Dream brother : the lives and music of Jeff and Tim Buckley

When Jeff Buckley drowned at the age of thirty in 1997, he not only left behind a legacy of brilliant music -- he brought back haunting memories of his father, '60s troubadour Tim Buckley, a gifted musician who barely knew his son and who himself died at twenty-eight. Both father and son made transcendent music that mixed rock, jazz, and folk; both amassed a cadre of obsessive, adoring fans. This absorbing dual biography -- based on interviews with more than one hundred friends, family members, and business associates as well as access to journals and unreleased recordings -- tells for the first time the intriguing, often heartbreaking story of these two musicians. It offers a new understanding of the Buckleys' parallel lives -- and tragedies -- while exploring the changing music business between the '60s and the '90s. Finally, it tells the story of a father and son, two complex, enigmatic men who died searching for themselves and each other. Jeff Buckley's drowning in 1997 was proclaimed a tragedy, not only because the 30-year-old singer-songwriter was perched on the cusp of stardom but also because his death so eerily mirrored the premature demise of his father, folk-rock icon Tim Buckley. In Dream Brother , music critic David Browne offers an incisive portrait of the ill-fated father and son, examining their deaths and their short, though accomplished, careers. Browne's keen reporting and strong sense of the complex relationship between Jeff and Tim Buckley create a gripping account of a young artist hurtling toward his own destruction and a lyrical story of two lives adrift on the same churning river. Too discerning to simply attribute Jeff's death to some otherworldly, shared destiny with his father -- who died in 1975 at 28 -- the author instead paints a compelling picture of two valuable artists who never should have left the world so early. Dream Brother avoids dwelling on the similarities between father and son, but its focus on their individual paths makes the coincidences all the more haunting. Despite looking and sounding uncannily like a man who came a generation earlier, Jeff Buckley did not embrace his father's legacy. As Browne points out, the son was already without his father long before Tim's fatal heroin dose. For the rest of his life, Jeff resented his father for his absence and rejected the drug habit and self-destructive lifestyle that had ensnared Tim. And yet, both father and son possessed a daring that led them to premature, accidental deaths. Painting vivid images of the art and business of music in two very different eras, Dream Brother makes it clear that the common thread linking the deaths of Tim and Jeff Buckley is a sense of profound loss -- youth cut short, talent unexplored, music extinguished. Indeed, pervasive throughout Dream Brother is the feeling of something seductively ethereal. Maybe it's the presence of the Wolf River, which lured Jeff to his death. Maybe it's the foreknowledge of how the story will end. But probably, long after the Buckleys are gone, it's the music they left behind. (Karen Burns) A "meticulously researched" dual biography on the lives and artistry of the father and son musicians whose lives were each cut short ( Chicago Tribune ). When Jeff Buckley drowned at the age of thirty in 1997, he not only left behind a legacy of brilliant music—he brought back haunting memories of his father, '60s troubadour Tim Buckley, a gifted musician who barely knew his son and who himself died at twenty-eight. Both father and son made transcendent music that mixed rock, jazz, and folk; both amassed a cadre of obsessive, adoring fans. This absorbing dual biography—based on interviews with more than one hundred friends, family members, and business associates as well as access to journals and unreleased recordings—tells for the first time the intriguing, often heartbreaking story of these two musicians. It offers a new understanding of the Buckleys' parallel lives—and tragedies—while exploring the changing music business between the '60s and the '90s. Finally, it tells the story of a father and son, two complex, enigmatic men who died searching for themselves and each other. Praise for Dream Brother "Ambitious. . . . Uses a wealth of reportage to depict convincingly two generations of pop music turmoil." — Washington Post "An extraordinarily detailed account of the Buckleys' personal and professional lives . . . Browne's book is a seamless, readable narrative. . . . He's not just a fine journalist but a natural storyteller." — Boston Globe "Captures their respective legacies with the same kind of poetic sweep the Buckleys offered with their music." — Fort Worth Star-Telegram

When he accidentally drowned in May 1997, Jeff Buckley was on the edge of pop stardom, with an acclaimed album under his belt and another one on the way. His live appearances had been hailed as revelatory and he was considered a gifted, melodic composer whose passion and talent brought dynamism to the singer-songwriter form Eerily, his father, Tim Buckley, an innovative musician who had only just begun to receive commercial success, had also died suddenly—from a drug overdose&@151;in 1975. The father and son had lived apart from each other, yet they shared and ineffable musical genius.

Jeff Buckley was only 30 years old when he died, outliving his father's age at death by just two years. With the power of a novel, Dream Brother explores the lives of these two gifted musicians, drawing a remarkably clear picture of the parallel music eras (the '60s and the '90s) in which they worked and elucidating the forces that led to their tragic deaths.

About the Author:
David Browne is a staff music critic at Entertainment Weekly. Prior to that he was the staff music reporter for the New York Daily News. In 1996, he won the Music Journalism Award for excellence in criticism. He lives in New York City.

Onion

Essential and engrossing...a remarkable job.

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