The first thing I learned in college was that if I wanted to talk to interesting women, I needed to get into Jeff Buckley. The big-voiced rock singer seemed to gaze pleadingly, and handsomely, from posters on the walls of every girls’ dorm room I was invited to enter, even though this probably did not happen often enough to produce a representative sample.

By then, Buckley had already been dead for a few years. His accidental drowning in 1997 had transformed the 30-year-old performer from a respected but commercially marginal major-label artist into a cult icon and a figure of tragic romance — less grim than many rock casualties, but still devastating for all the music he didn’t end up making.

See Full Page