When I joined the Air Force in the mid-60s, we had to fill out one of those psychological profile sheets. One of the questions was pretty much: what do you want to be when you grow up? I answered: poet. Which was pretty gutsy, because that was the kind of answer which usually got you a visit with the military shrink and he’d want to know: Why are you trying to get out of the service, because if you are, I can send you right to the front, are you listening? Bogus, really, because there was no front during Vietnam, just a lot of stuff coming from all directions, which in my case was not all that relevant because I spent my entire tour training pilots to go fight the war. Actually, I really wanted to be a poet. And no one really paid any attention to my answer to that Air Force question, anyway, because they made me an aircraft maintenance officer instead.

It would have never worked out, the poetry thing. T.S. Eliot, I was not. On the other hand, I could not stop noodling around on the Fender Musicmaster I’d bought for $70 or the Gretsch archtop that was a birthday present. I loved writing lines like: “Anita, can these poor lips still speak your name?” (Maybe I was a budding T.S. Eliot?) Alas, like my career in aircraft maintenance, my composing faded to black. I pawned my guitars and gave it all up for a quarter century. But music is not something to lie dormant and for me it returned when a beautiful woman said to me: "I love a man with a guitar in his hand."

Despite the sappy love poems of my youth, set in mournful minor keys, songs that make me cringe even to think about them, I’ve always viewed music as the ultimate poetic outlet. The challenge becomes marrying the poetry and the melodies, then communicating those creative impulses that emanate from an internal netherland. Although many singer/songwriter/guitarists feel a need to move past the three-chord progressions they start out with, I cannot free myself from the bluesy E-A-B7th line. It just feels so right to me. Consequently I work at variations in melodies, beats and lead lines within that progression. It’s a ’60s kind of thing. I eschewed the doo-woppers for the blues and rockabilly types. When I assemble my band today, I’ll call it "Stuck in the ’60s."

For me, however, it has never been about playing to screaming minions at Madison Square Garden. It has always been moving members of an intimate audience . . . say in some small coffee shop somewhere. Consequently, I play multiple venues around my home in Glen Cove, on Long Island. I love to share my music with listeners there. The lyrics this time are more like:

"Can we live here on the run? / With our histories up there hovering / Above this new page we’ve just begun?"

"You swept into my life like a leaf spun in a wind blown far from home. / An exotic child of nature with a song sung in a language all your own."

"So we walk deserted streets / those one-time muttering retreats / of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels . . ." (Wait a minute! That is T.S. Eliot. Oh, well, sometimes you can’t help but be influenced by greatness. T.S. Eliot set to music? Now there’s a challenge. Or did someone say, "Cats"?)