I used to listen to her albums before I went to sleep. “I was drinking beer because I couldn’t afford whiskey,” Stills says on stage in Westbury. One night at the Whiskey a Go-Go in Los Angeles, Stills spied Collins in the audience and made his move. The pair met in 1968 when Stills’s band, Buffalo Springfield, had just collapsed and Collins was preparing to record a new solo album, to be titled Who Knows Where the Time Goes. The last number not only speaks to their shared history, it indicates the original “scene of the crime”. New versions appear of So Begins the Task as well as Houses, along with Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes. The pair perform part of the song at the show while, on the album, they include compositions that, essentially, recast their entire story. “When we started rehearsing for the tour, Stephen said to me: ‘My God, we should have done this instead of the romance.’ And I said: ‘But then you wouldn’t have written Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, so that wouldn’t have worked.” “That’s a good message to send,” Collins says, several days after the Long Island show. Throughout the night, Collins and Stills meet each other’s eyes with easy empathy, reflecting the sweet kinship they struck and maintained after their romance ended. That dense knot of history adds delicious context to a current joint tour for the two stars, which recently made a stop at the NYCB Theatre at Westbury on New York’s Long Island. Then, in 1975, Collins wrote Houses, which finds her haunting the places Stills resides in without her.

Collins recorded and released her own version of that song less than 12 months later. Three years later, Stills recorded another piece about their relationship, So Begins the Task, which addressed the hard labour of accepting rejection. Their private connection became public after Stills, rejected by Collins, put his pining into classic songs such as Suite: Judy Blue Eyes and Helplessly Hoping, both of which turned up on the first Crosby Stills and Nash album in 1969. Nearly five decades ago, Judy Collins and Stephen Stills sparked a romance that was passionate and volatile enough to enter rock’n’roll lore.

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