Judee Sill

After her brief body of work was championed by artists like Jim O'Rourke and Andy Partridge, the name Judee Sill is no longer the wonderful secret of American music that only a handful of fans once guarded with care and almost mystical affection. The critical rehabilitation of that debut, which opened the catalogue of the fledgling Asylum label, hasn't been entirely painless, and many of its stylistic hallmarks have been obscured by hasty, oversimplified readings: the album "Judee Sill" has been filed away among the lost masterpieces of 70s country, a label that hides much of its charm and originality — a fate its follow-up, the more complex and atypical "Heart Food", was spared.

Born October 7th in Oakland, California, Judee Sill was a complicated woman, both artistically and personally. Her childhood was indelibly marked by the death of her father when she was just seven. Her future stepfather Ken Muse (a designer and animator for Hanna-Barbera) would only worsen her emotional state: drugs, prostitution, sexual ambiguity, a taste for criminal behavior and religious mysticism became the recurring threads of a turbulent, tormented life, in which music would represent an oasis of harmony and hope.

At eighteen, Judee entered into a whirlwind marriage ("just to do something," she would later say). After her mother's death, she plunged back into a spiral of drugs and armed robbery, ending up in reform school, where she discovered the allure of gospel music and the Rosicrucian cult.

Another marriage, to musician Bob Harris, would prove to be little more than a strategic alliance for securing a steady supply of heroin. It was her friendship with a lawyer that became yet another turning point in her life, encouraging her to find peace through her artistic calling.

When Jim Pons of the Turtles got in touch with her, music took hold of her destiny. Thanks to the good fortune of "Lady-O" (a hit for the Turtles, later reworked for her debut), David Geffen signed her to his newly founded Warner subsidiary, Asylum, spurred on by the musician's stubbornness and energy ("How famous do you want to be?" he reportedly asked her, to which she replied: "What's the limit?"). But it was a story that would last only two albums: from the public declarations of admiration written in the liner notes of her first record, to the public mockery of David Geffen over his then-undisclosed homosexuality.

A figure like Judee Sill would today be constant tabloid fodder — by comparison, many of today's faux-transgressive women seem like well-behaved schoolgirls devoid of character or personality: her obsession with acid and religious mysticism, her sexual promiscuity, her excessive narcissism, and her endless thefts and robberies to feed her drug habit would leave today's self-righteous critics pale with shock.

The truth is that Judee Sill was a very strong personality, her creativity reaching well beyond the confines of those folk singer-songwriters still shackled to male superiority (only Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro would match the same intensity and creative autonomy), and her voice had a wide, vibrant range, almost like a Karen Carpenter wrenched away from pop for a nobler cause. But it's her intricate musicality that lies at the heart of her originality: folk, r&b, gospel, bluegrass, classical and baroque music blend into a quasi-symphonic folk that only Joanna Newsom would manage to revive many years later.

Rather than the obvious folk figures like Graham Nash, Jackson Browne or Linda Rondstadt, her artistic essence is closer to the progressions and sonic exploration of artists like Van Dyke Parks or Brian Wilson, and it's from this perspective that her debut becomes essential to American music, and it's here that what critics would call the Laurel Canyon Sound would likewise find its genesis. First impressions might tie "Judee Sill" to the natural, predictable evolutions of American folk-rock, but repeated, closer listening reveals the absence of those AOR contaminations that would drag much similar music into the arms of the mainstream. There's a lyrical and arrangement poise (courtesy of Bob Harris) that frees her music from the dated quality that cheapened so much production of that era, bringing her creativity closer to a Nick Drake or a Gene Clark.

Judee Sill sets to music a cross-section of the culture of those years, forgoing personal and autobiographical implications. These are stories of lives shattered by acid or loneliness, in a tormented awareness that opens no door to salvation or redemption; resignation and a nascent ideological defeat peek through, thus anticipating the cultural themes of gothic-folk.

Behind the lyrics steeped in religion and mysticism there is no bucolic or romantic vision: the dichotomy between sin and redemption is almost incapable of resolution, and the near-angelic loveliness of "Crayon Angels" is not a promise but merely a sonic seduction that draws the listener into a sequence of songs concealing more than one possible reading.

Even behind her only hit, "Jesus Was a Cross Maker", lies more than one story or twist, starting with her passion for country singer J D Souther (at the time in love with Linda Rondstadt), who in the song becomes like Christ, the carpenter, the heart-stealing outlaw, the architect of her emotional and spiritual torment, while the music takes on shades of gospel, country and baroque-pop.

A great devotee of Bach and Ray Charles, Judee Sill would confide to her friends: "I want to write beautiful songs that touch people deeply", and listening to one of the lesser-known gems of this debut, "My Man On Love", one can't say she didn't live up to that commitment. The secret lies in the choral structure of the songs, which create an evocative, straightforward emotional impact just like the religious hymns that inspired her writing style.

Judee Sill leaves no detail of her songs to chance, whether it's the perfect vocal pitch or the most fitting arrangement. Her recording of "Lady-O", the song that brought success to the Turtles, is a feast of sounds and lyrical phrasing that lets you fully savor the refined interplay between voice and orchestra.

The more intrusive orchestrations of "Abracadabra", in pure Van Dyke Parks style, and the elementary chord progression of "The Phantom Cowboy" contrast with the lyrical complexity of "The Lamb Ran Away With The Crown", which, through constant harmonic shifts and a skillful use of horns, files away a small gem of baroque-pop in the style of the Beach Boys.

Small traces of blues in "Ridge Rider", of gospel-soul-jazz ("Enchanted Sky Machines") and neoclassicism in "Lopin' Along Thru The Cosmos" round everything off, delivering an album in which beauty and inspiration flow with seemingly effortless ease, and where many arrangement choices would go on to inspire future evolutions of country songwriting.

Faced with the perfection of these eleven tracks, the second album doesn't suffer by comparison, with the nine-minute mantra of "The Donor" encapsulating all her mysticism and passion for the theories of Pythagoras, in a complex, avant-garde arrangement (invoking Arvo Part is no blasphemy) that still sounds modern today.

The last biographical notes find her forgotten, her final home a trailer where she lived in wretched health conditions, following an accident she couldn't treat with painkillers because of her past as a cocaine addict. Her death, in 1979, went almost unnoticed, with even many friends learning of it only years later. An ending that, rather than tied to the usual stories of drugs and vice typical of that era, was instead the consequence of an artist's difficulty in accepting the compromises of a star system that was becoming ever more entrenched.

"Judee Sill" remains one of the most important albums in country music and beyond, in fact marking the watershed between the hippie generation and the more aware, mature one that was to follow. Nor should we pass over in silence the sordid misogyny that, faced with her musical genius, manifested itself in an emotional isolation reminiscent of the story of Camille Claudel, another woman victimized by her own passion and creative genius. Two artists out of time whose work remains rich with authentic physicality and spirituality.

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27/09/2015