Northern Light

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 above him. Jeff was my neighbor and friend, so I turned my car around to see if I could extract him from his tangle.

The incident had ended by the time I got there. It began raining. 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, then 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 corner that was known for drug activity, but he wouldn't hear it.

At the corner, instead of turning toward our street to go home--he lived a few doors from us in a rental house--I turned away. An anger I didn't know flared up. He demanded to be let out and opened the door while we were moving. The rain was hard and heavy, a dark rain. He did not want to know that I was only going one block out of the way. To calm him I told him I would take him home directly. F---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 the 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 a place he could be alone.

He leapt out of my car and was immediatelly soaked. "I'll walk," he said. "It's nice out." It was not nice out. Is that what he had to say to be alone?

Jeff rang our doorbell at six sharp. "Look at this," he told my wife, leading Mr. Clean into the kitchen. 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 a 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 pre-summer heat. My four-month-old daughter cooed at him, he cooed back, and they 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. One the street I could hear every thudding syllable. 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 put down 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 she handed him a menu and asked him for an autograph. He was polite; I think the occasional recognition was enough to sate his ego, but not so much that it interfered with his daily affairs.

My wife and I fed him a couple of times, hung out a bit. Usually his blinds were drawn, and we mostly left him to his work. One evening I stopped by on my way to the neighborhood bar. 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 heroine for cocaine, laid out a fat line, inhaled, 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 of years. My wife's father died accidentally when she was a child, and she speaks of the mixed feelings she had when she passed her father's age. Survivors' guilt tinged with survivors' 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 accidentally, laughed a lot at that first meeting but were never introduced, and I left thinking he was just some new guy in town. It took an effort by me to supress the opportunism presented by his fame and maintain that purity in our friendship. We never discussed doing an interview, though I took notes for one. He had recorded an Alex Chilton song on his first EP; Chilton plays a significant role in my first book, It Came From Memphis, but we never discussed that either. He'd never played his fame card before, and offering to drive him a mile home that day it rained, when I was a block from doing that anyway, made me painfully aware of the shared natures of fan and servant.

Fame is a buoy that raises you up and 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 fourth: 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. When a British magazine editor called the next morning asking me to confirm that Jeff had died of a drug overdose, I reamed the guy. "Let him work!" I said. "He wants to be alone." The editor assured me that this news was based in fact, that someone from 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 that reports were that Jeff had drowned, and what did I know about it? Geez, I thought, can't anyone let this guy work?

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 the current had swept him away and deposited him, tired and delirious, in a foresaken corner of a cotton field, and he 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 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 water. The shadow was heavy. The refraction was blinding. His boots were full.

It's said about the blues singer Robert Johnson 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 him.

The undercurrents in Memphis swelled in Jeff's absence. This city reveres obscurity, is hostile toward success. Beneath the reverence for the celebrated--here or anywhere--is a mean-spirited envy, a rooting for the lions over the gladiator. The tide of gossip rose: He staged his death for publicity. Or for solitude. He was on drugs. Suicide. Black magic.

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 friends. 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 seperate the purity of his tone from the tragedy of his fate.

My child is drifting off to sleep in my arms. She has learned to crawl, is beginning to understand spacial 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.

Source: Robert Gordon