Sins of the fathers

Fathers appear to us to love us without condition if only we can interpret their complicated language. – from Rick Moody’s The Black Veil

Is there such a thing as a family curse? A straight line of bad luck running from father to son?

Two books that explore the often-faulty paternal line are David Browne’s Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Tim and Jeff Buckley and Rick Moody’s The Black Veil: A Memoir. Both books leave us with a sense of dread or sadness at the frailty of the human receptacle – how often difficult it is to carry on the burden of legacy or history.

Dream Brother presents two lives: there is ’60s proto-folk artist Tim Buckley, who begat Jeff Buckley, the romantic alt-rocker of the ’90s. Both died young, Tim at 28 of a drug overdose, while Jeff, who barely knew his semi-famous father, drowned at 30 in the treacherous Mississippi River.

We learn that Tim was very much a product of his times: a ’60s troubadour who married young, quickly produced a son (Jeff), then just as quickly split to sow his wild oats in Greenwich Village’s burgeoning folk scene. Tim quickly gained a rep as a mesmerizing performer, a four-octave singer who scaled Olympian heights in his often jazz-influenced onstage jams. He was also more than a little self-destructive, having had a difficult relationship with his own dad, and impulsively sabotaged his own recording career by shifting stylistic gears and never landing that crucial number one hit record.

Alternating chapters present Jeff as a musical prodigy who, introduced to his first guitar, quickly found he could pick out any song after one or two listens. He absorbed his father’s history (through LP records kept by Tim’s abandoned wife) but was determined not to worship at the tarnished Shrine of Tim.

When he finally introduced his own voice to the public – during solo performances at New York’s Sin-é club and at a Tim Buckley tribute concert – young listeners were captivated by his mix of vocal influences – everything from Van Morrison, Nina Simone, Edith Piaf and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – while all the older listeners could hear and see was a reincarnation of Tim. Photos show a remarkable family resemblance, yet Jeff berated fans who called out for his father’s songs and embarked on his own musical journey.

Of course, his looks and atypical musical gifts raised him above the middling grunge scene of the time, and he was quickly signed to Columbia Records. The book charts Jeff’s efforts to claim his own voice and escape the shackles and the doomed echoes of the past. At the same time, he seemed to be escaping his own future, the record company pressure to fulfill his promising young career.

Hard to believe, but in Tim Buckley’s day, 28 was almost retirement age for rock musicians. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Hendrix all died at age 27. Tim succumbed to a taste for heroin, squandered his musical cachet with fans and – in a moment of bad luck or fulfilled misfortune – mistook several lines of H for coke at a drug dealer’s house. He OD’d, and it took 15 years before his nine-album legacy was rediscovered by a new generation of fans.

Jeff, meanwhile, produced one masterpiece album ("Grace") then suffered from sophomore slump, taking years to work on a follow-up. Perhaps the public fish-eye lens of being Tim’s son didn’t help matters. He wrote that he was relieved to have outlived his dad, at least. Yet one night, during a break in band rehearsals in New Orleans, he casually decided to take a dip in the unpredictable brown waters of the Mississippi – fully clothed, a large key ring and boots weighing him down. His body was found several days later, a sad ending to a father-son narrative.

Unlike many rock biographies, Dream Brother doesn’t make you end up thinking less of its "rock god" subjects. Often, we read about squandered gifts and thrown-away talent and feel disgust. The paranormally inclined might point to curses or bad blood for the Buckleys, but what’s left behind, ultimately, is a feeling of sadness.

Moody’s memoir, meanwhile, focuses on the writer’s distant New England relative – Rev. Joseph Moody, credited as the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, "The Minister’s Black Veil." Legend has it the colonial predecessor wore a black handkerchief over his face for much of his late life to atone for certain sins or to hide his shame from the public. (He reputedly shot a childhood friend in a hunting accident.)

Moody, author of The Ice Storm and Purple America, becomes curious about his namesake’s true roots. But the genealogical search is also a jump-off point to explore his own dark moments, including a stay in a New York psychiatric hospital for alcoholism and delusions. Apparently, the young writer became convinced for a time that he was going to be physically raped – by strangers or friends – a psychological fixation that he never attempts to explain fully (though he feels it has to do with a uniquely American obsession with its own dark side).

Though he touches on the difficulty of his own father-son relationship ("My father was a cipher to me, a mystery to me, an enigma"), mostly he traces his ancestors, their puritanical compulsions, and how such compulsions persist. He takes a five-day car trip through Maine with his dad, searching for clues to "explain" the real Joseph Moody. He buys black veil fabric at a Wal-Mart and, for a while, wears it around the house. He attempts to uncover the mystery, the fear circulating between generations, between fathers and sons – and finds instead a peculiar, nurtured dark side within us all, echoed in the US schoolyard massacres, in William Burroughs’ remorse at having shot his own wife in 1951, or in his own slow escape from personal demons. Moody, as his name suggests, is not the happiest camper or writer on earth. But it’s his acknowledgment of an inherited dark side – and his attempts to name this, to pin it down – that lifts this memoir above the merely confessional. Jeff Buckley probably felt that dark side, too – the pull and push from an estranged past – and it no doubt marked him. It’s the capacity, either inherited, genetically wired, or learned, to hide our worst fears and secrets from ourselves and from others.

Talk about curses.