As soon as Jeff was reported missing, Lory ordered all of Jeff’s possessions, especially recordings, scooped up. Foti, among others, was ordered to grab anything and everything in the house on Rembert; someone was dispatched to Sorcerer Sound in New York for the tapes of the Verlaine sessions. Jeff’s friend Inger Lorre, who was staying in his apartment in New York, was relocated to a hotel while Jack Bookbinder, Lory’s assistant, confiscated diaries, tapes and miscellaneous personal belongings. In the low-ceiling attic of 91 North Rembert, the band came across a temple-like scenario complete with skull candles and notebooks in which, according to Tighe, Jeff wrote about “transition and reincarnation and becoming molecules and rain.”

Although the Memphis police continued their search on Friday, now with the help of scuba divers, it was becoming horrifyingly clear Jeff would not be emerging from the depths of the Wolf River. By the afternoon, most of Jeff’s circle in New York-Wasser, Stein, Berkowitz-had flown down; Guibert and her sister Peggy arrived from California; Lory flew in from Ireland. Stein and Berkowitz asked Foti to take them to the spot at the river. As they took in the sight and attempted to comprehend what had happened, a police boat slowly passed by, its officers trolling the water for a body with the aid of a long pole…

On Monday, June 2, four days after his disappearance, Columbia issued a press release: “Jeff Buckley Still Missing As Search Continues; Family and Friends Believe He Has Drowned.” There was little else to hope for at that point. On sundry stages around the world, U2, R.E.M., and Bush dedicated songs in his honor. “I remember lying out in the driveway in the gravel and seeing the clouds move really swiftly in the sky,” Tighe recalls, “and I got the sense he was moving on.”

At 4:40 P.M. on Wednesday, June 4, a passenger on the American Queen riverboat near the mouth of the Mississippi informed two crew members that something appeared to be floating in the water between Mud Island and the riverbank. The boat employees use a lifeboat to move closer an discovered a body caught in an eddy of branches. Called to the scene, members of the fire department pulled the body ashore as Sergeant Johnson, who immediately drove to the riverbank, attempted to block photographers from taking pictures of the body with the swollen face. Just after 7 P.M., Bowen identified the body; he recognized not only Jeff’s face and hands but the gold earring in his belly button. Jeff’s Venice Quartz watch was still ticking.

Everyone was struck by two details. After six days in the water, Jeff’s body had surfaced mere hours after his closest friends had left town (”It’s almost as if he spared them,” says Nathan Larson.). Also he had drifted up not at the precise place he had drowned-which, according to police, was often the case-but at the slope of Beale Street, a symbol of both Memphis’s cultural heritage and American music. It felt like the final verse of a long and darkly poetic folk song.

David Brown DREAM BROTHER The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley

https://jeffbuckley.com/