December 18, 2002

Extreme Measures by j.h. tompkins

Time out

IT WAS JUNE 1993, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley had just drowned in the Mississippi, a Muni bus rolled down Divisadero near Turk. The young man wearing a white shirt, black slacks, and brown cordovans – I made him for a Morman – sat down next to me, tapped my shoulder, and asked if I knew about the accident. I nodded in his direction. "Don't believe everything you hear," he said gravely.

I'm a magnet for lunatics and have learned not to flinch. He mistook my courage for interest. "What was the name of Tim's second album?" he asked. It wasn't a question. "Goodbye and Hello, that's what. Coming and going. Death and life. Jeff Buckley is a manifestation of Tim, an astral projection. Together they live." Tim – for those who don't know – was Tim Buckley, Jeff's father, a '60s-era singer-songwriter whose commercial failure and 1975 heroin overdose ensured an eternity of cult worship. And if you're new to the notion of astral projection, imagine telecommuting, but without a computer. You'd know this if you'd ditch the SUV for Muni, where the core ridership – seekers, believers, the blessed, and the damned – experience and explain cosmic weirdness all the time. The kid clammed up, and I considered the moment: an artist – with but one EP and album under his belt – was dead, a cult figure born. I didn't anticipate the mercenary strip-mining of Buckley's work that followed, but I knew he'd be around: death rivals sex as a marketing tool.

Tragedy, talent, and obscurity are a prescription for rock romance that births little-known heroes whose invisibility – safe from profit junkies, media hags, and marauding armies of fans (cults depend on exclusivity) – offers intrigue and at least the illusion of control. Deceased British folkie Nick Drake epitomized the cult artist, until he rode a VW commercial to stardom some 20 years A.D. Faithful hearts were broken as a horde of claim-jumpers under the spell of his lovely "Pink Moon" hopped onboard. Infuriated Drake purists moaned about artistic intent and a misunderstanding of "the real Nick Drake," as if time could stand still and reality was fixed forever. But pop music is as much about context as it is about sound, and the world had turned. Drake 1.0 was simply upgraded by later versions.

A dip in the Big Muddy will work some magic, as well, turning casual fans into a devoted flock and, this week, floating more Buckley remains: The Grace EPs, an almost biblical stretching of his small body of satisfying work. The Buckley cult has mushroomed since his death, driven by his strange, posthumous career. His legacy as an artist has been shaped by an estate and record label whose interests begin and end at the bank, but if it bothers the flock, they aren't complaining.

"I taught him how to swim," my friend Eduardo said last week when I asked what he knew about Buckley Jr. Eduardo had dropped by to loot my record collection and show off the vintage 1974 Adidas, white with three red stripes, that he'd recently scored on eBay. "Hey, $230," he crowed. "Hadn't been worn in years." I'm not into secondhand shoes – call it an anti-foot fetish – and said so.

"That's why you're you and I'm me," he said pointedly. "This any good?" He waved a copy of Iron Butterfly's In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida in my direction. "I think you had to be there," I told him.

That's a lie, of course, but I was thinking about the Adidas I once owned – the same model – collateral damage in a war waged by an ex-wife to erase my past. Reality is flexible, and Eduardo's take on In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida would be no less valid than mine – although calling so stunted an album mediocre should be a criminal offense. Eduardo was born in 1970, two years after the record was released. As far as he's concerned 1968 is just part of the historical blur, not much different than 1776. "I just like old stuff," he explained. "It's new."

No surprise, then, that Eduardo likes Tim Buckley. "Can you buy yellow contact lenses?" he once asked. He was referring to Buckley's glowing iris on the cover of Goodbye and Hello. The album was DOA in 1967, but for once Eduardo and I were on the same page; Buckley looks fabulous. He was cool back in the day, although few people bought his albums. His song "Morning Glory," rumored (in my neighborhood) to have been inspired by the psychoactive properties of morning glory seeds, prompted my sister and me to soften eight packs in boiling water to better spread them onto peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We ate and before long found ourselves alone in a buzzing, rippling, oozing universe where we remained for seven hours, minds racing, muscles cramping, and stomachs heaving. I've stayed away from PB&J and Buckley zealots since.

The late '60s, when Buckley Sr. emerged, were littered with memorable moments, some heroic, others heroically stupid. That those days live differently in the memories of veteranos – those whose brain cells still work – and those of anyone born later, is a blessing. The facts of history are boring, limited by actual events. After the fact, however, facts offer a kind of fictional flexibility, adding luminous possibility to daily life. Eduardo's $230, 30-year-old shoes are theatrical props in an ongoing one-man show; mine, limited by the narrow boundaries of my life, were just shoes. The years have stolen the psychedelic imperative that lurked in Tim Buckley's eye, replacing it with a safer, more earthbound mystery. And Jeff has released more material since he slipped into the river than he did high and dry. Time only seems like a one-way street; in pop music anyway, no one really dies.