PLEASE CLICK ON EACH SONG TITLE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS & STORIES.

ABOUT "SONGS FOR FRED"
When we were asked to provide some memories or impressions about Fred Goode for his memorial, I thought instead I'd write a song, because that's what I do. But I could never rush that sort of thing, and particularly in this instance, for someone who mattered to me as much as Fred. That's when it dawned on me that practically every song I've ever written bears his imprint, in one way or another. At about this time I'd also been wrestling with the task of getting the body of my songs, old and new, "out there" on the internet. So I got the idea of of a themed compilation - songs in some way connected with the guy who was like a big brother to me during the most pivotal time of my life. I thought I'd donate whatever proceeds came from its purchase to the charity that Kathy, Fred's wife, had specified - the hospice that cared for Fred until his death. Fred died way too soon, stricken with a bewildering disease generally referred to as Frontotemporal Dementia. When I proposed my idea to Kathy, and sent her the results, she was delighted, and gave me her enthusiastic blessing. I am deeply grateful for her support; this would not have happened otherwise. Nor would Fred have known the unsurpassed love and care of a lifetime.



The songs on this album are not so much about Fred Goode, as they are informed by my time with him. In no small measure, my entire perspective of the world has been influenced by this remarkable man and his way of being, and so these songs would not have been what they are without him.

Fred came into my life when I needed him most. I had just turned 18, and was all alone in the world. Back in 1963, when I was five, my father had quit his job in electronics at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratories and turned raging hippie. He found a new lover, dissolved our family, dropped out of straight society and began selling drugs on the Sunset Strip. My mother had suffered a history of physical and nervous breakdowns. We were forced onto welfare and she was soon addicted to prescription drugs. By age eight, I became her de facto caretaker and head of household.

We lived in a poor, almost completely black and Mexican neighborhood, in a tiny triplex in Altadena, California. A triplex which, it turned out, also housed Rodney King and his family. Rodney's mother happened to be a Jehovah's Witness. It wasn't long before my own mother was converted. She couldn't grasp their doctrine, but liked the attention, which was enough for them. As children without any extended family, my sister and I embraced that church zealously. It became our new family, not just socially, but literally, for whenever my mother was periodically hospitalized, the congregation always took us in. I was in and out of several Witness foster homes, with multi-racial foster parents and siblings.

The Witnesses washed my brain with impending doom. Armageddon was set for 1975. The whole "wicked system" was passing away, they preached. Therefore, don't prepare for a future in it; forget college, marriage, career. Just preach the End Times, and He'll take care of the rest.

But 1975 came and went, and still the old system remained. The only real change was that my mother died, just as I turned 18. Suddenly I was free, but at a terrible cost. I was released from the fate of being her caretaker, but only because I'd failed at the job. Relieved to have my own future back, yet seared with guilt for that very relief, I would carry that load a long time.

Even more pressing: I was suddenly forced to reinvent my future, in a strange world I did not understand and for which I was not prepared. God was no longer going to take care of me. My faith dissolved, not just because the prophecies failed to materialize; my own age of reason had been reached. My mind was too broad to cling to such absurd dogma any longer, yet too ignorant to choose an alternate route. I was, in short, a wreck. Clueless. A blank slate.

Enter Fred Goode.

I found my own place, a California bungalow-style duplex. As fate would have it, the guy on the other side of the wall just happened to be a crazy artist by the name of Tom Brenner. Tom was from Connecticut, Yale - a world as mythical to me as The Garden of Eden. He was furthering his art studies in Pasadena. About the only art with which I was familiar was what I had on album covers, and my own artistic pursuit was limited to three-chord songs by John Denver and Cat Stevens. Tom soon had me listening to Wagner and drinking cheap vodka, as I watched him paint the most amazing scenes of street people in his darkened hovel, and he nonchalantly fed me a reading list that included Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and Herman Hesse. Toto, we're not in the Old Testament any more.

He soon introduced me to his whole wild crowd of friends, most of them east-coast emigres as well, and all of them artists - painters, designers, teachers, writers and sculptors. Rita Jepsen, Terry Taylor, Sue Riley, Pierre Ratte, Bob Stewart, Debbie, Neil Seaworth, Dwight, Kathy... and most of all: Fred Goode.

The year was 1976. The world was indeed in upheaval. Vietnam was over; Nixon had been run out of Washington. Hippies had come of age and were getting elected. The future, as Tom Petty sang, was wide open. And I, a naive church boy, had stumbled right in with its best and brightest.

As a foster kid deprived of stability, I was instantly drawn to Fred. He has always seemed full grown to me, even back then. He was so grounded, sure of himself. He was a senior among freshmen, someone you could trust, someone who knew himself and therefore someone to whom a lost soul like myself could tie his skiff.

And yet he was approachable; down to earth, self-mocking. There was always that great sense of humility and irony in both Tom and Fred. Whereas Brenner introduced me to Wagner and vodka, Fred showed me reggae and tequila. He could raise hell and drink anyone under the table, but when the sun came up, he was absorbed in processing it all and using it to plot his day. (In fact, on one just such hungover morning, Fred grabbed paper and magic-marker and ripped off the sketch of me used on this profile page.)

Every member of that vibrant crowd was gifted in some way, but Fred was the glue that bound them. Or silly putty. Fred loved people, loved family. I think he above all others reveled in our fellowship most. The parties were always at his and Kathy's home, because theirs was the most homey.

Fred was that rare mix of intellectual and sensualist. He was a workaholic, with a wonderful streak of hedonism. He was a painter. A sculptor. A cabinet maker. A designer. An architect. He dabbled in photography and Tai Chi. He introduced me to Buckminster Fuller, and bluegrass. He could get lost in the mathematical precision of Phillip Glass as easily as in the bare-bone pulse of Bob Marley. He was the guy you wanted most to have your back in a fight, yet he was a ladies' man as well, because of this sensuality, and because he genuinely saw everyone from the inside out, as a unique and fascinating individual.

Fred's curiosity about people never waned. He encountered new personalities like an anthropologist discovers new tribes; he was always hungry to plumb their depths. From the moment you met him, he looked you in the eye and seemed to say: show me the goods inside. Fred had high expectations for himself. And for those he counted friends. And yet he always accepted others as they were. Like a great team player, he seemed to elevate those around him.

Though highly driven, he saw the bigger picture. He synthesized imagination with craftmanship, work with art, and understood the connection, the need for work to have meaning. His design was devoted to the marriage of form with function, art with responsibility.
He was a Renaissance man. Who didn't take himself too seriously. He was a natural leader, and a natural rebel. He was a thinker as well as a doer, Kerouac and Cassady combined, with a dash of Che tossed in.

Fred loved the bizarre, the quirky fringe. He collected wacky and enigmatic one-liners from movies, books and culture. Tom first dropped the linguistic bomb "Kill The Baby" on me. Fred 's favorite aphorism was: "Seriously, Chew Groin." He never let things get too serious. Once, while I was spewing out all the virtues of a new girl I'd just been smitten by, he grabbed my shoulders and said, paraphrasing Old Odd Skins from Little Big Man: "Yes, but does she like to copulate with horses?"

Tom moved back to Connecticut about a year after we'd met; I lost my closest neighbor and new friend. Instinctively, I showed up on Fred and Kathy's porch the next morning. When they opened the door, I held out my signature calling card - a Tootsie Pop - and invited myself in. That night I slept on their living room rug. I wasn't about to let another family get away. I'd unofficially adopted them.

Fred and Kathy never let me down. They became my surrogate family, and Fred was the big brother I never had. For the next 12 years, until I left L.A., he was my go-to guy. We went camping, hiking, to concerts, parties, everything. For every job or hair-brained romance I fumbled into and out of, Fred coached and consoled, picked up my pieces, or just emerged from the kitchen with a pair of glasses and bottle of tequila saying: "Shots!" Somehow I knew that, even if I'd been dumped, if Fred still liked me, I must still be worth liking. Though I didn't realize it until years later, over time that confidence rubbed off. Fred gave me that precious gift I needed most: his own belief in me. These songs would not have been possible if not for that.

I never got to tell Fred how much he meant to me, but that's because I figured I still had lots of time. Fred was indefatigable, invincible. Fred would outlive all of us. He was bigger than life.

But life is long. People drift apart. Life slips out of our control. And suddenly, slips away. Sometimes, way too soon. If these songs have any uniting theme at all, it is that: don't miss what you have right here, right now. It will be gone all too soon.

"Someday, these friends will all be gone.
Someday, forever ain't so long.
Someday, will rob you like a thief.
Someday, today will seem so sweet."

I try not to make my songs into sermons. My musical mentor, John Prine, made his point by simply writing stories about characters to whom we could all relate. Fred Goode was the greatest character I ever met. Yet I never wrote a song directly about him. But all the characters I did write about, I saw through his eyes, through his unique, ironic, tender perspective. It's that perspective that made my songwriting what it is, if it's anything at all. I've tried to pick songs and characters for this collection that I think Fred would have related to, liked, been drawn to, intrigued by. If you did not know Fred, I hope hearing them will give you a sense of who he was. And if you did know him, I hope they will remind you, just a little, of what we've all lost. And what we still are lucky enough to have.

Thanks Freddy Babe. I'll miss you, every day.

Seriously.