by Alan Light
In late 1996, Buckley did a “phantom solo tour” of the northeastern states, returning to the one-man approach and billed under a series of aliases. “There was a time in my life not too long ago when I could show up in a café and simply do what I do, make music, learn from performing my music, explore what it means to me, i.e., have fun while I irritate and/or entertain an audience who don’t know me or what I am about,” he wrote in an explanatory online Christmas message to his fans. “In this situation I have that precious and irreplaceable luxury of failure, of risk, of surrender. I worked very hard to get this kind of thing together, this work forum. I loved it and then I missed it when it disappeared. All I am doing is reclaiming it.”
He gathered the band for another session with Verlaine in early 1997, but again was frustrated with how things were going. At the suggestion of his friend Dave Shouse from the scuzzy blues-punk band the Grifters, Buckley decided to try changing his surroundings: He moved to Memphis, Tennessee, rented a shotgun house, and set up shop at Easley McCain Recording studio, where such alt-rock royalty as Pavement and Sonic Youth had recently recorded. In February, Buckley and band did a third session with Verlaine but, still unhappy, the singer called Andy Wallace to discuss his taking over the production.
Buckley continued working on his new material the best way he knew, playing frequently at a downtown Memphis bar called Barrister’s, even going so far as to take a weekly residency there, just like the old days at Sin-é. He was looking for a sound, and for a purpose—he often visited the Memphis Zoo and talked about volunteering there (there’s now a plaque at the zoo commemorating him, purchased by Buckley fans around the world); he got around the city by bicycle; he let the grass grow at his house but meticulously sanded the floors. He was recording demos of the new songs on his own four-track recorder and sending them up to his band members in New York, who were scheduled to return to Memphis for rehearsals and recording sessions on May 29.
Penny Arcade, the former Andy Warhol superstar who had befriended Buckley during his early days in New York, wrote an online account of his final show at Barrister’s on Monday, May 26. Tim Taylor, the lead singer in the cult favorite synth-punk band Brainiac, had died in a car crash. Buckley’s first words on stage were “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, he’s fucking dead, the guy from Brainiac is fucking dead. I want this to mean something to every fucking one of you.”
Arcade writes that he “began to play ‘Terminal Cancer,’ a song that includes the line ‘The world has eternal cancer’—‘I guess that’s how the guy from Brainiac felt,’ he continued as he segued into ‘Hallelujah’ in requiem for Taylor.” Later, when he performed “Corpus Christi Carol,” a song he hadn’t played live in over two years, Buckley said to the small crowd, “Is that how you like your rock heroes—dead?”
Three nights later, when the band arrived, Buckley and his friend and roadie Keith Foti were heading to the rehearsal studio and got lost. When the ever-impulsive singer figured out that they had ended up downtown, he suggested that they swing by the river—there was a spot in the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi, where he had gone swimming, and he wanted to go back in. Though the water in the Wolf seems calm, natives know that its undercurrents can be deceptive.
Buckley waded in, still wearing his clothes and combat boots, and started singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” At about nine-fifteen, after Jeff had been in the water for fifteen minutes, Foti saw a tugboat pass and called to Buckley to get out of the water. As the water got choppier, Foti got up to move his boom box so it wouldn’t get splashed. When he turned back around, he didn’t see Buckley.
Foti called the police, who began a search process. Boats, helicopters, and scuba divers all scoured the river and its banks, but after several hours, the efforts were called off. Six days later, on June 4, a riverboat passenger caught sight of something in the water. It was the body of Jeff Buckley.
The medical examiner at the University of Tennessee in Memphis announced that Buckley had tested negative for drugs, and that his blood alcohol level was insignificant, the equivalent of a glass of wine. The official cause of death was accidental drowning with “no evidence of other injuries.” Buckley was thirty years old—two years older than his father had been when he died. His immense potential, his quest for transcendence through music, was stilled. But in ways no one could have anticipated, Jeff Buckley’s popularity and influence would only expand in the years to come.
CHAPTER SIX
Following his passing, like those of other beautiful stars who died young, from James Dean to Tupac Shakur, Jeff Buckley’s legend began to ascend. On June 7, 1997, just a few days after Buckley’s body was found, U2 appeared at the second annual Tibetan Freedom benefit concert, organized by the Beastie Boys and held on New York City’s Randall’s Island. They closed their set with a churning version of “Please,” a song from Pop, their most recent album, about the violence in Northern Ireland. This day, the band added a brief coda—a few delicate turns through the chorus of “Hallelujah,” which stilled the crowd. Before walking off, Bono quietly said, “Jeff Buckley.”
Numerous other friends and admirers—PJ Harvey, Chris Cornell, Rufus Wainwright, Aimee Mann, Glen Hansard—would also soon pay tribute to Buckley in song. Over time, Grace has sold more than three million copies worldwide, eventually earning gold sales status in the U.S. The album is platinum six times over in Australia. In Europe especially, a very dedicated Jeff Buckley cult began to arise. In 1998, Q magazine readers voted Grace the seventy-fifth greatest album of all time, and its standing would continue to rise as the years passed—as would the sense that this album, in truth a major commercial disappointment upon its release, had had a much bigger impact at the time than it actually did.
A batch of the demos and work tapes for the second album was released in 1998 under the title Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, and a steady stream of unfinished recordings, outtakes, alternate takes, and live material would follow over the years. Nothing, though, would ever truly reveal where the promise of Grace, Buckley’s one and only finished album, might have led. He is forever fixed as a wildly gifted, underappreciated artist beginning to bloom. We are left to imagine where his talents could have taken him, able only to project our own desires onto this blank screen.
After the publication of several books—most notably David Browne’s dual biography of Tim and Jeff Buckley, Dream Brother—and the release of multiple documentaries about the singer, there has been a constant stream of rumors and struggles over the film rights to his story, which has been closely guarded by his mother, Mary Guibert. Brad Pitt has been among the Hollywood A-listers who fought unsuccessfully to assemble the Jeff Buckley story. (James Franco and Twilight’s Robert Pattinson are some of the other names that have been tossed around as possible on-screen Buckleys over the years.)
One film—Greetings from Tim Buckley, focusing primarily on Tim’s story, and culminating with the appearance by Jeff (played by Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley) at the St. Ann’s show—enjoyed a well-received premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2012. In summer of 2011, it was announced that Jake Scott would be directing and Reeve Carney would be starring as Jeff in Mystery White Boy, the official biopic, sanctioned by Guibert; a year later, production had not started and Scott was replaced by Amy Berg, with reports that Carney may also be off the project.
No element of Buckley’s history, though, has received more attention than his recording of “Hallelujah.” The combination of the tragic young Buckley; Cohen, the revered songwriters’ songwriter, recently endorsed by Bono, Reznor, and Cobain; and the haunting, mournful delivery of the prayer-like words proved irresistibly alluring for listeners.
It rippled out to the world, resonating as if Jeff Buckley had written his own epitaph. Years later, NPR said that the song “sounds almost ghostly—a fitting statement for a singer who’s still finding new fans from beyond the grave.” The association with a life cut too short further s
olidified the song as an expression of melancholy, rather than hard-won celebration.
After Buckley’s death, “Hallelujah” took on an almost mythic stature. It was an insiders’ secret for those who already knew about him, and an accessible pop song if it was functioning as an introduction. It now served as an elegy that went above and beyond actual words and music.
• • •
A decade after Buckley’s death, at the 2007 Experience Music Project (EMP) conference in Seattle, an annual gathering of pop music academia, writer Michael Barthel presented a paper that was a landmark in “Hallelujah” studies. Titled “It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard: The Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ ” the presentation chronicled (complete with charts and graphs) the steady rise in visibility and popularity of the song. In the paper, Barthel described the transformation that occurred following Buckley’s passing.
“However you come to the song, it’s got an aura around it,” he wrote. “If it’s through Buckley, well, he’s this beautiful dead boy with an apparently ‘ethereal’ voice, and he’s singing this song that sounds like a long-ago thing. Cohen himself is distant enough at this point to be symbolically equivalent to an old blues guy: mysterious, wise, world-weary.”
The bulk of Barthel’s fascinating EMP presentation was an analysis of the cover versions and, especially, the film and television soundtrack uses of the song over the years to that point. An examination of the information that he assembled illustrates that starting in 1995—post-Grace, even prior to Buckley’s death—the song begins turning up with increasing frequency. However misguided Bono’s interpretation may have been, it seems like he had his finger on the pulse after all: In the second half of the 1990s, the flow of covers turns steady—there were three or four or five new versions a year, each year. Most of these early versions came from Europe; singers in Denmark, Spain, Finland, Germany, Holland, and the Czech Republic all recorded “Hallelujah” during this time.
Even more notable, however, is the development that would most dramatically define the standing of “Hallelujah” in the pop universe—the first uses of the song on movie soundtracks. Though these appearances did follow the release of Grace, they didn’t initially focus on Buckley’s recording. John Cale’s version appears under the end credits in the 1996 film Basquiat, painter Julian Schnabel’s dream-like biography of the graffiti writer–turned–art star Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Given Basquiat’s connection to Andy Warhol, played by David Bowie in the movie, and Warhol’s relationship to the Velvet Underground, Cale’s former band, this choice was a subtle but significant one.)
“Hallelujah” then turned up in a few Australian movies over the next several years. Though Buckley had—and has to this day—an especially passionate fan base in Australia, these soundtracks utilized versions by local singers. Simon Austin, a former member of the popular band Frente!, sang it for River Street, and jazz trumpeter Vince Jones performed it for Siam Sunset.
In 1999, Sheryl Crow sang “Hallelujah” on the public television music series Sessions at West 54th. Barefoot and perched on a tall bar stool, she performed a sped-up rendition of Buckley’s arrangement. Crow adds a nice, finger-picked guitar solo before the final verse, but she stumbles in the first few lines (“It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth / the minor third and the major fifth,” she sings, taking the lesson in harmony a step too far—obviously the song was not yet so familiar that these lines were permanently burned into every young singer-songwriter’s brain).
A pattern was being established. With all of these covers and soundtracks, every year saw a half-dozen or so new impressions of “Hallelujah.” Immediately obvious, too, was that its use behind dramatic scenes was effective: The mood and melody, the backstory, the chorus, and (less crucial, or at least selectively important) the lyrics added a powerful emotional jolt to a scripted scene. Directors and music supervisors discovered that, as with all good soundtrack songs, “Hallelujah” provided a shortcut—to feelings of contemplation, loss, solitude—in just a few bars.
As Leonard Cohen remained in isolation, a second collection of his best-known songs (it’s a bit hard to say “Greatest Hits” for an artist who has never actually had any hits), titled More Best of Leonard Cohen, came out in October 1997. Though most of the set was drawn from I’m Your Man and The Future, plus two previously unreleased tracks, this time “Hallelujah” was most certainly included—the Cohen Live version, in the construction that inspired John Cale, closer in spirit to the Jeff Buckley cover that was now the song’s calling card.
From the monastery atop Mt. Baldy, Leonard Cohen might have wondered why more and more royalty checks started coming in from around the world for this one composition—though, as we’ll soon see, perhaps he wasn’t actually informed of this development. It’s unclear how aware he was of the Jeff Buckley cover. Bill Flanagan recalls speaking to Cohen a number of years ago and bringing up Buckley’s “Hallelujah.”
“I got the impression that Leonard was actually not that familiar with it—like he might have heard Jeff’s version, but he didn’t know that much about it,” said Flanagan. “I remember he asked me, ‘He was the son of Tim Buckley. Did he die the same way?’ ”
In 1999, Cohen came down the mountain and quietly returned to his home in Los Angeles. He had already begun e-mailing poems, drawings, and new song lyrics to the Leonard Cohen Files fan website (these writings can still be found on the site, in a section titled “The Blackening Pages”). Whether or not the rise of “Hallelujah” entered into his thinking, Cohen’s spiritual retreat had ended, and he was creating for an audience again, in time for a new millennium to begin.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In 2001, “Hallelujah” was seventeen years old—almost a full generation in the real world, and thoroughly ancient in the pop universe. Its author, now nearing seventy years old, had barely been seen in public for almost a decade.
Meanwhile, since the advent of the Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing service in 1999, the music business was being turned upside down. Though the year 2000, driven by the teen-pop bonanza, represented a high-water mark for record sales—no fewer than five albums that year sold over a million copies during their first week of release—the digital revolution would soon cause the bottom to fall out of the industry, and the economics and culture of music were in the midst of a radical recalibration.
Yet, in 2001, “Hallelujah” would undergo a shift, in which it would no longer just be a song but also become a phenomenon, and would illustrate the power and impact that a piece of music could still have in the twenty-first century, however listeners were buying or consuming recordings. Several events—silly events alongside incomprehensibly tragic events—occurred within a few months of each other that altered the stature and meaning of this song forever.
In 1991, Steven Spielberg had bought the rights to a new children’s book by William Steig titled Shrek!, the story of a loner ogre who finds true love. For years, the project languished in development hell. When the DreamWorks studio was founded, the story was brought to Jeffrey Katzenberg’s attention; in the mid-nineties, he acquired the rights and put the film into production.
From the very beginning, the making of Shrek was fraught with complications. Codirector Andrew Adamson immediately clashed with Katzenberg over how far the movie could push its humor into adult territory. Saturday Night Live’s latest breakout star, Chris Farley, had recorded almost all of his dialogue as the voice of Shrek when he died in December 1997. Farley’s SNL predecessor Mike Myers, now a movie star thanks to Wayne’s World and Austin Powers, was given the role, but he insisted on a complete rewrite.
After recording his entire part, Myers asked to rerecord all of his lines in a Scottish accent that reminded him of his parents telling him bedtime stories. Meanwhile, Janeane Garofalo, who had been cast as the voice of Princess Fiona opposite Farley, was abruptly fired (“I was never told why,” she said later. “I assume because I sound like a man sometimes?”), and
ultimately replaced by Cameron Diaz.
“The movie was very much a bastard child of the studio,” said Adamson from Australia when I spoke to him over the phone. “But it led to people being bolder and braver, being willing to take more chances and just go with it.”
One way in which the filmmakers took some risks was in the prominent inclusion of rock and pop songs—not the usual accompaniment to a fairy tale. Songs by Smash Mouth (whose slots opening and closing the film may be the greatest legacy in their largely forgettable career), Joan Jett, and the Proclaimers were given significant placements in Shrek.
The most surprising musical selection came at the movie’s emotional climax. Shrek has rescued Princess Fiona from her isolated castle and is on his way to deliver her to her future husband, Lord Farquaad. Their feelings for each other are growing when Shrek misinterprets part of an overheard conversation and thinks Fiona is disgusted with him. When morning comes, Shrek has brought Lord Farquaad and his troops to collect Fiona. The couple heads for his castle, while a devastated Shrek retreats alone to his now-vacated swamp.
A montage follows, with scenes of Shrek pining for Fiona while the princess joylessly prepares for her wedding. Behind this action, music plays: John Cale singing an abbreviated, three-verse “Hallelujah.”
And somehow, as weird and unlikely as the choice may be, it works—the sorrowful but unsentimental tone fits the sophistication of a cartoon that features fart jokes and not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. A few of the lines (“I used to live alone before I knew you,” “love is not a victory march”) even manage to line up nicely with the narrative. With words courtesy of the Prince of Bummers, and vocals by the man who snarled “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend,” the musical moment proved unforgettable.