... in Words: Tributes "Requiem For A Son," by Shelli-Anne Couch This interview was originally published by Who Weekly, 8 June 1998.
Amid heartbreak and bitter criticism, Jeff Buckley's mother, Mary Guibert, oversees his posthumous album - by Shelli-Anne Couch As twilight faded on November 17 last year - what would have been Jeff Buckley's 31st birthday - his mother, Mary Guibert, stood on the debris-strewn banks of Wolf River Channel, a deceptively placed outlet of the Mississippi in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. "I threw this huge armful of flowers into the water and they rested on the surface," she recalls, sitting in her California home. "And I thought, 'How in the world could my son have died here?' Just then," she pauses, closing her eyes, a tugboat "passed by and it roiled the water and pulled the flowers down below the water's surface. And they did not bob up again. And that's the answer to my question." The night he drowned, May 29, 1997, Buckley and Keith Foti, his friend and roadie, were on their way to a local studio to rendezvous with Buckley's band and work on "My Sweetheart the Drunk," the follow-up to 1994's smash album, Grace, which spent 56 weeks on the Australian charts, topped international best-of-year lists and made Buckley an instant star and unwilling sex symbol. Around 9:00 P.M., Buckley and Foti realised they'd lost their way and decided to rest by the river. As Foti sat onshore with a boombox blaring Led Zeppelin's classic "Whole Lotta Love," Buckley, ever the clown, playfully waded into the murky waters in his black and white T-shirt, brown jeans and Doc Marten boots. Mary takes up the story of her son's last moments: "Just at the moment when the tugboat came by, he floated on his back, took the first stroke. Hadn't been treading water for a long time and had just gone out a little too far. Just over the shoulder of the drop, not realising that if he put his foot down it wouldn't touch land. Singing at the top of his lungs "Whole Lotta Love." If that's not a state of grace," she whispers through streaming tears, "I don't know what is." Ever since Buckley's body was spotted downstream by a riverboat passenger six days later, there has been speculation about a suicide wish and the grisly symmetry with his father, Tim Buckley, the folk-fusion singer who died of a heroin and morphine overdose in 1975, aged 28. It's all "bullshit," snorts Dave Lory, Buckley's former manager and now a Mercury Records executive. Lory says that in his last weeks Buckley "was in the best frame of mind." After bouts of writer's block and fruitless sessions in Memphis with the band, Buckley -- the LA born troubadour whose soaring, heavenly voice U2's Bono once describes as "a pure drop in an ocean of noise" -- had spent 2 1/2 months alone there in his rented house. He was finally "writing hits" says Lory. "I'd never seen him so focused in my life. He had quit drinking, quit smoking. He was like an athlete training. He had nothing in his house but a chair with a broken leg, prepped against the wall, his four-track, all his guitars and a mattress... It was like he was a monk." Lory says Buckley told him, "I finally wrote the album... I fell like this is as good, if not better, than Grace." Mary, 50, his sole heir (he didn't leave a will), decided to press ahead with the album using these home demos, plus earlier studio sessions, but added "Sketches for..." to the planned title to indicate a work-in-progress. Although a classically trained pianist herself, she says she was a "greenhorn" in the music industry, so she enlisted former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, Columbia Records' Don DeVito and engineer Michael Clouse. The two-disc album was released in May worldwide, debuting in Australia at No. 1. "He was far more successful here per capita than anywhere else around the world," says Sony music executive John Sackson, who worked with Buckley on his first Australian tour. The reason, Sackson thinks, is "he connected with the vibe of the country." Mary says it "goes beyond any momentary sensationalism of having been a dead rock star. It has much more to do with a deeper connection to his absolute courage to do anything that came to him and not think about what the rest of the world thinks. I think that's very Australian." Despite the success of Grace, Mary says Buckley was worth only $20,233 US when he died: "He wrote cheques to everybody," she groans. "He wasn't the type to count his shekels." Inheriting his estate and legacy means, she says, that "everything goes to me, including the slings and arrows. I'm standing in the bullseye." One of the archers is Dave Lory, Buckley's co-manager of four years, along with George Stein. Lory claims the pair were fired by Mary in November (Mary denies it) and "those who were close with Jeff, both musically and personally, were kept away from the project by the estate and the mother." Lory is adamant Buckley "didn't want to release the songs [as is]... He was gonna destroy 'em." Lory's wish, after Buckley's death, was to have artists the singer respected record the songs. He says he now hopes only that "without the people around Jeff who protected him in life, that they [the estate] don't prostitute him in his death." Mary counters by saying Lory distanced himself from the outset, and that contrary to some assumptions, "the estate will probably never see a penny from the sales ofGrace." It reportedly cost Sony $2 million US to create, promote and tour the album and Mary says, "they recoup that before we see a dime." So, she smiles wanly, "I didn't spend the last nine months running out to buy a new car or buy myself a condo with Jeff's millions or whatever. I'm right now living on an advance from Sony." Barbs from her critics aside, Mary says the nine months creating Sketches were "therapeutic", better than a "phalanx of therapists and psychiatrists". Curled up on the bed in her tiny rented bachelor flat in suburban Santa Ana, 20 minutes from Disneyland, she is surrounded by bundles of fan mail and boxes of Buckley's books (Marx, Tao of the Voice, even a 'How to' on meatless cooking - "he was always talking about going vegetarian"). On one candlelit table rests his Pakistani-coin necklace ("it broke just days before he died), personal snapshots, about 30-odd keys that were in his jeans pocket ("Here," motions Mary sadly, "you can still feel the residue from the silt from the river"), and a simple rosewood box which holds his ashes. "I had no roadmaps with what to do with all this," Mary says, looking over the table, her eyes welling. "I love to think that there'll be a day soon when all those things will be not put away, but dealt with and given away. I'll know what to do with the ashes then." In the meantime, while Buckley's 12 guitars are stacked neatly in her wardrobe, "his underwear fits his brother, so he has his BVDs" she chuckles, "and I wear his socks. The rest I want to give away, little by little. The stuff that really fills me up is just in my heart." By the time Buckley was born on November 17, 1966, in Anaheim to 18-year-old Mary, his father, Tim, had left on tour with another lover "and just didn't come home", says Mary. The couple soon divorced, and Tim saw his son only fleetingly before dying when Jeff was 8. Mary married mechanic Ron Moorhead in 1969 but they split after five years, when Jeff's half-brother Corey (now a kennel keeper in Los Angeles) was a year old. The trio's subsequent nomadic life included a stint no a farm "poor as church mice", laughs Mary. She recalls that while working 12-hour days as a sales rep she'd call home and a teenage Jeff would have "babysat his brother and there'd be a dish in the oven for me to reheat. I didn't dust, I didn't vacuum, I didn't do dishes. Jeffrey Scott did all of that. So when he wanted to have the band in the garage and I had to park my car out on the street, that was fine with me." At 17, Buckley moved out to study guitar at the LA Musicians Institute, determined "not to be a singer," says his amused mother. But after moving to New York with then girlfriend Rebecca Moore, his two-song set at a Tim Buckley tribute in April 1991 led to a bidding war. Signed to Columbia, Buckley released the 1993 four-song EP Live at the Sin-é. Grace followed, and in 1995 France awarded him its Grand Prix International Du Disque (previous recipients included Edith Piaf and Bob Dylan) and Who's US sister magazine, People, included him in that year's 50 Most Beautiful People. After that "he started uglifying himself," grimaces Mary. "He died his hair black and started parting it down the middle and not washing it. He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist." Not that his attempts to play down his looks deterred his female following -- some of whom contacted Mary after his death: "I can't tell you how many young ladies have come up to me and whispered, 'I had a very special relationship with your son.' I thought 'Oh really? We'll have to do lunch sometime.' I have DNA material on file at the University of Memphis. Just in case," she smiles, "somebody comes forward and says, 'here's the lovechild of Jeff Buckley.' " (For the last two years he'd been quietly dating violist Joan Wasser.) While his haunting music is Buckley's public legacy, those closest to him remember a clever mimic with a pure heart. Mary recalls walking together in New York when he "started leaping up and twirling around the lampposts and singing [My Fair Lady's] 'On the streeeet, where you liiiive' in his ridiculously operatic voice." Guitarist Nathan Larson, from the band Shudder to Think, says Buckley would "call you at 3:00 AM to tell you he loved you, or to sing whatever was on his mind, or to talk like Colonel Klink from 'Hogan's Heroes.' Just before he died, Buckley set up a meeting at a favourite haunt, the Memphis Zoo, to discuss being a volunteer cage-cleaner. "He thought the perfect way to spend his life would be to write songs, perform at night, and shovel tiger doody in the meantime," laughs Mary, closing her eyes again. Her son's death is "a dream I haven't woken up from yet", she murmurs. "I still want to hear his voice at the other end of the ringing phone. When his things came, [there was] and old pair of wing-tipped shoes, for God's sake... and I smelled them. I wanted to smell him. I found a used Kleenex in the pocket of his jacket." She blurts, roughly swiping at tears, "I put it in a little envelope and I saved that. Now that's got to be insane. But," she straightens, "my tears don't ever have to dry, I don't ever have to get over it if I don't want to. And I think I'll probably have to be missing him and loving him this much until I see him again." ©1998 by Who weekly. All rights reserved
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