I was just having a whole long conversation about the Boston band Morphine, which then led to me thinking of other great Boston bands, including the Dambuilders, which was the first time I saw Joan Wasser live. I looked at her Wikipedia page and there were several things I didn't know in there. One question I saw asked here in this forum in the last month was whether it was certain or not that she and Jeff were ever actually engaged. I'd say her Wiki page referring to him as "her fiance of 3 yrs" pretty much answers that question, because if that wasn't true I can't imagine her leaving that up on her page.

Here's the rest of the section I found most interesting, mainly about Jeff. I didn't know most of this:

Black Beetle

In May 1997, her fiance of three years,^([15]) musician Jeff Buckley, drowned accidentally in Memphis.^([16]) She found it "such a traumatic experience of loss. I needed to grieve but I didn't know how".^([5]) She continued to play with Those Bastard Souls, a band started in 1995 by a close friend of the couple, Dave Shouse of Grifters. They made a record entitled Debt & Departure attempting to respond to Buckley's death.^([17]) In late 1997, she created a band with the remaining members of Buckley's band called Black Beetle and finished an eponymous album that was never released.^([18]) This was the first project where she was writing as well as fronting a band. She commented, "I found singing terrifying at first, I didn't know about the boundaries of my voice and I had no idea what words I wanted to say. The violin had been my voice for so long."^([5])

Lately I have been digging into Jeff's time in Memphis to see if anything new popped up and it did.

In Jeff Apter's biography A Pure Drop it's mentioned (by Dave Shouse of the Grifters) that Jeff played a gig across the border at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. I have known this for quite some time but haven't been able to confirm the date of the show (haven't put much effort into it, tbh but now I'm going to try to figure this out!). Shouse said he drove Jeff to and from the gig and that Jeff left the check, crumpled up and coffee-stained, lying around the rental house.

Today I learned that sneaky Jeff played a second show outside of Memphis while he was living there. This bit of information is tucked away in an article his friend (and writer) Andria Lisle penned for The Oxford American in 2000 entitled Our Glorious Spring.

Most of the time I spent with Jeff was like that photograph. Funny, jesting. Our introduction, that February, involved spontaneous karate kicking. Another night, I took him to a gig in Oxford, Mississippi where a group of Ole Miss sorority girls invited him to their house for a party. The band that followed Jeff, Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, opened their set with the song 'Loser’s Waltz'. Jeff turned to me and asked "Shall we dance, Madam?" Then he purposefully fell off his barstool, like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. He hit the ground and bounced back up. By the time we waltzed around the room, the girls, horrified, were gone.

I did a deep dive to see if I could confirm that this happened and it did. Took me about 90 minutes of digging to find what I was looking for after first building some circumstantial evidence. Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys indeed played in Oxford, MS, at a venue called Proud Larry's on April 30, 1997. This was a Wednesday night, two days after Jeff played at Barristers' with his A&R rep Steve Berkowitz looking on.

I have posted the advert and the full dated page with the advert from The Daily Mississippian (a newspaper that serviced the University of Mississippi) that confirms the details of Andria's account.

I wonder if Jeff played under his own name or under a pseudonym like he did on the Phantom Solo Tour.

So that's two out of town shows that Jeff played while he was living in Memphis. Were there more???

Can’t wait to hear “That’s all I ask”

Finally a new addition to the collection after years. Happy RSD everyone!