A weird little coincidence struck me yesterday.
As we’ve seen, the last songs Jeff Buckley and Chris Cornell sang were songs most commonly associated with Led Zeppelin.
Cornell’s “sudden and unexpected” death right in the middle of Soundgarden’s U.S. tour that kicked off only last month is compounded only by the fact that his death was ruled a suicide, and while the 52-year-old musician outwardly showed no signs of depression or suicidal tendencies, the final song from last night’s sold out show at Detroit’s Fox Theatre: a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying”.
And this:
When Buckley entered the water from the trash-strewn bank, he was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and boots. He turned, grinning back at Foti, as he drifted in backward. When he was about knee deep, Foti remembers cautioning him: “You can’t swim in that water.” As Buckley continued, Foti repeated his caution: “What are you doing, man?” But Buckley smilingly reclined into the slate-gray water, singing the chorus of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” as he backstroked into the channel.
In 1974, Led Zeppelin started their own record label called Swan Song.
The term swan song comes from an ancient belief that swans will sing a beautiful song just before they are about to die.
Now we’re treading into dangerous waters here, no pun intended. There’s a temptation to cast too wide a net in search of symbolic connections, which, as they pile up, can tend to have a numbing effect. Plus, ancient mythology is so enormous that you could probably dig out a connection for whatever you like if you’re not rigorous about it.
And there’s still the open question as to why we would see so much symbolism and prophecy – practically to the point of overkill – attached to what most people might see as an historical footnote.
So let’s then establish that we’re specifically looking here at the “swan songs,” the very last performances by the people in question.
So with that in mind let’s look at the very last line of the last verse of the last song on the last Cocteau Twins album- or if you prefer, their swan song. The song is “Seekers Who Are Lovers” and the line goes like this:
The song is- you guessed it- yet another of Elizabeth Fraser’s love letters to Jeff Buckley*, in this case a little note explicitly reminding him how amazing she thought the sex was. Which is probably why nearly all of her performances of the song were extremely passionate, in her very strange way.
Then there’s this :
Love, on the tip of it/ The old river’s lack of other sweet sex†/ So sweet/You are a woman just as you are a man
The last line there corresponds to Buckley’s self-identification of a “chanteuse with a penis,” a reference to his interpretations of torch songs by singers like Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf. Which, of course, it’s also entirely compatible with his role as a postmodern incarnation of Attis.
And then there’s that “river” reference again.
This in turn then corresponds to the more recent death of one of Buckley’s closest friends (and posthumous spoeksman) just a few minutes away from Belle Isle on the Detroit River, which is itself closely associated with a Native American variant of the Siren myth.
Note also the connection of these fertility gods we’ve been looking at to rivers:
Adonis sprang from a tree; the body of Osiris was concealed in a tree which grew round the sea-drifted chest in which he was concealed. Diarmid concealed himself in a tree when pursued by Finn. The blood of Tammuz, Osiris, and Adonis reddened the swollen rivers which fertilized the soil.
But there’s another connection between these ancient fertility gods and Lucifer; all of them were sent into the Underworld.
And the way to the Underworld was traditionally the River Styx.
CHILDREN OF THE CORN(ELL)
Bearing in mind that Buckley died on the eve of an explicit Osiris ritual in Memphis, remember that the consort of Osris (who drowned in the Nile River) is Isis, whom “The Greeks conceived of (her) as a corn-goddess, for they identified her with Demeter. In a Greek epigram she is described as ‘she who has given birth to the fruits of the earth,” and “the mother of the ears of corn.’”
Similarly, Attis was identified closely with corn:
Like tree-spirits in general, Attis was apparently thought to wield power over the fruits of the earth or even to be identical with the corn. One of his epithets was “very fruitful”: he was addressed as the “reaped green (or yellow) ear of corn”; and the story of his sufferings, death, and resurrection was interpreted as the ripe grain wounded by the reaper, buried in the granary, and coming to life again when it is sown in the ground
Corn– and subsequently Cornell— both derive from the Latin cornu, meaning “horn.”
The closest Egyptian analog to goddesses like Isthar and Aphrodite is actually Hathor, whom Isis would eventually syncretize with, and who was commonly depicted as wearing horns. She has an interesting origin story:
In the Story of Re, she was created by her father Re as “Sekhmet” as a destroyer of men, who were disobedient to him. Later Re changed his mind, but even he could not stop her from killing men. He then disguised beer as blood and when Sekhmet became drunk, she could no longer kill and was known thereafter as Hathor, a goddess of love.
Jeff Buckley’s eventual swan song- which Chris Cornell was closely involved in producing- was the collection Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. It included the song “Morning Theft”, commonly assumed to be a documentation of Buckley’s reunion with Fraser sometime around the recording of ‘All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun’.
LUCIFER FALLING
There’s been an ongoing controversy over the Swan Song label, which depicts an angel or winged man in the throes of death. One side of the debate claims it’s a depiction of Icarus and others claim it’s actually paying homage to Lucifer, and that the image is a depiction of his fall from Heaven.
The painting is in fact an adaptation of a sketch by 19th century painter William Rimmer entitied “Evening, the Fall of Day.” Some have argued that the image is a depiction of Apollo, but we don’t see the chariot here which was associated with him when he absorbed the aspects of the Titan Helios.
So I think the Lucifer interpretation is probably closest to the mark. “The Fall of Day” is most probably a reference to Phosphoros the daystar, whose name is the Greek equivalent of Lucifer. Note that Jimmy Page had recently recorded the Lucifer Rising and later used a similar image for the release of the soundtrack.
Plus, Jimmy Page.
What we also need to remember here is that Led Zeppelin’s first use of the Swan Song logo was on the first side of the first disk of Physical Graffiti. And the last song on that side is Chris Cornell’s swan song, ‘In My Time of Dying’.
The album also has a strong link to Jeff Buckley:
“When I was 12, I decided to become a musician,” Buckley says. “Physical Graffiti was the first album I ever owned. My stepfather [who lived with Buckley’s mother from 1971 to 1973] bought that for me.”
But wait! There’s more: Swans were closely associated with the love goddeses of the ancient world, particularly Aphrodite.
As we saw, Elizabeth Fraser- in what seems to be her only foray into cosplay ever– explicitly portrayed herself as a rising Aphrodite (0r Atargatis) in the video for ‘Bluebeard’.
That single was released in February 1994. Fraser and Buckley met in March. At the time Fraser was in the midst of an ongoing personal crisis and seemed to experience a meltdown when the band performed ‘Bluebeard’ on The Tonight Show, going into full-WTF alien mode.
That meltdown was taped the same day Chris Cornell’s friend Kurt Cobain died, which was called a suicide at the time.
And just to throw out another creepy death omen, Jeff Buckley would have a fling with Cobain’s widow shortly before he died.
ALL FLOWERS
Lucifer also links us to another prophecy we recently looked at- Fraser’s retelling of the myth of Narcissus and Echo, “Mud and Dark” (again, Jeff Buckley was swimming near Mud Island in the dark when he drowned). From The Aeon Eye blog:
Like Icarus, the archangel Lucifer is said to have fallen because of his pride and vanity over his own beauty and power, much like the myth of Narcissus. This supreme spirit of evil who was once radiant, but who because of his sin of pride fell from heaven into darkness and became Satan, saying: “Non serviam: I will not serve,” and thus brought upon himself the everlasting wrath of God.
There’s also a strain of the Narcissus daffodil called “Lucifer.”
And there’s a Daffodil Hill in Memphis.
The mind reels.
NOTE: It’s also important to remember that Icarus- whose sin was disobedience- actually died by drowning.
* The lyric “His poor essence” may in fact be “His Pur Essence,” a reference to the fact the Fraser may have realized that she seemed to call Buckley by his given name – Scott Moorhead- in “Summerhead” (read:”S.Moorhead”) in between the songs “Essence” and “Pur” on Four Calendar Cafe.
That album was recorded while Buckley was still doing club gigs in tiny dive bars in Manhattan. They wouldn’t begin their relationship for at least another year.
† Erroneously listed as “sweet scents” on some lyric sites.