Troubadours

 Melanie Safka died this week. She was a few years older than me and I didn’t know her and didn’t have any of her records, but she was on the second Woodstock album, which I did own, and she sang a song called Beautiful People, which I suppose is a corny flower child song but it has a line I’ve carried in my head all these years that sometimes comes to me, usually ironically, when I’m on public transportation:

Beautiful people

you ride the same subway as I do

every morning

That’s got to tell you something

We’ve got so much in common

I go the same direction that you do

So if you take care of me

Maybe I’ll take care of you

(Melanie singing Beautiful People is on YouTube)

How could I not have a crush on this cute hippie girl from Astoria?

Half Ukrainian, half Italian, and one hundred percent from Queens, but the family moved to New Jersey and I guess the people there didn’t get her because they taunted her for being a beatnik, so she dropped out of high school and became a folk singer in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village and somehow got some recognition in Europe but she wasn’t known by American audiences until she appeared onstage at Woodstock. While she was singing it began to rain and people were lighting candles and it looked to her like half a million fireflies and gave her an idea for a song that became a hit and made her a star.

She had a couple of songs on the radio, but the performance that got to me was the one I saw her give on TV at a Phil Ochs tribute a month after his suicide.

I have to tell you that I cried when I heard Phil Ochs had died and I cried again when I heard her sing his song Chords of Fame:

I found him by the stage last night 

He was breathing his last breath

A bottle of gin and a cigarette 

Was all that he had left

I can see you make the music

Cause you carry a guitar

But God help the troubadour

Who tries to be a star

(Chords of Fame, sung by Melanie, also on YouTube)

I’m no troubadour and I don’t want to be a star. I don’t know what I am, some kind of artist, and maybe if I had the right kind of lever and found a place to stand I could move the worlds of some of you beautiful people the way these troubadours moved my world. 

(I Ain't Marching Anymore sung by Phil Ochs, also on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rVTBCtYjoY