Originally published in The Guardian, 30 October 2002

It is five years since Jeff Buckley took his final, mid-evening stroll into the Wolf River, a sleepy tourist spot on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee. Fully clothed and still wearing his combat boots, he splashed around happily, singing out lines from Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” The idyll was cruelly curtailed when a menacing undertow from a passing tugboat pulled Buckley under.

By the time the river volunteered his lifeless body six days later, on June 4 1997, news of the singer’s likely demise had already created its own wave of grief. Like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who’d taken his own life three years earlier, Buckley had provided that rare voice of authenticity in ’90s rock. Their tragic, premature deaths only enhanced the belief that their work embodied the full range of human frailty. Parallels with Jeff’s father Tim, a ’60s troubadour who pushed the bounds of folksong to embrace free jazz and impassioned white soul, and who had died of an accidental heroin overdose in 1975, were inevitably made.

Inevitable, too, is the belief that Jeff Buckley remains rock’s last great romantic. Yet, in common with fellow, departed dream-chasers Jimi Hendrix and Cobain himself, Buckley’s legacy has been sullied by acrimony and legal dramas. Crucially, though, there has been no avalanche of cash-in CDs. Two new releases, Songs to No One 1991-1992 and the five-disc The Grace EPs, maintain a careful balance between satisfying demand and not tarnishing Buckley’s slim, perfectly-formed, one-album legacy. Maybe that’s because it’s not the usual bunch of when-they-die, pile-’em-high record company executives that controls Buckley’s posthumous career, but his mother, Mary Guibert.

At the time of Jeff’s death, Guibert—whose short-lived marriage to Jeff’s father Tim had disintegrated by the time her son was born—was a contracts specialist working in healthcare in Orange County who harbored ambitions of reviving her acting career. Now executor of and beneficiary from her son’s work, she runs the Buckley business with a skeleton staff from an office in Los Angeles. Herself now a player in the rock world, Guibert maintains that it’s art, not avarice, which motivates her.

“I knew how sensitive my son felt about his work,” she says. According to Guibert, Buckley had “really strong feelings” about how aspects of the Miles Davis catalogue had been handled by her son’s record company. It was during preparations for the first posthumous release, 1998’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, that she came on board. Her first task was to ensure that the project was properly billed “as something Jeff wasn’t completely happy with.” Since then, she’s overseen a live album and video, co-operated with a biography and a BBC television documentary, and now plans to release a commemorative edition of Grace, Buckley’s classic album from 1994.

“Sony likes the fact that I come in and present them with a fait accompli, that Jeff’s work is being treated with respect, and that it’s not being handled in a way that’s gonna be embarrassing later on,” she says. “I feel over the last five years, I have built a bit of a reputation for having the right sense where these things are concerned.”

Guibert’s quest to locate and archive everything relating to her son’s short career has not been without its emotional difficulties. She admits she’s learnt “more than any mother should know about her son,” an inevitable consequence of sifting through hours of tapes, interviews, and diaries. “I have to compartmentalize myself quite a bit. There’s the musician side of me, and the businesswoman side—and the mother side of me never turns off. But the emotions are things I have to kinda set aside. That’s why I take good counsel. I’ve always involved people from Jeff’s band. It makes it a lot easier, especially if there are any critical blows. But the work we’ve done so far has been well received.”

That’s why, unlike previous releases, Songs to No One 1991-1992 is going out through independent label Circus. A mix of home recordings, studio demos, and live material recorded at the outset of Buckley’s career, it provides a raw yet riveting peek into pre-history. Essentially, though, it’s for aficionados only and is not to be confused with the real thing. “For us to go with a major label, the material would have had to have been tweaked technologically just to make it listenable. That was not the profile I wanted for this music at all,” Guibert insists.

It’s a shrewd strategy that keeps Buckley’s work alive and his reputation credible, but Guibert has other battles to fight—not least dispelling myths surrounding the manner of her son’s death. “Writers still insist that Jeff leapt into the Mississippi River. He did not jump into the Mississippi River! The Wolf River is a peaceful little channel that just happens to have great big tugboats going by. The police say they lose a couple of tourists there every year. You wouldn’t think that anybody could die there—and that’s exactly why tourists go wading into the water.

“Every once in a while, I love to raise my head up and say, ‘Let’s take another look at this, folks.’ We know that Jeff was happy at the moment that he walked in the water. He was singing a song and talking to his friend about love. This was not the act of a man who was about… well, goodbye cruel world, or totally drugged out or drunk, or out of his mind with depression. This was just a sheer, horrible freak accident that happened so unfreakishly.”

Jeff Buckley’s music may continue to save—or at least soothe—souls. But, says Mary Guibert, people are still dying down by the Wolf River. It’s hardly the stuff of romantic daring, but the erection of a “Danger: Do Not Swim” warning sign might at least help prevent further tragedies.

Watch: “Hallelujah” [at youtube.com]

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