Illusions of the Maintenence Man

 

:: Don't get down :: was written March 29, 1970 while I was living in Los Angeles pursuing my song writing career. I had moved there a month or so before and rented a small efficiency apartment in North Hollywood. Every day I would tuck reel to reel tapes and lyric sheets into my bag and hitchhike over top of Laurel Canyon into Hollywoodand knock on doors to present songs. It was a brutal awakening to the businessof song-writing with total and complete rejection being the most commonly experience reaction. This song was a self help thing that I created to tell myself that in the end it would be all right. It is a pretty straight forward folk song with very little gimmickry and I think it was placed first on the album because of its message. Ah, here's to the eternal optimist!

:: FOR A WHILE :: OK, I gotta admit this song is my favorite of all the Virgin Insanity tunes we did. It was written January 9, 1971 and is derived from an actual event. It also is the first of many songs written about Eve. The two of us had fallen lustily in love the preceding Christmas season while I was working as Santa and she was a Santa helper. It was late one evening and she called extremely upset because she and her mother had just had some incredible fight. After that she had packed her stuff and along with a girl friend, were going to drive off into the night to a better place. She called to tell me so I wouldn't wonder what had happened to her and ended the conversation with "This is not goodbye, it's just farewell for a while." Well, that stuck and before sunrise I had penned the piece. She was gone for a couple of weeks and showed up on my doorstep one morning. We got married before the end of January and on that day, Virgin Insanity became a reality. Once again altered chords and unusual interval movements dominated one of my songs.