The Man that Got Away - Part Three

THE GRUELLING TOUR SCHEDULE THAT FOLLOWED the release of Grace - for the last three years of his life, Jeff spent most of his time on the road - offered him a strong sense of family. He spent downtime in Seattle with powerhouse soundman Mark Naficy, a genial, self-effacing man who offered warm, uncomplicated company. Naficy had joined the crew from tours with Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, cut his wage in half and rebuilt the PA from scratch, such was his love of the music. Much of his time is now taken up with providing sound systems for raves. He rarely goes out on the road. "It's hard," he says, "to find something that's gonna equal that experience."

In the summer of 1994, a more fateful meeting occurred. David Shouse was singer with The Grifters, a Memphis band touring with The Dambuilders. At a show in Iowa City, remembers Shouse, "We were told we would be opening for Tim Buckley's son, and we were like, 'Huh?' We didn't know anything about this guy and we were all just absolutely floored. We all got turned on to each other that night and that began the friendship that went on through.”

For Jeff, who was just beginning to explore the musical possibilities a band could offer, it was an education. The Dambuilders were “straight-ahead pop/rock”. (Violinist Joan Wasser became Jeff's girlfriend, and later played with Shouse in Those Bastard Souls; currently she and Michael Tighe play together in Black Beetle.) The Grifters "represented for him that place a part of him wanted to go after, that more chaotic, uninhibited place. It's four guys who go, 'OK, there are no rules, we can just have a good time.' Some nights when things click you've got four different people coming from four different directions. It was almost like having to reach your hand through a barbwire fence to grab a melody.

"I look back on my relationship with Jeff, particularly after he came to Memphis and the amount of time we spent together, not like, Oh, we were music buddies... we were friends. I put pressure on Jeff to come down [to Memphis] because I started to realize he wanted a rougher sound than Grace. This was in late '96. He asked where we made our records and I said, There's this amazing studio [Easley Studios] where you can just do anything you want; he paid a visit and liked what he saw. Doug Easley and his people are very mellow - very encouraging of musicians who take chances and try weird stuff." It was at Easley in Memphis that Jeff began recording the follow-up to Grace, with Tom Verlaine at the helm, and Columbia and his management snapping at his heels.

David Shouse: "I was on tour when they got there, but it must have been January '97. When we got back, things had kind of hit the wall. Things weren't really jiving with Tom - the atmosphere was pretty bad - and I don't think Jeff was really happy with the songs. Our conversations were along the lines of, Fuck the label, you know? He was unhappy with that side of things, but I think he felt he needed to get inside those songs more, that's why he decided to hole up in the house here, and the reason everyone was coming to town when he drowned was because he called and said, 'I'm ready. Things sound good.' He was ready to go."

ON JULY 14,1968, TIM BUCKLEY RECORDED THE FATHER SONG at TTG Studios, Hollywood. Written for Hal 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' Bartlett's film Changes, it remained unreleased until its inclusion on the recent Rhino Handmade compilation Works In Progress. It's dangerous to presume it is simply autobiographical, but the lines carry an inescapable resonance:

I know I'll never be the man you want me to be
I feel so hungry, so empty inside
So tired of trying but I'm too young to hide
I didn't mean to smile and turn your love to fire
Oh tell me, father, is there shame in your heart for me?

Mary Guibert has never heard it. She is speechless for a moment when I tell her about it. "Really? Oh my gosh. I feel the same way about that as I do about Dream Letter. When I heard that I thought, That's a lovely thought, Tim, I'm sure that's the way you feel in your heart, why didn't that motivate you into action, just for that little boy? Not for me.

"One of the comforts I had in the hours after the realization that we weren't going to find Jeff was that he must have immediately gone into the arms of his father. I know that... Do I see an irony? That it was happening again? For me it wasn't an 'again' thing. When Jeff had his 29th birthday, he said, 'At least now I have outlived my dad.' Someone sent him his father's death certificate and he wrote on the outside of the envelope [mock-dramatic voice] 'Death certificates - who will be next?' My son had come up with such a different kind of attitude and different kind of life; he was a young man who was much more self-possessed than Tim. Tim didn't have the emotional support Jeff had growing up. They were different, and their deaths were very different."

Beyond the simple tragedy of a young man who drowned, there is a more complex one: some of those who cared most for Jeff are unable to speak to each other. And this was a man whose last human exchange was an act of love. He had been reassuring Keith Foti about his musical ability and prospects. Before wading into the river, Jeff kissed his friend full on the mouth.

At this moment, Michael Tighe was coming into Memphis to start rehearsals for the second album. "[The band] arrived as he was dying. We arrived at the house and he wasn't there. The objects there were very expressive of him, like statements. The way he had his clothes out, his food with a fork through it, I just felt his presence. The place was vibrating with his essence. This all went through me real quick then five minutes later the phone rang, [it was Keith] Foti who said ‘Jeff went under the water and hasn't come up,’ so we went down to the river, Parker [Kindred, drummer], Mick [Grondahl], Gene [Bowen, tour manager].

"I'm very grateful that I was so close to him when he did die, and that I did get to feel his presence so much. It was also very generous, the way he died. He gave me a lot of his touch. It was completely confusing, but I felt his love there, enough that it made me realize that death isn't an end, which I'd always thought. When you have that knowledge bestowed on you, that's such a gift. That's like the only thing I'm sure of I had this experience where his breath came into me and it just kept coming and I never had anything like that before. There in his attic. So that's my... what do you call that? I talk about it all the time, but it's something that feels... like my fact about God."

Michael pauses. "He moved really fast, like he was experiencing life at a very high speed and just really playful, like a kid. But with some very strong secret and internal language that he had with himself. There was one area that was really intangible. You could look in his eyes sometimes and know he was reverberating inside of himself, that he had these emotions and ideas that probably he would never tell anybody."

© 2000 Peschek/MOJO