Judy At Carnegie Hall; Judy Garland Speaks!

Not since Lazarus was coaxed out for a costume change had there been a comeback quite as celebrated as the one documented in Judy at Carnegie Hall, which is getting a much-needed CD remastering on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Judy Garland’s 1961 one-nighter wasn’t her first or last phoenix-style resurrection — she’d made a cottage industry out of those — only her best. The show caught the century’s greatest female entertainer at that magic hour when the nervous girlishness and no-holds-barred vibrato from her early movie musicals could cheerfully cohabitate with a heartrending sensitivity to loss and regret in the classic ballads being added to her repertoire. It’s no wonder that Carnegie Hall, which spent 13 weeks at No. 1 in 1961 and won Garland a best-album Grammy the following year, is still probably the most renowned non-rock live album ever: Even the combined power of the Who at Leeds couldn’t add up to quite this much life force.

By then she was in the September of her years, even though it should’ve been more like the July, with Garland being only 39. (She lived, against many odds, to age 47.) And so many admirers emphasize the show’s autumnal aspects. Listened to in this retrospective, bittersweet context, her first signature song, ”Over the Rainbow,” can sound almost as world-weary as her last one, ”The Man That Got Away.” She’d belted every number like she meant it from the time she got pushed on stage at age 2, but those extra few decades of professional betrayal, bad marriages, barbiturates, and self-loathing counted for something when it came to waxing resigned in the service of melancholy babies Arlen and Gershwin.

But it would be a mistake to make the set sound like a downer. Above all, Carnegie Hall (in stores Feb. 27) is a kick in the pants, full of honest razzle-dazzle and a generosity of spirit that few of today’s pop stars could imagine, much less muster. Her guilelessly funny ramblings between songs remind you why she was a hit on the Bogart-and-Bacall Beverly Hills party circuit. The second-act opener, ”That’s Entertainment,” wasn’t written for her, but might as well have been, with its brassy mixture of cynicism and celebration. If the winter of Garland’s last few years would prove to be fairly cruel, we should all have an Indian summer this spectacular.

In last year’s absorbing biography, the altogether ironically titled Get Happy, Gerald Clarke speculated that Garland suffered from an undiagnosed but all-too-self-medicated case of bipolar disorder, or manic depression. Carnegie Hall was a perfect example of her part-time public ebullience. Depressive, meanwhile, hardly begins to describe the raging id that shows up in an equally essential new two-CD set, Judy Garland Speaks! Brought to you by the folks behind the infamous Celebrities at Their Worst! series (and available at forcedexposure.com), it’s a collection of bitter rants dictated into a reel-to-reel machine from 1963 to ’67 as notes for a never-completed autobiography, tapes that now constitute one of the most excruciatingly fascinating spoken-word albums of all time. This is entertainment too if you have any voyeuristic impulses and not too many unresolved Adult Children of Alcoholics issues.

Early on, struggling with the recorder, her bon mots are pointed but gentle: ”It should be Johnson & Johnson tapes. My wounds, I’d like to tape.” But the tone gets darker and druggier as she rails against ex-husbands, ex-managers, gossip columnists, and occasionally even her adoring public: ”I’ve sung, I’ve entertained, I’ve pleased your children, I’ve pleased your wives, I’ve pleased you — you sons of bitches!” Clang, clang, clang went the trolley … to hell!

Speaks! feels like a great one-woman Off Off Broadway show. It could also serve as a final exam for a pharmacology class, given how Garland adopted a different slur each time she turned the recorder back on. If this lonely-at-the-top aural memoir sounds like a hoot, prepare to get verklemmt when she yells ”Don’t make a joke of me anymore!” or interrupts the rage to make some extremely inaccurate prophecies: ”We are correct, nice people. I will have more babies, with my husband, Mark [Herron] … There’ll be over the rainbow for me!”

There would be more husbands, not babies, before her accidental overdose in 1969. But the well-known details of her downward spiral haven’t even slightly diminished her allure — also evident in a Feb. 25-26 ABC miniseries, Me and My Shadows, based on Lorna Luft’s ’99 memoir. It’s a testament to Garland’s early screen innocence and later power as a stage performer that we can know about the pills and pathos and still put all that out of mind when need be. Sentimentalists will prefer to stick with the immortal comeback kid of Carnegie Hall, if not the idealized girl on the yellow brick road. Hardened postmodernists may prefer Speaks!‘ tragicamp vision of a rainbow ending in a vial of Nembutal. The real challenge, though, may be believing in — and learning something from — each Judy. Both: A

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