I was going to let my last post about Jeff Buckley ride, but there has been a little bit of commenting on that post to make me do a little bit of a quick update.
It was today in 1997, Jeff Buckley passed away.
On May 29, 1997, as the band’s plane touched down on the runway to join him in his Memphis studio, Buckley went swimming in Wolf River Harbor, a tributary of the Mississippi River, while wearing steel-toed boots, all of his clothing, and singing along to a radio playing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”. A roadie of Buckley’s band, Keith Foti, remained ashore. After moving the radio and a guitar out of reach of the wake from a passing tugboat, Foti looked up to see that Buckley was gone. Despite a determined rescue effort that night, Buckley remained missing, and the search was called off the following day due to heavy rain. One week later his body was spotted by a tourist on a riverboat marina and was brought ashore. [wikipedia]
A new album has been released, as of today, featuring some best of studio tracks as well as recordings of certain live performances.
The recognition of his brief time in rock and roll history is getting a lot more attention from fans than I expected, but it’s not too surprising. Amar Bakshi for the Washington Post left a comment about an interview he did with British singer Karima Francis, and it’s worth checking out the effect that Buckley is still having on musicians, ten years after the fact. NPR has a nice story about him as well.
I want to do more and explain why I’ve come to appreciate his music like I do, but the fact is that we don’t have much to go on. As he was rising up as an artist, the world lost an incredible talent. We’ll never know how good it could have been. When I go back to the small catalog that is, it makes you wonder. Plus, there are only so many people who can cover “Lilac Wine” and do it well, especially when you consider that Nina Simone did the same.