How Jeff Buckley paid tribute to his estranged father and got his big break: “I nearly cried on stage”
The relationship between parents and children is a complex one. It’s only nature; it’s blood, bone, skin and genetics. The very fabric of a person is the fabric of their mother and father. So when that natural connection is strained, if the two become estranged, it’s an incredibly difficult and confusing thing to navigate. Now take that, and add in the detail of their estranged parent being a famous singer, haunting them from the radio after abandoning them as a child. That was Jeff Buckley’s reality, as he never really knew his father, Tim Buckley.
In his own words, Jeff Buckley was “rootless trailer trash”. Born in California, he only ever met his father once, briefly, when he was eight. Other than that, he was raised by his mother, who did the best she could to not only support the family but also encourage her son’s dreams. Even without his musician father’s input, Buckley was raised in a house of artistry and music. His mother was a trained pianist and cellist, and his step-father was perhaps the most influential of them all as he introduced the kid to artists like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Jimi Hendrix and the legends of rock.
It’s an easy thing to claim that Jeff Buckley followed his father into music. It would be easy to write some flouncy paragraph about how his interest in singing and music-making was born from some kind of spiritual connection between the child and the father he lacked as if Buckley only made music in an attempt to grow closer to his estranged parent. But it simply wasn’t the case. Tim Buckley died when his son was still only a kid, and Jeff Buckley didn’t really even know his father was anyone special until he was much older and his mother finally played him a few songs.
Even then, Jeff wasn’t really that interested in being connected to the man who had abandoned him. In an interview, when he was a breakout star making his own name known, he said adamantly, “We were born with the same parts, but when I sing, it’s me. This is my own time, and if people expect me to work the same things for them as he did, they’re going to be disappointed.” He made it clear that he was no ‘nepotism baby’ and that his career was his own, separated from Tim in every way except for the name.
But even if a big part of him truly felt and meant that, it doesn’t make it simple or easy to ignore the yearning any child would have for a parent they never knew. No matter how he tried to shrug it off, the two were tied together in blood, and he couldn’t ignore that.
In 1991, a tribute concert was organised to celebrate the work of Tim Buckley. The organiser, Tim’s former manager, Herb Cohen, made a bold move when he contacted Jeff and invited him to perform. Few Tim Buckley fans knew he even had a son. He wasn’t invited to the funeral or mentioned in obituaries, so his existence was a surprise, let alone his talent. With the offer extended to perform, Jeff grappled with whether to sing or if he even wanted to, clearly struggling between the various conflicting thoughts and feelings towards his late and estranged father. But in the end, he decided to say yes, telling Rolling Stone magazine, “It bothered me that I hadn’t been to his funeral, that I’d never been able to tell him anything. I used that show to pay my last respects.”
It was an emotionally taxing process. Up until this point, Buckley had barely even listened to his father’s music; it hurt too much. So learning the song ‘Once I Was’ in order to perform it meant confronting the legacy he’d avoided for so long. “It was hard to learn it. I couldn’t do a really full version of it at home without crying,” he said. It didn’t get any easier as he admitted of the performance, “I almost cried onstage.”
The subject of the song likely didn’t help. “And sometimes I wonder / Just for a while / Will you ever remember me?” Buckley sings on the course, likely holding a very different and devastated meaning to his son when those same words came out of his mouth, sending them to wherever his late father’s soul lay.
But despite the emotional difficulty of the performance, it was a triumph. Even though he was adament that his career was his own, it was this performance at his father’s tribute concert that put Jeff Buckley on people’s radars, announcing his talent to the world almost with the help of his estranged parent.
