The Man that Got Away - Part Two

MARY GUIBERT LIVES IN A MODEST BUT WELL-SITUATED apartment in Silverlake, a quasi-bohemian suburb of East LA. When I step out of the lift on her floor, the first thing I hear is Jeff, wailing down the hall. Two Jeffs stand guard over her living room - one distracted, preoccupied, the other staring straight ahead; a huge print of the photo used for the cover of Sketches ... On the opposite wall is a small shrine arranged around a shot of Jeff and step-brother Corey Moorehead towering over their diminutive mother.

Here too, in Mary's apartment, are Jeff's CDs; going' through them seems like trespassing, but too tempting to pass up. ("There's none of his jazz stuff, that had gone, no Nina Simone, no Duke Ellington, no Ella, no Miles..." Mary mutters darkly.) It's a fair picture of catholic taste: there are seven by The Jesus Lizard, five apiece from Bowie and The Cocteau Twins, Jerry Lewis Just Sings next to Lil' Kim, Esquivel, The Last Poets, Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, Oscar Brown Jr's Sin And Soul next to Bow Wow Wow. And there are boxes and boxes of tapes, many unmarked, on which Jeff himself is still singing.

"I get letters from mothers who've lost their sons," Mary says haltingly, "or their children, or someone they love very much, and when I read their letters I'm totally, totally moved and blessed; when their child died there were no 87 hours of recordings of their voice, even though he might be singing the same song over and over again... in some cases I just sit and listen to the in-between parts."

When I first ask about Tim Buckley, she laughs as if recalling a brief but irrevocable indiscretion. They were high school sweethearts, he a senior, she a junior, at Loara High School, Anaheim, CA, in 1964. She was musical, and acted, and was "a goody-two-shoes. I wore the kind of clothes my mother bought for me. Tim was this really interesting-looking senior who didn't fit in with the rest of the people either, but his best friend was the student body president, this brilliant guy Larry Beckett. I noticed them... but I was too busy [with] all my little activities. I was all set to be a musician and an actress and a dancer, all those things..."

But he was beautiful... "He was absolutely beautiful. This burr of curly black-brown hair and these long curly lashes that reached all the way up to his eyebrows and this... very sensitive mouth, and just... this way of looking at me. I'd be walking past him and he'd be sitting with his back to the wall. He'd stick both legs out so I'd have to step over him. He gave me a look like he knew what I looked like naked. That was the way it started, this little love affair. He'd write me these erotic poems, and at 16 that was so grown up and so awakening, it was amazing."

Tim and Mary's wedding October 25, 1965

Tim started dating Mary, keeping her out past midnight. "You can't leave a Bob Dylan concert 'cos your date had to be home at eleven. That's ridiculous. So after the Bob Dylan concert at the Hollywood Bowl where he plugged in, I got home and got a beating. Tim told me later that he'd parked his car down the street and ran back and climbed up the bushes outside my bedroom window and watched my father beat me. We were sixteen and seventeen, and that just drove us together. We were Romeo and Juliet, and they were all wrong and we knew what love was all about. We married in December of my junior year."

If it hadn't been for the fact that it was 1966 and the pill wasn't all that readily available, Mary might have gone on to pursue her acting career, her music career, whatever. But at 17-and-a-half Mary found herself pregnant and Tim found himself newly signed to a recording contract with Elektra. He was about to go on tour and suddenly Mary wasn't very hip. She was a pregnant wife of an 18-year-old guy: “A real albatross around his neck.”

Mary was five and a half months pregnant when Tim came back to Los Angeles. She sent him a cassette through his manager. "I said, I just wanted to say this so you can hear my voice. I know about your girlfriend and I figured that it's over and I'm really sorry that this is turning out this way but I'm gonna set you free, I just can't stand to be your enemy. I almost expected to hear from him after the baby was born, he knew, but... that was just sorta... a lost connection."

A year later, when Tim was living out in Venice Beach, Mary visited him with an eight-month-old little Jeff. She visited him three times in Jeff's first year, hoping that Tim would want to stay in touch with his son. Later on in his life Jeff would tell his mother about a recurring dream which bothered him. He's on the beach, sitting on his father's shoulders, seeing Mary on a blanket. "I told him, That's not a dream, that really happened. I don't ever remember telling him. It must have been one of his earliest memories.

" There was someone who told me later, in the last two or three years, that Tim actually walked with [Jeff] to her house down the street; she saw Jeff when he was just a little baby asleep in his arms. So I know at least [Tim] was proud, he wanted to show her his baby boy. Then he moved and left no forwarding address and I was 19 years old. If he ripped my heart out before, this time he spat in the hole.

"I didn't make an effort to contact him again, although we continued to get child support checks."

MICHAEL TIGHE MET JEFF BUCKLEY WHEN HE FIRST arrived in New York at the start of the '90s. "He was so knowledgeable. I think the first person we listened to together was Son House. At the time I was mainly just listening to soul and blues. That was the first language we shared. Then he opened me up to countless other bands. I remember thinking there was some- thing superhuman to it, the way he could process all this information and extract the strength, the core, and what was beautiful about these songs. From being around him I learned to get closer to that, the heart of music."

More than anything, this is what Mystery White Boy - the new live album compiled by Michael and Mary - has to say. It's not always easy listening; in many ways, like Sketches…, it's an extremely sophisticated record that makes huge demands of the listener. If you love the layered swirl of Grace, you will almost certainly find it hard work. Often, Jeff seems to be flailing against the songs, daring them to break open and release some still-hidden truths. These are, largely, performances that value passion over craft and they make for exhausting listening.

Michael Tighe: "I do feel that because of the brevity of our time together as a band, there's not that much of what our essence was recorded, apart from these live shows. We listened to all of them and that was like... dragging pianos out of your heart."

Jeff didn't actually want these shows recorded, did he?

"No. None of us did. But the more and more I heard how incredible some of the performances were, I knew we were doing it for the right reasons. There were times when [his performance] was perfect, and then there are songs with this sense of him giving so much, unbridled, and it's not perfect, it's raw. You have to experience what actually happened to Jeff, it's not just like listening to a record."

Tucked away amid the blistering squall of Mystery White Boy is the song that perhaps has most to say about this driven, relentless young man. It's a solo cover of Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin's The Man That Got Away, written originally for George Cukor's 1954 remake of A Star Is Born, and sung by Judy Garland. There are two versions of the song that have parallel lives. It was also released as a single by Frank Sinatra in 1954, re-titled The Gal That Got Away; Ira Gershwin had rewritten the lyric at Frank's request. Jeff almost certainly learnt the song from the recording of Garland's 1961 performance at Carnegie Hall; it's telling that he chose not to switch the gender of the lyric.

There's a famous bootleg of Jeff's appearance at Elvis Costello's Meltdown Festival where he says. "You know, I love these women's songs, I really love them. Men are fuck-ups, and the only good thing about that is that so many wonderful torch songs have been written about what men have done to women, and I love to sing them."

Co-manager George Stein recalls Jeff being asked to describe himself as a performer. Jeff thought for a long time and finally replied, "A chanteuse."