Linda Perhacs's talent, long unnoted, is finally in full bloom, writes Bernard Zuel.
"Dental technician makes a record" is not newsworthy now and wasn't any more so in 1970. "Dental technician's album stiffs, sending her back to the surgery and obscurity" is the hardly surprising sequel.
This isn't sounding like an Australian Idol story, is it? But how about "dental technician's album becomes for a tiny cognoscenti a mythologised album available only on rare, poor-quality reproductions before dental technician resurfaces more than 30 years later with a high-quality studio tape which is then turned into a CD that sails around the world collecting rapturous reviews and abundant fans for a fifty something singer who has never performed live"? Bizarre but true, this is Linda Perhacs's story.
And it's a story that keeps getting better. She's writing again and finding "floods of new material" coming forth. There's a new album to come later this year, 35 years after her first, Parallelograms, and among the contributors will be Devendra Banhart, one of the much-celebrated young alternative folkies who claim Perhacs as inspiration and have been singing her praises in interviews for several years.
"Oh, I can't wait, I'm so excited," says a softly spoken and utterly polite Perhacs from her California home. "The possibilities are without limits. I don't know how to stop the ideas. The main problem is finding the time and the energy to do these projects because they're not just simple songs."
How different it was in 1970 when Perhacs, a closet singer-songwriter in Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, played a few of her songs for a friend who worked in the music industry. So impressed was he that he immediately recorded her and released her album.
A collection of folk-based songs with a strong psychedelic edge (in one song she sings "I'm spacing out/ I'm seeing silences between leaves ... I'm seeing silences that are his") and featuring a crystalline voice that could swoop and soar but also threaten, it had similarities to the work of contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley and Sandy Denny. Unlike them, it attracted no interest, hardly any sales and was out of print almost before Perhacs returned to the world of teeth, having given up any thought of music as a career.
The kind of spiritually aware person who might still be called a hippie - she talks about God, "the highest energy" - Perhacs says philosophically that in her early 20s she probably wasn't equipped to handle the kind of success she's having today.
But making music was something she had to do. "Clinical work and work on healing and helping other patients, which was the career I had chosen, you're giving energy every moment to other people, you become their dream," she says. "I felt the need to pull energy in and though I didn't understand how in those days, I reached for a guitar and said, 'I need to learn how to play this, how to write songs'. It came so quickly and naturally that other people were amazed and I thought it was just normal; it came naturally, like breathing. "But I had done fairly complex compositions, now that I look back, when I was five, six and seven, but I was reprimanded by the teachers and adults around me for 'disrupting' their pleasures for the day. I know those were the best parts of me but I was told to be quiet. It takes a lot of years to understand that parents don't always know. If it's going to pop out even at age eight it can't be held back, it will come out."
It's not hard to see in that tale a parallel with her adult career, of initial indifference followed by a late flowering.
"I had the gift of music popping up now and then in my life, but I'm a deeply practical person and I knew I needed bread and butter-type circumstances," Perhacs says. "Now I realize that each feed and fuel each other. The energy that you receive when you do something you're passionately in love with not only fills you but fills others with energy, and it recycles and lifts everyone."
Linda is great!!!! I love, love her music and that her spirit flows into my life. A great, wonderful and strong one she is! All the best to her, and all! With love.
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A black plum is as sweet as a white. Source: (English) A blind man will not thank you for a looking-glass. Source: (English) A cold April the barn will fill. Source: (English) A fair booty makes a fair thief. Source: (English) A full cup must be carried steadily. Source: (English) A goose quill is more dangerous than a lion's claw. Source: (English) A joy that's shared is a joy made double. Source: (English) A joyful evening may follow a sorrowful morning. Source: (English) A leap year is never a good sheep year. Source: (English) A maid who laughs is half taken. Source: (English) A man is as old as he feels himself to be. Source: (English) A man is as old as he feels, and a woman as old as she looks. Source: (English) A proverb is the child of experience. Source: (English) A shady lane breeds mud. Source: (English) A small family is soon provided for. Source: (English) A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner. Source: (English) A stumble may prevent a fall. Source: (English) Absence is a shrew. Source: (English) Absence sharpens love; presence strengthens it. Source: (English) Absence, and a friendly neighbor, washeth away love. Source: (English) Accusing the times is but excusing ourselves. Source: (English) Action is the proper fruit of knowledge. Source: (English) Actions speak louder than words. Source: (English) Advantage is a better soldier than rashness. Source: (English) Adventures are to the adventurous. Source: (English) Adversity flatters no man. Source: (English) Adversity is easier borne than prosperity forgot. Source: (English) Advice is least heeded when most needed. Source: (English) Advice to all, security for none. Source: (English) Age and wedlock bring a man to his nightcap. Source: (English) Age and wedlock tame man and beast. Source: (English) Ale in, wit out. Source: (English)
With much LOVE ,a dream has come true...As promised Im letting those who may have asked know......Please let me announce to my friends that my solo effort " DreamSong " is now at CD baby and you can try out the entire work for free...I think you will enjoy it as it is a new and different pop rock concept album, Maybe the first of its kind done exclusively with guitar synths ...An eclectic soundtrack of those forgotten previous lives. Wishing you the best of music and creativity ! Love makes dreams come true.
