There are some songs that so astound me that I can vividly recall when I first heard them. For example, I can remember the first time I heard “Cannonball” by The Breeders on the radio, as I think it was the only time I was so stunned by a song that I pulled off the road to listen to it finish without any distractions. Then there’s Judee Sill’s “Jesus Was a Crossmaker”, which had been playing a part of a compilation of various artists I was spinning for the first time. The track had started while I was in the bathroom and I walked out when it did that breathtaking run-up to the first chorus: “Blinding me, his song/remains/reminding me/he’s/a rebel and a heart breaker/ohhh/Jesus was a cross maker”. When the song finished, I had to start it from the beginning again.
That track was my gateway drug to Sill’s small body of work, with just two studio albums released in her troubled lifetime. Speaking of drugs, there was a lot of those in her life, as well as a lot of heartbreak. And, as if the cards weren’t stacked against her already, she seemed pretty desperate to commit self-sabotage. As a headline puts it at one point: “Who is Judee Sill? And why is she saying all these terrible things about herself?”
I was aware of those elements of her life before viewing the 2022 documentary Lost Angel: The Genuis of Judee Sill, but it digs into those issues as deeply as I believe a work can when it concerns such a complex, troubled and private person.
Her life was troubled from an early age, with her father dying and her mother consequently marrying a man of whom relatives of Sill’s advised each other to “not leave the children alone with him”. Soon, she’s doing drugs and doing time, the latter for holding up some businesses, like gas stations. It is at the reformatory, she seems to really discover music, playing organ during the church services.
When I say drugs, I don’t mean just pot or LSD, but actual heroin. According to her admission, she was shooting up 15-20 bags a day. She also talks about smuggling bags across the border in her “cunt” (her choice of work, folks!). No surprise she also turns to prostitution.
Now, here’s where I start feeling like a bit of an asshole because, although many of those interviewed regarded her as a tough customer, I started to doubt to suspect a touch of the “unreliable narrator” in some of her anecdotes. And we will actually her voice quite often in snippets from recorded interviews (at other times, a voiceover which a voice distinctly unlike hers will read quotes by Sill).
Why the doubt? One minor example is her telling at least three different guys she wrote the song “Ridge Rider” for them. More extreme is her conviction she was channeling music from the almighty, and that bowing to record company pressure to record another album would be an offense to Him: “They can rush me all they want, but I’m not going to rush God. What an outrage, sucking up to the almighty.” Honestly, I would have been looking askance at her just because it seems she drops in the person’s horoscope sign of whomever she’s talking about, but I know that stuff was all the rage at the time.
Speaking of rage, she had that in abundance, despite apparently being generally well-liked” “You never knew what she was going to say. Usually happy, but there must be a lot of rage underneath there.” She had no patience for hecklers, and we hear a recording of her stopping a song to tell one to either get on the stage and do that to her face, or to get out. But that’s nothing compared to what she did on the UK stage, reportedly calling David Geffen, her label’s boss a “fat fag”. Once again, folks, her words, not mine!
Admittedly, she had the deck stacked against even at the moment she was closest to breaking out. Although her debut was the first release on Asylum Records, that was lost in the promotion efforts for such major hitters as The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell. Also, as badly as this may read today, some attribute her lack of success largely to not being as physically attractive as more popular female artists such as Mitchell.
Which is a shame, because her songs are largely brilliant stuff: musically, lyrically and compositionally. She always knew exactly what she wanted, frequently incorporating unexpected instruments and taking tunes into directions which will take first-time listeners unawares. Not only was she direct in telling the session musicians how to play, but she even conducted the strings.
Decades after her death, her audience continues to grow. Hopefully, Lost Angel will help to recruit new fans to this still obscure artist. As one-time labelmate Ronstadt puts it: “She had more musical chops than anybody on the scene except maybe Brian Wilson.” I doubt I would have liked Sill as a person, but she was a brilliant songwriter. But, as the last words she sings in this documentary tell us, accepting yourself is really the most important thing: “I’ll tell you a secret/no matter how odd/however we are is OK.”
Dir: Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom
Documentary
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray