Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  I called him again the day before I left for Chit Chat. I thought about him on the flight to Pennsylvania, and when I came home, Louis called me. In July we went out to dinner.

  On the inside of the wedding rings we wear is the date we met, April 16, 1978, the day the angels sent Louis. We have seldom been apart since our first real date, when we went to Orsini’s for dinner, except every now and then when he’s unable to join me on a concert tour. We talked all night over our chicken and mushrooms while waiters hovered, hoping we would leave. He saw me home and again left me at the door, promising to return, which he did.

  Into my life came the things I have always been looking for. Louis and I are friends, lovers, confidants. We read and talk; we go to the movies. We love all our cats, including the most recent, Rachmaninoff, Coco Chanel, and Tom Wolfe. And we laugh a lot. He is a loving, creative, talented man. He knows how to listen and has helped me in every way with my career and music.

  When Louis and I had been together for eighteen years, we were married at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in a wedding that celebrated our joys with five hundred of our friends and family. It was a sober wedding—not a drop of booze was served—and everyone seemed to have a wonderful time! It was a celebration of our life together, our devotion to each other, and the fact that since I met Louis, I have never looked back, never deceived him, never been unfaithful.

  Louis was the one I had been looking for all along.

  CLARK was nineteen and in the middle of a long stretch of drug use when I got sober. He was kicked out of Sarah Lawrence, then was accepted by Columbia, where he took Chinese calligraphy and semiotics. For five more years he fought the madness of his addiction, but in 1984, Clark finally surrendered and flew to Minnesota to go to Hazelden, the recovery center for addicts and alcoholics. His life changed at once, it seemed, and he began to live a happy, useful life, free of drugs and alcohol. He started to thrive, finding love. He and his wife, Alyson, had a beautiful baby daughter, Hollis, who is the apple of my eye. She is so like her father in every way—she looks like him, laughs as he laughed, walks and talks like him, a subtle reminder in every movement that she is her father’s child.

  But in 1992, the bottom fell out of Clark’s recovery. On January 15 Alyson found him in his Subaru station wagon, dead from asphyxiation. He had been drinking, and he made a tape of his last words.

  I feel the agony of that loss every day of my life. I adored my son. At times I wanted to kill anyone who may have been in any way responsible for the pain he was in. But I had to let go of blame and anger, for if I held on to it, it would destroy me.

  When he got sober in 1984, Clark had begun to write me letters. The only letters I’d previously received from him were scrawls from camp, the kind moms often get:

  Dear Mom,

  I am having a good time—I caught a fish, here is a picture of the fish.

  Love, Clark

  It is always difficult to describe to someone who did not know him the beauty that was in Clark. People who spent time with him always felt it. There was a joy and tenderness in this attractive, tall, redheaded boy, a quality of caring for others. He was a good friend with a great heart and a smile and the ability to tear at your emotions with his laughter and tears.

  He wrote me when I was seven years sober and he was celebrating fourteen months of sobriety.

  St. Paul, Minnesota

  Rainy Tuesday

  April 23, 1985

  Dear Mom,

  Thank you for your wonderful and thoughtful letter. I mean thoughtful in the sense that it’s nice that you found time to write and in the sense that there are some things to think about in there.

  Congratulations on your birthday. I can remember when you first got sober and boy I couldn’t believe you really did it! Then when you started trying to help me, I thought you were crazy! But you were actually being restored to sanity. You’ve changed so much. You’ve become a directed person in a way that you never were. I always had the feeling before you got sober that you couldn’t manage your life. (I’m not trying to be funny!) You were so vague and lacking in a true center, running around frantically, worried and unhappy. Now you have a calm centeredness and a directedness that is truly beautiful. Your strength and faith, found in (spirit), were something I couldn’t discount. They were such tangible facts that I couldn’t dismiss your sobriety as some kind of unhealthy fanaticism. I saw proof that sobriety works and I believe, as I’ve told you before, that a seed was planted in my heart—a belief in the possibility of joyful, rewarding sobriety.

  I know that my relapses must have caused you a lot of pain. I know I’ve made an effort with this amend. But I think that I somehow know better what kind of grief we feel to see someone return to active addiction now that I’ve seen a few of those and one suicide.

  And Mom, it must be really awful when it’s close family.

  Life is good. I love you and I thank you for being a swell mom.

  Love, Clark

  I wept when I found this letter again many years after he had sent it, many years after his death—a letter from the grave. Like the touch of his hand, like the dreams I have of him that have come in startling numbers over the years since, they reassure me that I am not separated from him in any but a physical manner. He is here in his daughter’s beautiful bright eyes, in how his name comes up often in the world, in the memory of his sweet soul. I will never be apart from him.

  When Clark died, I dug myself out of the pit of despair again, Louis by my side all the way. Each day I chose not to drink. And I chose not to take my own life.

  I make these choices anew every day, one day at a time, and on many days it remains the only thing I do that feels right. I find great comfort in talking to other suicide survivors—great peace, in fact, in telling them that there is a gift in every loss and that they can survive. I tell them my story, and tell them what I do, and hope that it helps. That way I can keep Clark’s legacy alive, and keep my own heart busy so that it will not break, though the breaking heart can be a healing heart as well.

  When my son died, I began to understand what heartbreak really was. It turned out I hadn’t had a clue.

  In Judaism, it is taught that there are three stages of grief to be endured. First there is weeping, for we all must weep for what we have lost. Second comes silence, for in the silence we understand solace, beauty, and comfort from something greater than ourselves. Third comes singing, for in singing we pour out our hearts and regain our voice.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The End of the Storm

  When the snow flies

  And the night falls

  There’s a light in the window,

  And a place called home

  At the end of the storm.

  —JUDY COLLINS, “The Blizzard”

  I HAD four more albums left on my Elektra contract when I recorded Hard Times for Lovers. It was the first album I made as a sober woman, and it would be an amazing experience.

  Charles Koppleman and Gary Klein, who had just finished working on Dolly Parton’s album Here You Come Again, were my producers. Charles is a man who loves great songs, and we had chosen a gathering of beauties, from Hugh Prestwood’s title track to Glenn Frey and Don Henley’s ballad “Desperado,” to the Rodgers and Hart classic “Where or When.” Elton John’s “Sweethearts on Parade” added an ironic and perfect look at stardom and what it is and is not. I had learned the lesson well and loved this beautiful song of Elton’s, who was, though I did not know it, in his own struggle with addiction and success.

  Louis and I and my band all headed to L.A. to record, where Charles had set us up in a huge suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My rooms were filled with flowers. Being in L.A. again terrified me, and in the studio I felt tentative, frightened that the presurgery hoarseness and laryngitis from the hemangioma would return, even though my surgeon had assured me that everything was fine.

  I brought Max Margulis out to California to stay with me for a few
days, to listen and help. I knew I did not have the old power and intensity back. It was enough, however, to know I was singing well. I felt tremendous relief.

  I fought, as usual, for the right sound on my voice, agonizing over the mixes with Armin Steiner, our engineer and, back in New York, remixing with another engineer to get what I wanted out of the recordings. Every day I was getting stronger, and by the end of November I was finally ready to tour.

  My first live concert after we completed Hard Times for Lovers was in a huge auditorium in Hartford. There were seventeen people on that tour, among them some of the best musicians in the business: Tony Levin on bass, Ken Bichel on keyboards, Hugh McCracken on guitar, Warren Odes on drums, and a trio of backup singers I called the “Fallen Angels,” darling young men who now are either sober or dead. I strode out onto the stage, into the lights, and it all came together.

  I have been trained to perform, to do live shows. Perhaps I needed the big sound of a theater with a fantastic audio system, but whatever it was, it was all there. The lingering fear was gone, the voice was everything it had not been and could be now—richer, bigger, more intense, and healthy.

  The crowd roared as I finished the set, and Gary Klein, my line producer on Hard Times, who had suffered through the sessions in California and gotten the best he could from my singing, ran in from the wings. He threw his arms around me.

  “My God, where did that voice come from?” he said, nearly in tears. “Finally, the Judy Collins I knew and loved is back!” I blushed, and he went on, “Why didn’t you sing like that on the record?”

  I had to tell him that it had not been possible then, but time was healing me, and the live concert had shown me where I could go. The feeling was amazing, as it had been years before the hemangioma had begun. Now I could come home to the voice I had prayed was still there. I was finally back where I belonged.

  PART of the pulse of a musical career is the periodic firing up of the artistic urges, which of course interact with the business demands. The clock ticks on through the years, pointing the way to a new adventure in learning new songs, writing them, putting thoughts and energies into focus. It is something that drives me, as it does any artist, to keep trying to do the best work I can.

  Between 1979 and 1983 I made two more albums, Times of Our Lives and Running for My Life. Sober, I had begun to write songs again, and on those albums there were many more of my own compositions. To be writing songs again was heavenly.

  But I struggled with the next album, Home Again, which featured Dave Grusin as producer. Dave had Academy Award nominations for the scores of Heaven Can Wait, Tootsie, and The Champ, among others, and was a good friend as well as a colleague. In the mixes, in which I was watching over every song, I wanted, as usual, to make all the vocals crystal clear and not to have them drowned out by the instrumentation.

  The record included “Shoot First,” which I co-wrote with Dave, and another of my songs, “Dream On,” as well as the title track, “Home Again,” by Michael Masser. I sang “Home Again” with T. G. Sheppard, a fine country singer from Nashville.

  By 1984 Elektra had changed presidents again, and the new man in charge, Bob Krasnow, wanted a “new look” for Elektra, which meant getting rid of the old guard—including my own particular genre of artists. In the preceding twenty-four years, my albums had achieved gold and platinum status in the industry (meaning many had sold over a million copies), I had had dozens of Billboard-charting songs, and I had been nominated for a half dozen Grammys, receiving Song of the Year Grammys for “Send in the Clowns” and “Both Sides Now.”

  Even all that success was not enough, and after Home Again was released, Elektra and Bob Krasnow did not renew my contract. For the first time in twenty-four years, I was without a record label.

  I was devastated, and that led me to start my own label, Wildflower Records. In setting it up, I tried to emulate my old mentor, Jac Holzman, and I often think, “How would Jac do this?”

  OVER the past four decades, Stephen and I, after those difficult years when we were in love and then parted, have somehow remained friends, and we continue to see each other from time to time.

  In 2007, someone found that old quarter-inch tape Stephen had made in the studio the night in 1968 after we recorded “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” and sent it to Graham Nash. Graham returned it to Stephen, who arranged for it to be released on Rhino Records as Just Roll Tape. Many of the songs about the fractured fairy tale that was our musical and personal relationship were on that tape, sung in his sweet, steely voice, accompanied by his poignant guitar playing. Stephen had recorded them in the dark in that white villa of a studio at Elektra, where not even John Haeny was a witness.

  Just Roll Tape contains the original acoustic versions of some of the most beautiful songs ever written, including, of course, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” There’s also a song on it I had never heard before, called simply “Judy.” My eyes filled with tears as I listened for the first time. The songs on this CD are rare jewels, a revelation. How strange that the world—and I—would have to wait decades to hear these raw, early versions of songs that Stephen had written, many for me. I wonder, would it have made a difference to our love affair if I had heard this recording of them then? Perhaps. They were amazing, and Stephen was amazing. But he had his secrets, too; this recording was one of them.

  I called him after I listened to the songs.

  “It’s like getting a valentine forty years later,” I said. I could hear his smile over the phone. I knew it was time to find out more about this man who had such an important place in my psyche.

  In an interview after Just Roll Tape was released, Stephen said: “There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. I’ve had my share of success and failure at all three.” Of course, our original romance was too hot to handle, too much for me. He was too young, and I was even younger in a way, shackled in many ways by my dependence on the Sullivanians, and of course by my drinking.

  On my next trip to California I had dinner with Stephen and his wife, Kristen, and my granddaughter, Hollis, who was then twenty-one. Stephen has seven children and he and Kristen have been married for fourteen years. One of his sons, Henry, was then thirteen years old. During dinner, Stephen and Kristen told us that Henry had begun to do some sculpting in clay. They thought it was odd, for Henry’s talent for sculpture seemed to have come out of the blue.

  I reminded Stephen of the head he had sculpted all those years ago and told him I still had it. He had totally forgotten. When I went home to New York the next day, I wrapped the delicate clay sculpture in bubble wrap and sent it off to him. I had a hard time parting with it, but I am glad I gave it back to the man who fashioned it, so his son can see how wonderful it is and know his father’s talent flows in his blood.

  In October 2009, Stephen and I recorded a song together for my 2010 album Paradise. Stephen was in town for a silver anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and we were working in my home studio on the Upper West Side, singing Tom Paxton’s “Last Thing on My Mind.” He wore a two-toned blue shirt, telling me, “This dark blue is for my eyes, and this light blue is for yours.”

  I was wearing tight black jeans and a cashmere sweater. My feet were bare, and Stephen kept looking quizzically at them while we rehearsed the song.

  “I remember those bunions,” he finally said between takes, nodding down at my feet. All this was happening while Louis, my wonderful, loving husband, took pictures of the two of us.

  “You used to warn me I was going to get bunions on my feet if I kept wearing those tight cowboy boots. So I had the bunions taken off,” he said. He looked at my feet again. “I see you haven’t done a thing with yours!”

  “How romantic!” Louis said, and we all laughed.

  THE thunder is loud and the lightning flashes as I make my way home from my concert in upstate New York. The rain is still falling, but I know it will take more than thunder and li
ghtning to keep me from finishing with a flourish. The inner wars, and the outer ones, go on while I pray and struggle; sometimes in the middle of a dark night of the soul I wonder how they became my wars to fight. And then I hear a voice that says, “Why not me?”

  Louis and I live a peaceful, loving, sometimes quiet life amidst the success and drama of our careers. We love spending time together; we laugh together, and when trouble comes, we weep together. Our romance is better than ever after thirty-three years. Louis’ presence in my life is a miracle and a gift after my long, dark descent into madness and alcoholism. I feel incredibly blessed.

  Throughout my life there have been kind strangers and flashes of good fortune. I’ve been given the beauty of dawn and dusk in hundreds of cities around the world. I think of the great songs that have carried me along, songs I have sung with you, and for you, all over the world—songs that have carried all of us in rough seas as well as tranquil times, songs that have healed our hearts and kept us going.

  After all these years, I still believe that music can change the world, and as long as there is music, the dreams will never die.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to John Glusman, my brilliant editor at Crown Archetype, who has been inspiring, patient, and wonderfully insightful. He has brought Sweet Judy Blue Eyes to fruition, talking me through the most difficult places, seeing around corners that I couldn’t see, and finding a way to keep the goal in sight; he has waved his incredible magic editing wand over the text, getting the arc of the story just right, bringing it all back to the music, where it belongs. Thank you, John, for all the care and time you have put into bringing Sweet Judy Blue Eyes home, and for your love of the songs and the people in the book. You have made all the difference.