Broadside Magazine

 by Norman Ross

thecarlyle.com
judycollins.com
nedrorem.com
Judy is an enormously talented musician, and it is a treat to watch her strumming away on her signature Martin 12-string guitar and her unsigned 88-string Steinway piano. Listening to her at the Carlyle though was a slightly different matter. Although she commented on “what a wonderful room” it is, she didn’t say exactly why, and it doesn’t appear she meant the acoustics because her voice, more than ample without any mic for a room that size, was processed with an echo-chamber effect throughout her 90-minute show. In the end, she sounded more distant than in Carnegie Hall, although we must have been sitting 20′ from her. Nevertheless, she sounded great if you didn’t mind the effects. And it is a beautiful room filled with Picassoesque murals, comfortable banquettes and friendly clients, most of whom looked like Republicans but who seemed to be old folkies and in sync with Judy’s politics. (One lady commented to her companion as we walked past at the end, “Well HE looks like a folkie!” A redeeming moment for your reporter, certainly, but perhaps the only man in the room with even a small beard.)

The least expensive room upstairs at the Carlyle is $700, while a 3-bedroom suite starts at $4,000 per night! The cover charge in the Café Carlyle is $125, a Manhattan was $18.75 (maybe I shouldn’t have specified Seagram’s). A typical entrée (dinner is required if you want to sit at a table) is $40. So the three of us could have skipped the evening and rented Carnegie Hall (or at least a rehearsal room) for the same price! But then we would have had to do the singing ourselves, something of a letdown.

On the other hand, Judy did invite us to sing with her, including some of her own songs and the Beatles as well, although she indicated she was at least a year late for “When I’m 64?” because she’s collecting Social Security (just what I was wondering about between songs; I’m starting in August myself). Ned Rorem, the songwriter/composer, whom we had met only a few days earlier at a free classical concert at a church almost directly across Central Park from the Carlyle, graced the room and we got to hear one of his lovely songs, perhaps the only song of the evening we hadn’t heard before. (One of his classical pieces had been on the program at the church.) Several other celebrities were mentioned because they had been there on other nights, including famed producer Jac Holtzman.

As she did a year earlier, Judy led us somewhat through the story of her life, which we’ve also read, so there wasn’t much new. “When I moved to New York, I started seeing a therapist, but I thought it sort of came with the apartment.” To some extent, the between-the-songs patter was a continuation of those sessions. We learned that Judy’s had many affairs and we learned the names of some of the better-known men, including Stacy Keach (they used to live together near us on the Upper West Side) and Stephen Stills (we don’t know if anything transpired with Crosby and Nash). Her current husband, of 30 years’ duration, was sitting toward the rear and was introduced. Her accompanist on the piano sang along on some of the songs and generally added to the evening.

We went to the movies with Judy not too long ago. Well, we went to the movies and saw her there, intense, pacing up and down in the aisle with her cellphone, waiting for the previews to begin–a New York moment. Her face is always a little taut, but at least she now talks to the audience. We seem to recall Carnegie Hall decades ago with the same tautness, pretty much the same extraordinary voice and musicianship, but very little connecting to the audience. She has gradually learned to be at least a little relaxed. But she talked about the wonderful music of Rogers and Hart and then sang “Barbara Allen,” a strange segue. Struggling with tuning her 12-stringer she should have used Theo Bikel’s line in a similar situation, “Well, it’s close enough for folk music.” And folk music it mostly was, if you count her own oeuvre and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as folk. OK with me. As for Stephen Sondheim, as Lee Hays once said, he’s OK if you don’t ‘folk him up’ too much.

Pete Seeger sang at the Village Gate many decades ago (three fabulous discs came out of his stint there with Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim), and of course the Weavers got their big start when Gordon Jenkins heard them at the Village Vanguard around 1950 (can you believe that “Tzena Tzena Tzena” and “On Top of Old Smoky” were the most popular songs in the United States!), so folk music in night clubs is, I suppose, nothing new. And since she did get us singing along, it clearly was folk because when did Rogers and Hart ever lead a singalong? Judy has had a hard life, and we didn’t forget that last night. She’s also brilliant, despite my criticisms.