Melanie

Some of you may have seen the news about Melanie, the singer-songwriter who played at the original Woodstock, and who died on Tuesday at the age of 76.

This just depresses the heck out of me. I've written about Melanie many times on this blog, most comprehensively back in 2008. Her music spoke to me when I was young, partly because my father was a fan and I always associated her husky vocals and expert guitar-playing with joyful memories of riding around in his smoky, rattly Volkswagens, listening to her on 8-track tape. I bought stacks of her albums over the years, mostly at second-hand record stores because I became a fan with disposable income in the early and mid-'80s. By that time, the era of synth pop, her music was largely out of fashion -- but I still loved it.

Melanie is unfortunately known to most people for her hit song "Brand New Key," a plucky little ditty about a girl and boy getting together to, umm, roller skate. (She always insisted the song was not meant as a sexual double-entendre but frankly I don't believe it.)

I never thought that was her best song. I prefer the guitar work in "Lovin' Baby Girl" and the pathos in "Momma, Momma." I love the sunny optimism of "Beautiful People." I think her vocals shine most when she plays with minimal accompaniment, as in this version of "Together Alone."

Her performance at Woodstock prompted her to write "(Lay Down) Candles in the Rain," one of her most famous songs from probably her most famous album. She shared a stage with John Lennon and Stevie Wonder, and a TV soundstage with Johnny Cash, and performed with many other household names of the era.

I think it's fair to say she helped shape the peace-loving, hippie-ish, vegetarian ideals I lived by when I was younger. (And still do, though adulthood has of course leavened them with practicality!) I remember how surprised I was when I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing her in 1991, and we sat down in a restaurant and she ordered a chicken breast -- this woman who once sang "I don't eat animals, and they don't eat me"! Practicality comes to us all.

I saw her in concert three times. The first time, right after that 1991 interview, was at the State Theatre in St. Petersburg, Fla. My friend Kevin (above on the left) and I even got a backstage pass so we could say hi to her after the show.

I still have the pass! ("Precious Cargo" was the album she had just released at the time.) I also still have my ticket stub:

She wasn't a particularly pricey ticket by then, but I remember how great she sounded. (I have no memory of who the "friends" were.) Though often thought of as a "flower child" who disappeared after the mid-'70s, she was in fact always working and recording, and even won an Emmy in 1989 for writing the lyrics to the theme song for the TV series "Beauty and the Beast."

I saw her again in 1998, in Sarasota, and finally in 2008 when I went to "Hippiefest" at Bethel Woods, the upstate New York arts center now on the site of the original Woodstock concert.

I suppose 76 is a respectable age. It's not like she died an untimely death, and after all, it happens to the best of us. But I'm still sad about it, partly because I'm missing my father once again, and partly because the deaths of our idols can't help but bring to mind our own mortality and the passage of time in general. We are no longer our youthful selves.

(Top photo: Winter trees in Kilburn, last week.)