The human voice, as we all know, is as much of a musical instrument as any other instrument. But Jeff Buckley Had a voice that was so breathtaking, so ethereal rising, so to reach heaven in his virtuosity that it is as if he had received a different instrument than everyone else in pop and rock. Not because he was not deeply affected. He had a four-Octav interval, and as he rose in the upper registers, with the Theremin Wail and the incredibly fast Vibrato, he sounded as his biggest idol, Nina Simone, crossed with his second biggest idol, Robert Plant, crossed With the most suffering angel god had ever committed.
In “It’s never over, Jeff Buckley,” Amy BergRectarous documentary about Buckley’s extraordinary rise in the 90s and his tragically cut short life, we hear Buckley sing in every conceivable context: in clubs, at stadions, in the recording studio, and when he just sits. And when we drink in the majesty of his voice, the movie puts a paradox about him that is not almost as obvious if you just listen to “Grace” (1994), the only album he ever released.
When you imagine the decisive Jeff Buckley sound, you tend to think of one of his slower, meditative driving numbers – who, famous, his cover version of “Hallelujah,” which is so enchanting in its consideration that he seems to weigh and burn every word . It is Buckley who first wowed small audience at Sin-ie, East Village Hole-in-the-Wall arena (it sat 30 to 40 people) where he was discovered. Someone reminds that when he played at Sin-ie you could hear a pin drop.
But Buckley was as much of a rock ‘n’ roller as he was a hipster -chanteuse. In the documentary there is a clip where someone asks him what his influence is, and he says: “Love, anger, depression, joy … and Zeppelin.”
He did not charge. Robert Plant sang high because he followed the tradition of Black Blues singers who sang in women’s intervals as a form of empathy and seduction. Of course, Plant also used the keen high tones to express an appetite for destruction. With Buckley his sound was even more layered. There was a side of him who wanted to sound like a woman – but he also wanted to sing like the 70s metal god whose voice was a pure claim of male power. When Buckley sang slowly, he lost and hypnotic, but when he placed that voice on top of an up-tempo Rock ‘n’ roll song (which, say, the title track for “grace”), the result was every piece as transcendent. He came up in the grunge era, but he expressed something very different: a abandon It was lyric.
Jeff Buckley, during the time he was alive, was considered a cult rocker, a kind of “musician musician.” In the movie there is a quote from David Bowie that says he thought “Grace” was the biggest album ever made. We see pictures of time Paul and Linda McCartney went to visit him backstage. And what the documentary captures, I think, is that Buckley was about to become an astonishingly huge star. I defy you to see “It’s never over, Jeff Buckley” and don’t fall in love with Jeff Buckley’s voice. When the movie is over, you want to find a way to go back and save him to let him live the life he should have.
But in May 1997, Buckley drowned, who had moved into a shotgun in Memphis (he was still recovering from three years of tournament), in the Wolf River. Which tends to be the case when a rock star dies out of the blue at the age of 30, many people in the conclusion jumped that drugs were involved. But in fact, as the Toxicology report revealed, Jeff Buckley had a beer in his system and no drugs. His death was not a “drug casualty.” And so it was called a tragic accident. The film also officially takes that point of view. Still, if you look closely at the story it tells us, what you see is that Jeff Buckley’s death had a strange and haunting outline for it.
What Amy Berg, the big documentary that did “deliver us from Evil” (2006) and the definitive Janis Joplin movie, “Janis: Little Girl Blue” (2015), accomplish in “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is to take With Jeff Buckley alive as the insanely charismatic sprouting rock star he was, but also to color in the ground in his life that lent it an almost mythological aura. Skinny and raw-legged, with dark eyes and a razoric grin, Buckley was a real James Dean-the type of glamorously booked rock star they don’t do anymore, and he may have been the last of the breed. These are the types of people we look up to as gods and see them as glamorous, motionless, iconic in their beauty and slouching uprising.
But Buckley had demons. His father was Tim Buckley, the talented eclectic late 60s, who ditched Jeff before he was even born. Jeff grew up by his mother, Mary Guibert (who is one of the film’s executive producers), which may not sound like the unusual situation, except for the way Tim Buckley was not there and there. He was a famous musician, who had willed Jeff his talent if not his love. He hovered in the background and in the air and made Jeff feel that his father was a ghost that haunted him.
In the movie, Mary reminds that the first time she heard Jeff Sing was when he was still in a pool. Jeff says he heard Diana Ross version of “Ain’t No Mountain High enough” and that was it, he was gone. Obsessed with music. We hear about how Mary took the young Jeff to see Tim playing once, and he finished spending a week with his father. But then he was sent back by himself on a bus. And Tim, with his own demons, died of an overdose of heroin in 1975.
In 1991, when Jeff was 24, he agreed to perform, along with a number of other artists, in a musical tribute to his father held in St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn. He did it reluctantly and did not want to stand out. But his voice called in that church to the point where he stole the show. Very musical royalty was on hand, and he passed away with 60 business cards. The music world wanted him, and why not? He was already on his way to becoming a bigger artist than his father.
He did not try to be famous (although there is a way that you cannot be a famous artist without wanting to be). As the film shows us, his gigs at Sin-ie were low-key, unpretentious, with the sound from the espresso machine in the background. Yet he became a sensation. Died by record label, he signed with Columbia, the safe home to Dylan and Springsteen, and made “Grace”, an album that consisted of original material apart with some of the cover versions that had become his brand.
When “Grace” was released, in August 1994, not only launched Buckley’s career, but in a way, his identity, he had made the decision to put his father behind him. On the question of whether he continued Tim’s legacy, he would reject the comparison; He was his own musician. But when we drink in Jeff Buckley through the archive material – the photographs and especially the 90’s video films – which Berg has gathered with her usual transfixing ability, and through the nicely sincere interviews she presents by two of her most prominent romantic partners and muses, Rebeca Moore and Joan Wasser (both musicians), we’re starting to get submerged in a story unlike someone else in rock. Buckley looked, and in many ways acted, like an essential rock star, and when he went on the “grace” tour, the audience fell around the world for him. But his voice was not just a majestic instrument – in a real way, it tells the story of who Jeff Buckley was.
Buckley’s intense identification with singers like Nina Simone and Edith Piaf – and his ability, almost unknown in a male singer, to evoke his artistry – was about the music he loved, but it also wore a psychological component. He was in trolley against what he saw as women’s foremost. His every rising remark was a tribute to their majesty. At some level, this aspect was formed by him by the father who had abandoned him. He loved women and did not trust men.
But what about his own male energy? He was a wonderful icon of rock star, but he had a deep ambivalence about his own male spirit. He happened to be, but he was also, while not a grunge rocker, part of Kurt Cobain generation. Cobain, who sometimes wore dresses on stage, had a relationship with his own masculinity that was so self -critical that I would claim that it bordered the masochistics.
In many ways, these young male rockers were before their time. The sought after the future of being female. But when we look at the documentary, what happens to Jeff Buckley in the last part of his life at once mysterious and patterned. He becomes the subject of mood swings and reckless behavior, to the point that the theory is moved that he may have been bipolar, or even had a psychotic break. It’s all assumption; We never know. But what the movie shows us – and this is not assumption – is that during the weeks before his death he made a series of phone calls to many of the people he knew, and what he did in these conversations, one after it, was to apologize and seek closure; It sounded like he said goodbye. Mary Guibert plays us the last voice message he has ever left for her, and there he also seems to pay tribute to his mother with an eerie final. There is a clip in the movie by Jeff who chats with his friends, and when the subject comes up where he thinks he will be in ten years, he draws a strange type of empty. He says he can’t imagine it.
The most in -depth aspect of Jeff Buckley’s death, and this was caught in David Brown’s brilliant book “Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley,” is that the very fact, it died for young, rhymed, in a karmic way, with his father’s death. I don’t think Jeff’s death was a suicide, but it was an outgrowth of his ruthless behavior (no one swam in the Wolf River). So maybe, at some level, Jeff played his cavalrer’s attitude to his own masculine spirit.
But he also did something else. Jeff, James Dean Rock star who worshiped Robert Plant, sought after to wore their own male energy. He did not want to distrust it. And what that means is that he wanted to love the father who had left him. So in the end, what he did was reflect Tim’s abandonment – in the world and by Jeff. Jeff Buckley was a sublime artist, and his death was a tragedy, at human level and for rock culture. But part of the tragedy is how difficult it is to escape the feeling that Jeff Buckley died so that his father could love him.
