Jeff Buckley was more than just a rock’n’roll tragedy

Stevie Chick, The Independent

Though his 1993 debut Grace enraptured critics on its release, Jeff Buckley didn’t score his first hit single until a decade after his death. His cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” began its curious afterlife scoring The West Wing’s momentous 2002 season finale, becoming a standard sung by buskers and TV talent-show hopefuls alike, before eventually being released as a single in 2017. “Hallelujah” saw Buckley embraced by a new, more mainstream audience who imagined him simply as some swoonsome moody crooner who’d died too young. But, as Amy Berg’s new documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley explores, he was much more than just another handsome rock’n’roll tragedy.

“Jeff was a glorious weirdo,” says Berg, whose movie dives beneath the heartthrob surface to deliver a powerfully intimate portrait of the late troubadour. “I didn’t want Jeff to feel as if he walked on water. I wanted him to feel real and human and flawed, and some of the people in his life revered him in such a way that it was hard to see that. But I was able to peel those layers back and find this quirky guy that loved to make jokes, and make people laugh, and find his way through a crowd with humour and performances.”

In early 1992, shortly after relocating to New York from his native California, Buckley began a regular Monday night residency at an East Village café named Sin-é. “I’m a ridiculous person,” he’d confess to the patrons, during solo performances that detoured through Buckley originals and covers of songs by artists as diverse as Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin and qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And perhaps Buckley was ridiculous, but through these performances he attracted squadrons of thirsty A&R execs. The one who signed him, Columbia’s Steve Berkowitz, saw Buckley in the lineage of the label’s roster of legends: “Dylan... Springsteen... Buckley.”

But Buckley wasn’t interested in being anyone but himself. At Sin-é, he referenced rock’s canon only to reinvent it, stretching Van Morrison’s “The Way That Young Lovers Do” into 10 unhinged minutes of locomotive rhythm, jazz vocalese and combustible horniness. He was just as likely to lend his quicksilver vocal to Billie Holliday’s lynching requiem “Strange Fruit”, summon the gospel anguish of Ray Charles’s “Drown in My Own Tears”, or locate the spectral magic within the theme from Eighties arthouse movie Bagdad Café. He was bold, fearless and joyful in everything he did.

And he’d ensured he could be his complete, genius self on his debut album, Grace. “The word on the street was, Jeff had got the best record deal going at that time,” says Berg, who worked in the music business at that time. The money was nice, but, Berg underlines, “what made it so good was Jeff had complete creative control”.

Even so, Buckley would endure a bumpy ride through fame. He’d already bristled at the focus on his looks during early media coverage of the Sin-é shows, griping drily to the faithful one night, “I don’t look like Matt Dillon, do I? I’m sick of it.” He particularly hated comparisons to his late father, folk maverick Tim Buckley. “I can't help it if I sound like him,” he told Puncture magazine in 1994. “My voice has been handed down through the men in my family for generations.” Buckley met his father only once, when he was seven, in 1975; a fortnight later, Tim was dead of an overdose. Jeff wasn’t invited to the funeral, but 16 years on he accepted producer Hal Wilner’s request to perform at a 1991 Tim Buckley tribute concert in Brooklyn. He’d previously refused to cover any of his father’s material, but that night he sang “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain”, which Tim had written about leaving Jeff and his mother. Jeff was the hit of the show, though his relationship with his father’s legacy remained complex. “I’m convinced part of the reason I got signed is because of who I am, and it makes me sad,” he told The New York Times in 1993.