Sandy Denny’s song Who Knows Where the Time Goes has been much in mind lately, as I’ve listened while commuting to Judy Collins narrating her recent autobiography, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. Denny, who died in 1978 at age 31, has now been gone longer than she was here. Collins, who I think was the first American artist to cover Denny’s signature tune, is still in strong voice in her 70s. (She still looks and sounds great in this 2010 interview).
In Sweet Judy Blue Eyes, published this past October, the 72-year-old Collins offers a sharp memory but a generally forgiving view of her many interesting contemporaries in 60s and 70s music: Stephen Stills, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Arlo Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, to name just a few. She tells of a long-ago lunch with Janis Joplin, who, according to Collins, suddenly went off topic to confide, “You know, only one of us is going to make it. And it’s not going to be me.” She says in apparent bafflement about Joni Mitchell’s failure to keep in touch, “I thought we were friends.
Collins describes Leonard Cohen as a reliable friend, but remembers that Bob Dylan had a wicked sense of humor. Perhaps too wicked, as directed toward others. She borrows the book’s title, of course, from Stephen Stills’ song for her, Suite Judy Blue Eyes, about their painful breakup.
(For those of you who weren’t here then: Suite Judy Blue Eyes was a huge hit for Stills’ former band, Crosby, Stills & Nash, who performed it at Woodstock. Stills recorded a sparer and more private version of the composition on his own on April 26, 1968, but didn’t release it until 2007, on Just Roll Tape).
Throughout this memoir, Collins speaks plainly and unemotionally about the disasters that always underlay and sometimes inspired her music: a family and personal history of alcoholism; the suicide of her only son in 1992; the deaths of other friends and family members; unstable personal relationships; bizarre, cultish psychotherapy with the “Sullivanians” and others, who had no idea how to diagnose or treat her underlying problem with drinking; and Elektra Records dropping her after 25 years and several hits.
She does not apologize for errors; what she recounts, she says, is ” what happened to me,” though she acknowledges that other participants in events may have differing interpretations or memories of them.
A fine surprise at the end of the narrative, after the credits, is Collins performing five of her own compositions, accompanying herself on piano. Notably, four of the songs are elegies, to her son, her friend Richard Fariña, her father, and her mother, respectively: Born to the Breed, Albatross, My Father, and In the Twilight. The fifth song is Open the Door (Song for Judith), which may be an elegy, too, to the former self who drank so much and lost so much in consequence.
I haven’t listened much to Collins’ music for the past twenty or more years, but I had contemporaneously loved her Wildflowers and Who Knows Where the Time Goes albums. (I think I may still have them somewhere). A few bars of the latest version of Open the Door had me in tears. On some level, it appears, I do remember the old days, though mine were comparatively mild indeed.
I enjoyed listening to Collins read her story, with her rich voice and her characteristic lisp. Since listening to the book, I can better understand why she chose many of the darker songs in her eclectic repertoire over the years
I saw Collins in concert twice; once many years ago at Indiana University, and then again perhaps twenty years later at the Opera House in Lexington, Kentucky. At the first performance–before she stopped drinking in 1978–she was clearly impaired, banging her head on the music rack on her piano as she sat down, and slurring her words. It was still a fabulous concert, unsettling though her off-balance behavior was. At the later concert, perhaps in the 1990s, she seemed exhausted and distracted. Understandable, given the traumatic loss of her son in 1992. But she gave her audience a delightful concert, all the same.
I think I’ll go create a Judy Collins station on Pandora radio, and also download a few favorite tunes: her version of Leonard Cohen’s Joan of Arc, and of Ian and Sylvia Tyson’s Someday Soon; and the lovely lullaby, Pirate Ships.
