Apter (who churns rock bios out like sausages) runs through the usual accoutrements of rock-star life: studio tensions, time pressures, executive meddling, flattening commercial imperatives, broken relationships, band direction, the enervating nature of the road, sex, and drugs. But readers looking for titillating excess will be disappointed. Buckley’s rock adventures are mild when contrasted with biographies like Wonderland Avenue (1989) or Keith Richards’s Life (2010). Trade your cocaine for marijuana, your orgies for an energetic round of monogamous sex, and your televisions hurled out of hotel windows for occasionally churlish stage moods.

Following his early success, Buckley joked that he had become ‘the poster boy for fifty-year-old rockers’. Indeed, Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, Jimmy Page, and David Bowie (among others) were taken with his musicality. It becomes clear that Buckley’s fan base in the musical firmament was more closely aligned with his musty musical tastes (e.g. Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan) than with his cutting-edge musical contemporaries. The early exit of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke from one show upset Buckley, who began working hard to win the respect of his grungy peers. While Buckley had savant-like musical talent, over half of his only studio album consisted of co-writes or covers, leading one critic to label him a cipher. All in all this is a relatively benign book within the rock-bio tradition, but interesting enough for rock tragics or Buckley enthusiasts.