After half a century, love still lingers ...
STILLS & COLLINS: Everybody Knows (Sony) Verdict: Old flames relight the fire JOAN BAEZ: Whistle Down The Wind (Proper) Verdict: Breezy farewell
THESE days they are friends rather than lovers, but the enduring bond between Stephen Stills and Judy Collins forms one of rock’s more intriguing relationships.
The singers had a tumultuous love affair in the late Sixties, and their volatile romance worked wonders for their music — despite also bringing plenty of heartache.
The affair was commemorated by Stills in 1969, when he lit up the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album with his song cycle Suite: Judy Blue Eyes in a fruitless attempt to woo Collins back after she’d left him.
Judy was also the inspiration for Helplessly Hoping and So Begins The Task, while he was the focus of her 1975 album track Houses.
But despite speaking to one another in song, the pair had never made a full album together until now, and the soft-rocking Everybody Knows makes you wonder why it took them so long. With its title track, a Leonard Cohen cover, a knowing nod to private lives that were never that private, it owes its success to the creative spark that still exists between them.
Stills, 73, and Collins, 78, have plenty in common musically, despite the contrast between his gruff, ragged vocals and her tuneful, folk-tinged soprano. Both were part of California’s fabled Laurel Canyon singersongwriter scene and worked together briefly in 1968 when Stills played guitar on Judy’s Who Knows Where The Time Goes.
Everybody Knows — recorded with a tight LA session trio — revisits many of the songs that bind their lives together. The epic Suite: Judy Blue Eyes isn’t here, but So Begins The Task reappears, as does Judy’s poetic Houses. The former, a break- up song impeccably re-arranged by Stills, has lost none of its yearning power. Collins sings the latter piano ballad beautifully.
There’s a fresh take on the jazzy Who Knows Where The Time Goes, with Stills again on guitar, and a sprightly love song called Judy, written by Stills after the couple separated and only rediscovered ten years ago when he unearthed an old demo tape.
Adding light relief, there are some departures from the romantic narrative, with Bob Dylan’s Girl From The North Country acknowledging Judy’s folk roots.
The pair fall flat only once — on a workaday cover of Handle With Care, originally by The Traveling Wilburys: Stills sings George Harrison’s lines with Judy taking Roy Orbison’s parts, but the sublime ensemble piece is a hard one to interpret well. BUT
it’s the only false step. Following their stormy affair, Stills and Collins remained friends, with mutual affection replacing their youthful passions. Everybody Knows completes the circle.
■ JOAN BAEZ was a peer of Stills and Collins and, like them, she’s still making music. But, as the New Yorker, now 77, releases her first album in ten years, there are signs she is finally winding down.
This month’s UK tour is called Fare Thee Well, and the singer has hinted that Whistle Down The Wind could be her final album. If that proves to be so, it’s a fitting finale.
Bookending a solo career that began in 1960, it reinforces her reputation as a superb interpreter of other people’s material. In her early years, that meant traditional folk tunes and songs by her former lover Bob Dylan. Here, she tackles more contemporary material.
Among the highlights are the title track, one of two Tom Waits songs. She also covers Josh Ritter’s Silver Blade, a companion piece to Silver Dagger, the traditional song she recorded in her teens.
Baez is a seasoned campaigner for justice, but she ventures into overtly political terrain just once, addressing gun crime on The President Sang Amazing Grace. Elsewhere, notably on Mary Chapin Carpenter’s nostalgic The Things That We Are Made Of, her concerns are more universal.
Her husky voice has lost a little of its old clarity, but Baez is still an authoritative performer, with pedal steel guitar and mandolin adding country spice to her tuneful folkpop. Six decades after making her bow in the coffee houses of Boston, she’s preparing to bring the curtain down in style.