Henry James once described James Singer Sargent as "an insolent genius." James was referring to the speed and apparent ease with which the painter tossed off his creamy, sensual, shockingly accomplished portraits. But I think the phrase could be used just as easily to describe Judy Henske. Henske began her career in the early 60s folk scene, and her ribald persona and raunchy humor earned her opening slots for Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen (who, perhaps not coincidentally, made Henske's hometown of Chippewa Falls, WI, the birthplace of Annie Hall). She developed a devoted cult following and was even proclaimed "Queen of the Beatniks" by Rolling Stones producer Jack Nitzsche. Then, sometime between Woodstock and Watergate, after creating a body of work that practically defines the term sui generis?including four solo albums, a stint with Dave Guard's Whiskeyhill Singers, and the truly out-there Farewell Aldebran project with then-husband Jerry Yester?Henske abruptly quit recording and touring to lead a quiet life as a wife and mother.
Long championed from such seemingly disparate corners as Pauline Kael (who, one story has it, was so incensed with Judy's unwillingness to tour that it almost cost them their friendship) and Andrew Vachss, Henske broke her long silence in 1999 with the release of Loose in the World (Fair Star), her first album in three decades.
Describing Henske's music is difficult, and makes it sound like one of the lower circles of some gay hipster hell: equal parts light jazz, lounge, cabaret, torch song, honkytonk and folk. But the fact is, Loose swings harder than a limbo contest at a nudist colony. Singing like the love child of Captain Beefheart and Edith Piaf (with Janis Joplin midwifing), Henske dominates every track, sometimes to the point of overpowering the music behind her, soaring and diving, swooping and hollering, with one of the most phenomenal?okay, insolent?damn voices I've ever heard.
I recently spoke with the singer by telephone from her home in Pasadena, CA.
In one of your last e-mails you were so busy, you were doing shows in San Diego, rehearsing a new band and recording a new album. But other than that you're not doing anything, right?
Yeah, and then I think we're planning a tour for the summer. We'll be going here and there, and then I want to have a really big East Coast tour...but right now we have to find people who still remember who I am... Craig [Doerge?her husband, producer and songwriting partner] and I are working on the new album, but we probably won't have anything done and ready to go for four or five months. We've got two in the can.
Do you have a big backlog of songs?
You know, it's interesting that you ask that, because you're the only person who has ever asked me, and I have been interviewed really a lot of times. Know what the answer is?
Well, I'm just dreaming of this enormous, like, 20-CD compilation that's going to come out.
The answer is yes. Because, even though I disappeared, I wasn't gone as far as me?my own self?went. I was right here, working... I think we have enough for four CDs. Frank Zappa, whom I knew very, very well, would say to me, he'd come up to the house?this is when I was married to Jerry Yester?and he'd say, "Well, what are you going to do with that poem?" Because I really wrote a lot of poetry at that time. And I'd say, "Oh, I don't know, I'm just going to store it somewhere." And Frank said, "Do you know that I don't have anything that I ever wrote that I didn't put on record." What do you think of that?
It sort of reminds me of Sylvia Plath's line about the stench of unsubmitted manuscripts piling up.
So you're a fan of Sylvia Plath's?
A little bit.
Or her life, at least. If you could call it that.
So, let me see if I've got this right. You began testing the waters, doing local shows, around the mid-90s.
That's right.
But then, the album?after all this time, Loose in the World. Why now? What happened?
The reason I was retired was that I wanted a quieter life, because you know, there's a very bookish side to me. And I wanted a life that was more austere than the one I was leading. You know, where you have to be on the road with the band and you just sort of sink into that...leadership position.
I can't see you "sinking" into leadership.
Because I considered myself above it.
So you got married.
So I got married, I married Jerry, then I ran off with Craig, and he was really the one, and I got this life that I'd always wanted. And it was a quiet life: I was a mother, I had Kate, my daughter, and I wanted to be a wife and a mother until Kate was?and put this in quote marks?until she was "out of the way." Well, she didn't get married until, like, three years ago this October. So it was a considerably longer time than I planned!
Wouldn't arsenic have been quicker?
Just dump her, just get rid of her...
There's a lot of dark, and what I consider druggy, themes going through the album. Things like "Dropped Like a Dime," "Dark Angel"... It seems to inform your work.
Here's the reason it informs my work, and...well, you can write about it: my mother was a drug addict. And I come from a family?my father was a doctor?in Chippewa Falls, this small town in Wisconsin...and she got addicted to Demerol, which I think is an artificial morphine... I've had it once, to have my vocal chords operated on, back when I was with Dave Guard and the Whiskeyhill Singers, and I can't describe how wonderful you feel... The effect is just amazing...you see the scalpels all laid out, and you say to the doctor, "Oh! What marvelous-looking things are these! Look at the blade, how keen, how marvelous!" And then you see the doctors there, and they've got these masks, so all you can see are the eyes, and it should be terrifying, and you say, "What beautiful eyes you have, doctor..." Unfortunately, if you take it every single day, and you inject it like my mother did, then you just become the drug itself, you become a product of the drug...people carrying you upstairs... I've never said that in an interview before, and I probably never will again... So that was written for her.
Which was?
"Dark Angel." I remember her standing in the bedroom, in her evening gown, in exactly that way. And it was my father who always gave her the drug. He started giving her the injections, then she started giving them to herself.
It probably didn't help that you were coming of age musically in the 1960s.
Oh no, because it was so permissive, everything was permitted... I was never much of a pot smoker, but I was certainly a speed freak for a certain amount of time. And I am an alcoholic, which is about all I'm going to confess. But I'm not saying I'm sorry about any of it...
What part of that factored into your decision to lead a quiet life? You obviously cared enough to bring up your daughter in a more sane environment.
Yes, I did. But then I started going haywire when she was 14, at exactly the same time my mother started going haywire. It was like I was repeating the same thing... I don't know. I think it might be something I inherited, because all my mother's sisters started going crazy at that age. Some made it through and some didn't...and she had eight sisters... When I stopped drinking I thought I'd never be able to write again.
When was that?
I stopped drinking when Kate was 16. She's 32 now, so it was 16 years ago.
Okay, but obviously it didn't stop your writing.
Well, here's what happened. Andrew Vachss started writing to me. You know his books? And it's funny, because I got a note from him today, and I haven't heard from him for at least three years. He began writing to me, and in a way, because I had to write back to him, in order to write again, you have to write. It sounds...kind of double-talk, something silly. I don't mean it that way, but in order to write again, you have to put your hind end on a chair and sit at a desk and have a piece of paper in front of you and start writing.... And so that's how I started writing again. But I was really scared.
I don't want us to get too depressed here.
Okay.
How has the album done?
Oh, it's done very well. It's under our own record company, Fair Star Music... First we got a website, and then people wrote into the website and ordered the CD, and that's how we sold it... Then, we got a distributor interested. And now it's at Borders, and hip record stores, and so now we're doing really really well. Of course, we don't have a radio single.
Well, I really think "Tikky Tikky Gumdrop" could be a smash in the hiphop clubs with a couple of remixes, because that is just the funkiest song. I think you need Dr. Dre or RZA to come in there and do something with it.
That's really interesting that you say that, because I think that's a really funky little tune. So does Craig... You know, I think you're right, but I don't know how you do that.
[www.judyhenske.com](http://www.judyhenske.com)