Mary Guibert
by ADAM BAIDAWI
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This story originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Tsunami.
Few crooners have caused as much posthumous fuss as the doe-eyed, falsetto-drunk Jeff Buckley. His sole living LP, Grace, went from cult-hit to contemporary classic following his death in 1997, with tracks from "Last Goodbye" to "Hallelujah" now etched into the annals of alt. rock. Buckley became the pin-up for a generation of crooners from Matt Bellamy to Chris Martin. (Thom Yorke reputedly recorded the guide-track for "Fake Plastic Trees" in a drunken stupor after seeing Buckley play in North London).
In the years after he passed, a steady flow of releases began, with varying result. Sketches: For My Sweetheart The Drunk was a curiously messy opus-in-the-works with a few legitimate gems (and some awkward middle-eighths), while the difficult Grace Outtakes was tailored for an intent and curious niche.
At the centre of these releases is Mary Guibert—mother of the serene Jeff, partner of late father Tim.
In early 2009, she pieced together the latest Buckley release: Grace Around the World: a live CD compiling Buckley's performances during the Grace promotional tour.
Where are you at the moment—L.A.?
I’m in New York right now, normally I’d be in Los Angeles. There are some special projects that I’m working on that I needed to talk to folks about. So many wonderful things happen in New York.
You’ve put together plenty of posthumous projects over the past decade—what’s the maxim when it comes to work on Jeff’s legacy?
Jeff’s own idea for his life was to keep it organic. And by that I mean to make sure that his life had a high level of quality in terms of his own peace of mind and his ability to enjoy his life and not be under a public microscope all the time. To have something resembling a normal life, as much as one can have when you’re touring the world and having millions of people fall in love with you. That’s the tightrope that he walked in this life: trying to keep it real and living the life of someone that so many people loved, and some even wanted to have a piece of…to be blunt [laughs].
How many gems are still hidden away?
We’ve got a few. Jeff was in and out of the studio in his first couple of years under contract at Sony. There are some pre-Grace sessions where he would just go in and do a few songs – nothing cohesive, nothing with a theme – just simply because he would be working on learning…twelve Nina Simone songs or Dylan songs or July Garland songs, and his A&R person would say, “Gosh that sounds good—let’s tape that!”
Those kind of recordings wouldn’t sit well with something that had the band. So, we’ve taken a museum curator’s look at how to group these things together and give it a cohesive look and also be respective at where things fit together in rolling out the legacy.
It’s a huge responsibility to take on, hey?
You know, I love being the arbiter of good taste, but heavily lies the crown.
And where is that line—where do you pull away and say, “No, this isn’t for the masses”?
There are some things that I think should not be a part of the public library. And those would be some cases where Jeff was not really giving a performance that is better than ones that are out there, or is significant for some reason. To say, “Oh, well this is just Jeff in his bedroom, and that noise you hear in the background is him, uh, pouring a glass of water…or talking to someone across the room”—that’s way too intimate. That’s only meant from one person to another person.
The part I’m up to now—releasing the materials that we have—has really been a lot easier than what lies ahead of me. Now, we get to the bits and pieces. Now, we come to some edgy, borderline things that really aren’t the sort of things that hit the standard of everything else we’ve made. We’ve set the bar very firmly.
So how would you rate your output so far?
I’m proud of what’s come out – and I’m proud to be able to say that. It’s been a very steep learning curve, and I’ve had a lot of help from some very skilled individuals around me, and some very passionate supporters. The Jeff factor is very, very strong there, and that’s responsible for the success there, I’m absolutely convinced.
Which of Jeff’s songs do you find the most affecting?
Oh, hands down, “What Will You Say?”
Why’s that?
Well, because of the lyrics. “What will you say when you see my face?” and “What will you say when they take my place?”—when they take my place…well, right now I’m taking his place [laughs]. The moment when they take his place is when I’m no longer here, and so that would be the moment when I might be able to see his face.
When I think about him going through those moments of wondering where his father was, if his father cared—“Mother, do you know me?”, “Mother dear, the world’s gone cold, no one cares about love any more”—that just seems to be a message that was between us as he lived and that still resonates now that he’s gone.
Grace Around The World is a mammoth task, in theory—how was producing an international live set from such a huge collection of recordings?
[laughs] Pretty daunting, actually.
I can imagine!
The concept was in my head and difficult to show to people. On the money side, on the budget side, we had to convince folks that are used to seeing things in black and white, to visualise something in their imagination that we could not even give them an example of. That was a huge challenge.
Because he would perform “Grace”, “Last Goodbye” and “So Real” on all of the shows, we had no problem finding a myriad of examples of those three songs, but we had a devil of a time trying to find the rest of them. Getting folks to find the original masters for us—those were the challenges.
I guess with all of that must have come a lot of back-and-forth between yourself and Columbia. How did you find it? How difficult was the process?
Doing things with already existing material that is not multi-track, I mean, there’s nothing we can do in the studio to fix things, other than digitising. There was not much we could do.
Then came—what, segue, cohesion?
Yeah. Y’know, it’s not brain surgery, it’s just trying to make things look nice—if we didn’t have the product already; if we didn’t have that amazing performance…that’s really the power of what we were putting together.
All we had to do was get out of the way of the performance, and then make it cohesive enough not to jerk the listener out of the context.
Are you happy with the end product?
Oh, I’m thrilled with it. I’m thrilled.
Rumours have been flying around about a bio-pic—where’s the project at? Where do you sit on them?
Amazing Grace was totally done under my wings…I’m really proud of the outcome, and I’m really glad it’s being released with the deluxe package [of Grace Around the World].
And the new film? Mystery White Boy?
The film? I’m producing the film—so anybody else that’s out there, I am Mystery White Boy production. I’ve got myself and two producers including Michelle Sy, who produced Finding Neverland.
We’ve really got the whole project up to another level. We have a new screenwriter who’s putting together what I think is an amazing concept for the film. It’s out of the ordinary—very, very different from the usual biopic formula.
Hollywood’s not going to let me live without making a film about Jeff.