Eulogy For P.F. Sloan, by Paul Zollo

He said before then, “My desire was to be like every other teenager. I wanted to be loved. I wanted a normal family life. I watched American Bandstand and I watched the normal kids having fun and dancing and being happy and normal. I wanted to be Elvis, I wanted to be Ricky, I wanted to be Bobby and Johnny and Frankie and anyone else but myself. I wanted love and felt like I wasn’t getting it. But P.F. Sloan? He didn’t care about any of that. He wanted honesty and truth. “

Videos by American Songwriter

Where did that need come from? As he said, “perhaps it was the uneasy feeling that I was being lied to.”

Let’s face it – he wasn’t like the other kids! That night he wrote “Eve of Destruction,” he also wrote “Sins of a Family,” “Take Me For What I’m Worth,” “This Morning” and “Ain’t No Way I’m Gonna Change My Mind.”

He said: “I was up most of that night battling. I don’t know who I was battling or what, but I vividly recall saying to some higher music power, `Please let me be released from this. Please let me get out. Let me be released.’ And I kept hearing this voice saying, `No, no, sorry – you’ve got to live with it. Can’t let you go on this one.’”

“Finally words would start to come and I would see them and I would be filled with tears of joy, and I would be so happy that they were being given. It was a fantastic feeling of being in another place. The excitement was so great that I wouldn’t even bear to witness it. Other times as this greater power was beginning to love me a little bit more, it would say, `Watch this one come out.’ I would watch it and say, `But that’s what I wanted to say.’ Sometimes I would see a whole chorus that was written. It was pure witnessing.”

“My theory is that we are all one being all in the same consciousness, and that the Master Poet, who is writing our lives and is able to change our lives through that grace, is the source of all joy and happiness.  And knows all our grief and sorrow.”

I asked him what it was like to hear Dylan the first time: “It was almost too exciting to listen to. I felt the electricity go up my spine… it was almost like being in a church. A very enlightening church service that opened up my consciousness. It was an endless consciousness; infinity’s consciousness of love towards mankind. I think he opened up the consciousness up to 90% of the people who listened to him.“

That consciousness, of course, touched The Beatles. Lennon said he would never have written “Help” – which was a real cry for help – before he heard Dylan. And The Beatles, as you know, helped changed the world. That spirit of love and peace – played against the human context of our ongoing wars and chaos – was the rock on which he built his life, and moored his boat.

Just this week days after Phil’s death, I got a Xmas card from Yoko. Like Phil, she is an often misunderstood person, but an artist of great impact and spirit. Though John and Yoko urged us all to imagine a world beyond war, he died violently here in America. Yet so much violence has happened since then – so much war and turmoil and bloodshed and grief – to the extent that we hear news of our fellow Americans gunned down in another slaughter for no reason – and so inured to this now are we that we don’t shed a tear. Because it’s so normal now.

Yoko’s card shows a human eye with the words “Don’t let your eyes dry.” And on the back is this message:

“I realized that many people started to not cry in our society when we get reports of terrible happenings. We read a report from scientists that not crying is very bad for your health. Are we becoming a human race which just gets stiff when we see another report of terrible atrocity in the morning paper? …thank you for letting me cry for your beautiful deed. It’s nice to know that we are still human. I love you.”

So as Yoko explains, it is healthy to cry. Don’t hold back your unshed tears. If you haven’t cried for Phil yet, it’s okay. He had no problem with crying, and with shedding tears for others. Like any songwriter, he felt things deeply.

Never will I forget his story of hearing Jimmy Webb, back before Webb was famous, playing him all the songs that would become modern standards back before they did. Jimmy ultimately wrote an elegy for Phil, a very sad and also happy song called “P.F. Sloan.”

“Sometime earlier he played for me lot of his songs that had been turned down by everyone,” said Phil. “`Wichita Lineman,’ `Up Up and Away,’ `MacArthur Park.’ The tears flowed out of my eyes. The tears were unstoppable and kept flowing. His heart was breaking. He was being rejected and no one understood his songs. He was asking me if this was good stuff. And the tears were flowing out. I said, `Take a tear, any tear. They’re all yours.’”

“Later he was vindicated,” Phil said “and all the ones who turned him down later learned better. And he was very angry about the way they destroyed my career and later started to rally around him. He could see that these people come and go very quickly. They demolish you one day and love you the next. So he wrote this song ‘P.F. Sloan.’”

“The first time I heard the song was a divine moment for me,” said Phil. “I had had all my royalties suspended. I had absolutely no money. I had no place to live. I was at this hotdog stand on Vine Street and trying to scrape up 50 cents for a hot dog . And out of the speakers from the hot dog place was that song. And I was thinking, is this a divine play or what?“

“I went to a phone and tried to contact Jimmy Webb. And he was gone. It was like the show had left town and I was its invisible star.”

Paul Zollo on Paige Calico’s Crying Diamonds