archival content: Judee Sill was a badass from the Valley who sang psychedelic folk in a world of pain and disappointment
Shrike!
Judee Sill was a badass from the Valley who sang psychedelic folk in a
world of pain and disappointment
~ By ERIK HIMMELSBACH ~
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4427&IssueNum=174
http://www.lacitybeat.com/media/174/41sill.gif
Photo by HENRY DILTZ
Driving south toward Ventura Boulevard, you cannot help but make eye
contact with the Hollywood Hills, an expensive expanse of mountains
that anchor big houses whose inhabitants can make or break dreams on a
dime. The hills are made of dirt, but they may as well be brick or
steel to those with designs on stardom.
Judee Sill was a Studio City girl who wanted to scale those hills. She
almost did it. She was allowed a brief glimpse at the view from the
top, before she was summarily tossed back down. Unfortunately, there
was no getting back up.
Sill was a woman out of time, a solitary island amid the gridlock of
ambitious Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters. Her two albums – 1971’s
Judee Sill and 1973’s Heart Food – were among the most original to
emerge from the scene. She described her music as “country-cult
baroque,” but psychedelic church music is more like it. It’s fiercely
spiritual, resplendent in elaborate imagery in which cosmic cowboys do
battle with God. The rich choral arrangements owe more to J.S. Bach
than Joan Baez. And, what the hell, you hear a plucky banjo at the
damnedest times. However, a few incongruous problems kept Sill from
mention in the same breath as Joni Mitchell and Carole King: She was
an intractable badass and a junkie.
During the years in which she gigged and recorded, Sill was often
propped by her peers, yet her shelf life was criminally short. When
she died at 35 in 1979 of a cocaine and codeine overdose, she’d
already been largely forgotten. Graham Nash once heard an erroneous
rumor that Sill had died as early as 1974.
When she’s discussed at all, it’s rarely in the context of her music.
Instead, Sill’s held up as a tragic symbol of a scene overrun with
narcissism and moral corruption. Even the inevitable reissue of her
catalog was rolled out almost in secret – in 2004, Rhino Handmade
rereleased Judee Sill and Heart Food in very limited quantities. Thus,
after 30 years, Sill remains a faint musical ghost – perhaps the
ultimate cult artist. There have been no Nick Drake-esque
reassessments. Madison Avenue would have a very difficult time hyping
an artist who said her biggest influence was the philosopher
Pythagoras.
Fucking tragedy, really. Yet no one ever said the pop music business
is fair – as her work languishes in dusty obscurity and her ashes
float in the ether, a contemporary like her former lover and admitted
fan J.D. Souther sits back and counts the millions he earned by
sullying his soul for the calculated country-rock pap spewed by the
Eagles.
Whereas the Eagles succeeded largely by cherry-picking from true
pioneers like Gene Clark and Gram Parsons, Sill’s music didn’t fit
into a little box that could be described in a few short words (“Bach
Rock” probably wouldn’t fly). Complicated tracks like “The Donor” and
“The Kiss” grip listeners with much heavier intensity than, say, “Take
It Easy” or even the guess-who-I’ve-been-fucking-today? confessionals
of Canyon queen Joni Mitchell. “I still get chills thinking about
her,” says Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, who recorded Sill’s “Lady-O”
in 1969. “Her songs and her soul speak like Sylvia Plath to a
generation of kids that never even heard her name.”
But those who discover her can never forget. “It knocked me out,
because it was so gorgeous and painful and heartfelt,” says L.A.
musician Brad Laner. “I adore her no-frills vocal approach and her
druggy/romantic/spiritual lyrics. She’s right up there with all the
greats.”
Hers was an otherworldly catalog of sin, space travel, and salvation,
conveyed with plain-spoken perfect pitch that Laner describes as a
“Valley accent.” But her musical and lyric complexity made her the
odd-artist-out in a scene filled with self-styled desperadoes of the
early ’70s who flocked to the Troubadour, consumed prodigious amounts
of blow, and, on command, kissed the pinkie ring of the mighty David
Geffen.
Although Geffen promised to make Sill a star after he signed her to
his nascent Asylum Records (Judee Sill was the first album released by
the label), he turned his attention to surer bets like the Eagles when
radio turned a blind eye and Sill got all uppity, loudly declaring
dismay at touring as an opening act.
The lush Heart Food faded quietly upon its release, frustrating the
artist, who began taking its failure out on the boss. While touring in
Europe, legend has it she made disparaging remarks to the press about
the then-closeted Geffen’s “pink shoes.” With one remark, her
recording career was essentially over. She’d never record for Geffen
and Asylum – or for anyone – again.
“She fell out of favor very quickly,” says Kaylan. “I think [Geffen]
had the power to tell everybody in town, don’t sign her. When you’re
coming off a major rush like she was – and she could have been the
next big thing – and every door is closed in your face, that has to be
the worst of the worst.”
Judee Sill sought perfection in her music as an antidote to a life
that was a shambles from the beginning: She learned to play piano at
the age of three, inside the saloon owned by her father … She was
eight when her father died … She hated her stepfather, an animator
named Ken Muse. “He was an alcoholic – mean, dumb, narrow-minded,” she
told Rolling Stone in 1972.
By 15, Sill had fallen in with an older man whose primary vocation was
armed robbery. She was arrested after sticking up a gas station with a
plastic gun and sent to reform school in Ventura for nine months,
where she learned to play the church organ – “Pentecostal licks.”
Released from reform school in 1963, she was back in the joint a few
years later for forging bad checks to support the heroin habit she’d
developed with her husband, keyboard player Bob Harris. The time at
Sybil Brand gave Sill ample opportunity to experiment with
songwriting. One of her earliest songs, “Dead Time Bummer Blues”
(which appears on the 2005 Water Records release Dreams Come True),
was written in prison.
“In jail I had a recurrent fantasy about becoming a songwriter, so
when I got out, I started doing that,” Sill told Rolling Stone. After
her release, Sill began hanging out in Laurel Canyon, where she made
the acquaintance of Leaves guitarist John Beck and bassist Jim Pons,
who were about to join the Turtles.
Sill came in to sing for Turtles’ vocalists Howard Kaylan and Mark
Volman, and they signed her to a songwriting deal with their
publishing company, Blimp Music, after hearing her perform “Crayon
Angels.” Under the terms of the deal, she earned $65 per week. “I went
berserk, I was tearing up, and she was just sitting in the office
performing it,” remembers Kaylan. “That girl was just a fallen angel,
man, you could see it in her eyes.”
By 1970, Judee Sill jumped from Blimp into the arms of David Geffen,
who was in the process of starting Asylum Records. At first, the
star-maker machinery worked at full strength to spread Sill’s gospel.
Her debut album featured the star power of Graham Nash to add pop
sheen to “Jesus Was a Crossmaker.” She got got plum opening gigs (such
as with David Crosby and Nash) and her own billboard on Sunset
Boulevard. Finally, Judee Sill had a commercial buzz to go along with
the critical praise.
But the buzz was short-lived compared to the hellacious hangover that
followed. Heart Food flopped, and in late 1973, she suffered a severe
back injury after her car was rear-ended at Franklin and Bronson. A
series of botched back surgeries followed over the next year, the pain
of which resulted in an opiate addiction that she could not kick.
Still, she managed to record eight more songs during this period that
finally surfaced on Dreams Come True.
That album serves as an inspirational coda to the career of an artist
for whom pain and sadness were a personal gray cloud. Ultimately,
though, the demons eased her pain and became her constant companion,
until she died with them. “None of us knew how to help her,” says Mark
Volman. “She had the shittiest life and she just liked it that way,
you know.”
--
Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?
King Daevid MacKenzie
a hit single was with a title that said a lot about her own life: "Jesus
was a Crossmaker"...
--
King Daevid MacKenzie, WLSU-FM 88.9 La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA
heard Sundays 8:00 A.M. PST/PDT over KRFP-LP 92.5 Moscow, Idaho and at
http://www.krfp.org/documents/listen_windowsmedia.asx
archived in mp3 at http://www.radio4all.net
http://www.myspace.com/kingdaevid
"You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them."
HARLAN ELLISON
Bill Schenley
> psychedelic folk in a world of pain and disappointment
Judee Sill. Man, that is a name I haven't thought about in *years*.
She was as shanky and sleazy as any dope-fiend tramp could be. There
was nothing she wouldn't do for a fix. And there was no one she
wouldn't fuck over for a few dollars.
Still, she was soooooooooooooo fucking talented.
You can hear Judee Sill at this site, but remember, the songs on her
LPs are vastly different from these concert tracks:
http://www.webnoir.com/bob/music/
Photo of Judee Sill:
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/arts/2005/07/images/1102pop.jpg
Thanks to Shrike for posting the article.
Hoges
claimed Kaye's passenger John Wayne drove her to the hospital.
Hoges
-----
"This country is in a weird, feeble, grotesque state and it's about
time it got out of it and the reason it could get out of it is...
ROCK MUSIC!"
--- Ken Russell
Shrike!
> You can hear Judee Sill at this site, but remember, the songs on her
> LPs are vastly different from these concert tracks:
> http://www.webnoir.com/bob/music/
>
> Photo of Judee Sill:
> http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/arts/2005/07/images/1102pop.jpg
>
> Thanks to Shrike for posting the article.
Thanks a bunch for the links!
Jane Margaret Laight
Shrike! wrote:
> Falling Angel
>
> Judee Sill was a badass from the Valley who sang psychedelic folk in a
> world of pain and disappointment
<snip of excellent post>
thank you for finding and reprinting this article--I fell in with Judee
Sill when I was an adolescent at turns rowdy, moody and angst-ridden
and bought both of her albums--I would drive my family nuts playing
them over and over again while locked in my room to the extent that my
dad and uncle kicked in the door and dragged me outdoors to "get some
sun" as they called it. I always felt that she discussed the concept of
alienation better than such as Janis Ian, for example.
At any rate, I do want to mention that tomorrow (Saturday, October 7)
is Judee Sill's birthday; had she lived, she would have been sixty-two
years old.
Peace to her memory.
Jane Margaret Laight
Greenbelt, Md.
Judith Lynne "Judee" Sill, born October 7, 1944, died November 23, 1979.
Louis Epstein
: Bill Schenley said the following:
:
...but was she any relation to Dave Sill,
the guy who came up with the idea for this
newsgroup?
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
Hoodini
Rhino Reissue Sings the Praises of Judee Sill
By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 30, 2006; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/29/AR2006122901782.html
On the day after Thanksgiving 1979, Judee Sill, a 35-year-old, deeply
depressed and physically broken singer-songwriter, took an overdose of
opiates and cocaine in her North Hollywood apartment. The Los Angeles
coroner ruled Sill's death a suicide, but those who knew her better
have always contended that the "note" found near her body -- a
meditation on rapture, the hereafter and the innate mystery of life --
may just have been part of a diary entry or, perhaps, another one of
her haunted, haunting songs beginning to take shape.
When Sill died, both of her albums for Asylum Records -- "Judee Sill"
(1971) and "Heart Food" (1973) -- were long out of print; eight tracks
recorded in 1974 for a third album had never been finished. Such was
the obscurity to which Sill had fallen in 1979 that no obituary was
published, and a number of her friends never knew what happened to her
until many years had passed. Not that she was ever any sort of "star"
-- to this day, her name has never appeared in the New York Times, and
she has been mentioned only twice (and then only in passing) in The
Washington Post. Tom King's "The Operator," a 650-page biography of
David Geffen, who founded Asylum and signed Sill as the first artist
to record on his new label, devotes only one sentence to her, calling
her "a former prostitute and reformed junkie."
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2006/12/29/PH2006122901786.jpg
The singer's intensely devotional lyrics soared above a deeply
troubled life. (Warner Music)
King might have added "stick-up artist," "drug dealer" and "street
hustler" to his capsule biography, for Sill led a troubled and
unsettled life. And yet, as a new two-CD reissue from Rhino Records
U.K., titled "Abracadabra: The Asylum Years," makes clear, she was
also an artist of extraordinary gifts, one whose best songs are
suffused with a radiant, prayerful and excruciatingly tender
innocence, all the more affecting because it must have been so
hard-won. (Children -- some children, anyway -- come by this
naturally; adults, especially those with histories such as Sill's,
have to fight for it every day.)
The immediate temptation is to classify her with some of her more
famous contemporaries -- Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Carole King --
and, indeed, the similarities are there. Yet Sill's body of work is
both more limited and more perfect. Virtually all of her songs are
intensely devotional; along with J.S. Bach and Mahalia Jackson (two of
her acknowledged influences), Sill believed that the purpose of music
was the glorification of God. Instead of sharply etched social
vignettes or cosmopolitan evocations of modern life and love, she
wrote her own sort of hymns -- guileless, urgent, naked, absolutely
personal.
Her following, while still small, is a distinguished one, including
Andy Partridge from XTC and Liz Phair; the late Warren Zevon was also
a fan. The American singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin included Sill's
"There's a Rugged Road" on her album "Cover Girl." Sill's music
"didn't sound like anybody else," she told the London Guardian. "It
was streetwise and yet it was religious."
Sill's lyrics might be described as high hippie Christian, cries of
"Kyrie eleison!" melding with references to angels and astral planes.
Her words are very much of their time and place -- and yet, even at
their weakest, they more than suffice to decorate her unpredictable
and irresistible compositions, which are nowhere near so easy to
pigeonhole. According to Michele Kort, the author of Rhino's excellent
liner notes, Sill insisted she wrote "country-cult-baroque -- country
for the pedal-steel guitar, clip-clop Western beats and the twang in
her voice; cult for the esoteric nature of her concerns and her
small-but-fervent audience; and baroque for the Bach-like melodies she
favored."
But there is sun-splashed, deliciously over-marinated California pop
here, too. Brian Wilson would have been proud to have written "The
Lamb Ran Away With the Crown" (and the arrangement is so slick and
pitch-perfect that he might have served as its producer). "Ridge
Rider" proves a heretofore undreamed-of hybrid of Heitor Villa-Lobos's
"Bachianas Brasilieras" and cowboy music. "The Archetypal Man" swerves
from straightforward balladry to jazz-baroque scat singing right out
of the Swingle Singers. And "Lopin' Along Thru the Cosmos" is an
anomaly -- a popular song that actually earns the full orchestra that
accompanies it. Yet it never seems overdressed: to the contrary, this
is one of the most spare and evocative love songs ever written,
addressing aging, rootlessless, exhaustion, need, loss and resignation
in a few lines that must have been cut from the heart.
"Many artists refer to hard living in their work, but few had the
experiences Judee Sill had as a child and beyond," says Sean O'Hagan,
the leader of the British band the High Llamas. "Family breakdown,
petty crime, penal service, drugs -- and yet she overcame it all to
write as she had always wanted to."
* * *
She was born only a few miles from where she died -- in Studio City,
Calif., on Oct. 7, 1944. When she was still very young, the family
moved to Oakland, where her father owned and operated a tavern called
Bud's Bar. "That's where I started playing piano and found out I could
harmonize with myself," Sill told Rolling Stone in 1972. "But even
back then I knew something was wrong, that I was missing out on having
a normal life. It was so seedy in the bar, you know -- people were
always fighting and puking, there was illegal gambling, and my parents
drank a lot."
Her father died in 1952, and Sill moved back to Southern California,
where her mother married Kenneth Muse, an animator for Hanna-Barbera
who had shared in an Academy Award for the Tom and Jerry cartoon "The
Cat Concerto" (1946). Sill hated Muse from the start: She called him
"mean, dumb, narrow-minded -- he used to beat dogs."
She began taking LSD in the early 1960s, when it was still legal, and
then moved on to heroin, which most definitely was not. With a
partner, she held up liquor stores and gas stations throughout the Los
Angeles area. Finally, she was arrested for forgery and sent to a
reform school, where she developed her musical skills to the point
where she was permitted to serve as the organist at the mandatory
religious services.
Both her mother and her beloved older brother were dead by the late
1960s -- the one from alcoholism, the other from a liver infection --
and Sill hit bottom, living with a drug dealer on Central Avenue,
turning tricks to support her habit, and finally going cold turkey,
shaking and crying, alone in a prison cell.
After her release, a friend named Jim Pons, then the bass player for
the Turtles ("Happy Together") and somebody who recognized talent when
he heard it, hired the unknown Sill at $65 a week to compose for the
band's production company. Better still, the Turtles recorded one of
her songs, the luscious "Lady O," which became a minor hit for the
group in 1969. At that point, Geffen -- who was already managing Nyro,
Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills and Nash -- came along and
offered Sill the chance to make her own album.
"Judee Sill," an album of 11 original songs issued in 1971, was
respectfully received by the few critics who chose to write about it,
but sold only moderately well. With a few exceptions, most of them not
Sill's fault (a ghastly climax of brass and saccharine strings added
by the producer that overpowers the ending of "Abracadabra"), the
album continues to hold up wonderfully. From the beginning of the
first track, "Crayon Angels," it is obvious that we are in the
presence of a unique stylist, somebody who knows exactly what she
wants to do and is doing just that.
"Heart Food," released two years later, was, if anything, even better,
with achingly beautiful melodies such as "The Kiss" and "The Phoenix."
While I continue to find the gravitas in the last cut, "The Donor,"
with its extended length and sudden transition into the language of
the Latin Mass, a little puffed up, other listeners think it her
masterpiece. In any event, taken in full, "Heart Food" is an album
that, in its mixture of formal adventure and searing spiritual
intensity, can rank with Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" and the Velvet
Underground's self-titled third album.
But by now, Sill was feuding with Geffen, who dropped her from his
label after "Heart Food" sold wretchedly. The eight further songs she
worked on recording sometime during 1974 were never finished and would
be released only in 2005, in a respectful and loving completion by the
endlessly versatile musician-composer-producer Jim O'Rourke. (This
two-disc set, titled "Dreams Come True," was issued on the Water label
and is well worth investigation, as it also contains a rare film of
Sill in performance.)
From there, it was downhill all the way. A series of automobile
accidents -- by all accounts, Sill was a terrible driver -- destroyed
her back. Surgery made things worse, and she spent the rest of her
life in chronic pain. Because she was a convicted drug user, doctors
were reluctant to prescribe medication strong enough to ease her
suffering, and so she took to the streets again for a long and lonely
limbo. And then she died.
But the music remained, her legend continued to grow, and now, with
the reissue of her life's work, Sill has triumphed beyond the grave,
as she always believed she would. O'Hagan compares her to the late
Arthur Lee, who founded the Los Angeles group Love and made the
fabled, ethereal psychedelic album "Forever Changes" before descending
into a terminal cycle of drugs and violence. For O'Hagan, Lee and Sill
shared the same precious, contradictory qualities -- they were, he
says, "two West Coast desperadoes who ended up invoking the sound of
angels."
--
Stuff Up the Cracks