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halseyhazzard · 3 years

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The Redemption of Judee Sill

Halsey Hazzard, fall 2018

for a writing class on pop culture criticism “So much sensationalist bullshit has been written about Judee Sill (by people who never knew her) focusing on her days as a hooker and a junkie.” So begins Pat Thomas’s interview with Tommy Peltier, a longtime friend and collaborator of Sill’s, in the liner notes to the recently and lovingly compiled “Songs of Rapture and Redemption: Rarities & Live.” He’s not wrong; in nearly all of the writing on Sill, her music, an inimitable blend of gospel, folk and country at once bluesy and baroque, plays second fiddle to the stranger- and sadder-than-fiction story of her all-too-brief life. Her eponymous 1971 debut and 1973’s Heart Food were met with praise from critics and her fellow songwriters alike; in 1973 Steve Holden called Judee a “most gifted artist, one who continues to promise almost more than I dare hope for.” Unfortunately — for Sill and for those who loved her, and for those of us who love her music — much of that promise never came to pass. She died in obscurity in 1979, leaving behind an unfinished third record and quietly ascending to the pantheon of young, brilliant musicians who died too soon.

It’s hard to write about Sill without relying on sensationalist bullshit. I suppose in writing this at all I’m contributing to the problem, but like so many others, I have joined the ranks of Sill’s devoted disciples, compelled to tell and retell her story to rectify fate’s perceived cruel disservice to a great talent. What emerges is not always a faithful portrait of the complicated artist Sill was, but rather a shifting and sometimes contradictory fable that cements Sill’s status as a legend — not, as she might have hoped, as “an extremely famous or notorious person,” but rather as the subject of a “story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.”

The story goes something like this: Judee Sill was born Judith Lynne Sill to an average, unhappy middle class household in Los Angeles in 1944. She fell in with a rough crowd, got married, committed a series of crimes, got addicted to various drugs, went to jail, got married again. Eventually she cleaned up her act, put the gospel licks she’d learned in reform school to good use, and became the first act signed to David Geffen’s Asylum label. She put out two albums of intricate songs that married earthly desire and longing for heavenly salvation, populated with lonely cowboy types and vigilantes that sometimes seemed strikingly similar to Jesus. For a few shining years it seemed like Sill had made it. It soon became clear (the story goes) that fame was not what fate had in store for her. Until 2003, when Rhino issued Judee Sill and Heart Food on CDs for the first time as part of its Handmade series, Sill was “[u]nlamented and all but forgotten.” These are the words of Barney Hoskyns, who in a 2004 Guardian profile declared “[t]he tragic Judee Sill is well overdue for (re)discovery.” Since then, interest in Sill’s life and music has steadily increased thanks to a series of posthumous reissues and releases: 2005’s “Dreams Come True,” a two-disk set of unreleased recordings mixed by Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth, Wilco); Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972-1973, released in 2007; and “Chariot of Astral Light,” an intimate collaboration with aforementioned Tommy Peltier recorded in the ‘70s and finally released in 2004.

In a review of the 2004 Intervention reissue of Judee Sill titled “The Judee Sill Cult Continues, This Time at 45RPM,” Michael Fremer of Analogplanet writes, “sometimes "legends" are created and nurtured simply by tragic circumstances. In Judee Sill's case add wasted talent and unfulfilled great promise that add up to a movie worthy story.” Sill’s life has yet to inspire a movie (although a seemingly-deserted IMDB page indicates at least one attempt at a documentary), but songwriter Laura Veirs’ “Song for Judee,” renders the Judee Sill legend in sparse yet cinematic detail. In it, Veirs’ voice echoes on top of warm, jangling guitars, the apparently upbeat melody betrayed by the sadness of the story it tells:

“You wrote “The Kiss” and it is beautiful

I can listen again and again

You never really got a break

From the car wrecks and the pain”

The crux of the Judee Sill legend is captured in these lines, which immediately identify Sill’s work with the tragic events of her life. Sill’s music is mentioned in Veir’s lyric but once, and only glancingly; it’s not even clear “The Kiss” is a song, or “Judee” a songwriter. Veirs’ appreciation for her music is given is as pretext for why the listener should care about Sill’s life, but it’s clear the main attraction here is tragedy. The rest of this atypical ode is not praise, but a retelling, addressed to Sill herself, of key moments in the legend of her life. What emerges is a tellingly concise fable that identifies Sill with the lonely phantom cowboys who populate her lyrical landscape.

Veirs appears to have lifted her narrative and several phrases from the BBC documentary. She mines in particular the commentary from Peltier, who says Sill was his best friend and shares the insights that would come to compose Veirs’ chorus: “You loved the Sons of the Pioneers and the Hollywood cowboy stars/you were just trying to put a hand to where we are.” She also borrows, nearly word-for-word, an introduction Judee gave during one of her London radio performances in 1972, describing her time “living in a ‘55 Cadillac, five people sleeping in shifts.” This almost creates an intimacy with Sill, whom Veirs had never met; however, there remains an insurmountable distance. Sill had been dead 35 years — as long as she was alive — by the time this ode was composed. While Veirs hints at Sill’s troubles in the first verse, only in the last verse does she make explicit what happened: “They found you with a needle in your arm, beloved books strewn ‘round at your feet”. The revelation gives the chorus retroactive prophetic relevance. The past tense, once wistful, is now crushing.

Her death, like her life, became part of the legend. There are general points of agreement: she had been in several car accidents, was using heroin again, and died of an overdose just after Thanksgiving 1979. Everything else is less clear. Though her death certificate reports she was found dead in her house in North Hollywood, a persistent rumor suggested she had disappeared to Mexico to live out her final days. Her death was reported as a suicide, but family members and friends maintain that the note found near her, a characteristic musing on death and redemption, was an idea for a song.

The title of a 2014 BBC Radio documentary by Ruth Barnes says it all: “The Lost Genius of Judee Sill.” Sill’s genius is preceded by its lostness. Sill herself comes last. Her music is mentioned too, of course. They quote Sill’s self-description of her work as “country-cult-baroque” and her professed influences, Bach and Pythagoras. (In some versions of the quote, Ray Charles is thrown in.) Yet every time, it seems, someone brings up that she wrote “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” about JD Souther, that Graham Nash produced it. She was the inaugural artist on David Geffen’s Asylum, we’re told, .She opened for Crosby Stills and Nash, and Cat Stevens, and Gordon Lightfoot — and so on. These revelations are usually accompanied by astonishment at the fact that she failed to find the commercial success of her peers, despite her comparable — perhaps superior — talents.

Many have offered explanations about how this happened. There is a general consensus that her falling-out with Geffen played a role. It’s not exactly clear what happened. The word “faggot” was involved, but whether it was said live or on the radio, in reference to Geffen himself or a pair of his pink shoes, is up for debate. Whatever she said severed their relationship. Some contend that she may have been in love with him, and was hurt when he spurned her advances. Others point out that she was growing frustrated with what she saw as his lack of promotion for her music. By this point, she was already making no secret of her disdain for the “snotty rock bands” she had to open for, and I doubt this did her any favors.

The contradictions in people’s stories exacerbate the larger-than-life quality of her life and times, as do the many cliches used to tell her story. Headlines variously declare her “a star that fame forgot,” “L.A.’s doomed lady of the canyon who lost her genius to drugs,” a “mystic” who “walked among us.” The human Judee Sill is lost somewhere beneath this sensationalism. It is no wonder why her friends and family members, Tommy Peltier chief among them, feel so compelled to set the record straight by providing their version of events. In his remarks in “Songs of Rapture and Redemption,” Peltier is quick to discourage speculation about her drug use and past prostitution, declaring instead “She was just the most beautiful person.”

“Beautiful,” you may recall, was the only word Laura Veirs could come up with to describe “The Kiss.” When I first heard “The Kiss,” I was immediately struck by how inadequate the word was to describe what I was hearing. The song showcases the best of her efforts to induce mathematically precise intervals into intricate melodies that aren’t so much heard as felt. Her lyrics, confusing the sacred and profane, ride the thin ridge between love and logic, devotion and desperation. Over shifting and plaintive piano Sill sings a eulogy to stars bursting in the sky and begs a lover — god? — to come and hold her “while you show me how to fly.” I first heard “The Kiss” in a YouTube video, one of few that survives of her performing, whose introduction insists that she herself was determined to be a successful musician. Ironically, the video shows precisely why perhaps she couldn’t be: severe and guileless, Sill hunches over the piano as if it were all that exists, engrossed in the song’s intense and uncommercial emotional intensity.

Sill’s idiosyncrasies are on full display in “Songs of Rapture and Redemption”, a compilation whose greatest strength is its commitment to capturing the artist and all her contradictions in her own words. The sleeve features a candid photograph of a smiling Sill, alongside several of her paintings and drawings. The tracks included are a combination of live recordings, demos, and studio outtakes that lay bare the deceptive complexity of her compositions. In the Boston Music Hall performance that opens the record, Sill, armed only with an acoustic guitar, tells the audience “I’m going to sing you a few little songs before David [Crosby] and Graham [Nash] get here. I’d like to sing you this song called “The Vigilante”. It’s new, I hope I remember the words.” The self-effacing introduction notwithstanding, what follows is nothing short of revelatory.

An early highlight is “Enchanted Sky Machines,” a bluesy number about waiting for the end of the world where she trades her distinctive fingerpicking for pentecostal piano licks she picked up in reform school. There is an aching earnestness to the way she sings of swallowing her yearning, and it carries over into “The Archetypal Man,” which begins with Sill singing the song’s opening harpsichord solo. Before “Crayon Angels,” she describes how she would call up friends as she was writing the album and sing them instrumental solos, joking that it must have been hard for them to like her in those days. The crowd is in on it, and her self-deprecating humor belies a clear confidence in her talents and her musical vision that is justified by the virtuosic grace of her playing. Sill was a perfectionist who demanded and deserved creative control, a notoriously laborious songwriter who could be a tyrant in the studio, and these tendencies are on full display even in this humble solo set. When she introduces her second last song, “The Lamb Ran Away With the Crown,” she enunciates every word, then repeats it again — ”with. the. crown.” — determined to ensure the the audience walks away knowing exactly what she was saying.

The set ends with Judee’s signature song, “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” which had only just been released to radio two days prior. She calmly reveals the song’s inspiration, an unhappy relationship with a “bandit and a heartbreaker,” and describes waking up one day with the conviction “that even that wretched bastard was not beyond redemption.” Her diction is clear, her tone less so. The audience, nonetheless moved, cheers and laughs. She goes on: “It’s true, I swear. It saved me, this song. It was writing this song or suicide. It’s called “Jesus is a Crossmaker” and I hope you like it.” Her voice seems monotonous for such an emotional confession, but that stops mattering as soon as the song begins.

Instantly her singing voice, freed from the perfectionism of her studio recordings, reveals itself as strikingly human. Precise, unadorned, free of vibrato, it is flat in places, sharp in others, yet cuts to the rhythmic core of each note. She struggles with a few of the intervals she has given herself to sing, but this only enhances the song, giving human voice to the mathematical precision of her compositions, linking the downtrodden with the divine. With her unpretentious voice and deceptively simple language, she strives to speak redemption into being. Her longing for it is audible.

Such longing is a key theme in much of sill’s work, and nowhere is it more pronounced than in “Crayon Angels”:

Crayon Angel songs are slightly out of tune

But I'm sure I'm not to blame

Nothing's happened, but I think it will soon

So I sit here waiting for God and a train to the Astral plane

Later in the song, she confesses “Guess reality is not as it seems so I sit here hoping for truth, and a ride to the other side”. Sill knows the truth she longs for is unattainable, at least in this lifetime — but she remains unflagging in her belief in something. It is this belief that motivates her music. To characterize Sill as a god-given genius laid low by fate undercuts her formidable musical ambition, and the sincerity with which she approached her craft. The work she created was not purely inspired by the divine, but instead strove for it, confronting the inevitable impossibility of reaching perfection with the all-too-human drive for beauty in the face of death. Still, one gets the sense that Sill herself, enthralled as she was with cowboy stories and cosmic secrets, might appreciate the mythic proportions her life story has taken. I like to think that she’s made it to the Astral plane, and that wherever she is, she’s smiling.

#h: assignment #h: 2018 #judee sill #music criticism #folk music #songs of rapture and redemption

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smartworkingpackage · 7 years

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Thunder, Lightning, and Revisions—Mark Twain and Creativity

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives.” – Mark Twain, in an 1878 letter.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was many things: a steamboat pilot, a prospector, a reporter, a world traveler, a lecturer, an investor (mostly a bad one), an inventor (with three patents; two successful, one not), a father, and, most importantly, the author known as Mark Twain.

What he was not was either particularly organized or industrious.

This is not to say he wasn’t prolific; he turned out novels, essays, plays, reviews, and letters by the score. He just wasn’t a slave to work.

Strike While the Iron Is Hot

Alex Applebaum, in a review of Bernard DeVoto’s 1942 Mark Twain at Work, noted of Twain’s working habits that

Twain worked “sporadically” depending on fits of “inspiration.” Instead of forcing himself to work for a certain amount of time, [he] relied heavily on “improvisation” and would sometimes work furiously for days; sometimes not write at all; sometimes start projects and leave them hanging for years; sometimes finish them quickly … He didn’t finish nearly as much as he started, but, nevertheless, he wrote prolifically. There are still thousands of unpublished pages and ideas he never carried through with.

What can we learn from this? To write and write and write some more—when inspiration strikes. Make note of everything. Don’t censor yourself. Even if an idea may seem useless now, it could well turn into something valuable later. Keep journals, diaries, notes, or even a blog. Even if an idea doesn’t lead anywhere on its own, it may provide the spark for something that does. The only mistake would be to not let your native creativity express itself when the time is right.

What Works Best Is What’s Right for You

While there are indeed times when we want to write or communicate your ideas with a specific goal or project in mind, don’t let not having a specific result hinder you. Twain’s approach in this regard was noted when the revised edition of his autobiography was published in 2010. Robert H. Hirst, the General Editor of the Mark Twain Project and the Curator of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR’s David Bianculli that

Twain … “hit upon the right way to do an autobiography” … What he had discovered … was the art of dictation. Instead of writing down his autobiography, Twain wanted to tell stories to another human being. And instead of telling his life story in chronological order, Twain wanted to talk about what interested him at that moment—and to allow himself to change the subject as soon as his interest flagged.

Twain dictated most of that autobiography from his bed. In 1905, he told A.E. Thomas of The New York Times:

“Whenever I’ve got some work to do I go to bed. I got into that habit some time ago when I had an attack of bronchitis… I liked it so well that I kept it up after I got well. There are a lot of advantages about it. If you’re sitting at a desk, you get excited about what you are doing, and the first thing you know… somebody comes in to attend to the fire, he interrupts you and gets you off the trail of that idea you are pursuing.So I go to bed… Work in bed is a pretty good gospel—at least for a man who’s come, like me, to the time of life when his blood is easily frosted.”

While Twain’s “working” methods may seem both antithetical to productivity and unique to him (how many of us can perform our daily tasks from a comfortable feather bed or dictate our thoughts to a handy stenographer?), there are lessons to be drawn from them. There is much to be said for allowing one’s creativity to flow freely with no inhibitions; to get something down on a page or contributed to a project. You can always develop and edit ideas, but the initial spark of creativity should never be denied. Those ideas may sit fallow for months (or even years), but they exist and you can expand upon them later when you’re ready.

All Work and No Play …

Perhaps Twain’s disdain for traditional working methods had to do with the fact that he didn’t consider what he did to be “work.” In the same Times interview, he told Thomas that he had never done

“…a day’s work in all my life. What I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.

Who was it who said, ‘Blessed is the man who has found his work?’ Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind…When we talk about the great workers of the world, we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great.”

He expounded on this point in his 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (that savagely ridiculed capitalism and the looming “Golden Age” of plutocrats) by having his surrogate protagonist say:

“Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation and its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it’s a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.”

Today, so many of us get caught up in our day jobs (that can, admittedly, be drudgery) that we don’t allow ourselves to take the time to think, reflect, and enjoy the freedom of expressing ourselves and preserving our own observations and ideas. The thought of actually sitting at a keyboard—or, worse, actually putting pen to paper!—can seem like schoolwork or a chore. But how often do we get the chance to be with ourselves and commit what we really think and feel in a permanent form? Sure, coming up with a pithy tweet or a vague Facebook status is nice, but how much better to give ourselves the freedom to really dig into and examine an idea or a concept to ourselves? It’s not like anyone else has to see it or read it; the mere chance to think and write about an idea develop creative muscles that can be useful when they’re really needed for something to be expressed publically.

There’s No Such Thing as an Original Idea

To duplicate and use Twain’s methods would honor the man who expressed the notion that there were no original ideas; just borrowings and expansions of the work and ideas of others. In 1892, author and humanitarian Helen Keller was accused (and acquitted) of plagiarism. After reading about the case in Keller’s own autobiography, Twain was moved to write her, saying:

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. … It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. With this in mind, it almost behooves us to expose ourselves to as much knowledge and inspiration we can find from any source in order to synthesize it and, ironically, make it our own. Read anything you can. Write down notes and observations.”

(The edited versions of Twain’s own notebooks and journals of just his first 36 years as a writer run to more than 2,200 pages.)

Let inspiration take you to the familiar and imaginary. Travel. People-watch. Get out of your comfort zone and see things and meet people that are “strange” and unfamiliar in order to make them familiar and then share those unique insights with others. Make yourself the most interesting person in the room because you’ve been there and done that—and can express it in colorful and exciting terms. (Though two more precepts from Twain should be noted here: “As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.” and “Use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.” What good are even the best observations if they get lost in the underbrush?)

In his notebook for 1902-1903, Twain may have given his most trenchant tip: “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time, you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.” So, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to now to start over again the beginning …

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