Mary Guibert
Mysteries Revealed
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To that end, Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert, has worked tirelessly to preserve her son’s musical legacy through new releases, first with 1998’s Sketches (For My Sweetheart, The Drunk), and most recently, with the concert album Mystery White Boy and the VHS/DVD "Live In Chicago."
Guibert recently discussed the delicate task of assembly with NATN Associate Editor Jonathan Cohen, and revealed her hopes for a permanent Buckley archive to ensure that listeners from across the world can continue to discover his music for generations to come.
NATN: Tell me what the thinking was as to putting out the live album first, as opposed to maybe a collection of studio tracks that haven’t seen the light of day yet?
Mary Guibert: Well, actually, we go all the way back to the decision to make Sketches first, it happened then. The band members and I had made a proposal to Sony that we should not release any of the new material, [and instead] put together a live concert album first, and then take a little more time to see what we wanted to do with the Sketches material. But you know how it is when you bring something into the negotiation that is brand new, it becomes part of the whole picture. So when they said, ‘That’s a great idea, but we think we’d rather do this one first, and then do the live one,’ we were already talking about the live album from that time.
They gave us more time to do Sketches. They thought that the newest material he was working on at the time was what should go out. And we agreed to follow their advice. Then of course, as the months proceeded, and we received a huge volume of fan mail that indicated people were discovering Jeff after his death, and bemoaning the fact that they had not heard him or seen him live, it really emphasized the fact that there was a huge demand for a live concert album. That sort of clinched it. I imagine if Sketches had been a critical failure, or if people hadn’t warmed up to the roughness of the tracks on the second CD, it would have been a different story. We might have reconsidered putting out another album this quickly. But it just seemed like a natural thing to do.
NATN: It’s clear that Jeff’s live performances made a strong impact on a lot of people. But what went into the process of choosing the tracks for the album?
MG: From the beginning what we wanted to do was.. to do anything that was an example of what Jeff did live, the obvious thing was to go and pick the “best” concert, the night he was “on” the most, the sound was the best, the best soundboard recording. We narrowed it down to half a dozen from a list of about a dozen. For example, on some songs he really doesn’t reach a note, or reinvent the song from Grace. But we knew that the previously unreleased songs were a cinch to include. The knowledge that we had to somehow take any performance of Jeff’s and narrow it down to a 74-minute restriction of a single CD.. we asked Sony if they wanted to do a second CD, but they felt that a back-to-back double CD release wouldn’t be appropriate. We didn’t go to bat for that idea.
So, trying to keep it to 74 minutes presented us with an issue, since Jeff never played a show that was less than 74 minutes in his life [laughs]. Not even his in-store shows would be that brief. It also meant that we had to make some choices about which songs would make it and which wouldn’t. We set a high bar for the Grace songs we would include. We went through those concerts and isolated what we felt were the peak moments from each. We knew which songs we wanted to include, but we had to find which performance we wanted to use.
“What Will You Say” was one in particular where we found one where he really took it to an emotional peak. When you hear him sing that way, it just breaks your heart. We figured out we’d have to sell a box of Kleenex with every CD. It’s all very moving as it is, but we just wanted to have a really enjoyable album that people would be happy to play over and over again like they did Grace. That’s kind of where the delicate decisions came in. I was very much in a position where everyone had a personal opinion about what choice should be made. In the end, I just had to sit with myself and the music for about a week and just make the final decision, sitting in my seat as the producer.
There was one point when I went to [Sony A&R executive] Don DeVito and told him that there was no consensus. He said, “You’re the producer - you gotta do it.” That’s when I sat down and meditated and opened up my head and my heart and came up with the sequence and final selections that we have now.
NATN: Were there tracks that perhaps weren’t initially considered for inclusion that struck you with their intensity or inventiveness?
MG: There were some that didn’t make it because not only were they too intense, but they were just too long. We found a 29-minute version of “Kanga Roo”!! As he’s building up the intro, he starts making up a poem. It gets very, very intense, and that itself is almost 13 minutes long. To include that, we would have had to exclude two other songs.
Plus, in the back of my mind, I have a vision where that particular rendition will set that concert apart entirely as one that will make it desirable to the hardcore Jeff Buckley fan. And overall, that concert was not all 12 or 14 stellar songs. But that was the ultimate moment of that concert. If I were to make that show available later on, it would have been missing its climax.
The entire legacy is rife with stuff like this. At one point, we had a hard time deciding whether to use “The Man Who Got Away” or another funny little cover that he did. Often he would add songs to the set just because he was inspired by one thing or another. For this, the guys in the band just put their hands down and let him sing the song.
NATN: Jeff played some shows on his own in Memphis during the Sketches sessions. Were those recorded? I would imagine they have some of the only live versions of tracks intended for the album.
MG: Yes, those were at a tiny little hole in the wall, the entrance is on a dark alley. It’s called Barristers. I know some of these shows were bootlegged, but he forbade soundboard recordings of these. In fact, at all of the shows he did under pseudonyms prior to going down to Memphis, he refused DAT soundboard recordings. He didn’t want to feel restricted by the thought that it was being recorded for posterity.
NATN: Do you envision re-releasing some of the limited-edition EPs such as Live At Sine or Live At Bataclan?
MG: Well, it’s very interesting to discover how all of the different affiliates of Sony work [editor’s note: in foreign markets, Mystery White Boy was marketed with a special second CD]. The U.K. group likes to make people come back to the store for a second CD, they sell you the packaging with an empty CD. In Australia, they’re putting out a second CD featuring three additional tracks that didn’t make it onto Mystery White Boy : “So Real,” “Lover, You Should Have Come Over,” and a song Jeff called “Two Ninas,” which is really just an interpretation of a Nina Simone song called “That’s All I Ask.”
The Japanese were disappointed to see we hadn’t chosen anything from one of the Japanese venues, so they took three songs from a b-sides collection released there as Jeff Buckley Live And Acoustic In Japan. In Asia, they are doing the same thing. It’s really an import issue, because especially in Japan, when you bring in the U.S. version as a black market item, there is no incentive for people to by the Japanese version. It’s not just a marketing trick.
It’s also an indication of the commitment and excitement that these various regions have for Jeff’s work. They know that their constituents will go there and put their money down and be interested in those extra tracks. It’s kind of cool!
NATN: As far as plans for future releases, if you had free reign to make use of the existing material, what would you do?
MG: I’m dreaming this stuff! From what I know of the Internet and the direction that online music is going, I would love to see a situation where I could make the entire catalog available. First, we’d decide what should not be heard by anybody and just put those songs in the archives. Then, we’d clean everything up. The few multitracks we have are the masters that are owned by Sony. Then there’s the pre-Sony recordings and things that Jeff had done that people are very willing to share with me and see that they become part of a legacy.
I would love to put up a grid, a great big jukebox menu. There might be very few people who would like to have all 20 of what we consider to be Jeff’s very best concert recordings. I have about 42 of them, we could choose 20. But there might be several hundred thousand people who would love to have what we consider to be the top six from that group, or to select from that group what their favorite six or seven or eight may be. If it was via a downloadable fashion where we could accommodate those orders through a subscription service, then that material would never be out of stock. If someone had lots of money, they could buy the entire legacy if they wanted. Someone else could just buy six recordings. These tracks would be there for fans today, next year, or 10 years from now, in however the format progresses.
NATN: Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes did a similar thing with Musicmaker.com, where people could customize their own two-CD live album.
MG: Why couldn’t I, if I were a customer, be able to sit down at my computer and say, ‘I’m ready to buy some more Jeff Buckley. There’s all of these little odd songs from radio broadcasts. I think I’d like to compile some radio shows.’ You could pick and choose and put them into whatever order you want. There’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t be able to do it.
NATN: I think people would warm to that idea.
MG: I could start with the concerts and then continually update the series! For example, when I have all of the radio broadcast material compiled. Or when we have the St. Anne’s Tim Buckley tribute, or one of Jeff’s other performances from St. Anne’s. Or Gods And Monsters. Or WFMU! Gosh, Jeff used to just show up there and play. There’s one where he phoned in a performance. Barry Reynolds and his band were in the studio and somehow they got Jeff on the phone and they did a rendition of “I Shall Be Released.” So they just did it. Here’s Jeff on the phone with a harmonica, playing and doing a little Dylan impersonation. He’s laughing really loud when they get to the end. It’s just amazing.
NATN: Let’s talk about the concert film. It makes quite an impression, I think largely because there are no edits between tuning or song breaks. Why was it left complete like this? Was it because these things are all a part of knowing what Jeff was like as a performer?
MG: Exactly. When he looks over and gives the band a little evil look - if you were only listening to that, you wouldn’t know what it was about. The other thing is that a lot of musicians write me and say, ‘I have tried to play that key that I’m hearing on the record, but my fingers are all contorted. What did he do?” And the truth is, Jeff used a lot of alternate tunings. So it gives musicians the chance to see exactly how he played some of these songs. It’s an important part of learning how to play a Jeff Buckley song, to see his musical genius and the way he was able to manipulate the guitar to easily play those really extended chords.
NATN: Were there other concerts available that had been professionally shot like this?
MG: Oh, no. This was done for [Chicago station] JBTV. It aired on their station edited down to 54 minutes. It was highly bootlegged. I thought it was the best film we have of Jeff. We have some video taken by Merri Cyr, his favorite photographer. She spent a week on the tour bus and had her video camera going all the time. But it’s not a concert-quality video tape of him performing. It’s nothing at all like this. Until I get into researching foreign television programs -- which could take me a year to track down those tapes -- and unless there’s something like that which I’m not aware of, this is probably the only full document that we have of Jeff in concert. And that’s another reason for leaving it unexpurgated. It’s the only one we have from beginning to end, and we may as well let everybody see everything.
NATN: Have you seen [Buckley guitarist Michael [Tighe]’s new band Black Beetle?
MG: Oh, sure! I was their first fan! When I’m in New York I go to all of their performances. We don’t have anything officially released or on CD yet, but I’ve been with them when they’re performing in public. It’s a credit to these young people, that from the ashes of this really horrible experience, they turned it into something really positive for themselves. I know Jeff is smiling.
NATN: He’s certainly made an impact on a generation of listeners. We selected Sketches as one of the top-15 most compelling albums of the last decade.
MG: Excellent! Thank you! You know, I’m extremely proud that whatever the issues there might have been during Sketches, and the horrible experience we went through, that the band members and I remained together throughout, are even stronger now, and that the making of this album with the fellas helping me is exactly how I dreamed it should be. I’m really grateful that I had as much to do with it as I have. The project was literally given to me. The moniker of producer was not in any way just a token title. They really let me produce this album. And I appreciate that.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"