You Can’t Take The Brooklyn Out of Singer-Songwriter Susan Collins

Even if you have never heard of Susan Collins, you’ve probably heard her sing–more often than you might imagine. The East Flatbush native has been performing since she was teen-ager in the 1960s and can be heard on hits such as Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me,” ELO’s “Evil Woman” and “Strange Magic,” and Ace Frehley’s “New York Groove.”

For the last few years she’s been entertaining enthusiastic crowds with the four-voice-and-piano production of her autobiographical show, You Can Take the Girl Outta Brooklyn (But You Can’t Take Brooklyn Outta The Girl). Just before a March performance of the show at Manhattan’s Cutting Room, she sat down with Brooklyn Roads to tell us a little about her extraordinary journey through nearly 40 years of American pop history.

It all began, Collins says, with a jukebox at a local eatery across from her home in the Glenwood Projects. “I heard a song in Frank’s Pizza Place. It was Be My Baby and it changed my life. When I heard that song, I knew that I could sing it–and that all I wanted to do was sing,” she says.

“When you grow up and you are not privileged, you search for something that’s gonna lift your spirits and music always does that. And I think that my generation, all we ever did was sing on street corners, or in the stairwell or subway because the echo was so great.”

When she was 15, she heard about the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village, where amateur acts were welcome, and hitchhiked her way there from the Bay Parkway exit on the Belt Parkway, only to find that everyone that night was there to hear or play the blues. But, Collins tells Brooklyn Roads, she had traveled too far to turn back.

“The only blues song I knew was Stormy Monday. I got up and sang it and this guy said ‘you sing really good…would you like to sing with us?’” That guy was Jimi Hendrix, playing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. “So I became a Blue Flame.” It was her first professional gig and it eventually led to her joining Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour.

Emergence as a Songwriter

In the ’70s she met Paul Shaffer, which led to a stint as vocal director on Saturday Night Live, during which time she won an Emmy for her work. FYI, that’s her singing on the classic SNL commercial parody, “Jewess Jeans,” a number she still features in her revue. She also “did some background work and singing on albums and then was signed by Don Kirshner as a songwriter,” introduced to him by Shaffer. Through Kirshner she also met the Brooklyn songwriting legend who inspired her.

“When I got signed by Don Kirshner, who had a stable of writers, he said, ‘Sue, babe, if there was anybody you’d want to write with, who would it be?’ Well, I wanted to write something like Be My Baby, so I said without missing a beat, ‘Ellie Greenwich.’ I had been searching for Ellie for years.” Next thing she knew, Susan tells us, Kirshner picked up the phone and called Greenwich.  “And he said to her ‘Ellie, babe it’s Donny, I signed an artist …when you hear this girl sing, you’re gonna plotz.’”

“The next day I met with Donny at a restaurant and Ellie walked in. She had been sent my demos the night before and she walked in and said to him, ‘What a sound she’s got.’  It was an instant connection and we became the best of friends.”

It was a chance encounter with another Brooklynite who can sing a little that further boosted Susan’s confidence in her vocal ability. She was recording at the same studio on the same day as Barbra Streisand when she took a bathroom break.  “When I passed [Streisand] in the hallway, I was still singing the song I had been recording. She said, ‘Is that you singing that?’ I told her yes and she said, ‘Girl, you can sing.’ I was like, YES! Barbara Streisand said I can sing!” Others whom Collins made an impression on include Brian Wilson and the late John Lennon.

In 1978, she scored her first hit as a songwriter with the Paul Davis’ hit, Sweet Life, and received a featured performer credit on Davis’ follow-up single, Darlin’. That led to some solo albums, but, she tells Brooklyn Roads, her recording career was short-circuited because, “I wouldn’t give my body and soul to this manager/record executive. But he couldn’t really kill my career because he couldn’t take my voice away.”

The Birth of a Notion

Flash forward to 2009: “A dear friend of mine, Wendy Federman, who is a Broadway producer, said to me, ‘Susan, you really have to tell your story.’”  And thus You Can Take the Girl Outta Brooklyn… was born. She called on two friends, Ula Hedwig and Angela Cappelli, to sing backup and premiered the revue at Bergen PAC, for which Federman is a board member. “We did it there for two years to sold-out crowds.” She later added Bette Sussman as musical director, pianist and fourth vocalist.

When her friend Steve Walter reopened the Cutting Room (with co-owner Chris Noth) at its new Murray Hill location earlier this year, he reached out to Collins and asked her to bring her show there—a show Brooklyn Roads was privileged to catch.

Kicking it off with Be My Baby, Collins segued into a doo-wop medley and channeled Dusty Springfield on You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, followed by a Beach Boys medley in tribute to Brian Wilson. Original numbers included emotionally moving songs about her grandmother (”Living Example”) and 9/11 (“We’ll Never Be the Same”). She peppered the evening with amusing anecdotes about her adventures in the music business and, toward the end of her evening, introduced her son, Tucker Caploe, to sing one of his original songs.

Collins and company wrapped it up with a girl-group medley and rousing rendition of the show’s theme song, which was, she poignantly pointed out, “the last song Ellie wrote. We collaborated on [it] and she passed away a short time after that.” With this show, Collins is keeping Greenwich’s legacy, and her own, very much alive.