Their bicoastal relationship did not survive the winter, but it ended with one of rock’s greatest breakup songs, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which Stills composed in the spring of 1968. “I was off to be a rock star,” Stills said. You have to imagine: you’re sitting in the studio with someone who is so brilliant, and you are both so ambitious.” “It was very intense,” Collins continued, “and full of the music. “And I had all this stuff starting to pop.” “Well, I was a whirling dervish of a person,” Stills replied. “I never met anyone who had gone to the dry cleaners successfully.” And, lo and behold, in the nineteen-eighties I turned into him!” His mother was also an alcoholic. “I never drank until later, because my father was such an object lesson in how not to act.
Stills noted that alcohol was not his particular poison back then. “I don’t really remember that night,” Collins said. And she said, ‘Oh, these kids!’ But I was in the perfect mental state to be overwhelmed by an older woman.” He added, “And those eyes are even better live.” Their collaboration, fifty years in the making, is “the world’s oldest blooming flower,” Stills said, gamely trying to remember first meeting Collins, at an Eric Clapton show at the Whisky in Los Angeles, in the late nineteen-sixties.
Stills, seventy-two, and Collins, seventy-eight, are touring together, and they have an album, “Everybody Knows”-new songs, some catalogue, a few covers-coming out this week. Collins asked soothingly if he would like a Coca-Cola. Stills was grumpy at first about his squealing hearing aids (he is all but deaf in one ear), flinging them down on the table in frustration. “Don’t you look sharp!” Collins exclaimed as Stills, who was wearing a dark suit jacket over a black T-shirt, came in and kissed her on both cheeks. On a recent evening, the singer Judy Collins, who has lived in a classic six on West End Avenue for many years, had a visit from an old flame, Stephen Stills.
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