Judy Collins Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Judy Collins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Judy, 1939–

  Sweet Judy blue eyes : my life in music / Judy Collins.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Collins, Judy, 1939– 2. Singers—United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  ML420.C65A3 2011

  782.42164092—dc22

  [B] 2011014414

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71736-8

  All photographs are from the author’s private collection unless otherwise credited.

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPHY BY FRANCESCO SCAVULLO

  v3.1

  For my mother,

  Marjorie Lorraine Byrd Collins Hall

  (1916–2010)

  Author’s Note

  I have made every attempt to quote the conversations with people in this book correctly. If I have failed to be exact, I’ve attempted to convey the sense and the meaning. At times I have also quoted letters, and those are verbatim.

  In all cases, it is my memory of an event that supersedes the memories of other participants who might have been at the same party. There are no accidents in memory, for memory has its own reasons and its own logic. What I remember is what happened to me as I best recall it.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Chapter One: Ruby-Throated Sparrow

  Chapter Two: The Gypsy Rover

  Chapter Three: Lingo the Drifter

  Chapter Four: My Buddy

  Chapter Five: The Blizzard

  Chapter Six: So Early in the Spring

  Chapter Seven: The Gilded Garter, the Exodus, and the Excess

  Chapter Eight: Gates of Horn and Ivory

  Chapter Nine: Gerde’s, the Village Gate, and the Folk Blitz: Joan, Mary, Bob, Carolyn, and Richard

  Chapter Ten: The Lark in the Morning

  Chapter Eleven: Golden Apples and the Beginning of the Affair

  Chapter Twelve: There Is a Season

  Photo Insert 1

  Chapter Thirteen: Wild Rippling Water

  Chapter Fourteen: The Kettle of Fish

  Chapter Fifteen: Judy Collins 3

  Chapter Sixteen: Blacklist

  Chapter Seventeen: Mississippi Summer

  Chapter Eighteen: Pack Up Your Sorrow: Russian Songs, Broken Hearts, and Max

  Chapter Nineteen: The Coming of the Roads

  Chapter Twenty: Blue Strangers and Blue Friends: Dick Fariña, Mimi Baez Fariña, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen

  Chapter Twenty-one: In My Life

  Chapter Twenty-two: My Father

  Chapter Twenty-three: Wildflowers

  Chapter Twenty-four: Sky Fell

  Chapter Twenty-five: Smoke and Mirrors

  Chapter Twenty-six: The Swinging, Singing, Murderous Sixties

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Hello, Hooray!

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Helplessly Hoping

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Amid the Storm

  Photo Insert 2

  Chapter Thirty: Stacy, Woodstock, and the Humpback Whales

  Chapter Thirty-one: The Art of Antiwar

  Chapter Thirty-two: Amazing Grace

  Chapter Thirty-three: Easy Times

  Chapter Thirty-four: The Mogul and the Movie Star

  Chapter Thirty-five: The Last Gasp

  Chapter Thirty-six: The Drinking Decades

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Resurrection

  Chapter Thirty-eight: Miracles and Menaces

  Chapter Thirty-nine: The End of the Storm

  Acknowledgments

  Discography

  The Parade

  How exhilarating it was to march

  Along the great boulevards

  In the sunflash of trumpets

  And under all the waving flags—

  The flag of desire, the flag of ambition.

  So many of us streaming along—

  All of humanity, really—

  Moving in perfect sync,

  Yet each lost in the room

  Of a private dream.

  —BILLY COLLINS

  Prelude

  God of sun and moon, God of ocean tides,

  You who drive the stars, you of perfect light

  Teach me how to sing.

  —JUDY COLLINS, “Singing Lessons”

  IT’S a Sunday night, and I am traveling from Hartford to New York City, heading in from a show. Rain pours down, and the driver of my sedan is battling the storm like a captain of a schooner in white waves. Thoughts of my life flow like the water around us: years of life, love and anger, rage and hope; the songs I have sung; the men and women I have loved.

  “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is playing on the radio, softly, but I hear it through the steady sound of the rain and the hiss of the tires on the road. Unmistakable, Stephen Stills’ voice floats above the harmonies of David Crosby and Graham Nash. Stephen’s guitar cuts into my heart like an emotional arrow. Whenever I hear the song—in a grocery store, in an airport, on my own CD player—it resounds like a call from mystic lakes. It pierces the heart of this girl and all the other grown-up girls who think it tells their story. All great songs make you feel that way, as though they were written especially for you.

  But “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” really is my story. Stephen wrote it for me when we were both young and innocent, during our brilliant romance. The song never fails to transport me back to that thrilling and terrifying time we call “the sixties,” when so many great songs proclaimed our grand, noble visions. We were reckless dreamers, hell-bent on finding our own personal happiness, determined to elevate all of humanity above the anger and violence of the past.

  There is an old saying that every time you sigh, a drop of blood falls from your heart. It seems I sigh more now than I ever did, and that probably means my heart has lost many tear-shaped drops. I have lived my life, as we all do, between these sighs, between these drops of blood.

  My life has taken me from innocence to rage and back again. Those precious early years seem oddly clearer to me now, at seventy. The people I knew and loved and the drama of that diamond-bright time move closer as they slip farther away.

  Sweet Judy Blue Eyes will tell many stories I’ve never fully told, demons I have battled, and tragedies I’ve endured. In fifty years in the music business, there are also the blessings and grace I have found through it all.

  I will tell how I found my way to my marriage to Louis Nelson and more than thirty-three years of living with a man who is my partner, my friend and lover, my solace and companion, whom I met when I thought I had lost everything that mattered.

  I will talk of faith and money, sex and drugs and rock and roll, about learning to sing and tour, through all the days of shining sun as well as pouring rain. I will tell of my ongoing quest to become—and to remain—an artist.

  With the passage of time, I am able to talk about circles that have been completed and old friends with whom I have reconnected. Many have died, each spiriting away a unique impression of me that no one else will ever have, each leaving a ghost of himself behind in my memory. These memories are my treasures—memories of singers and poets, rabble-rousers and rebels. The closest of friends, the dearest of lovers, family members who were a part of me. There are so man
y, including Marjorie, my mother, Chuck, my father, and Clark, my son.

  Robert Richardson writes of the philosopher William James, “Trouble was for him a precondition for insight.” I can only hope that the same is true for me, and that I have learned at least some of the lessons born not only of my own troubles and of those close to me but also of the people for whose causes I have marched and rallied, raised money, and gone to jail, and for whom I always, always sing.

  I will speak of the wars of an emotional nature, against addictions, against suicidal depressions, against alcoholic drinking; these are not wars with fire and steel, but they are wars just the same, often with terrible prices to pay. No antiwar protest, no action against prevailing prejudice, ever was fought harder than these.

  Through all these years, I have been eternally grateful for the gift of music. There are times when the sounds of the voices in my audiences, singing along with the old sweet melodies, are, for me, all that stand between despair and joy. When we sing, we can do anything—change the world, bring peace, be our best selves at last.

  When we sing, our hearts can lift and fly, over the troubled waters and over the years.

  Chapter One

  Ruby-Throated Sparrow

  I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are.

  —STEPHEN STILLS, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”

  NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT, the year I met and fell in love with Stephen Stills, was a leap year. In the Chinese calendar, it was the year of the monkey, a year destined to explode with creativity, social upheaval, and tragedy. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam had escalated into all-out warfare and was tearing the country apart. Martin Luther King Jr., in whom we invested so much hope, had been murdered in Memphis on April 4. The day after King’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy made one of the last speeches of his life at a political gathering in Indianapolis originally intended as a rally for his run for president, reminding the weeping audience of black and white mourners that he, too, had lost a brother to a white man with a gun and urging them, as the Greeks had put it, to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

  Many young people were marching against the war, and music captured our conflicting feelings of disenchantment and romantic idealism, from the traditional folk songs of the Weavers, “Wasn’t That a Time” and “Rock Island Line,” to the powerful laments of singer-songwriters, Dylan singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Phil Ochs singing “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and Joan Baez singing “Silver Dagger” in her haunting soprano. This incredible music was everywhere, playing on Top 40 and FM radio mixed in with the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita” and “Eleanor Rigby,” the Byrds sparkling with Jim McGuinn’s twelve-string guitar on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the Mamas and the Papas urging us to leave cold New York and dream of sunny California. “I’d be safe and warm, if I was in L.A.,” they sang, their heartbreaking harmonies draping the airwaves with longing. There was the angst-filled psychedelia of the Doors with Jim Morrison begging us to light his fire, and Grace Slick, singing with Jefferson Airplane, her seductive voice drifting on the silky sound of her band: “One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.” All these songs were hitting the radio waves side by side with the reports of casualties in Indochina.

  The intermix of news flashes and this wistful and sometimes furious music made the atmosphere of the times seem almost otherworldly. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” cascaded across the country as Dylan put his lyrics to our tears and our rage.

  It was a time of undeniable destructiveness as the war raged and the young trashed their bodies and their lives with the drugs many of us thought were so cool. I remember singing in the dusk of summer, the audience primed with wine, organic cheese, and fruit for a long night of music. I put fresh flowers in my hair and through the lace of my Mexican wedding dress. I had bought a full-length leather vest that had roses painted on it, and leather bottoms were stitched to my Levi’s. I wore my hair straight and threw my head back. We were free, all of us, to be, to love, to live, in a world different from the one our parents had inhabited. We were going full steam ahead, and yet we floated like water lilies on a pond, dreaming of a billion suns.

  It was a time of tremendous hope and of tremendous naiveté, a pivotal period in which we would see how far we could push the wall. We knew we were the children of a new sun and a new moon. We were blessed with our music and our determination; we knew we would bring an end to the war.

  I had been making records for seven years by now, finding my own musical place in anger and innocence, singing for love and against war. We had awakened to the horror of war; at the same time we reveled in this luminous era as folk music became popular and coalesced into a quest for a better world.

  My first top-ten single, “Both Sides Now,” was playing on the radio, with the sound of the silvery harpsichord on the ride-out and the guitars and sweet rhythm filling in behind the resonant beauty of Joni Mitchell’s lyric. The song was climbing up the Billboard charts, and I was being hailed as an “overnight success,” although by then I had been making records and doing concerts for nearly ten years. My creative side was blooming like the purple and pink crocuses poking through the last snows in the parks in New York City, where I had lived for five years. And now, for the first time, I had begun to write my own songs.

  On June 1 I headed from New York to Los Angeles to make my eighth album for Elektra Records. John Haeny, my engineer, and David Anderle, my producer on this new recording, gave me a welcoming party so that I could meet all the new players. This was a band that would include many world-famous strangers, among them Stephen Stills, whom I had admired from afar when he played “Bluebird” with Buffalo Springfield. I had no idea what to expect, but I was already a little in awe of his great guitar playing and his lean, blond good looks.

  It was a clear night in Laurel Canyon. Stars floated in a black sky as I drove west over the twisting roads from my rental on Mulholland Drive. I could feel a shimmer of promise in the air.

  In the warmth of John’s house the music flowed, as did the wine and the conversation. Candles sparkled in the darkened living room and a small fire crackled on the grate despite the early June weather. John got me a drink, and David Anderle introduced me to the players who would be on the sessions. I was dressed in a soft silk top and velvet pants. I was feeling thin—thin was always good! I was smoking a cigarette and looking through the wreath of smoke out the window when I saw a handsome man arrive, slam the door of a sleek Bentley, and stride up the walk to the house.

  “Judy Collins,” David said when he walked in, “meet Stephen Stills.”

  Stephen was wearing Levi’s, cowboy boots, and a brilliant white shirt with the cuffs turned up and the top mother-of-pearl button undone at the neck. I could see the sinews of his throat as he took me in and bowed as if to royalty. His wrists were tanned, as though he had spent most of his days on a horse in the sun. He was possibly the most attractive man I had ever seen.

  Then his eyes found mine, and we gazed at each other, transfixed. I knew then that he would change my life.

  It was a good party. There was more than one moment of sudden silence as my eyes met Stephen’s again and again. We talked and sang until late that night, and when the party was over, we found each other walking up the pathway to our cars. We didn’t say much in parting, but the light of the fire that had been sparked glowed in our goodbye. We both knew we would see each other the next day, when the music began.

  As we said goodnight, I felt that I already knew all that was important to know about Stephen. There was a sensation of bliss in my heart.

  I knew I was falling in love.

  I SETTLED down in Los Angeles to record the new album, making music all day and making love all night with Stephen. Everything about L.A. in those days was romantic. It was the rocking place to be. The Elektra Records studio was right in the middle of a fascinating neighborhood of thriving clubs and hotels that hosted many of the artists of the
era as they came and went, recording the songs that were changing the musical landscape of the country.

  Among the crowds pushing through the doors of the cafes and bars on La Cienega, you could usually find a star or two: Tim Buckley, with his wild, beautiful hair around his angelic face, drinking an afternoon Pernod; John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, lanky and smooth-moving as a cheetah, wandering into the luxurious and notorious Chateau Marmont. You might see his bandmate Denny Doherty there, or Michelle Phillips, a beautiful blonde, the most elegant woman in the folk crowd, looking as though she had just stepped out of Bergdorf Goodman’s (hippie) hair salon, her teeth white as snow, her smile bright, her figure slender, and her grace exquisite. We once took acid together, and even then she looked and spoke in a charming and loving manner. Her gifts included a voice that complemented the voices of John and Mama Cass and Denny, weaving its slightly dizzy way around the melody, a great part of the group’s success. Michelle might be folding herself around a cup of hot chocolate or a rum toddy in the Chateau’s big stone room with the fireplace.

  There were days of music, lots of friends to hang out with, and the pleasure of my nights with Stephen.

  Joni Mitchell often had David Crosby on her delicate arm. I had already recorded her beautiful song “Both Sides Now” and had gotten to know her a little. But she was elusive. With long blond hair and striking high cheekbones, she sang with a voice that seemed to be etched out of the Canadian landscape, sometimes haunting, sometimes soaring high as the Rockies. She smoked like a chimney, and there was always a cigarette between her thin fingers, but her skin was alabaster smooth. From time to time a certain look would pass over her face as she caught the eye of someone or noticed something she didn’t cotton to, but then, like the sun peeking out from the clouds, she would break into a smile or even a song.

  Farther up the hill from the Chateau Marmont, the Magic Castle twinkled all night among the low-slung pines and flowering plants. Close by was the Tropicana, hotel host to rock-and-roll bands. My friend John Cooke, whom we all called Cookie, usually stayed there as well. Tall and slender with an aura that always reminded me of an elegant waterbird, Cookie had a bright eye and a clever way about him. He was the son of Alistair Cooke, the English television journalist. Cookie played banjo and sang with a group called the Charles River Valley Boys, and was road-managing Janis Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, who also stayed at the Tropicana.