Sweet Willow

Left behind by Jeff. 🥀

📸: thegeoffmoore

From Arthur Levy’s Facebook:

Rock star documentary #itsneverovermovie is only as strong as those given the bulk of the screen time to tell their Jeff Buckley story.

Director Mary Berg focuses on two long-time gf’s, actress Rebecca Moore and Dambuilders’ musician (and fiancée?) Joan Wasser, Ben Harper, photographer Merri Cyr, Aimee Mann, Jeff’s blood-brother bandmates guitarist Michael Tighe and drummer Matt Johnson, and of course Jeff’s mother Mary Guibert who controls every single molecule of Buckleyana with an iron grip.

On the business side, Columbia’s Don Ienner and Sony’s Michelle Anthony rep the company who nurtured and financed Jeff’s 3-years of non-stop touring. That left him insurmountably and impossibly indebted in the hole to the label that supported his influential (but commercially failed) “Grace” album of 1994 (which hit platinum 22 years later), and follow-up album “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk.” Conspicuously never mentioned in the film, it was posthumously released in 1998, the year after his tragic drowning death in Memphis at age 30.

Also conspicuously unmentioned are two key players in the Jeff saga: Gary Lucas, early collaborator and co-writer of “Mojo Pin” and “Grace” (par for the course); and Columbia’s #SteveBerkowitz.

Still, there are riveting sections on his father ‘60s/’70s singer-songwriter Tim Buckley (who died when Jeff was eight), Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, the 1991 St. Ann’s Church event in Brooklyn organized by Hal Willner, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (“my Elvis!”), meeting lifelong Led Zep idols Page and Plant, and the obligatory Leonard Cohen “Hallelujah” segment.