Earlier this month, I strayed back again to the Beacon, that old renovated theater near my hometown – the same one that stood witness to my odd, post-travel storm of ambivalence last spring – to see one of my formative influences, Judy Collins. She is 84 and still touring. I heard about the show only a few days in advance but didn’t hesitate to buy a ticket, despite it being mid-week and two hours away.
The drive down was unusually drawn out, with two accident-related slowdowns, having to take an unintended exit after moving over for an ambulance, and grabbing dinner from a drive-thru since that’s all there was ultimately time for. Unlike back in the spring, when NIN was still the customary soundtrack of choice for wandering back to my place of origin, this night it was War on Drugs and NostalgiaIsFun – music solely associated with the life I have built apart from any old attachments. By the time I exited that continuum of velvet dusk and spacious indie rock about time and change, I felt like I’d been on an odyssey. I parked at the theater with little time to spare and crammed down a chicken sandwich in my car. At long last, I made my way in and navigated a throng of retirees to my seat.
The concert opened with us hearing Collins’ a cappella voice singing “I’ll be Home for Christmas” as if piped in from an afterlife while the shadowy stage stood empty. Nevertheless, when Collins finally emerged, she moved like someone of considerably fewer years, wearing high heels that would have taken me out in less than ten minutes. Her trademark snowy billows of hair had been cropped into a smart, low-maintenance bob.
As has been the case with each legacy act I’ve seen at the Beacon, Collins regaled us with anecdotes from her personal history. She recounted how, as an intrepid young woman, her mother had met her father, a blind musician, on a bus, and by the end of the ride had realized that she would marry him. She cracked what felt like a mandatory joke about how, when the rest of us indulge in vices, we add years to Keith Richards’ life. She quipped that she’d never had much to do with drugs, but only “so as not to interfere with her drinking”. And, being that I’d just seen the Joan Baez documentary and had been listening to archived episodes of Bob Dylan’s early 2000s radio show, Collins’ stories about these fellow folk giants felt ridiculously apropos. The gang really was all there. In fact, she covered Dylan, as well as Cohen and Mitchell, and donned a glimmering pink-sequined jacket that Baez had gifted her on her eightieth.
One of the coolest things about the show – and something I, 40+ years her junior, find motivating – was how Collins just expertly rolled with things. She was “on book” for some of the older hits and got behind on page turning at one point, but her recovery from this was swift and unapologetic. Her voice now goes intermittently raspy, which at times changes the character of her signature soprano in a way that reminds me of what the “Brutalizer” knob does on my Arturia micro-synth; it gave a captivating gravitas to songs that may otherwise have sounded too tame. Interestingly, instead of running out of steam, it appeared she got stronger as she went on; the high notes became more effortless, and on the newer songs her piano playing (which I never knew was in her arsenal to begin with) was amazeballs, more fluid even than her guitar playing. At one point she joked that “84 is the new 27” and I was ready to believe her.
[Fun fact: she briefly blanked on a line in “Send in the Clowns”, which, seeing how I was absorbed and silently bawling, startled me slightly. Hilariously, it was the very line that’s always been my favorite and that, a few days before the concert, on a whim, I’d arranged to have printed on a t-shirt.]
Collins shared that she first started writing songs as a response to ole’ Leonard, who once asked why she didn’t write her own music. It’s always a head trip for me to think that otherwise masters of the craft sometimes need extra prompting to do this thing I’ve done since middle school because I had no other choice. Happily, her current album, born of a challenge by her husband to write a poem a day in lockdown, consists solely of originals and is receiving praise. The new songs were great – full-bodied and lyrical – and sounded rawer in person than they do on the album. That, too – her enduring creative potency – was a treat to witness.
Given the December date, Collins interspersed a few Christmas carols throughout, and I reflected on how folk songs (carols included), those straightforward, mysterious, weathered melodies, probably influence what I do more than anything else. I’m pleased that the niche the Beacon Theater seems to be filling is as a platform for legendary performers to release the stories of their escapades out into the world while they’re still around and vital.
While we’re storytelling, I will tell you the times I got sappy during Collins’ set (aside from “SITC”). There was her cover of Cohen’s “Suzanne,” a song I discovered at my college library and which, along with the rest of his Greatest Hits collection, was tailor-made for being up on the computer late at night pining over your best friend. (I also associate the song with the dude – still an internet buddy, then an unwise fling – I started seeing after moving to Charlottesville. He had demoed a darkwave cover of it for his… wait for it… MySpace page. Not to mention that my great aunt met the actual Suzanne on Hydra back in the day and apparently liked her loads less than Marianne Ihlen.)
There was also Collins’ cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, a song I associate most, not with the recording of Dylan himself or even that of the Byrds, but with the Melanie Safka version, to which my aforementioned college best friend had introduced me (being, as she was, the child of older campus-activist-variety liberals, who had done more than her share of campfire singing). I have no grasp of how many times I inflicted beautiful torture on myself with that song, as I braced for the puncture of our little bubble of make-believe, knowing we were too volatile, too diametrically opposed to each other, and too possessive of each other to actually remain friends for life.
What glares at me about this concert experience – particularly when compared with the one last spring – is how, despite taking place near my hometown and harkening back to my childhood, it felt totally disengaged from one other, very particular stale pain I’d been trying not to think about. Of course, there was still a poignancy, linked to a whole collection of personal lore, but for the most part it finally felt like, as Daniel Johnston describes, I could revisit the past and fully, freely realize there was nothing there for me anymore.
On that note… for this year’s seasonal cover, I opted for a song that, while it may be in the zeitgeist, I did not choose for popularity’s sake. It’s “Now and Then,” the last Beatles song, which everyone and their granny knows modern tech plucked from a warbling demo tape and launched into the stratosphere.
Rather than rehash my previous attempts at explaining why I covered it, I’ll defer to the words of a friend of mine, one of my biggest supporters and someone I feel often picks up exactly what I’m trying to put down about things.
“…honestly I wish more people would cover it. So much fuss is made (rightfully or not) about the process of it finally being shared that I don’t think enough attention is paid to the fact that compositionally and lyrically, it is a painfully beautiful song that hits right at the nerve of complicated feelings for someone [who] for one reason or another [is] not in the current chapter of your life (and probably can’t be in future ones).” -Cory Alexander Capron
Happy Holidays, All ~
The Sold Kingdom 
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