Judy Collins Read online

  On the floor of the Teller House in Central City, a few doors down from the Gilded Garter, is painted “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” which you could look down at or step over before they blocked it off with a silken rope. It was said to have been painted by a heartsick man and was inspired by a poem of Hugh Antoine D’Arcy about a man who crawled into the bar drunk and offered to paint a picture of the woman who had done him wrong. After a night of singing at the Gilded Garter, I would meet friends at the Teller House bar—sometimes Terry Williams, who taught English at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, and his wife, Nancy, and often Angelo Di Benedetto, a jeweler and well-known artist who made me a gorgeous cast silver bracelet with an onyx stone. We would drink a lot and gaze at the painting on the floor through a melancholy haze of alcohol. I heard the story of Baby Doe Tabor, from Leadville, who had married Horace Tabor and become a millionaire before losing everything when Horace died amid the downturn in the silver market at the turn of the century. She lived for thirty-five years in a shack on the Matchless Mine property until she died of a heart attack during a heavy snowstorm.

  At the Gilded Garter I opened for a rock-and-roll singer named Donna St. Thomas. It was a strange set. I came out in my tights and Robin Hood silk top to sing “The Gypsy Rover,” “Maid of Constant Sorrow,” and other songs for an hour, followed by a short break where people could order more drinks. Then Donna sang “Rock Around the Clock,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” shaking her body and showing off her well-endowed figure. Donna was married to Warren St. Thomas, who owned both the Gilded Garter and the premier strip joint in Denver, the Tropics, where a remarkable woman who called herself Tempest Storm was taking off her clothes and creating quite a stir. One Sunday night Peter and I got Clark a babysitter and went down to Denver to see Tempest Storm’s show.

  The redheaded Tempest Storm was known as the “girl with the fabulous front.” I expected her show to be tacky, even a little seedy, but Tempest put on a pretty classy act. She was also gorgeous and carried herself elegantly onstage. She didn’t take all her clothes off at once, leaving tantalizing remnants and using her fingers to suggest total nudity as she shivered off the shawl, shoes, scarf, and another shawl, revealing smooth, silken skin and, finally, most of her fabulous front. I had never seen a woman naked, except myself in the mirror when I was trying to figure out why I did not have a fabulous front! We went to meet her after the show, and I could barely speak. She was dressed demurely, and I remember thinking that she wouldn’t have to sing for her supper, ever.

  Still, I had come to love singing for my supper and was happy to spend the summer at the Gilded Garter. I didn’t know it then, but one of the people who would come to hear me in Central City was a young man from Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman. He sang a lot of Woody Guthrie blues, and no one had ever heard of him.

  AFTER our return to Boulder, with Peter in his last year of studying for his bachelor’s degree, I got my third professional gig at the Exodus in Denver, around the corner from Antonia Brico’s sprawling stone studio, where I had spent so many years studying the piano. Hal Neustaedter had opened the club in 1958, and by the time I worked there for the first time, in the fall of 1959, it was the club in the Rockies for folk music.

  I drove a long, dark forty miles every night from our house in Boulder to get to the Exodus. Often I had quite a few drinks in me, especially on the way home after a show. I was beginning to feel that hollow place in my heart that told me I had the same problem as my father, but still I believed I could control it. After all, at least I could see, I would tell myself, rationalizing that it was the blindness that made my father lose control when he drank. Sometimes I was very drunk, drunk enough that I had to keep one eye closed to make sure I was focusing on the road. One friend of mine had driven off that highway on a dark night at a very high speed and was paralyzed as a result. Another had been sideswiped at midnight, and his girlfriend, a cellist from Brico’s orchestra who was in the passenger seat, had been killed.

  At the Exodus, the roster included a combination of better-known singers, including Bob Gibson, the Tarriers, and Josh White. I got to listen to and learn from seasoned touring professionals, masters of their art and craft. It was thrilling, and at times very scary.

  One of the first groups I worked with was the Tarriers, a group that included Eric Weissberg, Bob Carey, and Clarence Cooper. Bob Carey was a neat-looking man with a slight build—not more than five foot six—who always had a smile on his face. I liked Bob—he was basically a gentle man, and was always sober enough, though later he fought a terrible battle with drugs. He lived on the edge and went over, as many would as the years went along. His body would be discovered in 1976 on a park bench in New York, a victim of drugs and alcohol.

  The Tarriers originally consisted of Bob Carey, Alan Arkin (the great film actor who would later star in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming), and Erik Darling. They had started in 1956 and landed a big hit on the radio that year with “The Banana Boat Song.”

  In the second week of my job at the Exodus, I worked with Bob Gibson. I had listened to his albums in high school and knew his rich, clear tenor and engaging playing well. I fell in love with Bob’s finger-picking wizardry, so crisp and free.

  Bob was in his late twenties. He stuck out his hand to shake mine, and I saw a cute guy with sparkling eyes, his hair cut short like the Kingston Trio’s. He looked a bit like James Cagney, with the same sort of offset, crooked smile.

  A Brooklyn-born folksinger and guitar player, Bob had heard Pete Seeger for the first time in 1953. He was inspired to use his rent money to buy a banjo and quickly started singing in Florida at local clubs, then made his way to the Green Door in Michigan City, Indiana, fifty miles from Chicago. He got a job at the Offbeat, a folk music club in Chicago, singing folk songs about boat captains and seafarers, accompanying himself on the banjo.

  When Albert Grossman and Alan Ribback, two music-loving entrepreneurial young guys from Chicago, opened the Gate of Horn in 1956, they hired Gibson for an eleven-month run at the new club. By the end of his run, Gibson had graduated from opening act to main attraction. He became a star in Chicago and earned himself singing engagements at clubs around the country, a record contract, and a management contract with Albert Grossman. Bob was Grossman’s first client. (Later Grossman would manage Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin.) After his long run at the Gate of Horn, Gibson would almost single-handedly start the revival of folk music in Chicago.

  Bob’s energy was razor sharp; perhaps it had something to do with the speed he took and the booze he drank. But Gibson’s bad habits did not seem to be a handicap when I knew him. We would knock a few back, then have a good laugh about drinking too much and whether or not I was sober enough to drive home. His wit was cutting but always backed up with a gentleness that softened its impact. He was eight years older than me, and by the time I met him he was already a force of the folk revival as well as a touring powerhouse.

  At the Exodus, where I opened for him, he would haul out his banjo, open his mouth, and charm the birds out of the trees. He was successful, a great force on the stage. Bob would become addicted to heroin in the mid-sixties and would spend the rest of the sixties and seventies trying to get clean. But when I met him, Gibson was golden.

  Bob would listen to me every night we played together at the Exodus, and he would offer me encouragement afterward.

  “You are a fine performer and you have a great career in front of you,” he would tell me. “You just gotta be patient, that’s all, and don’t be afraid of the work.” He gave me his enchanting grin. “And try to smile, just a little?”

  He had a point; I was grim, tight-lipped, all business, wanting to get the story told. The smile would take me a thousand miles, and Gibson knew it. “You gotta smile! You’re killing ’em with all those serious songs. Make ’em listen, give ’em contrast!”

  I would sing “The Great Selchie of Shu
le Skerry,” which I had learned from one of the albums of Scottish ballads I had started collecting in high school. It was a strange, otherworldly story of a seal, a hunter, and the woman who bears the seal’s child:

  In Norway there sits a maid

  “By loo, my babe,” this maid begins

  “Little know I my child’s father

  Or if land or sea he’s dwellin’ in.”

  Bob would weep whenever I got to the part where the hunter shoots the baby Selchie and the father. When we finished our engagement at the Exodus, he went back to Chicago, where he told Alan Ribback about me and the song—and Alan booked me for six weeks at the Gate of Horn.

  Bob’s role in establishing the singer-songwriter tradition is never properly acknowledged. His eye for talent, his unquestionable taste in songs, his enthusiasm, even his friendships—with Albert Grossman, with Odetta, with Joan Baez, with me—have slid somehow under the radar. His influence and insight have earned him a place in the folk music pantheon.

  Back at the Exodus in the winter of 1959, I was opening for Josh White. Josh had it all: good looks, genuine charm, a great sense of humor, an incredibly seductive energy, and a rollicking, all-embracing laugh that seemed to take in the whole room and the whole world. He had snow-white teeth and smiled much of the time in spite of a fungus in his fingernails that caused him pain on a regular basis. He seemed to carry the sun around with him, and if you were anywhere near him you felt that warmth.

  The stage at the Exodus was set in the middle of the room, with the audience in front of you as you sang, and the bar behind you. I would start the first of three shows a night, six nights a week, still dressed in my tights and Robin Hood top and boots, my hair long and straight, wearing practically no makeup. The audience was friendly and welcoming, and I finished with a flourish to the sound of great applause.

  In the intermission after my set, waiters swirled through, bearing pitchers of 3.2 beer, baskets of curly french fries, burgers, and big whopping bowls of chips with jalapeño dip. Then Hal Neustaedter, the owner, announced Josh White. The room hushed when Josh stepped onto the stage, all eyes watching him through the silvery cigarette smoke and drifting wisps from the candles that burned on each table. He was an established star, and the audience was already in awe of him.

  Josh would start his show with a big, resounding chord on his guitar and launch into “St. James Infirmary.” With another ringing chord he would take us into the morgue, show us the hovering figures, the long white table, the body under a sheet, “so cold, so still, so dead.” I was totally mesmerized.

  More than twice my age, Josh had lived a rich life, filled with controversy. He had been blacklisted during the fifties and for many years had had a hard time getting work, but he was now recording for Elektra Records and experiencing a real resurgence of popularity. I knew his recordings well, but nothing prepared me for his live performances.

  He was tall, powerful, and impressive, and a natural storyteller; then Josh took you with him into “One Meatball,” a song from the Depression. His songs came alive in his one-man theater performance. By the third song he would be drenched with sweat, an unlit cigarette behind his ear or a lit one stuck onto the end of one of his guitar strings at the neck of his guitar—a trick I would immediately copy. His shirtfront would be open to the third button (which I did not copy).

  Later I would hear Billie Holiday’s famous version of “Strange Fruit,” and I would hear Odetta sing it, but it was Josh who introduced me to this powerful song, there at the Exodus. The song tells the story of a lynching, and Josh, a black man born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, in the Jim Crow South, would sing it with the power of someone who had been there and probably seen it happen.

  Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

  Josh had been a confidant of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Roosevelts were godparents to his son, Josh junior. White sang at Roosevelt’s inauguration and was the first African American to sing command performances at the White House. The Roosevelts often invited him to their home in Hyde Park, New York, and FDR appointed him a goodwill ambassador. Eleanor Roosevelt took Josh to Sweden with her for an international conference after World War II. The Swedes asked Josh to sing “Strange Fruit,” but he declined, saying that he did not want to talk about the racism in America while he was a guest outside his country.

  Josh tried to teach me what he could about singing, about the life that I would lead if I continued down this road. We would drink together between shows. I told him, probably the first time I told anyone, that I was afraid of my drinking.

  “The travel,” he used to say, “will probably kill you before the whiskey does!” He seemed so sure.

  When Josh broke a string, he would put the guitar behind his back and play “Summertime” on it backward, while he put on a new string. He’d finish with a flourish, the guitar, new string and all, suddenly in front of him. You knew you had seen something wonderful if you were lucky enough to witness one of these impromptu repairs. The thing is, he would do that at each show, and I never did figure out how he managed to get that string to break night after night!

  From that time on, Josh took me under his wing, telling promoters about me, getting me on shows he was doing around the country. I owe Josh so much, and won’t be able to pay him back, except by trying to do the same for some other artist.

  EVERYWHERE I worked, I listened, watched, and learned from other artists, honing my own performances. I also learned how to put on a good show after I’d been drinking all night; I learned just when to stop, because when I drank too much I couldn’t sing. I had started having depressions again and thoughts of suicide after Clark was born, and for a long time I thought the drinking relieved them. It would be years before I realized the drinking deepened them.

  But work always seemed to save me, and now I was making my bones, learning my craft, becoming steady on my feet as a performer, and starting to hold my own.

  In January 1960 I got an offer to sing at the Limelight, a music and supper club in Aspen, Colorado, for a month, working with the Smothers Brothers. Peter drove me up, helped me get settled into the gingerbread house on Main Street where the owners would be putting me up, then turned around and drove back down to Boulder. It was my first real time away from my marriage, and I would miss Peter and Clark. I took our dog, Kolya, a husky, who loved the snow and would walk me to the club every night and wait outside, sleeping in a snow circle and greeting everyone who came to the door of the club. I got to know Dick and Tommy Smothers well over those weeks and would often work with them in the future.

  The Smothers Brothers had been born on Governor’s Island, off Manhattan, two years apart, Tom in 1937, Dick in 1939, the year I was born. Their comedy act consisted of milking each other’s weaknesses and strengths, on and off the stage. That first night I met them at the Limelight I was nervous about working with these new strangers, but I loved them from the start. Standing at the back of the club near the bar as they did their turn, I giggled and guffawed at their antics while Quinn, the club’s bartender and sometime cook, who once chased Tommy with a cleaver through the kitchen in a drunken rage, smiled and shook up the martinis and the Black Russians, which I used to take the chill off the cold nights in the mountains. Tom and Dick made gentle fun of me from the stage, me with my engineer’s boots and with my husky who followed me to work every night. They mocked my seemingly endless songs with, as Tom would tell me later, “every verse that was ever written, boring the bejesus out of the worn-out skiers!” They twinkled with fun at their own humor, and seemed on and off the stage to have the same semi-taunting relationship. They were young, funny, and easy to be with, and I always thought of them with affection. Once Tom was driving back from Denver when he ran into a deer on the highway; they hauled back the carcass, which Quinn butchered, and we shared fresh sautéed venison liver. I took off my boots and dug in, loving every bite.

  AFTER a
month, I returned to Boulder, to my life with my husband, who had been pulling double duty as dad and student. On a ski trip in February I took a bad fall and had to have surgery for a double spiral fracture, spending a week in the hospital. Back at home I hobbled around on crutches, but took more weeks of work at the Exodus and at Michael’s Pub. Peter and I managed the duties of child care, physical therapy, and breadwinning together.

  I always knew Peter was brilliant. After all, it was he who’d suggested I get a job singing! If it hadn’t been for Peter, I might still be filing papers at the University of Colorado. So I was not surprised when in May 1960, graduating with his B.A., he was awarded a teaching fellowship at the University of Connecticut. That same week, I received an offer to work for six weeks during the summer at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, and we were offered the fire watch at Twin Sisters, a pair of peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park. A plethora of opportunities! Our heads were spinning.

  We had a lot to think about. We packed a lunch and drove out to one of our favorite spots in the mountains, a green meadow overlooking Genesee Park outside of Denver. I was still in the heavy cast I would be wearing for the next three months and hobbled over the rough terrain to the picnic table. From there, we looked out at an entire range of glorious mountains in front of us as we ate lunch, Clark crawling at our feet. We talked about what we might do about our futures.

  I remember crimson paintbrush and blue and lavender columbine swaying among the mountain grasses, and it felt as if these familiar friends were saying goodbye to us. The truth was, we were headed out of this world of mountains and majesty. We both knew we could not really take the fire watch at Twin Sisters; if there was a fire or any other emergency at the Twin Sisters site, with my leg in a cast I might be more of a burden than a help, and hinder our chances of getting to safety with our baby. And while I wanted to stay in Colorado, I also wanted to sing at the Gate of Horn. We said nothing for a while, and then finished our lunches and made our way back to Boulder to start packing. He would go to Storrs, for Peter’s job, and on the way spend the summer in Chicago, where I would continue my metamorphosis into a folksinger.