Joseph Finder - The Book Beast - Dec 3, 2011
In a new book, the legendary folk singer offers a disarmingly honest look at her wild life, including her bouts with alcoholism, nude photos, her son's suicide, and a rift with Joni Mitchell that never healed.
Five years ago I got a fan email from a woman who claimed to be Judy Collins. She told me she loved my books and invited my wife and me to one of her sold-out performances at the Café Carlyle in New York.I replied, “Yeah, prove it.” (I get a lot of weird emails.)She gave me her home and cell phone numbers. I called and asked her to sing something.“Bows and flows of angel hair,” she sang in that unmistakable crystalline voice: the opening lyric to “Both Sides Now,” Judy Collins’s first big hit.
We went to the Carlyle, hung out with her and her husband, Louis, after the show, and since then we’ve become friends. So I’ve had the opportunity to observe both sides of the woman, the private and the public. Before one concert outside of Boston, Judy and I had supper backstage with Hadley Taylor Fisk, the sister of her ex-husband, Peter Taylor. Judy brought her own food. When she got up abruptly in the middle of dinner and excused herself, easily an hour before the concert was to begin, Hadley explained, “Oh, it’s time for her to become ‘Judy Collins.’ You’ll see.”
On stage, she seemed to have been transformed into another person: glamorous, regal, larger than life, intimate yet distant. She told me later that she goes through certain rituals before each performance, besides the usual hair, makeup, and vocal warm-ups: she secludes herself, meditates, and then emerges in a different state of mind. She becomes the public Judy Collins, the folk-singer icon with the amethyst eyes who broke through to a mainstream audience in the 1960s and 1970s with impeccably rendered covers of “Chelsea Morning,” “Amazing Grace,” the Sondheim ballad “Send in the Clowns,” and a lot of other hits.
“I always want to be a sort of bad-ass, and I always come out smelling like a wildflower.”
But it’s the private Judy Collins that’s revealed in her new memoir, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music. It’s alarmingly candid—about her long battle with alcoholism, her son’s suicide, her own suicide attempt. This Judy Collins drops acid with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, has love affairs with a string of famous performers (including, briefly, Joan Baez, which convinced her that she preferred men). When we spoke a few days ago she told me she wanted a different subtitle: “Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n' Roll, and the Music That Changed a Generation.” But her publisher insisted that wasn’t the way people see Judy Collins. “Well, wait till they read this book,” she replied. She was overruled. “I always want to be a sort of bad-ass, and I always come out smelling like a wildflower,” she told me.
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