Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, appears in new documentary ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,’ and reflects on raising the singer-songwriter in a Panamanian household.
Mamá … you got some f—ing cojones, baby.
These were some of the last words that legendary singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley left for his mother on an answering machine — not long before he tragically drowned in a river in Memphis, Tenn., in the spring of 1997.
Just three years earlier, Buckley, a staple of New York’s downtown coffeehouse scene, had released his debut album, “Grace” — a collection of eclectic guitar confessionals and cover songs, propelled by the androgyne elasticity of his four-octave vocal range. The orchestral rock elegance of “Grace” drew a stark contrast from the grunge fare that conquered the airwaves in the early ‘90s.
It would also be the only full-length album he released while alive.
Helmed by Academy Award-nominated director Amy Berg, the new documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” recalls the story of Buckley’s life and death, primarily and most intimately by the women who loved him most: his former partners, artists Rebecca Moore and Joan Wassen; and of course, his mother, Mary Guibert.
Buckley was born on Nov. 17, 1966, to Guibert and her high school sweetheart, who became the beloved antiwar folk singer Tim Buckley. Yet before the release of “It’s Never Over,” Buckley’s Latino heritage had long been eclipsed in the media by that of his famous, yet estranged father.
“There’s so much emphasis on the Buckley side of things,” says Guibert, who calls me from her home in Northern California. “But [Tim was] just somebody flying through the night.”
Guibert and her family immigrated to Anaheim from the Panama Canal Zone, a territory long contested between the United States and Panama until 1999. A student at Loara High School, Guibert became a skilled cellist, pianist and dancer. She started going steady with Tim, then just a quarterback and member of the French Club, in 1964; they married the following year, after Guibert became pregnant at 17.
“When I met him in high school, I was very busy,” Guibert says. “I was sitting first chair cello in the Youth Symphony Orchestra. I was performing in a play. I [took] ballet, tap and modern jazz dance classes. I wanted to be an actress on Broadway. … But I was the one with the uterus.”
It was during Guibert’s fifth month of pregnancy that Tim abandoned her to pursue his musical career — and tune in and drop out with the likes of 1960s icons such as Andy Warhol and Janis Joplin.
The couple divorced in 1966, just a month before Jeff was born. In an show of narrative justice, the documentary juxtaposes Tim’s righteous monologues against the Vietnam War and social inequality with scenes of Guibert and their son celebrating milestones in his absence.
Tim remarried in 1970 and died five years later of a drug overdose. Jeff was notably omitted from the obituary and not invited to the funeral. He would later resent comparisons by music journalists to his father, whom he’d spent only a handful of days with as a child.
“I have a great admiration for Tim and what he did, and some things that he did completely embarrass me to hell,” said Jeff in a 1994 interview. “But that’s a respect to a fellow artist. Because he wasn’t really my father.”
Guibert wells with pride when I ask her about bringing up a rock legend in a Latino household; she and her mother sang nursery rhymes to young Jeff in Spanish. Family members often referred to him as “El Viejito,” for his long face and an emotional literacy well beyond his years.
Eleven-month-old Jeff Buckley and his abuela are photographed singing a Spanish nursery rhyme, “Que Lindo Los Manitos,” in 1967.
(Courtesy of Mary Guibert)
But Guibert admits that their home life was no lighthearted family sitcom. She and her siblings were often subjected to violence at the hands of her father. “I adored my dad, but I feared him like nothing else,” she says. “The escape route was to get married and get the f— out of there. But after I divorced Tim, I couldn’t get a checking account for my paycheck … because in those days, I had to have my father’s signature.
“In spite of the machismo,” she says, she left home with Jeff at 19, got a job and started a new life in North Hollywood. “Jeff was my rescuer. He’s the reason I [said], ‘You know what? I have to take my son out of here because I don’t want him to grow up to be a man like [my dad].’”
Guibert and Jeff often moved homes. She eventually married Jeff’s stepfather, Ron Moorhead, changed Jeff’s name to “Scott” (it didn’t stick) and gave birth to his half brother, Corey. Yet she continued to smoke pot and party with her peers, longing for the kind of life enjoyed by other young California girls.
Jeff adopted a stern, fatherly tone with his mom, which the documentary illustrates with the missives he left on her answering machine. But however fraught, or codependent their relationship was, Guibert says, it remained strong to the end.
“He said, ‘Mama, you could have given me up, you could have aborted me, you could have done all of those things and you chose to keep me,’” she recalls. “And I think that was a bond that never could be broken.”
Throughout the documentary, friends and lovers remember Jeff’s bottomless well of empathy, which was no more pronounced than in his music. Perhaps due to what he described as his “rootless” nature, he felt at ease interpreting songs by artists across cultures and genres, from Nina Simone to Edith Piaf and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and imbuing their lyrics with his own yearning, elegiac croons. Likening himself to a “human jukebox,” Jeff entranced millions of fans with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but he got listeners hooked with original ballads such as “Grace” and “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.”
Berg first reached out to Guibert about making a film in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2019 that she agreed to share her treasure trove of archival materials. Guibert says it was her own protective, motherly instinct that gave her pause; she also preferred the idea of a scripted film. (Actor Brad Pitt had originally vetted the idea of a biopic in the ‘90s, but the project fell through; he eventually became executive producer of “It’s Never Over.”)
“With all respect to documentarians and filmmakers, it takes a long time to really understand how things work,” Guibert says.
She has previously supervised the production of all of Jeff’s posthumous records, including the 1998 compilation “Sketches for My Sweetheart, the Drunk,” and a live album released in 2000 called “Mystery White Boy.” She adds that she made a “handshake deal” with Don Ienner, then president of Columbia Records, to be present in the studios for the mixing process.
Yet Guibert remains hesitant to share all his musical material, which is locked in a climate-controlled unit in Seattle. “It would be like showing his dirty laundry,” she says of releasing certain recordings. “That’s what agonized him so much — that when you record things, they are forever.”
Eventually, Guibert says, she would like to revisit the idea of a biopic about her son, who’s continued to amass a cult following in the decades since his death. “Grace” reentered the Billboard 200 in July and debuted on the Top Alternative Albums and Top Rock & Alternative Albums charts.
“If somebody had said you’re going to be the curator for an amazing phenomenal artist, I would have said groovy — who?” Guibert says. “If they said, ‘It’s your son, but he has to die first. … I’d say, ‘Oh no, I’ll keep being a secretary.’ I’ll keep selling whatever I can sell until I’m too tired and they have to put me in the home.”
“But that’s not my fate,” she says, “and that was not his.”
Released by Magnolia Pictures, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is now showing in select theaters across the U.S.