Judy Collins Read online

  The club originally had been a pizza joint at West Fourth and Bleecker streets, near New York University. Just like Michael Bisesi at Michael’s Pub, where I’d had my start two years before, Mike Porco, the owner, had served pizza, pasta, and booze and had no entertainment—until Charlie Rothschild and Izzy Young convinced him to start hiring folksingers to perform. Charlie took over the folk music bookings at Gerde’s in 1961, and it was Charlie who got Porco to hire Bob Dylan for his first gig at the club.

  I would have a long relationship with Charlie over the years. He looked a little like a walrus, with his bright eyes, round face, and handlebar mustache. He had a big smile, a bigger heart, and great taste in music. He had an ability to spot talent and take care of it. As my road manager and agent for a few years, it was Charlie who drove me to the dates, settled the finances, took care of transportation, and at times made me crazy, as any good road manager will do to almost any artist from time to time. He had a quality that I always felt needed protecting, in spite of his gruff manner. Once, on his birthday, one of the musicians in our group shoved a cream pie in Charlie’s face as a joke. Charlie took it like a champ; I fired the guy who threw the pie the next day.

  It seems to me that everyone was at Gerde’s when I got there in February 1961: Joan Baez; Cisco Houston, a great singer and a friend of Pete Seeger’s and Woody Guthrie’s who had been on the New York folk scene and played with the Almanacs (Cisco would be dead of cancer within a month of our meeting); thirteen-year-old Arlo Guthrie; and Eric Weissberg.

  The first night at Gerde’s I met Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. He and I were sharing the bill. He sported a cowboy hat and rough-out Justin boots, and he wore his hair long and curly. His Stetson came down over his eyes, and around his neck was a little flowered cotton scarf. He stuck out his hand when we met and said “Howdy,” like some hand on a Colorado ranch. But something in his voice gave away his origins in Brooklyn, New York. Born Elliott Charles Adnopoz, he was the son of a New York doctor who would have liked his son to be a doctor, too. There was a sweetness and gentleness about him.

  I watched from the bar as Jack wound that audience at Gerde’s around his little finger with charm and talent. He sang “Talking Merchant Marine,” a Woody Guthrie song about a merchant sailor who goes into the navy during World War II, and then he did a few more songs. He bowed deeply before he came back to the bar to join me. He doffed his hat, flashed a beautiful smile, shook out his curly hair, and settled down to drink me under the table. I liked him immediately. He was friendly, and boy, could he hold his booze. He also noticed that I could not, and was gentleman enough not to mention it.

  Ramblin’ Jack could finger-pick like mad. He was a master of “Travis picking,” the style named after Merle Travis, who invented the rolling thumb-and-forefinger technique now used by many strummers. Jack and Dylan met in Minnesota and Jack seemed to loom as large in Dylan’s life as Woody Guthrie had in Jack’s own (in fact, Jack was at Woody’s side for a few years at the end of his life, even taking care of him at the hospital when Woody was dying of Huntington’s disease). Some people even referred to Dylan as “Jack Elliott’s kid,” because he sang the same Guthrie blues Jack performed. But soon Dylan began to produce earth-shattering songs, making it clear that he was not just Ramblin’ Jack’s kid but a force in his own right—a true original.

  I also met Peter Yarrow at Gerde’s. I would see him around clubs in the Village, guitar under his arm, a singular, thin man with a sweet voice, searching, serious, and earnest. One night when I couldn’t drive home—because of the weather or being too drunk, I don’t recall—he took me under his wing.

  “Come home with me,” he said, “it will thrill my mother, she loves you!” Peter drove me to the apartment where he lived with his parents and I slept soundly in the guest room. A few nights later his mother sent my pajamas down to Gerde’s in a little package. It caused a bit of talk, which Peter and I still have a chuckle over.

  TALL, willow-thin, with straight blond hair falling around her face, Mary Travers was often at Gerde’s, shining like a light among the other ragged folkies who were dressed, it seemed, in wrinkled clothes of indeterminate origin (except Dylan, who seemed to have calculated the impact of his outfits). Mary would join all of us as we talked about the war, the politics of the day, the candidates, the problems in the country. Occasionally she would sing along with a guitar picker. She was striking, with a totally unique, off-balance beauty, and she seemed to dance when she walked. I remember singing harmony with her behind Ramblin’ Jack one night, with Cisco Houston and Carolyn Hester chiming in. Mary was a harmonic dream, finding all the right notes and making us sound better than we might have otherwise.

  In the late spring of 1961, Albert Grossman had chosen Mary as the ideal person to fill out the trio he was assembling with Noel “Paul” Stookey and Peter Yarrow. The chemistry was immediate, and the album Peter, Paul and Mary appeared in stores in no time, it seemed. By 1962, “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer” were playing on the radio and the trio was a worldwide phenomenon.

  I saw Mary often over the fifty years we knew each other—at concerts, at festivals, and in our homes. Sometimes we would talk on the telephone or in person, and we had rambling discussions about life and love and work, the books we were reading, the books we were writing or intending to write. I met her daughters, Erika and Alicia, and visited with her and Ethan, her fourth husband, in New York and at her home in Connecticut. The rooms in Mary’s homes were always lined from floor to ceiling with books, books, books. She usually had a book in her hand—politics, biography, poetry, economics, history, Keynes, Schlesinger, Marx, Dostoevsky, Byron, Yeats. She usually had a particular issue on her mind, some axe to grind.

  Mary grew up in Greenwich Village with parents who were journalists and organizers for the Newspaper Guild trade union. She sat at the feet of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, attended the Little Red School House, and left school when she was in eleventh grade to sing backup for Pete on an album called Talking Union on the Folkways label. Mary had yearnings for the theater. She had the looks for it and the passion. She was intense, outspoken—never shy.

  She and I told each other war stories about traveling, about promoters, managers, record executives. We laughed a lot, and sometimes cried together.

  Mary once expressed to me her rage at one of the most famous folk stars of the day—“Miss Thing,” as she called the diva—by whom she said she had been upstaged at a Newport Folk Festival finale. Miss Thing stepped in front of Mary during the encore, elbowing her way to the front for the cameras and the television audience.

  “I would never do that,” Mary snapped a few days after the show. “Who does she think she is? She stepped right in my face, as though she didn’t know I was there.”

  It would have been very hard to miss Mary Travers anywhere, even with Miss Thing around.

  Mary had a profound influence on the music of the times. Peter, Paul and Mary recorded many songs that were musical bellwethers, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” to “If I Had a Hammer.” On November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated, there were three of their albums on the charts. Their popularity was overwhelming, and in the face of her fame, Mary was not afraid to travel around the world in support of her favorite political causes. She stayed involved with the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers movement.

  In 1961 Bill Cosby was just getting started in the tiny “pass-the-basket” clubs in Greenwich Village, making about $69 a week, when he saw Mary in the park. She grabbed his arm as they strode through Washington Square, turning heads, the tall willowy blonde and Cosby.

  “You know what people are saying?” Cosby asked her as he struggled to keep up with Mary’s wild rhythm.

  “What?” she asked.

  “They are saying, ‘There goes May Britt and Sammy Davis Jr.’!”

  IT was in those two weeks at Gerde’s that I met Bob Dylan for the
first time. At least I thought it was the first time, but Bob told a different story.

  One night I had just finished my set and was sitting at the bar, sipping Pernod, the drink that turns foggy yellow before hitting you in the solar plexus, which had become my drink of choice. I was wearing a Romanian blouse that tied in front, a long denim skirt, and a leather vest. I had straight hair, brown and a bit unruly, with a part in the middle. I wore dangling silver earrings and a couple of silver rings, one with the onyx that Angelo Di Benedetto had made for me in that seemingly distant past in Central City. I was smoking my favorites, Gauloises—strong, fragrant French cigarettes.

  Bob Dylan strolled across the dingy, smoke-filled room toward the bar. He was wearing rumpled clothes, a battered-looking pair of boots, and Levi’s. He had some kind of ragged scarf around his neck, like his hero, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. His hair was indescribable, unkempt but soft like a child’s. The curls framed his face, a sweet face but one full of contradiction, a combination of innocence and arrogance.

  He stuck out his hand and told me my set had been great. We both ordered drinks and began to get a bit tipsy together. I offered him a Gauloise. He took the cigarette, made from Turkish and Syrian tobaccos, and rolled it between his fingers before I offered him a light.

  I said it was nice to meet him, but he shook his head, as he inhaled the strong, distinctive aroma.

  “Don’t you remember?” he said, squinting through the smoke from our cigarettes.

  “Remember what?” I said.

  “I sat at your feet.” Bob smiled shyly under his stained hat and described how he had come to hear me when I was first singing in Central City. He told me he had been singing at a little bar in Cripple Creek, just up the highway, when he was still Bob Zimmerman. I nodded, but didn’t have a clue.

  Behind the bar the bottles of booze shimmered in reds and yellows, blues and greens. I was a little drunk, and so, it appeared, was he. I heard him sing his set then, a few songs, mostly Woody Guthrie. He had an okay voice and was a good storyteller, but there was not much to look at. (Much later, after their affair had begun, Joan Baez would admit that when she first heard him singing Woody’s songs she thought Dylan looked like a toad!)

  I would see Bob around in the Village, at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center, sometimes hanging out by the fountain in Washington Square on a weekend, where the guitar players drifted from one side of the park to the other, and the smell of pot washed over the scene. In July, at a folk festival at Riverside Church, Dylan met Suze Rotolo, the long-haired, pixie-faced, bright-eyed seventeen-year-old from Queens with whom he would spend the next four years. Their relationship would become a part of the lore of the 1960s, a well-known chapter in the seemingly magical life story of Bob Dylan.

  But no one really knew what that story was, or even where Dylan came from. He tended to be vague, at best, about his roots, and often deliberately misled people about them. He was known over the years by different names at different times: Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Wilbury, Elmer Johnson, Sergei Petrov, Jack Frost. Sometimes he had grown up in a junkyard, was born in Kansas in a snowstorm, had been in the circus, or worked as a fruit picker for most of his teenage life in rural California with migrant workers. You get the idea—it was anything to get you off the scent of a relatively typical upbringing in Hibbing, Minnesota.

  Oscar Brand, who has had a folk music show on New York’s WNYC-FM on and off since 1945, told me that Dylan came on his show pretending to be someone from the Dust Bowl.

  “He just plain lied. He was a nervous wreck. I guess he didn’t like his own story much; it was never the same. He was very interested in where everyone came from, what their stories were. I think he was all nerves.” Brand smiled at the recollection.

  Dylan offers a more credible tale in his wonderful book Chronicles: Volume One. He came to New York, he says, with no money, but he got to know people who were willing to lend him a pad for varying lengths of time. He spent his days reading the books on their bookshelves. He says his education really began during those weeks and months in 1960 and 1961 when he read voraciously, everything from Plato and Sophocles to Salinger and Shakespeare.

  The songs were incubating. We would have to wait just a little while longer.

  WHEN I was on the road, it was rare that I was able to go to clubs and concerts to see other artists perform. I was usually singing six nights a week, two or three shows a night. So I was fortunate to hear Barbra Streisand sing in St. Louis in 1961 at the Crystal Palace. I was working with the Smothers Brothers at the Laughing Buddha, across the street from the Palace, in the Gaslight district. The club was a thriving musical mecca. Tommy Smothers took me to meet Barbra, who was then an up-and-coming diva but not yet well known.

  After we listened to Streisand, we went backstage. Barbra shook hands coolly and moved to her dressing room, elegant but aloof.

  “So, what do you think?” Tom asked me after we had met “the voice.” She would, of course, go on to have the career every girl from Brooklyn dreamed of. “They say she is going to be a big star.”

  “Well,” I replied, “I liked her, but I could think of some other material she might do.” Barbra was singing “A Sleepin’ Bee,” a song by Harold Arlen, and other chestnuts from the Great American Songbook that I considered passé at the time. I don’t remember what I suggested, but it was probably some Pete Seeger songs and perhaps an old Irish ballad. She made The Barbra Streisand Album two years later, with “A Sleepin’ Bee” on it. It won her three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. Always glad to be of service!

  On April 27, 1961, a day off from that four-week engagement, I flew from St. Louis to New York’s La Guardia Airport and took the bus to Greenwich Village in the rain. Spring was starting with a blast of wet weather. Guitar in hand, I trudged down the now-famous stairs to the basement of the Village Gate. I had been invited to appear on a television show to be filmed there with Josh White, Lynn Gold, the Irish folk group the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and Theo Bikel.

  Chip Monck, the Village Gate’s lighting magician, was setting up for the show that night. Chip always wore jumpsuits in psychedelic colors with pockets and zippers everywhere. Bill Graham once gave Chip an oversized zipper because he said Chip had zippers on his zippers. Blond, handsome, quick with a smile, Chip could indeed make us all light up beautifully with his craft.

  I sang “Anathea” and “Golden Apples of the Sun,” and when I exited the stage, a tall, good-looking man wearing glasses greeted me. He offered his hand.

  “My name is Jac Holzman,” he introduced himself, saying he was president of Elektra Records. “And you are ready to make a record!” he said.

  I looked up as he leaned in over me as though we were the only people in the room, as though we were a couple. He wore a jacket over a dress shirt open at the neck, and his hair was cropped short. He had a firm handshake and looked more like a college professor than a record mogul, from what I knew of record moguls, which was not much. He was scholarly-looking, and there was a glint in his eye that told you here was a man who knew his own mind, a man you didn’t argue with.

  When I met Jac, Elektra was ten years old. Jac had started the label in 1950 from his dorm at St. John’s College in Annapolis. His first recording was a group of lieder pieces, which included Songs of the Auvergne. The label’s co-founder was Paul Rickolt, Jac’s pal from St. John’s. Each man put up $300. Soon Jac bought out his partner and began to haunt the clubs in New York and the folk festivals. He decided that folk music was the way to go.

  The year I met Jac and he signed me to Elektra, the folk music world was abuzz with Joan Baez. Jac told Mark Abramson, his main producer at Elektra, that not having a “Maid of Orleans” rankled him.

  “We’ll find our own” was Mark’s response. Mark, the man who would produce many of my albums in years to come, would later tell me that I looked like a skier—“blond, athletic, strong forearms.” He must have been thinking of my brother Dave. I was certa
inly not a blonde, at least then! And what was that about those forearms?

  “Judy … looked like definitely a product of the West,” Mark said in Follow the Music, Jac’s book about the Elektra years, “and there was a certain fresh-air feeling to her, which was not really too much in evidence at Elektra, with people like Dirty Ed McCurdy.” McCurdy could become rather vociferous when he had a few drinks, and a little bawdy, some might add. He was also a wonderful songwriter from Canada who wrote “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.”

  Mark later told me that I was really the first person who was seen as someone to get Elektra on the map. “We were looking for our star!”

  It is funny to think that Jac and Mark were calculating, at that time, that anyone could be a star, let alone a (blond?) skier type with strong forearms. Jac would later say he had lucked out.

  “I hadn’t found my Joan Baez; I had found my Judy Collins.”

  IN June 1961, I signed my Elektra contract. I felt like I was on top of the world. I went to perform at the Indian Neck Folk Festival, at the rambling old Montowese House, a hotel in Branford, Connecticut.

  It was pouring that night. The rain slanted down through the pine trees and flooded the stage, which had to be mopped up after every act. Everyone was scrambling to keep his or her guitar dry. After I sang, I listened to Dylan give the first of many performances that would be recorded and archived for posterity. He sang three Woody Guthrie songs, “Talking Columbia,” “Hang Knot (Slip Knot),” and “Talking Fish Blues.” He left the stage with no particular fanfare, although the audience seemed to like him. At some point on that rainy weekend, Dylan and I both met Bob Neuwirth, who became Dylan’s close friend and road manager.

  Neuwirth emerged as a kind of folk icon himself over the years, a painter, singer, rogue about town, and protector of all things Dylan. For many years Bob took Bob under his wing, or vice versa, emphasis on the vice. I remember catching my first glimpse of Neuwirth and thinking, “Bad boy, long hair, dangerous to fall in love with, would love to get to know him but I dare not!” For a long time I kept my distance, sensing I could not have handled all that charm. Bob and I are good friends now, and I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the handsome devil with the angelic smile.