... in Words: Interviews

"Late Singer's Mother Carries Buckley Mantle With Sketches," by Robert Hilburn

An interview with Mary Guibert

This interview was originally published in Dallas Morning News, June 1998

        Every time the late Jeff Buckley read a profile or review about him or his music during the boldly original singer/songwriter's tragically brief career, he found himself linked with one of his parents. Somewhere in the article would always be a mention of his father, Tim Buckley, a richly talented songwriter who died of a heroin overdose in 1975 at the age of 28.

        The difficult thing for Mr. Buckley in seeing his name constantly tied to his father was that the two had almost no personal connection in life. Tim Buckley's year-plus marriage to Mary Guibert ended before she gave birth to their son in 1966 in Anaheim, California.

        "Everything I know about him was secondhand except for about a week, and even then I don't remember much," Jeff Buckley said in a 1995 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "Genetics be damned... I have completely different musical choices."

        Ironically, Jeff's mother is the parent who will now be most often mentioned in articles involving the posthumous release of Sketches (For My Sweetheart the Drunk), a two-disc collection of her son's music. It's a captivating work that extends the enormous promise of Mr. Buckley's 1994 debut, Grace.

        In the months after her son died in an accidental drowning in a Memphis marina last year, Ms. Guibert listened for hours to his unreleased tapes to select the tracks that would be included in the new set.

        On the eve of the album's release May 26 by Columbia Records, Ms. Guibert, 50, who lives in Santa Ana, California, spoke about her son, his music, and how she hopes he's remembered as a positive force.

        Q: How did you feel when Jeff told you he was going into the music business? Given the way Tim's life ended, did you worry about what might happen to Jeff?
        A: From the time Jeff was an infant, I knew he was musically inclined. Even when he was in those little infant seats, he would vocalize with the music on the radio in a way that you could tell he was trying to follow the melody line. It was amazing.

        Q: But did you feel any fear that he, too, might end up tragically?
        A: No, not that. The fear I had was the same fear Jeff had... that people wouldn't give him an opportunity to express his own music...that they would never be able to shake the comparisons with Tim Buckley.

        Q: When did you start thinking he might actually be able to have a career, that he was truly talented?
        A: It sounds like a mother talking, but I really knew early on that his love of music was so profound that it was going to put him somewhere in that world. I hoped that he would become a songwriter, someone whose work was often performed by other artists, which might be an easier life... rather than being a star.
        And, I think that's what he originally had in mind. I once said to him, "Watch out, Grace might get a Grammy nomination." And he said, "No, Mom, that's not the kind of artist I am." He didn't see himself as a pop star. I think he even went out of his way to avoid that mold. Look how long it took him to make the second album.
        He was thinking of a long career. He didn't want to be the flavor of the month. He wanted a stable life.

        Q: That's interesting...the "stable life" part because it's easy to think of him, especially after his death, as a tortured artist. There was such a restless, soul-searching quality to his music. But that wasn't him?
        A: No, Jeff hated that [stereotype] of songwriters. He hated how this society seems to glorify negative issues. If artists are drugging themselves to death at an early age then something is wrong with the psyche of those young artists. But that wasn't Jeff.

©1998 by Dallas Morning News. All rights reserved

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