Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  But we’ve been down too long,

  And we had to make somebody listen.

  It was a fine song, one of his very best, and painted a picture of pain and hope in vivid detail. That was one of Phil’s great gifts. His story songs are still as fresh and engaging as they were that morning when I listened to his urgent and optimistic voice. I knew his songs made a difference in the world and told him so.

  Phil was in that cluster of singer-songwriters who congregated around Dylan. The aura of fame and the drama of Dylan’s work washed over all these men, each of whom was, in his own right, an extraordinary writer: Phil, Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens, David Blue, Eric Andersen, Al Kooper, Tim Buckley, Len Chandler, and John Winn. Eventually, even some women found their way into that circle of light—Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Joan Baez, and me, although neither Joan nor I was writing songs yet.

  Sam Hood, who ran the Gaslight, would lock the club down, shutting out all but the anointed on the nights when Dylan deigned to appear, slouching through the door. Bob and Joan were doing a lot of touring now. Joan was putting Bob in her shows, introducing him to the sometimes ten-thousand-strong audiences coming to hear her. Suze Rotolo said she was getting fed up with the situation but deeply wanted to hold on to her friendship with Bob, even if they were no longer living together. Every now and then, when Bob would show up at these clubs, Suze would again be on his arm.

  Back in New York, I spent as much time as possible in the clubs downtown, listening to songs, learning new ones, looking for the next writer. Between shows at the Gaslight, songwriters might congregate at the Kettle of Fish, drinking coffee with shots of Irish whiskey (“to sober up,” a lot of them would say) and talking, talking, talking. They rubbed elbows and egos, honing their personas, all the while praying for inspiration, and probably for courage. Life wasn’t that easy for most folkies—living and writing in sometimes dingy hotel rooms or traveling on planes and cars and trains. But the Village was like home, a safe place to come to roost for a time, to get rested and refreshed.

  By the end of the summer I was ready to go back into the studio again, and that meant that Mark Abramson would again become a daily fixture in my life. Mark, of course, had been my producer on all of my albums, but the first time we slept together was late in that autumn of 1965, after I had come back from the USSR. There were times during the fall when I thought he might be the right one, the answer to my dreams as we began to plan and work on the fifth album. After all, he was already the answer to my artistic aspirations.

  Mark and I were not in love, certainly, and yet we had a loving and successful working relationship that had as much sex in it as I think I could tolerate at that time. And perhaps as much intimacy as well.

  He was exactly what I needed, falling into my lap and later into my bed. But the bed was not our best thing going. From the very first album we made together, Mark and I were deeply committed to the business of my records, to creating the best records we could—not just a string of songs but albums that had heft and meaning and would last forever. That was the way we thought.

  The people who played on the album were mostly friends—Richard Fariña on dulcimer, Bill Takas on bass, and Bill Lee also on bass, for starters. Eric Weissberg played guitar and sang background vocals, Danny Kalb played guitar, and Chuck Israels doubled on bass and cello. A special guest was John Sebastian, playing harmonica on “Thirsty Boots.”

  Judy Collins Fifth Album stuck fairly closely to the model that had worked so well on the previous records, combining my favorite traditional songs with the works of contemporary singer-songwriters. Many of the new songs had the feel of classic folk songs but seemed destined to become folk standards. Dylan made an appearance on my Fifth Album, with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” and “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” which Bob said he wrote for me.

  During this recording there was an argument on the phone between my lawyer, Bob, and Joan Baez, who swore Dylan had told her he wrote the song for her. I think Bob had just forgotten whom he wrote it for, or perhaps he wanted to make Joanie mad. They had been an on-again, off-again thing for a while. I won, if you want to call it that, but I always wondered if, in fact, he had told me the truth.

  Years later, when I was recording an all-Dylan album, I found that Bob had written extensive liner notes, in which he clearly acknowledged writing “I’ll Keep It with Mine” for me. I was, of course, honored. Who wouldn’t be?

  Dylan would record “I’ll Keep It with Mine” twelve times over the course of his career, in live concerts and on studio albums. My recording was the first, and was followed by recordings by Nico and Dusty Springfield. I only released “I’ll Keep It with Mine” on a single; it never appeared on an album. And Joan Baez never did record it.

  The difficulty with Dylan was that very quickly after the success of those first records with all his powerful songs, he became somehow larger than life. Sometimes he seemed to take up all the air in the room, leaving little for the cluster of great writers around him. Suze Rotolo would say about her longtime beau that after the floods of fame had come, he had somehow felt entitled to do or say whatever he wanted. While she would describe Bob as charismatic and like a beacon, she would also compare him to a black hole.

  And sometimes people acted as if they believed Dylan could walk on water, while the rest of us could barely swim. In the early days of that meteor-like fame, Dylan didn’t exactly try to disabuse anybody of that notion.

  He does remain a unique and complicated man.

  And of course, a genius.

  FROM Phil Ochs, as planned, came “In the Heat of the Summer.” He also contributed in a very personal way to another of the songs on Judy Collins Fifth Album, “Thirsty Boots.” In the spring of 1965 he had told Eric Andersen that I was looking for new material. They both arrived at my place, and as soon as Eric walked through the door he asked if he could use the bathroom. That was where he finished writing the last verse of “Thirsty Boots.” He sang the song for me right then and there, and I said, “Great, I’ll record it tomorrow.”

  Traditional music is the foundation of what the folk music revival was about—songs of unknown authorship handed down through the generations. I keep returning to these old, classic songs, often bringing them back to find new meaning and fresh interpretations. “Danny Boy,” “The Lark in the Morning,” “Barbara Allen,” “So Early, Early in the Spring,” and “The Gypsy Rover” have lasted for years and will endure for years more. They touch your heart, and for anyone trying to write new and original songs, they stand as an unspoken challenge: make something as good and as timeless as this and you will have won the heart of your listener. You also will have added something to the story of humankind.

  Traditional songs didn’t just spring from the earth, of course. Somebody somewhere came up with a melody through which to tell a story, and that story-song got passed along. These songs survive in the memory of a culture because they tell stories of universal emotion and experience—of love, heartbreak, mourning, abandonment, victory, and defeat—and because they are so very adaptable to so many times, to so many people. One person would add a verse; another would change a melody a bit. This is what we call the “folk process,” borrowing to fit the time, the person, the incident.

  I have sung many traditional songs but always thought “So Early, Early in the Spring” to be one of the best, and I included it on this album. Eric Weissberg and I played the two dancing guitars in a way I can’t quite replicate anymore.

  I KEPT very busy in the fall of 1965, running in a dozen different directions. In September, I did Studs Terkel’s radio show in Chicago. Studs and I had met after I made my first album, Maid of Constant Sorrow, and began a years-long friendship. Studs was intrigued by “The Great Selchie of Skule Skerry,” which he heard me sing live at the Gate of Horn and on my second album. He found it curious that my father was blind, and felt that his influence—especially his reading to us at night with the lights out—and h
is remarkable life might explain my passion for mysterious songs such as this ballad. Studs was always a great interviewer, going beyond the mundane and giving you something to get your teeth into. We always had a fine time. His stocky figure, trademark cigars—until doctors made him give them up—his tender feelings for his wife, and his truly brilliant thoughts about people were attractive and engaging.

  In New York, my WBAI radio show was still on the air, and I did shows with Guy Carawan, an oft-recorded singer who was active in the movement for racial equality as well as the peace movement. He had made many albums for Folkways and practiced the art of the hammered dulcimer. Koerner, Ray and Glover, a Minnesota blues band, was a guest on the show as well. “Spider” John Koerner, Dave “Snaker” Ray, and Tony “Little Sun” Glover—young and vibrant—recorded for Elektra and sang “white blues,” inspired by artists such as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt. I had met them at the Newport and Philadelphia folk festivals, and I had a brief romantic interlude that fall with the handsome and talented Koerner, who was slim and tall and gentle, and I needed gentle.

  Jac was continuing to sign artists to Elektra that were eclectic. He brought me a recording by a new band that he wanted me to hear, and I encountered Jim Morrison’s amazing voice and songs for the first time. Jac has since told me that he was very nervous about my opinion of the group.

  “They were so different, and by that time, you had every right to know where the record label you were with was going next,” he said. My response to the Doors was nothing but positive, and I could see that, in addition to signing Paul Butterfield, whom I adored, Jac had made another very important contribution to the label.

  Jac signed the Doors that year after watching them play at the Ritz in L.A. They were raw, dropped by their first label, and the other labels were not lining up in droves to sign them. But Jac heard something in Ray Manzarek’s bottom keyboard line from “Light My Fire”—for Jac, that was what he would often call the “Rosetta stone,” the tipping point in Jac’s decision to sign any group or individual. Ray Manzarek of the Doors described his first impressions of Holzman: “He was the only person who was interested. He was an intellectual, the cowboy from New York. He was like Gary Cooper riding into town.”

  IN 1965 I made my first trip to Australia and New Zealand. I was to tour with the Limelighters, and they introduced me to Tina Date, who became a friend. She belonged to a cluster of free-loving and free-drinking artists and musicians in Sydney, living in group houses and sharing wives, husbands, lovers, children. Tina introduced me to many of them, and they reminded me of the crowd who clustered around my therapists in New York. They made me comfortable in the thriving, exciting city of Sydney.

  After I returned from Australia, my schedule didn’t let up. In late 1965 I attended a meeting of the Newport Folk Festival board. I had been asked to join the group, which already included Pete Seeger, Harold Leventhal, Peter Yarrow, Ronnie Gilbert (of the Weavers), and George Wein. Theo Bikel was on the board as well. Of all of us, I was probably the least obsessed with keeping the folk tradition pure at the festival. I saw that the new writers—not least of all Pete—were building something new out of the very tradition they were steeped in.

  That November I was on tour in California, and performed around Carmel, where Joan Baez was living. We made a date to see each other on that trip. Over the years our friendship grew in fits and starts; Joan invited me to concerts when she was playing in New York City, and I invited her to come to the shows I did in the San Francisco area. We have always been closer than meets the eye.

  In addition to her beauty as a singer, Joan brought more than bare feet to the folk fashion table. She looked fabulous in everything, and often wore a white silk blouse before any of the rest of us even had a clue that silk was not polished cotton. I don’t think Joan ever wore a pair of Levi’s unless she was cleaning out the barn. I have a sweet memory of hanging out one night at her hotel in New York after her Carnegie Hall concert. She, Mimi, Big Joan, and I were celebrating with flowers and glasses of Moët et Chandon champagne. Joan had on a silk blouse (of course) and Mimi was letting loose her delicious giggle over the fact that Joanie had gotten through the concert without throwing up. Joan always said that her nerves were often a-jangle before going onstage, but she performed beautifully that night.

  Like everyone who heard Joan in those years, I was moved by her voice and by the intelligence and dedication behind her singing.

  Soon, as we both were making records and going on the road, there began a sort of gentle competition between us, fueled by the media, by our audiences, and by our place in the culture. My friendship with Mimi may have been a factor, but I don’t think so; Mimi and I had a relationship very different from the one I had with Joan. Joan and I both know the price it takes to do what we do, to be where we need to be, so I never felt that competitiveness was helpful or warranted. We were very different people, different singers, and the durability of both our careers was not dependent on a contest between us. But if she was Ceres, the goddess upon whom the entire existence of Roman society was dependent, I was Diana, the goddess of transition, a huntress. And the forest is a big, thriving place, chock-full of gods and goddesses. Both of us would have to make our mark, and each of us faced far more serious challenges than competition from a woman we respected. The question would come down to whether, with all that chatter in the woods, we could become friends.

  That would be a race worth betting on.

  While promoting Fifth Album, I went to Carmel. I had already heard the rumors that Joanie had walked into a Jaguar showroom in her bare feet, told the dealer she had to have a Jaguar because she lived up a hill, put down five thousand dollars in cash, and driven off. Indeed, Joan picked me up in her Jaguar XKE roadster and drove me out to her Spanish-style villa near the sea. It was quiet in the house except for music and our voices. As we told our stories and shared our secrets over a single candle, I remember looking at Joan and thinking that no diet was going to ever make me that thin! And of course Joan’s beauty put me in awe, as it always has. She made me laugh, imitating my lisp. It was so like her. I smiled as she begged my pardon, and forgave her.

  Joan had prepared some supper—cheese and olives and baklava, served on southwestern plates with paintings of churches and seascapes that mesmerized me. We played guitar and sang songs for most of the night. The candle flickered and the wind blew outside the door, and then she floated up to bed in her silk skirt and blouse, leaving me to sleep in a wrought-iron bed in the guest room. I lay awake for a long while and thought about how much Joan wanted me to see her as strong, and about how profoundly vulnerable she really was.

  In 1965, Joan had started the School for Nonviolence in Carmel with her mentor, the activist and Gandhi scholar Ira Sandperl. The next morning we visited the secluded spot under the eucalyptus trees where Ira was teaching a class on nonviolent protest to a number of young people.

  “Here’s where I really belong,” she said to me. “The music is just what I do to support this school, right, Ira?” Ira was also under the sway of the Maid of Orleans, as were all of the young people who joined Joan and Ira’s school. The smell of the trees, the dusty hillside, and the faces of those eager youngsters—their hair long like Joan’s, their faces filled with adoration—made an indelible impression on me.

  “See, they love nonviolence, just like we all do,” she said, her hand holding mine. I could have stayed there forever, I thought.

  Joan and I have fought similar demons. We both found therapy early in our careers, at early ages. In the early 1960s, Joan saw Eric Berne, the psychologist who popularized the concept of transactional analysis in his book Games People Play. I was deep into my own therapy with the Sullivanians.

  In a letter to me dated July 13, 1964, Dick Fariña wrote:

  The private terrors you speak of, Judy, stalk us all. I can think of no one in our limited acquaintance who has not been tempted to cup his fingers over his ears and run moaning into the ni
ght. [But] when you’ve walked a little with death, you learn to court it, play with it, defy it if you choose.

  Friend to us both, Dick might have been writing to Joan as well.

  One way or another, it seems, Joan and I both managed to find ways to weather the storm, to battle those doubts.

  BACK in New York that year I was dating Dick Lukins, a native New Yorker with a wicked sense of humor and a great laugh. I needed the laughter. After we stopped seeing each other (Dick soon met and married Sheila Block, who as Sheila Lukins started a world-famous catering and food emporium called the Silver Palate), he introduced me to David Levine, a medical intern studying psychiatry. David and I went to a few movies together, had a few meals, and enjoyed a brief romance. I was drifting romantically, but I liked David a lot. He was smart and charming, and I realized I wanted him in my life in some way. He was a keeper, not my lover but certainly my good friend. I would make every effort to hold him close.

  There was a march on Washington to end the war in Vietnam on November 27, 1965, and I joined thousands of Americans on the National Mall. Soon after that march I attended the first of Jacques Brel’s concerts at Carnegie Hall. He was a dazzling performer, and though he spoke no English and my French was limited, I was able to tell him through his translator how much I loved his work when I began recording it on my sixth album, In My Life, beginning with “La Colombe.”

  On Christmas Day I did my first Carnegie Hall solo concert, which Harold produced. At the party following that Carnegie Hall concert, I introduced my friend Lucy Simon to David Levine.

  They went home together that night, married, now have two children, and began producing music together. In the early 1980s they received Grammys for In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record and In Harmony 2.

  AT the end of December, Peter informed me that he had taken a job teaching English literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He would be moving out west in a short time, putting an entire continent between our beautiful redheaded son and me. As usual, I made every effort to be there for Clark, traveling to Canada or bringing him to see me whenever I could.