‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’ Pays Tribute to One of the Greatest Singers Ever
It’s extremely hard not to gush over Jeff Buckley. An Adonis with an four-octave range, the singer-songwriter had the sensitivity of an early-Seventies folkie, the melody-meets-muscle rock chops of an early-Nineties grunge practitioner, and a frontman sex appeal that was timeless. He counted Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Led Zeppelin, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as his musical influences, and could replicate their vocal stylings to an uncanny degree. Having moved from Orange County, California, to New York City, Buckley began playing guitar and singing cover songs at the Lower East Side cafe Sin-é. Soon, he introduced his own original compositions into his set, and record-label reps began frequenting his shows in bulk. His 1994 debut, Grace, instantly established him as the next big thing, and years of touring grew his fan base exponentially. Buckley was in the middle of writing his second album when he accidentally drowned in 1997, at the age of 30.
Such a potent combination of good looks, once-in-a-generation talent, and senseless tragedy has turned Buckley into a cult figure, the kind where the romanticized mythology of someone forever young, hot, and full of unrealized potential constantly threatens to overshadow the musical legacy itself. It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, Amy Berg’s long-in-the-making portrait of the late, great singer, feels like it’s consistently walking a fine line between doubling down on the easy lionizing and drawing your attention back to Buckley the Artist, rather than Buckley the Brooding Boho Thirst Trap Who Could Hit a High C. Her love for his work is genuine, to be sure. So is the love for the person that many of the interviewees here reminisce about. Straight-up hagiographies and hit jobs thankfully weren’t options. But pitched between music doc and mash note, this was always going to be the estate-sanctioned version of the story, even when it digs into his demons and depressive episodes.
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Still, if you’re the type of Buckleyphile who’s worn out several copies of Grace, studied the song sketches that comprise the stillborn sophomore record My Sweetheart, The Drunk like they were Torah portions, and still listen to the Arlene’s Grocery gig bootleg on the regular [raises hand], there’s a lot here to get giddy over. Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, has been extremely protective over her son and his songs, but she’s opened up the vaults for Berg’s film. There are pictures of Buckley as a chubby, smiling baby, and rocking a metalhead shag mullet as a teen; clips of him playing in high school bands, glimpses into notebooks filled with an elegant scrawl that you can only describe as Buckleyesque. Music from every phase of his career, in both rough-demo and finished form, plays over the soundtrack, along with voicemail messages — including the last one he left his mom — and recording session banter. Rarities abound, which makes this feel as much like an archive tour as a movable scrapbook.
There’s also a lot of inside-scoop insights, given that the folks who knew him best — Guibert, of course, but also his ex-girlfriends Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, band members Michael Tighe and Matt Johnson, producer Andy Wallace, tour manager Gene Bowen, fellow troubadours Aimee Mann and Ben Harper — use this opportunity to open up about all things Jeff. His mom details Jeff’s one encounter with his dad, singer-guitarist Tim Buckley, who’d split from Guibert when their son was six months old. She’d taken seven-year-old Jeff to a gig, after which he went home with his father for a week, then came back with a matchbook that had Tim’s phone number inked inside it. The elder Buckley died of a heroin overdose shortly thereafter. She also talks about goading twentysomething Jeff into performing at a tribute to his father at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, which he initially turned down. That was not a shadow the young man was interested in living under. But Jeff not only relented and sang “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” the most Oedipal catalog choice imaginable, he wore his dad’s coat onstage. He later told her that he left that one show “with about 60 business cards.”
That key introductory NYC gig was also where he met Moore, a theater actor, who lived with Jeff and gives you a glimpse of how he could be a dream boyfriend one moment and a self-involved dude the next. (See: virtually all tortured male artists in their twenties.) It’s Never Over winds through the freedom Jeff felt during that exploratory period living in a creatively fertile downtown scene, as well as the now infamous Sin-é tenure and how his first performance of “Mojo Pin” turned him into A&R catnip. He signed with Columbia because they had pictures of Dylan, Miles, Monk, and Nina on the wall, and he wanted to be up there with them. Buckley fretted over getting enough songs together to reward the faith that the powers that be had in him upon signing. He was already beginning to chafe under the pressure of having to live up to his hype, something Buckley would deal with even after it was evident he could deliver. Still, the sensitive songwriter put the finishing touches on his debut, even after arguing with the brass about an album cover that made him look like a cross between a louche lounge singer and a New Romantic poster boy. You know what happens next.
There may not be a more appropriate title Buckley could have given Grace, though It’s Never Over makes it clear that he didn’t always apply the concept in how he handled the fame that came with that record. The doc does a stellar job in reminding you that Buckley could be both achingly pretentious (“Songs are poems, and poems come from dreams…”) and casually lyrical in conversation, not to mention catty. What did you inherit from your father, one unfortunate interviewer asks him. “People who remember my father,” he spits back, staring icicle daggers. A beat. “Next question.” Aimee Mann remembers him dropping boulder-sized hints that he wanted to sleep with her, but the “boundary-less, liquid feel to him” that she clocked immediately felt a little “too tidal wave-y” to give in to. Wasser, whose band the Dambuilders toured with Buckley, recalls him standing in front of her during their whole set and staring at her, giving off a “worshiping-a-goddess” vibe that felt way too try-hard. Then he sang his cover of Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine,” and per Wasser, down went the walls of Jericho.
That, along with Buckley having what his friends called a psychotic break while planning out his follow-up to Grace, is as close to the negative as the doc dares to tread. It doesn’t whitewash Dark Jeff, his conflicted feelings about his dad or his childhood, or how the creative gift he had could feel like a burden as much as a blessing. But the mood favors the celebratory over the funereal; it comes not to bury Buckley or bring the finality (see title), but to praise him. Praise and mourn him. Berg has been here before, in terms of cinematic postmortems that acknowledge shadow selves while accentuating the positive, with her 2015 film Janis: Little Girl Blue. Except that was Joplin, someone who’s live-fast-burn-bright-die-young life and times had already been picked over for decades. Buckley hasn’t had a million portraits sketched of him, much less to this degree. The singularity of It’s Never Over, along with the access and the candor, makes up for a lot here. It doesn’t fixate on his death, or dig too deep into possible theories other than the accidental, which may make some feel this isn’t definitive. But it’s not trying to be needlessly macabre, either, and it prefers to err on the side of remembering his life over possibly re-litigating a death. (About that last part: Bowen says in the doc that a Rolling Stone piece about Buckley’s death felt needlessly sensationalistic, as well as failing to mention that Buckley only had a beer in his system and no trace of narcotics.)
The mood in the Ray Theater yesterday when It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, premiered at Sundance certainly felt more like a jubilee than a wake, and there was a lot of love in the room. Then, right as the end credits were rolling, volunteers began to set up a rug, a chair, and an amp under the screen. During the movie, Buckley’s friend Ben Harper talked about how Jeff’s particular interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” set him apart from your usual pretty-guy-who-rocks-out type of figure. This was a soulful testifying that truly went into the mystic.
Suddenly, Harper walked out of the wings, lap guitar in hand, and sat down in front of the theater. He talked about meeting Cohen and asking him about Jeff’s cover. The elderly man gripped his arm, Harper said, and admiringly went, “Whoa!” Then Harper proceeded to play his own version of “Hallelujah,” which borrows Buckley’s sparseness but doesn’t try to imitate his friend’s version. Tears flowed. The room was pin-drop silent. Then, when he finished, people burst into raucous applause. It was the perfect capper to the doc. A moment we wished would never be over.
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