Chapter 25
Summer in the city, 1970 ... Panhandlers, drunks, whales, and nightingales ... The cathedral's roar ... And Amazing Grace
JUDY COLLINS: In a funny way, one great thing did come out of the encounter group: 'Amazing Grace.' It was the one song that you could carry into any social environment. I first heard it from my Methodist grandmother and sang it at church, at school. Later, I often wound up an evening of folkie participation with it. And then it filtered its way into the encounter group, as a way to end the evening.
MARK ABRAMSON: Something very moving had happened in the group, and Judy said, "Why don't we sing a song?" We sang 'Amazing Grace,' and I said, "Judy, you've got to record that."
JUDY COLLINS: Mark and I were starting to put together a new album, which became "Whales and Nightingales." The whales came when I was doing "Peer Gynt" in Central Park with Stacy. Roger Payne, a whale researcher, came and brought me a tape of whale sounds, whale songs, and said, "I don't know what to do with these beautiful singers." I played them for Mark and Jac. On the way to Woodstock (which I went to despite not being invited to perform, the rap on me being that I was too much of a singer's singer), en route to Williamstown to see "The Cherry Orchard"—I played the tape in my car, and I thought, "I know what to do with this. I'm going to sing an old whaling song, 'Farewell to Tarwathie,' a capella, with the sound of the whales." And as we began to think of traditional things, 'Simple Gifts' came to mind. Then there was 'Nightingale I' and 'Nightingale II,' which I wrote, and Josh Rifkin did that beautiful arrangement, which I love so much—it's one of my favorites of anything I've written. And the next thought was 'Amazing Grace.'
JOSHUA RIFKIN: Judy asked me to work on one more record with her.
As I see Judy's early recordings, she was a bit dominated in the artistic process by the men with whom she was working. That's happened to so many people, and Judy is one of the most solid, independent women I know, and if this happened to her, it's nothing about her, it's an indication of the time and what the situation was like. But as I look back on it, she at least seemed to me to do what she was told. Certainly, when I was her arranger, in a way I was putting her in that position.
I think Judy was breaking out of that. Professional success, changing times—all of this was allowing her to do more of things that were always inside her, be stronger, grow a lot. None of this is to be taken as having at all a patronizing view of what she was before. These are struggles through which any performer, any artist, any human being—and in those days, particularly, any woman—would have been going. But this was giving her a different sense of her role in her records, a much more activist role, if you will. She was feeling more muscle, feeling able to take control more.
Which was a very salutary development, although it did not work in very salutary terms for our relationship at the time. You could say that the success we had had with our last project, "Wildflowers," had strengthened both of us, strengthened egos, character, abilities, but we could no longer quite mesh the way we had.
I didn't finish the album, and we never worked together again, in fact we never saw each other again. That said, I have a great fondness for Judy, and enormous respect, and I am glad that she has kind words for me in her autobiography.
JOHN HAENY: Putting that album together was a magical experience, one of the two best in my career. It was a brilliant record, on all levels, an enormously broad tapestry of music, big classical works, little folk works, esoteric works.
I was pretty much responsible for figuring out how to record. We did some test sessions in studios around town, including 'Amazing Grace,' where we had a whole bunch of folkies with a lot of acoustic guitars, and a big electric organ and basses and drums, and it was a wonderful evening and a musical disaster. Any time Judy tried anything with drums it was an absolute atrocity.
We had also test-recorded some small classical ensembles, in a big studio, and it was my impression that there was no one studio that would suit the various music types.
JUDY COLLINS: Mark and I decided that we were going to go out of the studios, and use sound situations that we thought were uniquely distinctive.
MARK ABRAMSON: I always liked those old days when Jac and I recorded in churches, or in any kind of hall that was acoustically right, or even cheap and convenient, like Judson Hall. John and I decided to record "Whales and Nightingales" all remote, but remote on a grander scale, since now we could afford to.
JOHN HAENY: We decided to pick locations that matched the emotional ambiance of the songs we were recording.
Mark and I spent weeks scouting locations. And then recording . . . What a time we had. We recorded out of a converted red truck, with bums, panhandlers, and junkies all around us, during a hot, steamy, New York summer, and it was just the most vibrant experience imaginable.
For 'Simple Gifts' we went to Paul Harris, a keyboard player down in the Village—I had found his loft accidentally. We went to Carnegie Hall for 'Prothalamium.' We recorded Brel's 'Marieke' in the Manhattan Center, the seventh-floor ballroom where Capitol recorded all their great cast albums. We went to the library of a church—
MARK ABRAMSON:—We figured that most people would not be conscious of what we were doing, but subconsciously it would have its effect.
JUDY COLLINS: If something is recorded someplace for a reason, then the reason will come through in the recording.
JOHN HAENY: Mark was a filmmaker at heart, and I always thought of music as a visual medium. So on this album we were moving from room to room, dissolving from one environment to another, like you would if you were montaging a film.
MARK ABRAMSON: In the final product we went to great lengths to actually crossfade from one room to the next. There's no dead air between the tracks, just like Jac's earlier recordings. We let the ambient sound of the place we were in blend into the next one. If you listen with headphones, you can really hear this.
JOHN HAENY: After Jac had introduced us to Dolby we always recorded Judy with noise reduction. Without the tape noise, if you have the proper equipment to listen, at the end of the roar of a cathedral, you'll hear the chairs kind of squeaking as you enter the loft.
JUDY COLLINS: With 'Amazing Grace,' which I had always sung with friends, I said to Mark, "Let's open it up, get a bunch of friends together." Some of the people from the encounter group. My brother. Stacy. Josh and his girlfriend. Susan Evans, who played drums for me, still does from time to time. John Cooke, Alistair Cooke's son, who had a fine voice. Not professional singers, just a whole gang of friends, really.
JAC: People that Judy or Mark knew, mostly white, mature, some music business people, but non-professional voices. And me.
JUDY COLLINS: I said to Mark and John, "Where to record? What's wonderful?" Mark had gone to Columbia and knew about St. Paul's chapel. He and John went up and took a look, and it was ideal, a beautiful, tiny, little round-domed stone-tiled cathedral; green tile, with a stained glass window.
MARK ABRAMSON: There was just something about it, a spirit.
JUDY COLLINS: John set us up. For on-site recording, there was nobody better.
MARK ABRAMSON: It was partially the church, and then the way that John miked it, which was with a portable eight-track, a vocal mike tightly on Judy, close microphones, other microphones about sixty feet away, and then another set of microphones all the way to the back of the chapel, and up in the ceiling, that we could play with in the mixing, to get this incredibly full sound.
I was so frantic, so afraid that with all these people we were going to screw it up in some way. But it worked.
JAC: Everyone was grouped at the choir end, like a platoon of voices in a shower, but smoothed out and sounding great. The mood was joyous and affirming.
MARK ABRAMSON: It was almost heavenly, but not choir-like. It doesn't sound like a select choir. It's real down to earth. It was exciting, playing it back in the church, with all of those people, and everybody was just—"Jesus!" Then sitting in the van we had outside, listening to it, I knew we had something hair-raising.
JAC: I had been so impressed by 'Hey, Jude.' To me it was the Sistine Chapel of rock, and if I were in the dumps I would listen to it through headphones. Now there was 'Amazing Grace'—I was overcome by its purity, the sense of redemption in the words and the elegiac simplicity of the melody.
JUDY COLLINS: The rule that never held for me was that you had to have an uptempo song on an album. 'Both Sides Now' is the closest thing to an uptempo hit that I've ever had. 'Send In the Clowns' later on was completely out of left field. And 'Amazing Grace' is the farthest away.
MARK ABRAMSON: With every record, there's huge discussion about what the single should be. Jac told me 'Amazing Grace,' and I said, "You're kidding." It was the last thing I would have released as a single. It could have been a tremendous problem, because it was so long—
JAC:—A 'Light My Fire' all over again. And it was not rock and roll in any form.
JOHN HAENY: An a capella hymn? Are you serious?
JAC: I was considering 'Amazing Grace' as a wild card single when I was further nudged in that direction by Clive Selwood, our label manager in Europe. Elektra was completing a three-year contract with our licensee, Polygram, and Clive was trying to convince them to release 'Amazing Grace' as a Christmas record. Polygram thought the idea a tad far-fetched but at Clive's insistence did release it in mid-November, to massive holiday radio play, and it sold a million in England! The minute we knew the reaction in the UK we moved in the US, releasing the single in less than two days.
MARK ABRAMSON: 'Amazing Grace' certainly had an enormous impact. Far beyond sales. I remember George McGovern, when he was running for president against Nixon—Jac was a McGovern supporter, he had him in the office—McGovern came up to me and said, "I want to thank you for 'Amazing Grace.' It meant so much to me." It was Judy's recording that made that song an anthem for so many people.
