Paul and Linda McCartney met Jeff Buckley after his show at the Roseland Ballroom on June 2, 1995. Photographer Merri Cyr was their to capture it.
“Paul and Linda McCartney had come to see Jeff play that night and after the performance they came into the dressing room to meet him. I remember Linda McCartney saying that she had known his father Tim and had taken some photos of him – they seemed to be honoring Jeff, coming to see him backstage. When I look at that picture of Jeff I really get that he was trying to keep his cool, but his eyes are saying, ‘Can you believe it?!’ He was very excited.”
– Merri Cyr
“She was gushing all over him, as was Paul. Now his career was really off and running.”
– Danny Fields
Danny Fields on Linda McCartney on Jeff Buckley
One night in the spring of 1991, record producer Hal Lindner was putting together a (long overdue) tribute to Tim Buckley at a church in Brooklyn Heights renowned for its rather avant-garde events. Scheduled to appear in New York for the first time, singing two of his father’s songs, was Jeff Scott Buckley, Tim’s son. Tim had bolted from Los Angeles to New York while his wife was pregnant with Jeff; father and son had been together only twice in Jeff’s lifetime, and only once when Jeff was old enough to know that this was indeed his father. I had never met Jeff, nor to my knowledge had anyone who had hung out with Tim Buckley in his New York days. Linda and Paul were in town, and I asked her if she wanted to come to this tribute to her beloved Tim and meet his son.
‘I can’t make it,’ she replied, ‘but I’d love to send him a note. I don’t know if he knows Tim and I were friends, but I’d just like to tell him how great I thought his father was.’ A few hours later a messenger delivered an envelope to me; in it was a note from Linda to Jeff. I dashed backstage after the show (if indeed it’s called ‘backstage’ at a church; I never know) and introduced myself to young Jeff – an astonishingly beautiful and talented replica of his late father, by the way.
‘Linda McCartney asked me to give you this note. She was a friend of your father’s, and has always been a huge fan of his music’
‘I know that they knew each other, I know it very well,’ he said. ‘My favourite picture of my father is one that she took, and I keep it with me all the time. It’s the one where he’s sitting on a step with his feet like this, all pigeon-toed. Please tell her that I can’t ever thank her enough for that picture.’
Jeff’s own career started to take off soon after that. Linda followed it closely in the press, and would ask me about him whenever we spoke. Then she called to say that she and Paul would be in New York to do Saturday Night Live, and could I bring Jeff up to their dressing room, as they were both so eager to meet him?
I relayed this summons to him (it was always more in the nature of a summons than an invitation when one was invited into the actual Presence), and he was terrified. ‘What will I talk about? I’m just not ready to meet them, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready, what should I wear?’ etc.
Jeff and I were whisked into the McCartney dressing room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza; they both stood up to meet him – Paul greeted Jeff with the famous charm that outshines anyone else’s that I have ever known, and Linda hugged him. ‘We’re so happy that you’re doing so well,’ she began, and they continued to make such a loving fuss over him that I soon began to feel de trop. One is not supposed to leave until one is signalled to do so (which indeed I have been, from time to time), but I never thought of myself as one of those ones, so I said, ‘Well, Jeff, I’m going to be off, I’m sure you’ll be OK.’
He looked at me as if he weren’t so sure at all, but Linda saw that and intervened. ‘Of course he will. You take care of yourself.’ Bye guys!
Months later, it was reliably reported to me that Paul and one of his children (probably Stella, but I won’t put my arm in the fire on that) actually went to the Roseland Ballroom to see Jeff Buckley perform. Paul almost never goes to concerts, it’s like the President taking a scheduled airlines flight. And to see Linda’s friend’s son? Even though he was one of the shining talents of the 1990s – this still blows my mind. Only a 60s cliché will do.
Alone at the house I take on Fire Island each spring and summer, fifty miles and a world away from New York City, pottering in my garden on a dreary Friday afternoon, I had a call from Linda, who was home in England. As always, she didn’t bother saying ‘Hello’ or identifying herself, she just started talking.
‘I heard that Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi River,’ she said at once. ‘What do you know?’
‘Nothing, of course I would have heard something, it’s a ridiculous rumour.’ I was getting upset and angry – I mean, friends have died in weird ways – and I kind of barked at her: ‘Anyhow, how could you know? You’re sitting there on your hilltop in the middle of nowhere, how could you know? I’m sure it’s not true.’
‘Check on it, will you?’ Linda insisted. ‘And get back to me right away.’
Of course it was true; it had happened the day before. A slightly inebriated Jeff Buckley, aged thirty-one (Note: he was actually 30), went swimming with a friend on a river beach, fully clothed, and a wave took him away. His body was recovered on the Memphis waterfront a few days later. And Linda knew about it before any of Jeff’s own friends in New York, where he had lived.
Refusing to believe that Linda was actually psychic, I tried to trace the source of her information. When I asked her how she knew that Jeff had drowned, she said she had heard it from ‘a friend at MTV in New York’. More probing revealed that she had heard the story either from a high-profile record producer, or from his girlfriend, who worked at MTV. The news was so devastating that Linda couldn’t quite recall; the ‘girlfriend at MTV”, it turned out, was an old friend of mine, and so I told her I hadn’t realized that her guy was close to Linda McCartney, close enough to transmit death rumours to. ‘He’s not,’ she replied. ‘But I’ll ask him.’ She called back: ‘He knows nothing about this, he promises. It must be someone else.’
But it wasn’t ‘someone else’. Linda had given me the producer’s name. Now, she’d be evasive from time to time, but never did she lie. This whole episode remains an unsolved mystery; I’ll attribute it to … I don’t know, the power of love, perhaps instinct. And maybe I was wrong to think that Linda wasn’t psychic, however that gift might manifest itself. Those Buckley men were strange angels, father and son, after all.
Below is the photo which Linda took that Jeff mentioned that he kept with him.
Tim Buckley, New York, 1968 © Linda McCartney
Revolution Rock 