Jeff and Tim Buckley and the Joy of Record Store Discovery

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know. 

One of the best parts about shopping for records is that you’re always on the verge of discovering your new favorite music. Never heard Thelonious Monk? This store has 12 options. Don’t know which Beatles’ solo career you like the best? You can find out it’s actually Ringo by buying all his records. Never listened to Classical music? Head to that section and close your eyes and pick something.

I recently had one of these moments myself. In early September, I was at my favorite local record store—shout out to Mill City Sound—and saw that they had gotten a new reissue in the Rhino Hi-Fi series. I love the folks over at Rhino, and this series has been all killer, no filler. They even put out Buckingham Nicks for the first time in over 50 years! This one was of Happy Sad, by the singer songwriter Tim Buckley. An album I had never listened to. It sent me on a mad dash to find and hear as many of his albums I could.

Happy Sad feels like some missing connective tissue between the jazzier works of Joni Mitchell, the early albums by Bob Dylan, and like if Jim Sullivan had an actual major label budget. It’s a classic singer-songwriter album, but Buckley was clearly trying to do something more ambitious than just writing self-confessionals: He was pushing the boundaries of what could be considered “pop” songwriting. Happy Sad is not really a masterpiece; but it’s an album by a guy who was clearly aspiring to do something out there.

This single album lead me down a rabbit hole of Tim Buckley. From there I went to his self-titled debut, an album that sounds like a Los Angeles-super studio rendering of folk music. It’s like when an indie movie gets remade as a Blockbuster: It seems more polished, but at its heart, it’s this littler thing. Then I went to Greetings from L.A., Look at the Fool, and Sefronia, albums Buckley put out under Frank Zappa-owned record labels, after Buckley’s time recording for rock powerhouse Elektra—they had the Doors on roster at the same time as Buckley—ended without any major hits.

It was easy to track down Blue Afternoon and Lorca: They were released on Elektra and I found them in Twin Cities record stores for under $10 each. They show Buckley as an artist who was never content to settle down: Each album tries different genres, different bands, different singing voices for Buckley. The rarest Buckley album—Starsailor—has been harder to find. It’s considered a cult classic—and it inspired a band of the same name—but I have a rule with myself I won’t listen to it until I find it on a record hunt.

My favorite Buckley album, however, is Goodbye and Hello, his sophomore album, and the last one I found after hunting at four different record stores in two weeks. The centerpiece of the album is a churning, haunting, six minute banger called “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain.”

The song finds Buckley speaking to an unnamed person about how he never was meant to settle down, never meant to be someone’s rock, and he needed to leave. It was only after becoming obsessed with this record and song that I discovered that it was a pivotal song in the life of one of the possible subjects: Buckley’s son Jeff.

Tim had married Jeff’s mother as a teenager, gotten her pregnant with Jeff, and more or less disappeared on them. He’d reappear after tours and recording sessions, but Jeff never had much of a relationship with Tim. They never got to reconcile Tim’s abandonment when Jeff reached adulthood: Tim passed away at 28 from a drug overdose when Jeff was eight years old.

In the early ‘90s, Jeff was a singer and performer in New York City, having moved there to pursue what he hoped might morph into a music career after time spent as a session guitarist in L.A. But because he had that aforementioned difficult relationship with his father and his father’s legacy, he didn’t go around advertising that he was son of Tim Buckley, the experimental singer-songwriter. But at the urging of his mom, he participated in a tribute concert series in New York that honored Tim. It served as Jeff’s coming out party, as he did a fiery take of the song his dad probably wrote for him:     

And this is where I make a confession: Prior to my frenzied Tim Buckley deep-dive, I hadn’t given Jeff much of a thought. My intro to him—like, I suspect, a lot of people my age—was via dreadlocked Christian rockers covering his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on American Idol. All I could hear when I listened to Jeff was that maudlin cover that takes the edge, weariness and desperation out of Jeff’s version.

Thanks to Tim, I was able to listen to Jeff with fresh ears and eventually went and got a vinyl copy of Jeff’s lone LP, Grace. Recorded in the couple years after his coming out party covering Tim, it too is an expansive, wide-eyed approach to singer-songwriter music. Grace is not pinned down by any genre—“Mojo Pin” and “Hallelujah” do not sound like they are on the same album—and only fits into one mold: Jeff’s. Jeff bristled at being compared to his dad throughout his life, but they both had the same musical restlessness, the same refusal to do the expected, and unique, battered voices. While Jeff’s could go many more octaves, Tim’s sounds as anguished as Jeff’s on his ballads.

That run from 4:54 to 5:54 is just flawless.

Jeff tragically also died young. While writing and working on the follow-up to Grace, he went for a swim in the Wolf River in Memphis and drowned. He was 30 years old. In the years since, a bunch of lost material has surfaced, namely You and I—an early recordings compilation—and Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, the few songs finished enough from that sophomore album to be released. But the most revelatory is the official release of Live at Sin-é, a compilation of recordings Jeff made at an Irish coffeehouse in New York. Jeff was a regular performer there and had A&R from every label stalking him there. But when you listen to it now, you can hear a young performer working it out, a delicate guy finding the edges of himself in real time, in front of an audience that loves him. It’s the kind of live album that’s hard to find: It’s a performer doing his art for the audience directly in front of him, with no concern for how anyone else might enjoy it. It’s got early versions of a lot of the songs on Grace, but the highlight is listening to Jeff’s monologues and covers of songs by the Band, Bob Dylan, the MC5, and Nina Simone.

I wouldn’t have spent any time with any of this music if I hadn’t have taken that chance on Happy Sad two months ago. So, that’s my message at the end of this week’s edition of All the Music of All the World: Go take a chance on a record you’ve never heard. You won’t know where you’ll end up, or what music you might discover. 

--Andrew Winistorfer