He proposed to Joan [Wasser, Buckley’s girlfriend]. He even applied for a job to be a butterfly keeper at Memphis Zoo – a lot of weird stuff that was uncharacteristic for him. I think it was a yearning to settle down. He wanted a normal life.”
According with NME, Lory, who has written a book about his experience of managing Buckley, also recounted getting the phone call telling him of the star’s accident. “It was 5:58 – I’ll never forget the time – in the morning,” he said. “I was in Dublin so that meant it must have been almost one AM in New York and midnight in Memphis. I just froze. I thought I was having a dream. I dropped the phone and you don’t know what to do. Thank god there was no internet cos it would have been tweeted off the banks. You just go numb. I was totally numb, no emotion.”
Jeff Buckley drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River 20 years ago. His legacy amounted to one completed studio LP – 1994’s near-perfect Grace – a handful of fantastic live shows and many broken hearts. Jeffrey Scott Buckley was born in Anaheim, 17 November 1966 died in Memphis, 29 May 1997.—
Jeff unexpectedly drowned in the Wolf River Harbor. He was last seen floating on his back singing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ before he disappeared. At the same time a boat was passing through, creating a whirlwind that probably sucked him.
The singer disappeared from the sight of Keith Foti, who called the police who, despite having ordered a dredging in the area, found nothing. She was 30 years old. The body will be found only in the morning of June 4, spotted by an American Queen ferry passenger, entangled in the branches of a tree beneath the Beale Street Bridge, the most important street in Memphis. Gene Bowen (Buckley tour manager) recognized the body by a navel piercing and worn t-shirt. The autopsy did not detect traces of alcohol or drugs; The case was filed as an accident.
The manager returned to Memphis and went to the river three days after the accident, before Buckley’s body had been found. He said he spent the first 15 minutes he was there crying and the next 15 minutes throwing “rocks in the water and I said, ‘How dare you leave me with this pile of you know what.'”
