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Jeff Buckley: Mystery White Boy Blues
Jeff Buckley’s doe-eyed good looks and exceptional musicianship made him a Gen X poster boy and the object of reverent admiration from rock’s aristocracy. His ethereal yet powerful voice forever changed the landscape of popular music, and his short but intensely lived life has crystallized into an enduring rock'n'roll legend. Jeff Buckley explores the rocker’s life and legacy in unprecendented detail. It recounts his self-described "trailer trash" upbringing and long years of hand-to-mouth struggle through his emergence as the most acclaimed singer/songwriter of the mid-1990s and the preliminary recording sessions for his never-completed second album. More than a decade after his tragic accidental death, Buckley’s myth has lost none of its potency. Steeped in melancholia and excess, his story is retold here through the memories of those who knew him best, making Jeff Buckley a captivating narrative of rock'n'roll dreams, burning ambition, and doomed youth.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 14, 2020
Jeff Buckley, as a singer and musician with so much promise and such a tragic early end, makes for a compelling if potentially threadbare story. He had so much potential, but his life was just made up of music. And not as much of it as there might have been - whether due to his own rather capricious output or his rootless traipsing around bizarrely disparate bands in late 80s LA. He had the enormous albatross of a cool, multi-talented absent father just being rediscovered by the musically with-it of the time (Song to the Siren had created a wave, and some of the harder-to-find albums like Lorca and Starsailor were being given a new lease of life by CD reissues). For a musician with such a desire to push the envelope, this could have been a boon, except that it was the opposite. He practically had to sample his father's work in secret from himself.
All of that leads to approaches to Jeff that treat Tim as either the elephant in the room or the doppelgänger story or both (see Dream Brother by David Browne). So Anthony Reynolds, himself a singer-songwriter (with Jack/Jacques in the 1990s and some other projects since) whose tastes run in the same melancholic and deeply moving postcodes, looks to try and disinter the real Jeff Buckley from the effect of reading too much into the Tim effect. Not by ignoring it, but by compartmentalising it, giving space to opinions of the likes of Tim Underwood, but always coming back to the day-to-day realities of Jeff Buckley's band and the relationship with CBS. Also by dissecting the real results of the different recording sessions and Jeff's own instincts as a performer and decision-maker.
The truth is a difficult thing to settle upon when so much of the evidence is lyrical or psychological. "He said/she said" steps up, sometimes confusingly self-contradictory. Jeff Buckley wanted to be a star, believed (with good reason) that he had the tools to be a star, but also wanted to be an outsider (an indie figure) as did many young musicians of that time, given that certain luminaries of the independent had been able to more or less have their cake and eat it. But he wasn't really a musical outsider. He was a fantastic interpreter and an intutitive songwriter, but without a clear musical identity. To give an example: where the rather less talented Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers) created a persona out of a grungy soul man and put out some interesting albums, there is nothing in output that I would deem worthy of the long haul. there is nothing in output that I would deem truly worthy of the long haul. Dulli released 13 studio albums just between those two bands. Buckley could actually make that combination work, but it was just a string to his bow. We only have only true album to judge him by. Dulli just banged on with his creation and became an indie star. Some of the albums (e.g. Gentlemen) are very good, possibly even more cogent than Grace. But Grace has a timeless quality and an underlying talent that is never questionable. And yet at times Buckley seemed to want to be a kind of Dulli.
It is undeniable that the truth about Jeff Buckley lies in what he recorded. Grace was a brilliant curate's egg, hard to assimilate even for a listener with the most catholic tastes, but full to the brim with brilliance. It was what had to come next that would lay down some marker. All we have are outlines, but they give us signs. Deep down Jeff knew that his desire to wig out and wail worked against his natural gifts. The Sky is a Landfill, lead-off track on the posthumous (Sketches for) My Sweetheart The Drunk, is a prime example. It is a long way from his strengths and falls flat. His heart is not really in it, despite the caterwauling and heartfelt anti-system lyrics. Curiously, Yard of Blonde Girls, which he supposedly hid from Columbia so they wouldn't release it as a single, has aged reasonably well as an artefact from the time, while Opened Once and Morning Theft showed exactly where his true gifts lay and are movingly brilliant tracks that can be placed against anything his father recorded. Then there's Everybody Here Wants You, which seemed like demo then and now seems suitably finished. As a literate white soul man with a Scorpio-fired romanticism he really could have been peerless.
While it might seem that I'm trying to join the growing list of books written about this one-album artist, this is in fact a review of Reynolds' book. The focus here is the music (hence my lengthy aside) and Reynolds' arguments follow these kinds of lines (albeit with slightly different conclusions). What he does do is beg us to avoid the lazy drug theories, amateur psychology and reading too much into water-filled imagery and instead to look at what was really there. The answer is a hyper-talented singer-guitarist who was restless and sensitive. He loved to be a musical seeker (within others' songs and on his own), loved to show off, loved to feel the freedom of letting go in performance. He was a late starter so talented he broke through the then-prevalent avoidance of late bloomers in the music industry. But he was fragile as well as protean. He wanted to do everything but did not come up with a way of encompassing it easily within one persona, the way, say, a Neil Young managed to do (despite having far less musical talent). In music, particularly in the world of commercially-sold popular music, talent gets channelled in a persona. Jeff Buckley seemed not to want to play the obvious role that the major labels expected him to play (legacy ballad-heavy artist spanning various genres with an emotional voice and killer cheekbones and guitar). But he did not have his own role quite prepared. He thought about music and its marketing, but found it hard to place his own musical desires into that framework and mark out a patch for himself. Maybe he would have managed it in Memphis. But we'll never know.
All of that leads to approaches to Jeff that treat Tim as either the elephant in the room or the doppelgänger story or both (see Dream Brother by David Browne). So Anthony Reynolds, himself a singer-songwriter (with Jack/Jacques in the 1990s and some other projects since) whose tastes run in the same melancholic and deeply moving postcodes, looks to try and disinter the real Jeff Buckley from the effect of reading too much into the Tim effect. Not by ignoring it, but by compartmentalising it, giving space to opinions of the likes of Tim Underwood, but always coming back to the day-to-day realities of Jeff Buckley's band and the relationship with CBS. Also by dissecting the real results of the different recording sessions and Jeff's own instincts as a performer and decision-maker.
The truth is a difficult thing to settle upon when so much of the evidence is lyrical or psychological. "He said/she said" steps up, sometimes confusingly self-contradictory. Jeff Buckley wanted to be a star, believed (with good reason) that he had the tools to be a star, but also wanted to be an outsider (an indie figure) as did many young musicians of that time, given that certain luminaries of the independent had been able to more or less have their cake and eat it. But he wasn't really a musical outsider. He was a fantastic interpreter and an intutitive songwriter, but without a clear musical identity. To give an example: where the rather less talented Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers) created a persona out of a grungy soul man and put out some interesting albums, there is nothing in output that I would deem worthy of the long haul. there is nothing in output that I would deem truly worthy of the long haul. Dulli released 13 studio albums just between those two bands. Buckley could actually make that combination work, but it was just a string to his bow. We only have only true album to judge him by. Dulli just banged on with his creation and became an indie star. Some of the albums (e.g. Gentlemen) are very good, possibly even more cogent than Grace. But Grace has a timeless quality and an underlying talent that is never questionable. And yet at times Buckley seemed to want to be a kind of Dulli.
It is undeniable that the truth about Jeff Buckley lies in what he recorded. Grace was a brilliant curate's egg, hard to assimilate even for a listener with the most catholic tastes, but full to the brim with brilliance. It was what had to come next that would lay down some marker. All we have are outlines, but they give us signs. Deep down Jeff knew that his desire to wig out and wail worked against his natural gifts. The Sky is a Landfill, lead-off track on the posthumous (Sketches for) My Sweetheart The Drunk, is a prime example. It is a long way from his strengths and falls flat. His heart is not really in it, despite the caterwauling and heartfelt anti-system lyrics. Curiously, Yard of Blonde Girls, which he supposedly hid from Columbia so they wouldn't release it as a single, has aged reasonably well as an artefact from the time, while Opened Once and Morning Theft showed exactly where his true gifts lay and are movingly brilliant tracks that can be placed against anything his father recorded. Then there's Everybody Here Wants You, which seemed like demo then and now seems suitably finished. As a literate white soul man with a Scorpio-fired romanticism he really could have been peerless.
While it might seem that I'm trying to join the growing list of books written about this one-album artist, this is in fact a review of Reynolds' book. The focus here is the music (hence my lengthy aside) and Reynolds' arguments follow these kinds of lines (albeit with slightly different conclusions). What he does do is beg us to avoid the lazy drug theories, amateur psychology and reading too much into water-filled imagery and instead to look at what was really there. The answer is a hyper-talented singer-guitarist who was restless and sensitive. He loved to be a musical seeker (within others' songs and on his own), loved to show off, loved to feel the freedom of letting go in performance. He was a late starter so talented he broke through the then-prevalent avoidance of late bloomers in the music industry. But he was fragile as well as protean. He wanted to do everything but did not come up with a way of encompassing it easily within one persona, the way, say, a Neil Young managed to do (despite having far less musical talent). In music, particularly in the world of commercially-sold popular music, talent gets channelled in a persona. Jeff Buckley seemed not to want to play the obvious role that the major labels expected him to play (legacy ballad-heavy artist spanning various genres with an emotional voice and killer cheekbones and guitar). But he did not have his own role quite prepared. He thought about music and its marketing, but found it hard to place his own musical desires into that framework and mark out a patch for himself. Maybe he would have managed it in Memphis. But we'll never know.
April 27, 2013
This is a good introduction to Jeff Buckley if you don't know anything of him other than his music. I feel like if you know a little more about him, then this book wouldn't be up to scratch. I didn't know anything much about him other than his music so it worked for me as an introduction, but I felt that there was a little too much "fan" in the author's words (nothing wrong with that, you write about the things that interest you)- but it wasn't engaging or well written. And if an author claims that Sydney is the capital of Australia, can I trust the rest of the book?!
December 23, 2012
Jeff Buckley has an amazing voice. This book does not.
I can listen to Jeff's music continually, but trying to learn more about his life was not needed (even though when I started this book I thought otherwise). Jeff died too early, left too little of his talent behind, but reading this book didn't bring me any perspective except how cloyingly sweet obsession is, not mine but the biographer's.
I can listen to Jeff's music continually, but trying to learn more about his life was not needed (even though when I started this book I thought otherwise). Jeff died too early, left too little of his talent behind, but reading this book didn't bring me any perspective except how cloyingly sweet obsession is, not mine but the biographer's.
November 25, 2025
I am a bit skeptical of the factuality of this book because the author, a Brit I believe, didn't seem to be knowledgeable about his geography. While I do know it is true that Buckley was born in and grew up in Anaheim, California, the author called Anaheim a "state" and said it was snowing the night of his birth. If it was truly snowing that night, that would have been an extraordinary night in Southern California, but this is mentioned as though snowfall is normal there.
April 2, 2020
I wasn't seeking a stylized treatment of Buckley's life. What I wanted was a direct account, and here I got it. As haunting a life as is his voice; his death: pure poetry. Thanks, Anthony, itch scratched.
July 13, 2011
God, it took me three days to slog through this turgid mess. I'm being generous with two stars. I can't remember the last book that I abandoned mid way through, but I came mighty close here.
I admit that my interest in the Buckley family stems from Tim Buckley, I was mostly ignorant of son Jeff's life and career. After reading Anthony Reynold's 'Mystery White Boy Blues' I'm still not too much wiser. Mystery indeed. Reynold's has probably done quite well in stretching this tale out to over two hundred pages! Jeff Buckley only released a single album, 'Grace', and the reader is only graced to a few lines of lyrics of the singer-songwriters work.
The cover of this book states that it "is a captivating narrative of rock'n'roll dreams, burning ambition, and doomed youth." Perhaps I'm getting too old for this stuff.
I admit that my interest in the Buckley family stems from Tim Buckley, I was mostly ignorant of son Jeff's life and career. After reading Anthony Reynold's 'Mystery White Boy Blues' I'm still not too much wiser. Mystery indeed. Reynold's has probably done quite well in stretching this tale out to over two hundred pages! Jeff Buckley only released a single album, 'Grace', and the reader is only graced to a few lines of lyrics of the singer-songwriters work.
The cover of this book states that it "is a captivating narrative of rock'n'roll dreams, burning ambition, and doomed youth." Perhaps I'm getting too old for this stuff.
October 3, 2009
"A Pure Drop" was a much more engaging biography. Little new info in this book. Regurgitated much of "Dream Brother." Several distracting typos. The only plus is some new photos, but Merri Cyr's book is the best collection of that.
June 8, 2011
An interesting look at the life & music career of Jeff Buckley.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews