On May 29, 1997, Jeff Buckley was en route to a rehearsal space in Memphis, Tennessee to work on his second album, tentatively titled ‘My Sweetheart The Drunk’. The follow-up to his acclaimed debut ‘Grace’, an alt-rock classic that eventually shifted two million copies, was not coming easily.
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Frozen by fame and the weight of expectation, he’d retreated into his modest Memphis home, which was later found in disarray. He’d been leaving friends and family strange, final-sounding voicemail messages – though, after a period of writer’s block, the creative juices were finally flowing again.
For reasons we can only speculate on, he took a detour and, in the searing Tennessee heat, dove into the Wolf River. His resulting death was declared accidental. Buckley was 30 years old.
This tragic end is not the focus of It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, director Amy Berg’s beautiful, elegiac new documentary. Instead, the film celebrates his extraordinary talent – he was blessed with a powerful, four-octave range and a mega-watt personality that was just as strong – while exploring the fractured familial relationships that tormented him. Inevitably, however, the subject’s death hovers in the background of every scene, as collaborators, former romantic partners and his heartbroken mother, Mary, attempt to make sense of his life.
“I think there was something with impulse control,” Berg tells NME. “Maybe it’s like ADD or just the creative connection between impulse control and art, but Jeff didn’t have that sense of danger. If he saw something, he just went for it. He was such a drinker of life. He saw the Wolf River at the end of his life and it just looked so appetising. If you’ve ever been in the South in the summer, you know how sweltering hot it is, so he just jumped in. But he wasn’t thinking about the undertow or the risks associated with it.”
Our interview was supposed to take place in the restaurant of London’s Soho Hotel, but Berg came down with food poisoning at the last minute – so last-minute, in fact, that NME had already arrived when we received the news. This leaves us in the slightly odd situation of conducting a Zoom interview from different rooms of the same building. With her camera turned off, Berg sounds weary but is carried through by her enthusiasm for a project that was 15 years in the making. What kept her going?
“It’s passion,” the LA-raised filmmaker says. “I really wanted to tell his story. Not only because the music is emotional and evocative, but also because the story is so important – how this kid from Anaheim, California made it to be this cult ingénue was just so interesting to me. I didn’t know how many layers I would be able to unpeel. Every time I got deeper, it just got more and more interesting.”
Buckley’s childhood and adolescence were marked by instability. Mary was just 17 when she fell pregnant, while his father, Tim, absconded early on to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter. By her own admission, Mary was unprepared for the role she found herself in. Tim, meanwhile, found his own cult success that foreshadowed Jeff’s when he became a celebrated, experimental figure of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s LA singer-songwriter scene, before suffering a fatal heroin and morphine overdose at the age of 28.
Mary and Tim both came from abusive homes, and there’s a sense of trauma ringing down through the generations as Jeff attempts to forgive his mother’s shortcomings and outrun Tim’s shadow. In one telling clip from the documentary, an interviewer asks him: “What do you think you inherited from your father?” Jeffs visibly bristles, before replying curtly: “People who remember my father. Next question.”
“This is a kid who was abandoned by his father before he was even born and when he chose this career, he kept being introduced as the son of a person he didn’t know,” explains Berg. “It begs the question: what is a father? How bonded are we genetically? It’s the tragic tale that brought us this incredible music.”
It’s Never Over took so long to reach screens partly because Berg needed to get Mary onboard. “I was rejected the first time I got to her,” the filmmaker recalls. “But there was enough love there to keep me going for another 10 years.” Without Mary, she explains, there was no film: “She is the legacy and a crucial part of the storytelling.”
Many of Berg’s interviewees emphasise Buckley’s feminist values, which the director attributes to his mother’s influence: “I was reading these interviews of his and just marvelling at the things he was talking about in the ‘90s. It was so incredible because it was so unusual for men to be of that type of feminism – it’s like second or third-wave feminism, which was going on at the time but wasn’t in the mainstream.”
Ultimately, the film is a portrait of a man who took the best of his parents and channelled them into a magnetic persona, creating music that was experimental, gut-wrenching and unique. He is, after all, far more than his cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Buckley’s love of music is summed up by a scene in which he spontaneously climbs the stage scaffolding during a performance by his childhood faves Led Zeppelin so that he can feel the vibrations running through his body.
Alas, it seems that this was the same spontaneity that led him to leap into the Wolf River – he was even reportedly singing Zep’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ at the time. Perhaps the film’s most memorable scene is Mary listening to the last voicemail he ever sent her. “You’re a person that fought for your child. Anyone can be famous but it takes a real spirit to raise a kid,” he says. “I’m glad you’re my mother. I love you.”
Berg heard the voicemail years before she secured the rights to the film and dubs it “the driving force” behind the project. She could also be describing her gorgeous eulogy as a whole when she reflects: “It just tears at your heart.”
‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’ is in UK cinemas now