Within a few minutes, Buckley would be a victim of the river’s noted unpredictability — and his own. Though his friends and the local authorities would spend a long night of fruitless searching, it was presumed that Buckley had drowned. It would be six days before the singer’s body was given up by the river, found at the foot of Beale Street — amid branches and the other debris that typically gathers at a slow-swirling eddy where the channel meets the Mississippi.
“Hey, get out of the way!” yelled Foti, and Buckley did, but very shortly afterward, a larger boat appeared, creating a wake that surged toward the shoreline. Foti turned for just seconds to move the boombox off the flat rock where it sat. When he turned back, he says, “There was no sight of Jeff.” Buckley had been raised as Scott Moorhead — from his middle name and the surname of his stepfather, auto mechanic Ron Moorhead. Unresolvedly bitter over his natural father’s uncaringness, Buckley spoke well of Moorhead — often noting that his step-dad gave him his first Led Zep album — and the two stayed in touch even after Ron and Mary split up.
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.
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 on-stage Buckley poured his irrepressible emotionality into covers of pop, rap, folk and even cabaret songs.
“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….
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