Joel Bernstein Interview: The Story Behind Neil Young's Album "Songs for Judy"

Joel Bernstein
San Francisco, April 9, 2018
Photographed by Joshua Ets-Hokin

Neil Young's long time archivist and photographer Joel Bernstein played a very key role in the recent album release "Songs For Judy".

Bernstein taped the November 1976 concerts and created a mix cassette with fellow fan Cameron Crowe. The cassette eventually evolved into the album release 42 years later. From an interview with Joel Bernstein in The Philadelphia Inquirer by by Chuck Darrow:

You were Neil’s guitar tech on the “Songs for Judy” tour. What were the circumstances of your capturing it on tape?

Joel Bernstein: I thought, ‘I really want to have a souvenir of this tour. So, I’m going to bring my Uhr cassette deck and get a PA feed and record these shows. It’s for me. It’s never going to become a bootleg album or something. It’s just so I can remember how cool it was.'

So I recorded 16 shows out of the 25 we did — it was a short tour, all in November.

Some people might assume the “Judy” of the title is Judy Collins. But it turns out it is a far more iconic Judy.


Joel Bernstein:We finished the tour [with two shows] in Atlanta, and Neil and the band were celebrating the end of the tour and had imbibed something and were pretty out there.

Neil hallucinated during the first show. The [spoken segment on the album] is him describing to the audience of the second show what had happened to him on stage during the first show, when he looked down into the orchestra pit and hallucinated Judy Garland standing there looking up at him.

So we decided to call the album Songs for Judy.

Full interview with Joel Bernstein in The Philadelphia Inquirer by by Chuck Darrow.

Also, more on Joel Bernstein and The Neil Young Archives.

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