“Jeffrey, great kid”: Tim Buckley talks about his son and the state of music in 1969
Jeff Buckley was never fond of being referred to as “Tim Buckley’s son.” The similarity of their soulful, five-octave voices not withstanding, any influence from one generation to the next—Tim, the jazz-folk hippie of the 1960s; and Jeff, the grunge-adjacent crooner of the ‘90s—was purely genetic and nothing more. That’s because Tim Buckley, even before his sad drug-related death in 1975 at the age of 28, was almost entirely absent from his son’s life during the eight years they shared on the planet.
This makes it partly tragic, partly touching, to hear Tim Buckley make a rare, brief reference to a then two-year-old Jeff in a 1969 conversation with the New York Times. “Yeah, Jeffrey. Great kid. He’s in a Montessori school in LA. I’m not sure I ever want him to go to regular school. It took me almost two years to throw away all those patterns they lay on you in school, but I was fighting it all the time.”
Tim Buckley was only 22 years old at this point, but he was already a divorced father and a touring singer/songwriter with three studio albums under his belt. That third album, Happy/Sad, would prove the most successful of his career, breaking into the top 100 on the US album charts. But with several songs clocking it at over seven minutes, it had also gently warned his admirers that he had no interest in traditional radio pop stardom. His reference points, by now, were people like Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk, and indeed, each subsequent record would veer further toward those avant-garde waters, sometimes to great effect, sometimes decidedly not.
“Rock musicians are businessmen,” Tim explained. “The focus is more on clothes than music—you change your clothes every day, ride around in limos and airplanes and you never see the ground. It’s like a thing Woody Guthrie said—when you’re not living with the people, something wrong happens.”
Ironically, one of the people Tim Buckley wasn’t living with was Jeff Buckley, who grew up as self-described “trailer trash” in Orange County, California, raised by his mother, Mary and a stepdad, Ron. It was the latter who had a much bigger influence on Jeff’s eventual music taste than his biological father ever did, introducing him to the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and The Who while generally skipping the more self-indulgent, drug-damaged jazz-folk genre altogether.
While Tim Buckley might have seen his son “Jeffrey” on a few occasions around the time of that NYT interview in 1969, Jeff Buckley himself would later recall only one in-person meeting with his estranged father, around 1974 (Jeff would have been no older than eight). Tim would be dead by the following year.
By the time his own debut studio album, Grace, came out in 1994, Jeff Buckley was already well on his way to eclipsing his father’s success many times over, and soon, journalists even stopped asking him about the semi-famous folk singer he’d barely known. In some ways, this would add even another layer of tragedy to Jeff’s shocking drowning death in 1997. Not only was the world denied a chance to see what this remarkable artist, who was only 30 years old, had in store for the rest of his career, but Jeff Buckley would also now be permanently linked, once again, with his father; another brilliant artist who died too soon and left behind only a small sampling of what he was capable of—both as a singer and as a parent.
