The Crack of Dawn #786

8/15/2025

8/15/2025

Newsletter #786

The Crack of Dawn

For the past couple of months I’ve been writing a lot of song lyrics. I haven’t counted, but I’d say about 150 so far. I have four files of lyrics in my file drawer: “Lyrics, New;” “Lyrics, Old;” “Lyrics, Bad;” and “Songs.” Songs means that it is sheet music with both lyrics and music. I’ve got three of those. They were created by my songwriting partner, Mike Choly, who lives two houses away.

I started writing song lyrics when I was sixteen. I was living in a tiny apartment in Hollywood. My building was located at Melrose and Van Ness, kitty-corner from Paramount Pictures. My rent was $65 a month, including utilities.

A year earlier, when I was attending Oakland Community College here in Michigan, I took a terrific poetry class. The smart female teacher whose name I can’t remember had us all write a Shakespearian sonnet, a haiku, a limerick, and several other forms of poetry, including a double-dactyl (I can’t fucking believe I remembered that). Each form of poetry has its own set of rules. For instance—the three rules of a traditional haiku poem are: it has three lines, the first and third lines have five syllables, and the second line has seven syllables. This is called the 5-7-5 structure.

For the sake of comparison, here is a famous Japanese haiku:

An old silent pond

A frog jumps into the pond

Splash! Silence again

Here is one of my Haikus from that poetry class:

Creativity

Comes most easily in the

Bowels of the night

Here’s another one of mine:

Men count stones of time

Snakes lie motionless digesting

And life drips like sand

Pretty deep. Writing and reading limericks is fun. They too have a very specific structure, which makes itself apparent when you read a couple of them. Isaac Asimov loved limericks and wrote four books of dirty limericks. Kurt Vonnegut came up with really good limericks. Here are the two Vonnegut limericks I remember.

Those who write on heaven’s walls

Will mold their shit in little balls

And those who read these lines of wit

Will eat those little balls of shit

Here’s another Vonnegut limerick.

There was an old man from ‘Stamboul

Who soliloquized to his tool

“You took all my wealth

You ruined my health

And now you won’t pee you old fool”

Here’s one of the limericks I wrote for that poetry class in 1975.

Rhett Butler is in quite kind of a jam

He’s about to go out on the lamb

“Scarlet,” he rasps

As she falls back and gasps

“I frankly don’t give a damn”

Here’s another limerick of mine from that class. Remember, I was sixteen years old at the time.

There was a young fellow with qualms

Who’d recently been reading the Psalms

If a girl he could get

He would be all set

But his date was with Rosy Palms

So, I was living in that little apartment across from Paramount. I was trying to figure out how to be a writer. I was writing everything—screenplays, novels, short stories and poetry. Anything, and everything. And I started writing song lyrics. I wrote a bunch of them, and thought at least one of them was pretty good. It was called Technicolor Blues. Here is the chorus:

Right or left or up or down

Don’t matter how you choose

Dissolve right in or fade right out

You got them Technicolor blues

I felt reasonably sure that I had gotten the song form correct—I had three verses, a chorus, three more verses, and the chorus. I didn’t understand the bridge, so I skipped it. Stick with me on this, folks, this is a good story.

One day as I was walking up Van Ness Avenue, I heard a funky, rockin’, barrelhouse piano coming from somewhere. Following the music, I found that it was coming from a closed garage. I stood outside the garage and listened for about fifteen minutes. Whoever was playing was terrific. The piano was swingin’. I could smell weed, too, which was a good sign.

Over the next couple of days I walked past the garage and each day there was that same great piano, and the odor of weed. But it didn’t seem cool disturbing a musician while they’re playing. Finally, I knocked on the metal garage door. The piano stopped. I timidly knocked again. The door swung open and there stood a heavyset black fellow in his early 20s—which was older than me at the time—wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts, an unlit joint hanging out of his mouth. I hesitantly explained that I had heard him playing over the past few days and thought he was really great. I told him I was a neighbor, just a few buildings away. He smiled cordially, invited me in and asked, “Do you smoke pot?” I said, “As a matter of fact, I do.” He sat down on the bench in front of a ramshackle-looking upright piano. He lit the joint, took a big hit and handed it to me. I too took a big hit. As potheads, we bonded. He indicated that I should take the one available chair if I’d like. Since I had no friends in L.A., and this guy seemed really cool, and smoked weed, I happily sat down. As we smoked the joint, we introduced ourselves. His name was Cecil. He was from somewhere. He was in Hollywood because he wanted to be a star, just like everybody else. Turning to the piano, he began to play. And he was wonderful. He should have been a piano player in a saloon. In that hot, baking, stuffy, smoke-filled garage, Cecil would just play and play, and smoke and smoke, one joint after another. I could handle about an hour before I had to go home and take a nap.

The fourth or fifth time I went to Cecil’s garage, I brought along the lyrics of Technicolor Blues. At an appropriate moment in our routine, I said, “I wrote the lyrics of a song called Technicolor Blues. It’s got a real basic blues beat. Maybe you could write the music.” I handed him the piece of paper. He slowly read it. Really slowly. Looking oddly befuddled, he said, “This isn’t a song.” I said, “No, it’s the lyrics of a song. But it could be a song if you put in the music.” Cecil placed the lyric on the piano. I could hardly believe it. This was kismet. And now I would get to see how the music for a song was written.

But Cecil looked dreadfully confused. His fingers hovered hesitantly over the keys. Since I’d heard him play a lot at that point, I’d heard him play exactly the sort of blues the song called for. I had no question he could do it. He brought his fingers down on the piano keys, making an ugly, out of tune sound. After a long moment, he did it again. Then, to my utter astonishment, he grabbed the page of lyrics, tossed it at me and said, “I gotta get back to what I was doing, I’ll see ya later.” He turned around back to the piano and began to play, acting like I wasn’t there. Stunned, I just stood there for a long moment, then I took my lyrics and left.

As I walked back to my place I thought, “How could my lyrics fuck him up so bad? I caused him to have a nervous breakdown.” It was shocking. It certainly wasn’t encouraging. But I wasn’t in Hollywood to be a songwriter; I was there to make movies, so fuck it.

I never saw Cecil again. I put Technicolor Blues into my poetry file, where it has remained for the past fifty years.

But I didn’t give up writing lyrics.