Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Originally published in The Guardian, 30 October 2002

It is five years since Jeff Buckley took his final, mid-evening stroll into the Wolf River, a sleepy tourist spot on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee. Fully clothed and still wearing his combat boots, he splashed around happily, singing out lines from Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” The idyll was cruelly curtailed when a menacing undertow from a passing tugboat pulled Buckley under.

By the time the river volunteered his lifeless body six days later, on June 4 1997, news of the singer’s likely demise had already created its own wave of grief. Like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who’d taken his own life three years earlier, Buckley had provided that rare voice of authenticity in ’90s rock. Their tragic, premature deaths only enhanced the belief that their work embodied the full range of human frailty. Parallels with Jeff’s father Tim, a ’60s troubadour who pushed the bounds of folksong to embrace free jazz and impassioned white soul, and who had died of an accidental heroin overdose in 1975, were inevitably made.

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