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Coney Island Dream

Coney Island

dear Todd,

I had a very pleasant dream this morning. You’d written a short play in which a bunch of guys crammed into a cab and were driven to Coney Island (from someplace else in the 5 boroughs). Lots of talking between the guys. I’d agreed to play a small role (I was a teenager), but when I read the play I couldn’t really hear it. “Do people really talk like that?” I wondered.

But when I arrived at rehearsal, all these wonderful character actors had been cast, guys of various ages, and when they said their lines, wow, it was completely convincing and funny and smart (philosophy of the Regular Joe). I was the only inexperienced one. I hoped I’d remember my lines, but I had so few and everyone was really nice and reassuring. After the read through, we were all trying on vintage summer costumes, loud shorts and patterned shirts and caps. What a crew! I knew you were going to be really pleased with how it turned out.

Then there was a sort of espionage area, and finally I ended up looking at black & white photocopies of photos that my young pal Tyler had taken. He spread them out on the floor, and I was giving my 2-cents, thinking the photos were brilliant. I was young, and it was in the past, but not MY past. I could be young without any of the unease of youth, and I was in a past that seemed so mild because inside myself I knew about the future: I knew some bad things then would get better, and I knew that many naive hopes people had would be flattened, but this made me not so naive, which was actually restful. This past didn’t feel like an old song that can suck me back into the puddle of my old self. I woke up happy to be in the present again, but almost as if I get to have a slightly different past than the one I had yesterday!

love,

Max

dear max,

I love this Coney Island dream of yours and how you felt when you woke up. And I’m pleased to know I wrote a delightful play on the astral plane. I use the expression astral plane in reference to dreamland because some years ago…

As you know, I used to live in Sacramento. Seems like several lifetimes ago, but I have it on good authority I lived there for fifteen years during this lifetime. When I lived in Sacramento, in the days before digital photography, I took my rolls of black and white film to a photo lab and they would produce negatives and proof sheets from which I would choose photos to print.

One of the people who worked at the front desk in the photo lab was a woman named Harriet. She was single and very appealing to me, and had I not been married, I would have pursued her. My wife and I eventually divorced and I moved from Sacramento to Berkeley. A few years after moving to Berkeley, I went to Sacramento to visit old friends, and on the spur of the moment I stopped by the photo lab to say hi to Harriet.

She seemed genuinely happy to see me, and when I told her I missed her, she replied, “I would say I missed you, too, except I see you almost every night on the astral plane.”

“Really?” I said, pleasantly surprised. “And… um… what’s going on there?”

She frowned and said, “You don’t dream about me?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said, sorry to disappoint her, “but whenever I go to the photo lab in Berkeley, I think of you.”

“That’s sweet,” she said, forcing a smile. “Gotta run. Thanks for coming by.”

I wonder if my telling her I didn’t dream about her had the effect of ending our astral relationship, or if our relationship on that plane was strong enough to withstand any disappointment she might have felt about my not dreaming of her.

While living in Berkeley, I chanced to hear a radio show featuring a woman who was a well-known interpreter of dreams. People were calling into the show to tell her their dreams; and after listening to the dreams, she would ask the callers clarifying questions, the callers would do their best to answer her questions, and then she would give her interpretations. I was fascinated by her takes on dreams, which were often quite different than mine.

The last caller was a woman who said, “I’ve never remembered a dream, not even a tiny fragment, and listening to your interpretations, I feel like I’m missing out on something really important.”

To which the dream interpreter said, “I’m sure in the course of your life you have interesting experiences, and you witness things that might happen in a dream, and you can interpret those experiences as you would dreams. For instance, we could interpret the dream of you listening to a radio show about dreams and deciding to call the show. Your call is selected out of the hundreds of people calling in, and the dream interpreter suggests you interpret your experience of calling and getting through to her as a dream.”

“Okay,” said the caller, her voice trembling. “What do you think this dream means?”

“I think it means you have a strong desire to understand your inner thoughts and feelings, and by taking action to address that desire, doors of understanding will open to you.”

Speaking of dreams, my new CD of songs is entitled Dream of You. Here are the lyrics to the title song, which you can listen to on Youtube, download or stream from iTunes, or you can buy the entire album of nine songs from me for five dollars.

Dream of You

Woke this morning from a dream of you

And I wondered if you might be dreaming of me, too.

We were on that beach so very long ago

Holding hands, singing songs and walking slow,

only this time you say yes instead of no.

 

So we get married, get an apartment,

You write songs and I write movies.

We play our guitars in cool cafés

And live the life of urban groovies.

One of your songs gets covered by a star,

I sell my script about a car that can think and feel and understand.

We make lots of money and start a rock n’ roll band.

 

You have an affair, I have two,

And for a dicey year or so it looks like we’re through.

But then we fall in love again while touring in Spain,

get into therapy, heal lifetimes of pain,

and when we finally make it through

we start all over again.

 

We move to a little town by the sea,

Have two great kids, Susie Q and Lee,

And you write songs, and I write movies.

That’s when I woke up and you were not there

Because you didn’t say yes, you said,

“No my friend, I would not dare.

No my friend I would not dare.”

 

But sometimes I wonder how things might have gone

if you’d said yes instead of no and we had carried on

holding hands and walking slow,

and when I take you in my arms you say yes,

when I take you in my arms you say yes.

 

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Guitar Case

distance

When and Where: This morning in Mona’s, the one and only bakery/café in Carmeline Creek, a small town on the far north coast of California

What: I, Paul Windsor, fiftyish, bespectacled, shared my table with Eric Miller, a guy in his late sixties. Eric moved to Carmeline Creek from Oakland fifteen years ago. He’s a carpenter now, his specialty fences and gates, but for most of his twenty-five years in Oakland, he was a studio musician (guitar and congas) and a member of the folk rock quartet Suspenseful Animation. I recorded our conversation at the request of my son Conor (17) and my daughter Alexandra (14) who are making a movie based on Eric’s story about his guitar case and want audio of Eric telling the story to use in their movie.

Eric is five-foot-eight, stocky, with long black hair gone mostly gray. He wears T-shirts with slogans writ on the front, and today he is wearing a black T-shirt with white letters that proclaim I Saw You From A Great Distance.

Me: So… I’ve been assigned the pleasurable task of prompting you to tell your story about the guitar case one more time. You up for that?

Eric: Sure.

Me:  How old were you when this happened?

Eric: Twenty-three. 1972.

Me: Where were you?

Eric: Los Angeles. I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, but I’d gone to LA to shop some songs. Things were so different then, nobody under forty today, fifty maybe, can conceive of how different the music business was then. Our whole culture really. This was long before home computers and smart phones and the internet. The first copy shops had just opened, a decade before CDs started replacing LPs.

Me: So how would you go about shopping songs in those days? And who did you shop them to?

Eric: If you could afford it, you went into a studio, made a good recording, you know, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and then you had cassette copies made of your recording to share with whoever, and if you could actually get your songs to somebody in the biz, you sent them a reel-to-reel version to play on their snazzy machines. If you couldn’t afford a studio recording, you did the best you could with whatever recorder you could afford. I had a couple good microphones and made recordings on a pretty good cassette recorder in my living room.

Me: What kind of music?

Eric: Folk rock. I grew up in the Bay Area and was smitten with Jefferson Airplane before Grace Slick, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Youngbloods, Dino Valenti, Buffalo Springfield.

Me: Okay, so you’re in LA. Set the scene.

Eric: So I was staying with my sister in West LA, which in those days was solid middle class. Houses and apartment buildings, nothing over three stories. I had a friend who was a singer with some recording connections and we met at UCLA in a practice room with a piano. I walked there with my guitar, a couple miles, sang a few songs for my friend, hung out in a café in Westwood for an hour or so, and then headed back to my sister’s apartment.

Me: What time of year?

Eric: Early summer. So smoggy your eyes burned. And the thing about LA in those days—I don’t know about now—but back then nobody walked anywhere, so I was an anomaly and I was keenly aware of this because people would frown at me as they drove by or roll down their windows and shout, “Get a job!”

Me: Why would they say that?

Eric: This is a little before your time, Paul, but in those days most people thought hippies were dope-smoking draft dodgers who didn’t want to work. So I guess with my long hair and guitar and tie-dyed T-shirt they thought I was a derelict hippy who couldn’t afford a car. And remember, this was before there were homeless people in LA, before Reagan closed all the mental hospitals and cut rich people’s taxes so there was less money for social services. And then he did the same thing to the rest of America, and so it continues today. But back then only poor people in LA walked anywhere, and most poor people in those days were African Americans or Mexicans. So a white guy with a ponytail walking through a middle-class neighborhood in LA was an odd thing. I know that sounds unbelievable, but that’s how it was.

Me: So you were walking back to your sister’s.

Eric: Right, and I’m on a sidewalk in an upscale neighborhood of newish apartment buildings and houses, just walking along schlepping my guitar, when up ahead of me, maybe two blocks away, I see this police car approaching. Then they turn on their flashing red light and their siren starts wailing, and I assume they’ll zoom past me in pursuit of somebody, but right before they get to me, they turn sharply, jump the curb, block the sidewalk, and two big cops jump out of the car, point their guns at me and shout, “Hands up!”

Me: Oh my God.

Eric: I was so fucking scared I thought they were gonna shoot me for sure. So I set my guitar case down and put up my hands, and one of the cops grabs me and slams me down on the hood of their car, twists my arm behind my back, and holds me down until his partner joins him and they handcuff my hands behind my back.

Me: Did they read you your rights?

Eric: No. And while one cop holds me down, the other cop gets my guitar case, brings it over to the car, sets it on the hood in front of me and asks, “What’s in the guitar case?” And the question seems so ridiculous, I laugh, and the cop holding me down, lifts me up a few inches and slams me down again and shouts, “What’s in the guitar case?” And I say, “A guitar!”

And then the other cop asks, “Can we open it?”

Why he bothered to ask my permission, I don’t know, but I say, “Yeah. Just don’t shoot me.”

This is when they realize they haven’t read me my rights, so the cop holding me down does that as fast as he can say the words, and then the other cop opens the guitar case, and there’s my guitar.

And the cop holding me down says, “Shit.” And the other cop says, “He’s not the guy.” And the cop holding me down says, “He’s gotta be. He fits the M-O exactly. This is the neighborhood he’s been hitting. It’s gotta be him.”

So then they put me in the backseat of the patrol car and head for the police station, and they get into an argument about whether I’m the guy or not, and I get up the nerve to say, “Listen I don’t know who you think I am, but I haven’t done anything wrong and my uncle is a lawyer here in Los Angeles, and when we get to the police station I will call him and tell him everything that just happened, which I don’t think is quite legal, the way you handled things, and…”

The cop riding shotgun turns around and looks at me and says, “Where were you last Saturday night?”

“Santa Cruz. Where I live. Witnesses galore.”

“Shit,” says the cop driving. “He’s not the guy.”

“Why were you walking?” asks the cop who isn’t driving.

“I like to walk.”

“Who is your uncle?” asks the cop driving.

“Howard Miller.”

“Shit,” says the other cop.

Then they pull over to the curb and the cop not driving says, “Look… we thought you were the guy who’s been robbing apartments in the area and getting away with stuff in a guitar case. But maybe we were wrong.”

Then he gets out, opens the back door, helps me out, takes off the cuffs, opens the trunk, hands me my guitar case and says, “Take it easy.”

Then he gets back in the car and they drive away.

Me: Couldn’t they have at least given you a ride home?

Eric: You would think so, but in those days… I was a hippy and they were hoping I’d just blow it off, which I did, though I was freaked out for a long time. Had nightmares for months afterwards. Always that same scenario. Being hurt by big men for no reason.

Me: If you’d resisted or run they might have killed you.

Eric: I’m sure they would have. They were young and inexperienced and God knows what else. As it was, I had a fractured rib and terrible neck pain for a long time after that.

Me: Did you tell your uncle what happened?

Eric: I did, and he said, “Whatever you do, don’t mess with the LA police department.” And then he said, “And the next time you come to LA, take cabs or rent a car, but never ever walk anywhere.”

Me: That’s insane.

Eric: That’s the way it was before jogging and walking were declared good for you. That’s how it was in LA in 1972 for a guy with long hair schlepping a guitar case.

Me: I wonder how Conor and Alexandra will capture the moment when the police car jumps the curb in front of you.

Eric: I think they’re gonna use a toy police car and stop-frame animation. Can’t wait to see it.

fin

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Orange Juice and Beads

sunflower

Where in the world: Carmeline Creek, a town on the far north coast of California, population not quite a thousand

Where in Carmeline Creek: Mona’s, the one and only bakery/café in town

When: Yesterday

What: I (Paul Windsor, middle-aged conversationalist) had a fascinating conversation with my friend Olaf Wickersham, recorded at the behest of my daughter Alexandra who is making movies with soundtracks composed of bits of conversations accompanied by accordion and guitar.

Olaf is sixty-seven, tall and fit, with a shaved head and sparkling brown eyes. He usually wears black clothing and bead necklaces, sometimes one necklace, sometimes several, the beads thereon for sale.

Me: Where have you been since I saw you selling your delicious fresh-squeezed orange juice on Main Street in August?

Olaf: I left Carmeline Creek on August 31, got a ride to Oakland and took the train to Los Angeles where I spent a few days in Santa Monica with friends. Then I took the train to Chicago where I visited my sister for a week, and from there I took a boat to Canada and trained to Halifax where I spent a week trading beads and visiting friends. From Halifax I sailed to Ireland on the S.S. Merveilleux.

Me: A freighter?

Olaf: Yes, a large freighter carrying lumber. I used to work on freighters to get to Europe and back, but I stopped needing to pay for my passage that way about ten years ago. Now I go as a passenger. September is usually a good month to cross the Atlantic by boat, though I have had some harrowing trips. One never knows about the ocean.

Me: How long does the crossing take?

Olaf: Two weeks, give or take.

Me: And what do you do to while away the hours?

Olaf: Read, write letters, play guitar, carve beads, walk, exercise, and I commune with my bead collection so I know what I’ve got to trade and how much I’m likely to ask for each bead.

Me: How many beads do you carry with you?

Olaf: Varies. This last time I set sail for Europe with about a thousand beads. Arizona turquoise, amethyst, tourmaline, bone.

Me: So you were in Ireland by mid-October?

Olaf: Yeah. I have a dear friend, Irene, with a small farm outside of Arklow. I stayed with her until Christmas. I’d take the train into Dublin now and then to trade beads and go to plays and hear live music, but I mostly stayed on the farm and helped Irene. Then I took the ferry to England, got a train to France, spent a week in Paris with friends, trained to Barcelona where I visited my nephew who married into a big family there, and in February I went to Morocco and spent a week in Marrakesh and a week in Fes buying and selling and trading beads. Then I went from Morocco to Mallorca for a week, and from Mallorca I went back to Barcelona to court a woman I’d fallen in love with. She was not amenable to coming with me or having me stay with her, so I soothed my aching heart by meandering along the Mediterranean to Italy and Greece, trading beads and visiting friends along the way. Then I went to Zurich where I sold several extraordinary beads to a wealthy collector, and finished my European journey in Amsterdam from where I flew non-stop to Los Angeles. And by the middle of May… well, here I am.

Me: And that is roughly what you do every year.

Olaf: That is roughly what I’ve done every year for thirty-five years, but I’m changing my pattern this year and staying in Carmeline Creek for at least a year without going anywhere.

Me: Why the change?

Olaf: I’m ready to try a different living pattern and I’d like to live on my little acre all the days of a year to really get to know the place and see how I feel about that. I’m tired of being a vagabond, though my vagabond life has gotten more comfortable with every passing year. I suspect my inability to create a satisfying long-term relationship is connected to my unwillingness to stay in one place for long, and I would really like to be in a good long-term relationship.

Me: Will you still sell fresh-squeezed orange juice on Main Street from May to September?

Olaf: No. I gave my cart to Ruben (Olaf’s longtime employee). He and Tania have done most of the hard work these last few years, while I became more the jovial barker. Fear not, there will still be fresh-squeezed orange juice available on Main Street.

Me: How did you get started in the orange juice business?

Olaf: I was living in Los Angeles trying to make it as an actor and a musician. I shared a garage with another guy behind a cruddy house in Echo Park before that area got gentrified. I had lots of part-time gigs and sold joints to tourists in Santa Monica when marijuana was still highly illegal. Just scraping by, smoking too much dope, and occasionally auditioning for a part in a low-budget movie. Then one hot summer day, I was working on a catering crew at the mansion of a big Hollywood producer, lots of movie stars and celebrities on display, and the wife of the producer, a gorgeous Mexican fashion model, had hired a couple Mexican guys to bring their cart to her mansion and make juice for the guests. They’d been selling fresh-squeezed orange juice on the boardwalk at Venice Beach for decades. They set up right next to the barbecue, and when I saw their colorful wooden cart and how fast they cut the oranges and pressed the juice out and filled those half-pint glasses—and how happy they were—I said to myself, “I’m gonna do that.”

Me: In LA?

Olaf: No, I had to get out of LA. I was dying there.

Me: How old were you?

Olaf: Twenty-seven.

Me: So where did you go?

Olaf: Well… my younger sister, the one who now lives in Chicago, was going to college in Berkeley and lived in a commune in Oakland. So I went there, camped in her backyard, built my first cart, and started selling orange juice in Oakland. And I did really well for a couple months until I got busted for selling without a permit. Long story short, I worked farmers markets and art fairs all over the Bay Area for three years, which meant I had to have a big pickup truck to haul my cart, and what with gas and parking and insurance and rent, I hardly broke even. So I gave up for a while, went roaming around for a year or so and discovered Carmeline Creek. A few months later, I moved here, rented a shed from Dominic Andrini a block from where I set up on Main Street, sold my truck, and settled into my routine.

Me: You didn’t need your truck for hauling the oranges?

Olaf: No, I ordered my oranges through Andrini’s and they delivered right to my cart.

Me: Why Carmeline Creek?

Olaf: Why did you choose Carmeline Creek?

Me: I stumbled on the place, bought an old house for next to nothing, and here I am.

Olaf: There you go.

Me: And you made a living selling orange juice?

Olaf: On a good day I cleared three hundred dollars. Sunny summers I made enough to live and travel for a year and then some.

Me: And the beads? When did you become a bead trader?

Olaf: Ah, the beads. The short version is that when I was in my early twenties living in Santa Cruz, I had a girlfriend, Mira, the great love of my life. She made jewelry and bead necklaces and was always looking for new sources of beads. I would accompany her on her expeditions, fell in love with the bead trade, and decided to go into the business in my own idiosyncratic way. Then Mira dumped me for a man with piles of money and a mansion in Malibu, and I followed her to southern California and embarked on my struggling-actor-and-musician phase. My goal, or I should say my fantasy, was to become a huge star and win my girlfriend away from the rich guy. But that didn’t happen, and when I left LA, I got into beads again.

Me: Will you continue to trade beads while you’re living here year-round?

Olaf: Oh, yeah. People will seek me out and I’ll communicate by phone and letters with people in the trade I’ve gotten to know over the years. However, I’m rich now, so there’s no great imperative to make money. I’ll do it because I love trading beads.

Me: May I ask how you came to be rich when you were not so rich a year ago?

Olaf: I can give you the gist, but not the deep specifics.

Me: Gist is fine.

Olaf: Well… as I’m sure you can imagine, being the imaginative person you are, there are legendary beads, just as there are legendary diamonds and legendary paintings and legendary guitars worth millions of dollars. By chance I came to possess a legendary strand of beads, and after three years of extremely careful and secretive negotiations, I was able to sell that strand for what to me is a vast fortune, which is now stowed in the Carmeline Creek Credit Union earning interest more than sufficient for my simple needs.

Me: Why did it take three years of extremely careful and secretive negotiations? Why not sell the beads right away?

Olaf: Because had it been known to anyone but the very few people I negotiated with that I possessed those particular beads, I would have been dead within a week.

Me: Jesus, Olaf. Really?

Olaf: Really and truly.

Me: But why?

Olaf: (thinks for a moment) Imagine if word got around that you had a strand of beads in your house or on your person or hidden somewhere, and those beads were worth several million dollars. Would you feel safe?

Me: No, I’d put them in a safety deposit box and sell them as quick as I could.

Olaf: And how would you go about selling them?

Me: Well, I don’t know. Go to a bead trader? Put an ad in Beads Quarterly?

Olaf: Not a good idea.

Me: Why not?

Olaf: Because if more than a few trustworthy people knew you had those beads, a surprising number of powerful, resourceful, and highly unscrupulous people would try to find you and force you, in one way or another, to relinquish those beads or they would kill you.

Me: My god, Olaf, how much were they worth?

Olaf: Impossible to say. Priceless? Worthless? Only worth something because people value them? Certainly rarer than the rarest diamond.

Me: So how did you sell them?

Olaf: It was very tricky. Much trickier than selling a famous painting or a rare guitar, because the thing about beads is they aren’t Picassos or Modiglianis or Gibsons or famous diamonds once owned by the Czar. They are beads, their identities and values known to only a small number of people in the world, many of whom are not what you and I would call honorable or law-abiding.

Me: And why were these particular beads so valuable? Were they diamond-encrusted blobs of gold?

Olaf: No.

Me: Worry beads passed down from Socrates?

Olaf: (frowns curiously) What an interesting guess. And not so far off. But… no.

Me: How many beads are we talking about?

Olaf: That I can’t tell you.

Me: Why not?

Olaf: The number is indicative.

Me: But you’re safe now, so…

Olaf: Ah but the person who bought them from me will never be safe so long as he or she possesses those beads privately rather than give them to a grand art museum or the national gallery of a large and powerful nation.

Me: Oh, so they’re works of art?

Olaf: Yes, and that’s all I’ll say. But if I ever learn that those beads are in the possession of some powerful and well-known institution, I will tell you the story of how I came to possess them and how I was finally able to arrange the sale without losing my life.

Me: Okay. And congratulations. What’s on your docket for the week ahead?

Olaf: Gardening, guitar, walks on the beach, carving, and with any luck entertaining a woman friend I hope will come up from Berkeley and spend some time with me.

Me: By the way, Alexandra has started a movie company. Perhaps you would like to do some acting in one or more of our upcoming films.

Olaf: I would love to. I always wanted to be an actor, you know.

      fin

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Dream of You

th_dreamofyoucover-122

Hello dear readers, I’m pleased to announce the birth of my new album Dream of You, featuring nine of my original songs for guitar, piano, and voice. One of these tunes was written forty-eight years ago, and two were written in the last year. The primary guitar tracks and vocals were recorded simultaneously to give the songs a live feeling, with Marcia’s gorgeous cello and Gwyneth Moreland’s splendid vocal harmonies adding magic to the mix.

You can buy copies of Dream of You from my web site for 5 dollars each, plus a flat rate shipping fee of 6 dollars no matter how much stuff you buy from my web site, or you can download the whole album for 6 dollars from CD Baby, or download individual songs from CD Baby for just 69 cents per song. Such a deal!

The album is also available for downloading and streaming from iTunes and Amazon and Spotify and Apple Music. Or you can listen to the songs on YouTube. If you do take a listen and enjoy what you hear, I hope you’ll share this article and links with your music-loving friends.

I’m now at work on a new batch of songs inspired by the satisfying creative experience of working with Marcia and Gwyneth and Peter Temple in his Albion studio.

Here are some brief notes about the songs on Dream of You.

Wake Up Thinking About You

Written thirty years ago as a slow smoky blues, I never got around to recording this tune until now. When I was learning the song again for this album, I sped up the tempo, added some swing, some piano, some Gwyneth harmony, and I love the joyous feel.

Strange Confusion

This song is twenty years old. I’ve long imagined harmony parts and was thrilled when we got them all in place. I sang two additional vocal tracks, Gwyneth sang two, too, and I love how groovy the song feels now.

Dream of You

This is the newest tune on the album, composed a few months before we recorded the initial guitar and vocal track. After a ten-year break from playing the guitar to focus on my piano playing, this recounting of a lucid dream was the first new song to come to me as I was regaining my guitar chops.

Alone and Lonely

I wrote this song almost fifty years ago. A vagabond in those days, I spent hundreds of hours standing by the sides of roads hitchhiking. This tune was born in those long hours of playing guitar while waiting for a ride and hoping for happier times.

Nothing Anybody Says

This is my newest piano tune, written within the last year. I imagined singing this love song with a fine female vocalist, and Gwyneth surpassed my imaginings.

Whole Lotta Kissing

I wrote this tune in Berkeley, circa 2000, following a painful dismissal by a woman who clearly (erroneously) thought she was too good for the likes of me.

Hey Baby

I was broke and lonely and pining for an old love when I wrote this song in Seattle in 1977. I imagined Bonnie Raitt singing this song, and over the ensuing twenty years I tried to get it to her without success. This song also forms the basis for my novel Night Train.

Agnes June

I wrote the words for this song in 1970 in New York City. A young German composer asked me to write lyrics for operatic lieder, and this was my favorite of the several poems I created for him, none of which he used. I found the lyrics in my guitar case some years later and put them to music. Gwyneth’s beautiful harmonies thrill me every time I listen to this song.

One Last Time

I wrote this song in Sacramento in 1989 and first performed it in an art gallery as part of a two-man show with the fine poet and artist D.R. Wagner. A song of resurrection and the healing power of love.

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