River's Edge

Buckley had immense self-confidence, a kind of bad-boy zeal mixed with a natural spieler's stage savvy. He could play, note-perfectly, the '60s and '70s rock that he said had "polluted" his musical training. And he immersed himself, courageously, into anything from Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday (he once called himself "a chanteuse with a penis") to the Bad Brains, Van Morrison and scads of Bob Dylan. He particularly loved Dylan's "If You See Her, Say Hello." At a gathering held at St. Mark's Church in New York 13 days after Buckley's death, many a tear was shed when his musical pal Tom Clarke played "If You See Her." The mythological strands around the singer's death will enforce the true believer's mystical view that Buckley's gift came from "some other place." But his craft actually has roots that are quite straightforwardly traced.

Buckley often cited Led Zeppelin II ("Whole Lotta Love," "Ramble On") as the record that bewitched him into rocking, though he came to favor the more exotic drones and wailing of Zep's Physical Graffiti. "He had the audio equivalent of a photographic memory," recalls Andy Wallace, who produced Grace. "Not only everything from [Charles] Mingus to Sonic Youth, but every verse of 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.' "

Buckley's abrupt arrival on the New York art-pop scene came with his invitation to play at a concert tribute to Tim Buckley at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn on April 26, 1991. Writer Bill Flanagan, an early Buckley adherent, recalls how, just before intermission, during an "at-times tedious" show in which performers played by an altar, "Jeff appeared, in silhouette, and for the first time the stained-glass window was lit up. He strums a guitar and starts singing one of Tim's songs, 'I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain.' " It was the elder Buckley's autobiographical tale of abandoning his family: "The flying Pisces sails for time and tells me of my child/Wrapped in bitter tales of heartache, he begs for just a smile." His hair then long and curly, Buckley sounded uncannily like his father and evoked "a little bit of a gasp," recalls Flanagan. "At the end of that night, he was surrounded by people handing him their business cards."

It was the start of Buckley's cat-and-mouse game not just with his father's legend but with his own. "He had been in bands in L.A.," says Flanagan. "He'd bumped into Tim Buckley cultists enough to notice he wanted to stay clear of them; he wasn't a novice to any of this."

That night he met lover-to-be Rebecca Moore, who at the time was helping to stage the shows at St. Ann's. The daughter of veteran downtown photographer Peter Moore, who documented the famed '60s performance-art group Fluxus and other avant-garde phenomena, she was a beauty who plugged Buckley into an arty world he hadn't seen. He finally decamped for good from California to be near her. In the inner fold of Grace's sleeve, he acknowledged Rebecca's father: "P., Thank you for her. Thank you for them all. Bless you for us two. Love, Jeff."

"When he got here, at 23 or 24," says New York performance artist Penny Arcade, who was among Buckley's closest friends, "Jeff was coming from pop culture, from cultural amnesia, and all of a sudden he found himself in the middle of a scene steeped in a history of artists working for generations."

After a brief stint in the band Gods and Monsters -- led by Captain Beefheart alumnus Gary Lucas -- Buckley took his craft solo, he said, "to sit still and let the music -- what it sounded like, its philosophy, its needs, its eccentricities -- come to me." He listened repeatedly to such adored musical touchstones as Duke Ellington and Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but onstage Buckley poured his irrepressible emotionality into covers of pop, rap, folk and even cabaret songs. "Certain emotions," he said, "just take you to the notes -- being furious, heroic, sad, erotic, when rain comes. . . ."

Buckley was quite capable of shedding tears, doing Edith Piaf's "Je N'en Connais Pas la Fin" at Sin-e, but he was even more capable of doing long skeins of stand-up-style banter with the audience. Present at those early shows at the East Village dive were label heads like Arista's Clive Davis and Columbia's Don Ienner. Even though Buckley had virtually nothing but cover tunes to offer them, his gift was so apparent that a quiet bidding war began. He had hooked up with lawyer George Stein for guidance, and, although several labels were willing to cut him a deal with rich signing bonuses and creative control, he settled in at Sony in part because of an empathetic A&R man, Steve Berkowitz -- plus, Buckley had glimpsed a giant photo of the young Dylan in the company's hallway.

Buckley's debut EP had primed the pump, and when Grace came out, in August of 1994, it was welcomed not just by his eager cult but by some 250,000 others ("The Last Goodbye" stayed near the top of Billboard's Modern Rock chart for 19 weeks). With the band he'd recruited for the studio -- drummer Matt Johnson, bassist Mick Grondahl and, just in time for the last album cut, guitarist Michael Tighe -- Buckley hit the road for the better part of two years, crisscrossing the United States and Europe (where, at Paris' Olympia Theater, fans ripped his shirt off his back) and also breaking big in Australia.

The road, and the demands of minor but intense rock stardom, undid the romance with Moore. Joan Wasser, violinist and vocalist with Buckley's sometime support act the Dambuilders, became a frequent companion. So he toured on, playing quirky club gigs and giving fervid interviews: "My personal aesthetic is to be affected directly by everything about what you're seeing. . . . I don't mind being dashed on the rocks. . . . My most base act of defiance is to live a long time and still rock."

He'd survived past 28, the year of Tim Buckley's sudden end, but had grown plenty sick of the questions about and the comparisons with his father. "I remember," recalls producer Wallace, "him telling me how the one time that he met his father, it was a relatively negative interaction where he sort of felt like his father just wasn't that interested in Jeff. That's a tough thing to have happen -- that [and the comparisons] combined just make it a very, very raw nerve."

I'll Never End Up Like My Old Man After nearly three years on the road, Buckley halted. Management told him to take some time off, then woodshed and write songs. No pressure -- just that dreaded second album. His downtown friends felt the tension: "He was on edge in terms of being completely afraid to make a second album," says a friend Nicholas Hill, a record producer and alternative-radio DJ, who heard Buckley's frustration come out as anger against the label. "I would always yell back at him, 'You consciously made a decision to go with the biggest record company you could find.' "

"Last fall," says Penny Arcade, who shared a psychoanalyst with Buckley, "he called me late one night, and I went and met him. He was really going through a lot of changes about the new album, feeling a lot of pressure. He just had his 30th birthday. He was pretty upset, pretty shaky, and he said, 'I just want to be as good as my father.' And I said, 'Well, you've got a problem, because your father made nine albums before he was 28. . . . Just by virtue of the way the music industry is today, you couldn't make that many records. . . . [But] he wasn't at all about, you know, being the guy with dark glasses in the convertible breezing down La Brea Boulevard. That wasn't his vision.

"Jeff has been going through turbulence ever since he was born," Arcade continues. "He was in a very rigorous personal inquiry of what it was to live in America at this point in history. I'm playing a tape now of one of his unreleased songs, 'The Sky Is a Landfill.' Before he died he called me from Memphis, and we spoke for three hours. I told him that that song would be the 'Stairway to Heaven' of his generation."

With the public ghost of his father (and a glimmer of Jim Morrison, who died at age 27) shadowing him, it was often rumored that Buckley had been abusing drugs, notably heroin. Gossip, about which Buckley vented his disgust in these pages, had him playing romantic games with Courtney Love and Hole-mate Melissa Auf Der Maur. But one source deep in the Love/Hole camp maintains that Buckley's smack use was "common knowledge." The source, however, never saw it. Another musician who is a veteran of such scenes said that Buckley's behavior at a particular after-show party was, to his eyes, blatantly junked out. Yet a good dozen friends and colleagues who saw Buckley regularly in recent years insist he was either categorically clean or, at most, may have merely experimented with drugs. "If you're an addict, you're an addict," says Keith Foti, who quit substance abuse two years ago, "and if you're not, you're not. Jeff obviously was not."