I was blessed to be working with great musicians. Josh Rifkin came aboard my team in 1966 when I was recording In My Life and Wildflowers in New York, London, and Los Angeles. I met Josh because he was making records for Nonesuch, part of the Elektra family. He was smart and full of humor, and he created great orchestrations.
A classically trained musician, Josh was a graduate of the Juilliard School and had studied at New York University. Teresa Sterne, who ran Nonesuch Records, had hired him to record, produce, and play some of their more esoteric music, and conduct the many Telemann, Haydn, and Scott Joplin records that Nonesuch released. Josh had reinvented fingering technique on his recordings of Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano. Mark and I invited him to New York to talk about the music we were interested in recording. Josh ended up writing the arrangements and conducting the songs for In My Life and Wildflowers. He also played the famous harpsichord riff on “Both Sides Now,” something I believe no one but Josh would have thought of. With Mark’s input, I believe—because they talked the language of early music together—it was Josh who suggested that I record “Ecco la Primavera,” an anonymous fourteenth-century composition arranged by Francesco Landini, on Wildflowers. Josh was sweet, a genius, and a devil of a piano player. We all got along beautifully.
We went to London to get the more authentic sound of the same singers and musicians who had been on the recording of the musical Marat/Sade. In the hotel there, I freaked out. I was alone, drinking too much, and, convinced I had been poisoned, called for an ambulance. They were very nice and took me to St. Michael’s Hospital, where I was made to throw up, after which I said I was fine. Then I left, against the doctor’s advice. He wanted me to stay till morning; I wasn’t about to agree to that. I knew better than they what was wrong with me, didn’t I? My alcoholism was progressing fast, begetting fear, apprehension, terror, and profound depression.
Paradoxically, In My Life was just what we hoped it would be: the singer-songwriter material my fans expected, plus some totally unexpected selections.
Dylan was represented, of course, with “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” but with orchestration by Josh Rifkin that would have knocked the socks off Dylan had he been wearing any. “Hard Lovin’ Loser” was by Dick and Mimi Fariña, and the song seemed to be about a guy just like Dick—a mischievous but lovable rogue, someone with an irrepressible sense of humor, and someone, I mused sadly, who was, finally, tragic.
In addition to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” I recorded a song by Randy Newman, a newcomer in 1966. Mark Abramson found “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” on a song demo tape. Newman would release his first album, Randy Newman, in 1968, and by that time, my recording had become a mini-hit. Soon, Dusty Springfield, Nina Simone, and Peggy Lee recorded versions of it as well. Randy Newman was on his way to becoming a successful singer-songwriter and performer.
Then there was Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street”; and after that came the even more surprising “Pirate Jenny,” from Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and “La Colombe,” a translation of a Jacques Brel song that was as bitter a charge against war as any I have ever heard. Finally there was “Marat/Sade.”
Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook, was a play with songs that ran on Broadway in 1966 and told the story of the French Revolution from a unique perspective. I was intrigued, of course, by the portrait of the insane asylum in which the play is set. There was not a drunken night that went by that I did not think I was headed for a place that might be very like a modern-day version of the asylum of Charenton.
When In My Life came out, of course I did a lot of publicity. I got help from Nancy Carlin, the friend whom I’d met through the Baez family. Nancy was coincidentally a pal of Linda Liebman.
Nancy had great ideas about the marketing side of music. For In My Life, she designed a bumper sticker that said “Put Judy Collins in Your Life”; and I would see it on cars up and down a seventeen-mile stretch around Big Sur.
Before they both moved to Big Sur, Nancy and Joan Baez were friends from Boston. Nancy had been an aspiring folksinger and sang at little clubs when Joan already reigned as the singer du jour of the college folk crowd.
After In My Life, Nancy became involved in other aspects of my career. She went with me on the tour that supported the album and later helped me find songs and work on promotion.
Nancy later worked for Joan Baez as part manager and part organizer of Joan’s various projects. She received a producer credit on Joan’s album Diamonds and Rust. She also started the Big Sur Festival, which ran for a number of years at Esalen on the Big Sur coast, where Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Cass Elliot, Stephen Stills, and I appeared for the first and only time together.
She and I often talked about the new direction signaled by In My Life, which moved away from the guitars, banjos, and mandolins of my previous albums and incorporated more diverse material. Nancy tried her best to prepare me for what she saw as the possible fallout from my rebellion against the expected. I didn’t worry, but I tend to be an optimist about my work.
She was right to worry. The critics got out their long knives.
Richard Goldstein, who had joined the Village Voice in 1966 and started writing music reviews, wrote: “Judy Collins should take a deep breath of country air and a long look at her guitar—just her guitar.” He went in for the kill: “Judy Collins’ transition from Joan Baez’s kid sister to Barbra Streisand’s chambermaid is regrettable. Judy used to be a formidable folk-warbler, and her successful ‘ethnic’ purity shows on the new album, In My Life.”
But he wasn’t through yet. “Judy Collins lacks the vocal breadth and emotive depth to sing Brecht well. So do a lot of folk singers. But Judy gives us a version of ‘Pirate Jenny’ that Lotte Lenya wouldn’t tolerate in the shower. Her rendition of incidental music from Marat/Sade is like the Emancipation Proclamation carved on a bar of soap. Even if you manage to carry it off what can you do with it but wash your face?”
Fortunately the album did well and contained my very first charting single, “Hard Lovin’ Loser.” Dick Fariña would have loved that; he was thrilled by the idea that his songs could take over the radio waves and seep into the collective unconscious.
Other reviewers described In My Life as one of the most interesting albums of the decade. It went off in its own direction, eventually hitting number forty-six on the Billboard pop albums chart. And by the looks of things, it was taking me with it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
My Father
My father always promised us
That we would live in France.
—JUDY COLLINS, “My Father”
MY father told me, in the autumn of 1966, that he was dying. He was depressed. He was drinking hard and couldn’t stop. I suggested a shrink, knowing that while therapy had not helped me stop drinking, it had helped me have fewer depressions. I hoped it might help my father.
“It’s no damn use when I can’t even pay my bills,” he said. He had lost his most recent radio program and was trying to sell mutual funds and trying to believe in what he was doing. “Anyway, I don’t want to change and look at myself and explore my psyche and my navel and my asshole. That’s for you and those half-witted friends of yours.” (Which friends he meant I didn’t know. Not one of my friends is in any way half-witted, but this is the way Daddy sometimes talked.) “Taking your brains apart and paying a fat fee to bellyache to some Ph.D.? No, I’m a cornball from Idaho, ain’t nothin’ in that stuff for me!” Daddy would revert to twanging country slang when he wanted to make a point, an educated, erudite man making fun of his past or his intelligence, I could not always tell which.
We were in Boulder, Colorado. My parents had come to a concert of mine earlier that night, and then we went to an old friend’s house for some food and talk. There was a lot of drinking—when was there not when we were together? Martinis, bourbon on the rocks, Canadian or German beer for the courageous. My mother usually drank Manhattan
s, each new glass decorated with a red maraschino cherry perched on the lip like a Christmas gift. Tonight she was drinking Presbyterians, a sort of watered-down highball of ginger ale and bourbon. She was driving, she said, and wanted to be awake. At the concert, my father drank glass after glass of Jack Daniel’s, smacking his lips. He shouted merrily at my performance, making a ruckus on my behalf, proud of his daughter. On the one hand, his appreciative shouts and applause always gave me courage; on the other, these public outbursts, especially when he was drinking, usually resulted in Daddy becoming the center of attention, and always scared me to death. I did not want people to look too closely at him when he was “in his cups.” He could be unpredictable, too enthusiastic, too loud, too there.
Still full of praise for my performance, Daddy greeted new and old friends at the small gathering. Slowly, as the evening progressed, I watched him become silent, surrendering conversation to the others, his lips narrowing, his eyes tightly shut or wide and roaming the room, seeing something inside his head that none of the rest of us saw. He moved about the unfamiliar house, finding the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, walking, as he always did, as though he could see.
I lost him for a while, then sought him out on the deck, where he had wandered. The cold late summer air was clear and fresh and I could smell the sage. My father’s usually straight back slumped as he sat at a redwood table. He always walked with such a proud stride, compensating for his slight stature.
“Smell that?” he said, knowing me from my walk. “Sage.”
“Yes,” I said.
I took a seat across from him and reached out for his hand. He raised his head and that bright smile flickered across his face for a moment. He told me again, this time quietly, how good I had been, how proud he was of me. Soon, as I watched him, his face fell once more, again becoming a tight-lipped mask. He seemed to be collapsing into himself as he and I sat, drinks in our hands.
It was quiet except for night birds and the soft wind in the pines. Then he started talking. I was pretty drunk by now as well, as I listened to my father tell me of his deepening depression, telling me that, for him, life was no longer worth living.
There was silence.
I felt my breath freeze in my throat, ice crystals in the air. I tried to speak and my voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “No,” I thought, “this can’t be happening; this is not in the script. He is supposed to get in and out of these depressions; he is the original cheerleader. He’s the one who always brought on the band, the baton twirlers. He’s the man.”
“Daddy, you’re only depressed. It will clear up tomorrow. It couldn’t be that bad,” I said.
I talked brightly to counter the darkness I felt behind his words. I wouldn’t accept, couldn’t accept, that he had reached a place that was too dark and too painful for him to overcome.
“You’re just drunk,” I said. “You know how you sometimes get when you drink.” The drunk would pass, I said, and with it the depression. I knew him—he would dry himself out again with Tiger’s Milk and Gayelord Hauser, with wise words about fate, the future, and staying the course, as he had done for years, turning his depressions around by a monumental effort of his will—like seeing when he could not.
Chuck could do that. He was the father who brightened our mornings with his call to “rise and shine,” the blind man who took on the world with both fists, flinging himself into his career in the radio business as a singer and radio personality in 1937 in Seattle, becoming a star in every town he worked in, making a living to support five kids and his wife with gusto and bluster.
But there was something different about this night, about these words and this man. He had come to the edge. I could feel something in my heart breaking, cracking like the sound of ice breaking up.
There was always the drinking, and we didn’t talk about it, except in nervy conversations when more than one of us was drunk. The drinking and the depression, the deep remorse, and even the shouting and staggering around in the kitchen late at night were not new to me or to my family. We knew by then that the dragon my father lived with could breathe fire and death, that it wasn’t him talking when he was drinking but the dragon. Though we understood what was the matter with him when he drank so much that he became a stranger, it was still frightening. He was simply a different person, talking wildly, insulting the wrong person, coming on to the wrong woman.
Now he was in one of those confiding moods brought on by booze or sometimes just by his deep need to communicate. I never thought to walk away or not to listen. I was the confidante, the fixer, the oldest. I thought it an honor that Daddy confided in me.
I knew he hadn’t been happy in the recent past. People still stopped him on the street, still thought of him as a star. That night, speaking to me in a hushed voice that seemed totally sober in spite of all he was drinking, he kept saying, as he turned the tumbler of whiskey in his hands as though it were a looking glass and he could see the future in it, that his life was hopeless, that he couldn’t go on living.
I emphasized all the good things that were in his life. Even though I drank probably as much as my father did and knew that whatever was wrong with Daddy’s drinking was what was wrong with mine as well, I was a functioning person with a career and with my demons mostly under wraps. I had certainly learned to manage my drinking from my father, and I believed, although I couldn’t see the damage, that I was almost okay with it.
Somehow my parents would have to get back to Denver that night. Mother would drive, and my father, blind as well as drunk, would be her co-pilot and navigator, discussing the route, making sure that she drove at a safe sixty miles an hour. He would not, I knew, fall asleep in the passenger seat. He never passed out.
A few months later, he got sick. His doctors all said there was nothing they could find wrong with him, that he was not that ill.
They were wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wildflowers
The rain is falling down along with the sky
The colors and remembered suns are falling by
—JUDY COLLINS, “Sky Fell”
AFTER I recorded Leonard’s “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” for In My Life, he asked me why I was not writing my own material. I had never really thought of it, and without his question, I might not have ever written anything. So I sat down at my Steinway a few weeks later and put a composition notebook on the music stand, a pen by its side. It was the spring of 1967, a quiet day in New York. I started to do what I always call “noodling,” having no idea that many of my songwriter friends employed the same technique. Just sit there long enough, not answering the phone, not going to the refrigerator, not leaving the apartment; keep thinking about your fingers on the keys as you find a line, then a riff on the piano to go with it, then another line, then a rhyme, and your heart begins to beat a certain way, you can recognize that beat. It says, “This is good. Find another rhyme, and then go on with it. Find the melody to the bridge. Find your way from the beginning to the end.” It is like being in heaven for a few hours.
Melodies from my years of playing the piano came to me through my hands. They were not the same melodies I had learned when I played the piano, nor were the songs I was writing like the ones I had recorded before. These new songs sprang from some idea of a song that was already in me and now were given permission to be uniquely mine. I was inspired by getting back to the piano, inspired by all the songs I had recorded, but the music was mine, an amalgam of what I had absorbed over time and what came to me from my own muse.
They say that any artist has to first learn from the experts, and I suppose that is what I did. I had recorded songs that I still feel are first-rate. Now I would try, sometimes successfully, other times not, to write songs that I felt could live up to the very high bar I had set for myself. I had to go back to my roots as a pianist to find the melodies and the harmonies for my music. I had to relearn the old exercises, play Hanon and a little Debussy, Chopin and even b
egin relearning Rachmaninoff. Only then, when my muse was free to wander the keys of my Steinway grand, was I able to carve out the songs that would be mine, different from the others I had recorded, different from anything else I heard in other songwriters.
The very first of these was “Since You Asked,” which I wrote in about forty minutes. From that easy entrée, I have learned that some take longer than others.
I have always been grateful to Leonard for asking me that question. I was now a songwriter as well as a singer. I began to play the piano onstage, and to sing my own songs.
There is nothing in the world like that feeling.
IN 1967, it seemed as if every piece of music I heard had Al Kooper attached to it. Al played the organ on several important Dylan recordings, including Bringing It All Back Home, and he contributed the memorable organ riff on the chorus of “Like a Rolling Stone.” In the mid-sixties Al, who had been in the Blues Project with Andy Kulberg as the bassist, and Steve Katz on guitar, started Blood, Sweat and Tears, a hot jazz-rock band.
I had been friends with Al since I moved to New York, and I always felt close to him. He reminded me of my grandfather Oscar, my mother’s father—same lean build and open, loving nature. Al was an iconoclast, my favorite kind of guy. And he looked a little like my platonic flame from high school, John Gilbert.
One night, in the spring of 1967, I was fast asleep when the phone rang at three in the morning. Al said a few words about being sorry to be calling so late and then told me he had met a great songwriter and wanted me to hear her sing an amazing song. He put Joni Mitchell on the phone.
He and Joni had met up at a show he was doing (I think she had a crush on one of the band members). Al said he went home with her when she told him she was a songwriter and had some songs he might like.
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