Decades Later, Why Jeff Buckley’s Legacy Lives On

On a Monday night in late spring of 1992, Jeff Buckley arrived at the tiny Cafe Sin-é on New York’s St. Mark’s Place with a borrowed Fender Telecaster and a story to tell. He had scored a prestigious weekly gig at the East Village mainstay that had hosted both Irish rock royalty (Sinead O’Connor, Shane McGowan, the Waterboys), as well as up-and-coming talent, and the 25-year-old appeared ready to meet the moment.

He set up against the wall in a corner, waved a shy hello to the small crowd, opened his mouth to sing and that’s the moment when all hell broke loose. The raw power of his voice overwhelmed the space, alternating between a feminine falsetto and masculine growl—often within the same song. His guitar playing, too, had elements of punk and blues, but with Eastern flavoring woven throughout. In other words, he threw the kitchen sink at the unsuspecting audience.

Within weeks of Jeff Buckley’s first solo show in New York, even the most jaded local music fans were left to wonder how we’d ever lived without him. His impact was seismic and remained so until his death five years later, in May of 1997, while swimming fully clothed in the Mississippi River.  

A new documentary from Amy Berg, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, comes out this week and spends nearly two hours trying to unpack the conundrum of his legacy, with never-before-seen live footage as well as interviews with artists, industry execs, friends and family. For his most ardent fans, it’s a welcome snapshot of a complicated man who was kind and inquisitive, who probably suffered from depression and who craved and was ultimately tortured by attention. It captures a person whose death had a profound impact on those who knew him best. The film also confirmed that Buckley’s wellspring of art was likely deep and profound. And largely untapped.

The phenomenon of artists dying young is nothing new — Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Cobain are all charter members of the “27 club.” Even Buckley’s own father, folk singer Tim Buckley, was only 28 years old when he fatally overdosed on heroin.

What’s different about Jeff Buckley may be the key to unlocking the mystery of his enduring appeal: None of those other artists left as little evidence behind of their genius for people to dissect. So much is still unknowable about him because he was still early in his creative journey when he died.

He recorded one nearly perfect album and then … nothing. His career was like a baseball player hitting a walk-off grand slam in his first-ever at-bat and then retiring. Time never gave Buckley a chance to strike out.

With a five-octave vocal range, preternatural charm and a razor-sharp wit, Buckley’s extraordinary live performances at downtown clubs became the stuff of legend. The growing crowds swooned from his setlists in which he covered songs from Edith Piaf to Van Morrison to Nina Simone to Led Zeppelin.

Invariably, Buckley’s sweaty, intense shows would conclude with him alone in the spotlight, performing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which may have been the first mic drop.

I saw Buckley play at Sin-é early in his run and was so dumbstruck by his performance that I followed him for more than a year as he played venues like Fez, CBGB, Under Acme, the Knitting Factory, St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn and Maxwell’s in Hoboken.

Since iPhones and social media channels were non-existent then, you really needed to bring others to experience it for themselves. There was no way to contextualize his performances because there was no other performer to compare him to. And so, herding my friends to Jeff Buckley gigs became my hobby.

In fall of 1994, I spent part of an afternoon interviewing Buckley for a regional New York music newspaper, an assignment for which I was paid zero dollars minus expenses. He was in the midst of mixing his debut album Grace, just weeks before its release.

It was an unguarded conversation, since the stakes for talking to a guy from a small regional newspaper were fairly low. You could probably reach a larger audience by shouting from your kitchen window.

Having seen me at the gigs, he was curious about my heightened level of interest. I replied semi-facetiously that I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing, and it was simply taking longer than I’d anticipated. “Fair enough,” he replied, with a lopsided smile.

Over the years, Jeff Buckley has been so difficult to pigeonhole as an artist because he was sui generis: He was Plant and Page; he was Reed and Cale; he was Buckingham and Nicks. His music is not rooted to a time period or genre profile. Quite the opposite.

There was a reason that Robert Plant called Buckley’s talent “mind-altering” and that seeing Buckley perform live in London sent Thom Yorke and Radiohead directly into the studio to record “Fake Plastic Trees.” Buckley’s original songs were so genre-bending and sonically out there that they could appeal to both Bad Brains fans and Judy Garland devotees. 

Most music fans must contend with the unease of seeing their favorite artists age out of relevance. But Jeff Buckley’s legacy is frozen in time, as a 30-year singer-songwriter whose best days were ahead of him. There are no mugshots, unflattering interviews or half-assed tours to tarnish his legacy.

He is, and will remain, one of the greatest “what if” stories in modern music.