Leslie Hall was brought up to Goldensbridge as a teenager to be a mother’s helper. Everyone fell in love with her, including me. The music is just my old Gibson 12 singing, the lyrics are quintessential ’60s imagery. It was totally consistent with her wonderful sense of irony that she could brighten up a room like few others could. I reconnected with Leslie (now Leslie Charles) on Facebook and despite the decades, the core of who she is and why I loved her come through with almost every post. I toyed with mescaline a couple of times and once or twice got off on it, and there was a mellowness to it that permeated my senses like talking to Leslie on an August night.
Lyrics
Mescaline
Fellow come up to my door
Asked me what was I silent for
I whispered: No one’s really sure
I’m just waiting to be wound
Wound like clockwork, plenty to say
Guess sometimes we wind up that way
It used to be
That I would start to speak
By the time I reached my peak
People thought I was trying to preach
But by then they’d be out of reach anyway
So I’d just take my guitar and I’d start to play
(cho) And my music tripped like water
Over Victoria Falls
‘Til someone says: Hey, you can’t play like that
I’m just so afraid
I won’t know where her music’s at
Maybe if I asked her
Guess it couldn’t do me no harm.
For lately Leslie’s let me ramble
On and on and on and on
and on
One night I hear trick or treat
I look outside and under a sheet
A pair of bare and dirty feet
Looking for a place to run
Hardly calloused, soft like down
I wonder how she gets around
It used to be
That I would go somewhere
Thinking I knew my way there
Like I’d built the highway there
But I see someone has been by there
Today
So I just take my guitar and I’d start to play
(cho)
Over a bridge and under a town
I sure would like to show her around
But I’m hung up about the sound
The meter, the sense and the rhyme
Leslie whistles nonsense words
She makes my strings sing like birds
It used to be
That I would write a song
I’d make it thirty stanzas long
Try to mention love along the way
But I’ve learned it comes out wrong
That way
So I just take my guitar and I bang away
(cho)