Judy Collins

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, welcome back to the Bob West Podcast. My
guest today he is the one to know me, Judy Collin,
you'd be glad to have I'm thrilled to be here, Bob,
thanks for inviting me. Okay, you actually played a gig
last night at City Winery. How did that come together? Well?
It was wonderful. I'm an old City Winery performer, and

(00:30):
so I've already performed twice since uh, March or April
May one, I guess May first. So it's been wonderful
to get back. And I was also in New Jersey
last week at a wonderful engagement in Eatontown. So I'm
back on the boards and my book is full again
of all those dozens and hundreds of concerts that were

(00:53):
booked last year when we went into lockdown, and so
they're all coming up now like Roses. Uh. So what
do you do during lockdown? I practice the piano, I
made lunch and dinner for the most part, looked for movies,
had had zooms with friends and with various business enterprise.

(01:16):
Started my own podcast called Since You've Asked, which is
coming into being I think in July July, the eight
and I have interviewed a number of people that I
have enjoyed being with. It's it's you know, I think
you will agree. I think I'm very attracted to your
podcast and to your wonderful array of exploratory talks with people.

(01:41):
And it is kind of a way of socialize, don't
you think, among other you know, I talked to my
shrink and I say, listen, I'm in a bad I'm
in a bad mood. And all of a sudden, no
matter what moods I start to podcast, it completely changes one.
It changes your mood. It's wonderful. So it's good to
be back on the wards and uh so that's what

(02:02):
I did in the in the lockdown here in New York.
We were here, I think we have I'm I'm terribly
unhappy about the losses and the deaths that we've had here,
and I know you've had them there, and I have
to say that we've in that in the light of
that that was going on, we've had a very privileged lockdown.
In fact, I've had a rest. I haven't had a

(02:24):
rest in about sixty years, so except for being sick
a couple of times. So it's been a real strange
kind of a gift for me. I've worked on all
my own songs which are going to come out soon
in an album, probably next year. So that's been very
totalizing to me. Wow. So, uh, he's not very busy,

(02:48):
you know, I'm busy. Okay, So what kind of movies
did you watch during the lockdown? Oh? Everything you can
think of the favorites. We just watched thirty episodes of Yellowstone. Now.
I'm a Western girl, so I love Kevin Cosner, I
love the rodeos, I love the mountains in Montana, I

(03:11):
love the Indians. I love the fights about land and
water and uh so that was a big part of it.
We watched all of a couple of big We watched
The Queen. We watched What's What's the early series about
King Henry the eight and the guy who played in
was very sin so it was distracting for a while.

(03:33):
We have one of our favorites, which I really recommend
to everybody, is called The Night Manager, and it's I
think six or eight episodes and it's a John Lacarae
book of course, taken into the into the theater of television,
and it is superb. I must say that was one
of our favorites. I would go back and watch. In fact,

(03:53):
we did, I think watched that twice. We had a
whole year, and then we went back and picked the highlights,
and we're giving them another run. I even watched my
I even watched my own movie. I can't listen to myself,
so good credit for that. Let me ask you something,
you so so upbeat invaluable. I'm kind of stunned. Is

(04:13):
this your normal personality? Yes, this is me. This is me,
you know. I was born an optimist, and my sister
always accuses me of taking on that that costume at
all times, not taking it off very often. No, I
have to be well. The first thing that you have
to do as a singer. I think the practicing is

(04:35):
initially the daily routine has to be done once a
day because you're a pianist, so you have to keep
the fingers in shape. You have to keep doing your
chair and doing your motort, and you have to keep
writing because if you're writing poems, you might see that
one or two of them come out as a sound,
so sometimes they are poems and they won't fit into
the lyric quality that has to be there for a song.

(04:59):
So they then you have to eat well. You're breathing
when you're singing, so that's good. That keeps your spirits up.
And I have to keep my My routine involves having
to exercise at least five times a weekend, usually uh
three or four miles of walking, sometimes five. So it's
the exercise and I eat well. I can't eat junk.

(05:22):
I don't Oh, we don't smoke anymore. I don't drink anymore.
So what's left but to have fun. Let's go back
a chapter. You say you're a Western girl. You certainly
grew up in the West, but you know, having you
pretty much lived in the city since then, is your
mind in the Western? Do you actually go visit the West?

(05:42):
For years, I have visited. I've gone on ski trips,
I've gone hiking ventures. I usually go to Colorado. That's
the place that my heart lies, and I've and I
have so such strong pull to Colorado a lot of
a lot of my writing. I just wrote a new
called new song called Girl from when I was a
girl in Colorado, and I think it's going to actually

(06:04):
be very strong piece in the album. I'm starting to
do it in public now and a few other things.
So yes, I live in the city. I've lived in
New York since nineteen sixty three when I moved here,
and I've been in the same apartment here in New
York for fifty years. But people associate me, Oh, I
love Los Angeles. I have roots there too, certainly musical roots.

(06:28):
And I've done a number of recordings there. And so
I think the ocean and the West. Uh, the West
in all its glory, has a great pulp. But I'll
tell you there's nowhere. There's nowhere like New York. Yesterday
night before last, we went to Monday night, we went
to an opening of a Renaissance exhibition of the Medici paintings,

(06:52):
portraits really and the The few days before that, we
went over to the met and we wandered for a
number of hours through the Asian Wing, which is one
of the great treasures of this city. And of course
I have friends here. I have roots here. I know
all where all the good restaurants are, and some of
them are still open by God, and so that's been

(07:15):
a treat um I have. I have all kinds of friends,
you know, in l A. Well, the truth is, I
didn't move to Los Angeles I did work there. I
had an affair there was a very important affair with
Steven Stills. But I never moved there. I think I
would be dead if I'd moved there. I'm too susceptible
to the rhythms there. And it was the age of

(07:36):
drugs and overdoses, and I would have been right there
in the middle of it. And I in New York.
I had my therapist, I had my my lovers, and
my husband now of well, my my life partner, but
and my husband and my life partner of forty three years.
So New York is where it's at for me. There's

(07:56):
nothing like it. It's stimulating. My friends are not all decisions.
Some of them are painters, some of them are writers.
Some of them are just weird. So you know, Colorado,
Denver's in the flats and then in the mountains. Are
you more of a mountain girl or do you like
to see the mountains in the distance. I'm a mountain girl.
I had when I was a teenager. I was living

(08:20):
in Denver, of course, and when I was starting to
have those summer jobs, I started out working at a
place called Sportsland Valley guest Ranch over on the other
side of birth it well, I started skiing. Of course,
my brother's skied all the time. I had to practice,
so I was not up on the slopes as often
as they were. So I'm not as great as skiers there,

(08:42):
but I'm a very I'm fifty five or sixty years
of skiing, and you know, it does teach you how
to ski. So I'm a mountain girl and working in
in the mountains, uh at at guest ranches, and then
after I got out of high school and went to
college for a year, had a job in Rocky Mountain

(09:05):
National Park running running a wilderness site in the Rocky
Mountain National Park which was called Friend Lake Lodge. It
was a lodge which had been in existence since nineteen ten,
and when we got there, we were the first people
to run it for a couple of years because nobody
wanted to live there without electricity, which we didn't care.

(09:27):
And I can live by starlight or moonlight or firelight anytime.
And it was really the event of a lifetime. Really.
I had to bake pies and bread on a wood stove,
and I got by the end of the summer, We're saying,
you know, you really can't get a decent meal without
cooking it in a was so so I'm very I

(09:49):
very much romanticized the Rockies. Yes, things have changed. I
tried to buy that place, but the government had started
Operation sixty four, which was intend to move all of
the commercial quotes commercial enterprises out of the National Park.
So we lost that and I would have wound up
working for the parks. I was probably if I hadn't

(10:11):
started singing songs for money. So when was lost? Time
you skied? I'm a big skier in Colorado. I love
I love skis, you know. I I skied pretty much
every year either either Veil or Aspen or Winter Park
and primarily those places. And about four or five I
have I decided that I really had to give it

(10:33):
up because I couldn't afford to have another injury, frankly
because of my schedule, because I'm on the road. Because
I just couldn't do it anymore. It's too dangerous. It's
a dangerous sport. And I have I have a um
A replacement shoulder, I have lots of pins in my legs.

(10:53):
And uh, I really said to myself, it's after the
last big one. And I went back after the show
to replacement, and I skied for a few more years.
But I love it, love it, love it. But I'm
not going to ski across country. It's there's no no
fair comparison. And I like the speed and the wind,
and I couldn't agree more. The freedom. You know. The

(11:16):
great thing about skiing, I'm like tennis or something. At
any ability level, you can reach your limit and both
enjoy it and be scared. Right exactly, So these injuries
were all as results of skiing. Yes, but that's why
I think so. Yes, I'd like to go back, and
who knows? I may, I may, I may go back

(11:38):
because I have a brother who's a ski instructor still
at Veil, and oh yes, Dave has hung in there.
You know, Dave's life consists of getting injured in the
winter and then spending the summer rehabbing. That's his life.
He's in another one. They've taken one of his shoulders
apart three or four times. They're giving up trying to
find place, think places to put all this gear that

(12:01):
has to go back there when he gets an injury.
But he's still at it Veil and he still has
has clients. I mean, he's got to be seven years
younger than I I am. I thinking I made it too.
So he's whatever that is, seventies something. But he also
works all the time because he's a great builder. He
built about ninety of the maybe you know them, the

(12:22):
pine Um houses in Veil in the early sixties, and
then he went off to went off the tracks for
one then he came back and they all they all
have to keep Dave Collins on board because he knows everything,
you know, he has the he's like being a national
treasure in Japan. He knows all the things to do
with all the building tricks and all the things that

(12:44):
people need to have done when they're building or rebuilding.
And so he promised me that maybe next year he
is going to retire, but I don't believe it, and
certainly not from skiing. Okay, so you say that you're
eighty two. We live in a world where every but
he's lying about the rangel though now you can look
at you're so upfront. So how do you feel about aging? Well,

(13:08):
it's a fortunate journey because you could get off anywhere
along the way, and I haven't. I I like what's
going on in my life a lot. I like it
I am always willing to say that somebody might be
right instead of wrong. So I'm open to improvement, and

(13:32):
I think that's never ending. Learning is never ending, and
curiosity is never ending. And I live in a very
interesting world which we all do challenging, certainly as challenging
as the sixties world, though, I mean, nothing nothing comes
up to Vietnam. Nothing does. There was a big piece
in the Times, I don't know if you saw it

(13:53):
last week about it was. It was about ten pages,
well pages, uh, and about the big report that was
came out in nine one about all of the lies
and all of the horrible Anyway, nothing really beats Vietnam,
and frankly, we'll never get over paying for it. I

(14:16):
said all the time as we were marching against the war,
I said, you know, this is this comes with the price.
This it's not just the people that are dying, both
in Vietnam and our American soldiers. It's it's it's a price,
and it's gonna it's gonna come to one of these days. Okay,
So how is your health other than these physical injuries

(14:37):
with h you know, the shoulder, etcetera. Perfect for a
check out. Okay, So you could you can live for
another twenty years? Twenty years is what I'm counting on.
Maybe I come from also a line of people who
live a long time, and I have an aunt who's
a hundred now, and some of my mother's aunts and
uncles from uh the Bird line, in the Cope line

(15:00):
of her family. The Birds and the Copes live a
long time hundred and four hundred and five. So who knows. However,
I'm getting I'm in the game for today. That's plenty
for me. Well how do you feel, I mean, I'm
fourteen years younger than you and I'm experiencing it. How
do you feel about your friends and people you know? Passing?
I hated, I hated. I lost a couple of friends

(15:24):
to the COVID Dynamic. Wonderful writer named Patty Bosworth was
a very close friend of mine. She was one of
the first to could leave. She was finishing a book
on UH Paul Robeson. I'm hoping that it's coming out.
I think her publishes. Her publishers said in her oh

(15:44):
bit that she was that it was ready to roll.
I haven't seen any announcements about it. And that was
a year ago that she died A little over a
year ago. But of course, yeah, it's terrible. I mean,
people die and the ones you don't expect to die,
and you know, only the only the young die young. Okay, now,

(16:08):
needless to say, just talking about the music business, it's
completely changed from the sixties and seventies from today. And
one of the big things is stars were much bigger
back then. Without going into all the technology, why does
this affect your outlook? It's like, okay, you have all
this visibility in the sixties and seventies and nobody has

(16:31):
that level of visibility or do you just put your
eyes forward and keep going. Well, the work is what
it's all about, of course, the contact. It's interesting because
during the pandemic I did too viral full fully operational shows.
I went to UH September twenty three. We got in

(16:54):
the car in our masks and we drove to We
were driven to Norfolk, Virginia, where I sang to an
empty theater. It's called the Chrysler Theater, gorgeous theater. And
we stayed in a hotel. There was a hilton there
was full. Fully, we didn't eat any food there. We
took all of our food with us, but we had

(17:14):
a wonderful time, and I sang into this gorgeous, gorgeous theater.
I don't have a problem with that. I love my audiences.
But frankly, after all the years of television and recordings
in recruit recording studios where you don't have an audience,
and I'm a radio girl. I grew up my father
was in the radio. He had a radio show for
thirty years, and so I was on the show and

(17:37):
I listened to the show, and I was used to
I'm used to singing wherever it is that I am,
with or without an audience. Then I did a big
town Hall show which I just signed about a hundred
and fifty posters from that show, which I did here
at town Hall in January, again empty theater. Well, I've
been in town Hall since nineteen sixty four. I've been

(17:58):
singing there, and town How asked me, would I repeat
some of the material that I did in nine, which
involved a number of songs by Tom Paxton, Billiatt Wheeler,
Bob Dylan, and so we did a repeat of a
number of those things. Of course, we mixed in the
current some of the current songs, but it was fantastic

(18:21):
and of course, town Hall is a gorgeous theater with
or without people in it, and it's historic, and it
sort of resonates. It gave me a chance to talk
about to change, to sort of upgrade my my spield,
you know my spield. I'm funny on stage. I take
the time and the energy to be funny. I have

(18:43):
done this for a long time, and to tell stories,
because it came through working at the Carlisle in New
York a lot and having that weekly you know, seven
six or seven days, six days a week, going in
and talking while you're working. And of course I have
a lot of stories having lived all this time and

(19:03):
known a lot of people, and had a lot of lovers,
and and had a lot of strange things happened to me.
And so I was very comfortable. But I also went
back through the history of town Hall and talked about
some of the people. The people that first open town
Hall in New York was the Suffragettes. They hired the

(19:24):
theater and they started out in nineteen one. Was it
twenty one? I think so. And then everybody you can
think of performed there, saying they're played in the my
my teacher, Dr Brico, when I say that I watched
one of my watched my movie during the lockdown. I
meant it. I made a movie which was nominated for

(19:44):
an Academy Award in nineteen seventy five, about my teacher,
Antonio Brico, and she I'm on the stage there where
I had been in nineteen sixty four, almost fifty years before,
and she had been on the stage during the war
because she had her own orchestra in New York which
played at Town Hall and at Carnegie Hall. So it

(20:06):
was a wonderful experience, and I'll tell you it's draw
It was a very successful experience, and it gave me,
referring to your idea about exposure. A lot of people
have watched it, and town Halls got very excited. In fact,
they made not a CD but a vinyl. So I
just saw beside vinyls and and posters. I mean, can

(20:29):
it get any better? I don't know. Okay, let's go
back to the beginning. You're you know, and some of
this I know from Wikipedia, as opposed to just living
and knowing your career from having experienced it. So you
grow up in Seattle at age four, you move right.
We moved to to Los Angeles where my dad got

(20:49):
a job at the CBS radio station in Hollywood. And
so those years from from already five to forty nine,
we're in in Hollywood and in the midst of stardom,
and that's where he met got got all kinds of

(21:12):
stars that he met. But he also got um involved
with people who what's the diet guru Gaylord Houser. So
from then on we ate right, you know, we didn't
need any white things. We didn't need any any white
rice or white bread. And he was always on a
health kick, so that I'm sure that helped everybody. And

(21:35):
then after Denver, after Seattle and then Hollywood, we moved
to Denver in n Now, your father was blind. He
was he was blind from the age of four, and
he had I think, a stunning career and really life.

(21:55):
He was He was brilliant, he was funny. He he
read everything in Braille. He thought, if you hadn't read
Moby Dick by the time you were seven, there was
something fundamentally wrong with you. And so I got rid
the Russians and Ruskolnikov and and Mark Twain, and I
grew up in a literate and musical household that was.

(22:17):
There was none like it. And I played the piano
from the age of about five, maybe four and a half.
But let's go back at chapter how did your parents meet? Ah?
They I had my mother right out her a story
of her meeting my father. And and she was in Seattle.
They broth in Seattle. She was one of nine kids.

(22:41):
She was in her early twenties, well I think she was.
She was twenty two, maybe three, and she was in college.
And she got on a bus to go home, and
this fellow was there, she said, dressed nicely, dressed in
and she noticed he sat down and began pulled out

(23:04):
a very large book and began running his hands over
at which at which point she realized he was blind.
He didn't have a dog, he didn't have a cane.
So there was only his appearance with the Briale book
that gave her the clue. And when she got up
to get off, he got up, got up to get off,
it's the same spot. And she tried to help him,

(23:27):
you know, she said, can I give you a hand
or something? And he brusquely refused that. He said, I
don't need any help or something. Then it turned out
that he was walking in her directions, and he was
going to a club called Kenny's, which was on Queen
Anne Hill, right near her parents home. And they started
talking and he said, why don't you come and see me?

(23:49):
And they did, the family and her sisters and her
best friend, Eleene. They started to go to Kenny's to
hear daddy play the piano and say. My father had
a gorgeous voice, and he sang all the Rodgers and
heart wonderful hits of the day. And he said to her, now,
I'm having my radio debut next Saturday night, so I

(24:09):
hope that you and your friends and your family will listen.
So Eileen and she and Aline, her best friend, sat
down in front of the old Pine Emerson Walnut radio.
You know, the huge thing that you should fill up, Yeah,
the console. And in the middle of this performance that

(24:30):
my father did, he was singing, U been so long
since yo, you went away. I think about you every day.
My body, my body remember it. Your buddy misses you.
And my my mother is in tears. And Aline said,
what is wrong with you? And my mother said, that's

(24:51):
the man I'm going to marry, and she did. She
went home and told her parents, I think she told
her parents before she told my father, and so, so
then you, uh, you start to take piano lessons. Do
you like playing the piano? Do you practice? I practice
all the time. I have to. I practice as I
once asked my mother if she had to force me

(25:14):
to to play, to practice, and she said no, I
had to remind you to wash your hands. Because I
was also a tomboy. I mean I was out in
it all the time, you know. I was always a
running around town. Okay, And when did you start to
be singing? I sang right away, I have. My first

(25:34):
performance was in Butte, Montana. My dad was a big
hit on the radio, and when he lost he lost
his job on on the on the Seattle radio station,
but immediately was out on the road with something called
National School Assemblies, which was something devised by f dr

(25:56):
Um to accommodate music Asians and communities which needed entertainment,
and so it was a whole big deal. It was
something that operated all over the country. But he was
doing the north western route and so I was in
the car in the big Buick which my father named Claudia.

(26:17):
From the age of two and a half or so
and three and we would drive every place and we
wound up. I mean, the Northwest goes only so far,
but we wound up in Butte, Montana. And one night
he was singing and we came to the intermission and
he said, do you want to sing something? Because I
was already singing, he would play the piano for me
and I would sing. So I said sure. I was

(26:38):
very excited and I've never been asked to do that before.
And I said, so what should I sing? And he said, well,
you should sing something, you know, which is always a
good idea. So I sang I'll be I'll be hung
for Christmas. You can count on me. And of course

(27:00):
it was a big hit. And it was also April,
but that was the first of my performances and about
three maybe, yeah, close to three. So you're in school.
You go to regular public school? Oh yeah, oh yeah,
oh the best public schools, by the way, I did
go to them. Were you known as the singer? Did

(27:23):
people say, oh that to Judy, she's the singer. Yes,
oh yes, I sang at the school shows. I sang.
I played the piano and sang on my father's radio show.
At my school whatever I was in the choir as,
the church choir, the school choir. I sang in the
opera courses I got when I when we moved from
l A to Denver, my father found me a new

(27:45):
teacher and it just turned out to be Dr Antonio Brico,
who was this wildly famous dynamo conductor and pianist. And
she did, of course, was always doing opera. So I
was sang in the operas y Poachi and Onyagan and
so forth. And I played the piano, and I of

(28:07):
course was going to be a great pianist, she thought.
And so the first thing I did was the first
thing she did was to hand me the the manuscript.
I was going to say, the manuscript, the whatever they
call it, uh to the Mozart to piano concerto. This
was when I was eleven, and she said, I want
you to start memorizing this immediately. And so I played

(28:30):
with her orchestra two years later and played the Mozart.
So I had to practice all the time. Okay, but
when you were practicing, what kind of student were you
and how did you fit in in school? Were you
a loner? Were the leader of the group where you're popular?
I was very popular for lots of reasons. Um, I

(28:52):
was fun, I had liked people, I got along with people,
and I was always doing something about me, playing in
the shows or and I liked my teachers. I was
not great in algebra, but I was very good in geometry,
which I think is the clue of why I do

(29:14):
what I do today, because geometry is really about finding
your way, and a lot of what I do is
I travel, and I travel. Of course, I do about
a hundred and twenty shows a year normally, that's my normal,
uh routine, and I've done that for years, well since

(29:35):
two thousand and eight. Before that, before the crash, I
was probably se shows a year, and now it's twenty.
That's because finances have changed in the music business. And
so I was. But my two friends, my two best
friends who are still I'm still in touch with, and
we're all the same age, which makes it easier. But

(29:57):
they live in different places. Ones on the West Coast,
ones in Tacoma, ones in Norfolk, not Norfolk, but we're
all uh, I don't remember, it's a Confederate town and uh.
And so we've been friends since we were in grade
school in Denver and then in junior high in high school,
we formed a group, a trio, and we called ourselves

(30:21):
the Little Reds. Oh, everybody else called us the Little Reds. Two.
It wasn't it wasn't political as it would have been
if we were here in New York. But we were
called the Little Reds because we did a version of
Little Red Riding Hood. And I sat at the piano
and I made up the themes of Red Riding Hood
and the wolf and the grandmother, and and the girls

(30:44):
danced the story, and I played it and told it
on the on the piano, and that's what led. And
I'm I'm at this late date in my career, in
my life, I have put together that really it was all.
The rest of the music was going to be there anyway.
I was always going to be playing the piano. I

(31:05):
was now. I was learning rockmaninof to play with my
teacher's orchestra. And but the girls and I needed a
new piece of of of we needed a new story
because we've done this everywhere and done at the all
the clubs, you know, the Elks Club and the Kawana's Club,
and the and Lowry Air Force Base and for Simmons

(31:29):
General Hospital, and we even went to the Brown Palace
where we met one of those famous movie stars. Can't
remember his name right now. That's the only thing I
have to complain about this. Once in a while a
name slips my mind. It wasn't Tony Curtis. Maybe it
was Tony Curtis. So we needed some new material and
I was supposed to be playing this rock mining off

(31:52):
piano concerto, which I was gonna do with my orchestra.
I was about fifteen and a half now, and uh,
but I got up and went over to the radio
and turned it on. And you know, my father sang
all of the great American songbook material, but he also
every once in a while he'd break into, oh oh,

(32:15):
Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are called. He'd do
a little Irish or English melody. And I turned on
the radio and I heard the Gypsy Rover, and I
heard the next week, I heard Barbara Allen. So those

(32:35):
two songs locked it into my brain that this was
the music I was going to go after. I didn't
know anything about folk music, or about the folk revival,
or about any of these people. But down at Wells
Music when I went to buy this record of the
Gypsy Rover, which was It was in the soundtrack of
an Allen lab movie called The Black Night, so it

(32:57):
was very popular. It was movie great success. And when
I went into Wells Music, the guy said, well, you
know what you're looking for? You here it is. I
have it. Yeah, I have it. So I bought it
with my babysitting money and he said, we'll see you
around on the walls. See all these albums this is
there's the Classy Brothers, and there's Josh White over there,

(33:22):
and there's Pete Seeger and there's Gene Richie. I said,
what is that and he said his folk music? And
I said what he said, it's folk music. And that's
where I began to see my life opening up before me.

(33:45):
You graduate from high school, then what do you do? Well,
this was before that, I understand, but I want to
get back to that with context, into the full folk music.
So by the time I had graduated from high school,
I had, first of all, I been um, my boyfriend
was this guy that I married, and we've been having

(34:07):
our love affair for a couple of years already. But
I had already memorized and learned and gone to the
gotten that my calluses on my fingers to play the guitar.
And I had a guitar now, and I went to
all the folk music meetings in the folk Folklore Center,
and I met Lingo, the drifter who played all the
songs of Witdy Guthrie. So I had that in my

(34:30):
bag of tricks, so to speak, and I sang it
every place I went. I took the guitar, I sang.
I went off to a year of college in this
dreary little well. I shouldn't say that, insulting a college
in southern Illinois. I don't know how I got there.
I think my mother got me a scholarship from one
of her peo groups, some some Unitarian gathering of souls

(34:54):
who had who got together and got me some sort
of a scholarship. Anyway, came back from that at and
that's when I went to the mountains with my husband
to be, and we got married in the mountains. And uh,
I just would make bread and pies on a woodstove,
and then I sit on the porch and play this
land is your land. So that's how it all began

(35:16):
to unfold. So how did you get from the mountains
to the east coast? I had uh when we were
finished with the mountains, and we tried to buy the
fernlike Lodge. My husband was now in graduate school at
the University of Colorado. We moved back down to Boulder.
We got a little apartment in the basement. I had

(35:38):
my first my only son, Clark, who was a little baby.
And I had a job. I worked at the university
in the filing department. And my husband, of course, was
in school, and he had a job. He had a
paper route at four in the morning, and it was February,
and he said he came in put on his boots.

(36:00):
It was snowing. Of course, it's always snowing in Colorado.
And he came in and he said, he looked at me,
and he said, you know, I was going off to
file papers at the university later that day, and Mrs
Chingley was going to take care of the baby. And
he said to me, why don't you get a job
doing something you know how to do. You've always been

(36:22):
a musician. You have all these songs. Look, I had
no clue that you could get a job singing these songs.
I mean, there was no indications that I didn't know
anything about that world. I knew all those people that
made records, But I thought records were for learning songs.
That's what I figured. And so I called my father

(36:44):
and I said, what about this? Do you know anybody
up here and Boulder that Do you know anybody who
knows anything about this? And he said, yeah, let me
let me make some calls. So people will tell you
that all the time. Let me make some calls. But
he did, and he found this friend of ours from
Denver who knew all about the clubs and Boulder and

(37:04):
had this connection with a couple of the owners of
bars and restaurants. And so I got a job at
Michael's Pub in March of nineteen fifty nine. And I
came home with a job and a hundred bucks a week,
which was a lot of money in nineteen fifty nine,
when I'd been making forty five cents and a bottle

(37:28):
of Coors beer for working in the college. So I started.
And in those days, you know this, you know a
lot about this, this business, Bob. So you know that
in those days it was really a matter of word
of mouth. It wasn't even agents or gatherings. It wasn't

(37:50):
really morse. It was you know, you're saying at the
club for a few weeks. And the guy who owned
the club told the next people down the road, oh,
you know, she we got we sold some tickets since
she did well, and so on. So that started it.
And right away I was singing at the Gilded Garter
in CenTra City. There was Bob Bob Dylan who was

(38:13):
then called Robert whatever his name is, Zimmerman. He was homeless.
He was trying to get a job singing at everybody's
hooting atis. You know, you'd get to sing three songs
in a row. Uh. And then I when I got
to New York a couple of years later, he was
there in New York, same homeless as well. It was

(38:35):
six one when I got here, so he still had
not changed his name, and I thought he was pathetic.
I thought, oh my god, he's singing these old witty
Guthrie blues. I thought, badly, badly chosen, badly sung. I
couldn't believe it. Then one day I opened up the
Bible of folk music that's called sing Out. It was

(38:56):
a little tiny pamphlet in those days. Now it's a great,
big piece of literature. It looks like a life magazine,
compared to what it used to look like. Anyway, there
was a song after I have a few drinks with
him and heard him sing at the hooting Nanny and
I think he was opening for uh Robert Johnson or

(39:18):
one of the one of the blue singers. After I
had closed at Girty's Folk City and uh, so I
looked at this little book and there was this song
printed out. It said blowing in the Wind. Nice title,
I thought, and I read the lyric and I was
then the Then they printed the melody. I said, oh
my god, this is this is brilliant. And at the

(39:41):
bottom it said Bob Dylan. And I had known that
he had changed his name to Bob Dylan, and I
thought there has to be some mistake here, so I
wrote him a fan letter, which of course he didn't
get because he was homeless. But still, but of course

(40:01):
I became a complete um wreck over his music. I mean,
I just thought he was and I recorded him right away.
I recorded well. One of the songs that I sang
at town Hall in January was the Lonesome Death of
Hattie Carroll, which when I heard it in sixty two,

(40:24):
I said, well, I have to sing that song. It
is one of the great songs of all times, and
it is, and of course it's as appropriate today as
it ever was. Okay, let's go back. The folk scene
has really been lost to time. Most people think popular
music started with the Beatles, but for those of us
who were older and you certainly lived through it and

(40:44):
were part of it and uh before me. But it
was such a big scene. They even had a show
on TV hood Nanny, So can he give us a
feel of what the folk music scene was like and
how that developed? It was amazing. There was a shift
in the culture which had to do I sink with

(41:09):
the guitar and the singer songwriter, and thus because previous
to that, in the fifties you had to have a band.
I mean I had a job with the with the
band singing Rogers and Heart when I was sixteen getting dressed.
I was under age, so they had to get rid
of me. But because I had to sing in bars
and I wasn't able to go in. But before fifty

(41:32):
nine sixty, before the Newport Festival which started in fifty nine,
you had to if you if you were going to
go anywhere, do anything, you had to have a band.
You had to have a uh, one of the Rogers
and Hart songs, one of the new songs from the
shows in New York. And you had to have all
the accouterments that surrounded you, orchestras, soloists, long dresses, and

(42:00):
all of a sudden there's this crop of kids playing
guitars and singing songs. You remember that Woody Guthrie and
Pete Seegers started their lives as protesters, as people on
the edge, on the outside of the inner circle. And
they were originally writing songs to raise money for the unions.

(42:21):
And that's what where their hearts were, and that's what
they were doing. Sometimes people forgot about that in those esoteric,
pristine years of some of the some of the Newport years.
Because I even was on the board of Newport. As
I said, I moved to New York in sixty three.
Just one second. What was the motivation to moved to
New York? I had? Um, I was in the hospital.

(42:48):
My my marriage broke up in sixty two. And what
happened was that the marriage broke up and I also
got sick. Just just since we're getting there, why did
the marriage break up? Um? Well, we were awfully young
when we met and I think that over the course

(43:09):
of my growing career and the fact that it was
very hard on on motherhood and being married, I just
think we didn't get along anymore and we weren't going
to stay together. And I left New York to go
out to Tucson to sing after I opened actually for
Theodore macall at Carnegie Hall in sixty two in October,

(43:32):
and then I got on a plane for Tucson. And
when I got to Tucson, I was working at a
little club called ash Alley, and I was already having
trouble breathing. My lungs were gurgling, and I didn't want
to do anything about it because I didn't want to
go to the doctor because I thought that a doctor
would tell me to slow down and stop running around

(43:53):
and working. So the people that ran the club also
were interns at the two on Clinic, and they worked
for a doctor who was a long specialist, and they
took one look at me when I got in that night,
and they said, we're taking you to the hospital tomorrow,
and which he did, and Dr Schneida took one look
at me and said, you have TV and you're not

(44:16):
going anywhere. And so there I was with my guitar
and my notebooks and a court of kalua and a
case of of course beer, no it was, I'm sorry,
it was a Canadian beer. And there I stayed for
the beginning of what became five months of hospitalization, and

(44:40):
my husband came to see me and brought my son
to Denver, where my mother lived. Then I went from
Tucson for a month to Denver to National Jewish Hospital.
I got in there only because because C. Bickell was
on the board of directors and he got me in
there or I don't know where i'd be actually, but

(45:01):
they were great. And I was in Denver with my
mother and my son was there, which was fabulous, and
my husband and I broke the knot and said this
is not gonna work, which it wasn't, and so then
of course I was stranded in in National Jewish Hospital.

(45:22):
And when I left National Jewish Hospital, I went to
New York. New York was the place we had lived
in Connecticut for a while, and I had worked in
New York at Gertie's Folk City, driven two or three
hours back and forth for a while. So that was
part of probably my health breakdown, was that stress of
traveling and working and driving and singing and so on.

(45:46):
So I knew when you moved to New York, where
are your ex husband and your son? In uh in Connecticut,
in stores, Connecticut where he was teaching. And you know,
he was a good guy. I mean, there's nothing wrong
with him really, except that we didn't mesh anymore and
that was just the problem. And did you get along thereafter? No? No, No,

(46:10):
he was he was great. He was great, He was
very generous. He uh specifically wanted to have custody, and
I fought him for it. I the custody battle was hard,
and I lost it, which you know, my lawyer said,
you can't lose women never lose custody in nineteen sixty three,

(46:33):
that's out of the question. But I lost custody. I
was told by my lawyer that the reason that I
lost custody was that I was in therapy, which is
the first thing I did when I got to New
York was to get into therapy, which was the best
thing I could have possibly done and probably saved my sanity.
And uh So, nowadays, if you weren't in custody, if

(46:56):
you weren't in therapy, you'd lose custody. But in those
days it was so unique that that, you know, the
judge in Connecticut couldn't conceive of anybody being in custody
who wasn't totally crazy and who certainly didn't have the
right to have a child. Anyway, a couple of years
later I got got full custy. But even though that happened,

(47:17):
I was always he was Peter was always generous with
everything about I mean, I could have he could have
lived with me, actually if I hadn't had the tour.
But he was very good. He's a good guy. He
was always a good guy. Okay, so take us back.
You know, we're in the early days. You're talking about
the folk scene. So suddenly you could play with the guitar,

(47:37):
you didn't need a complete orchestra and play out how
that scene goes. It was amazing. It was just amazing.
I landed. I knew that I had to be in
New York. I knew that the village was the hotbed
of all the writers and all of the extraordinary music
that was coming out into that world. And I didn't.

(48:01):
By the way, one of the pieces of this which
I've which I think is fundamental to my career, and
to my fortune, the good fortune that I've had is
that my skill. I was never a great guitarist, please,
but I did know how to choose songs. My father
had really taught me that. My mother always reminded me.

(48:21):
She would say, you know, you didn't invent this. He
taught you how to how to choose a song. And
I had that innate ability to to to know when
I heard the right song that it was right for me,
and if it wasn't, I didn't go near it. And
so there I was among people a lot of whom

(48:42):
were writing songs, but many of whom didn't have contracts.
So quite often I would be the first person to
record the songs of an artist to who I would
help to launch. I would help because I had the
recording contract. How did I get the recording contract? When
I started singing in Colorado, I was I moved from

(49:07):
Michael's Pub to the Gilded Garter in Central City, and
then I went to Denver to a place called the Exodus,
and that was a very, very fundamental club to the
folk movement. There were clubs like that all over the country.
They were hugely influential for anybody who was playing the

(49:28):
guitar and singing songs. I opened for Josh White, I
opened for the Terriers. I opened for a guy named
Bob Gibson. Bob Gibson played the guitar, played the banjo,
and sang and was a recording artist with Electra. A
number of those artists had recorded with the Elector, including
the Terriers and and Josh White. And Bob Gibson had

(49:55):
been the one who heard Joan Bias in Boston and
called p Seeger and Uh, the fellow who started the
Newport Festival, and said, I have found your star. I'm
going to bring her to the Newport Festival, which he did.
That was September of fifty nine August of fifty nine.

(50:15):
He then came to Denver and I opened for him.
He called Jack Holsman and said to Jack Holsman, who
was president of Elector, I have found your Joan Bias
and Jack and I only found this out two years
two years later, two years ago. I mean I only
found this out how much? At least sixty years later?

(50:38):
Jack went to Denver, but he didn't He listened, but
he didn't introduce himself and he didn't show himself to
me and when he told me this a couple of
years ago, he said, you know, I went and I
heard you, and I said, you know she has talent.
That he said, I didn't know if you had the

(50:59):
mileage you, if you had the commitment in you. I
said to him, you should have asked me. I was
in for it from the very beginning. And when I
was in New York two years later in sixty one,
when I opened at the at Gurneys, Folk City, which
again was one of these clubs which was a um

(51:22):
what do they call it, a magnet for artists of
all kinds, starting with with Dylan. Dylan worked there and
so many many artists worked there, and I worked there.
And the clubs were scattered, as I said, around the country.
In in the on the West Coast, there was a Troubador.
There was that place I never worked in um I

(51:46):
can't remember who started. There was the Hungry Eye in
San Francisco. In in Chicago, there was the Gate of Horn,
where I worked in nineteen sixty for weeks on end
I opened for the Terriers there again I opened for
I met O'Dell to there. I met Sonny Terry and
Brownie McGee there everywhere there was this burgeoning gathering storm,

(52:08):
so to speak, of singer songwriters and of all kinds,
of all all sorts. The old blues singers used to
show come to the to the Newport Festival. Uh, the
the religious bands from from New Orleans would come. Uh,

(52:29):
all of the pickers and fiddlers from Boston, you know,
the New York City ramblers would come. There was a
gathering as I it is like a gathering storm, but
of the good kind. And so by the time I
got to New York in sixte I was booked to
do a couple of weeks or three weeks I think

(52:51):
at gurnie S Folks City, and then I went across
the street to the gate of the village gate and
I did a movie. I did a recording there for
a film, and the Clancy brothers were in it, and
Josh White, uh not Josh Pa. Theodore McCall was in it,
and the and a girl named Lynn Gold was And

(53:11):
when it was finished, Jack Holsman, president of Electra, walked
up to me and said, dear, you're ready to make
a record. So he had waited those two years to
find out what would happen with me. Where I would
be going and so on a handshake, and John Hammond
called me a week later and said, would you like

(53:32):
to sign with Columbia? Said, I just made a deal
with Jack Holseman on a handshake, So I'm sorry I
have to pass. Okay. So now you have a record deal.
You cut a record that separates you from so many
in the village. Okay, So you start to make records

(53:52):
forgetting the inner scene of the people in New York. Uh.
After you make a record to what to We? Does
that change your career? Change your life? It helps because
it's a calling card in a way, and it opened up,
uh further the stream of clubs and by sixties and

(54:15):
I would make a record basically throughout my career, I've
made a record either every year or every year and
a half, every eighteen months or so pretty much regularly. Uh.
And because I started, and because it was the time
that it was. If you made a record, you didn't
have to sell a million records to make an impression.

(54:37):
And you also didn't have to sell a million records
to to um convinced your record company to keep putting
money in you. You know, I I have had my
own record label now for a few years, and I
understand I signed a lot of artists that I really
care about, but I understand what record labels were up against.

(54:58):
They had they had to be sure if they signed
an artist that the artist was going to tour, because
there was no other way to sell records really, And
so I was a touring I was a queen of
the touring. I loved it. I did it. I wanted
to do it. I knew I was going to be
able to make a living that way, and that impressed

(55:20):
me a lot that making a living was possible, and
so it was helpful. And also it meant that I
could go on. And of course, because I didn't write
my own songs, I was gathering together the songs of
many artists who couldn't get a record. As you said,
you know that everybody didn't have a record record deal

(55:42):
in those days. So I was one of the first.
I even was the first person to record Brandy Newman.
Strangely enough, it's a it's a great somebody sent us
a copy. I mean, this happens in my career many times,
the little bit slower. So how did you get the song?

(56:02):
I was about ready to record an album called In
My Life, and I had sort of jumped the fence
with that album because I had already made five albums
and uh, the last one was called the fifth Album.

(56:24):
I think we didn't have a name for it, and
somebody sent us then my my producer, Jack Mark Abramson
and I and I think Jack had something to do
with it. To Jack was always involved completely. He's like
the chef who goes into the kitchen all the time
and checks out all the recipes and make sure you're
doing it right. And he had great taste and has

(56:45):
great taste, and Uh, it's a great fellow to know
and be with. And we decided, Okay, enough guitars, enough
Bob Dylan, enough, Tom Paxton, enough, even Richard Frena, enough
Pete and Woody. We're going to jump the fence and
do things that are from a whole different point of view.

(57:09):
So I wanted to record songs from Uh. I wanted
to record Pirate Jenny. I wanted to record the songs
from Mark the Maratsad and have them orchestrated by Josh Rifkin.
And Josh Rifkin was a part of the Electric family
because he did a lot of things for None Such.

(57:30):
He found that Scott Joplin rags and he translated them
and started playing them. He orchestrated handle he put wonderful,
wonderful music together for the None Such album, and he
he was our friends. So Mark and I said, oh, okay,
let's get Josh to record and orchestrate the things from

(57:52):
the uh marasad pirate. Jenny and we actually went to
England to record, and we got a choir that we
liked over there, and we were just about finished with
the album when uh somebody came to our door and
dropped a tape off and it was a tape of
Randy Newman singing Broken Windows and Empty Star Wars, and

(58:19):
we said, oh my god. So we put the album
together and we recorded that song, and Randy heard it
and he said, oh, I see, I'm not gonna spend
my life doing music for movies. I'm going to be
a singer's all writer. He says that he did that,

(58:41):
that he knew that I had recorded it and put
and I had been doing that with a lot of
artists whose material, as you pointed out, was getting out
when they didn't have record labels, and by that time
I was sort of I was paying the bills at Elector,
I was working, I was selling albums. I was courting
artists that would become very, very very famous, and in

(59:04):
a way I was contributing to this folk music revival
in in my Own Way. And the next album was
On On On The On, The in my Life album
was when I had discovered No. I didn't discover him.
Leonard Cohen found me, and he found a little bit slower.

(59:26):
Tell us how we found you. I had a friend
in the city that I would have dinner with. There
were a bunch of us, Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner
and my friend Linda. Oh this is long before laughing. Yeah,
how do you know Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner Because
they were friends of my friend Linda Gottlieb Linda. I'll

(59:49):
think of her name in a minute. Anyway, they were
They were just social friends that I met and somehow
we bonded and we would have dinner once in a while.
And Mary Martin was one of these women. She was
working in the music business. She was working for Warner Brothers,
and she was working for um Al Grossman Albert who

(01:00:11):
also owned the club I had sung it in Chicago.
He owned the Gate of the Gate of Horn. Yeah,
and so and so we would go out for dinner.
I go out to dinner with the girls. And we
would just hang out and have dinner and go to
the various clubs. And Mary would talk about Leonard. She'd say,

(01:00:33):
you know, there's this guy. I went to McGill with him,
I grew up with him in Montreal, and he's just
a brilliant poet. He's a wonderful guy. But we're also
really upset because he's not He really is not going anywhere.
And I would say, well, that's too bad. You know,
I didn't know him, I never met I said, that's
too bad. I said, why do you feel this way better?

(01:00:56):
And Mary said, you know these poems that her sow.
He gets published and we buy his books and we
go to the readings, but you know the problem is
that they are so obscure. Nobody knows what he's really
talking about, and so we're worried. I said, well, sounds

(01:01:16):
like a sad story to me. Then one day in
sixties six, she called me up and she said, guess what,
Leonard wants to come and see you. He wants to
sing you his songs. So I said to her, are
they obscure? And she said, oh yes, oh yes they're obscure.
That's we'll see. But he's coming to see you. He

(01:01:39):
wants to see you. So he came, you know, and
I thought, I opened the door, and I thought, I
don't care if he doesn't write songs. He was very
good looking man and very smart and very charming, darling,
absolutely wonderful man and amazing man. And he came in
and he said, I can't sing and I can't play

(01:01:59):
the guitar, and I don't know if these are songs.
And then he sang me the Stranger Song and dress
rehearsal rag and Suzanne, and I said, these are great,
these are wonderful. I said, I'll record them tomorrow. And
I did two out of three. I didn't do the
Stranger song. I still will have to have the Stranger

(01:02:23):
song somewhere on an album. I'll do it. And so
that's how we became friends. That's how I recorded his songs.
And after I recorded Susanne on my fifth fifth album,
on my sixth album, in my Life, he said he
called me up and he said, you've made me famous.
And I said, well, that's wonderful. That's good. It's good

(01:02:47):
for you, good for us. It's a great song, Susanne,
it's a great song. And uh, he said, but there's
one thing I don't understand, which is I don't understand
why you're not what writing your own songs. And I
didn't have any answer. Dylan had always said to me,

(01:03:09):
you should. You know people who say that you should
do such, and you don't want to ever listen to
those people. And but it was the way that the
way that Leonard asked it was different. There was the
difference between some kind of socratic method and the other way.
I don't know what the difference is exactly, but it's

(01:03:31):
not it's not the same as saying you should. And
he said, I just don't know why you don't. So
I came home. I already had my Steinway. I had
already moved uptown because I needed more room because now
I had to have custody of my son. I had
to have a bigger apartment, and I had my Steinway,

(01:03:51):
and I sat down and I started fiddling around, and
I wrote a song called since You've asked. That was
the first. Now you know, my books and my study
are filled with attempt, some of which have made it
to the stage. And so I've been writing ever since then.

(01:04:14):
So what is your technique today for writing a song?
It's twofold. First of all, I have to practice every day.
That's essential. And when I finished with my hand and
my charny and my exercises, I can usually listen to
something or read something while I do hand and charny,
and thank god I can do that. So then I

(01:04:35):
put that aside, and then I take the copies of
poetry that I've written in the past day or day
or two or week, and I put it up in
front of the piano. Wa wa. The poetry is that
something you write on inspiration? Is it something you force
yourself to write? How does the how do the words
come to be? Well, it's both. It's a chore and

(01:04:56):
a pleasure, but it's also a responsibility. Is if I
don't write things down. I've written a number of books
over the years, and I've written a lot of songs
that some of which have been recorded in some of
which have, you know, sit there waiting for more attention.

(01:05:18):
Sometimes it is I have a friend who says that
writing is like is like laying pipe. If you don't
do it every day, you're not going to be there
when the muse comes through the window. At least that's
true for me. Some people it doesn't matter. They can
write any time of day or night, it doesn't matter.
There are me, I have to find the time in

(01:05:39):
the day to get it done, and then when it's done,
it's done, and then I can look at it and
listen to it. I also have times when I'm able
to do what I did in the early years, which
is to sit a noodle at the piano until something
comes through. It's not necessarily something that is going to

(01:06:01):
make it, but if there are a few lines and
a few melody, and sometimes it's the melody, sometimes it's
the lyric, it's the hook. But sometimes it will tighten
itself up into a song actually while you're sitting there
at the piano. And sometimes you'll write something that I
have made it u For instance, in I wrote a
poem every day, and so at the end of the

(01:06:24):
year had three poems, a number of which made it
into song form. Most you know, two thirds of the
poems have wound up in the poem patch, so to speak,
but some of them make it make it to the piano,
and they make it through the test of whether this
is really singable or workable. Now, I've got a whole

(01:06:44):
batch of new songs on this album that's coming out
in uh twenty two, probably the early part, and they're
all kinds of subjects. It's it's very interesting. It's uh
you know, there's me about language and being able to
hear language, and writers who hear language in songs have

(01:07:07):
a great gift uh lingua franca. They used to call it.
It's the common knowledge of people around you and the
phrases that they say that are memorable and jump right
off the page, and something that will jump right into
a melodic structure easily and lead you to then finish
the story. But it is a job. It's not I

(01:07:30):
don't think for most people. I don't think you can
say that it's something you do. It's like falling off
a log. No, it's a job. You have to do
it every day. Okay, So you work and you get
more notoriety having covered Susanne? How do you end up
knowing Joni Mitchell and doing both sides? Now, another miracle

(01:07:51):
coming through the window, an angel at the window. I
it was I had, of course recorded Nerd and anyway,
I loved the Canadians. I recorded and worked worked with
and recorded songs by Fred Ed mccurty. At the beginning
UM Last Night, I had this strange dream. I recorded

(01:08:15):
him very early on Ian and Sylvia Canadians of whom
from whom I learned some day soon, which I would
do on my UM who Knows Where the Time Goes album?
So I loved I loved Canadians and Gordie Lightfoot I
recorded him on that fifth album, and so Canadians were.

(01:08:39):
There was something fresh and different about the way they wrote,
probably the wide open plains or something, or the English influence,
I don't know, maybe, But then Leonard came along, and
Leonard Leonard blew my mind and of course started my writing.
So the next year, in in sixties Heaven, I'm asleep

(01:09:01):
one night and I get the phone rings and it's
three in the morning, and it's my friend Al Cooper.
Now I knew Al Cooper because he was hanging around
the village. I was hanging around the village. I would
always go I loved blood, sweat and tears, so I'd
go down to hear them play, and I think I
was half half in love with I forget the guitar player. Uh.

(01:09:25):
And so he knew my phone number by by heart,
and it was him on the phone at three in
the morning. And I and I had no romantic involvement
with al. I just knew him and liked him and
hung out with him. And so he called me up,
and he knew I was recording, and he knew that
I was involved with the new with the new album,

(01:09:45):
and that I had started to write my own songs.
I had written since you've asked, I'd written Albatross and
another song which died in early deserved death. And so
he said, Hi, how are you? And I said, I'm fine,
how are you? It's three in the morning. Well, it

(01:10:07):
could have been in those days I could have been
up still or getting ready because I could have been drunk.
I probably was surprising that I woke up. But he said,
you know, I ran into this girl. She came to
the show and she's I think she's in love of
the drummer and she was hanging out and I asked
her what she did and she said, I'm a songwriter.
So he said she was good looking, and so I

(01:10:30):
decided to follow her home, but he said When I
got here, I thought, oh my god, Judy has to
hear this. So then he turned the telephone in the
direction of Joanie and she sang me both sides now,
and I said, oh my god, what a song. Oh
be right over, So I was. I went to her

(01:10:51):
house at three in the morning. No, I didn't go
right over. I went over the next day. I called Jack.
I said, you have to meet me Joni's apartment, and
you have to hear the song, because I'm telling you
this is it. And I we got there and she
played the song and we recorded it and Josh, Josh Rifkin,

(01:11:12):
made a beautiful, wonderful arrangement. And you know he's the one.
We were sitting in this studio in New York, the Columbia,
the big fat Columbia Orchestra recording studio. We had a
nice sized orchestra. But then Josh said, you know, I
need a harpsichord. I said, what do you need a

(01:11:32):
harpsichord for. You have a whole orchestra here. He said, no,
there's something here in this orchestra that needs to come
out in a different way. So it's that do that
and that's where we did it and how we did
And then of course I got to know Jony in California.
First I hung out with her here and listened to

(01:11:54):
her sing her songs to me, and she's just the
most splendid writer. She's got an for that thing we
were saying about the lingua franca, that that that that
sense about saying things that are in the conversation, things
that are unusual language that's unusual. It's partly it's partly Canadian,

(01:12:19):
it's partly a thing that's a twist that they have
on communication. It's different than ours and charming and fresh
and very powerful. Okay, suddenly the stars aligned and both
sides now is a gigantic kit. You're recording for years,

(01:12:40):
but this How does your life change when suddenly you
have a worldwide hit. I'd like to say that the
big change was that everybody answered my phone calls. They
really did, They really did. That That was a big change.
I didn't. I mean, I started to make some money

(01:13:01):
at that point. I gave my mother a trip, my
mother and father trip to uh to Hawaii that Christmas,
and so you know, that was I had a little money,
not a lot, but I've never had a lot of money,
so that's not a big miss. But it did help.

(01:13:22):
It certainly helped was my working because then I could
pretty much work wherever and did and and have and will.
But it was a huge thing to have a hit
in nineteen sixty. You're a single woman with a recording
contract with history, with a hit record, your upbeat, you're talkative,

(01:13:47):
you're beautiful. I would think that you'd be fending off
men over their basis. I'm also very picky. Well, there
are two separate issues here. What has been approaching. The
other issue is whether you open the door or not
men Even to this day, you know, an attractive woman,

(01:14:09):
never mind successful with a personality and optimism, you know,
men are very aggressive. I yeah, well I've been lucky,
was guys. I'm also you know, the thing that we
haven't talked about is that I'm a recovering alcoholic. And

(01:14:29):
I was starting in nineteen starting in in uh. When
I first started, I already knew I was an alcoholic,
So I figured that that also was a job. The
job was to drink and to work hard. And if
I worked hard and I was successful, I had the
right to drink. Don't you think. So I felt that

(01:14:52):
way about it, and I, of course I didn't know
I had a choice anyway. I didn't have a choice,
because an alcoholic, an addict who is in their cups
and in their addiction does not have a choice that
they know about until they finally know about it, and
then they have a choice. So this went on for
the years. All these years were talking about I was

(01:15:13):
drinking like a fish all the time, but I showed
up on time. I did exactly what my father did.
He never missed a job. He was always on time.
He was a professional. And that was me. That's where
I learned to do that, you know, working alcoholic and
as it was pretty I was pretty much a blackout
drinker also, So I managed throughout that horrible part of

(01:15:39):
it was horrible, But I do know that I developed
something and I think now that I might have been
a snob. I think that probably explains my uh situation
with men. I was very picky. I was also very
I was always um, very aware of the space that
I was in a I don't know what happened when

(01:16:01):
I was in blackouts. It was very dangerous territory to me.
For for anybody who's who's a blackout drinker there there.
We are vulnerable in every way because we don't know
what we were doing, we don't know who we're with,
we don't know what happened last night. I would call
friends and they would say, you know, you told me
that last night at length, so I don't need to
hear this again this morning. And uh, but luck was

(01:16:27):
with me and I was with a couple of guys.
I mean, of course, Stephen, Stephen such an angel, and
we had one of those angelic kind of uh stories,
which is that we remained friends after the affair, even
though Sweet Jut Blue Eyes was such a huge hit,
and that, of course came after I recorded both sides

(01:16:50):
Now and it was the album that followed that album.
And that was when I met Stephen. I didn't know
he was a fan. He was a and he used
to go home at night and play my records after
he'd been to all the basket clubs in the city
and come home, like Elaine May would say, you know,

(01:17:10):
the the the basket wouldn't even come back. Not only
did it not come back with money, it didn't come
back at all. And he put on Judy Collins records
and would put him to sleep, which is I'm not
sure if that's a compliment, but it helped him get
through some of these nights. And so David Anderley, who
was my producer on Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Um,

(01:17:33):
he came and played on that album. That's how we met,
and we fell in love and had this affair, and uh,
you know, he's one. He's wonderful. He's such a incredible musician.
And then of course it was heartbreaking because the song
was so beautiful and it was played every time I
turned around. I couldn't get away from it. It was
like a shield of armor in a way. It just

(01:17:55):
kind of prevented my movement in any direction. And I
had in a long affair with Stacy Keach for a
few years, and then with a couple of other people
short lived, and then on the brink of losing my
mind and my career and everything else, I met Lewis
and I met him, uh four days before I went

(01:18:17):
into treatment for alcoholism in nine and with the I
don't know, some fortunate piece of luck, I went to
the right place. I was finished, I was done, I
was wiped out. I had no money, I had no
way to work. I couldn't sing, I couldn't do anything

(01:18:37):
but collapse into the arms of a A and gets over,
which I did and which I've done. And so then
the second half of my life actually started. When was
the first time you heard Sweet Judy Blue Eyes? I
heard it in a hotel room in May of sixty nine.

(01:18:58):
We had we had split up. Well, you know, he
lives in l A. I live in New York. He
we had one big, two big problems. He didn't like
l A and he didn't like therapy, and I was
in both. I was not about to stay in l A.
I couldn't. I couldn't handle it. It was really too
much for me. Hell a, as I said, I would

(01:19:21):
be deentified lived there. I really would. I have been
too much. So so I heard it. He came to UH.
I was doing a concert in Santa Monica, and he
came to the hotel some place on on the beach,
and uh he brought me a birthday present of a

(01:19:43):
beautiful Martin guitar, which I have still, and a bunch
of flowers, and then he said, I have to sing
you a song. And then he sang me Sweet Judy Boys,
and we were both sobbing, and when it was finished,
I said, it is so gorgeous, but it is not
going to get me. However, we made we've made it

(01:20:04):
a point of staying friends and being friends. We liked
each other, not just having an affair, but we liked
each other, and we liked each other's music. I like
his music as well as I liked anybody's music in
my life. It's spectacularly. He's a spectacular writer and performing
what a guitar player doesn't get his due unfortunately anyway,

(01:20:25):
they don't talk about it a lot, but he is.
He's one of the best. So we remained friends all
that time. Every once in a while we see each
other or we talk, or we have a long back
back and forth. He'd be in China or Japan or
something and we'd be texting each other and in in
about I think about seven years ago, we were we

(01:20:45):
were both on a big show in Orlando. It was
an a a RP huge festival show at the theater
out there and uh it was unfortunately, um the last show,
live show that Richie Havens did, So he was on that.
Richie was on the show c S and n was was.

(01:21:06):
I don't think Neil was, I'm not sure, C S C.
Crosby Stills and Nash was on and we were on,
and when it was finished, we looked at each other
and we said, what's the matter with us? Are we
chopped liver? We should be out there doing our thing together.
So it took a lot of doing, but in six

(01:21:34):
we did a hundred and fifteen shows together over a
period of a year and a half. They were well.
Steven says they were the top of his career, that
they were the best time he ever had on stage.
And you know, most of the time, if you go
to a show with two artists, it'll be a half
and half thing, and then if you're lucky, you'll get
a song at the end. But maybe not, not if

(01:21:56):
they don't not if the artists don't know each other
too well. So we were on the stage for two
hours solid together. We each had a solo, but other
than that, we sang everything together. And each night I
would be listening to this extraordinary guitar player, unbelievable, and

(01:22:17):
I was a girl singer in a rock and roll band.
I mean, just think of that, as I mean, that's
the top of the world. I always wanted to be
a rock and roll singer. I just couldn't play that
electric guitar. I could not get that together. Okay, will
it happen again? I don't think so. For me. Yes, anytime,

(01:22:38):
any time he has said, well we will see, we'll see.
Life is long and uh. Anyway, we had a dreamy
time at best time ever, incredible, incredible time. Okay. Now,

(01:23:01):
another interesting thing in your career is you know Bob
Dylan had all the success and he had the Woodstock years.
Then he took a left turn with Self Portrait and
then regained his form with New Morning, which was a
great record. But you recorded Time Passes Slowly from that album,
which I love, before that album came out. How did

(01:23:22):
that come together? If you remember? I don't know. I
think maybe UM our mutual lawyer, uh, David Braun, who
was my lawyer from the first Electra uh contract in
David represented Dylan for a long long time. In fact,

(01:23:46):
when when David Braun went to UM Polygraph, David Brown
represented everybody, represented Barbara streisand he represented Neil Diamond, he
represented Bob Dylan, he represented me and but he got
a job with Polygraph, being the president of polygraph, big mistake.
All the artists left him, but Dylan stayed, and I stayed.

(01:24:11):
And I think Neil over the year's state. I mean
Neil was at his funeral. I think Neil stayed. But
David always had an end on what Dylan was recording,
and I'm sure that that's where it happened. I think
I had a you know, elite costy. This may be

(01:24:32):
a left turn, but what Dylan has been been as
successful without Albert Grossman as his manager, I don't know.
I loved Albert, and I think Albert was a brilliant man.
Is wasn't brilliant man. Unfortunately he's not with us anymore.
But Dylan, Dylan, He's NonStop. I think this this last
album is one of the best things they've ever done. Uh.

(01:24:56):
The song about Kennedy's murder is really one of the
finest pieces of art that I've run into in a
long time. That's pretty that's pretty damned impressive to come
around that circle. I did an album of of Dylan
songs and I listened to everything. This was in ninety two.

(01:25:19):
I listened to everything you ever made up to that point,
and uh, you know, in chronicles he writes about why
he had those ten years of writing those incredible songs,
and he doesn't know how it happened. He doesn't know
why it stopped. He doesn't know why it started. I
have a clue though about it, and I'm not sure

(01:25:41):
what he has said, probably said some things about it.
But when he got to New York and when he
changed his name to Dylan and he was still homeless,
he spent a lot of time sleeping on people's couches.
And I mean Dave En Ronks and and probably David
Blues and probably who knows, certainly Jack Ramlan, Jack Elliott.

(01:26:03):
So he was exposed to people's libraries in a way
that is not always possible if you're sleeping on somebody's
couch and there bookcase. And it's interesting in times of zoom,
you look at people's bookcases behind there, their pictures, newscasters,

(01:26:25):
people who are coming in with opinions, and they often
have book book libraries behind them, and you always peer
around and look, you know, what's That's why I don't
do that here. But I think he read a lot.
I think he I think he was exposed to things
he hadn't seen, and things ideas he hadn't heard, and

(01:26:46):
I think something wild and wonderful got stirred up that
hadn't been stirred up. And I'm not saying that there
was anything less about being homeless in Colorado and sleeping
on the bed of one of our folk music lights
in those days, but I think it was different. I

(01:27:08):
think it jogged him. And do you you mentioned you
stayed in touch with Steven Stills, those people who haven't passed.
Do you stay in touch with the writers of the
songs you've done or that was a moment more of
a momentary thing. Oh. I've always had relationships with most
of the people that I've that I've who's material i've

(01:27:30):
I've I've worked on if they're on, if they're living, uh,
And I've had I had a wonderful relationship with with Leonard.
I mean it was he was so generous and he
was so kind, and you know, he'd calling read me
fifty verses of a song before he'd settled on the

(01:27:51):
ones that he liked. I I'm a great fan of
of Jimmy Webb, for instance, who's a good friend and
just an amazing writer. I have such respect for him,
and I'm always so moved by his writing. It's tremendous
and most of the singer songwriters that I've known, I

(01:28:13):
certainly knew Joni in the early years much better than
I do today, but I knew her well and uh
and people like Farina was a great friend of mine.
I just was devastated by his death. And you know,
it's kind of it's dangerous to get too close to
people because they do leave the planet. Going back to

(01:28:35):
the early days, did you feel in competition with Joan Baias,
Oh God, No, I was very friendly with the whole family.
You know. Mimi was a good friend her mother. I
have more I often choked joked to her about this.
I have more letters from her mother, from big Joan
fan letters, and I do from her although she's wonderful.

(01:28:57):
She came. I sang at her seventy fifth at the Beacon,
and then she came to my eighties birthday party a
couple of years ago. We had a great time, great
time together. No, we love each other. We laugh. Mimi
was the laugher Memi was hysterical, and she and Dick
were good friends of mine, very good friends. Well. I

(01:29:19):
loved the book that down so long it looks like
up to me, he really made a huge impact upon me.
You're so forthcoming and so many aspects of your life
that therefore you talked about Steve and you talked about alcoholism.
That a touchy subject for me, but maybe he is
not for you. You know, your son took his own life.
You also say that he said he had alcohol issues

(01:29:43):
and depression issues. You've also gone on record that you've
had depression issues. Can you talk a little bit about that. Well,
this gene that was in both of our families. My
father was an alcoholic, of course, and his his background,
his his own father's father took his life. I don't

(01:30:04):
say that because I think that that means that if
it's in the family, then you you'll get it. It's
not that, but the gene for addiction is certainly in
the d n A, and we do get it at birth,
and if we have any luck, it gets into our
behavior or our behavior brings it into fruition. Perhaps. But Clark,

(01:30:28):
when when he when he would turned ten eleven years old,
I knew there was something off. He was a d
d H D or he was um. They used to
have different words for it. Uh. Anyway, he was antagonized.
He was, he was short tempered, he was, but he
was brilliant and his his focus. He was a wonderful musician.

(01:30:50):
And he would have a short focus at times. But
I knew he was. I knew in those days in seventies,
seventy one seventy two, when he first got to New York,
when he first was exhibiting the tendencies that I now
associated with alcoholism and getting into trouble, and the schools

(01:31:14):
that followed, you know, places like windsor Mountain up in Lennox,
where the headmaster would say, oh, you know, we really
we really focused on the drug issues and the substance issues.
And then two weeks later he'd be in the hospital
with an overdose. So I mean it was classic alcoholism.
And had it happened in a later time, most people

(01:31:37):
would be saying, and doctors included, you know, this kid
needs to be in rehab. And I was not sober yet,
I still had some years to go. So he was
nineteen when I got sober, and he had actually cleaned
his life up and and gone. He and his girlfriend
both had had gotten clean, and they were both both

(01:31:59):
at Colombia, and they decided to move up to Ristie
and they were at school up there, and he was
in very good shape. And then he came back to
New York and he sort of fell apart. And I
went into treatment in seventy eight and he was in
bad trouble. So it was six years before he came

(01:32:21):
and said to me, I okay, I give up or
I surrender and win, which is actually the way we
look at it. And he went into treatment in in
at Hazelden and he was sober for seven years. What
a life, you know. He had a little girl, He
had a wife who is now my my daughter in

(01:32:43):
law still, who's a widow, but she's still my daughter
in law, and the mother of my granddaughter who is
now in her forties. No whore now in her thirties.
Forgive me, Hollis. And so his his his suicide just
about destroyed me. And when I say that, because I'm

(01:33:04):
giving you the background, because it shouldn't really have almost
destroyed me, because suicide if you're an alcoholic and you're active.
But he wasn't active. He was sober, and he relapsed
and he called me, he said, you know, I'm I'm
having trouble. I said, I know, and he went into
another couple of rounds of of going to their retreat

(01:33:31):
up there at Hazelton. But they said it they let him.
I say, they let him loose. But he was an adult,
he was thirty three years old, so mom really couldn't
ride in on a white horse and fix it. And
he drank, and in the conclusion of his life, he
did the same thing as grandfather on his father's side,

(01:33:55):
that he went into a car and turned on the engine.
And you know, Joan Rivers called me about four days
after Clark's death and she said, I know what you
want to do. You want to close your life down.
I had started to cancel concerts and she said, you
can't do that because if you do that, you're not

(01:34:16):
going to heal. And as you know, she had lost
her husband to suicide a few a couple of years before,
and she said, there are no guilts in suicide, which
I knew on an intellectual basis, but you have to
talk to other people about it, which I did and
I got some important, important help from a lot of people.

(01:34:40):
And I decided to write a book about suicide, which
I did. Uh what is it called? I don't remember
gratitude and grace, I think. But I wanted to get
down everything that I knew about suicide. Having been an
attempter at the age of fourteen, I tried to do

(01:35:01):
myself in It was all those pills and and I
was very determined. And I don't I still don't know,
except that they made me sick at my stomach and
that I was not going to I was perfectly happy dying.
I was not happy being sick of my stomach. Um,

(01:35:22):
So I think what we need to do. When Clark died,
there were only two books that really were positive. There
were no books that were positive except one. The other
one was called The Savage God, which I would never read.
I never would have read it until this happened. And

(01:35:43):
of course it's all about silly plast's suicide and it
has not one ounce of solution in it. And the
other book was by Irish Bolton, who whose book is
full of solutions, and it's a marvelous book and it
was very healing. And then I read everything I could
get ever that it's ever been written. I think about suicide,

(01:36:05):
and A wrote about it because I needed to get
it out of my system. And I think that's really
the secret to this, you know, suicide. I often say
that suicide is fascinating if it's not happening to you.
But on the on the positive side, you go you
cannot go over it. You have to go through it.

(01:36:27):
So you have to go through the feelings, you have
to go through the experiences. It's it's a it's an
opportunity to completely overhaul your ideas about what's happened. And
you can't take it personally because it's not personal. It's

(01:36:50):
a universal as as as um Cock. It's not Cocktau.
It's another writer that starts with a sea who says
that it is a universal human conundrum because we can
all get off the planet if we want to, and
so then the question is do we want to stay?

(01:37:12):
And if you haven't had a suicidal thought in your life,
you're living on some other planet. I think. Well, put now,
subsequent cleaning up with alcohol, do you still have issues
of depression? No? No, alcohol is a depressant. Funny, but
that's the truth. Now, I know you were you a

(01:37:34):
drinker before you got to New York and got really
heavily into the musical lifestyle. Oh yes, I always drank.
I drank from the age of fifteen, and I drank
for twenty three years solid, you know I was. And
did you have other than personal bad experiences, meaning you know,
you woke up where you didn't know you were black
out whatever. Did you ever have people who disconnected from you,

(01:37:57):
were business opportunities that fell away because of your the
whole use? Well, I don't know. I was very protected
in a lot of ways. I had a very strong career,
I had strong management. I do think that I was distancing,
but I don't think that that was no. I was

(01:38:20):
just getting sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker. And
it wasn't anybody else's problem but mine. The last year
of my drinking in seventy seven, I and someone said
this to me recently. They the guy who wrote um
Vincent what's his name? Don said to me, you know,

(01:38:43):
I was in l A during those years. That year
I saw a big poster that said that you had
canceled concerts that year, and yeah, that's a career killer you.
You canceled forty five shows, so the industry, but it

(01:39:04):
was me. I couldn't sing, and in a way that
was my That was a blessing that that was the problem,
because if you can't sing, you can't show up. So
it's not your alcoholism that's in the way. It's the
fact that you can't think, so you have to cancel.
And people understand that in the music business, they don't
get terribly upset. If it doesn't go on for years,

(01:39:28):
they don't get upset. If if it had, they do
get upset. But if it happens for one season or
two seasons, it's a whole summer, it's a whole spring.
It's that's not unusual. So thank god that was the
end of that, because then everything was canceled. And then
I went into treatment, and then I couldn't work, I
couldn't sing, and but eventually, slowly, but surely, it all

(01:39:51):
came back. Okay, So what was the final straw? Who
or what got you to go to rehab? I went.
I had what we call an s gamo I. There
was a guy in New York who was a very
big drinker. He's very famous actor, and he was always drinking.
In His picture would be on the on the daily news,

(01:40:13):
falling out of some bar somewhere with blood splashing all
over his face. He'd been in a big fight, and
that happened a lot, and I would sit and I
didn't know him personally, but I thought, oh, that's it. He's,
you know, somebody's carrying on the tradition here, somebody. And
I got to know his wife through an exercise class
that I was in. I didn't know him personally, but

(01:40:35):
I knew her, and so one day I said to her, Um,
what happened. I don't see him, he's not I don't
see these photographs in the time, in the news or
the post. What's going on? She said, well, he got sober,
and I thought, oh, dear God, that's terrible news. Some

(01:40:59):
police give up the fight. And she said, would you
like to talk to him? I said yes, and he
drink again, and so I I was at the end
of my rope, really, and so I already I was
already trying to go to meetings, but I was too
drunk to really do much about it. So I called him.

(01:41:20):
He was on he was on location somewhere in Arizona,
and he called me back and we spent a couple
hours on the phone, and he said, I should go
see this doctor, dr get Low, and I should go
to these places, these meetings, and so on, and so
I went to get low and that's how it happened.
He I sat there and told him my sob story

(01:41:42):
and uh he said. He was laughing, and he said, well,
there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you
except you're an alcoholic and there is a solution to this,
and I will help you. And so he got me.
He want me to call this place where I went
for treatment at chit Chat. It's called it's called the

(01:42:05):
Care and Foundation now and it focuses well, people go
there and get sober, but it also focuses on the
family because it is a family illness, and if you're
in a family with alcoholism, you have it, whether you
drink or not. It's about the isms, it's about powerlessness.
It's about about trying to tell somebody else what to

(01:42:26):
do and getting nowhere, because you can't get anywhere with
somebody who's using. You can't keep saying you, look at you,
you'd be so much better if you didn't do X,
Y and Z. You just can't do it. It's also
a self diagnosed disease, and that's the difference. That's why
the a m A has such a hard time with it.

(01:42:47):
And of course, I'm very Doctors know a lot about
building bridges and bone cures. I mean not the not
the one that takes bis phosphonates, but putting them back together.
They know a lot about that. They don't don't know
squat about most emotional things. And one of the first

(01:43:10):
things they don't know is that alcohol is a depressant,
and that many of these medications that they hand around
so freely, the uh, you know, the pills for sleeping.
I had a lot of those, the pills for sleeping
and the pills for feeling good, and they often have
different reactions to different people that are not good at

(01:43:31):
that are not healthy, that are not up there with
clean and sober living. So how do you stay sober
day to time? You just do it one day at
a time, and you go to meetings every day and
you have a miracle happen, and it's happening all around us,
all around us. Okay, what are your two favorite songs

(01:43:57):
to sing? My favorite song of all is the most
recent one that I've written, and a Jimmy Web song
called the Highwayman. Okay, And in the time you have
left on the planet, anything specifically you want to do
whether it be career wise or just personal, go someplace

(01:44:18):
you know that you haven't been before. It looks like
I'm going to go to China, which I've never been
to in all these years. And I want to go
back to Japan where I was with Mimi and Arlo
and uh Bruce Langhorn in nineteen sixty six. And I
wanted to take a walk in the park today. Okay,
And you mentioned you know finances, So how are your finances.

(01:44:42):
They're fine, They're wonderful. Okay. So you are working primarily
to work, You're not working for the money is always good,
but it's not like you literally need the money to live. Well,
that doesn't matter. There's nothing embarrassing about working. I think
we're working for a living is one of the highest
achievements one can have. I don't believe in retirement. I

(01:45:05):
think it was invented after the Industrial Revolution so that
the top end of the management could make it all
and send the rest of us home. So I don't
believe in it. And I don't think many artists stopped
working when they can continue doing their artistic adventures. And
that's what I'm honest, an artistic adventure, which involves going

(01:45:28):
in front of audiences and recreating and creating what makes
them happy. And I think being part of art is
part of what keeps the planet awake. I don't know
why anybody would stay on the planet without art and music.
I don't know why any of us would stick around.
You're speaking my language. I feel the same way. You know.
It's all these people work at these jobs they hate

(01:45:50):
so they can watch to go to the movies tonst
without that. And you know that I don't want to
get on a soapbox myself. But the fact that we
live a country where there's no money for the arch's
no music in the schools is you know, the priorities
are not right. No, they're not right. And the teachers
don't get paid enough, and the the the workers in

(01:46:12):
the hospitals don't get paid enough. Our educators don't get
what they should have. And and we have all of
this abundance, and we cannot take care of the homeless,
we cannot take care of our medical costs. We what
is the matter with us? We need to have a rejuvenation. Well,

(01:46:32):
you know you're you're speaking my language. Unfortunately, I'm more
of a glass half empty person than you, But I
am not optimistic about where we're going. I'm optimistic about today,
and I'm optimistic about doing the things you know I had.
And I'm friendly with the Molly John Fast. I don't

(01:46:54):
know if you know who she is, but she's she's
she's my friend Erica's daughter, and I've known it for
a long time and were talking the other day. I said,
what do you suggest? What are the two since all
this trouble is going on, and since we've we're up
against this incredible wall of greed, insanity, misbehavior. Uh, people

(01:47:16):
who are living in some foul dream that they're trying
to shove on us. You know, they attack the capital
and call it tourism. What is the matter with us? What?
What is? What do we do? Individually? She said, Well,
the first is subscribe to a great newspaper. Well, you
and I probably do that, Bob, And three or four

(01:47:39):
or more get get get a good newspaper into and
also run for office. And so I am not going
to run for office, but I'm gonna be as vocal
as I can, which I've always been anyway, about what's
going on, to take action. Get a goddamn facts scene,

(01:48:00):
for instance, you know you're preaching to the converted. You know,
I subscribe to four newspapers. I know you know what
you're going But the frustration I have we grew up
in a different era where there was a level of cohesiveness.
Everyone tuned into one of the three networks for the news.
If you're a news junkie, maybe get newspapers. In addition,

(01:48:22):
now you cannot penetrate the other side. You can write
the truth all day long. So I was of the
belief that once they got rid of abortion, America would revolt.
Now the truth is in a number of Southern states
essentially there is no abortion. You know, there's one, you know,
one clinic whatever. So the question becomes, what is the

(01:48:45):
spark we saw last year with Black Lives Matter? You
could have a lot of free flowing feelings and emotion.
One spark can set it off. And it's not like
I want. You know, maybe I'm a child of the sixties,
but we're going to need a revel luction if things
keep going in this way. And the question becomes, you know,
will that it's so far it's just the minority on

(01:49:07):
the other side rising up, Whereas listen, the vaccine thing
is just insane. It's like I have I got the vaccine.
It didn't work for me because I have this take
this medication. I'm still home waiting for the medication last
for two years, but six months intensely, and so it

(01:49:28):
has to wear off so I can have B cells,
so I can get the N bodies. But without being
making it a personal thing that I'm still home. If
you follow this BuzzFeed and they reprinted it in the
week and CNN people are dying, the delta variant spreads
faster and your number could come up. And it always happens.

(01:49:50):
Oh if I if he knew, we would get a vaccine,
and you know, it's just it's just I don't understand it.
It's not to be understood. It's not to be understood.
But we have to do our work. We have to
believe in the present and take the actions that we can,

(01:50:12):
and we have to let go the anger that comes
up when we want to smash the windows in and
trip up and poke into the spikes of the bikers
on the street that are gonna kill me because they
don't pay any attention to anything or anybody. I mean,
let's start with that. You know, the person on the

(01:50:32):
scooter last week. Absolutely, I think you know, uh, living
in southern California where bird scooters started. On a raw
physics level, it's got a very small wheel, so if
you hit anything, you're gonna fall and you're gonna get injured. Forget,
forget somebody else. This is not a good situation for

(01:50:57):
a society at large. It isn't. It isn't solutely because
you can't see. You know. It was one thing to
go to London and have to look both ways. Right now,
I'm in New York City enough I look up. I'm
still in trouble. Listen. Everybody thinks they're in violent until
it happens to them. And that's another thing, you know,

(01:51:18):
you know, Paul Krugen said, the difference between the right
and the left is the left believes in a social
welfare and safety net, but bad things ultimately happen to everybody.
You sit there and you say, well, that's not me.
You know, they're giving all those people that money, or
they're doing this whatever. One day, it's gonna be you
and you're gonna be glad. It's like that building that

(01:51:41):
collapsed or Florida. Right there has to be something going on,
buildings just don't collapse. So we live in a country
where they keep saying we want less and less regulation. No,
we want regulation. Generally speaking, the buildings don't fall in
the United States because of regulation. Rex Chillerson, who worked

(01:52:02):
for Trump and was the head of the big company.
In one of the general waters, he said, it's so
much easier to deal with foreign countries where there are
dictators because they don't have any rules. You can get
a lot done. Well, you know, staying on the same point,
because I think, you know, I think authoritarianism will ultimately

(01:52:24):
triumph for one simple reason. It's easier. Yeah, they had
a story in the news last week than in China
they built a ten story building in a day. In
China they can get things done. We have complete gridlock.
I mean. And you as a world traveler. Though they
keep saying America the greatest country in the world, I've

(01:52:45):
bet a lot of places where it's really damn good.
Not that we don't have some great things in America,
but never mind. Free education, that's a good thing. Okay.
We could go on about this, and I would like to,
but we're all at length. Judy, you're wonderful. I mean,
you know, it's knowing you only from Afar. It's just
fascinating to actually talk to you because my impression was

(01:53:06):
a someone more stayed or not exactly snobbish, but more stayed.
And then to talk to me, we could literally talk
all night. You're right, You're absolutely right. Well, I love
it that you're you're on your your proper paths doing
what you do because we need you. And it's a

(01:53:29):
light that comes out of this kind of work that
you do that helps everybody get through the rest. Don't
forget that. Well, listen, you help me out in the
nature of being a writer, especially because I'm home, you're
alone a lot, and sometimes you write something or you
do something and people are talking about it externally, but
you're in the eye of the hurricane, so you're unaware.

(01:53:50):
So when you tell me that, and there are other
things you said through the podcast that really resonated certainly
relative to continuing to do the work. So you're open
when the inspiration. Absolutely, when the inspiration comes, you know
you have the tool you'll be able to execute. Will
I be able to write this? What's the first word?
It's just flows right out. Absolutely, Thank you. It's been great.

(01:54:16):
Till next time, My dear, have a beautiful I have
a friend to says, you know, have a beautiful day.
Unless you had other plans. Well, hopefully it'll be beautiful. Yeah. Good, Okay,
Well you've got three hours more than I do in
your life today. Absolutely well, i'b surely you've had the
experience of you know, flying over the International dateline. You

(01:54:38):
lose two days going that way and you left. Oh yeah,
that's right, and I'll have that again soon. I'm sure.
I can't wait. That's what everybody's talking about. I get
from people here, from people over the world. I can't
wait to get on a plane to Pace with good thought.
It's a good thought, all right, thanks again, until next time.

(01:55:02):
This is Bob left Sex m

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