Check out the latest Judy interviews.
SFGate.com Read  
Marin Independent Journal Read

JUDY'S COMMENTS ABOUT HER BAY AREA TOUR SHE & CRAIG JUST FINISHED

  Pix: Mindy Giles

I loved San Franciso more than any city I was ever in on the road. It's got everything. It's got atmosphere.. even when it isn't nighttime you still feel like you're in a movie. It's got fog. It's got fog horns. It's got the Golden Gate Bridge, sometimes covered in fog with just the city shining through. It is so incredibly beautiful. It is the perfect temperature for me at all times. Cool, cold...sometimes warm...but never too hot. I LOVE IT and I really loved the San Francisco nightclub, BISCUITS & BLUES. And I loved SWEETWATER in Mill Valley. Among the best stage experiences I ever had. The audiences were as hip as the cities.

View Image   Pix: Marilyn Jones

View Image   Pix: Marilyn Jones

Bonnie had these wonderful comments following the show at Sweetwater

"Judy is a force of nature,..great singer / songwriter / performer. She's hilarious, poignant, witty and totally unique. She and her husband Craig are an experience you don't want to miss. I've wanted to see her ALL my life!! She is my favorite..there is NO ONE BETTER" - Bonnie Raitt 7/24/05

Maria's note about Judy's Sweetwater appearance:

"Alternating between a wickedly droll and whimsical wit, and the ability to
express soul-searing pathos, Judy was utterly captivating and had EVERYONE entranced. She can tickle your funny bone one minute and rip your heart out the next. I sat in the audience with my mouth open, but I was taking notes the WHOLE evening"--Maria Muldaur 7/26/05

HEY EVERYBODY!! I'M HITTING THE ROAD IN CALIFORNIA!! HERE IS SOME NEW TOUR AND RADIO INFORMATION FOR JULY 2005**

JUDY WILL BE DOING A LIVE RADIO SHOW FROM FREIGHT AND SALVAGE CALLED WEST COAST LIVE! ON JULY 9 - THIS BROADCAST IS 10:00am to NOON. JUDY AND CRAIG WILL DO A FEW SONGS AND A INTERVIEW. THIS IS A VARIETY SHOW THAT GOES OUT ALL OVER THE WEST COAST. IT IS CARRIED ON MANY PBS STATIONS AND WILL ALSO BE ON SIRIUS RADIO 108. THE INTERNET INFO ON THIS SHOW CAN BE FOUND AT http://www.wcl.org

JULY 10 JUDY WILL ALSO BE MAKING A LIVE APPEARANCE ON KPIG, SANTA CRUZ- "PLEASE STAND BY WITH SLEEPY JOHN" SANDIDGE. BE SURE AND TUNE IN FM 107.5 This show streams live. http://www.kpig.com.

JULY 13 JUDY & CRAIG WILL BE PLAYING IN MILL VALLEY AT THE FAMOUS SWEETWATER. SHOW TIME IS 8:30- 153 THROCKMORTON 415-388-2820 TIx $17

ON THURSDAY, JULY 14 2005 THEY WILL BE AT BISCUITS & BLUES in SAN FRANCISCO. SHOW TIMES ARE 8:30 and 10:30. 401 MASON ST. 415-388-292-2583 RESERVATIONS recommended. THEY ALSO HAVE GOOD FOOD THERE. tix $15/17

ON JULY 20 JUDY WILL PLAY IN THE SANTA CRUZ AREA, AT DON QUIXOTE'S INTENATIONAL MUSIC HALL IN FELTON, 6275 HWY 9. phone 831-603-2294 doors open at 7 and show time is 8pm Tix $12/14

AND, ON THURSDAY JULY 21ST SHE AND CRAIG WILL APPEAR AT 'MONTERREY LIVE, IN MONETERREY. 414 ALVARADO ST. ph/ 831-646-1415 tix $14/16

TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND COME ON! IT'LL BE FUN! xxJudy

MINDY GILES IS BACK WITH JUDY AND CRAIG AS HEAD OF ALL PRESS MATTERS AND UPCOMING TOUR INFORMATION:MINDY's CONTACT# is 916/456-6508 - mail MinGiles@AOL.COM

Judy will be on SIRIUS RADIO this coming SUNDAY FEB 6 2005 as guest on DAVE MARSH'S new satellite radio show called: KICK OUT THE JAMS - 10 to 12 am Sunday. This is a wonderful show for Judy to be on, and we hope Judy fans can tune in to the show. TURN ON YOUR RADIOS - shoud be fun!! Sirius Radio station #148. Here's a http://www.shorefire.com/artists/sirius/pr_sirius_10_19_04.htmllink about Marsh's show.

Judy and Craig have finished recording their new CD, "She Sang California". There are 13 new recordings - both live and in the studio. It's available for purchase RIGHT NOW! FOR THE HOLIDAYS!

"Judy always liked songs that tell a story and on this album she gives that impulse free rein. These are the sort of stories you might hear if you had the good fortune to be around the right campfire or on the right stool in the right bar at just the right moment" (Steve Hoffmann 11/04)

WE'RE ON LINE WITH SECURE ORDERING- AND NOW HAVE MORE OF MY CD'S THAN ANY OTHER SITE.. FINALLY! .. Power to the Artist! xxjudy

STAY TUNED for info on upcoming performances. We'll be touring to support the new CD.

JUDY WILL BE PERFORMING AT DIZZY'S IN SAN DIEGO THIS COMING FEB 25, '05, 8:30 show DIZZY'S IS A GREAT ROOM AND ALSO HAS A GREAT BALDWIN PIANO FOR CRAIG. HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE.
(The Lou Cutiss Benefit on the following Sat has been postponed- stay tuned for more info)

Booking: info@judyhenske.com

- Here's our first piece of press on Judy's new CD. Buddy Blue is a music critic for The San Diego Union, and appears as well in The Sacramento Bee and The San Jose Mercury Press. Judy's distributor has scheduled nationwide release for February '05. _____________________

SALUTATIONS, PUTOHOLICS! JUDY HENSKE has given birth to a new album, She Sang California, which I yam honored to have sneaked in some guitar, dobro and background vocal work on. The album also features such heavy company as Judy's husband, supersession pianoman/master composer/arranger Craig Doerge, plus Lee Sklar, Graham Nash, Russ Kunkel, Norton Buffalo, Richie Hayward and many other fine musicians.

Judy da Cootie (as I affectionately call her) is known as the legendary Queen Of The Beatniks; the woman whom Sam Cooke biographer Daniel Wolfe says put the whorehouse back into the blues; the literary muse of creepy old Andrew Vachs; a one-of-a-kind combo platter of Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, Lenny Bruce, Allan Ginsberg, Tom Waits, Dorothy Love Coates, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rusty Warren, Tuli Kupferberg, the Marx Brothers, Frank Capra and Shirley MacLaine.

Judy is the most uniquely talented person I've ever worked with -- her recordings and performances combine every cool style of music under the sun with stand-up comedy, beat poetry, vaudeville, philosphy and method acting. "She Sang California" is, in my opinion, her best album ever. It'll make ya alternately laugh, cry, dance, drink and think. S'a goddamned masterpiece, is what it is. The official release of "She Sang California" (I believe she also sings New Orleans, Chicago, Memphis and Western Wisconsin) isn't until February but you can pick up a pre-release copy at Judy's website www.judyhenske.com. While yer in there, sign her guestbook and tell her I done sentcha. Buddy Blue

REVIEWS!!!

DAVE MARSH REVIEWS JUDY HENSKE's CD, "Loose In The World" (Playboy, May 2000)

Return of the Beatnik Queen

To hear the least known musical treasure of 1999, all you have to do is send $15 or your credit card info to Fair Star Music, P.O. Box 326 Plaza Station, Pasadena, Ca 91102, or fax it to 626 577 4257. In return you will receive a copy of Judy Henske's Loose in the World. This is the first album since 1972 by a woman sometimes known as Queen of the Beatniks and always as a talent so diverse in what she's good at that she's beyond all categories except "legendary" and "great."

What I mean is that Judy Henske is a great blues and folk singer with a wicked sense of humor, a grand sense of theatrics and that she renders hipster wit and wisdom with grace, brass and power.

You should be able to summarize a legendary performer in simpler terms than those, but not this Henske. Loose in the World opens with "Mad Dog Killer", with an arrangement that evokes New Orleans funeral bands and a lyric that is both an update or a sendup of the badman ballad tradition. "It seemed just like show business to me," she says of her gunsel's arrest. "First they interview you, then they take your picture free." Coming from anyone else that blend would be about as palatable as eating a mixture of paste and Tabsco. Coming from Henske, it sounds like the height of American art-song, and that's because in terms of our popular culture, that's pretty much what it is.

That's a lot to promise from an album by a singer who hasn't made a solo record in 34 years (The Death Defying Judy Henske) or any full-length album at all since Rosebud, her duo disc with Jerry Yester & Craig Doerge in 1972. But Henske hasn't lost a thing; her voice is still the rich, bluesy, embracing vehicle it was in 1972. And all that time off hasn't rusted her writing chops, either. "Dropped Like a Dime" has a joyous folk-rock groove and lyrics and melody that drift in somewhere out of cowboy surrealism: "Dropped like a dime on candy / I believe the big time's through with me." Well, I don't believe it. Not when she follows up with a darkly gorgeous ballad like "Dark Angel," rewrites "Motherless Child" and "I Believe to My Soul" into "Blue Fortune" ("love is just like smoke / you know you can't see clearly 'til it disappears"), confesses a past that would make anyone envious in "Wish I Had My Old Guitar," and wraps it up with a folk song ("Betty and Dupree") and a classic show-tune ("'Til theReal Thing Comes Along"), both rendered as versions of the blues.

Wedged between those last two is "Tin Star," another comic turn that's not really a joke. "Oh my child, you'd be better off dead / than to live all your stories in your head / and spend the rest of your life at home in bed," she sings, and it sounds like an account of how she decided to return to what she was born to do. But then she muses in the next line, "Although I hear that worked for Howard Hughes," and you realize that this is one artist who's never wasted a second. She sees clear through love and smoke, both. May she make a record a year for the next 34.

Dave Marsh - January 2000

Java Joe's Show reviews, San Diego, October 15, 1999

Notes From The New CD, "Loose In The World"

It's somehow fitting that Judy Henske has returned to record-making at the very end of the Twentieth Century, releasing this dark gem of an album just under the wire. She steps back on the scene after much too long an absence - yet she's picking up right where she left off, with the same wickedly humorous take on the world she's always been known for. and if anything, the world is both more wicked and more hilarious than when she first stomped and wailed across the stages of America. Judy's unflinching vision and dagger-true voice are needed now more than ever.

Judy Henske reclaims a niche in American music that no one else has ever quite filled. When she began recording in the 1960's the critics always had a hard time categorizing her - she was at once a folk diva, a nightclub chanteuse, a hipster comedienne and songwriter of great poetic nuance and craft. Back in those days, when traditional songs were often treated with an excess of reverence, she could rip into folk-blues material like "Wade in the Water' and "Duncan and Brady" with enough hell-bent abandon to shock them back to life. Her fiery version of "High Flying Bird" remains the definitive one. Later, her songs in Farewell Aldeberan avoided the introspective preciousness of the era in favor of more exotic, moodier vignettes. Henske is a genuine original, and if that makes her hard to categorize, it enriches her as an artist.

Judy's story is filled with the same sort of odd twists and unlikely associations that show up in her music. First discovered and signed to Elektra Records by its founder, Jac Holzman, Judy sang at the Village Gate in New York, with a band that included Herbie Hancock and Clark Terry. In the years that followed she went on to record more albums, star in a Broadway musical by the legendary Anita Loos, open shows for Lenny Bruce, headline at the Hungry I, perform on the Judy Garland TV show, write songs with the late Shel Silverstein, appear in the folk exploitation movie Hootenanny Hoot, by B-movie mogul Sam Katzman, and open for Woody Allen at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago (Woody would later make her hometown of Chippewa Falls WI the hometown of Annie Hall) Rolling Stones producer, Jack Nietzsche, proclaimed her "Queen of the Beatniks", but she wore her crown at a jaunty angle, walking through the kingdom of the insane that is show business with an air of wry bemusement.

Judy put aside recording and touring in the early 70's to raise her daughter, Kate, though she continued to write, co-writing songs with her husband, Craig Doerge, that would later be recorded by Crosby Stills and Nash and Bette Midler, among others. But Judy Henske's music kept its hold on her fans, and earned her new admirers over time. In the past six years Judy has been performing in select venues from San Francisco to San Diego. A Henske revival arose when writer Andrew Vachss began using her as a leitmotif in his novels. His detective, Burke, listens to Henske's records on stakeout. Vachss then included her on his 1999 Safe House blues anthology CD - between Otis Spann and Muddy Waters. The time was ripe for Judy to record again.

Fortunately, her muse has never left her as is evidenced by the tunes gathered on this new CD. These songs are by turns rueful, disturbing, hilarious and tender, veering from the Brechtian "Master of Love" to the skewed rock of "Tikky Tikky Gumdrop" and the honky tonk commentary of "Tin Star". As a lyricist, Henske is exquisite in her imagery and merciless in her sketches of humanity. In "Mad Dog Killer" she neatly updates the badman ballad tradition found in tunes like "Betty and Dupree" into the present day... StaggerLee as a 1999 gangsta, rousted by vice cops. "Dark Angel" is a chilling invocation of evil's addictive pleasures, while "Blue Fortune" is a lament of spare, stark power. This is music for the present fin de siecle, sung with conviction and a scathing sense of humor. But then, that was always Judy's forte: telling tales of the far edges, whether of love or regret or murder.

Loose in the World closes with "Til the Real Thing Comes Along ", a classic tune that Henske initially recorded on her first Elektra album. It's a masterful reprise of one of her old concert standards, a mixture of obsession and irony that's even more appropriate now. The lyrics may be fatalistic, but her performance is passionate and defiant, the work of an artist revitalized. Welcome back, Judy, you've been sorely missed.

Barry Alfonso 1999