As the band plays, the screen behind the stage loops video footage of Sin-é in the nineties. Jeff Buckley in his white T-shirt and combat boots, sending the audience into bouts of barely contained ecstasy. A table of young women, commiserating over coffee and cigarettes. A flash of Sinéad O’Connor, elegant and ferocious, performing underneath the Sin-é banner. The footage is grainy and sepia-toned, captured with shaky camcorders. It all looks old-fashioned to me.
I laugh at myself.What does that make me, then?
The frontwoman, a twentysomething with waist-length braids and a voice like suede, swaps her acoustic guitar for an electric one and strums the first crunchy, sexy chords of “Yard of Blonde Girls.” The guitar is a white Telecaster. The sight of it alone floods me with longing.
It’s the same guitar Jeff Buckley played at the Sin-é show in 1993. The show that I still think of asourshow.
Emme taps my elbow. “You OK, Mom?”
I look up at my daughter—she inherited her father’s height, to his unending satisfaction—and I notice the crease in her smooth, perpetually dewy brow. She’s beenwearing her blond hair in a pair of pink-dipped space buns these days. For the concert tonight, she braided it before swirling it into the buns, then lined her eyebrows in stick-on rhinestones. She’s wearing an Edwardian lace nightgown and a pair of cherry-red cowboy boots, both thrifted.
“It’s giving Gwen Stefani circaReturn of Saturn,” I told Emme, when she emerged from her vanilla-scented bedroom earlier tonight.
She shot me a lovingly stern look. “Mom,” she said, with long-suffering patience. “Please never sayit’s giving.”
At fifteen, she’s somehow approaching the age I was then. The passage of time was never so punishingly obvious until I became a parent. I want so badly to encase this moment in amber, to keep my daughter exactly where she is now—at home, with me. Especially since the divorce, I’ve organized my life into two boxes: Emme and my work. I can’t even begin to think about how it will feel when Emme goes to college and that box becomes significantly emptier.
“I’m OK, sweetie,” I tell Emme now.
Then I realize I haven’t picked up my camera during the past ten minutes of this band’s set. They’re covering the first three tracks ofSketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, my favorite—but an often overlooked—Jeff Buckley album.
“You fine here for a bit?” I ask.
“I’ve been coming to Webster Hall since I was six.” Emme rolls her eyes, and the rhinestones above them sparkle. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom anyway.”
I make my way up to the lip of the stage, flashing mypress badge to the few people who stoically refuse to budge. Overall, this crowd is generous, flexible, joyful. Not the case at every show. But this is hardly every show.
A week ago, Nisha sent me an Instagram post announcing the event: a one-night-only tribute show to Jeff Buckley, honoring the twenty-sixth anniversary of his death in 1997. The owner and two previous employees of the now-defunct Sin-é had hoped to commemorate the twenty-fifth, but COVID prevented that from happening. And the past three years have felt like a single, sprawling, unidentifiable mass anyway. What’s the difference between twenty-five and twenty-six?
The hosts had originally planned to put on the event at the club’s original venue on St.Mark’s Place, but they weren’t expecting the thousands of messages from supporters, mourners, and celebrants asking if there was still space for more. Or the number of musicians who reached out asking if there was room for them to contribute a cover.
Can you believe it’s been over twenty-five years since he’s been gone?Nisha had texted.
Of course, the answer is no. That is always the answer when faced with the relentless march of time.
I remember distinctly where I was when I learned that Jeff Buckley had died: James and I were on our third date at Aquagrill when I got an urgent message on my beeper. It was Nisha:Call me.For all my complaints about James, he was nothing but compassionate in that moment, displaying the appropriate amount of concern and understandingwhen I excused myself from the table, hustled up to the hostess booth, and asked to use their phone.
“He’s dead,” Nisha said, her voice thick with fresh tears. My mind went blank, then kaleidoscopic with a riotous montage of every important man in our lives to whom she might be referring. Bill Clinton? Her father?Myfather?
“Jeff Buckley is dead.”
My knees buckled in relief, and then in potent despair. If someone as alive and electric as him could leave this earth so violently, what hope was there for the rest of us?
I couldn’t help bringing up Nisha’s call when I texted her back:It feels like just yesterday that you ruined my date with James.
Nisha responded instantly, despite the fact that it was 4a.m. in Seattle, where she’s been living for the past few months to help care for her father.
Nisha:Didn’t stop you from marrying the guy.
Me:Clearly I should’ve taken Jeff’s death as an omen.
Nisha:No comment.
Me:None needed.
Nisha:You have to go to this show for us.
Nisha:And take Emme. Show her how cool we used to be.
