Jeff Buckley's Divine Feminine

It’s appropriate that women open It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, and that women close it, too. The first documentary about the 1990s rock songwriter and guitarist, who rose to widespread acclaim on the lilt of his powerful falsetto until he died in the Mississippi River in 1997, the film relies mostly on the testimony of his mother, Mary Guibert, and two partners who shaped his work: Rebecca Moore, a child of Fluxus immersed in the experimental theater world of downtown NYC, and Joan Wasser, the violinist whose band, the Dambuilders, opened for Buckley on tour. 

Buckley was enchanted by the music of women, a fact he spoke about frequently: raised on Judy Garland, with Nina Simone among his favorite singers, he referred to himself as a “chanteuse.” But as director Amy Berg’s film shows, Buckley circumvented the one-dimensional and negating concept of women as “muse.” He admired women as artists and humans, fascinated from an early age with the way women sing—a point underscored as the film opens on “The Last Goodbye,” a midtempo rock song that’s mystified and mesmerized me since I first heard it 30 years ago. His high voice vibrates with the spirit of gospel; in places, he belts like Patti LaBelle taking it to church. Though he paid homage, his songwriting was always his own, skirting hollow mimicry. (As he told Interview magazine in a tangent about Michael Bolton, “The thing is, I’m not taking from [Black] tradition. I don’t want to be Black. Michael Bolton desperately wants to be Black... He also sucks.”)

It’s Never Over is as emotionally raw a music documentary as I’ve seen: Guibert, Moore, and Wasser all hold their love and grief for Buckley close to the surface. That immediacy becomes especially apparent when Wasser describes Buckley meeting another of his favorites, the Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and her whole demeanor cracks from the fondness of the memory. Buckley’s sensitivity courses through the film, his embodiment of a different and fuller shape of masculinity—one unafraid to express the human range of emotions—apparent in both his work and his personal life. “All people are sensitive,” Wasser says in the documentary, “but his sensitivity wasn’t crushed like some men’s sensitivity has been.”

Upon releasing Grace, his 1994 debut and only album, Buckley earned fame in Europe and Australia, but it eluded him in the U.S., his voice too “girly” voice for the burly rock charts of the mid-’90s. (Though it might not come as a surprise that he was close with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, a fellow melismatic belter.) On the cover of Grace, he wore a gold sequined smoking jacket that his label apparently fought against, claiming he looked too feminine. But as the scholar and critic Daphne Brooks wrote in her 2005 book about Grace, Buckley “took seriously the brilliant craftsmanship of singing itself to recuperate and champion the unpredictable and ‘rocking’ elements of women who had long been overlooked by the Rolling Stone rock critic mafia.” Which is to say, he recognized the “artistic continuum” by which women artists were the inspiration for the rock critic mafia’s most beloved bands. As Brooks points out, Buckley covered Judy Garland in San Francisco, sang Edith Piaf in Paris, worshipped and studied and performed the repertoire of Nina Simone. His cover of  “Lilac Wine,” a ’50s show tune that Simone made her own, attempts to climb into and illuminate the nuances of her vocal timbre—as the documentary points out, one of Buckley’s more uncanny skills was his ability to mimic the tone of other vocalists, a talent you can hear in the way he trembles the “Lilac Wine” lyrics “sweeeet and headddy.” 

Buckley was himself sweet and heady, as It’s Never Over tells it. His own voice narrates, with clips from interviews and his tapes, and written words from his journals and lyrics are overlaid throughout—Guibert, his mother, gave Berg unfettered access to her archives, even to unflattering answering machine messages. A “To Do” list, made in Memphis towards the end of his life, is especially heartbreaking: “Meals, Reading, Sleeping, Relationships,” the checklist of a person attempting to recapture some equilibrium after years on a grueling tour schedule and disoriented by fame. 

Buckley’s fragility came into focus as his renown rose. Wasser recalls that fame clouded even the most mundane of his favorite activities, like reading. “He just wanted to be anonymous and be able to talk to anybody in the bookstore, not worrying if they were talking to him because they knew who he was,” says Wasser. Another friend he stayed with in Memphis remembers he told her he didn’t know how to be a man. Which is to say, he was lost. His mother was a teenager when she gave birth to him in 1966, and found herself having to shelve her dreams of being a concert pianist in order to raise her child, while the child’s absentee father—Tim Buckley—lived out the drugged-up rock and roll fantasy that would eventually kill him. And the pressure of masculinity was complicated by Jeff’s realization that he may have had serious mental health issues and had been going through what multiple people in the documentary describe as a “psychotic break” towards the end of his life. 

And yet once the music clicked, the sun emerged. By May of 1997, Buckley was happy and working on his new album. That’s one reason It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, is so overwhelming: he didn’t live that cliché life of a drug-addled rock star but seemed pure in the pursuit of art, and yet still died so young. I found myself thinking of And So It Goes, the recent documentary about Billy Joel, and the way Joel too has lived a fairly clean if depressed life with women—Elizabeth Weber, Christie Brinkley—as the subjects of his songs. They were Joel’s muses, but we see him aging at home, fathering children, remodeling his house. Instead, Jeff Buckley was caught in the undertow, clean but for a single beer in his system when he died. Even at the end, he had the women in his life on his mind. “It takes a real spirit to raise a kid,” Buckley said, on his final answering machine message to his mother. “A lot of my phrasing when I sing—it’s you.”