1994: Jeff Buckley, Grace
By P. Scott Cunningham
This story tells itself backwards.
July 1998
When my best friend Nick and I get to Memphis, we drive downtown and start looking for a place to get ribs. All we know about Memphis is what we’ve been told, that it’s the home of two things we love, blues and ribs, so when we see a sign for “B.B. King’s Blues Club,” we assume that fate, and not roadside advertising, has led us there. We sit down and eat and are ecstatic to discover that, yes, these are the best blues we’ve ever heard and yes, these are the best ribs we’ve ever eaten. We’re nineteen, driving west.
After lunch, we take a walk, following the gentle slope of the street until it dead-ends, and then down something that isn’t really a path to the banks of the Mississippi River. No boats are passing by. The water appears calm and peaceful. I feel like I could dive in and swim across to Arkansas, no problem. In my head, I say a prayer, or something like it. After standing in silence for a while, we turn and head back to the car. Nick takes his shift at the wheel, and I pick the music. I put the CD into the slot of my Honda Prelude and tell Nick to get into the right lane and slow down as we cross the Hernando de Soto Bridge. As the first notes of “Mojo Pin” float into the car, the river comes into view, and I cry quietly into my palm. Nick doesn’t ask me why.
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August 1997
I’m at Borders Books and Music when I learn how Jeff Buckley died. The revolutionary thing about Borders is that it has listening stations for a curated selection of albums. Previously, I had to buy albums without having listened to a single note of them, so the opportunity to preview a CD, even if it’s only the ones the store has selected, never ceases to amaze me. But today my eyes are drawn to the magazine rack, specifically to the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone, which proclaims Puff Daddy as “the new king of hip-hop.” Beside his face is a smaller headline: “The Haunted Life & Death of Jeff Buckley.” I grab the magazine and sit down on the carpet.
On the day his band was supposed to arrive in Memphis to record his second full-length album, Buckley had taken an early evening swim in the Mississippi River, floating on his back in a deceptively calm eddy while singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Despite his friend Keith’s protestations, Buckley let himself float farther out, and as a boat passed by, he disappeared into its wake. Six days later, authorities found his body at the foot of Beale Street, tangled in some branches. They identified the corpse by its navel ring and three toenails painted green. None of Buckley’s friends were surprised by how he died. “It’s typical Jeff,” his road manager said. “He was a butterfly.”
As I try to reckon with the news, a small detail in the article stops me. Buckley was raised under a different name: Scott, which is my name, too. Well, actually, it’s my middle name, but it’s what I’ve always gone by. My parents named me with the intention of calling me by my middle name, so on the first day of class every year, when the teacher took attendance, looking for someone named “Phillip,” I’d go through the same explanation of, “yes, that’s me, but no, it’s not me.” It always felt like a lie I’d been coerced into and forced to perpetuate. As a teenager, the structured misrecognition of my name felt like something more: a misrecognition of me. But here was Jeff Buckley, who had also been tagged at birth as a “Scott” but, at some point, had escaped it. Buckley had become who he was meant to be, and then, at the peak of his artistic powers, as the new self he’d manifested was about to bloom again into a new project, he was lost to a different kind of misrecognition. The river, looking so calm, must have seemed like it agreed with his mood, and what does a happy man do? He goes swimming.
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June 1997
I’m working at an off-off-Broadway theater in SoHo and crashing at my friend John’s parents’ apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Every morning I walk to the subway, cross under the East River, do ten or twenty jobs no one else wants to do, then cross back beneath the river. When I get back to the apartment, I go out onto the balcony and wait for John to get off work. His parents are never around, so we have the place to ourselves. Every night John and I eat pizza and drink beer out on the ledge, which has an unobstructed view of Manhattan’s financial district. From right to left I can see the Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street Pier, Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, and up above it all, the World Trade Center, like two giant front teeth in the mouth of the island.
One morning, on my daily walk to the subway, I notice a laminated sign affixed to the side gate of St. Ann’s Church. On it is a picture of Jeff Buckley and a set of dates beneath it: (November 17, 1966 – May 29, 1997). May 29th was almost a month ago. I stop and stare at the sign, in total disbelief. I don’t have a cell phone or a computer, so I have no idea how to confirm or deny this news. It doesn’t seem real. Why haven’t I been told? Why isn’t everyone talking about it? I’m in New York City after all, where Buckley moved in 1990 and played regular gigs in small venues before his debut full-length album, Grace, came out. This city is where the son of Tim Buckley made his own name. But no one is saying anything. They’ve just hung this pixelated image of his face and these two dates, the parentheses around them like bars in a stanza.
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July 1996
I tell Pauline what happened. She says, “Get out.” I go.
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May 1996
Jeff Buckley, the world’s greatest singer, describes himself as a “chanteuse with a penis.” His voice is at once deeply corporal and completely ethereal. He seems angelic not in the sense of being holy but in the sense of having both human and non-human parts, a dick and wings. When I listen to Jeff Buckley, which is usually when I’m making the long drive to Pauline’s house, I believe there’s something inside me waiting to emerge, something of equal beauty to Buckley’s voice, except its emergence is being thwarted. The sound of that voice, how it rises from a throaty whisper to a high, powerful wave, forms the shape of emergence itself—it sounds how I want to be, and makes me believe, perhaps falsely, that Buckley’s voice is a mirror of my internal self. It’s just right now that my Buckleyness remains invisible to others, or at least I believe it does, which amounts to the same thing. Sometimes I think it’s just a matter of time before it emerges, but most of the time, I believe it’s my own fault, that I haven’t tried hard enough to find the angelic piece of myself, or worse, that I don’t deserve to find it. The fantasy I have when I dream of being a rock star is that, while performing, whatever is beautiful inside of me will suddenly emerge and become visible, that people will finally see me the way I want to be seen. But maybe what I’m actually dreaming about is my singing masking what’s ugly about me, so that I can still be loved.
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April 1996
This is how I change my life. At a Day’s Inn in Tampa, while sharing a room with David, I invite Tara to stay with us too. The three of us laugh and joke until it gets late, and then David falls asleep, and instead of going back to her room, Tara stays, and she and I do what we’ve been dying to do as quietly as possible in the double bed a few feet away from David’s. This happens every night for three nights. This, after all, is the Florida High School Drama Competition, where those of us who can most expertly disappear into the lives of others win awards, so it feels natural to pretend like Pauline doesn’t exist, and neither does Tara’s boyfriend. Our secret seems like a play that has a beginning and an end and no effect whatsoever on anyone who hasn’t seen it, and no one has seen it, not even David, who has been asleep the whole time. If the play had a name, it would be “Hallelujah,” or “Lilac Wine,” or “Lover, You Did Come Over.” I know what I’m doing is wrong, but Jeff Buckley has taught me that the value of an experience is not qualitative. It can’t be reduced to good or bad; the only thing that matters is amplitude.
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February 1996
On the passenger seat, I keep a Case Logic sleeve that fits exactly ten CDs, and while I change out the other nine, Grace stays in the front slot. It’s the first album I always reach for when I don’t know what to listen to, because, no matter my mood, I always want to listen to Grace. Or rather, I always want to be in the mood that Grace puts me in.
I’ve recently taken a Meyers-Briggs test that told me that I should become a minister, and what is a minister, I ask myself, if not a person who is called by a higher power? I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in romantic love. I don’t know if I’m in love with Pauline because so far the relationship is easy, and because I listen to Jeff Buckley so much, I know that being in love is supposed to be a huge mess. Love, according to Grace, is a force that makes you behave irresponsibly; it makes you feel alone; and it makes your voice vault into the upper registers of what’s possible.
Jeff Buckley sings really, really high, and I tell myself that when I finally develop the ability to sing, I’ll also sing really, really high. Why? It seems to me that unless you’re hitting a register well above your normal speaking range, you can’t access the emotions required to sing about love. Love can be extreme joy or utter sadness but never anything in between. Like a divine ordeal, love breaks us to prove that we believe in it, so doesn’t that make Jeff Buckley my religion? And in the church of the Honda Prelude, am I not both Buckley’s deacon and parishioner? As he preaches, I all but raise my hands and close my eyes and beat my chest. Every weekend, I drive through the sticky heat of another South Florida night, past Cheesecake Factories and California Pizza Kitchens, past walled neighborhoods with names like The Preserve, The Hunt Club, and Broken Sound, all the while aching to be transported to wherever Buckley’s voice exists, be it in some other city or plane of existence. Every night is both charged and empty as I drive toward its interior, marking the progress home by the exits on I-95, each one like the name of an album Jeff Buckley hasn’t made yet, but will: Forest Hill, Lake Worth, Lantana, Congress, Atlantic. The first time Pauline brings me to her room, I notice a quote on her bulletin board, right beside the light switch: “Everything is sweetened by risk.” She says she doesn’t know who said it, but to me, it sounds like a line from Grace.
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December 1995
At a club on Washington Street in South Beach, I hand the bouncer my fake I.D., which isn’t even a driver’s license. It’s a University of Kentucky I.D. that a friend made on his computer. The bouncer quizzes me. “What year did you graduate high school?” I hesitate, and then say, “’92.” “Should’ve been ’90,” he says, but he hands the laminated card back anyway and pulls the rope aside. Once we’re in the club, Pauline says to me, “That’s why we have the girls walk in first. They’re not going to turn away eight girls because of one bad I.D.” Her boyfriend didn’t come out tonight, and by virtue of everyone else being paired up, she and I end up hanging out, which eventually leads to us walking down to the beach. We sit on the ramp of a lifeguard house and talk. If a swimmer were in trouble, a lifeguard would run down this ramp at full speed and launch into the ocean, wrapping the body of the drowning into their arms. But now, under the moon, there are no swimmers, no lifeguards. There are hardly even waves. The ocean pulsates gently, like a vocal cord, and after the noise and lights of the club, the beach feels like an afterlife. Pauline says, “I just want to have as much fun as possible before I graduate,” and I do what Jeff Buckley would do. I lean over and kiss her.
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July 1994
Three things happen in quick succession: (1) I get my driver’s license; (2) I inherit my sister’s Honda Prelude; (3) Grace comes out. It almost feels like Grace is released because I suddenly have a place to listen to it all by myself, with the volume turned up toward the sun. I’ve never loved an album like this. It feels like something more than music, a premonition or a haunting. Nothing much has happened to me in my life, but this feels like the beginning, the origin story. The car is black and fast and the windows are tinted so it always feels dark inside. Learning how to drive stick was a process of letting the engine teach me what it wanted, and now that I have it down, now that I can stop on the only hill in town, the one made by the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, the place where the ocean used to end, I can feather the clutch until it sends the car into a paroxysm before releasing it and letting the gasoline flood outwards, sending the chassis into a pure forward motion that looks like a believer catching the spirit. I’m sixteen years old. I can go anywhere. All the people I will hurt I’ve never even met.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018). His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, POETRY, A Public Space, Harvard Review, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. He lives in Miami, FL, where he serves as the Executive Director of O, Miami.