It’s easy to be fooled by the strength of one’s own narrative into overlooking the exceptions to it. Thus, I knew I liked Jenny McLeod’s music long before I heard Amy Beach and Kapralova and worked out that there was a whole culture of women writing classical music that I liked. And years before I got woke via Spotify rabbitholes to the intrigue of women wresting with occult themes in song, I was obsessed with gnostic revelations from a half-forgotten LA folkie, Judee Sill, thanks to my friend Graeme Humphreys (Abel Tasmans, Humphreys and Keen) who pressed a 2CD jewel case into my hands and said “this woman’s story is right in your wheelhouse” or words to that effect. And Judee Sill’s story, which I’ll get to in a bit, is exciting, profound and tragic, but would be but a footnote in musical history if it weren’t for the uniqueness and perfection of her music, and the unusual relationship between her story and her songs.
What we hear on ‘Crayon Angels’ the first track of her first LP, Judee Sill (1971), is a very precise sense of structure and melody – none of Joni Mitchell’s jazz syncopation, something closer to Judy Collins1 – and a kind of New Age Sunday school allegory of her life at that point:
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
Magic rings I made have turned my finger green,
And my mystic roses died
Guess reality is not as it seems
So I sit here hoping for truth, and a ride
To the other side
Phony prophets stole the only light I knew
And the darkness softly screamed
Holy visions disappeared from my view,
But the angels come back and laugh in my dreams
I wonder what it means?
It’s a Christian vision, sort of, except for the hints of Rosicrucianism, astral travel, and practical magic.2 Jesus, or a Jesus figure, appears in ‘The Phantom Cowboy’, and ‘The Ridge Rider’, on the razor’s edge between good and evil, “forgets he’s travelling with a friend”. This song exemplifies what Sill described as her “country-cult-baroque” style, with its clip-clop Western rhythm,3 occult themes and baroque discipline and sense of repose.
He comes from under the cryptosphere
Where the great sadness begins
And he doesn't pretend to be brave
Tho' the road's dusty and dim
Bless the ridge rider
The ridge he's ridin' is mighty thin
I guess the ridge rider
Forgits he's travelin' with a friend
Since the great fall, he's been travelin' hard
Thinkin' bondage is sin
When we get to ‘Jesus Was A Crossmaker’, a masterclass in finding the heart of simple cadences, we meet a flawed Jesus who’s the cause of suffering, a stand-in for Sill’s then-boyfriend, songwriter J.D. Souther. Sill’s method is reminiscent of the fantasy of C.S. Lewis, wherein a variety of aspects of nature and human nature symbolise the divine, only in reverse – divine symbols are being used to illustrate, express and support the human soul.
Judee Sill was born in Studio City, LA in 1944 and raised in Oakland where her dad, who imported wild animals for use in the movies, owned a bar where she first learned to play piano. After her father’s death in 1952 the family moved back to LA, where her mother Oneta, an animator of Betty Boop cartoons, married Kenneth Muse, a prolific animator of Tom and Jerry and The Flintstones . Sill’s relationship with her heavy-drinking and abusive stepfather and alcoholic mother was a violent one – “I always had scars on my knuckles. We had such violent fights at our house that the police and newspapermen would come”, and when she moved from a public to a private school “for rejects” she fell in with some other outcasts – getting married briefly and impulsively after her graduation to a man who “later got killed goin’ down the Kern River rapids in a rubber raft on LSD.” She started robbing liquor stores and gas stations, with her husband or another man isn’t clear, with a .38 “just for kicks”, until she was arrested in 1963 at the age of 18. Or, as she put it in an interview with Record Mirror, “I saw a lot of terrible injustice all around me, so I fell in with a bunch of hoodlums to express myself poetically.”
During a nine-month stint in reform school she became the school organist, and studied gospel lyrics, music and art. When her mother Oneta Muse died (of alcoholism, or cancer, reports differ) in 1964, Kenneth Muse forced Judee to leave home for good; for the next year-and-a-half she took LSD every day. In 1965 Sill married pianist Bob Harris and turned to forgery, drug dealing and prostitution to pay for a $150-a-day heroin habit. The couple went to Mexico to trade their car for smack that “had some impurity in it that gave me a rash all over my body, made my legs swell up like balloons. But we had to keep shootin’ it because it was part heroin, and I smuggled it across the border in my cunt, and it was rainin’, and I was crying, and I could barely walk.” In 1968 Sill was arrested again and sent to prison, where she kicked heroin even more painfully, but in the meantime had her first musical success, selling her song “Dead Time Bummer Blues”, about her time in the reformatory, to The Leaves, whose John Beck was a friend of her husband (who plays piano on The Leaves’ 1966 version).
I'm doing all this dead time
For the partaking of a plant
The earth says "help yourself"
But the law maintains I can't
This song is nothing like the usual “blues” folk-pop songs of its time and place; you can hear the blend of gospel and Bach influence, wherein Sill creates an objective correlative for the structure of a prison and the “dead time” structure of prison life, an amazing achievement for a beginning songwriter.
Out of gaol in 1969, Sill’s exquisite love song Lady-O was recorded by The Turtles. If it sounds a bit like a missing Brian Wilson song from this period, it’s easily as good as one.
I've been trying hard to keep from needing you
But from the start
My heart just rolled and flowed
I've seen where it goes
Still somehow my love for you grows, Lady-o
As well as Beck and Jim Pons (who’d left The Leaves to form The Turtles), Judee Sill’s talent had caught the attention of David Geffen, who signed her to his brand-new Asylum records, and Graham Nash, who convinced The Hollies to cover ‘Jesus Was A Crossmaker’ on their 1972 album Romany and asked her to support Crosby, Stills and Nash on tour (David Crosby plays second guitar on Judee Sill, which was produced by Beck and Pons, and Nash plays organ on and produced Judee’s version of ‘Jesus Was A Crossmaker’).
Judee Sill was loved, by those critics who noticed it, for its qualities of radiance, perfection and interesting strangeness, but didn’t sell well. The esoteric is by definition something that powerfully attracts but an elite few, and Sill’s outspokenness about drugs, her criminal past, and her bisexuality (her live sets attracting dedicated groupies to the home she was able to buy when she scored her record deal, where she treated them with “mild contempt”) didn’t chime with the popular image of a female folky in the early 70’s. On her second album Heart Food (1973) she becomes more ambitious, conducting the orchestra, and creating an FM-friendly rock arrangement (Jim Gordon is the drummer) for ‘Soldier Of The Heart’.
Heart Food contains Sill’s two most ambitious compositions, ‘The Kiss’, a pean to ecstatic communion, “the union of opposites” as she says, and the unique ‘The Donor’, a mysterious evocation in processional rhythm of lost, forgotten and nascent songs, reminiscent of Thomas De Quincy’s Suspiria prose poem Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow (which Sill, as addict and adept, may well have been aware of), with its multitracked choral arrangement of “kyrie eleison” (Lord, have mercy).
So sad, and so true
That even shadows come
And hum the requiem
Again, Heart Food was praised but didn’t sell; Sill is said to have camped on Geffen’s lawn to protest what she saw as a lack of support, before alienating him by some unwise, perhaps unkind remarks about his then-closeted sexuality, whether on stage or in a radio interview (or both). This was probably on her 1973 tour of the UK supporting Roy Harper; 1973 was a good year for Harper and these concerts would have been well-attended.
While there she filmed ‘The Pearl’ and ‘The Kiss’ for The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show, where she voiced her dislike of playing support to “young, loud and snotty” rock’n’roll bands, a comment seized on by Iggy Pop, who promised to write a song for Judee (I hate to guess), bringing it to the attention of punk guitarist Cheetah Chrome, who used Young Loud and Snotty in 1977 for the title of The Dead Boys LP, one of the best US punk albums.
Did Judee hear this tribute? One hopes so – she died in her apartment in 1979, of an overdose of codeine and cocaine. Because one of her “rapture” lyrics was found near her body her death was ruled a suicide, but it’s an unusual mix of drugs to use for that purpose.
Dropped by Asylum, Sill had recorded another eight tracks, in 1974, for an album that wouldn’t be finished – these songs were released, with a collection of Sill’s demos, as Dreams Come True in 2005.4 They give the same upbeat, ecstatic vibe as her earlier songs. None of the violence of her upbringing, none of her physical suffering, none of her despair over her failing career is represented in her songs, each of which is a pagan act of worship or an evocation of some aspect of the holy. Christ appears as a longed for goode and gentle knight, the celestial bridegroom, in Sill’s words 'my vision of my animus', no more the object of her faith than that, which was surely enough. In musical terms, her choice of notes seeks the baroque value of “repose”, applying an angelic overview to humanity and her restless soul. It’s as if Judee put all the discipline of which she was capable into her music, and all her reading of Jung, Crowley and Blavatsky and the rest of her considerable esoteric learning into following the right-hand path, the path of white magick through music.
In her real life, Judee was a terrible driver, and in the mid-1970s car crashes and unsuccessful operations left her in pain, which her history as a drug addict prevented her doctors treating effectively (hence her return to heroin, and the codeine in her system when she died). She worked, when she could, as an animator, as her parents had. No obituaries followed her death, and some friends didn’t learn about it for years. When Barney Hoskyns first told her story in the Guardian in 2004, her albums hadn’t been reissued (they came out in 2006 on CD as Abracadabra: The Asylum Years); today there’s a documentary film, Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill, and the tone of writing about her has changed; it’s easier, maybe safer to see her as the saint of her songs or the gendered victim of her circumstances rather than the rock star she was, haughty, flamboyant and sensual, while it lasted.
Algorithmic angel: Karen Dalton, ‘Something On Your Mind’
'I saw her play once, 'and some woman asked her to play a Judy Collins song [Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’]. She said, "I don't know that fuckin' song and if I did I wouldn't play it". And I just thought, "Right on."' JD Souther, taking to Barney Hoskyns
‘Enchanted Sky Machines’, a UFO tract, is Judee Sill’s contribution to the Posadist trend in early 70’s rock.
My desire is a rosebud
In the magic design
I can't wait to feel it bloom
They'll be landin' anytime
Then when the sceptics are wonderin'
Where all the faithful have flown
We'll be on enchanted sky machines
The gentle are goin' home
As per my thesis that the things that impress an artist in childhood often go into their original creative mix, this clip-clop rhythm is, I think, derived from Sill’s childhood watching of Westerns, rather than a later study of folk songs.