hey i think i told you when i was 23, and working at kinkos on 12th and university, and ostensibly here to play the drums, i was already into walking around haphazardly on the streets after work to see if i could sniff out what was happening, and that is how, i think i told you, wandering around, i found this cafe that there used to be back then, this cool little cafe on saint marks place on the south side between A and first. it had two bays of kinda wide-ish windows with a door in the middle. it was shabby-chic simple east-village style and there was an anomalous heavy sheet of brushed iron on the left wall that said "Sin-é" in cut out letters.
so when i went in there were these two irish longhairs sitting at one of the like 8 tables in the place, looking like they owned the place, which i later found out that they did. and there was this pretty, sad-looking tough girl with frizzy blond hair working the coffee machine, really mellow. it was still light outside so i got myself a cappuccino and a beer and sat down, and i tried to look available for conversation, which didn't work, but eventually the longhairs paused and looked at me and gave me an in, and i asked what was going on that night and this gaunt guy with long stringy grey hair around these supersharp eyes looked at me for a second and said "Ah, it's good music tonight. jeff buckley. y'heard of em?" and i said definitely not. and this younger dude who kind of had robert plant hair, who was similarly quiet and precise, said this jeff guy was tim buckley's son, and that didn't ring a bell either.
but i hung around alternating coffee with beer until it got dark, and
eventually there were maybe 20 or so people, mostly the kind of office women who think they know what's up, sitting in there drinking either cappuccino or beer or wine, that's all the cafe had. and then finally a thin guy in a white wife beater walked in, sat down at a table where there already were some people, and talked to them while he took out his telecaster guitar and tuned it real casually, leaning back and talking, and everybody else in the place was talking too, it was not like a starstruck thing cause he was unknown, but people were definitely more psyched since he was there. after his conversation he stood up and plugged the guitar right into the p.a. system, there was no amp in the place, and started doing a little fingerpicking, like he was just fucking around. but he kept it going and then after a few minutes, he stepped up to the mic, sort of looking like he was now seriously in the zone, and started singing, and it was real nice and delicate. for the next like 10 songs everybody shut up real tight and all you could hear was the occasional steam exhaust from the coffee machine, and breathing and little talking and stuff between songs. the songs were long and he stretched them out with really relaxed and pretty fingerpicking on the guitar. more people arrived little by little, but not too many. i didn't move from my seat.
so at the end of the night, the place was pretty hopping, and i gave the irish dudes and the blonde girl the salute-bow of respect, and i decided right then and there i would definitely come back almost every week for many months, and I did and it was each time kind of a different revelation. i've seen all the jeff buckley music videos but they seem to have all been made more self-consciously- and i especially don't recognize the experience cause the music changed with the backing band, and all these videos were made after I moved back to virginia.
but finally today this video appears on an english newspaper's site, and it's the only one i've seen that shows what he sounded and looked like standing upin that really small cafe. I think it's maybe not even a lipsync, i think it's a straight up filmed performance of the song. he really did sound just like that, i think he maybe had a chorus pedal or something between his guitar and the p.a. board, but nothing else, it was just eq'd.
turns out the coffee girl was from hungary - this was 1992 and she was really on kind of an adventure with no plan B - and eventually i asked her out because i saw her like 3 times a week and she was unstandably pretty and mysterious. her name was marianna. she told me not to mess with her, she said i seemed nice but she thought she would probably break my heart, i hadn't experienced the things she had.
yeah.
http://music.guardian.co.uk
written by Andrew Nimmo
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