Judee Sill: A Summary

As a rule, I generally don't like female singers. The ones who sing the songs of others aren't typically worth my time and the ones who sing their own songs more often than not annoy me. I don't have anyone to fill me in on great female singer/songwriters, I have to try to discover them myself and it's been hard… in my eyes, one of those few and far between great ones was the late Judee Sill.

Sill's life wasn't an easy one. Born in Studio City in 1944, her earliest years were spent in and around Oakland, where she picked up early pointers on piano in her father Milford "Bun" Sill's bar. When Bun passed in 1952, her mother Oneta packed up Judee and her brother Dennis and headed to Los Angeles to pick up her life. Within months, Oneta Sill had taken up and married the famous animator/jackass drunk Kenneth Muse, who soon enough dragged his wife down into a spiral of alcoholism and drug addiction that would eventually kill her.

Sill never forgave her mother for marrying Muse, rebelling against her family starting shortly after Dennis moved out, acting out with hoodlums and falling in love at fifteen with a Clyde Barrow-type with whom she stuck up various gas stations and liquor stores throughout the San Fernando Valley. When they were finally caught, Judee was sent to reform school for nine months while her Clyde was sent to prison. It was at reform school that Judee picked up the gospel licks that would permeate throughout her music. After her release, she entered into a blip of a marriage that her mother and stepfather had annulled.

In 1963, she entered San Fernando Valley Junior College, majoring in art and playing the piano in the school orchestra, freelancing in clubs on double bass in her free time. After one year of college, she flunked out, going on to spend part of 1964 working in a factory making mass-produced paintings for motel rooms. Orphaned after the 1965 death of her mother, she began dabbling with heroin, married jazz pianist and fellow heroin addict Bob Harris and moved with him to Las Vegas for a time where the two eked out an existence as occasionally homeless junkie musicians. After returning to California, Sill turned to prostitution and forgery to feed her habit. After being picked up for forging checks and in need of bail money, she reached out to her brother only to be told of his death. She was found guilty and sent to prison where she went through a forced withdrawal. After her release, she straightened up and was determined to make her way as the "greatest songwriter in the world".

Through Harris (whom she soon enough parted with), she met John Beck and Jim Pons of the seminal Leaves who would record her "Dead Time Bummer Blues", written while she was awaiting trial. After Pons joined the Turtles, Judee remained in his orbit as well as those of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, who ended up signing her to their Blimp Productions as a songwriter for a weekly stipend of sixty-five dollars a week, giving her the opportunity to make demos of her songs. The Turtles were enamored enough with her "Lady-O" that they put it out as a single in 1969 on which Sill played guitar. Though it wasn't a smash single like "Elenore", "Happy Together" or "It Ain't Me Babe" had been, it did garner the attention of super-agent David Geffen whom she developed a crush on and who, at least initially, she felt was the man to get her to the top. Geffen got her a lucrative publishing deal, allowing her to put a down payment on a home.

She could have signed to Atlantic but she instead opted to wait until Geffen started up his label. The first artist signed to Asylum, she spent 1970 and 1971 recording her self-titled debut with her ex-husband Harris helping out in arranging the strings and production split between Beck, Pons and Henry Lewy with Graham Nash producing the most radio-friendly cut, "Jesus Was A Crossmaker". An ambitious mix of gospel, baroque, folk and pop with hints of country here and there, Judee Sill itself is a summation of the best tracks in Sill's catalogue, some written for Blimp Productions, others for April-Blackwood. One could call it "Christian" music, but Sill's vision of Christianity deviated far from the norm and threads of theosophy ran throughout. God or Christ is almost like a lover impossible to find, the album is full of tracks dealing with this such as "The Lamb Ran Away From The Crown" and "Loping Along Through The Cosmos". The single, "Jesus Was A Crossmaker" wasn't about God or Christ, rather J. D. Souther, one-time lover of Sill and future sellout. David Geffen bought a billboard to introduce his first label's first album, "Jesus Was A Crossmaker" made waves on the radio, it seemed that at age twenty-seven, a lifetime of paying dues would finally start to pay off.

Unfortunately, Judee Sill had the misfortune of being followed by the infinitely more commercial debuts of Jackson Browne and the Eagles, whose records sold infinitely better than Sill's, whose album sales instantly dropped off. Judee Sill, though a critical hit, had a handful of bad reviews, notably that of Playboy, whose reviewer wrote "next time give us less seedy fruit" in response to "may you savor each word like a raspberry", the message she placed on the album's back cover. Though given the opportunity to open for big names such as Graham Nash and David Crosby, Sill quickly grew tired of playing for audiences who came to hear others. She had a handful of sessions for the BBC, stripping down the lush vocal and instrumental arrangements to their base, coming off not one iota less powerful than the studio counterparts.

In 1972, she began work on her second album for Asylum, co-producing the record with Lewy, faced with the daunting tasks to follow up an album that showcased two years worth of her best songs and arranging the orchestra without any formal training. Another hybrid of baroque, folk, pop and gospel with more pronounced country overtones, Heart Food managed to come across as a stronger unified album than its predecessor. Yet again, the lyrics had their fair share of Christian and theosophical overtones, such as on "The Kiss" and "The Vigilante". "The Pearl" was a thinly veiled portrait of Sill's years as an addict. There wasn't a "Jesus Was A Crossmaker Part Two" among the tracks, though perhaps "Soldier of the Heart" could have made it on the radio. As with Judee Sill, Heart Food was ignored by a populace who, just as they do today, prefer the simple pablum of predictability to a more sophisticated feast.

The failure of Heart Food to resonate with the public drove a permanent wedge in the already fractured relationship between Sill and David Geffen. Believing the still closeted Geffen was paying more attention to his male acts, she famously outed him while touring Europe. Geffen, in turn, blacklisted Sill, unceremoniously dropping her from Asylum and doing his damnedest to see that no other label sign her. In 1974, sessions at former Monkee Mike Nesmith's studio with Bill Plummer producing resulted in the recording of a third album's worth of material. Sill designed a potential album cover herself, going so far as to include the Asylum logo in an attempt to get herself re-signed to her former label. Asylum stayed away as did everybody else. Unable to find a home, the songs were abandoned, the sessions remaining in the can for another thirty years.

After 1974, Judee Sill fell off the map. Denied painkillers in the aftermath of various accidents and botched surgeries and with nowhere else to turn to numb the pain, she returned to the heroin she had left behind so long before, taking up cocaine as well. Spiraling downward for five years, she was found the day after Thanksgiving 1979. It was the result of an overdose of cocaine and codeine, a probable suicide. She didn't even make the obituary page.

You'll never hear anything quite like Judee Sill. Unlike her contemporaries, the music she produced wasn't easily digestible- she once claimed to the NME that her three biggest inspirations were Pythagoras, Bach and Brother Ray, take that as you will. It takes time for her songs to crawl under your skin, the fifth or sixth listen is the important one. Because of this, Judee Sill remains an underrated artist, perhaps a reason I like her- who the hell knows who she was? You all should. Her two Asylum albums are collected in the 2-disc Abracadabra set with bonus material, the 1974 sessions and assorted demos from 1968-1974 in the Dreams Come True set, with the Live in London set presenting the BBC sessions. You can't go wrong with any of it.