Judee Sill died in obscurity. A new film says the LA musician was one of the greats
Anaheim, Calif. — Singer-songwriter J.D. Souther says he didn't know what to expect when record producer David Geffen urged him to check out a little-known folk singer named Judee Sill at a tiny Melrose Avenue club more than 50 years ago.
What he found changed his life.
"It was kind of like a musical bomb," Souther says from his home in New Mexico, describing the night he stumbled onto Sill performing to a dozen or so people at Artie Fatbuckle's Cellar in Hollywood in 1971. "I expected her to be good because David Geffen said she was great, and he has great taste.
"I did not expect her to be an absolute original," he continues. "Because she was really unlike anything any of us had ever seen at that moment when we were all just starting out and just being signed to (Geffen's) Asylum Records."
For singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin, while the setting was different, the epiphany was much the same.
"I was 17 and I was scooping ice cream in Baskin-Robbins in Carbondale, Illinois," Colvin says from her home in Austin, Texas. "We were listening to our college radio station, WTAO, and this woman comes on and it was ... I was kind of like pushed back and nailed to the wall. I was like, 'Who's that?!'
"It was 'There's a Rugged Road,' which is the first song on 'Heart Food,'" she says of the 1973 album that had just come out when Colvin heard Sill for the first time. "The guitar playing was superb. Nobody before or since, to me, has ever sounded like Judee Sill as a singer and as a writer. So it was totally unique, but in a genre that was close to my heart.
"And that was it. I just went to the record store and got 'Heart Food.' The record probably cost $3.99. And fell in love with it."
Souther and Colvin are not alone in their love of the singer-songwriter whose hard life has often overshaded the genius of the two albums she made for Asylum in the early '70s, where she was the first artist signed after Geffen launched the label.
They, along with artists including Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt, Big Thief, Weyes Blood and Fleet Foxes, all appear in "Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill," a new documentary that opens Friday, April 12, in theaters and on streaming services.
Through the testimony of musicians, friends, writers and more, the film seeks to restore Sill to her rightful place in music history, say co-directors Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom, who worked more than a decade to bring the project to the screen. (Full disclosure: Lindstrom and I were college classmates.)
"We were very lucky to have such enthusiasm," Lindstrom says of the response from those they approached to participate in "Lost Angel." "The feeling was like, 'Wow, this is about time. People need to know about her. How can we help?'"
A life revealed
Sill never shied from sharing the basic facts about her life before she made her first record.
As a teenager, she was arrested for a string of robberies in the San Fernando Valley and sent to reform school where she developed her musical skills by playing gospel songs on the organ for chapel services. After her release, she fell into drug addiction, sometimes working as a prostitute for money to buy heroin.
But that's not the story Lindstrom and Brown wanted to tell, and to those who knew her, it never defined or confined her as an artist.
"What was striking about the interviews was, each of the people we talked to just said how much fun Judee was," Lindstrom says. "How lovely she was. What a light she was. It completely blew away that kind of Wikipedia doom and gloom, the female Nick Drake depiction of her.
"One thing that's really notable is the circle of love that she built in her life as an adult," he says.
"She was, as far as her friend group, their dearest friend," Brown adds. "The funniest person they ever knew. The one who would organize all the holiday gatherings and gave presents on their birthdays."
Sill released her self-titled debut in 1971 and the sophomore release, "Heart Food," in 1973. The first sold about 40,000 but failed to break through commercially. The second sold less and Sill was dropped by the label, a huge blow to a singer-songwriter who wanted not only to be famous, but also to heal the world with her music, as she says through interviews and journal entries in "Lost Angel."
The filmmakers were limited to the decades-old footage of Sill in performance, but even in a video recorded by a friend at a performance at the University of Southern California, her talent shines through in the grainy images.
Other sources provided more context. An audiotape of an extensive interview she gave a journalist for the L.A. Free Press covered much of the same ground as the cover story that Rolling Stone published. Her niece had kept many of Sill's journals, which through the narration of a voice actor and animation of Sill's drawings, provided more of her voice for the film. The multitrack tapes of "Heart Food" allowed Sill's music to serve as the film score.
"Our goal was to have Judee tell the story, but we didn't have the archive to do that," Brown says. "That's partly why it took 10 years to make the film, because we were accumulating these things as we went along."
J.D. and Judee
After that first night in the folk club on Melrose, Souther was completely taken by Sill.
He was already deeply enmeshed in the growing country rock scene in Los Angeles, writing and performing with friends such as Glenn Frey and Don Henley, soon to become the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and Warren Zevon.
Yet in Sill, Souther says he saw things that none of them were doing yet.
"None of us — even Jackson, who was at that point far better than Glenn or Don or Zevon or I — had the kind of detail and the sort of admixture of the numinous and the absolute earthiness," he says. "It was just great. She was great.
"She was by far the best writer of any of us," Souther says. "If you asked her what musicians she liked, she would say Ray Charles and Bach. And she kind of liked the Sons of the Pioneers, which you can hear in some of her stuff that's kind of cowboy country. Her craftsmanship was just elegant, well-formed, and deep. It had a point of view without judgment, but it also had great detail, great specificity."
Souther and Sill became an on-and-off couple. It ended for good when Souther left to tour with Ronstadt and came home in a relationship with her.
The breakup inspired one of Sill's greatest songs, "Jesus Was a Cross-Maker," which mixes holy metaphors with earthly sorrows as it takes Souther down a peg or two for how he broke her heart. Famously, she showed up at his house before breakfast one day to let him hear it straight from her.
"Oh yeah, she threw it right in my face," Souther says, laughing. " "Here's how I feel about you, you unrepentant bastard.'
"I think I said, 'Wow. Well, let's go to Lucy's and get some huevos rancheros,'" he says. "So we went to El Adobe and had some some huevos rancheros. She had spoken her piece, you know. And then we got close again after that. Even when Linda and I were together, and we were in the studio singing, Judee was there a couple of times."
One of the greats
After Sill lost her record deal, she struggled. Her new boyfriend at the time wasn't good for her, Souther and other friends say in the film. A car crash in Souther's borrowed VW Beetle left her with long-term back pain, which soon led her back into a drug habit.
When she died in 1979 of a drug overdose, she left behind two albums, both of them filled with beautiful music, but outside of her friends few noticed her passing. Her dream to succeed ended unrealized by commercial measures, but that's not the only way to judge an artist's life.
"My first instinct is to just prompt us all to kind of reevaluate what it means to make it," Lindstrom says. "Can anyone listen to 'The Kiss' and think that Judee, in any way, did not make it?
"I think she kind of helps us understand her story with her last words in 'Lopin' Along Through the Cosmos,'" he says. "'However we are is OK.' I think that can sometimes be used as a kind of meaningless phrase, but in Judee's case, it's quite the opposite. I think of it as a kind of hard-won depth and acceptance and grit and perseverance to it."
Unlike Souther, Colvin never knew Sill through anything but her records. She recorded that first song she heard on the radio at the Baskin-Robbins on her 1994 album "Cover Girl," and has performed other Sill songs including "The Phoenix," which appears in "Lost Angel," over the years. But the most common response to her mention of Sill's name has been the blank expressions of those for whom it isn't known.
"That's why this movie is so important," Colvin says. "I liken her to Van Gogh or something. It's like you're gonna know about her long after she's gone, and hopefully this is the start of that, because she really should be.
"I just think it's one of those cases where I have to believe that she just wasn't meant to blow up while she was alive," she says. "And who knows how long it's going to take. But she belongs among the greats. Because she is one of the greats."