocalists traded verses and united in close harmony on the choruses:

Everywhere there's rain, my love

Everywhere there's fear...

And then the flashbulbs started popping.

Off the stage again, and Jeff was absolutely on fire backstage, stalking the wings defiantly with his acoustic guitar, so eager to go out again and perform, jumping out of his skin like the first time we met.

He charged back onstage with his acoustic to sing 'Once I Was' by himself as an encore. He tore the place apart, singing and playing with such an intensity that he broke a string in the process—singing with a conviction and authority far beyond his years, inhabited not only by the ghost of Tim but by a mysterious ancient everyman soul that poured forth from him like purest honey.

And sometimes I wonder

Just for a while

Will you remember me?

The love in the room was palpable. People could not believe what they were witnessing and hearing. Heads were shaking in dumbstruck awe, smiles spreading everywhere.

And then Jeff left the stage again, and the ironic, post-modern impresario Hal Willner played Henry Mancini's famous Moon River theme over the PA as the audience slowly filed out of the church into thebalmy Brooklyn night.

Whatdid this schmaltzy film music have to do with Tim Buckley?

Not a whole lot, other than the fact that, yes, Tim was a dreamer who was "after that same rainbow's end"—just like everyone else on the planet.

I wondered if Hal had deliberately chosen this song to undercut the power of our performance of 'The River'—to take us down a peg or two. He seemed jealous and annoyed about our Columbia Records deal after we had passed on him as producer and had made a few put-down remarks in passing.

To this day, I do not understand him using this song as a capper on what had been a great night of music. I remember thinking something was very off as the audience left the church.

In the light of Jeff's subsequent drowning, Hal's choice of 'Moon River' to close the show is one more ominous momenta mori that haunts me still, all these years on—a chronicle of a death foretold.

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Дата добавления: 2015-11-04