Michelle Paster
After a few minutes of introductory chatter between Judy Collins andStephen Stills on stage at the Saban Theater on Monday evening — aWriters Bloc event with the two former lovers/collaborators and still friends discussing the former’s new memoir, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music — Collins suddenly paused and turned to the audience:
“Just to get this out of the way,” she said, and then began to sing, unaccompanied:
Bows and flows of angels hair, and ice cream castles in the air….
Delighted gasps, sighs and rising cheers came from the audience, many members of which hold Collins’ version of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” as one of the songs, one of their songs, a life landmark that has stayed with them since it was a hit in 1968. And as she finished the brief performance, just the first verse and chorus, even Stills sitting next to her smiled and shook his head in wonder, as the voice we’d just heard was as pure and powerful and moving as when we first heard it 45 years ago.
A few minutes later in what unfolded as a freewheeling conversation, as much two friends catching up with colorful tales and asides as a discussion of a book, Stills reminisced about his first awareness of the singer. He’d moved to New York in the peak of the Greenwich Village folk boom, was “living on pennies” while playing at “basket clubs” where tips were the only pay and staying with a friend in very spartan circumstances. But the friend had a few albums, one of which had a cover photo of a woman with “cornflower eyes,” as he put it, and he found himself entranced both by the image and the voice contained within.
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