Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley Book

I was a huge Tim Buckley fan and had the pleasure of seeing him perform live, twice, in 1967 and '68. No recording I've heard has ever captured the richness of his voice which was unlike any I have ever heard elsewhere. I also got to meet Tim backstage and learned how short he was, and how nasty he could be to a complete stranger simply because she expressed the fact that she had been deeply affected by his music.

Later I heard many stories about Buckley's untidy personal life from hippie friends in Cambridge in '68, so I was particularly interested in learning the real details of what happened. This book answered most of my questions, but it was not an enjoyable read. The author's tone throughout is strangely flat, reverting too often to discographical detail (who played on what album, and when it was produced) but failing to bring alive the environment in which Tim Buckley flourished, or for that matter, the personalities of either Tim or his son.

This may be partially because there is little written material to give us a sense of these men's thought patterns and motivations. But lack of written material didn't keep another author from writing a brilliant evocation of the lives of the Carter family in Zwonitzer's Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone.

Unfortunately, the approach taken here was one that, by the end of the book, made me think much less of both Buckleys, who come across as stubborn and self-involved in a way that doesn't make us empathize with them or, by the end, care about them.

Despite my experience of Buckley's unpleasant personality, I still loved his music, and listened to it until he verged off into the Jazzy direction that Browne appears to think was progress but which to me was boring and in retrospect a sign of just how drugged out Buckley was. Somehow Browne doesn't seem to connect up the drug use with the change in Buckley's approach to playing music. The Grateful Dead in the same timeframe were able to get extremely stoned but still keep aware that music was for the listener. Somehow Tim couldn't. He became seduced by the pleasure of listening to his own music in his own mind, without understanding that performers must connect to those listening or they have no right to be on a stage.

I had not been a fan of Jeff's music, and having seen quite a few YouTube videos of it, he seems to me to be someone with excellent musicianship but no feel for song construction. His stuff goes on and on, and his best performances are of other people's songs. Even there, I like Leonard Cohen's version of Hallelujah a lot better than Jeff's.

Finally, the issue that never gets discussed in this book, but should be, is that of hereditary mental illness, which appears to have been an issue with both father and son. At one point the author mentions "borderline personality" as if it were something someone "came down with." This shows faulty research, and since borderline personality is basically a form of psychosis which results in people being completely unaware that other people are alive, or caring for them in any regard except to manipulate them, to bring that diagnosis up is quite a dramatic statement that wasn't lived up to by the actual story told here.

But obviously both father and son had some major mental issues, and it seems clear that Jeff was losing touch with reality during his last months of life, given the word-salady quotes presented here. A bit more insight into this could have helped give us more empathy for these two brilliant but doomed musicians. The author's intellectuality appears to be the real problem here. He is too much the New York jazz critic, too far away from the reality of musicians and the life they lead.