Ben Harper has been performing for more than three decades, but as he sat with his lap steel guitar in front of an audience of roughly 500 people at the Sundance Film Festival, he seemed a bit nervous.
The audience had just watched the world premiere of “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” a documentary that explores the too-short life and career of a once-in-a-lifetime kind of artist — one of Harper’s friends and musical heroes.
When Buckley drowned in Tennessee’s Wolf River at the age of 30, in 1997, he had released just one album and was in the middle of recording his second. David Bowie called that debut album, “Grace,” the greatest album of all time.
On that album is Buckley’s take on the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” — a rendition that is arguably the definitive version of the song.
Now, in Park City, Utah, Harper was paying tribute to Buckley with a performance of “Hallelujah.”
“I only do it every so often as a tribute to Jeff,” he said in his soft-spoken manner, noting that he was friends with both Buckley and Cohen.
“If there ever is a college dissertation about how to turn a song into a hymn, Jeff Buckley and ‘Hallelujah’ — that’s the intro," he said, recalling how he once asked Cohen what he thought about the rendition.
“He wasn’t easily impressed, being Leonard Cohen, and I said, ‘Isn’t that incredible what he did?‘” Harper continued, quieting his voice to a soft whisper. “He grabbed my arm and he goes, ‘Ohhhh, yeah, it’s cool.‘”
And then Harper sang, his voice tinged with emotion as he played his steel guitar.
“Thanks, Amy (‘It’s Never Over' director Amy Berg), for putting me on after Jeff,” Harper said with a laugh before addressing the cheering audience. “And thank you for your grace and patience in allowing me to do that.”
Harper, a three-time Grammy winner, was solely in Utah to honor Buckley.
“Jeff is a hero of mine, and Amy is a hero of mine cinematically,” Harper told the Deseret News a few minutes before the premiere at Sundance. “There was no distance far enough to keep me from being here.”
But, as Harper told the Deseret News, having the documentary premiere at the Sundance Film Festival was fitting because Utah has long played a special role in his own career.
Ben Harper shares his love for Utah
Harper doesn’t hesitate when it comes to sharing his love for Utah.
He said he’s had a number of great shows in Utah over the years, and joked that he was dating himself by mentioning a performance at The Holy Cow in Salt Lake City (now the Urban Lounge) back in 1997.
Salt Lake City, he said, has been one of the places that has “accepted” his music.
“The music we make is left of center as far as what is standardly available ... what’s marketable,“ he said. ”Utah was there en masse representing the sounds we were making, the noise we were making. So it’s a real privilege to always come back here and have people still recognizing what we’re doing.”
The singer said he likes to make the most of performing in Utah, and doesn’t make it a quick stop on tour — his go-to place is a bit of a drive from the Salt Lake City area.
“Every time we come through Utah, we try to take our time with Bryce Canyon,” he said, adding that he enjoys camping at the national park. “We get the bus as close as we can and then go on in. I have a lot of great memories at Bryce.”
What Ben Harper says in the Jeff Buckley documentary
At Sundance, Harper told the Deseret News it was “a huge honor” to play a “small splinter of a role” in Amy Berg’s documentary.
Berg said she spent a total of 15 years on the film — 10 years trying to get rights to film, which involved developing a relationship with Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, and five years putting the story together once she got that approval in 2019.
The director added that the film is a love story to Buckley, told “through the people he loved.”
That included Harper, who praises Buckley’s vocal range — a staggering four octaves — and the singer’s ability to imitate vastly different vocal styles, including Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin and Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
In 1995, both Harper and Buckley, in the early stages of their careers, were performing at a rock festival in Belfort, France. As Harper recalls in the documentary, they could hardly contain their excitement that Led Zeppelin’s Plant and Jimmy Page would be performing later on. They made an arrangement to meet up to see Zeppelin’s set together.
But as Plant and Page took the stage, Buckley was nowhere to be found. At some point during the show, Harper said he looked up to see Buckley hundreds of feet in the air, hanging off the scaffolding next to the stage so he could literally feel the music.
”To this day (it’s) one of the most unthinkable, impossible things I’ve ever seen in rock,” Harper said to a laughing audience following the film’s premiere. “That’s 200 decibels coming off at that point.”
‘There just aren’t words to explain Jeff Buckley'
“It’s Never Over” takes viewers through Buckley’s childhood, rise to fame and tragic death that nearly 30 years later continues to leave those who loved him most in tears.
A common theme throughout it all is the frustration Buckley clearly felt as he strived to escape the shadow of his father, singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, who left the picture when his son was just a few months old.
“There are so many tapes where you can hear Jeff being introduced as Tim Buckley’s son, and he just changes his whole demeanor, because he was never happy with that introduction, with somebody he didn’t actually know,” Berg told the audience at Sundance. “He looked like him and sounded similar to him, but ... he wanted to be his own person.”
Most attending the premiere were Jeff Buckley fans. But when Berg asked if there was anyone in the audience who had never heard his music, a few hands shot up.
That brought a slight smile to her face, knowing that her film is already helping to spread the music and story of an artist who has meant so much to her.
“I was trying to understand and articulate why I love him so much, and it’s not easy to explain,” Berg said of creating the film. “There just aren’t words to explain Jeff Buckley.”