During his 30 years, Jeff Scott Buckley lived many lives: suburban loner, music school misfit, west coast headbanger, New York chanteuse, rock and roll gypsy, Memphis dreamer, lover, poet, boozer, boss, dog stalker. There's no doubting that he was damaged goods – anyone whose father jumps ship even before you're born is bound to carry some heavy emotional baggage. So there was a darkness to his character, but he was also a goof who could seamlessly segue from a heart-breaking ballad to an impression of Robert Plant – at 78rpm, no less – all in the time it would take to reach the bar, buy a drink and return to your seat.

As incomplete as his life was – he took his fateful dip in the Mississippi literally hours before starting rehearsals on his second attempt to record a follow-up to Grace – Buckley lived an incredibly full life. Some even felt that he had a sense of his future, although others believe he had no death wish whatsoever. Regardless, the fact that he was wailing 'Whole Lotta Love' at the time of his fateful swim, one of his favourite songs from one of his favourite bands, only makes his demise more poignant and somehow pointless at the same time.

Jeff Buckley may be 10 years gone, but he's everywhere: his take on Leonard Cohen's stately 'Hallelujah' – a cover of a cover, as it turns out – has redefined the term ubiquitous. And almost every other modern band with a widescreen flair and a worthy singer – Radiohead, Coldplay, etc – readily confess to Buckley's influence on their craft. He may have only completed one album in his lifetime, but his musical legacy is immense. As U2's Bono once said, 'Jeff Buckley was a pure drop in an ocean of noise.'

This extract from Jeff Apter's new biography covers the period in Buckley's life when he was a regular performer at New York's semi-legendary Sin-E Club, the venue where his earliest recordings were made in 1993.

Café Days

A FEW years before Jeff Buckley took one look at Sin-E and announced, 'Dude, I'm fucking home', there'd been some big changes taking place in that beaten-up, downtown slice of New York City, especially amongst the expat Irish population. A severe recession back home in the early 1980s had driven thousands of Irish abroad. But these weren't the great unwashed that had been settling in America since the time of Jeff Buckley's great grandfather; a large proportion of this 'new wave' of Irish were skilled professionals: accountants, engineers, nurses and others. Lacking Green Cards, they formed a close-knit subculture, especially in New York, bonded by a fear of deportation. By the mid 1980s, an estimated 50,000 'undocumented' Irish lived in America.

Their lot improved substantially when an amendment was attached to the Immigration Act in 1986, which provided for 40,000 US visas to be issued over the following three years (these were known as 'Donnelly' visas, named in honour the congressman who introduced the act). The word spread quickly and some 16,000 of these visas were issued to Irish residents alone. Shane Doyle, the co-owner of Sin-E, was among these transplanted Irish. He'd come to New York in 1983 and had witnessed the influx of Irish into the city, and it seemed as though everyone with a Donnelly visa gravitated towards the venue he'd open on the site of a former art gallery (now a kosher deli) at 122 St Mark's Place in the East Village, during 1989.

'They cleared the decks for the Irish,' Doyle told me. 'All the Irish coming to town were a lot better educated than previously. And they weren't going to hide out; they were coming to do their own thing. They were getting legitimised.' Doyle, by his own admission, was no businessman. He might have taken out a lease on the Sin-E site, but he had no idea as to the type of business he was going to open there. 'There was no such thing as building permits or any of those things' – Doyle and co-owner Karl Geary possessed neither Green Cards or a liquor licence at the time – 'so we literally opened the door. I had no money. A guy from Ecuador, who liked the place, did all the electrical work. People would stop in and say, "What's it going to be?" I'd say, "I don't know – what do you think?" I tried to be inclusive.'

Gradually, this tiny coffee shop-cum-music venue became a must-visit for every Irish musician playing New York. On more than one occasion, Doyle would be stopped in the street and asked whether, say, the Hothouse Flowers would be playing Sin-E that night. He'd admit that he had no idea – and why were they asking? 'I saw them at the airport and they said so,' he was told. 'Well, I guess they are,' Doyle would reply, and the band would duly turn up and play. Such A-list Irish acts as U2 and Sinead O'Connor would always frequent Sin-E when they were in town; sometimes they'd get up and sing, usually on Doyle's encouragement. 'I really just facilitated things,' Doyle said. 'I'd never go near a microphone, I'd just be floating around all the time. And if I saw someone show up, I'd go out of my way to get them to do something.'

Even as the venue's reputation grew, Doyle and Geary didn't know how to capitalise on it, and weren't too sure that they actually wanted to. They were doing their best to stick with their original plan: that Sin-E would simply be a cool place to hang out. According to Mark Geary, one of the Sin-E faithful, a good friend of Jeff Buckley's, and the brother of the venue's co-owner, Doyle had created a venue to purely suit his own interests. 'It was a place to hang, especially for a guy [like Doyle] who wasn't a drinker and wasn't into clubbing. Where could I go? What could I do? Live music at a coffee shop with an intimate vibe was the answer.' Doyle, however, started to get a sense of the broader interest in the place when one of his regulars, a guy who was frequently scribbling in a notebook, and who always seemed intent on squeezing the very last drop from his one morning tea bag, introduced himself. He was Harold Goldberg, a reporter who was keen to write a story on Sin-E. He then asked Doyle, 'Do you know who's here?' and pointed out the editor of Sassy magazine and the photo editor from Rolling Stone. 'I was flabbergasted,' admitted Doyle. 'I didn't know about them.'*

Once writers started to profile this downbeat hole-in-the-wall, Doyle found himself selling more Sin-E T-shirts than coffees. 'That kept me alive,' he said. Only as the venue's star began to rise did Doyle investigate some kind of alcohol licence. 'I'd sell these two dollar cappucinos – and this was way before Starbucks – and no food. The Irish musicians who'd come and play there would buy a cappuccino, but they wouldn't touch it.' At the end of the night – and that could be as late (or as early) as five in the morning – Doyle would roll down the shutters, walk inside, and discover that the floor was littered with empty vodka bottles and half pints of whisky, which probably explained how all the players managed to get drunk on an untouched cup of coffee. 'The hustle,' said Mark Geary, 'was that you'd put whiskey in your coffee, and that's an Irish coffee. That's not liquor, you give that to kids.'

But even when Sin-E became a licenced joint, Doyle opted only for a beer and wine licence – and even then he'd only stock Rolling Rock, one of the cheapest and nastiest brews known to man. 'I didn't want to be serving six double vodkas or something and have to deal with it,' he said. 'People would come to the counter and order a vodka and orange, a vodka and cranberry and a Heineken, and I'd take the lid off three Rolling Rocks. That's the way it was.' In short, this deliberately understated yet incredibly vibrant slice of no-bullshit Irish culture was the ideal place for Jeff Buckley to work on his solo career. There's no doubt that his Irish roots – and his taste for alcohol – made assimilation that much easier, while he clearly identified with the spirit of rebirth that existed in New York at the time. 'That part of the American dream was still alive,' said Mark Geary. 'You can get off the plane in New York and go, "I'm a ventriloquist, I'm a pipefitter", whatever. And the beautiful thing about New York, and Jeff was included in this, was that it's a city of immigrants, and you're bonded by that.'

Another big attraction for Buckley was the bohemian spirit and tolerance that in 1989 could still be found in the East Village (even though it's now long gone, displaced by horrific real estate prices and what Doyle called the 'gentrification' of the city). Doyle recalled receiving an early morning visit from a disgruntled St Mark's Place neighbour, still in his pyjamas, who walked into Sin-E and pleaded with him to keep the noise down because he was due at work in a few hours. 'I said, "I'm sorry, I've got [the Pogues'] Shane MacGowan here." He said, "Is that him over there?" So he came in wearing his dressing gown, sat down and didn't go to work that day. That was the kind of people who were around then.' This was a place of writers, musicians, hustlers and actors. Some, like Buckley, were well on their way, and others were simply trying to get started. 'Everyone was learning when we got in there, Jeff included,' said Geary. 'Sin-E, in a way, was a bit like Sesame Street: you always knew who was going to be in there, there was always someone to chat to. And there were lots of insane nights, people like [Bruce] Springsteen turning up and playing because they'd heard about the place. It was a club like no other.'

St Mark's Place also hosted what could only be termed 'colourful local identities'. Sin-E's best known was Tree Man, so named for the strips of bark that he shoved down the front of his shirt and wore like some environmental badge of honour. He developed an interesting ongoing relationship with Buckley and the many other players who squeezed onto the area of floor that passed for a stage at Sin-E. Geary has vivid memories of Tree Man. 'He didn't consider himself homeless, as far as he was concerned he was a street carnival guy,' said Geary. 'He'd show up in the middle of the gig and ruin it for you, because he'd be bumming for change and at Sin-E you played for tips. It was tough to win the audience back after the fucker left.'* Jeff Buckley, as dutiful as ever, thanked Tree Man in the liner notes for Live at Sin-E. 'You'll never walk alone,' he drolly noted.*

Various theories exist explaining how Jeff Buckley began his Monday night residency at Sin-E in April 1992. One notion is that he was steered towards the venue by Daniel Harnett, a musician friend of Rebecca Moore's, who played in the band Glim. Buckley backed this up in an early WFMU interview, and also mentioned that Dorothy Scott, a regular performer at Sin-E, 'put in a good word for me'. (Buckley had dropped a copy of his Babylon Dungeon demo tape into Sin-E, but it's unlikely that Doyle played it. He tended to ask hopefuls to play something on the spot, completely impromptu, rather than endure demos.) Doyle, however, believes that it was Hal Willner, a Sin-E regular, who suggested to Buckley that he return to play at the venue he'd turned on its head during that one night with the Commitments' Glen Hansard. 'I guess Hal took a liking to the place because it was a little odd,' Doyle figured. 'It was Hal who suggested Jeff play there. Hal knew Jeff.' On one occasion, Willner brought Marianne Faithfull into the venue and she liked it so much she played there on three consecutive Thursdays. 'He knew lots of people,' Doyle understated.

Regardless of the circumstances, Buckley warmed to Sin-E immediately, even if it took some time for his following to build there. Buckley, however, shied away from playing too many originals during his two-hour slots, not that he had many to choose from, admittedly. Instead he peppered his sets with covers from Dylan ('Just Like A Woman', 'I Shall Be Released'), Van Morrison ('Sweet Thing', 'The Way Young Lovers Do'), Led Zeppelin, and such haunted songbirds as Edith Piaf ('Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin') and Billie Holiday, along with one-offs like his version of the haunting track 'Calling You' from the film Baghdad Café (a cover suggested by Rebecca Moore) and his own impressive take on the devotional chanting of his 'Elvis', Pakistani legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Buckley needed to be a fast learner to fill out his sets, but, as Janine Nichols revealed, he 'had a photographic memory for music'. He'd hear a song, and if he liked it, it was committed to memory almost immediately. 'After he broke up with Gary and started performing solo, he didn't perform any of his own material at all, for at least a year,' said Nicholas Hill. 'He was inhabiting other people's songs. He was finding his own voice within the music of others.'

And it was just prior to another Sin-E set that he was introduced to Leonard Cohen's stately, profound 'Hallelujah'; but it wasn't the Cohen original that Buckley soon worked into his set. He was taken by the John Cale version that appeared on the Cohen tribute I'm Your Fan. What grabbed him immediately was not the ballad's delicacy but its subtle profanity and its undeniable wisdom. 'Whoever listens closely to 'Hallelujah' will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth,' he once said. 'The hallelujah is not a homage to a worshipped person, idol or god, but the hallelujah of the orgasm. It's an ode to life and love.'*

But Buckley's lengthy Sin-E sets were as much about his witty asides and interplay with the few locals spread amongst the four or five tables, as it was the vast and varied collection of personal favourites (and the occasional original) he was singing. Wired on too many cups of coffee – he'd joke how friends dubbed him the 'William S Burroughs of caffeine' – and the occasional slug of wine, Buckley rambled at length about anything that crossed his mind, be it his musical heroes, the challenging acoustics in the venue, or his taste for Guinness, which he celebrated in a scat-based take on Van Morrison's 'Moondance'. ('It's a fabulous time for a Guinness / with the booze all about in your brain / the browwwwn liquor'.) Always up for improvisation, he quickly perfected an imitation of Sin-E's cappuccino machine, which became as much a part of his act as regular visitor Tree Man.

Sin-E, however, wasn't the easiest of gigs, as Mark Geary explained. 'In a subtle way, that was a very intimidating room,' he told me, 'because you were on the audience's level. Your job is twice as hard as playing a big club, with a PA and lights, where it's a show, you're the guy. But on a floor, with a shitty PA and no monitors, sitting in front of a guy eating the house salad at seven in the evening, that's very hard. Your job is to transcend all of that.' A few months into Buckley's residency, during another set for Nicholas Hall's The Music Faucet on WFMU, he echoed Geary's feelings about Sin-E. 'It's threatening. The thing I always wanted to do, before I left LA for the second time, was get in a space that was impossibly intimate, really up close, and Sin-E is like that, you're right in front of the people. Some people come to talk, some come to listen; sometimes there can be a lot of noise. It's a strength I really wanted to get into with my music, my singing, my playing – if I couldn't move people close up there was no point going any further. [But] I've got a lot of learning to do.'

What Shane Doyle lacked in business nous he made up for in observational skills: he could see early on how right Sin-E was for Buckley at this stage of his career. 'I don't know where else he would have had the same freedom,' he figured. 'He was totally experimental, you could see that. He'd be reaching for notes that he didn't even know existed, or that he could reach.' Leah Reid, who would soon get very close to Buckley in her role as Product Manager at Columbia Records, was also convinced this was the best possible place for him to master his craft. And it wasn't just about stretching his voice into myriad shapes and colours. 'Through playing at Sin-E he learned to adapt and not just get completely engrossed in the music. He'd look at the whole room as part of what he was doing. If someone in the crowd said something or did something he'd work it into a song or his between-song patter. As engrossed as he was with what he was doing he was also in tune with what was happening around him.' (Reid was watching a Buckley set at another downtown venue when the power failed. Undeterred, candles were lit at each table and Buckley continued, absolutely unplugged. She says that the half a dozen people in the room agreed it was one of the greatest gigs they'd ever witnessed.)

Mark Geary was one of many who noticed how easy it seemed for Buckley to slip between the sublime and the ridiculous during those early Monday night slots at Sin-E. 'When I watched Jeff... a lot of the songs would go on for 15 or 20 minutes and you could hear a pin drop. But he was also really good at telling stories; he was incredibly witty, a great mimic. He'd do a 15-minute bit on Robert De Niro, quoting him, the whole act. He'd do this thing where he played and he'd be killing the room and then almost in a self-deprecating, bring it back to earth way... it was almost self-mocking.

'I think that levity, that between songs stuff, was really what gave people a sense of what a star this was, because he had this amazing personality. With singers sometimes there's this terrible danger of getting into Celine Dion territory – it can be hell on earth, a total wank. But Jeff never fell for that; he could nail a song and still have this great stagecraft. And it wasn't a scripted thing, it wasn't a gimmick; Jeff just wasn't about that. There was a real bravery to have an audience hanging on your every word and then to throw out a gag. It was compelling.' Geary, who's released several high-quality albums himself, admits that Buckley remains a heavy influence on his own work, especially when playing live. 'I've always gone on stage as me and by the end of the show hope that I've revealed something about myself, where I'm coming from. It took me a long time to build up the stagecraft that Jeff had in spades. And it didn't look like he was trying.'

Photographer Merri Cyr, who'd first shoot Buckley in 1992, witnessed a darker, more belligerent side to Buckley's on-stage demeanour. 'He could be very challenging to an audience, too, he picked fights all the time,' she told me. 'But he could have been a comedian if he wanted to, some mix between Lenny Bruce and George Carlin: he could taunt people. I saw a couple of performances where guys were ready to thump him. It could be very stressful to watch. If he was singing and someone was being a loudmouth, he'd pick a fight with them.'

Buckley was also an enthusiastic punter at Sin-E. Musician and record producer Jack McKeever, another close New York pal of Buckley's, spotted him standing 'three feet from me and my band' while McKeever played at Sin-E one night. (Keep in mind that no-one really stood at Sin-E. This was a sit-down, sometimes even a fall-down, type of joint.) 'He just went into a trance while we played,' said McKeever. 'There was a lot of love and camaraderie between us [from then on].' McKeever recalled another time when there was some kind of technical hitch and Buckley started 'moving gear and amps, even though he was a shit engineer. That was him being a friend, he was such a solid guy. When he spoke to you he looked right in your eyes. He was so real, so great.' Buckley told McKeever that his mother had once come to watch him play at Sin-E and confided in him that they'd shared a joint afterwards. 'Who smokes dope with their mother?', McKeever wondered.

On another night at Sin-E, when Buckley was performing, something almost unbelievable occurred: he played a song of his father's (although no-one present can recall which one it was). Buckley recognised the significance of the moment, too, because he stopped for a moment and pleaded with the crowd not to record it, if anyone was considering it. Mark Geary, who was looking on at the time, thought it was odd, because 'Jeff was one of the hundred who might play Sin-E in any one week, and he's asking people not to bootleg. But cut to now,' he continued, 'and I wonder. But I remember it more because of what he begged people not to do, rather than the song itself.' Buckley hadn't gone anywhere near his father's music since the St Ann's Greetings show, so clearly this was an indication of his growing respect for Tim Buckley's music, if not his parenting skills. Geary, like so many others who were aware of the troubled Buckley family history, didn't push his friend for an explanation. 'It's like the guy who just got out of jail,' he said. 'You don't have that conversation. And there's a reason for that: Daddy happened to leave his voice and music with Jeff, but Daddy left. He was in a lot of pain, [he was] a suffering, struggling junkie. That was pretty heavy.'

1. Over the next few years, and after hundreds of performances of 'Hallelujah', Buckley, in his typically verbose way, fleshed out his explanation of the haunting ballad. 'It's not the bottle, it's not the pills, it's not the face of strangers who will offer you their lines and hot needles,' he stated on stage in Germany in 1995. 'It's not from the Bible, it's not from angels. It's for people who have been lovers. You are at last somewhere. Until then it's hallelujah.'
2. Regardless of his understanding of its message, the song would become irreversibly joined at the hip to Buckley, both during his life and for many years after.