Musician Jeff Buckley left little behind when he drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River 20 years ago. His legacy amounted to one completed studio LP – 1994’s near-perfect Grace – a handful of memorable live shows and any number of broken hearts. Yet, as revealed by writer Clinton Heylin in his book It’s One For The Money, Buckley was also up to his pretty neck in record company debt — a hard truth only discovered by Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert, after his death.
Heylin writes that his A&R representative at Sony, Steve Berkowitz, “was convinced he would succeed, and gave him a whacking great publishing contract along with a [cross collateralised] record deal.” When Jeff died, Heylin continues, “Berkowitz himself would end up explaining to a madly grieving mother how come there was no pot.”
As Buckley signed a publishing and record deal with the same company, any gains on one would be offset against losses in the other — it was like he was servicing two mortgages at the same time. The artist did get a pretty strong hint of his precarious financial circ*mstances in the final months of his life, when he moved to Memphis and hoped to buy the ramshackle doer-upper he was renting. The asking price was a miserly $40,000, but Buckley learned that after all the gigs and accolades since he’d signed his Sony mega-deal, there simply wasn’t any cash in the bank. He was stunned — and angry.
This would go a long way to explain the flood of posthumous Jeff Buckley releases, which to date includes one partly-completed studio album (1998’s Sketches For My Sweetheart the Drunk), four live albums, extended “Legacy” editions of Grace and his concert EP Live at Sin-E — the four-song original stretched to 34 tracks — as well as the various odds-n-sods collections, including You And I, which was a number one hit upon its release in Australia last year and reached the UK Top 20, as well as charting highly through Europe and even reaching the US Top 50, something he failed to achieve while alive. Collectively, Buckley’s global fanbase has done their bit to chip away at the substantial debt he left behind. But if only he’d written more songs – Buckley was not a prolific songwriter – his estate may not have been in such parlous shape.
Would the same situation apply to those many musicians – Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and David Bowie among them – who are now playing that great gig in the sky? Not likely.
Cohen, in what proved to be a big win for his fans (if not necessarily for him), learned in 2005 that he’d been fleeced of his $5 million retirement fund by his manager, which led him back to the concert halls and left him with an estate far healthier than at any other time of his life — Cohen grossed some $150 million from late-career world tours. Bowie was always in control of the business side of his legacy; he even floated himself on the stock market in 1997, raking in £35 million worth of “Bowie bonds”. Much of Prince’s career was spent battling with the “suits”; he even went as far as to rebrand himself “Slave” as a protest against corporate greed. Yet Prince’s estate is valued at close to $300 million — and his back catalogue outsold Adele during 2016, no small achievement. George Michael’s estate at the time of his death was estimated at $200 million.
So what next for the Jeff Buckley cottage industry? It does seem that while the musical well has just about run dry, there’s more archival dredging in the works. In 2019 you can expect a book compiling Jeff’s sometimes funny, often out-there journal entries and letters, edited by Guibert and writer David Browne. Just in time for the 25th anniversary of Grace.
And how would the renowned perfectionist Buckley have felt about being more productive in death than while alive? Not so great, as several of Jeff’s friends told me when I was writing A Pure Drop. According to Irishman Glen Hansard, it’s not a notion that Buckley would have been happy with: “My theory is that if this guy wasn’t into it, then leave it the f*ck alone.”
