In the spring of 1991, New York’s underground royalty gathered at St. Ann’s Church, in Brooklyn, to pay tribute to Tim Buckley, the avant-folk singer who died 16 years prior at 28 years old. The legendary producer Hal Willner assembled a bill and guestlist of Downtown artists who adored his work: Richard Hell, Bob Quine, Julia Heyward, and G. E. Smith, among others. But there was someone else in attendance who had a rather fraught and incomplete relationship with Tim Buckley: his 24-year-old son, Jeff. “Dangerous situations appeal to me; there had been a bit of buzz that Tim Buckley’s son would be there,” the late Willner says in a clip featured in Amy Berg’s new documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. “I figured, Hey, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Initially, Buckley rejected the invitation to sing his dead father’s songs. “I said, ‘No, I will never ever perform that music,’” he once recalled. “I’ve got my own music.” It wasn’t until his mother, Mary Guibert, pointed out the alluring guestlist that Buckley accepted the offer—a decision that would expose him to the record industry, spur his move to Manhattan, and introduce him to performance artist Rebecca Moore, the love of his early days in the city. Moore, a major presence in It’s Never Over, remembers Buckley racked with nerves and hunched underneath his father’s coat. From behind a mess of hair, he sang the song Tim Buckley wrote about leaving him and his mother. In an instant, the evening belonged to Jeff, and one of the most dynamic voices of the 1990s emerged.
Featuring highly personal interviews with Guibert, and touching on Buckley’s close female relationships, Berg’s documentary pays special attention to the women in his life. Guibert, whom Berg courted for nearly two decades before she agreed to the film, is a grounding presence who illuminates her close, at times flawed relationship with her late son. A first-generation Panamanian immigrant, Guibert met Tim Buckley in high school French class, and the two bonded over their love of music and culture beyond the confines of Anaheim, California. By age 17, Guibert was pregnant with Tim’s son, and she scrapped her own dreams of becoming an actress and concert pianist to raise him—alone, ultimately, as Tim divorced her and took off before Jeff was born. Berg’s framing of Guibert’s experience highlights her intimate and playful rapport with her son, illustrated by a number of Jeff’s voicemails that punctuate the movie. “Hey, you there? This is your big sexy son,” begins one from 1995. Buckley was calling his mom to rib her for smoking weed in the parking lot of his concert. “Jeff and I sort of raised each other,” Guibert tells Berg at one point in the film.
In interviews with Guibert, it is clear to see where Buckley got his sense of humor, his early exposure to music, and a general sense of support. With It’s Never Over, Berg chooses to explore these intimate relationships instead of focusing on celebrity fans of Buckley’s work. The film also includes prominent appearances from Rebecca Moore, as well as Joan Wasser of Joan as Police Woman. Wasser was in a longterm relationship with Buckley at the time of his death in 1997, while Moore remained a dear friend. For many years, both women have been characterized as Buckley’s girlfriends and muses (Moore for “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” and Wasser for “Everybody Here Wants You”), but Berg allows them to speak as artists in their own right, ones who had fruitful creative exchanges with Buckley and served as his closest confidants. “Society has a weird view towards women in these relationships.… There’s so much misogyny,” Moore says at the start of the film. “You’re sort of pigeonholed into this sort of girlfriend or ex-girlfriend.… You’re these roles and you’re sort of cut as a pathetic figure.” It’s Never Over upends that cliche by examining Buckley’s reverence for female artists, and how he grew by being in their presence.
Berg also interviews Buckley’s bandmates and peers, like guitarist Michael Tighe, drummer Matt Johnson, Aimee Mann, and Ben Harper, and each of them speaks of Buckley’s ravenous and eclectic musical appetite. He lionized Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin, Judy Garland, jazz guitarist Al Di Meola, legendary qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Keith Jarrett, and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Buckley mimicked these artists until he could extract just enough of them to spike his own strain of precisely arranged operatic rock. His head was abuzz with these varied influences as he entered the studio to record his first and only studio album, 1994’s Grace. Berg chronicles this fruitful period by interviewing producer Andy Wallace and string arranger Karl Berger, the latter of whom was specifically requested by Buckley for his work with jazz greats like Ornette Coleman and Dave Brubeck.
Though It’s Never Over spans Buckley’s infancy, his rise to fame, and his untimely death at the age of 30, some of the most arresting footage captures early performances at defunct East Village coffee house Sin-é, where Buckley waited tables and played solo in the early ’90s. Those sets, lovingly captured on the Live at Sin-é compilation, present unvarnished early versions of the songs that would populate Grace. In a brief, black-and-white clip of Buckley singing “Mojo Pin,” you can actually hear the chatter in the room completely dissipate—as if someone was controlling it with a volume knob. These moments are singular and special, and you can feel that rare sensation along with everybody in the audience: That there is something about this person, and their hold on you is inescapable. If I took any issue with Berg’s documentary, it’s that these moments can be too brief and abandoned rather quickly, often interrupted by animated text and motion graphics.
But Berg still understands the power of a single image; one of the most gutwrenching shots is of an old matchbook with a phone number and “love you,” scribbled in ballpoint pen. It was quite possibly the only object Tim Buckley directly gave to Jeff, after they met for the first time in 1975. Jeff was eight, and his mom took him to see Tim play at a club in Southern California. The younger Buckley wound up staying with his father—and his new family—for about a week, before Tim put him on a bus back to his mom, matchbook in hand. Tim Buckley died two weeks later. Jeff wasn’t mentioned in a single obituary. Berg cuts back to that matchbook only once or twice more in the film, but it hits with a hefty weight.
On May 29, 1997, Buckley went for a spontaneous swim in Memphis’ Wolf River. He was fully clothed, which, combined with the river’s undertow and the wake of a passing boat, contributed to his drowning. Miles away, his bandmates were hitting the tarmac, having flown in to record Buckley’s sophomore LP, My Sweetheart the Drunk. Despite the coroner finding no trace of drugs in Buckley’s system and ruling the death as an accidental drowning, the press still managed to sensationalize the tragedy, insinuating additional factors with phrases like “it was presumed that Buckley had drowned,” and drawing parallels between he and his father’s premature deaths.
Berg’s documentary makes no allusions to fatal drug use or suicidal tendencies, but the specter of mortality was something Buckley acknowledged throughout his own life. In an especially devastating clip, Buckley sits for an interview with his bandmates and is asked where he would like to see himself in 10 years. “I don’t see myself 10 years from now,” he says flatly, eyes downcast and his left leg restless. Bassist Mick Grøndahl cracks up next to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Buckley tries to force a smile, but there is something so resolved about his expression. It’s Never Over has no interest in painting Buckley as a doomed, tragic figure, but as an artist who somehow foresaw his brief life—and devoured the world, while he could.