Songs we sing

You know what's great about the Web?

You can discover your own history.

Tonight, I was suddenly and inexplicably struck with curiosity about two vague memories, both involving live musical performances. I searched and found the first one, from a colleague and old friend, Ben Fong-Torres. Here is his memory:

"I wrote the songs for amusement; this was decades before radio shows concocted and aired parody songs every morning. But at Rolling Stone magazine in the Seventies, I continued my little hobby, and at least two songs were performed. One, to the tune of Bob Dylan's Hurricane (The Ballad of Reuben Carter), celebrated the magazine's big scoop in 1975 on the Patricia Hearst/SLA kidnap and aftermath. I vaguely recall doing the song, with real musicians behind me, on a couple of occasions, including a nightclub, the Boarding House:

Doorbell rang out in the Berkeley night
Into the apartment house they burst
Knocked down Steven Weed with hardly a fight
And made their getaway with Patty Hearst!

Here comes the story of the Rolling Stone
Of David Weir and of Howard Kohn
They found the trail of Patty Hearst
And they wrote about it first.


I remember that night very clearly, Ben. You were great on stage.

The second memory is harder to trace, but involves a kid from Sanibel Island, which is where we were in those days when we weren't in San Francisco. This guy was a country singer and he dedicated a song to me, based on the Patty Hearst stories, one night in southwest Florida, probably at a club in Ft. Myers or Ft. Myers Beach.

I heard later on that he made it, more or less, on the country music circuit, so I sure as hell wish I could remember his name. It'll probably come to me over the next few days.

The lithograph photographed above hangs in my living room. It was the artwork used to produce the cover page of Rolling Stone when Howard and I wrote our big story, one of several "15 minutes of fame" both of us have experienced before then and since. As I pull together the story of my own life in the coming years, I wish I had a tape of Ben and the musicians performing his ballad that night 30 years ago at the Boarding House.

But maybe these experiences are best left to the hazy mists of our memories? After all, we can't go back.