Jeff had a lot of issues with the noteriety of his father who also was an abundantly talented songwriter who was also blessed with a soaring multi-octave voice. I read an interview with Jeff where he said he didn't like going into record stores because he was eternally linked to his father in the record bins because they shared the same last name. He was quite bitter about his father's negligence.
Ironically Jeff made his public debut at a memorial concert for his father at St. Ann's Church in NYC. Jeff's debut performance was legendary and people in the audience gasped at his physical likeness to his father and they cried when they heard his magnificent voice. The anticipation of his first recording began with that show in January 1991 because even Newsweek and Time magazine carried an item on his appearance at the St. Ann's memorial concert.
Jeff didn't seem in any big hurry to make his mark because he waited 2 years after the St. Ann's appearance to sign a recording contract, even though record companies were showering him with offers. Jeff only made 14 public appearances in the three years between 1991 and 1993. Being a big fan of his father and having been exposed to all the hype about Jeff's voice, I think I bought the album the first week or two after it was released.
The album wasn't what I expected and a musical statement that bore no resembalance to his father's wonderous and often erratic spacey, jazzy, surrealist folk music. When I first heard Jeff's band, I thought they had the mock operatic granduer of a Led Zeppelin type of group. It took me a few weeks to digest the music on it's own terms and see Jeff's musical brilliance in a different light.
Jeff made his first album at age 27 and produced two full albums in his three year career. His father made his first album at age 19 and produced 9 albums over an eight year career, even so, I think Jeff's small body of work is better than his father's and has had more influence. This poignant account of Jeff's death was in Rolling Stone magazine:
Quote:
On the evening of May 29, 1997, Buckley's band flew in intending to join him in his Memphis studio to work on the newly written material. That same evening, Buckley went swimming in Wolf River Harbor, a slackwater channel of the Mississippi River, while wearing boots, all of his clothing, and singing the chorus of the song "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin. Jeff had gone swimming there several times before. A roadie of Buckley's band, Keith Foti, remained ashore. After moving a radio and guitar out of reach of the wake from a passing tugboat, Foti looked up to see that Buckley had vanished. Despite a determined rescue effort that night, Buckley remained missing. On June 4, his body was spotted by a tourist on a riverboat and was brought ashore.
The autopsy to clarify the cause of Buckley's death confirmed Buckley had taken no illegal drugs before his swim and a drug overdose was therefore ruled out as cause of death.
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Jeff swore he'd never be his father's son and die as a drug casualty. By all accounts he stuck to his pledge.
Jeff received a lot more attention in the years after his death. I think around the year 2000 his version of Hallelujah became a runaway Internet hit and the Hallelujah is still one of the top selling downloads at Amazon well over a decade after his death. I was lucky to see him play in small venues because he had yet to become a headliner that could fill a 5000 seat concert hall venue. He had an aura of electrifying charisma that I've only seen in one other person, Bob Dylan.
I only wish he had lived a little longer because he left so many songs unsung.