Judy Pearlman was my first serious girlfriend and we had a rather tumultuous time of it. She was totally one of a kind, a lovely, warm, funny, effervescent soul. She deserved a much more upbeat, celebratory song than this, but all that tumult made its way into the lyrics. I did write a ton of poetry for her. We reconnected many times over the years and she is always an absolute delight to spend time with. My greatest reward from listening to this song is that I rely on Alice in Wonderland (my second favorite book; Looking Glass is my first) to close out the choruses.

Another song from my late teens that I pretty much never played for anyone. There was no Diane in my life (in fact, at that time there was no one in my life) so I’m not sure why I used the name.  And this is also another song that my 12-string wrote, I just filled in the lyrics (which sound like they were written by a not particularly precocious teenager). It’s fun to sing and has a key change that I like and Elliot set it to a bossa nova arrangement.

One of my early neighborhood bands was called Jazgor Seazanspan, a name we came up with by taking the first two or three letters of the band members’ names. The lead singer was Sharon Zane and during a break one night I had a conversation with her husband Ed. And that conversation morphed into this song.

I first met Ann Danoff pirouetting by the Lake in Goldensbridge when she was 13 (I was 17). I was really taken by her Bohemian looks, her charisma, intelligence and talent. I fell in love with that 13 year old and that love has never abated. Over the fifty years since then Ann and I have had intermittent contact as she gracefully moved from being a dancer, to being a Tai Chi instructor, and finally (?) to being a physician. It was always very warm and gratifying for me to see her, even though we could never pull the trigger on coupling. I’m reminded of Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy: We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be alright. I’ve never performed the song. I wrote it so I could capture the few romantic moments we shared, and so I would always have someplace to go where I could be with her. It may be my best realized lyric insofar as it reflects so well my impressions of her. Still, listening to the song only underscores for me how unknowable this remarkable lady was and is, and evokes another lyric, this one mine from a different song and time: How can a poet talk of distance to a dancer.  And finally, the lines from this song: 

Ann moves her own way

There is no choreography

are taken verbatim from the program of a solo dance piece that I saw her perform ages ago. For me that sums it up.

One night my wonderful friend Eric Stand asked if I would accompany him to pick up a friend of his, Stephie Bershad, and drive her home to Brooklyn. I agreed and when we got to her house (Union St.?) I met her roommate, Jane Teller, who was sitting at the kitchen table. I developed an immediate interest for this exotically pretty, super smart and funny, and definitely offbeat woman. We would spend many hours at that kitchen table in the months that followed, in many a fanciful mental excursion. I’ve never had conversations quite like that again, but they, like her, were addictive. I’m reasonably certain she liked me a fair amount, but I certainly didn’t generate any romantic sparks with her. Even so, hope springs eternal, and over the course of our friendship I wrote her two songs. She was a wonderful poet, and on a bulletin board in that kitchen was a short poem of hers which ended with the line: And the frog was naked. This song was originally entitled: Confessions of a Naked Frog.

Always loved this incredibly romantic story and at the time, Phil Ochs had set a couple of classic poems to music, The Bells and the Highwayman, both of which I really loved. So I gave this a try.  You can hear the iconic music from Wagner’s opera stuck in just before the last chorus.

Another song from my late teens. Sort of meant as a song for kids but really I couldn’t figure it out. At the time I was writing social protest songs mostly and while this has a touch of that, it was something else. I was a counselor at Webatuck, a left wing summer camp, and I had the oldest kids, just a few years younger than I was. One day, when my bunk was off doing some activity that I wasn’t needed at, I took out my 12-string and started playing the song. One kid who had decided to skip the activity was sleeping on his bunk and I didn’t know he was there. After the song, he said to me: “That’s the kind of song you should be writing, not the other junk.” That’s the only reason I even kept this tune and he’s the only person who ever heard it. When I subsequently heard a similar comment about another personal song I wrote I quickly shifted over from the agitprop writing to the more personal stuff that I’ve written ever since. When I recorded the song and started paying attention to the lyrics, I finally got it. This isn’t a song for kids. This is a song for an old man, which is what I am now. And I find it very comforting.

I’m guessing this was early on in my relationship with Carolyn. The frog was my animal (to the extent people have animals) largely because I could draw a reasonable facsimile of the frogs inhabiting Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and so I wrote a fairly tale featuring a frog so I could illustrate it.  I had the unfortunate and somewhat sexist propensity to characterize Carolyn as a “princess” so it all fit together. Back at a time when I was writing complaining dirges, this was a refreshingly lighthearted departure. I usually include it on the rare occasions when I perform. The guitar riff in the beginning and then in between the verses is a channeling of a folk dance, Sestorka (a/k/a Hoo Ha) danced regularly at the Goldens Bridge Friday night folk dancing.