Trailblazers: Gram Parsons, Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley

 Trailblazers: Gram Parsons, Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley

Parsons, Drake and Buckley were three young musicians who died before they had made their mark on the musical world, yet left behind them a legacy that was as rich as it was beautiful. Ex-preacher Parsons was outrageous, outspoken but impeccably polite. He recorded with various bands including The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Byrds and very nearly the Rolling Stones. His light shone brightly but briefly before his mysterious death, and more bizarre cremation, at the age of 26. Almost a polar opposite, Nick Drake was intensely shy with crippling stage fright, who made less than 40 public appearances. Handsome yet fragile, he composed beautiful melodies. He sank into depression in the family home, before overdosing on medication – whether deliberate or not, nobody knows – at the age of 26. Jeff Buckley’s vocal range spanned an astonishing four octaves. He could sing any style – from Piaf to Gershwin, from scat and jazz to Oum Kalthoum, alongside his own superb realist compositions. In 1997, on the brink of stardom, he never returned from a fully-clothed swim in the Mississippi River.

Gram Parsons

Nick Drake

Jeff Buckley

An extract from David Bret's autobiography, Putting One's Head Above the Parapet:

He was only a little slip of a thing—in his own words “goofy and loud”—and whilst some songs such as his definitive version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” could break your heart, there were others which were so noisy that they had me reaching for the skip button on my machine.

Jeff only released one album during his tragically short life. This was Grace, and it was a corker. I met him in a London radio station. I was there promoting my Freddie Mercury and Jeff was—well he was just there, wearing the most appalling fur coat which had a posy of battered flowers pinned to the lapel. However, it was not just any old fur coat—it was the one that Joan Crawford had worn in Queen Bee, and Jeff was not saying how he had got it. He had no idea who I was, until he read the name on my book.

   “You’re the same David Bret who wrote about Piaf?” he asked. “Holy fuck, I’m sitting with royalty!”

   Well, I wouldn’t have gone that far!

   It emerged that Jeff had recorded a radio programme I did for America: The Nights of Edith Piaf. To be honest, the producer had made a mess of the whole thing, trying to cram in my anecdotes with thirty songs into a half-hour show. Jeff however had liked it and become smitten with Piaf, recording two of her songs—“Hymn To Love” using the Eddie Constantine lyrics and exactly the same arrangement as she had, and “Je n’en connais pas la fin”. He also performed “Padam, padam” at the Ba-ta-clan, in Paris, and was awarded the prestigious Légion d’honneur.

   Sadly, Jeff drowned in June 1997, aged just thirty-one, and the entertainment world lost a potential lodestar. He was possessed of a unique talent and could have achieved so much, had he lived.

 

 

Only in death was the true potential of these talented young men appreciated, their songs still appearing in ads and Buckley had his first number 1 in 2008. With every passing year, their legends grow. And posthumously they have influenced a whole host of singers who now crowd the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. This is their remarkable story.