It's been barely a year since Buckley waded into the Mississippi for a sunset swim and was sucked under, his body surfacing in Memphis Harbor six days later on June 4. His friends are still suffering, some too much to speak. Buckley's long-time friend, Rebecca Moore, gracefully declined to be interviewed, saying, "When I find the words, I'll be glad to talk, but I just haven't found them yet." A year is a blink in mourning time.

Buckley moved in with Moore when he left L.A. for New York in 1991. Gary Lucas, the innovative guitarist most widely known for playing with Captain Beefheart, had convinced him that New York was "a more conducive place."

And it was. In the early '90s, New York's downtown music scene thrived on the way crusty punks and dreamy-eyed folkies, poets and jazz musicians rubbed up against each other on the streets of the East Village, cross-pollinating like horny buzzing bees.

Only in New York is there a tradition of the best bands being led by poets--like Patti Smith or Jim Carroll or Soul Coughing's M. Doughty or Drunken Boat's Todd Colby. Only in New York do rock singers grovel to read from their notebooks on Monday nights at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on 2nd Avenue. Only in New York are you a nobody if you aren't given five minutes to sing, read, or honk your saxophone at the New Year's Day Marathon at said church. Where Patti Smith first performed after losing her husband and brother. Because her tribe was there.

The tribe was knocked out by Jeff Buckley. In a town crawling with brilliant musicians he was a phenomenon. "I saw Jeff perform at the Tim Buckley tribute at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn," says avant-garde composer and guitarist Elliott Sharp, "and all I can say is that I was struck by the beauty and power of his voice--certainly a ghostly reminder of his father."

Producer Hal Wilner had asked Lucas, who was a huge Tim Buckley fan, if he would collaborate with Jeff on "The King's Chain" for the tribute.

"He looked uncannily like Tim," Lucas recalls. "He was standing there vibing, electricity shooting out of his brain, rolling his eyes. I was immediately attracted to him, like, What the fuck is this guy trying to do? Every other musician was standing around trying to be ultra cool, like 'I'm in my downtown musician bag and I might as well be wearing shades'.

"He said 'You're Gary Lucas?' I read all about you in Guitar Player,' so I was very flattered. He came back to my house and I spread out my electronics. I created a loop with some Eastern-sounding singing and he started to sing through that amp over there, and I was just sent. I said, 'You're a fucking star!' and he said, 'Really? Everybody in L.A. hates me and they all say if anybody likes me it's because of my dad.'

"So I said 'Move here and shake that off; this is a more conducive place.' I took him to the White Horse Tavern and we really bonded. I decided to revamp Gods and Monsters with Jeff as my singer. Then we did the show at St. Ann's, and he just destroyed everybody. I said to myself, I've encountered a miraculous talent and he's a sweet kid and I'm gonna do my best to make this work."

Buckley returned to LA and Lucas went on tour with James Blood Ulmer. Meanwhile Lucas wrote the music to songs Buckley would re-name "Grace" and "Mojo Pin."

Buckley returned to New York in August to record with the band. According to Lucas, Buckley, "bluffed his way through the songs in rehearsal. But when he came to sing his tracks he had every note worked out in such a cool way."

Lucas credits Buckley's mother with helping develop his astounding musicality. "Everybody says Tim Buckley was the major influence on Jeff and, in fact, he knew his father's catalog backwards and forwards and could sing any of the songs just like his dad if he wanted. But his mother, Mary Guibert, encouraged him and instilled a love of music, whereas he had a lot of negative feelings regarding his father and the whole abandonment issue. She has an amazing voice. I heard her sing "Amazing Grace" at a memorial service for him and it gave me shivers. That's where he got so much."

Lucas went on tour with Nick Cave and brought a cassette with him, "but I was so awestruck by Jeff's talent that I didn't play it for anybody." Shortly thereafter, he and Jeff performed in Lucas's apartment for some Imago execs who agreed to pay for Jeff to move to New York and to finance a showcase for him at St. Ann's.

Buckley was still unsure of his abilities, however. At his first show with Gods and Monsters, at the old Knitting Factory in October of '91, he was mesmerizing but painfully shy. "We did a duet of 'Bluebird Blues,'" Lucas recalls. "It was semi-improvised country blues and he sang his ass off. Then we brought the band on and did a few songs. There were a lot of musicians there, like John Cale and Nick Cave. It was overwhelmingly great but Jeff was insecure because Nick and Cale didn't stick to the end. He was very rattled. I had to spend a long time convincing him that it was so strong that they probably didn't know what to say."

Despite Buckley's misgivings, the concert at St. Ann's "went fucking great," according to Lucas, who has a tape he says will come out "sometime, with his mother's blessing." But the next day Buckley informed Lucas that he was leaving Gods and Monsters to pursue a solo career.

"I felt destroyed," says Lucas, "I didn't talk to him for a long time. Things were rough between us for awhile."

Two years later, though, Buckley turned to Lucas for songs and guitar playing on Grace. "I play space guitar and open the record with guitar and I doubled some guitar parts. He had a wonderful tour and I was really bitter. But when I saw him play I thought, 'Hey, maybe it wasn't so bad,' because he had this thing about having the band stand far behind him. We had quarreled about this at St. Ann's, in fact. He said "Keith always stands behind Mick," Lucas remembers, chuckling.

Lucas and Buckley last performed together at the Knitting Factory's 10th anniversary show Feb. 4, 1997. "We did 'Grace,' and everybody was like 'Yeah, we've been waiting five years to hear this.' It was ecstasy and telepathy all over again. I was waiting to get a call to maybe go to Memphis to do something on the new record, and then . . . ."

Overcome, Lucas gets up to find some Kleenex. He returns to his chair and eases into it, sighing "He was the best singer I ever worked with."

Considering that Lucas has played with Patti Smith, Joan Osborne and many other great singers, that's high praise.

"It was very clear that this guy had magic," agrees Knitting Factory owner Michael Dorf. "As a person, he was shy but very sweet. When Rebecca Moore was recording Admiral Charcoal for our label in '96, he was involved in every session but wouldn't take a credit. I'll always remember him saying, 'Don't screw Rebecca!' Not sexually, but business-wise. He was showing this real care about her -- protecting her."

Poet Wanda Phipps was friends with Moore, who introduced her to Buckley: "I didn't notice him at all, but then I saw him perform at Sin-T Cafe (Sketches includes a photo of Buckley playing Sin-T's upright piano). When he sang he was gorgeous. It was like some channeling of the divine.

"I was running Monday night readings at the Poetry Project and I went to Sin-T after the readings every week. My friends thought I was crazy because I kept going back, but it was never the same. He didn't want to perfect a song in a certain form; he kept improvising -- finding what else was there. Often people didn't pay much attention to the performers at Sin-T, because it was free, but once Jeff would start to sing a huge hush would descend and everybody'd be totally rapt."

According to Phipps, Buckley performed some covers at Sin-T, including "I Am Calling You," from the movie Baghdad CafT, "Strange Fruit" ("He sang it once and it was almost too painful for me to listen."), and "Lilac Wine," as well as songs that ended up on his albums, like "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen.

At Moore's birthday party, Phipps and Buckley "had a long talk about life and work; about crying in the night in despair and how we were both Scorpios. After that there was a kind of bond, even though I'd just run into him on the street and he would kiss my hand. He noticed details other people wouldn't notice; like if I'd changed my hair, he'd touch it and ask what I'd done to it. He had this way of focusing in that made you feel like the most valuable human being on the planet."

After he became famous, Buckley played unannounced gigs under aliases like the Crackrobats, Possessed by Elves, Crit Club, and Topless America. When Phipps booked him with Homer Erotic and Maggie Estep at Mercury Lounge, Buckley asked her to bill him only as "special guest. He said he didn't want the suits to come down and make it all weird, he wanted it to be just us. But it was packed anyway."

Once Phipps went to see him at Sin-T and "there was a huge swarm of people crowding around him. I was about to leave but he grabbed my arm and held onto it really tightly so I couldn't move. Just to make sure that after all the rabid fans disappeared I could say whatever it was I'd wanted to say to him. He was really considerate and thoughtful that way. He had a nurturing way that made you feel full and joyous long after you'd parted." Phipps dabs at her eyes and is silent for a few minutes.

Have any of Buckley's albums captured what he could do live? Phipps pauses before answering: "No, although Live From Sin-T did it best. Listening to Sketches I realized that even though it seemed when you saw him live that you were eavesdropping on him in private, there was actually an intensity that's missing on Sketches because he wasn't performing for anyone but himself."

Phipps didn't speculate on Buckley's mental state before his death, as she hadn't talked to him in awhile, but Dorf says, "He was really excited and happy to be working on a new record, and was in a hyper state of challenging himself. And took that too far, perhaps. We don't really know what happened. Rebecca got a phone call from him within six hours of his drowning that was kind of predictive. It's horrible to have known him and have him die -- like he did. I played 'Grace' over and over again. In a weird way, many of his lyrics indicate a kind of 'follow the father' premonition. It's a poetic story, really, though a very sad one."

"I hope people will just remember what a brilliant artist and wonderful person he was," Phipps says quietly. "Once when Jeff was playing at Sin-T he saw the tree man outside -- the guy who used to walk around the East Village with a bag of leaves on his head and tree limbs tied to his arms. Jeff asked him to come in. He said he was a singer, too, so Jeff asked him to sing a song and played the guitar for him. It was really sweet."

DEB DESALVO