Memphis allows you a great freedom. On the street, you don’t encounter stars of today’s charts, nor a world of less-heavenly bodies—agents and publicists and managers. There’s no mill expecting fresh grist, nor even is there much of a culture-seeking audience; there’s better towns for higher culture. You work at your own pace, you develop in public as much as you’d like, then you take it elsewhere to sell—either in a van with a guitar, or through one of the cities of industry, or from your bedroom on the Internet. We are a hole in the wall—some call it a city—for artists, so having the factory two hundred miles away in Nashville seems just about perfect to me.
I think that’s why Jeff Buckley came to Memphis—to be free from the factory’s heat. He came to experience people who don’t care about Manhattan or Los Angeles, don’t think of meetings there in the course of their day. In Memphis, the rent is cheaper, the days are slower, the narcissism less tolerated. You can afford to dig deeper, to hew the piece one time more before the forge.
Unlike the others in this book, Jeff Buckley had fame and came here to lose it. Obscurity wasn’t his problem. He is, in a way, the anti–James Carr. He came to Memphis for what many residents complain about: the isolation. He wasn’t leaving the grid, just resituating himself on it. On the road in the 1990s, he’d befriended the Grifters, Memphis’s finest alternative rock band, and he came to see if this town and its indie studio were all these enthusiasts proclaimed. That’s when I met him.
’Nuff said. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)
I was leaving Hi Records drummer Howard Grimes’s house with some photos he’d given me for the Al Green boxed set Anthology. I had to show someone and I knew Doug Easley and Davis McCain would appreciate the finds; their studio was on the way home. At Easley-McCain Recording, there was an energetic kid checking out the studio who paced as he talked, moving like Gumby with a wire through him, and he shared the excitement. We didn’t exchange names.
Jeff booked studio time and returned—twice. In Easley one night he mentioned moving here and I told him about a house for rent on my Midtown block. It was owned by the couple across the street from me. They were simple country folk in the city. They had performed their wedding vows at home in front of their favorite Sunday morning TV preacher. (When my wife first entered their living room, she exclaimed to the husband at the TV’s size. He missed not a beat, answering, “There’s only one bigger.”) They had a menagerie of pets and raised rats to sell for snake food. They were casually anti-Semitic and rabidly born-again. For me, their life was a reality TV show that ran loudly and without cessation. For Jeff it was a world that had to be explored. He’d walk down with his guitar, compose songs by letting their German shepherd’s nose push his hands around the guitar neck, and pick up lyrics from their dialog as he watched them cook dinner.
He also took up a residency on Tuesdays at the punk club Barristers. The gigs weren’t announced, but word spread plenty quick. He’d try out material, do fun covers, and run a stream of bebop stage patter like Neal Cassady, as much stand-up comic as songster. During the breaks, he’d shoot pool with challengers. Memphis allowed him a giant step backward, a chance to be a pretty regular guy.
Days before Jeff died, we began discussing a music video. He wanted to model it on The Party, starring Peter Sellers. I watched the film and the reasons for his affection were obvious: Sellers was a dapper, daft nerd and a mimic, a stranger in a land of facile, graceful performers who wreaks havoc obliviously and continuously. I looked forward to dressing Jeff in a white three-piece suit and choreographing the stunts. But it was not to be.
Jeff Buckley, left, and Andria Lisle at Miss Ellen’s Soul Food on N. Parkway. Legendary johnnycake. (Courtesy of Lely Constantinople)
From Jeff’s Memphis recordings, I’m a sucker for “Everybody Here Wants You.” The writing is dense but Jeff’s in no hurry, his voice soaring like silk in a pleasant breeze. He’s slinking over to Al Green territory, cathedral-like and yet so intimate. And while I know it’s a love song to a woman, I can’t help thinking that the central line is a recurring thought after his quick success in New York, in Memphis, and in every room he was in: “Everybody here thinks he needs you.”
Oxford American, August 2000
Thirty-six hours before Jeff Buckley died, I saw him standing on a quiet Memphis street corner. A sheriff’s car had pulled over and the beige-suited federale stood towering over him. Jeff was my neighbor and friend, so I turned my car around to see if I could extract him from this tangle.
The incident ended before I got there, and Jeff was walking away. Rain began. I pulled up next to Jeff. He didn’t like strangers stopping him and he kept his face forward as I drove beside him. He didn’t look up until I spoke, and when he heard my voice he stormed into the car, furious that the deputy had stopped to ask who he was. Jeff thought the lawman recognized him from his videos. I tried telling him their paths happened to cross at a spot notorious for drug activity, but he wouldn’t hear it.
At the corner, instead of turning toward our street to go home, I turned away. An anger I hadn’t seen in him flared. He demanded to be let out and opened his door while we were moving. The rain was hard, heavy, and dark. He did not want to know that I was only going one block out of the way. To calm him I told him I’d take him home directly. Fuck it, if he wanted to act like a rock star, I’d indulge his fame, don my chauffeur’s hat, take his assholiness home, and then do my errand.
If he’d not died, the incident would have meant nothing. I see my happening onto him right after a cop as proof—if he was seeking proof—that he could not take a walk and be alone. He had owned Manhattan and walked away for just that—a place he could be alone.
He leapt out of my car, was immediately soaked. “I’ll walk,” he said. “It’s nice out.” It was not nice out. Is this what he had to say to find solitude?
One day a couple weeks earlier, Jeff had rung our doorbell at six sharp. “Look at this,” I told my wife, leading Mr. Clean into the kitchen. We’d invited him for a home-cooked meal. He wore a frilly green three-piece thrift-store suit, two-tone black-and-white shoes, and a wide-brimmed hat tilted forward over his face. I assumed a matching green Cadillac with fake fur steering wheel was parked out front. He said, “I like to dress for dinner.”
He and I drank red wine outside in the presummer heat. Our four-month-old daughter cooed at him, he cooed back, and they both laughed. After dinner, he wanted to retrieve a notebook he’d left at the downtown club where he had a weekly gig. “Sure they’re open,” he said, “live bands seven nights a week.” We walked to his house where he got the keys to his rental car. Before leaving the house, he put on a Dead Kennedys CD and left it at top volume. In the driveway, I could hear every thudding beat. An Avon lady lived next door to him. I didn’t ask questions.
He drove like his verbal riffs: all over the place. The club was, of course, closed. But his outfit was glowing, we were half-lit, and we hit a Beale Street beer hall that had a pool table. He laid two quarters in line for a game and steadily pumped the jukebox.
In Memphis, Jeff could play at anonymity: a dangerous, green-suited pool hustler running Beale. The bartender found his Grifters selection too noisy and pulled the plug. Jeff leapt onto the pool table and demanded not only that the machine be turned back on, but that he be given his money back so he could play the song again. A pretty girl recognized him and between pool shots handed him a menu and asked for an autograph. He was polite.
Usually, we left Jeff to his work up the street. He kept his blinds drawn. One evening I stopped by on my way to the neighborhood bar and he joined me. He talked about his dad that night, also a singer with a clarion voice. Tim Buckley was twenty-eight when he found a packet of powder and, mistaking the heroin for cocaine, laid out a fat line, snorted, and died. Jeff was eight at the time. He lived with his mother, her husband, and his half brothers, and back then his name was Scott J. Moorhead. Then he’d entered his old man’s business, and though he didn’t know him (he’d only spent a week with his dad), he was feeling the weight of his father’s shadow. Dead at such an early age, Tim Buckley would be forever young. “The only way I can rebel against him,” Jeff told me, “is to live.”
You don’t go swimming in your boots without some kind of intent somewhere. Jeff was thirty when he drowned in the Mississippi River. I don’t imagine that his father’s specter ever left him, but I do believe life must have refracted through the ghost differently during Jeff’s last couple years. My wife’s father died when she was a child, and she speaks of the mixed feelings she had when she passed her father’s age. Survivor’s guilt ringed with survivor’s triumph: “It didn’t happen to me” becomes “it couldn’t.”
People like me who write about musicians have a relationship with celebrity that is either symbiotic or parasitic, depending on the perspective. Jeff and I had met by happenstance. It took an effort by me to suppress the opportunism presented by his fame. We never discussed doing an interview, though I took notes for one. He often covered an Alex Chilton song, “Kanga Roo”; Chilton plays a significant role in my first book, It Came from Memphis, but we never discussed that either. He’d never before played his fame card until that day in the rain, and then my own willingness to oblige made me painfully aware of how my friendship with him could shade into fandom, and fandom into servitude.
Fame is a buoy that raises you up and it’s a weight that brings you down. Jeff Buckley was beautiful to behold, a blast to be around, a singular talent. He seemed strong enough for fame. His core bubbled with energy, an excitement that sometimes overpowered him. Talking about his dad in the bar, he bent to his drink and gnawed on the glass with his teeth. Though he could wrangle his power, like when he made music, he seemed most at ease letting it pour forth: A rush of comic routines. Impulsive actions. His wardrobe. Swimming in the river.
The day after the rain, I saw a furniture rental truck unloading beds at his house; Jeff’s band was arriving.
A British magazine editor called the next morning asking me to confirm that Jeff had died of a drug overdose. “Let him work!” I said. “He wants to be alone.” The editor assured me that this news was based in fact, that someone at Microsoft News had—but I cut him off and told him to leave the guy alone. Ten minutes later a friend at Jeff’s label called to say reports were that Jeff had drowned, and what did I know about it?
My wife said if I’d been called about another of my neighbors having an accident, I’d have run to their door and knocked, made sure everything was okay. I did walk down to Jeff’s house and stood in front of it, dumbly—his house looked like his house—but I wasn’t about to disturb him with rumors of himself. An hour later, back home, I glanced out front and an image of his bandmates, their stooped backs, the shade of the magnolia tree, red Converse high-tops on asphalt—seared into my brain. Death. I’d never seen them before, but their dyed hair and disheveled look announced them as Jeff’s guests, and their dazed walk and stupefied manner instantly confirmed the worst. It rained for four days after that.
The first daylight hours passed as we waited for the phone to ring—for Jeff to tell us that a current had swept him away and deposited him, tired and delirious, in a forsaken corner of a cotton field and he’d walked for hours between rows to dirt paths to gravel and was finally calling from a gas station near a stupid Tunica casino, could someone please come pick him up right away and bring dry clothes, he was miserable. But that call didn’t come. His mother came, his girlfriend, an aunt, a lawyer, and some record company people.
When Jeff Buckley immersed himself in that inlet of the Mississippi River, he swam out on his back, looking at the stars, singing a Led Zeppelin song. A tugboat passed and left a wake. He swallowed unexpected water. The shadow was heavy. The refraction was blinding. His boots were full.
It’s said about Robert Johnson, the blues singer, that he lived a compartmentalized life. That to some he was Robert Dusty, to others Robert Spencer, and that his personae were as varied and as independent as the people to whom each was known. Jeff had a life in New York I knew little about, and his family was in California. But his absence broke down those partitions, and we survivors clung to each other in his house, surrounded by his belongings, waiting for our own different versions of the same person.
The tide of gossip rose in Jeff’s absence. He staged his death for publicity. Or for solitude. He was on drugs. Suicide. Black magic. Fame worship always conceals a mean-spirited envy, a rooting for the lions over the gladiator. And Memphis is a city that reveres obscurity, is especially hostile toward success.
On the fourth day, before his body floated up, his mother called his friends to his house for a wake. His beautiful photograph was propped on the table, along with a candle and maybe a flower. She wanted to celebrate her son’s life and she made a toast, reminding me how little we can each know of even the ones we call friend. She raised her glass, and we raised ours. Her words startled me: “To Scotty.”
His singing was magisterial, like a pipe organ, natural like the northern lights. Jeff’s voice made me want to build shrines—though now I see Jeff Buckley was the shrine to his voice. His sudden end has seeped into my memories of his passion and vitality, and I can’t separate the purity of his tone from the tragedy of his fate.
My second child is floating off to sleep in my arms. She has learned to crawl, is beginning to understand spatial relations. The puzzle that is everything she sees is beginning to have pieces and the pieces are beginning to fit. Her dreams have become more lifelike, and as she is momentarily disturbed into consciousness, her eyes open. She can’t tell the worlds apart, and since the dream feels so much nicer than the coldness of reality, she doesn’t fight the return. She drifts off.