The song Chris Cornell wrote as a final tribute to Jeff Buckley
When Jeff Buckley’s family began sorting through his possessions following his tragic death in 1997, one of the more unusual items they found was a red telephone, not unlike the type you’d see the president use to call for a nuclear attack in a 1980s movie. This red telephone, however, wasn’t connected to a landline. For Jeff, it had been a symbolic prop of sorts, one that he would use to “talk to God”, according to his mother, Mary Guibert.
Very few people, even devout Buckley fans, knew about this story until 2011, when an unusual red telephone started appearing as a stage prop on Chris Cornell’s solo tour. At a show in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that December, a fan shouted at Cornell to ask about the phone, which the singer hadn’t used or mentioned during the entire set.
“A friend of mine’s mom gave it to me after my friend passed away,” Cornell patiently replied, adding that he’d decided to bring it with him to his first acoustic performance on a whim. “Ever since then, I’ve had it there,” he continued, pointing to the phone’s place of honour on a stool behind him. “That’s the actual true version [of the story]. There’s a whole bunch of other bullshit reasons I make up sometimes. That’s the real one.”
When a reporter in Michigan followed up with Cornell’s PR team to enquire further, it was revealed that the red phone was indeed Jeff Buckley’s.
Buckley and Cornell were close friends in the mid-1990s; so much so that Cornell was ultimately invited to help compile Buckley’s last recordings into the posthumous album Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, released in 1998. This experience gave Cornell a chance to bond and mourn with Buckley’s mother, Mary, who later gave him Jeff’s red telephone as a token of her appreciation.
Shortly after working on the Sketches album, the musician focused on putting together the songs for his own debut solo album following the break-up of Soundgarden. That record, Euphoria Morning, was a very different animal from anything in the Soundgarden catalogue and certainly suggested a direct influence of his late friend Buckley.
One track on Euphoria Morning, ‘Wave Goodbye’, addressed that connection directly and served as Cornell’s tribute to a singer he’d proudly taken under his wing. Considering that his close friendship with Buckley had been largely under the radar, as was the nature of both men, many fans only learned about their relationship from hearing ‘Wave Goodbye’ for the first time.
The song, which opens with Cornell performing a brief, Buckley-esque falsetto, has a soulful feel, almost like a heartbroken Otis Redding tune rather than a typical soul-crushing Soundgarden lament. “When you miss somebody / You tell yourself a hundred thousand times / Nobody ever lives forever / So you give it one more try / To wave goodbye / Wave goodbye”.
In retrospect, there was a further tragedy in the fact that Cornell couldn’t use the red telephone to chat with Buckley later in his own life, as the burdens of addiction and lifelong mental health struggles finally caught up and led to Cornell’s death by suicide in 2017, nearly 20 years to the day Buckley drowned in the Wolf River.
