Love me tonight, tell me I’m the one,
And I won’t come undone till the morning when you’re gone
                                                           -Robby Seidman

A Jewish Huguenot from New Rochelle,
Whose tunes and heart and humor we loved well
He came to Cambridge to pluck his guitar
In the Oxford Ale House and the Harvard Yard.

A beautiful sense of the deeply absurd,
He stayed true to his troubadour dream,
Drummed up one Sunday, the Sullivan Show,
February of 1964.

An electric guitar, and an amp, and a band,
And a dance, and some girls, this is fun!
Let’s do this again, I can’t wait! We got paid!
she kissed me She Kissed Me SHE KISSED ME!

He reserved his best songs for his shot at the top,
Releasing them one by one, recordings by
Tom Rush, Lynne Anderson, Roger McGuinne.
Then came double platinum Belinda Carlisle.

Finally someone whose last album was platinum
times two, wants you and your song to record.
Not only that, it will be the next single,
Place hotels on the Monopoly board.

Then something goes terribly, terribly wrong,
The video isn’t played on MTV.
A textbook case how not to market your product,
A new way to make musick history.

He then pitched an idea to someone at Disney,
About the lost continent under the sea,
He came back in two weeks and then the guy told him,
“What a coincidence! I didn’t know,
Someone here’s working on the same idea,
Glad you could come, Oh now I’ve got to go,
Give me a call, I’ll be glad to see ya.”

Then came a phone call with really bad news
Leukemia, possibly fatal.
I saw him one last time when there was still hope,
His spirit resilient, no self -pity.

Choosing the artist’s life seems romantic,
The highs are quite high, but the lows, oh-so low.
When the new stars are almost all infantic,
There’s a place where few with sanity go.

Thus some lovely moths, when summoned by light,
Oft become undone, succumbing in flight.