VALLEY WEEKEND : Giving Voice to the Personal and Universal : At 56, ‘60s folk icon Judy Collins has branched out into acting and writing. She brings her silvery vocals to the Alex Theatre.

When the CD player that is memory turns on, the voice many of us hear is Judy Collins.

Who knows all the reasons why? There is the voice itself, described by composer Ned Rorem as “icy silver.” Collins, who will appear Friday night at Glendale’s Alex Theatre, had the finest instrument of any of the solemn, straight-haired girls who made folk the favorite genre of the early ‘60s.

In a career almost four decades long, Collins has shown a genius for choosing material, from John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “In My Life” to Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns.” And she has written some lovely songs of her own, songs such as “My Father” and “The Blizzard” that manage to be both personal and universal.

But there is something else: Collins’ interpretations don’t leave. Driving the freeway, noodling through the FM stations, you run into the right Judy Collins song, and the past detonates inside your head.

It is 1968. Patchouli scents the air. You are wearing Yaqui medicine beads and something woven in India. A man who learned massage at Esalen (your father would like him dead) throws back his hair, which is longer than yours. You are cooking--brown rice in a stoneware pot. It seems important somehow, as only brown rice cooked in an altered state can seem. Then the apartment (decorated entirely in pillows and kilim rugs) fills with the voice of Collins singing Leonard Cohen. “Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river . . .” It is the sound of that room, that perfect time. “You can spend the night forever. . . .”

It was Leonard Cohen who encouraged Collins to start writing her own songs. She was the first to record “Suzanne” and other songs by the raspy-voiced Canadian, and he counseled: “If I can write songs, surely you can.”

Her early compositions include “My Father,” a tribute to her blind singer/radio personality father, Chuck Collins. He died a few weeks after she finished it, without having heard it. Not long after President Bill Clinton declared her 1972 “Colors of the Day” album his all-time favorite, Collins sang “My Father” at the White House. Afterward, she made a tearful call to her mother from the Lincoln bedroom.

A longtime New Yorker, Collins first heard Cohen in Greenwich Village, when folk was evolving from the meticulous rendering of traditional songs into something rich and new. It was then that she also discovered Joni Mitchell.

Singer/songwriter Tom Rush, she says, or maybe it was Tom Paxton, called her in the middle of the night and put Mitchell on the phone to sing her “Both Sides Now.” The song, which appeared on Collins’ 1967 “Wildflowers” album, was her first hit.

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Always surrounded with music, Collins was 5 when she began studying classical piano. Later, she studied in Denver with conductor Antonia Brico, who thought Collins would become a concert pianist (Collins produced and co-directed a 1974 documentary about Brico, which was nominated for an Academy Award).

But, like so many of her generation, Collins fell in love with the work of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other musicians, who believed songs could be instruments of social justice. By the age of 16, she was strumming her guitar in the coffeehouses and other folk venues of Colorado.

Although her early albums were decidedly folkie, she always had eclectic taste in music, she says, shaped by her early exposure to many different forms, from classical to show tunes. The work of Cohen, Mitchell, fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia and others whom she recorded was mislabeled folk, she says.

“It’s a different kind of music. It’s a different kind of aesthetic. People say it’s folk song. They’re crazy. It’s art song.”

Oddly, Collins was not asked to participate in the recent Leonard Cohen tribute album, “Tower of Song,” on which Sting and the Chieftains pound out “Sisters of Mercy” and Tori Amos does “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

Collins attributes her omission to the lack of a sense of history on the part of unnamed people involved in the project. As for her friend Cohen, she says: “I made him a lot of money, and I made him famous. That’s enough.”

Collins was once quoted as saying she was glad she had never fallen in love with Cohen because “I never would have survived it.” The remark was a joke, she says, but she knows people who did fall in love with him and “had a very bad time.”

Given a career boost by the president, Collins is busier than ever at 56. She recently published her first novel, “Shameless,” a steamy entertainment complete with trashy cover.

When asked how readers could distinguish her book from those of, say, Jackie Collins, she volleyed: “Her books don’t come with a record in it.” The book includes a mini-CD of original songs, and there is a full-length “Shameless” album of songs inspired by the novel.

Since 1993, Collins has done an album of Bob Dylan songs, a Christmas album and “Voices,” released late last year, a CD of original songs and an account of how they came to be written. The last includes a fascinating gloss on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the epic song written for her by former lover Stephen Stills.

It seems that the line “Thursdays and Saturdays--what have you got to lose?” refers to Collins’ insistence, at the urging of a bad psychiatrist, to establish clear limits for the relationship. She chose to see Stills, then living in Topanga, just two days a week.

Asked to name the six songs in her repertoire she likes best, she includes “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” along with “Amazing Grace,” Cohen’s “Joan of Arc,” Jacques Brel’s “La Chanson des Vieux Amants,” and her own “The Blizzard” and “The Wall.”

Yet to be recorded, “The Wall” was inspired by the Korean War Memorial designed by her companion of more than 17 years, industrial designer Louis Nelson.

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There have been other recent projects. As a spokeswoman for UNICEF, she has toured the former Yugoslavia and Vietnam. She also appeared in the 1994 film, “Junior,” as the owner of the spa visited by the pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger character and had a recurring role as a blind singer in the TV series “Christy.”

Obviously busy, she says she is also very happy. She loves New York, her home for the last 33 years. “New York is real,” she says of the city where she lives by the Hudson River in an art-filled apartment. “You see real people in all kinds of circumstances, and there’s something very sane about that.”

She lived as a child in West Los Angeles, and often comes West on business, but likes to be in California, then leave. “I always thought my mind would turn to fuzz if I lived on the West Coast.”

Collins’ contentment is a personal triumph. “It’s a great accomplishment for someone who, at 12, all I wanted was to have a sane life. Fat chance, at that point.”

Collins’ first album, released in 1961, was called “Maid of Constant Sorrow,” and, for many years, the title seemed prophetic. She has had polio, tuberculosis, career-threatening throat problems and bronchial asthma.

At 14 she attempted suicide. She has overcome both bulimia and alcoholism--two of what she refers to as her “many-splendored addictions.” She endured losing custody of her only child, son Clark Taylor, when he was 4 1/2. She even survived his suicide in 1992 at age 33.

Her son’s death has encouraged her to talk about her own survival: “It means other people say, ‘If she can do it, maybe I can do it, too.’ ” She has said that there “are no guilts in suicide. . . . You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.” What you can do, she says, is end the silence that so often surrounds suicide, and the addictions she believes are so often implicated in it.

Millions of people are touched by suicide in this country alone, she points out. “Suicide’s a taboo--we need to talk about it,” she says. “I’m not worried about my son. He’s out of his pain. I’m worried about the survivors. We’re so vulnerable.”

As virtually everyone knows, the Clintons named their daughter Chelsea after Collins’ version of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning.” Asked if she will be campaigning this year for her most prominent fan, she says: “I’m always campaigning for the president. He’s the cat’s pajamas.”

DETAILS

* WHAT: Judy Collins in concert at the Alex Theatre.

* WHERE: 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday.

* HOW MUCH: $32.50 and $27.50.

* CALL: (800) 414-ALEX or Tele-charge at (800) 233-3123.