Raised in a prominent Republican family in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Dellinger had turned his back on his family’s wealth and political position. During his college days at Yale, during the Depression, he had helped hobos, and had served as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War. During FDR’s administration he became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. He studied for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where his resistance to all wars deepened. He refused to show up for his physical when he was drafted in 1941, which landed him in prison as a conscientious objector. Later, Dave became an early and outspoken critic of the war in Indochina.
Dave Dellinger possessed a Gandhi-like serenity. He seemed calm, buttoned down, and unflappable on the outside, but he simmered with political passion. His antiwar philosophy had been an influence on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as nonviolent resistance began to take shape in the great leader’s thoughts. I had listened to Dellinger’s inspiring speeches at antiwar rallies for years, and that day at the Americana we embraced at the table, donuts in our hands and peace on our minds. He represented the cool head of a motley group. The New York Times called Dellinger “solid, sober, resolute, selfless, and always brave.” A gentle elder statesman in his coat and tie—but always the complete radical—Dave was an inspiration.
That morning at the press conference I sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which everyone knew at least some of the words to. We listened to Abbie and the others talk about their intentions: to change the thinking of those in power, and to do it with music and dancing, with a life-affirming message rather than one of confrontation. As naive as it sounds now, they hoped that the forces of beauty and art would reach people on an emotional level and help stop the war.
Only a few slightly bleary-eyed reporters turned out for this comically named organization. Had anyone known how this tiny group was going to capture the world’s attention, the press would have come in droves. Most of the news coverage treated the whole affair as a joke. The Chicago Tribune was there, but all they said was: “Yipes! The Yippies!”
These young people—and I was one of them—sincerely believed that they had the power to change the course of history. We stood as firmly for civil rights and free speech as we stood against the war, dedicated to what we saw as the founding principles of America. What could be more patriotic than supporting the Bill of Rights? Underneath all the joyous and seemingly frivolous antics of the Yippies, I identified with the seriousness of their commitment.
I have always felt that how you treat your friends, how you vote, and where you put your money and your energy are the things that count in your personal politics. From the very early days of my career, the music I loved connected directly to political and social currents swirling around me, whether it was voter registration for African Americans in the Freedom Summer of 1964, fighting for civil rights, women’s rights, or ending the war in Vietnam. My father would smile in appreciation that his training had been more than effective; these two worlds, music and politics, had forever become one.
Later that month I heard from my mother that Daddy had become ill in Hawaii with undiagnosed pains. He was hospitalized now at St. Luke’s, in Denver.
On the phone, Daddy sounded weak but he said he was better. When I talked to his doctors about whether I should cancel my concert plans to go to London that month, they reassured me that my father was not in any real danger. Daddy’s fifty-seventh birthday was on April 23, and I would go to Denver after London in mid-May to have a late celebration. I had written a song about him, called “My Father,” and I planned to surprise him with it.
Denver John, my youngest brother, was seventeen at the time. He had a week off from high school and I had invited him to come with me on the trip to London, a rare opportunity for sister-brother bonding. All of us have always been close. At home, my siblings were doing well. Holly Ann was a teenager, fourteen; David was twenty-one; and Mike, my oldest brother, was twenty-four. Denver and I were glad to hear Daddy was getting better. We were full of excitement as we boarded the plane for London with my band: Susan Evans on drums, Richard Bell on piano, Gene Taylor on bass, and my road manager, Charlie Rothschild.
But the morning before the scheduled concert in London, Denver John got a phone call. Even now, writing about it, I feel a shiver, and tears begin to well up. Our father had had an aneurysm all along, but no doctor was able to find it; when it burst, he died. Daddy was my mentor, the energy and inspiration for my life, for all our lives. We could not imagine the world without that ball of fire and enthusiasm, that talent, that emotional cheerleader. Now he was gone, never again to touch our faces so that he could see our smiles.
My father’s best friend (and my godfather) was Holden Bowler. Daddy and he had made a bet: the one who was left when the other died had to stop drinking. Holden was at Daddy’s bedside in the moments before he passed. He reported that Chuck said, “You won, old buddy.” A true friend to the end, Holden Bowler kept their wager and never touched another drop.
I canceled my show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and, in a daze, my brother and I flew home to the States for the funeral. We stopped in New York to pick up Michael and Linda Liebman, both of whom had been close to my family. I called my mom from my apartment as I was packing for the trip, putting my black hat and my best black coat and dress into a suitcase. We wept together over the phone, and then my mother said, “Please, no black. Don’t wear black. Now, your father will finally see all the colors in the rainbow.”
The roses we laid on my father’s coffin were a deep ruby red. I kept a dried bouquet of those blood-red roses for years, faded and fragile, a reminder to me of Daddy’s bright, eager smile, his wondrously quick mind, and the rare beauty of the man whose like I would not see again.
In the darkness he would read to us,
His fingers thwarting blindness
With the sound of flesh on paper
Brushing underneath the fantasy
Like the sound of wind moving through the house:
He soothed our fear of the night
With sighing hands.
—Judy Collins, “Trust Your Heart”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Smoke and Mirrors
I never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
—BRUCE COBURN, “Pacing the Cage”
I ARRIVED in Los Angeles on June 7, 1968, grieving over my dad’s death but eager to start my new album. The prospect of singing new songs, some of them my own compositions, renewed my sense of purpose and hope.
My producer, David Anderle, had put together a band of exceptional musicians for my new album, Who Knows Where the Time Goes: Jim Gordon on drums; James Burton, one of Nashville’s greatest, on pedal steel; Chris Ethridge of the Flying Burrito Brothers on bass; Buddy Emmons, also a stellar guitar player from Nashville; and Stephen Stills on lead guitar.
John Haeny, who was setting up the engineering for my new album and had recorded Wildflowers in the same Elektra studios, had once told me that the canyon neighborhoods of Los Angeles were the place to live—a nonstop scene of drugs and music, where huge talents such as Carole King and Brian Wilson might mosey in for a drink. You might see Van Dyke Parks riding around on his bicycle or Frank Zappa catching up on his grocery shopping at the Laurel Canyon Market in the neighborhood where Clara Bow and even Harry Houdini had roamed the winding roads and breathed in the scent of pine and eucalyptus. Tucked in among the little houses on the hillsides were other stars yet to shine: John Sebastian, the Incredible String Band, and Jackson Browne, among others.
It was there that I met Stephen for the first time at the party John and David threw for me at John’s house.
All during the evening, Stephen and I sang songs, trading verses, swapping harmonies. I remember leaning against the window and sneaking a closer look at this handsome man with his eyes of a blue different from mine. They were remarkable, and seemed to spin a myriad of colors within their orbs, more blues than one c
ould have dreamed. Stephen’s body was taut as a guitar string, his blond hair falling across his face. He looked at me and whispered that he loved the way I closed my eyes when I sang and that he loved my voice.
We drank and sang together, and I sensed Stephen was an old soul with a vivid imagination. He was just twenty-three, six years younger than I, but I didn’t think the age difference would be a problem. I worked to keep in shape, and always worried about my weight; even then I was dieting like mad, hoping to look like Twiggy. I had started exercising before it was fashionable, and I often weighed myself before and after I put on my earrings!
We traded stories, told each other about our lives. He was born in Dallas, Texas, and his family had moved a lot when he was growing up. He had gone to school in the Panama Canal Zone, in Costa Rica, and in Florida, where as a boy he learned to ride horses and fell in love with folk music and the blues. He had attended the University of Florida but dropped out to try his hand at making music for a living. He played guitar, sang, and wrote songs. After a few turns in Greenwich Village at the Cafe au Go Go and the Fat Black Pussycat, he moved to California, where he formed Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young and Richard Furay. Stephen said that he was still unhappy about the breakup of Buffalo Springfield but it was meant to be.
“I have some great news,” he said suddenly that night, looking up from the Martin guitar he had been playing and locking eyes with me. “I’m going to form a new group with Crosby.”
David Crosby, an L.A. singer and guitar player, was a longtime friend of Stephen’s. They had sung together in Les Baxter’s Balladeers in the early sixties before David joined the Byrds, with Jim McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and Gene Clark and had recorded many hits, among them “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
“So you and David are free and ready to rock,” David Anderle said, looking pleased.
“Yes, and Crosby, at this moment, is producing the second Joni Mitchell album,” Stephen said, smiling at me. David had heard Joni first in Coconut Grove, Florida, and produced her first album, Song to a Seagull, for Reprise Records after I recorded “Both Sides Now.” “David was able to get a second record for Joni. They’re over at Wally Heider’s recording studio as we speak, probably recording ‘Both Sides Now.’ Your hit.”
“But she wrote it,” I said in defense of Joni.
“But you did have the hit—admit it!” Anderle had a right to be proud of “Both Sides Now.” He had mixed and remixed the song for months after the album came out and finally got it right for radio, making him at least a partner in the song’s success. He turned back to Stephen.
“Is it going to be just you and David?”
“We don’t know—but for right now it’s just us.” I could see that Stephen was both agitated and excited about his plans. I didn’t know then that he was always like that, so gifted but so high-strung, often a stranger to the serenity everyone seemed to be searching for in those days.
I overheard John telling Stephen that he had seen me naked on his front lawn one morning when I had had some nude photos taken. I was probably too high to be embarrassed, or maybe I was excited that John had planted this image in Stephen’s mind.
We were all a little stoned, drinking wine mostly, though somebody was smoking a joint, I remember. I probably took part in whatever people were passing around, although marijuana always made me paranoid. John knew I liked to drink, so there were plenty of my favorites—Kahlúa and a bottle or two of something sparkling, probably champagne and rosé wine. I didn’t bother with Southern Comfort but would have it if there was nothing else. There were bottles of beer, which I never touched. Beer made you fat, I knew from experience. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that night at John’s, and there were drugs. I didn’t understand how drugs worked, actually, and the last time I had taken a pill out of a stranger’s hand in L.A. at a rock-and-roll party, the pill turned out to be Thorazine. I spent twenty-four hours rolled into a ball in the corner of my host’s living room. So I didn’t usually do drugs.
In those years, drinking the way I drank had fallen out of fashion. I pretended to like fine, sparkling pink wines and light drugs, but in reality I would have preferred a good shot or two of bourbon. I certainly had enough liquor that night, so I was feeling no pain.
A FEW days before Stephen and I met, the sunny optimism of the Los Angeles hills had been shattered by another assassination, that of Bobby Kennedy, who not two months before had spoken of healing after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
My friend Cookie was spending a few days with me in my rented house on Mulholland Drive. On June 5, he had been at the Improv, a club in L.A. where the Committee, a group from San Francisco, was performing. In those days the Committee included Carl Gottlieb (who would write the screenplay for Jaws), Mimi Fariña, and Rob Reiner. Their presentation on the night of RFK’s shooting included as part of the show a number of television sets that were airing local news. The actors had been using the TV as inspiration for their scenes when they realized that the news was broadcasting reports of Kennedy’s shooting. Everyone panicked, and Cookie raced to my house on Mulholland Drive.
I was getting Clark settled at our rental house when Cookie rushed in, stabbed the on button of the television set, and spun out a story about the shooting. Scenes of chaos at the Ambassador Hotel played out on the screen. Huddled in front of the screen, watching the chaos, we were mesmerized by this terrible news.
Cookie was unaware that his father, Alistair Cooke, had also been at the Ambassador Hotel to do an impromptu interview with Kennedy for the Guardian. Alistair had been let into the now-famous kitchen area by security and was waiting for Pierre Salinger to arrange an interview with the senator.
As Alistair Cooke wrote in his “Letter from America” column:
There was suddenly a banging repetition … like somebody dropping a rack of trays. Half a dozen of us were startled enough to charge through the door, and it had just happened.… There was a head on the floor, streaming blood.… And down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes, and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.
Cookie stayed the night as we watched the television on and off, waking and sleeping again, and then weeping when the news was confirmed by the papers the next day: Robert F. Kennedy was dead. Sorrow fell over Los Angeles and the rest of the country, gloom hanging like smoke, seeming to hide the sun.
Yet as I prepared to record with my band of minstrels a few days after Kennedy’s death, there seemed to be a rustle of conviction that we must do something to heal ourselves and those around us. It was the music that was always our haven and our gift.
THE new band began recording in the charming, wood-paneled Elektra studio. The whole place had the feeling of a comfortable, cozy home—a hippie home, with the same fairy-tale ambiance that pervaded everything about Elektra. The compound was a maze of whitewashed walls and spaces for offices, with a new, state-of-the-art recording studio. There, among the instruments and the brilliantly tie-dyed panels to absorb the sound, you could become lost, have a secret joint, kiss the drummer between takes, or have a nap (perhaps not a solitary one) while you were waiting for the band to return from a break. The offices and the studio were separated by a garden, which was nourished by a small spring spanned by a miniature bridge hanging with purple, orange, and white bougainvillea. Stephen kissed me for the first time in that garden as one of my first songs, “My Father” (with Van Dyke Parks playing piano), wafted out of the studio doors and swirled among the blossoms.
Inside the doorway to the Elektra offices, there stood a painted wooden horse—a pure white pony with roses and filigree around his mane—salvaged from some antique merry-go-round.
As our affair took flight in those heady days, Stephen said this was my merry-go-round, my pony, and we would ride our wild white horse together.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Swinging, Singing,
Murderous Sixt
ies
Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me
Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me
Before we get married some pleasure to see.
—Traditional, “Pretty Polly”
WE continued to record tracks for Who Knows Where the Time Goes in June 1968, and the music flowed quickly and easily. I was in love with the sound of Stephen’s guitar and his voice—in love, as they say, with love. After the first day of making music with him it seemed I could not remember a time when I had not known Stephen. He sang and played and drove me around the canyons and beaches of Los Angeles in his Bentley, and I fell deeper into the affair that he would chronicle in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
Something inside
Is telling me that I’ve got your secret
Are you still listening?
Fear is the lock and laughter the key to your heart
And I love you
The songs for my eighth album for Elektra were exciting, and the band was fabulous. “Story of Isaac” and “Bird on a Wire,” Leonard Cohen’s contributions, were beautifully played by Van Dyke Parks, with Stephen’s guitar wrapping around the piano part; “My Father,” the song I had written for my dad three weeks before his death, was poignant, and I couldn’t get through it at first without sobbing. How could I have found “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” in time for this album, when it was so perfectly honed following the death of my father? There had to be an overseeing angel who takes care of these things. I just had to let go and let the music and the love and the wine flow, and everything took care of itself. I was ready to catch the gems when they fell into my lap, and they kept on coming. By now I was officially eclectic and would try my hand at anything that touched my heart.
Judy Collins Page 22