How Jeff Buckley’s estranged father gave him his big break
The legend of Jeff Buckley still looms large over 20 years since his untimely death. Despite only releasing one studio album, Buckley left behind an incredible legacy and legions of devoted fans. With a unique and powerful voice, the Californian singer has a timeless quality to his music, but were it not for his estranged father, we may have never heard of him.
Jeff’s father, Tim Buckley, was a fantastic and well-revered singer-songwriter in his own right. With an illustrious career beginning with folk rock, Buckley soon began experimenting with psychedelia and the avant-garde. The songwriter, much like his son, had a captivating voice with a certain otherworldly quality to it. Over the course of his career, he witnessed some great mainstream success, particularly with the 1969 album Happy Sad.
Tim Buckley never had much of a relationship with his son. He had left his wife, Mary Guibert, before their son Jeff was born. Throughout his life, Jeff was estranged from his father, being raised as Scott Moorhead, taking his surname from his stepfather. The singer attested that he had only met his father once during his life, “I met him once when I was eight. We went to visit him, and he was working in his room, so I didn’t even get to talk to him. And that was it”, he said in 1993. In fact, when Tim tragically died of a heroin overdose at the age of 28, many people connected to the folk singer were unaware he even had a son.
Shortly after the death of Tim Buckley, a tribute concert was organised in his memory. Jeff was not even invited to his father’s funeral, something which the singer struggled to deal with, “It bothered me that I hadn’t been to his funeral, that I’d never been able to tell him anything,” he once told Rolling Stone. During the organising of the tribute show at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York, Herb Cohen, once the manager of Tim, mentioned Jeff’s existence to the organisers.
Jeff had already found his love of music. According to the singer, his love of music filled a hole that was left by the absence of his biological father, “It was my mother, it was my father. It was my plaything, it was my toy. It was the best thing in my life” he said in 1994. Despite Tim’s lack of presence in Jeff’s life, the songwriter seemed to have inherited a lot from his father, not least his incredible gift for writing and performing.
Cohen was aware of these gifts that the young Buckley possessed, and so he was invited to perform at the tribute concert in Brooklyn. Much of the show was reported to be pretty chaotic and lacklustre, with musicians like Richard Hell and Eric Andersen topping the bill. The indisputable highlight came when Tom’s son took to the stage to perform ‘I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain’. The song, from Happy Sad, is one of Tim Buckley’s most personal, dealing with his divorce and the abandonment of his unborn child. That child gave an unbelievably passionate performance of the track whilst backlit on-stage, giving the appearance of some kind of heavenly being. The gig gave Buckley a sense of catharsis, using the performance to express the complex emotions he felt towards his estranged father.
As well as allowing Buckley to deal with the loss of his absent father, the tribute concert also acted as a springboard for his musical career. After such an incredible set, Buckley was widely accepted into the musical circles of New York City, allowing him to start his musical career with a bang. In many ways, Jeff Buckley could be viewed as having eclipsed his father in the years since, but it was the death of Tim Buckley that gave Jeff his big break.
