Original subtitles

Jeff?

reaches people on such a deep level. I think because he is like the essential

artist. It's raw, it's real, and his voice is like an instrument in itself.

a poet for the ages, and it's a love story that just continues on and on.

I've actually done my best to really not think about this for 30 years, let

alone talk out loud about it.

Society has a weird view towards women in these relationships.

There's so much misogyny. You're sort of pigeonholed into this girlfriend or ex

-girlfriend or these roles, and you're supposed to sort of be cut as a pathetic

figure.

I've gone as far from being an artist in New York City as one can imagine, and I

think that is a lot because of his death.

He heard the whole of his person in the

music.

Writing his second record was so daunting.

It was a huge step forward for him.

But I haven't been able to listen.

That might sound crazy, but I can't.

I certainly was a flawed parent.

But he sure got me, you know, and he thought exactly where I came from and

understood why I made the choices I made in my life.

No one has ever loved me more or better

than he.

Every human being has music that only they can make.

And it's my deepest form of communication with people.

It'll always keep on changing.

It'll always defy anything that tries to put people in a box.

This is our last goodbye.

There are things I want to

do that I've never heard of.

It's my life.

I just love when men use their voice so unselfconsciously. I mean, he was

literally the best singer I've ever heard.

And he was so amazed by what female singers could do.

Feminine masculine, he was and is my favorite.

When you really dig into the lyrics, it's so sacred.

Him recognizing his own.

I guess you could call it mortality.

I want to be songwriter Jeff.

Jeff Buckley, songwriter.

He had a way of playing the most beautiful song you've ever heard.

He could have literally been doing anything musically that he wanted to do.

First time I heard Jeff sing.

Oh, he was in the bassinet.

One time I came in and I could hear him. He was vocalizing

to the radio.

The day I heard Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I thought, ooh, yeah.

He's a singer.

Music charged my life.

A good childhood?

Uh, it was a childhood.

My mom's first generation, Panamanian immigrant, very good girl, brought up

voodoo Catholic values, you know, brought over to Anaheim, you know, that

hellhole in Southern California where Disneyland is.

My parents had high

hopes for me.

You know, immigrant parents with their eldest child.

I wanted to be an actress and sing and dance and play the piano, but I had

soiled the family name and dishonored them having premarital sex.

I met Timothy in French class.

He would do things like pull one hair on my, right? And I would turn around and

he would be looking up.

We were two kids from abusive, crazy homes, and we just knew the world better

than anybody else.

17 at the time, I was already a teenage pregnant mom.

My parents thought maybe I should give the baby up for adoption, but there was

no choice for me but to go through with the pregnancy.

I knew from the fifth month that I was never going to see Tim again.

First of all, he was with somebody else.

Plus, he was determined to be a singer -songwriter.

This child was on me.

He split before I was born.

You know, you decided not to be a father to me.

You don't serve your country, man. You serve life. You serve people.

TV from the very beginning and also public schools have been the great

lobotomizer.

Everything in the outer world is not the world. Cars, how much perfume you wear.

The world is what's inside and what cats pull out of themselves all through

time. I said to him, you gotta go pursue your dreams. You go.

But...

My dreams of being an actress or being a concert pianist, that was all gone.

Jeff and I sort of raised each other.

Well, his father wasn't there, but this woman loved him with all her heart and

didn't hesitate.

to make him feel loved at every chance he had.

He would come and put his little hands on my face and say, we're going to be

okay, Mommy, right?

And I'd go, yes, we are, honey, we're just fine.

He had to take care of her.

And he was feeling like she had been hurt and feeling horrible about

that.

Perhaps it is the color of the sun caught flat and covering

the crossroads I'm standing at.

Jeff was like having a grandfather watching over me and telling me who was

to date and who wasn't. Mama, you've been on my mind.

When I was a kid, I always felt really proud if I could roll a joint for all

grown -ups at the party.

I never did it, but I always, I want to do it, let me do it.

I now remember the day that my mom called me over to the reclining chair

tried to explain to me that if I told anybody that they did this stuff, they

would go to jail.

When Jeff was little, before I even

made coffee, music would go on.

Constant, constant, constant, constant.

Judy Garland, the man that got away.

I love that song.

And it was very important to him.

Music, always.

My stepfather, Ronald, who was a car mechanic.

He was the one that introduced me to Led Zeppelin.

And that changed my whole life.

Ron would turn the stereo on loud enough to hold blocks in here.

And there would be little Jeff laying on top of the speakers with his little

body vibrating to the music.

Music, it was my mother.

It was my father.

It's the best thing in my life.

I see in the newspaper this quarter -page ad.

Tim Buckley made a name for himself as one of pop music's genuine innovators.

Over the course of nine albums, He incorporated the prettiest of folk

most extreme of freeform jazz, and the raunchiest of rock and blues.

I thought, wow, maybe this is an opportunity for my son to get to know

father.

I looked at Jeff and said, hey, would you like to go see your dad perform?

Jeff was rocking to the music.

Looking up at his dad.

Tim had his eyes closed, but he had to know he was there, had to be aware of

presence.

When he went back to the green room, I looked down and said, you want to go see

him now?

I could feel Jeff clutching my skirt.

You know, kind of hanging on, pressing close and looking around.

I couldn't see Tim at first, and then I heard, Jeff!

Hi, bud, how are you doing?

Jeff sat on his lap, and he started talking what his favorite color was, my

dog's name is King, what grade he was in.

About ten minutes later, Tim said, we'd like to take him home with us tonight.

Yeah, you can take him home right now.

But you better not fuck up.

I stayed with him a week.

He used to vacation.

He had an adopted son. He had a new wife.

He had a whole other family.

Four days later, I got a telephone call.

Kim had to get back into the studio and put Jeff on a bus in Santa Monica.

It was so much fun.

My dad has a lot of friends, and he gave me this.

He said, you saved that buddy.

No calls were returned.

That was two months before.

I have a great deal of pain and anger, but I have a great deal of love and

compassion.

For Tim.

Some things that he did completely embarrassed me to hell.

But the things that were great hold up against anything.

Jeff wasn't even mentioned in any of the obituaries.

By the time I was in high school, I got my first electric guitar.

It was a black Memphis, black Paul Coffey.

Yeah, just fell in with the wrong crowd and got a band together, of course.

Thank you.

15. Jeff was practicing algemiola every night.

That was a fixation I had up until the time I was maybe 16. And I can play

anything I hear.

My high school boy called me faggot. And your fucking new age girlfriend sent

old geek on my fucking Ovation Viper electric guitar case.

Jeff had an ability to mimic the vocal cadences and the inflections of people

he was listening to.

It's an exact album.

Because, you know, a lot of people would tune it down a step so they could hit

the note. This is the exact, it's album pitch.

It's the same key.

I used to want to be a guitar aficionado.

But the thing I was going to learn to do best was songwriting.

Music and words.

I decided to make a woman of music and give myself to her.

And at another point I decided to make a man of music and give myself to him.

When you're a kid, people assume that you have no mind of your own, which at a

very early age I did.

I put so many things onto music for me so that I wouldn't shrink into a

black universe.

St. Anne's in Brooklyn wanted Jeff to sing at a tribute to Tim.

I said,

no, I will never, ever perform that music.

I got my own music.

I said, you know what, son?

Give it some thought. There's going to be some really amazing artists being

lined up.

So I said, okay, but I just want to come on and sing and come off.

This is not a springboard. This is something really personal.

And they told me, well, we don't know how good he is, so we'll put him with

other artists to fill in any gaps in his talents.

Dangerous situations appealed to me.

There had been a bit of buzz that Tim Buckley's son would be there.

I figured it wasn't the worst thing that happened.

The luminaries of downtown were there.

This could be exactly what I dreamed for him.

I didn't know who he was, and I'm working, doing sound and lighting, but

so nervous. He was so, like, his hair was just in front of his face, and he

seemed so awkward.

Long time ago, when I was a little kid, my mom sat on a bed, and she put this

record on, and it had my father's voice.

He had on his father's coat, and he started to play with Dad's song about...

leaving him as a child.

And he was weeping.

It did become Jeff's concert.

I was like, this can't be real.

He told me he walked away with no less than 60 business cards in his pocket.

My friend said he heard Tim Buckley's haunted voice.

It's not his voice.

And it's not my voice, it's the voice that's been passed down through every

in the family.

He came out and sat next to me and said, what do you think?

I was thinking, my opinion here does not matter, but that was really stunning,

like just so beautiful.

He was asking if he could walk me to the subway and get on the train with me.

And took it all the way into Manhattan and we're talking and talking. And we

stayed on that train and we went all the way up to the last stop.

Besides reading and movies, what I really like is night prowling. Finding

the white places where the misfits go.

You're making me laugh so much.

Then we got in the downtown and we went all the way to Coney Island and back.

so interested in what I did. It's really surprised me because I was doing

experimental theater.

It was really less about money and fame and more about pushing the boundaries.

Nobody I knew my own age was really interested in any of that. But he was

someone who drank up the world like a sponge.

You make me feel so young.

Thank you.

You make me feel like spring is coming.

I was in a play with Rebecca.

I was in high school, and Jeff just felt very electric to me.

Jeff had a real lust for life.

The East Village at that time was such a collection of every eccentric that did

not fit in anywhere else.

He saw so many people breaking down the status quo.

Artists were being banned.

The NEA was being censored.

New York was the place for this amazing stuff, stuff I can't even describe to

you.

Sometimes he would just disappear, and I'd get a call from a friend later

Jeff showed up at my house today.

Every moment was so spontaneous.

He would make very elaborate.

outgoing messages like old -time radio shows.

And now, the continuing adventures of Spinach the Cat.

His most famous being Spinach the Cat.

And now your host, Preston Snubbery.

Jeff didn't have a job, so he had a lot of time on his hands. Jeff used to look

specifically for Michael Bolton tapes so he could put the piece of tape over the

top and record over it.

He would line up tape recorders because there was no samplers. There was no

digital computer, nothing.

He basically created a little studio all for the outgoing message.

Pressing this sound effect for when the crowd cheers.

This sound effect when the cat meows.

It was an hour long.

And so people had to listen to this hour long soap opera.

He asked me, do you think this part is too much?

I thought the whole thing is too much.

Join us next time for the continuing adventures of Spinach the Jack.

Girlfriend.

I love you.

I think Jeff had this desire to be liked and loved and

to connect with people.

Jeff started calling me butterfly.

I think he saw me at that point of coming out of a cocoon.

We were these two sensitive young souls searching for where you fit in and feel

empowered and loved and found each other.

But I called him the Scratchy Fish because he was always not shaving,

very bristly.

And he started making these stories, almost like children's stories.

This is Scratchy Fishy, this is their home, and this is Butterfly, and they're

getting married.

The story he wove about a butterfly and a fish was that they could never be

together.

You could see in his eyes that he would sometimes go to this place that I think

was very inaccessible to anyone but himself.

He just would check out.

I wanted to be a, you know, a chanteuse.

I think I wanted to be Nina Simone.

Although she would advise against it strongly, I'm sure.

Sometimes.

I think I wanted to be.

He was my Elvis.

kid from Orange County covering Nusrat Fatih Ali, Conor, Nina Simone.

You just have to give it up. He must have been working his ass off.

There was a tiny little club in the East Village called Sine.

You could probably fit in maybe 30 or 40 people at the most, and it would be

super, super crowded.

And Jeff was washing dishes.

He was serving people coffee, and then every now and then, he would just get up

and play.

I'm a ridiculous person.

And you're lucky you've paid no money to see me.

It was an Irish -run coffee shop.

It's a great little place to see somebody in the raw.

This is a perfect place for music lovers.

It's not like playing at a rock club. It's not like playing at a hall.

It's a good place to get real. Turn it up.

It was so homey in here.

It just smelled like espresso.

TV in the middle of some, like, ballad, and you just hear that.

The Sinead community became a

place of such encouragement for him.

It really became a home where he could experiment.

It's a fabulous time for a Guinness.

The brown liquor.

The buttocks of steel tour, Jeff Buckley.

In the beginning, there were just a few people.

Then, all of a sudden, it was like packed.

It's like the seed finding song.

Crowds, you know, spilling out into the street.

Everybody stop!

He was really an entertainer there, as much as a musician.

By the way, all these songs are for the lovers in the audience.

We mostly did covers.

And then he started introducing some of the original material.

Went from laughing to jaw -dropping, you know.

It's a song about a dream.

That was the first time I ever saw Jeff Buckley at Sinead.

I

mean,

a pin could drop.

I wasn't thinking about being a music executive. I was just a fan.

I

was

there

with Columbia.

I think we were all sort of stopped in our tracks that night.

The whole record company, Gauntlet, started infesting my gigs.

They were all there. People from Elektra, Arista, Tony.

It was a bit of a cotillion, but that's the way it goes.

We'd all heard so many nightmares about large labels and lack of creative

expression. But I think he went into it feeling like he'd been reassured that he

was going to get that.

I knew that I was just sitting there with bated breath waiting for the new

Buckley to come up and pick up where his father left off. I hated it. I couldn't

stand it.

Fucking bullshit.

What do you think you inherited from your father?

People who remember my father.

Next question.

I went around and sampled record company people to find where I fit in.

Jeff had a little bit of fear about the fact that he didn't have more original

material. I wouldn't ever tell him what to do, but I was like, go small.

I went to Sony.

Well, Columbia.

When you walk in, the first thing you see is Bob Dylan.

On the wall, looking beautiful.

A foot away is Miles.

A foot away is Monk.

Duke Ellington.

Chambers Brothers.

Mahalia.

It was purely emotional. I was like, I want to be here.

Columbia has such a storied legacy of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and Bruce

Springsteen. What we all felt sitting in that room was that he would one day be

in that Pantheon.

As a gentleman, you won't be able to dictate anything to me. You're just

to make something I've never heard before.

And the people that I settled with were pretty fine with that idea.

He was told that it was like one of the biggest deals an unknown person had ever

gotten.

He brought home the contract. It was like 40 pages long. I'd never seen

like it.

It should have been just joy, but I think suddenly things changed.

I would come home from work, and I'd come up the six flights of stairs, and I

would get to the door and put my key in the door, and I'd hear him stop.

Before the record contract, he would sing and play for me all the time.

I said to him, do you need a place to work?

The pressure to write songs and not be interrupted was so intense.

I'm going to write a hundred songs.

In five weeks?

That means 20 songs a week.

He struggles with the lyrics.

I'm a horrible critic.

I'm my own worst critic.

He was obsessed with Morrissey and Dylan, so he had a very high standard.

He didn't want to be known as the guy who only does covers.

My hope had been that we would work on the relationship and live together, but

he would find another space where he could get this record contract

That was naive to hope because he moved out completely.

People are like saying, look, I'll give you all this money. Look, I'll be your

manager. Look, I'll be your agent. Look, I got this place I want you to go to,

blah, blah, blah, blah.

I just want to make something special, not even care about anything else, money

or prestige or a tour or nothing.

Try it again.

Coming up with a record's worth of material with musicians and a producer

engineers waiting and everybody's dependent on you.

You know, it's like tick -tock, start making magic.

Let's try it again.

Come into my world.

My journals are the lyrics for the albums.

Songs just come out of poems.

And sometimes poems come out of dreams.

There's a song called Grace.

It's basically a death prayer.

I always describe it as, you know, Not fearing anything, anyone, any man, any

woman, any war, any gun, any fling or arrow aimed at your heart by other

Because there is somebody finally who loves you for real.

You can achieve a real state of grace through somebody else's love in you.

Jeff would say, oh, we should bring strings in on this song.

We had this idea to write interesting backgrounds that fit the voice, actual

lines, you know, counter lines.

Carl came from the jazz world.

He was more appealing to Jeff than somebody who does pop string

Britney Spears would call, and I'd say, no, that's you calling the wrong person.

Jeff listened to Bill Evans.

He listened to Shostakovich.

Have you heard of any pop singers even knowing who Shostakovich is?

It was the same way that Led Zeppelin used orchestrations. Any orchestra

would have loved to have had their day with Jeff to be able to just go to the

moon.

People who sing high lose power, and Jeff actually gains power.

His range was like four octaves.

You think you're coming to a peak, and then it goes one step further, and then

it goes another step further.

Grace is one of those songs that would inspire me to pick up guitar and play,

and then I'd start to kind of find something that made me feel like that

fail miserably at it. Put the guitar back.

Jeff said, I want you to shoot my album cover.

I had all the contact sheet, and Jeff just went, boing.

That's it. That's the cover.

It's completely iconic.

He already looks like he's Sinatra.

The folks at the company didn't like the glittery gold jacket.

Yeah, that's a little too effeminate. And just like, you gave me creative

control. I choose that.

seven originals, three covers.

He made a record that no one else could ever have come close to

making as a first record. It's uncanny.

Now it's like a legendary album.

People know me better for that than for my own music.

putting it in the CD player in my car.

And I was overwhelmed with the mastery and

the musicianship and the poetry and the

vocal performances were beyond anything

I had imagined.

He was capable of.

Boy, France, Australia, UK, huge.

Grace was huge.

It was a monster hit.

U .S., moderate.

As a child, I lived in Los Angeles.

I mean, you see people getting signed, dreams totally inflated falsely.

I really admire artists allowed to fail, allowed to be human, allowed to make

the most glorious dances they could ever imagine and totally fall and get back

up because it's all human. But if you're like this side of, you know, Danny

Partridge, it's like totally impossible.

It's the era of grunge.

And Jeff was a real counterweight to that. He was part of this downtown New

scene.

Back then, Jeff defied genres.

Jeff tested boundaries.

Jeff challenged traditional male -female roles.

So his music was not easy to fit into the dozen radio categories.

And yet Jeff was also influenced by some of the artists that came out in the

late 80s and early 90s in Seattle.

Soundgarden was playing in London.

And I don't think I quite realized what a huge Soundgarden fan Jeff was.

Oh my goodness, this is where he could be like a little...

you know, annoying brother. Like, you have to take me.

I'm coming with you.

He just magically showed up one day, and it was on.

It was a beautiful, beautiful friendship between he and Chris.

There was a sense of mischief with this almost soulmate understanding.

Chris Cornell does it really well. It's like one of the few people I've met.

make his life work, his ordinary life. Because without ordinary life, there's

art.

How would you like your fans to think of you?

Just as, really, as a guy that's just like a really good storyteller. Just

somebody who does a job that they enjoy.

Of course it was incredible that so many people reacted to his music.

But the fame that went along with that was not the fun part.

Even when he acted confident, it was kind of an act. It was him channeling

bravely as a character, but I still think that really insecure person was

there. Well, everybody's sensitive, but sometimes men don't want to recognize

it.

I don't even want people to really think of me as a face or a name or a body or

anything, just the music.

Because when I'm dead...

That's the only thing that'll be allowed.

How he was being examined under a microscope was so intense.

That quality he had to disappear in the moment ultimately

amounted to not showing up where I was.

One night, he didn't come home. And this was Valentine's Day.

By 3 or 4 in the morning, I was calling hospitals around New York City.

And then he just sponsored in.

He had been out with friends.

Maybe I'm too young to keep good love going

on.

But tonight... Hi, Rebecca.

9 o 'clock.

I fucking couldn't get into your show because I got there too close to 8 o

'clock and I'm so disappointed.

I really want to see you.

Too young to hold on Too old to just

break free and run During his record release party, I

had a backstage pass.

He'd handwritten my name on it.

His manager was at the door, and he went, you can't go in now, sit over

Two hours went by.

I went to the door, and I turned the handle, and I walked in, and it was a

mostly empty room.

They said Jeff left like over an hour ago.

He must have gone out a back door.

The next morning, he was so apologetic and really upset.

I felt resigned.

I didn't want to be an appendage. I didn't want to be in his world if he

really want me there.

The hard

part about letting go was, like, I hope

he will have good people.

because he didn't have any self protection.

Rebecca and him split just kind of looked like a different person for a

There was a time when I was in New York, and we spent some time together, and we

met at a bar, and this jazz band is really loud, so it was impossible for us

talk.

We started...

writing each other messages.

For a lot of it, I think he was trying to be seductive, but really not where

I wanted to go.

There was a very boundary -less kind of liquid feeling to him.

He felt very desperate to self -medicate with making this into a sexual

relationship.

I remember getting kind of frustrated and writing, you need love, not sex.

Generally, I love to rush in there and try to fix the broken guy, but that

liquid, watery quality just felt very tidal wavy.

He was very hard on himself.

Like, sometimes I got the sense that he felt that there were, Good and evil

forces, you know, I play within him

Music

I don't know it'll save you

Matt Johnson on drums.

Bass player Mick Grundle.

I'm Mick Grundle. And I'm Jeff Buckley, and you're watching 120 Minutes on MTV.

He asked me to join the band, too.

Sometimes I think Jeff wanted me in because I was a connection to Rebecca

those memories.

I think it was clear that Michael didn't know how to play the guitar.

All right, there were two stops.

There were two stops. But...

It was about personalities. It was about people.

I would have my amp really quiet. Jeff would slowly turn it back up, you know,

and I'd get all tight.

He always told me not to be afraid of the mistakes.

Don't use your brain the way you were using it 30 seconds ago.

You know, in fact, don't use it at all.

Matt, in particular, was just so good at following Jeff wherever Jeff was going.

That musical chemistry they had is very hard to come by.

My name is Jeff Buckley. This is my band, and this is our techie abode. On

outside, it looks like a huge black phallus of death. So Velcro.

Clocks. He's like, okay, I want you.

Until I got sober.

Drugs and alcohol have been a big part of my life, which we connected on

of, you know, his father's situation.

It's a huge cliche that, you know, bands are like families.

but they are.

The infamous American Legion Hall concert was the

first one that Jeff was in town since he started the tour.

All of the relatives, the friends of the relatives, the relatives of the friends

of the relatives all wanted to go to the concert.

We filled the last two rows.

The Tasmanian devil of the pack showed up and there was no beer

left. There was nothing left. Everything was like wiped out before the show.

Let's just say that as soon as there was an opportunity.

To become part of the inner circle of a rock star was very attractive.

The promoters came to me and said, we have a situation.

I go outside and I realize it's Jeff's mother sitting in a car with one of

her girlfriends just smoking pot.

You know, hi, Jean, what's up? Hey, well, Mary, listen, you got to, you

got to curtail this. You're going to get arrested.

And I go back inside to tell Jeff that the show is going to be canceled because

his mother is outside in the parking lot smoking pot.

Hey, you know this?

This is your big sexy son.

I think you should really not like set yourself up like that when you like

fucking light up a tube, light up a fucking joint.

What? We're in the parking lot. It's like over there. It's California.

No, no, no, no, no.

We ended up in Iowa City and opening up for us were the Dan Builders and the

Grifters. My booking agent said Tim Buckley's son, Jeff, who had taken New

by storm, was going to be on this tour as the headliner.

Joan Wasser was one of the heavyweights in the music world, being a tough -ass,

cool female coming up in the 90s through the music scene.

Lots of power, lots of shiny, you know, lots of shiny.

When I saw him, it was definitely a vibe.

We were just sort of checking each other out.

Jeff stood right in front of

me the entire show and watched me.

He was rocking a, like, I'm worshiping a goddess vibe.

Not subtle.

Not subtle.

And then hearing him, the thing that I thought of was, that's Nina Simone.

He sang the whole show to me.

It was like,

man, this guy really knows how to work me right now.

I was feeling like...

Oh, I got this, and then being like, oh, I don't got this.

This person is too powerful.

jockey guys were, like, making fun of me. I had this very cartoony type of

so I was pretty used to that.

But Jeff leapt up and said, you wouldn't know a woman if she slapped you in the

face. I was like, oh, God, that's so romantic. I love it. And, like, fuck

I don't need defending.

But I came to learn that he was someone who was a really...

daunch defender of women.

All people are sensitive, but his sensitivity wasn't crushed

like some men's sensitivity has been.

It stayed intact.

You're talking about two amazingly talented people who immediately

First thing I thought of, oh my God, they're going to become a band and it's

just going to rule.

Jeff toured a lot. It was a slow growth

of that following.

We toured almost consistently for two years.

What's life been like since Grace came out? Work, work, work, work, work, work.

I gotta take them out!

His label.

They wanted him to be there.

And he was like, well, I have another idea of what that means.

Being famous without content, that really hurts me. He did get discredited

certain, like, cool musicians because of the branding.

He was chosen to be in People magazine, 50 Most Beautiful People, or whatever

the hell that was called. The poor relative, I think one of them walked up

him, look, Jeff, look what I've got. And he took her Sharpie and just went.

We went to every newsstand and bought every single one. Spent hundreds of

dollars so that no one would see it in his neighborhood.

This entire show is dedicated to People magazine.

It was becoming an increasingly stressful environment.

You're very much a public person now. How does that feel?

Well, I'm public with a camera, but I don't like TV.

Why does your TV station want to know about me?

Once we got to Europe, I remember we felt a little sense of relief.

The album was doing better over there.

Radiohead came to a show in London and was so inspired by Jeff that they left

the concert and went right to the studio and recorded Fake Plastic Trees.

In Paris, we went to the opera and walked along the set and went to every

that we could.

They fell in love with him, and who wouldn't fall in love?

when you do justice to an Edith Pia song.

What about Edith Pia?

What's your attraction to her?

Her sound, her voice. Her

sexiness, the romance, her

tragedy.

No one could rock like Jeff.

But once you knew Hallelujah,

God help you.

This

is

for Leonard, wherever you are.

And this is for Nina Simone.

The secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord.

But you don't really care for music, do you?

Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and

the major lift.

The Bible came composing.

We were both on the road.

You know, it's like so romantic, like impossibly romantic.

But when we were together, we created a space where

nothing was too scary to talk about.

We both needed that so badly.

And she tied you to her kitchen chair.

She broke your throne and she cut your hair.

And from your lips she drew with hallelujah.

Hallelujah. All right. Just get rid of this.

You sit around and play your guitar all day.

And you have a beautiful lady woman in your bed.

Hallelujah.

That's true, I do.

The high school boys are undoubtedly living a completely pathetic life.

We

felt

like we found the person that we felt the most safe with.

Nothing was off limits.

We could just be free really for the first time.

Hallelujah!

the connecting thread because you will do a cover of bad brains or of the smith

or of edith piaf or probably my mindless hero worship

this is jimmy page

and this is i'm robert plant and uh we're at the 99th festival of the tour

europen and it's uh i don't care

We're at the U .S. Cannons Festival, right?

Easy as that.

I don't think Jeff had ever seen the page in Planet Live.

My main musical influences?

Love, anger, depression, joy, and Zeppelin.

It was like he was going to Mecca or something.

Next stage at the festival.

I felt something over my shoulder.

It was like heat.

And I turned around.

Jeff was walking towards me.

He put his hand on my shoulder. He said, hey, I love your slide guitar playing.

Could you show me some slide guitar stuff? And I said,

well, Jeff, you could probably show me some slide guitar stuff.

He said, no, please, show me, you know.

And he said, hey, Page and Plant are playing. When I get off, if we go

there, we'll make it.

We meet at the side of the stage, and we were both really excited, obviously, to

see them.

After Jeff's show, I go around.

I'm in the pit.

We're looking for Jeff constantly.

We're trying to watch the show. We're trying to look for Jeff.

We looked up.

They're just out of my periphery.

Oh, shit.

There's Jeff hanging all the way up off the scaffolding.

Zeppelin is at full throttle, and Jeff is with every decibel

coursing through his veins.

You could call it death to find.

The volume of music as it passes into your body turns you into an instrument

that your own ears hear.

There's a great deal of comfort in the same way that a baby's greatly comforted

by their mother.

He looked at us and gave us a wave, like, said, like, come on up.

Like, the water's warm.

Music. It was my mother.

It was my father.

When he was back in New York, we went and saw Nusrat play

at Town Hall.

After the show, we went backstage.

Nusrat is very, like, flaccid.

And here was this, like, bouncing around Jeff.

Nisra did not speak any English, and Jeff was trying to connect with him, and

then he just started... Oh!

Nisra,

like,

looked at him like...

This smile came on his face and it was just instant respect and love.

That is the universal language.

I didn't only just listen to things. I totally, absolutely lionized everybody

having anything to do with it.

Some of Jeff's heroes eventually became fans of him.

I was at a show at Roseland where Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney came, and

it was just amazing. There's this one shot where he's looking at me going,

can you believe it?

But some of the heroes also recognized his father's work as well.

I thought it was difficult for him because, like, Linda McCartney knew his

father better than he did.

In these situations, I'm hoping that I'm understood.

But with comparisons, I'm not understood.

I have my own way.

Jeff would buy all of Tim's CDs at Tower Records, listen to them, and then throw

them out.

Led Zeppelin was being inducted in 95 into the Rock and Roll Hall

of Fame.

I've never seen Jeff so starstruck.

And he just started pointing.

You're the one that's been in my head all these years.

It's you.

At one point during the evening, Robert Plant said something to Jeff like,

you're the greatest new singer in the world.

It freaked Jeff out. He turned white.

Got up. I don't know what he did, where he went, but he was missing for like two

days.

I noticed Jeff's depression started to kick in.

Your mailbox is full.

There was so much on his mind, but he wasn't talking about it.

And he just felt heavy.

We all, like, experimented with taking drugs and stuff.

It was sometimes a bit crazy, but, like, I never got, like, an addict vibe from

him at all.

Yeah, there was dipping and dabbling and stuff, some more than others.

But I couldn't be around it.

Next year, then, will that mean a new Jeff Buckley album?

I have to work on it this year, so something will be out.

No, you know what? I can't make any promises now.

I'll be a corpse by then.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Buckley. It's a great... Thank you, sir.

I feel like as his fame grew, the demands of success started to irritate

The label was kind of breathing down his back for this second album.

I think he was weighed down by the debt that he owed them.

millions of dollars in debt with no hits on your next record yet.

Well, you're never going to get out of the hole.

No one ever gets out of owing a record label money because that's how it's

structured.

That probably would have been very scary to Jeff, and maybe he

thought that the type of deal that he had may have been a little bit of a deal

with the devil sometimes.

That's your bed, and you made it, and you have to lie in it.

Jeff started to spiral around this fear that he has of the loss of his artistic

freedom.

Columbia Records meetings would be very full of pressure, you know, when Jeff

didn't want to do something.

Every parasite needs its host, and we are them. I'm Jeff Buckley. And I'm

Michael Tai. And we've been guest parasite hosting tonight.

The label wanted the next record to come out, but they were still touring.

Make another album, please.

Oh, my God.

You've taken your time, haven't you? I mean, you haven't rushed into recording

the follow -up album.

Only because of being on the road so long. Do you anticipate that it's going

take months and months? If it takes any longer, you'll find me swinging from the

news.

Get in the van, eight hours a day, every day.

We're like two and a half years, bro.

Like, can I just have some fucking faith?

Then, I was nuts.

I was fucking nuts.

And the last thing I need is another nut motherfucker next to me.

You could really feel the disconnect between Jeff and Matt.

And I think Jeff felt like he was being abandoned by a brother.

So Matty quit the band, said he was done.

I myself am erratic.

Music is erratic. If people look upon music as something to have control over

something to be uniform and predictable, then it's their funeral.

I'm going to come home.

I'll record, definitely. I just want to come home and experiment and get all

these ideas out.

Where would you like to see yourself in 10 years, 10 years from now?

I don't see myself 10 years from now at all.

I just don't.

Just a blank movie screen.

Just a void.

What can I tell you?

I heard Grace in the summer of 96, and within two weeks, I would

meet Jeff.

We need a drummer we love.

Come try out.

Jeff had so much fear around this record.

He wasn't ready.

He's questioning everything.

Was the first album a fluke? Am I an imposter?

Grace was a compilation of everything that he had done until he was 27.

You wonder, do I have another record in me? Do I need another 27 years?

Then you had the record company guys coming down to check in on us.

see our progress and was like, are you kidding me?

We wanted to be able to supply the inspiration that would get him to the

level, but I think he felt he had to do that on his own.

many of the people he admired had somehow self -destructed.

People think that my father and the EPA is all there to talk about.

And then to have Jeff come from a father who had died young, he was really

trying to be healthier.

On his 29th birthday, Jeff turned to me and said, I've now outlived my father.

It was a really strange...

reality for him in the face.

He said, I have to tell you something about me.

I'm not going to last that long.

I just have to tell you what it feels like because I want to warn you.

And I said, I'm not going anywhere.

And because of his father dying,

I thought, of course you think that. That makes all the sense in the world.

At the end of three years of touring, who do you know?

What sort of life do you have?

It's a little corrosive and a little frustrating.

And that's why I have to go away.

I have to find some place and really think into it.

Jeff found this house on Rembert Street.

He didn't have a lawnmower, so it became overgrown.

I would visit him for a week, a month.

I remember lying with him in the grass.

No one could see us.

Joan had said to me, take care of Jeff, keep his feet on the ground, and I took

that seriously.

There seemed to be some normalcy, some grounding.

Cooking. Some cooking, food.

And I feel that Jeff came here where there's not as much external stimulation

order to process.

not just to create.

Without ordinary life, there's no art.

Balanced meals, reading, sleeping, relationships.

Love.

It felt like he felt safe there.

He would wear my dresses in the house sometimes and loved wearing them.

He just wanted to be anonymous and be able to talk to anybody in the

not worrying if they were talking to him because they knew who he was.

I went to pick him up, and he was crying.

I said, do you want to talk about what's going on? And he said it had to do with

his mom.

Yeah, well, one day I went to visit a friend in Los Angeles.

I didn't have Internet at the time.

And she had a computer, and I'll sit up with her. She said, oh, do you know,

here's a chat room all about Jeff.

So I sat there and read some of the comments, and they were just a bunch of

bullshit.

So I said, hi, I'm his mom. I want you to know none of that is true.

Well, that did not go over well.

It got back to his manager that I was, you know, dealing with the fan club and

saying things that he didn't want me to say, et cetera, et cetera, and he got

really pissed at me.

Oh, yeah, Mama, you've got to fucking grow up, all right?

He can't be a girl anymore, Ma. He's got to be a woman.

I had to be the man.

I had to be the man in your house.

Just get the anger and the pain that was rested upon you to get rid of that

shit.

Because that's in me.

Everything you experienced at home, it's in me.

And that's how I know how to hurt people.

We've never had a falling out.

And it was serious.

And we didn't spend Christmas together that year. He went to Northern

and spent it with his stepdad.

Jeff got real serious and turned, took my hand, looked down, very

dejected, and said very quietly, I don't know how to be a man.

He was looking at who raised him and formed his ability to

deal with life on a day -to -day basis.

He was looking for answers, really, from a ghost, from his father.

And I've caught on foreign sounds for you.

Jeff could shift gears, though, very quickly.

His mind worked like a radio that was tuned to all frequencies at once.

How you doing?

Hi.

He said, I realized something.

I think I'm manic depressive.

I didn't know what that meant. I thought immediately of the Jimi Hendrix song.

We just, I didn't, and nobody did then.

He was in a really heightened state and was having really disturbing visions,

like visiting the devil.

He took me into the attic. There was a dead bird laying on the floor and his

black skull candle.

He sent a fax to the office, and he's like, I got the cover for the next

We comment, and this is too X -rated. We can't send this to Sony.

He said that he dreamed he had a brain tumor, and he thought that he was going

to die.

It was what I understand now to be a psychotic break.

The same thing was going on with Hendrix and Joplin and Martin.

chemical imbalance mixed with some sort of trauma that's only sustainable for so

much time until either it gets fixed or it fixes you.

I'll never forget, he always said, I'm not going to end up like my father with

tag on my toe.

Jeff had gone to the zoo numerous times and loved the butterfly house.

But he felt like the guy working in the butterfly house was mistreating the

chrysalis.

He felt he could be more gentle.

The last conversation we had, he woke me up with a phone call.

He was wanting to clarify the past.

He was apologizing.

I remember saying, it takes two, you know.

to mess things up the way we did, and it's all good.

He said he was doing work on his childhood and that they were looking for

someone to help him, presumably a counselor.

I'm going to work my ass off, baby.

I'll see you on the other side.

For like two weeks, he, like, called everybody he knew just to, like, have

contact.

I remembered him calling me and saying, I realized that you were right about

stuff, and, you know, I wasn't even sure what he meant by that, and I didn't

know how to follow it up, and it's sad.

Jeff was very quiet and didn't say anything.

I told him I loved him.

I said to him, I

have photos of you from your childhood.

Would you like me to send them to you?

And like in a really soft voice, he said, I'd like that.

I said, you just got to let go and not care if mistakes

are made.

Barristers became his second Sinead of a kind, where

he could go and work out music without having

the entirety of, say, New York City find out about it.

I have been everything on stage.

I've been wrong. I've been completely ugly. I've been stupid. I've been...

Angry I've been totally in love. I've been beautiful. I've been hideous.

I've lost my pants But I've never been bored I've never been dead

on thing I've never been dead He

left my answering machine Michael starting to click it starting to feel

way the gray song felt

He hadn't played anyone, any of it.

His band was joining him really soon to start recording the record.

Sometimes a song gets into you and just gets into you.

It just happens to you in a moment.

Me, Michael, and Mick each got a four -track tape.

I could feel that those songs had come from a very pure place.

He was doing it all on headphones.

I said, Jeff, you could get speakers and it would fill the room.

He got where he needed to go.

He's like, I want to open up a bank account, buy this house, and I want to

car.

He was really happy and having so much fun.

Jeff was supposedly on their way to the rehearsal space.

He was with the guitar tech, Fody.

They ended up going down to Wolf River.

It was typical Jeff.

He thought, oh, it's so beautiful, I'm going to go in fully clothed.

No one swims down there. It's muddy.

I don't know about currents. There were boats.

He was listening to a whole lot of love. Why?

Led Zeppelin.

Love, anger, depression, joy.

And Zeppelin.

He probably went in the water as soon as we hit the tarmac.

We got to the house, and it was kind of in disarray.

I kept thinking I was going to hear this green door squeak open in the back and

slam, you know?

And then he'd come to the kitchen, and we'd be like, oh, and he'd be like,

what's up?

Gene picks up the phone, and...

Just said, let's go.

I thought he just swam across.

It was very quiet and peaceful down there.

The sun's setting. You know, it's going to be dusk.

Now there's like helicopters.

I picked up the phone and said, hello, and someone said, this is Memphis Police

Department.

And I said, I'm coming.

The car pulled up in front, and it was Sergeant Mary Grace Johnson

of the Homicide Department.

And she said, you know, we have to have the sunshine.

Because that'll bring the body.

If we want to find him.

I was sitting in his attic two or three days after he went into the river, and I

just remember breathing in, and my breath, like, just kept going in. Like,

I just, I had, like, the biggest inhalation that I've ever had, and I

like, my lungs puffing up with air and, like, my spine straightening, you know.

And something switched in me, and I...

Kind of felt like he was gone.

Singer -songwriter Jeff Buckley's body finally surfaced late Wednesday

at the foot of Memphis' famed musical corridor, Beale Street.

As a friend watched helplessly from shore, Buckley disappeared under the

a passing boat.

The irony wasn't lost on anyone that a man who lived for his music would be

found dead at the foot of Beale Street where he'd performed before.

I was in Texas visiting family.

I was staring at Bray's Bayou, watching the water.

That was the same time when Jeff died.

It was more than I could bear.

It

was an

undertow. The Army Corps of Engineers had actually specifically dug that

area out to keep it clear of debris, so it dropped off.

Obviously, being fully clothed and weighted and out there for about 20

plus an undertow, his drowning made sense.

Hallelujah, hallelujah,

hallelujah, hallelujah.

The autopsy report said he had a beer in his system. That's it.

Rolling Stone to please publish the report to show that drugs had nothing to

with it.

But the shame is that the story was very sensationalistic. It was very much

like, well, we don't know.

And unfortunately, I can't tell you how many people I've ran into in the last 20

-something years who are like, oh yeah, he died of drugs, or oh, he followed in

his father's footsteps.

Jeff was one of the greatest singers of all time.

I

didn't fully

comprehend how dope he was when he was alive.

It was my first band, and he was my boy, and everything just felt natural.

It was a perfect example of, you know, youth is wasted on the young.

He had said, you should come out to Memphis. It's beautiful here.

And I said, when your record's done, I'd really love that.

We were so young.

Like, you know, all of those things that felt so urgent and scary,

those fall away.

And, you know, I would have loved to see him have

those things fall away.

Mom, you know, anybody can be famous, baby.

Anybody can be fucking famous, baby. But it takes a real spirit.

You hear me?

It takes a real spirit to raise a kid.

And he brought me into the world.

Yeah.

Thank you, everybody.

Good night.

You were beautiful.

Thanks a lot. I love you.

Why do you think I did not all this with love?

Like I kissed you, lines of escape in my...

I am your fail.

I'm your contender. I'm your long shot. Come on, please.

Stream you with an arm.

There's a world too many explosions.