How one sparkly jacket shaped Jeff Buckley’s career
When Jeff Buckley first launched his music career, a world of expectations he didn’t ask for and didn’t want fall heavy on his shoulders. In blood, he was the son of Tim Buckley, and no matter how many times he said it, no one seemed to listen to the fact that, in spirit and in history, he really wasn’t at all.
The relationship between Tim and Jeff Buckley is such a fascinatingly tender, and complex one that it has been picked at over and over for years. It’s tricky because really, that’s the last thing Jeff would have wanted, but in spite of that, the connection between these two artists is one that the music world can’t seem to leave alone.
Jeff Buckley was both blessed and cursed in a variety of different ways. He was blessed because of his father and the natural musical talent that seemed to come down that bloodline, granting him a voice with a range like no other.
But he was also cursed because his father was famous, so he took up the airtime. In interviews, Buckley insisted that really, all of his musicality came from his mother and from the influence of her singing around the house and her record collection. He would remind people again and again that he didn’t even really know his father, stating, “He left my mother when I was six months old… So I never really knew him at all. We were born with the same parts, but when I sing, it’s me”.
With the spotlight on who his father was, any complexity to his position on their estrangement was public. Jeff’s decision to sing at a memorial for his father, marking the first time he ever performed one of Tim’s songs publicly, makes a lot of sense on a personal level when you consider the child just trying to make peace with the loss of the parent they never knew, but who left art behind. Obviously, though, the sudden emergence of Tim Buckley’s son with a sound that could beat the legacy of his father was a career blessing that launched him, though tainted by the enduring comparisons and conversations.
Throughout his career, Buckley worked hard to distance himself from the constant connection to his father. In one interview, he quipped that the only thing he ever got from his dad was “people who remember my father”, painting Tim’s fans who lingered around his career as a weight he didn’t want.
Musically, though, there was little connection, as Jeff Buckley was a child of the rock and roll world who liked Led Zeppelin above everything else, and he was also an eclectic fan of French singers like Édith Piaf or legends like Nina Simone. He wasn’t a folk artist, and as he released Grace, a lot of the decisions made on how he’d present himself seemed to come from a place of defiance against that.
For the clearest example, look towards his jacket.
On the cover of the record, Buckley is dressed in a gold sequin jacket. “It’s the first thing that he bought for himself when he got his first ‘real’ chunk of money. It was at an upper-priced used clothing shop that specialises in clothes worn by celebs in movies,” Buckley’s friend Inger Lorre said of the jacket. Specifically, this is said to have had Judy Garland’s name stitched into it, taken from some costume department. That alone feels like a perfect homage to Buckley’s broad influences, spanning from a world so far beyond his father.
It’s feminine and theatrical, and in an age where ambiguity was still shunned, his label even tried to fight against the outfit, wanting him to wear something more masculine or angsty. They probably would have preferred him to be wearing a simple shirt, like his father did on his album covers, but Jeff was clear.
However, as Grace didn’t perform the way the label hoped, they genuinely wondered if it could be chalked up to that jacket and the pop star-like image of Buckley on the cover. Though it matches his spirit perfectly, has it ever really quite matched the music? And would that have stopped listeners back in the ‘90s from giving Buckley the fame and career he deserved but never got when he was alive?
