“Well, wait till they read this book,” she replied. When we spoke a few days ago she told me she wanted a different subtitle: “Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n' Roll, and the Music That Changed a Generation.” But her publisher insisted that wasn’t the way people see Judy Collins.

This Judy Collins drops acid with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, has love affairs with a string of famous performers. It’s alarmingly candid-about her long battle with alcoholism, her son’s suicide, her own suicide attempt. She becomes the public Judy Collins, the folk-singer icon with the amethyst eyes who broke through to a mainstream audience in the 1960s and 1970s with impeccably rendered covers of “Chelsea Morning,” “Amazing Grace,” the Sondheim ballad “Send in the Clowns,” and a lot of other hits.īut it’s the private Judy Collins that’s revealed in her new memoir, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music. She told me later that she goes through certain rituals before each performance, besides the usual hair, makeup, and vocal warm-ups: she secludes herself, meditates, and then emerges in a different state of mind. On stage, she seemed to have been transformed into another person: glamorous, regal, larger than life, intimate yet distant.