By
Richie Unterberger
Like
many of the most significant musicians to rise to prominence in the
1960s, Judy Collins began the decade as a singer of traditional folk
tunes with sparse instrumental backing. Yet by her third album, #3, she
was already rapidly expanding beyond those boundaries in both
repertoire and arrangements, covering contemporary songwriters like Bob
Dylan and using soon-to-be-folk-rocker Roger McGuinn as arranger and
accompanist. Her 1964 live release The
Judy Collins Concert turned the focus even more toward emerging
composers, with material by Dylan, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil, Billy Edd
Wheeler, and John Phillips.
The following
year's Fifth Album was a
still more decisive step in her evolution from traditional folk toward
a new kind of sound. Again there was a rich assortment of material from
the top contemporary folk composers of the day. There were more songs
by Dylan and Wheeler, but also material by other writers on the verge
of moving into folk-rock, including Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, Gordon
Lightfoot, and Richard Fariña. While still folk at their base,
the arrangements were also more varied than ever, including noted side
musicians like Bill Lee (father of filmmaker Spike Lee) on bass; Lovin'
Spoonful leader John Sebastian, who plays harmonica on "Thirsty Boots";
Danny Kalb, soon to join the Blues Project; Eric Weissberg (whom she
had met back in 1959 at the Exodus club in Denver) on second guitar;
and Fariña on dulcimer.
Producing the album was Mark Abramson, who would
continue to act in that capacity for Collins well into the 1970s,
though as Judy elaborates, "we produced together, truly. I would never
have denied him his production credit. But it was also my choices, my
thinking, my determination, and then Mark backing me up, helping me get
what I wanted to get done. And we knew all these wonderful people, of
course."
Adds Judy, "Fifth
Album came as a collection–as they all are, really–of what I'm
doing and what I'm thinking of. I suppose the difference is that I had
done an album of singer-songwriter songs on the third album. Then I had
done a live concert with a number of other additions [to the
songwriters interpreted], like Billy Edd Wheeler. So by the time I get
to the fifth album, I'm sort of settled in my choosing from, I suppose
you would call them, the city writers."
By far the most famous of these city writers, even
in 1965, was Bob Dylan. Three of his songs are on Fifth Album, and one of them is far
more famous than the other two. "Mr. Tambourine Man," as she explains,
was not a tune she learned from Dylan's recording or the Byrds' #1 hit
version, but a composition she first heard sung in person by the
songwriter himself. "I went up to visit [Dylan manager] Al Grossman's
house in Woodstock," she remembers. "Bob was there that weekend. His
wife Sara was there, Grossman's wife Sally was there, and Al Aronowitz,
who was a wonderful writer, took me up there for a weekend. I was
asleep in bed that night. We'd had a lovely dinner and a great time,
and then I heard this song coming up the stairs. It was Dylan down in
the basement, playing this song over and over again. It was 'Mr.
Tambourine Man.'" While a few artists covered the classic shortly after
it was written, including the Byrds and Odetta, Collins's version is
one of the first.
Although Ian & Sylvia had already released a
cover of Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" in 1963 (as Elvis Presley
would in 1966), no official Dylan-sung version would be issued until
after the 1960s. "I think he probably had sent me a demo of that song,"
says Judy. "I wanted to use that song in a movie Stacy Keach was making
when he and I were living together, but I couldn't get the rights to
it." Dylan's never issued an official version of "Daddy You've Been on
My Mind," though it was also included on a Joan Baez album in 1965. The
Fifth Album performance
features second guitar by Danny Kalb, with whom Collins "actually was
taking lessons with at that point, trying to learn to play the guitar a
little better than I did."
Judy's knack for finding songs which had yet to even
be recorded was a gift which would surface again and again in her
career, leading to some of the first major exposure for important
talents such as Leonard Cohen. For Fifth
Album she was especially quick to recognize the merit of a tune
that would become one of Eric Andersen's most famous compositions.
"Thirsty Boots," she reveals, "was a result of my friendship with Al
Kooper, who introduced me to Eric Andersen. I didn't know Eric
Andersen, so I was very happy to get to know him and start recording
his material. Al had called him and said, 'Judy's got another album in
the works. Why don't you get over here, and bring some songs?' He came
to my door with Al one day, and I didn't know from him Adam. I answered
the door, and he said, 'I've gotta use the bathroom.' So he went into
the bathroom and finished writing 'Thirsty Boots' there, writing it on,
I think, a matchbook," she laughs. "Then he sat down and sang it to me.
I said, 'Great, I'll be recording that tomorrow!'"
Collins was also quick off the mark to record one of
Gordon Lightfoot's most acclaimed early songs, "Early Morning Rain"; it
wouldn't appear on a Lightfoot album until his debut LP the following
year, though Peter, Paul & Mary also put out a version in 1965. "In
the Heat of the Summer" had only recently appeared on the second album
by fellow Elektra Records artist Phil Ochs. While she'd done three of
his other songs on Concert,
Judy's particularly fond of Billy Edd Wheeler's "The Coming of the
Roads," though Wheeler's perhaps most famous for writing "High Flying
Bird" and co-penning the Kingston Trio's hit "The Reverend Mr. Black."
Collins was close friends with both Richard
Fariña and his wife Mimi, who had recently formed a duo and were
making tentative ventures into folk-rock with recordings of their own.
"Pack Up Your Sorrows," one of the two songs on which Richard played
dulcimer, is one of the most famous of his compositions–or, in this
case, co-composition, as he wrote it with Pauline Marden, sister of
both Mimi Fariña and Joan Baez. Fariña also wrote the
poem that graced the back cover, and he and Mimi even brought their
German shepherd to Fifth Album
sessions.
"I adored Dick," wrote Collins in her 1998 book Singing Lessons. "He was the buddy
I had never had before, a pal I could tell anything. I needed his
friendship...he wrote a poem for me in which he compared my voice to
amethysts; but his friendship was the true jewel." Tragically,
Fariña died in a motorcycle accident not long afterward in April
1966, though Mimi would have a strong role to play on a future Judy
Collins album, co-writing the title track of the 1976 LP Bread & Roses.
Although interpretations of new material by young
contemporary folk singer-songwriters comprised the majority of Fifth Album, the record also had
more traditional numbers. "Lord Gregory," with cello by Bob Sylvester,
and "So Early, Early in the Spring" are both traditional in origin. The
Civil Rights anthem "Carry It On," the other cut to feature
Fariña's dulcimer, was written by Gil Turner, who's also noted
for his membership in the New World Singers, the first act to record
"Blowin' in the Wind." "It Isn't Nice" was co-written by two veterans
of the most socially conscious wing of the folk revival, Malvina
Reynolds and Barbara Dane. The only live track on Fifth Album, it was recorded at New
York's Town Hall on March 21, 1964, at the same performance where the
songs on The Judy Collins Concert
were taped.
As much of a step forward as Fifth Album was for the folk scene
in general and Judy Collins in particular, it was still very much a
folk album. She'd make considerably more radical innovations in both
the songs she sang and the way they were played on her next album, In My Life, also reissued on CD by
Collectors' Choice Music. – Richie Unterberger
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