Jeff Buckley is one of the great enigmas of music. In his lifetime he released only one fully realised album along with a few other recordings and the sketches for a new album My Sweetheart the Drunk, which was never developed into a proper album, because of Buckley’s untimely demise in the swift flowing currents of the Mississippi River in 1997.
Buckley is one of rock music’s great what ifs; like what kind of music would Jimi Hendrix have made if he had made it past 27 and what would the Beatles have sounded like if they had reformed in the mid-1970s.
Like those unanswered questions, just how Buckley’s career would have unfolded had he lived we simply can’t say. It is unlikely however, that he wouldn’t have been a major influence on peers and newer acts alike.
Early life
The film started appropriately enough with Buckley’s early life and how he “heard the whole of his person in the music”.
His mother accepted that she was a flawed parent but reminded us that nobody loved her more or better than Jeff.
Meanwhile Buckley staked his claim to making original music, by talking of how every human being has music only they can make. He also talked of the dislike he had for boxes, whether for people or music.
That Jeff Buckley would go on to make music, might seem natural, given that his father was the singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, but his father left his mother before Jeff was even born and the pain of the rejection by father never left Jeff, throughout the rest of his life.
Musical beginnings
Jeff is however, loved a lot by his mother, who encouraged him to follow his dreams, and it was soon cleat that they would involve making music.
And his influences were as wide as the ocean, from Judy Garland to Led Zeppelin, from Nina Simone to Nusrat Ali Fateh Khan, the Pakistani spiritual singer.
When he was still a young boy, Jeff was taken to see his father perform. His father took him home for a few days and left Jeff with a box of matches, with a short message on it. Not long after that meeting, Tim Buckley would die of a heroin overdose in 1974.
By this time, music had become of overriding importance to Jeff and we see a film of him singing and playing Roxanne by The Police at the age of 14 in about 1980.
Jeff developed his music and was then invited to play a tribute gig for his dad at a cathedral in Brooklyn, New York in 1991. He hesitated at first while people wondered if he would be any good. He eventually did appear and people soon saw how good he was.
It was said of Jeff at this time that he “drank up the world like a sponge and had a real lust for life”, a comment that would take on a certain poignancy as future events unfolded.
Sin-e and on to Grace
It would be at a small bar in New York, by the name of Sin-e, which could barely hold 30 people that Jeff was able to develop his talent, starting to write his own songs as well as covering a huge range of songs.
However, once word spread and he was signed by Columbia, the pressure began; the pressure of the recording contract and of having to write more original songs.
Grace came out in 1994 and was to many minds, including mine, a majestic album, where the originality of his song-writing and his voice, which carried over a range of four octaves showed the world just what Buckley was capable of.
Indeed, the album, gained high praise from David Bowie, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant among many other musical peers.
However, it was not immediately a huge hit in Bickley’s native USA as it was hard to put in an album category, with self-penned songs such as Lover Come Over, as well as covers of Lilac Wine, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and the Corpus Christi Carol.
This was the time of grunge and Grace seemed to act as a counterpoint to that strand of music. However, that didn’t stop Buckley building a firm friendship with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden
The pressure mounts
Insecurity unhappy with fame
To promote Grace, Jeff and his band went on a two-year tour, while the record company put increasing pressure on him for the second album while he still and owed them money. Soon it was that a fear of loss of artistic freedom with the label wanting a new record, mixed with elements of manic depression.
Jeff was finding it harder and harder to find a way forward, leading him to take a small house in Memphis. There he would work on new material and then call the band down from New York.
The end
So, it was one warm day in May 1997, just as his bandmates were touching down at the airport at Memphis, that Jeff decided to go for a swim fully clothed in the Wolf River , a slack water channel of the Mississippi River, while playing Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love on a boom-box. He never came out of the water alive…
As for what he might have gone on to achieve, Jeff Buckley could have gone on to make any music he wanted. He truly was a once-in-a-generation talent.
This was an honest and riveting portrayal of the immensely sensitive and gifted Jeff Buckley, an artist who shone brightly for far too short a time, and who should never be forgotten.
