On May 29, just as he was to begin recording the follow-up to his acclaimed album, Grace, Jeff Buckley decided to take a swim in a channel of the Mississippi River and was swept away by its raging undercurrents. He was 30 years old.
For Jeff Buckley, it had been an early evening of driving around Memphis, Tenn., in a rented truck with his fellow musician (and roadie) Keith Foti, listening to Foti's mix tape -- Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros, the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus." Their idea was to eventually go play twin sets of drums at a rehearsal space set aside for Buckley's band, which would be arriving by plane later that very night of Thursday, May 29, to begin recording the follow-up to his first full-length album, Grace. But Buckley couldn't seem to locate the building.
So they drove, recalls the 23-year-old Foti, not stopping to eat or drink, until the idea came: "Why don't we go down by the water?" Around dusk they parked the truck in the nearly empty lot adjoining the Tennessee Welcome Center near the heart of downtown. They brought their boombox down the sloping bank to the shoreline of the Wolf River channel of the Mississippi River.
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. At the time of his death, Jeff Buckley was six months short of his 31st birthday, and his fans and many critics felt that his promise was as bright as any musician of his generation.
