Judy Collins Read online

  Robert Shelton, the legendary New York rock-and-roll and music critic, described Dave in No Direction Home, his book about Bob Dylan: Van Ronk “resembled an unmade bed strewn with books, record jackets, pipes, empty whiskey bottles, lines from obscure poets, finger picks, and broken guitar strings.”

  One famous night of carousing and drinking at the Chelsea Hotel with Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen ended up with Dave’s taking authorship of the song found on pieces of paper scattered about the hotel room the following morning. Dave called it “Last Call.”

  And so we’ve had another night,

  of poetry and proses

  And each man knows he’ll be alone

  when the sacred gin mill closes

  Dave, who was also known as “Dylan’s first New York guru” and the “musical mayor of MacDougal Street,” unloaded his bags in the little house around the corner from the Buddhi. The wind was howling and the snow was swirling, and it was freezing-your-tits-off cold; I had no idea how the two of us were going to get along there on the plains.

  I needn’t have worried. Van Ronk was an angel, come to rescue me from my solitude in Oklahoma. He took the icy upstairs room, giving me the bed downstairs next to the one potbellied stove. Each night I would wait for him to finish his set, listening to him sing the songs that I came to understand were his passion and religion: old Woody Guthrie blues, folk songs, Brecht and Weill, and “The Internationale.”

  Back at our little house after the shows, we would curl up, me snuggled in the bed beside the fiery stove, and Dave in the chair beside me, his body wrapped in his big New York winter coat and all the extra blankets he could find.

  I would burrow down under the covers as the room slowly warmed up, while Dave soothed me to sleep with stories from his life, about serving in the merchant marine or being born and bred a Trotskyite, steeped in political activism. He might recite something from the literature of the Russian Revolution. He would wait until he knew I was almost asleep before he crept upstairs, leaving me to dream of the Decembrists, the Bolsheviks, the songs of passion and union building, and the old, sweet blues he would sing as the fire was dying down and the snow was blowing more softly in the night.

  And Dave always left the bottle of good whiskey near my pillow.

  “Sweet dreams,” he would say as I drifted off and he made his way up the stairs to his freezing-cold room.

  In the morning, when we were both staggering out of bed, he brought me coffee. Dave’s coffee felt hearty and solid, so unexpectedly delicious, coming out of that tiny little kitchen, as if made of some kind of determination in the face of impossibility. I will always associate Dave with the miraculous appearance of a great cup of coffee in the middle of a biblical storm.

  IN late February 1962 I started a two-week gig at the Golden Vanity in Boston, a club across from Boston University. Joan Baez ruled the Boston folk scene then, with her long black hair, piercing dark eyes, and beautiful soprano voice. She had some help carrying the Great Folk Scare, as Van Ronk called it, from a leather-jacket-clad, good-looking, Harvard-educated singer named Tom Rush who had played the Golden Vanity just before I got there. Rolling Stone magazine credits Tom with ushering in the singer-songwriter era, although one could argue that it had begun two decades earlier with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Tom would describe his career as that of a singer who sort of muddled along, searching for great songs as though searching for some lost family. He will always have the credit for discovering Joni Mitchell in the mid-1960s and recording her song “Circle Game.”

  I commuted to Boston from our farmhouse on Browns Road five or six nights a week, driving two hours each way. On the last day of my two-week gig, a great blizzard suddenly slammed into the area. I was about halfway between Storrs and Boston, on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I kept pushing ahead as bravely as I could, but soon I couldn’t even see the road. The snowplows and salt trucks were moving up the highway with blinking blue and white lights signaling all traffic to turn back. I turned the Chevy Carryall around and headed back home, stopping at a little grocery store on the way to buy chocolate chips, walnuts, and flour, for the cookies I was going to bake. When you are in a jam, always bake something sweet—that was my motto then. Once back home, as the snow continued to fall, we hibernated like bears. We shared frozen pies and roasts with our landlords, the Scottrons. We ate clam chowder and chicken stew, and we shivered without heat for two days. I was thrilled to be off the road, snowbound in the farmhouse and wrapped in the arms of my husband, Peter, and my little boy.

  HOW did I keep my sanity on the road? I wrestled constantly with the difficulty of leaving my family behind in order to earn our living. A lot of people I know nowadays take their children with them everywhere, and I wish I could have done that. For one thing, I couldn’t have afforded it. For another, Peter was just getting started in his academic career, and needed to stay put to hold on to his position at the college. He liked the stability of looking after our son and our home.

  I think the road warriors who travel to sing or do other work all over the world have usually had a hard time juggling responsibilities as both parents and performers. Especially women. There were times I felt torn at being away, but I was learning to leave the pressures of touring at the door.

  I knew I would have to leave again, that I had to go where the work was. I still get paid for the travel and for the heartache of being apart from my loved ones.

  The music is free.

  SOON enough, I was on the road again, back in the Village in New York.

  Scott McKenzie was singing in the Journeymen with John Phillips and Dick Weissman when we first met. Scott had a dreamy look, a pale creamy complexion, dark curly hair surrounding a Three Musketeers face, and a glint of steel in his glance. He sang in the sweetest voice. It was Scott’s voice everyone heard a few years later singing “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” at the Monterey Festival in 1964. He looked at me with dark brown eyes aglow with mischief and promises. I liked him immediately. He felt familiar, like a newly discovered brother.

  We were all working at Gerde’s, and one night he asked me if I knew anything about New York City beyond the Village. The honest answer was: not much. There was the Fred Braun shop where I bought my leather sandals and the folk music store run by Izzy Young. I knew how to get back on the West Side Highway to drive home to Connecticut. I knew the Broadway Central Hotel, around the corner from Gerde’s, where I was staying for $1.50 a night. I knew Harold’s office on West 57th Street, and the little studio nearby where I had recorded my first album.

  “We have to show you the city,” Scott said, and promptly took me down into the subway and whisked me uptown to Tiffany’s, where we stood gazing at the dazzling jewels in the big, elegant windows.

  “How do you like them diamonds?” he asked.

  I said I loved them but only wanted the smallest ones, for my ears. Someday I would have them, but not that day.

  Then Scott and I rode back downtown, where he took me to the door of the Broadway Central.

  “Do you know about the famous murder that happened here?” Scott asked.

  “Murder?” I said. It seemed a pretty calm hotel to me, quiet and very much a hideaway.

  He told me the story of Ned Stokes, who had shot Jubilee Jim Fisk in January of 1872 on the grand staircase of the Broadway Central while the men were fighting over a showgirl named Josie Mansfield. The facts of the murder were similar to those of the later 1906 scandal, when Harry Thaw, heir to a fortune and known as the “Prince of Pittsburgh,” shot Stanford White, renowned architect of McKim, Mead and White, in a rage over White’s previous treatment of Evelyn Nesbit, to whom Thaw was then married. In both cases, the women involved in the triangles were music hall dancers. Both were stories of scandal and murder, and both men were wealthy and powerful.

  I told Scott that such drama was more than I had expected of the Broadway Central, but I knew that it could have been me. I ne
ver had an affair with Scott, or even spent the night with him, but the conversation reminded me that I was playing by the rules of the 1960s, where new forms of partnering, including open marriage, were the coming thing. But I was sure my husband had been faithful. Hadn’t he? The loosening social and cultural rules and restrictions didn’t necessarily mean the end of jealousy and passion. The one-night stands I’d had—although they were few and far between and I didn’t think my husband knew about them—could be dangerous. There was no AIDS, and though you might get pregnant, there was no worry about STDs—you could get a shot of penicillin to cure whatever ailed you. Sex was probably not life-threatening in most cases, and the pill had been around since 1960. Still, I knew I should watch myself, I thought as I climbed those same stairs on which Fisk had been murdered.

  JAC Holzman had a pilot’s license and that spring, to celebrate our second album, he took me up in his private plane to show me New York City in a way I’d never seen it before. We buzzed over the Empire State Building, circled Central Park, and streaked across the harbor from the Battery to the Statue of Liberty. You could still do that in 1962, without jets chasing you up the East River or down the Hudson. It was glorious up there, just Jac and me.

  Jac would take me to concerts in New York to listen to young musicians and singers. He sent me albums to listen to—which is how I was introduced to Jacques Brel. He played me the recordings of new artists that he was considering signing, who eventually included Jim Morrison and the Doors, Bread, Tim Buckley, Mickey Newbury, and Aztec Two-Step. He came to every show of mine he could manage to attend, critiquing, pointing out the high spots and the low as well.

  I was back in Chicago at the Gate of Horn in early 1962, opening for Bob Gibson and Hamilton (né Bob) Camp. Hamilton looked like an Irish imp, with a small, wiry body and a glorious tenor voice that danced around Gibson’s darker baritone. The combination of their harmonies was riveting. You could hear the Irish wit and art in Hamilton, and he was a wonderful addition to Gibson’s act. Albert Grossman was managing Gibson at the time and had wanted originally to put Gibson in a duo with Ray Boguslav, a great guitarist as well as a pianist and singer. Somebody recommended Hamilton, who was working at the Associated Press when Albert found him.

  One cold night Bob and Hamilton and I had been drinking after the last show, and I was just too drunk to walk home alone through the dark streets to the Cass Hotel in downtown Chicago, where I was staying. It was about four in the morning. Bob offered me a little handgun to protect myself on the way home. I had never touched a gun before, but I slipped it into my pocket as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I kept my fingers wrapped around it as I walked slowly home from the club.

  The snow had stopped falling but there were still silver flakes hovering in the light under the lamps. When I got to the Cass, I stepped inside the door of my room. One side of the giant double window was open and the room was cold. I threw my coat on the bed and then held the gun out straight. I thought I should try to take the cartridge out of the gun, as they do in the movies.

  The gun went off in my hand, scaring the hell out of me. I dropped it on the bed and rushed to look out the window expecting to see people running, someone shot, the ambulance coming. No one in the street looked up. In fact, there was no one in sight, only those stray, hesitant snowflakes lingering in the air. It was very late, or very early, depending on whether you worked all night or all day.

  I’m sure the drinks had blunted my shock. I was free now to sleep it off. When I awoke, somewhat hungover, I found the bullet on the floor at my feet. It had slammed into the steel partition in the window and ricocheted back into the room; I’d been too out of it to realize that it had nearly hit me between the eyes.

  I got to the club that night, holding the gun gingerly in my pocket. I handed the weapon to Gibson with a grimace, telling him it had gone off and that it must have malfunctioned. He laughed and told me I didn’t know how to handle a gun. As he tried to take out the cartridge, the gun went off again, burying a bullet in one of the doors to the back room at the club.

  From then on, I walked back to my hotel alone, early or late, unarmed. And, fortunately, unharmed.

  BACK home, Clark was growing up, a little boy with needs and interests and a sweet, curious personality. He seemed to be getting along just fine. I loved him and hated to leave him. I missed out on so much of Clark’s early life. I knew I was plying my trade, learning my craft, and bringing home the bacon, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with, nor does it make the memory any less painful.

  “Mommy, Mommy, what did you bring me?” were the words Clark was learning to say. “Mommy, Mommy, when are you coming home?”

  Chapter Twelve

  There Is a Season

  To everything (turn, turn, turn)

  There is a season (turn, turn, turn)

  —PETE SEEGER, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

  BY the spring of 1962, I was keeping my eye on the young singer Bob Dylan, whom I had spent time with at Gerde’s Folk City. After I had seen him at the festival in Connecticut, Dylan had written a couple of his own songs to add to the repertoire of Woody Guthrie blues he was performing. John Hammond signed him to a three-album deal for Columbia Records, believing that Bob was the “great white blues hope.” Hammond himself was a genius, and could spot genius even before it had proven itself. He had no doubt about Dylan.

  Robert Shelton, critic for the New York Times, had seen Bob’s first proper run at Gerde’s Folk City. In September 1961, Shelton served up his take on the young singer: “Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.”

  Shelton seemed to understand what would happen before it did. When that review came out, Bob hadn’t yet rocked the world with his reach, his imaginative, stunning lyrics, his perfectly conceived melodies. But by May 1962, the guys in the folk music circles, those with great talent and beautiful songs to their credit, sat up and took notice. Dylan, with his new songs, seemed to be in a league by himself. Soon people everywhere were seeing the world through his eyes.

  It was in its spring edition that Sing Out, the bible of the folk movement, printed the first of Dylan’s remarkable compositions, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I loved it and learned it, and began to dwell on its elegant structure. The writing stunned me.

  Back in Chicago toward the end of 1962, Albert gave me the first tape of original Dylan songs. “What do you think?” he asked. “They say he can’t sing.”

  “Oh yes he can,” I replied. “He can sing.”

  I WAS traveling across the country, learning new songs, and preparing for my second recording. My marriage was doing fine, I thought. I loved and admired Peter, and I could rationalize the long separations from my son as the price of professional success. I thought I could shake off the terrible emotional hangovers, as I did the physical ones, believing I was somehow above petty self-judgment, and certainly above the judgment of others. After all, weren’t we supposed to be moving beyond guilt? We were sixties children.

  But during the recording of my second album, Golden Apples of the Sun, which I started making in the spring of 1962, I met the man who would be the catalyst for the breakup of my marriage. He was Walter Raim, a talented guitar player and producer whom Mark Abramson had hired to be the album’s musical director. Walter was no stranger in a strange town, but a man, fully present and real, who fell in love with me and who would not take no for an answer.

  Walter was Jewish, smart, with an ex-wife, in fact two ex-wives, with whom he was still on speaking terms. He had brown hair, delicate features, and hands that played the guitar tenderly and reached out for me with the same tenderness. He was a gentle soul who played beautifully on my new record and didn’t drink or use any drugs. Perhaps he took an occasional toke of something, but he was not an addict, and I would know that, being one myself. I had rarely spent time with anyone who did not drink, and
I found Walter irresistible.

  We danced around each other at first, while Walter guided the sessions for my second album. Finally, after weeks of flirting and skirting the obvious, I surrendered without even a whimper of protest. What Walter knew about the physical act of love came as a revelation, like fireworks suddenly filling a black sky with brilliant light and electricity. I was simply overwhelmed. Like Madame Bovary, like all the mythic women of romances who had fired my imagination and my creativity, I was swept off my feet. Suddenly I could understand taking that perilous walk on the edge of a cliff that could catapult you, in an instant, into another, sometimes terrible, world. With Walter, I became the heroine in a drama of my own making, a drama that could not end well.

  WHILE I was recording the songs for Golden Apples of the Sun that spring and summer, I would drive down from Storrs to New York and find a place to park near the studio, where we would work for hours, after which I would go to my hotel. Once Walter and I gave in to our passion, we stayed together more often at his apartment on Hudson Street, not far from the White Horse Tavern. I was experiencing sex in a way I had never imagined possible. It was heavenly and horrible at the same time, because of the guilt I felt. As the affair became more of a presence in my life I grew more and more anxious.

  I had never been good at deception, and it was beginning to take a toll on me. I was also falling apart physically—exhausted from travel and drinking too much.