JUDY, JUDY, JUDY
Folksinger, 80, is still making music ‘amid the strife’
When Judy Collins appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1969 the headline called her the “Gentle voice amid the strife.” Collins was a singer’s singer. She is 80 now, striking in crushed velvet, rhinestone-studded leggings and cowboy boots, with piercing eyes and a voice that breaks frequently into tinkling laughter.
She still plays more than 120 gigs annually and releases one album; her first, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, came out in 1961. Her latest is Winter Stories, in which her ethereal soprano is pitched to haunting effect against the gruff baritone of Norwegian singer Jonas Fjeld, and the accompaniment of American bluegrass band Chatham County Line.
Collins grew up in Colorado; her father was a blind singer, pianist and radio broadcaster, who nurtured her love of music. She trained as a classical pianist, but when she heard traditional folk songs, she says, “It was ‘OK, no more Rachmaninoff for me!’”
She made her way to Greenwich Village, where she fell into a burgeoning scene populated by the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez, with whom she has remained the best of friends. “Joan gave me a jacket for my birthday this year, it’s kind of red and sparkly. I said, we’d never have been caught dead in a sequined jacket in 1963. We’d have been chased off the stage with howls and screams and pies thrown at us. We had better look a little homespun in those days, even if (our clothes) were from Dior.”
In 1966, a friend introduced Collins to a little-known poet. His name was Leonard Cohen. he recorded Suzanne — an instant classic — and shortly afterward she persuaded the shy Cohen to go on stage for the first time, in front of 3,000 people.
“He was very reluctant. I introduced him and ... then he broke down in the middle of a song, came off and said, ‘I just can’t do this.’ I said, ‘You have to. I’ll go back out with you and we’ll sing it together.’ And people went crazy.”
Music is Collins’s life.
“It’s the same life I had when I was a little girl, where I was singing, playing the piano, going on my father’s radio show.
“I take care of myself. I exercise.
I don’t smoke and I don’t drink and I don’t scream and all that.”
For a period in the ’70s, Collins struggled with alcoholism, then in 1992, her only child Clark took his own life. She received a call from Joan Rivers (whose own husband had killed himself ). “She said, ‘You cannot stop working, because if you do that you won’t get over it.’ And she also said, ‘You didn’t cause it; there’s no guilt in suicide. It’s not about you, it’s about them.’”
Collins shows me where Clark’s name is inked on her left wrist, next to a tattoo of a swallow. “It reminds me of him all the time and the swallow is a good symbol of what he’s up to.”
Her son was suffering from depression: “Enormously popular as a reason for suicide, but anybody can come to the edge of the cliff and decide they’ve got to jump, no matter what the problem is.”
As a teenager she attempted suicide herself. “I grew up in an alcoholic family, where everybody wanted everything done, and done now and done perfectly ... I was 14 — old enough to know better, stupid enough not to figure out how to do it properly.” When the pills began to make her feel nauseous, she made herself throw up. “I was perfectly willing to die, but I was not willing to feel nauseated. My mother said afterward, you’re always trying to make people feel bad.” She laughs. “That’s probably why I tried to kill myself.”
Collins came to understand it was the creative process that would keep her alive. “It’s how to treat my own mental illness, because I had heavy, heavy depression even as a kid. And the suicide attempt, I think, was part of that. Whether it was practising the piano, learning a new song, keeping a journal — which I still do. It was all part of keeping me sane.”
She is already thinking of her next album, a collection of Joni Mitchell songs. Mitchell was a close friend, but has long since cut her off, for reasons Collins is unable to understand. “Joni is in her own world and she has her own scores, some sort of a checklist, that she thinks she has to settle. And I don’t know what it is.” Collins gives a faint smile. “I mean, I’d like to have a thank-you note from her.”
With Cohen, things were straightforward. “Now Leonard, first of all he was a good friend, a loyal friend — always presented me with all these songs he wanted me to record. He was generous to a fault, one of the most interesting people I ever knew, and a gentleman on all scores, except if you were having an affair with him, and then all bets were off. I never did, although so many people assume I might have done.
“... He was the smartest person I knew because he died ... before (Donald) Trump was elected, leaving us with his last album, You Want It Darker. We are royally screwed ...”