It's after 10:30 at night, and I just got back from a concert downtown. Judy Collins was in town for the night.
What do I say? Her voice is no longer the voice of a young woman (she is now 71) ... but it is sure and clear and she still has perfect control over it. There were little glitches here and there: the microphones didn't stay where they were put, and at one point (in the middle of her second song) she completely lost her way and had to ask her pianist for the next line. Her warm-up act didn't arrive, so she agreed to do two sets herself (although the second one seemed shorter than the first).
But she owned the theater, and all of us. Her talk between songs was probably a routine for her, but it came across as disarmingly fresh reminiscences, with mild humor at her own expense. At one point she said that she is working on a memoir, but that she and the publisher keep disagreeing over the title. He wants her to call it My Life and Music. She wants to call it Judy Blue Eyes: Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and the Music That Changed a Generation. She turned to the audience and asked, "Which title do you think would sell more copies?" [We all laughed.]
Sometimes her reminiscences (e.g., of growing up listening to her father rehearse songs for his radio show) would walk into Rodgers & Hammerstein songs that she would sing a capella for a stanza or two and then drop in the middle to go back to her story. There were songs from her most recent album, that probably nobody there had heard before. Certainly I hadn't. (Her first encore was one of these, a song about Paul Gaugin.) And there were pieces everybody knew: some to guitar, some to piano ... some, again, a capella. Sometimes these were done in a classic way that was instantly recognizable -- for example, "Send in the Clowns." But then her very last encore started with a tune I had never heard and lyrics I had never heard, something about birds fluttering past windowpanes and around houses, and about the time I was wondering where this was going she dropped an octave without warning and launched into "Somewhere ... over the rainbow ...."
I do admit that for the first two or three songs, right at the beginning of the first set, I was thinking "This is really cool, that I am here in person listening to a legend" ... but the music didn't feel particularly legendary. She was just a singer with a really good voice. But the cumulative effect grows on you. I kept wishing D had the seat next to mine, so that the romantic mood wouldn't have to go to waste ....
Looking ahead to the days after the concert ... I wrote all this to D and then asked her if she even liked Judy Collins. She replied that oh yes, of course she remembered Judy Collins ... she was the nice safe folk singer for people who weren't political enough to deal with Joan Baez. I let it go at the time, but it was the kind of gentle put-down that she was shockingly good at. And in the end, it was part of what contributed to my deciding I'd be better off without her. But this night I was dancing on air, intoxicated with music and love ....
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