The Wolf River in Tennessee is located north of downtown Memphis. It’s a tributary of the Mississippi, which makes it somewhat notorious. The other thing about the Wolf River that makes it even more notorious is that Jeff Buckley drowned in its waters, ten years ago today.I probably learned of Buckley’s death well after I arrived home from work on the following day. His music didn’t get a tremendous amount of airplay around Southeast Iowa, so it would make sense that the radio stations didn’t mention word of his death.
Ironically, it was while working at a radio station in the same area that I discovered Jeff Buckley. The Top 40 station I worked for was about a mile-and-a-half away from the Mississippi river too; it even had a Highway 61 address, which made it kind of rock ‘n’ roll in my mind.
I was in charge of adding the music to the station’s format, a task I’m fairly sure that isn’t done locally anymore, thanks to all of those Clear Channel purchases.
The job was fairly easy: I took calls from the promotional departments of record companies and listened to their pitches as to what new songs they hoped I would add to the station’s playlist. Sometimes I listened to the things they wanted me to consider but the majority of the time, I didn’t.
In the fall of ’94, my station received a promotional cd copy of Jeff Buckley’s Grace. Being somewhat familiar with the work of his father, Tim Buckley (meaning: I knew who he was and that he had been dead for many years), I listened to the disc and read through the obligatory bio sheet that Columbia Records had created to entice me.
The label was focusing their promotional efforts on the lead-off single, “Last Goodbye,” which was already starting to receive some significant airplay on alternative stations across the country. Clearly, the brass at Columbia smelled a potential hit and began servicing the track to more commercial stations like the one I was working for.
I didn’t know if the song would be a crossover hit and, to be honest, I didn’t care. By the second verse of “Last Goodbye,” it became clear that his voice was capable of otherworldly heights.
Regardless of whether or not it would become a “hit,” I felt that we needed to play it.
I put “Last Goodbye” in the lunar rotation section of the station’s current playlist, with the hope that my boss wouldn’t have a problem with it. He usually didn’t like me adding a song without any research backing it up. “Research,” by the way, meant having a larger, more influential stations add it first, providing me with a legitimate reason why our station was playing it.
I figured that if I added it to just the nighttime playlist, which also happened to be the times when he wasn’t at the station, there was a good chance he wouldn’t notice it.
He didn’t and, sadly, not very many other commercial stations did either. The song stiffed fairly quickly; I kept it in the rotation for six weeks before finally admitting defeat.
In case you’re wondering, the number one song in the country during that time was Boys II Men’s “I’ll Make Love To You.”
It’s also important to consider what I was actively listening to during this time. In the fall of 1994, I was pretty fanatical about the Jesus Lizard, Barkmarket, and Kyuss. Obviously, every one of those aggro-rock selections is pretty far from what Buckley was doing, but as knuckle-dragging as my tastes may have appeared to be, I was smart enough to understand that Buckley was something special.
It appears that I wasn’t the only one around that time who immersed themselves in post-Nirvana distortion: Grace failed to give Columbia Records the out-the-gate sales that they anticipated. In fact, it took eight years before the album finally received a gold reward for selling 500,000 units.
While Buckley’s sales figures weren’t enough to qualify him as a runaway hit, his talents were great enough for those who initially supported him to share the music with others. As Jeff struggled with the daunting prospect of starting to work on his second album, word of mouth spread and his fan base continued to grow. Just when a larger audience was beginning to discover him, Buckley decided to test the dirty waters of the Wolf River.
His death, it goes without saying, did wonders for his career. Suddenly, the Brandon Lee posters that covered the walls of many female dorm rooms were replaced with the brooding images of a recently deceased Jeff Buckley.
I can’t blame them either: Jeff was a handsome sonofabitch.
For those of us who were more impressed with his talent, there was only an album and an e.p. to examine. This was quickly addressed: In the 10 years since his death, Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, has authorized a number of posthumous options (some of them questionable) to choose from.
Most will want to consider the material that Buckley was working on during the time of his death. Sketches (For My Sweetheart, The Drunk) compiles the nearly-finished album that Tom Verlaine produced along with the demos that Jeff worked on in Memphis after he decided to pass on the Verlaine sessions. For me, the Verlaine sessions are quite good and it lifts Sketches to the level of a worthwhile release.
The demo recordings that comprise disc two are minimally revelatory and, at times, feel like Buckley wouldn’t appreciate us listening to it; they are obviously blueprints for material he wanted to examine further before releasing them to the public.
At their worst, they feel just as exploitive as Cobain’s Journals.
An even more recommended posthumous title is the Legacy Edition of Live at Sin-é. Expanded from a four-song e.p. into a two disc set, the release features material from two separate performances. This is Jeff continuing to hone his skills at Sin-é, even after signing with Columbia, a venue that allowed him to explore different material in a very intimate and laid-back environment. The reissue benefits from the expansion as we get a longer glance at a young man who’s in complete control of his vocal abilities and his stage presence, even before he’s found a band or released a record.
As far as the other posthumous titles, well, let’s just say that Guibert is treading on some exploitive practices. Eight titles, both new releases and expanded re-issues, have found their way into Buckley’s catalog in the ten years since he passed. With any artist that is taken so quickly, there is an overwhelming desire to want every shred of recorded evidence that they created. At the same time, there is a need for some kind of balance. Matching the quality and the significance of the performances against the eventual perception of “scraping the bottom of the barrel” is important when managing the release schedule of an artist that’s no longer with us.
I understand this; I have considered the repetition of The Grace EPs box set,
the live posthumous selections (Mystery White Boy and Live At L’Olympia), and the obligatory early recordings (Songs To No One). At the end of the day, it’s all merely pointless fodder that feebly attempts to cover up the reality that Buckley offered us so little material to consider while he was still alive.
So while I’ve effectively ended my need for additional Cobain material, I’m not through with Buckley. It’s hard to debate his genius as a vocalist, but for me, Buckley provided something more: a musical diversion to finally offset the events of April 8, 1994. Even though my sonic landscape at the time was clearly paved with Nirvana’s four chord blast, it was Jeff Buckley’s four octave range that helped remind me that there were other generational talents to contemplate after Kurt Cobain.
But like Cobain, we never got a full picture of what Buckley would have ended up accomplishing because of one misguided dip in waters that the true locals knew enough to stay out of.
I’m expecting Buckley’s catalog to continue to grow, particularly when a biopic is currently being considered. Not only will it enhance Buckley’s deadsexy image and spawn additional fans, it will remind me, like this somber anniversary does , that I’m still not ready to believe he left us with so little…and so long ago.
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