Garland Jeffreys Was One of Rock’s Most Essential Voices. Where Did He Go?

I
n the late 1970s, many of music’s top tastemakers felt sure Garland Jeffreys would become the next big thing. Rolling Stone named him the “most promising artist” of 1977. The prestigious PBS program Soundstage predicted he would become “the next performer to lay claim to superstardom.” And powerful radio stations like New York’s WNEW-FM kept his songs “35 Millimeter Dreams” and “Wild in the Streets” in heavy rotation. The sound that drew all this praise was marked by vocals that recalled the sardonic cadence of Jeffreys’ close friend Lou Reed, matched to a theatrical blast of rock that brought to mind the work of another friend, Bruce Springsteen, had he grown up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn rather than his old stomping grounds in New Jersey.

So deep was the belief in Jeffreys’ talent in those days that, two decades later, he was still famous enough for the massively popular TV show Jeopardy to feature the title of one of his most acclaimed songs as the answer to a question. Unfortunately, the reaction of the show’s three contestants in 2000 revealed a sad disconnect: None of them showed any sign of recognition when his song was mentioned. “That tells you everything,” says the singer’s wife of more than 30 years and manager, Claire Jeffreys. “Garland was hot enough to have his song mentioned by Jeopardy’s writers, but not known by enough of the general public to get a single response.”

That sense of missed opportunity forms the emotional core of a new documentary about the star titled Garland Jeffreys: The King of In Between. The title refers both to Jeffreys’ musical style — an uncategorizable mix of rock, reggae, and soul — and to his identity as the mixed-race son of a Black father and a Puerto Rican mother who struggled to find his place in the overwhelmingly white world of ’70s and ’80s rock. That struggle became his most sustained subject, forming the basis of many of his most powerful songs. “I don’t know of anybody who has written about race as directly as Garland has,” Springsteen says in the documentary, which premieres at New York’s IFC Center on June 6 before arriving in select other theaters in the coming weeks. (The film will stream on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, and Tubi starting in August.)

Striking as the story of Jeffreys’ career may be, it’s been dwarfed in some ways by the dramatic events that have taken place in his life in the nine years since his wife began making the documentary. In 2018, the now 81-year-old musician began showing signs of dementia, a condition that has progressed to the point where he is now unable to care for himself and barely able to communicate. The daunting task of his care at their Manhattan apartment has fallen to his wife, with assistance from a home aide.

Despite that, she chose to leave his dementia out of the film she made. “I felt it would overwhelm the music and everything else about his life,” she says. Ultimately, she adds, she chose to talk about this with Rolling Stone to give full context to a tale that already touches on a host of hot-button topics.

Even today, years later, Jeffreys’ autobiographical style of songwriting remains remarkable. “Garland has been incredibly courageous in the particular way he has written about race,” says guitarist Vernon Reid, who played on one of Jeffreys’ albums in the Nineties. “He writes about it in a very intimate way so that what you hear in his songs isn’t like the work of anyone else.”

Jeffreys introduced his approach in the very first track off his self-titled debut album back in 1973. In the “Ballad of Me,” he described himself as “Black and white as can be…a freak in the family/Like a newborn child/With a frozen smile.”

As his lyrics suggest, Jeffreys’ family life was fraught from the start. His birth father left the family when he was just two. His mother, whom his wife describes as “high maintenance,” remarried a few years later to a man who beat Garland on a fairly regular basis for the smallest infractions. “His mother would tattle on him, saying ‘Garland didn’t sweep the stoop,’ and then his father would wallop him,” Claire says.  “That his mother, the person who’s supposed to protect him, would tell on him created in him a deep psychological distrust of people.”

More, she adds, “It made Garland into someone with a huge chip on his shoulder, both personally and professionally.”

Despite that, she says her husband’s childhood in Sheepshead Bay had many bright spots, some involving the family, others involving neighbors whom he would entertain by singing doo-wop on street corners in the style of his idol, Frankie Lymon. At seven, Garland started coming into the city for piano lessons. By his early teens, he snuck into jazz clubs in Greenwich Village to hear singer Carmen McRae (a distant relative) and sax work from Sonny Rollins (who later played with him in his PBS Soundstage performance). A few years later, his father made sure to send Garland to Syracuse University, no small feat for a man who made his main living waiting tables.

At Syracuse in the early 1960s, Garland met and quickly befriended Lou Reed, a fellow student there. The fact that Reed already wrote songs despite his limited vocal range inspired the more vocally adept Jeffreys to perform himself. Part of their bond came from their mutual ability to reflect the character of their birth city in their music. “You can hear New York talking in both of those guys,” says Laurie Anderson, who married Reed in 2008. “They’re both connected to the language of the streets. When they hung out, they would always riff on it and turn it into a song.”

After college, Jeffreys attended the Institute of Fine Arts in New York but dropped out to pursue music. In 1969, he played guitar on John Cale’s debut solo album, Vintage Violence, and, that same year, formed a band named Grinder’s Switch that were signed to Vanguard Records and performed at the Fillmore East. Their debut album was produced by Lewis Merenstein, who had recently overseen Van Morrison’s classic Astral Weeks.

Though the Grinder’s Switch album flopped, Jeffreys managed to get a solo contract with Atlantic. And while his sole release for the label — that 1973 self-titled debut featuring “Ballad of Me” — was another bomb, it got good reviews for a sound that favored folk-rock, blues, and reggae, a style that was just beginning to make an impact in the U.S. at the time. In an attempt to get attention for himself in that period, Jeffreys told some media outlets he was Jamaican. The lie revealed a flair for self-mythologizing already evident in his choice of a stage name: Born William Jeffreys, the singer chose to use his middle name, Garland, to sound more exotic.

Four long years passed before he got another record contract, this time with A&M. His 1977 debut for the label, titled Ghost Writer, featured a song called “Wild in the Streets” that was inspired by a horrific incident in the Bronx in which two teenage boys raped and murdered a nine-year-old girl.  “He was deeply affected by that story because it happened to children,” Claire says. “He always felt like a wounded child himself.”

“Wild in the Streets” earned lots of FM radio play and was later covered by the Circle Jerks in what became such a signature piece for the California hardcore punks that few of their fans know Jeffreys actually wrote it. It didn’t help that their version inverted its meaning entirely, turning it from a tragedy into an expression of joyous freedom. “Garland didn’t mind,” says Claire, who would go on to marry him in 1989. “No matter how someone interprets your song, it’s still an honor when someone covers it.”

Given all the hype behind Ghost Writer, including RS‘ “most promising artist” rave, Jeffreys took it hard when the album failed to sell. It didn’t help his cause, his wife says, that he frequently fought with his label. “He never felt like the label was doing right by him, even if they technically were,” she says. “He always came from a place of insecurity and distrust.”

Despite all the setbacks, Jeffreys continued to soar creatively, releasing notable albums like 1979’s American Boy & Girl, whose cover featured an image of an interracial couple, and which generated a huge hit in Europe with the song “Matador.” Stateside, Jeffreys continued to burn through labels, issuing albums on Epic and RCA.

His first effort for the latter label channeled all of his frustrations into a stirring 1992 concept album about race called Don’t Call Me Buckwheat. Its confrontational title was inspired by an ugly incident in the early ‘90s at a Mets game when someone in the crowd yelled at Jeffreys, “Hey Buckwheat, get the fuck out of here,” making reference to the Black character from the 1930s series Our Gang. To drive home the pain and poignancy of that, the album cover featured a photo of Jeffreys as a child dressed in his baseball uniform to attend the historic game in which Jackie Robinson broke the color line. One song on the album was titled “Color Line,” while another, named “Racial Repertoire,” discussed what’s known today as code-switching. “The way you speak in the neighborhood is different from the way you speak on the job,” Vernon Reid explains. “Garland wrote about that situation better than anyone.”

More daringly, Jeffreys wrote about his own internalized racial shame in “I Was Afraid of Malcolm,” with lyrics that found him struggling to accept Malcolm X’s message. “Malcolm was demanding an accounting, and Garland was terrified of what that would mean,” Reid says. “To face the truth of racism is a monstrous thing.”

While the album resonated in Europe, aided by strong support by a German record executive, it was buried in the U.S., once again reinforcing issues the singer had long faced as a Black rocker. In an interview I did with Garland in 2011, he talked about that. “I’m too Black to be white, and too white to be Black,” he said then.

“We faced the same issue in my band,” Reid says of his pioneering group Living Colour. “Black artists are not considered in the rock field.”

At his most frustrated, Jeffreys resorted to painting his face Black, while also creating blackface masks to wear on stage. “He knew that could be controversial,” his wife says. “But he felt he had to do something.”

Reid considers Jeffreys’ blackface move to be an “act of self-lacerating performance art. He was forcing the issue while also forcing the audience to face their own complicity in the situation.”

Jeffreys’ lack of success in the States ultimately left him without a recording contract in his home country for nearly 20 years. When he finally returned to recording with The King of In Between in 2011, the album appeared on his own label, Luna Park. Critics raved. Again, audiences remained aloof.

Undaunted, Jeffreys continued issuing new work through 2017 with 14 Steps to Harlem. Two years later, he announced his retirement, though his wife thinks he should have stepped back sooner. “He had been faltering in live performances for quite a while, forgetting lyrics or telling a story that was meandering,” she says.

Her initial suggestion to stop didn’t go over well. “It was definitely a case of killing the messenger,” she says. “It was really rough because performing was so important to him — way more important than success.”

Eventually, however, not only did Jeffreys come to accept retirement, he began to appreciate the level of success he had achieved by re-centering his focus on the quality of the work itself. For the documentary, Springsteen offered the most laudatory summation of Jeffreys’ talents. “He’s in the great singer-songwriter tradition of Dylan and Neil Young,” Springsteen said, “one of the American greats.”

Spreading the word on that was the main impetus behind Claire Jeffreys making the documentary, but it took some convincing to get her husband to go along. “At first, he was ambivalent because it brought back all of those hard feelings,” she says.

Despite his declining health, Jeffreys was able to appear during much of the filming. Eventually, though, his wife had to jump on screen to speak for him. Relieved as she is to finally get the film out, it pains her to know that her husband may be unaware of either its release or its reception. Regardless, she believes his story has a silver lining.

“Ultimately, this is a story about perseverance,” she says. “When each of us gets older, we realize that certain dreams of ours haven’t been fulfilled. I hope this film helps people to accept what they have achieved, as Garland eventually did. Despite all that he faced, his has been a life well lived.”