fanmix: a soldier or a dreamer || tim & jeff buckley

Made for this month's round at

waywardmixes where the theme was 'family.'

I've been a pretty huge fan of Jeff Buckley's for a while now (read: I am obsessed; he is second only to Dylan in my heart), but not really a big fan of his father, Tim Buckley. My mom actually liked Tim a lot when she was a tweenager but I didn't get into him until the last couple of weeks when I started reading this biography of the both of them that I will not shut up about called Dream Brother by David Browne. It's a really great book. I don't feel like I really ~got Tim's music until I read about it, weirdly.

So, a bit of background for those not reading books about these dudes: Tim Buckley was a musician in the 60s and 70s, best known as a folk singer though he later rejected that, thinking of himself primarily as a jazz singer. He was sort of billed as a prettier Bob Dylan but that wasn't really who he was (in fact both Tim and Bobby were sold as folk singers and ultimately constrained by that, as they were really interested in expanding into other types of music). He met and married young, around eighteen, to Mary Guibert, before his music career had really taken off. She thought she was pregnant, and they thought they were in love. It turns out she wasn't, actually - in the craziest turn of events ever, she had a hysterical pregnancy??? Like, people remember her being visibly pregnant, she thought she went into labor, but nope. No deal. Not pregnant. Both Tim and Mary came from very abusive households with abusive fathers, so I guess that kind of fear and depression caused an extreme reaction in her - any way to get out of the house, you know? But still. NUTS. So she and Tim began to drift apart even more (and he was of course messing around with all sorts of other ladies) but she ended up pregnant again, for real. And so Jeff was born.

By then Tim was becoming moderately successful - I don't think his record sales were ever crazy big, but he was popular enough and he toured a lot and had a legion of fangirls because he was so pretty. And, by the time Jeff was born, Tim was pretty much divorced totally from his situation with Mary. He only saw Jeff a handful of times in his life - a few times when Jeff was a baby, and then once when Jeff was eight. Tim died shortly after that of a heroin overdose, age twenty-eight. Jeff grew up with a definite passion and talent for music but no desire to be compared to his father - in fact, growing up most of his friends didn't even know his father had been a semi-famous musician. Jeff worked in various bands as a guitarist and whatnot; it wasn't until he received a polite invitation to perform at a tribute concert for his father that his career began to take off. He hadn't, to my knowledge, performed publicly as a singer before that concert. The concert was called Greetings from Tim Buckley and that's what the movie with my bf Penn Badgley is going to be about. Jeff performed four songs of his father's, one of which I included on the mix. Everyone was rightly blown away.

Jeff only released one (amazing) album before he died, though there is a plethora of live stuff out there. He died in 1997, age thirty, by accidentally drowning in the Wolf River in Memphis while working on his second album.

So that's the Buckleys. Two incredibly talented musicians who never really knew each other and both died insanely young. I think Jeff was quite obviously conflicted when it came to his father - wanting distance from him out of resentment but nonetheless curious about this father he never knew. He looked a lot like Tim and sounded comparable (sharing his father's impressive range; though personally I prefer Jeff's voice a lot more) but hated any comparisons. Yet he got his start, so to speak, through performing his father's music - perhaps his attempt to say goodbye, or understand his father, or something. With the mix, I tried to go through Tim's early life, his abandonment of Mary and Jeff, and then Jeff dealing with that/trying to make his way in the world. I included songs that Tim wrote about Jeff ('I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,' which is mostly directed at Mary, and 'Dream Letter') and vice versa ('Eternal Life' and 'Dream Brother'). I've already rambled on more than I think I ever have for a mix, and I could talk about Jeffrey until I'm blue, soooo go enjoy the mix!

And just a general disclaimer: I own nada, everything belongs to its respective songwriter/photographer, etc, etc.