“Once there was a woman who came into your life …”
One of the great thrills of my life grew out of one of the greatest friendships. My friend Bill Madden and I are now in the 50th year of our friendship, and late in our first decade, we wrote a book together.
If you’ve been following this website, you know that book is “The System,” our comic novel about professional football that was published late last summer. It was the first full-length literary work I ever completed, and it was a real breakthrough for me. I have authored or co-authored four others since. One was published 20 years ago as an e-book, two no longer exist except in faded memories and the other is “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
But before any of them existed, Bill and I collaborated on a handful of songs. He had written some wonderful songs on his own — both words and music — and at least a couple of them are still in my heart half a century later.
Nothing we collaborated on was as good as the stuff he did alone, but he was a good enough friend — and generous enough — to work with me.
He had three skills I’ve never had and all were important. He could sing on key, he could play the guitar and he could compose music. Me, all I could do was write poems.
I wrote lyrics for five collaborations. Three were basically horrible and are best forgotten. One was quite good, and the fifth was “Golden Morning Days.”
It was a song about my first love, three years earlier and the way it had ended. The affair had lasted nearly six months and then ended somewhat strangely. From September 1970 when she ended it to August 2000, when we ran into each other briefly in Staples Center in Los Angeles at the Democratic National Convention, this song was all that remained.
I have written before about what it meant to me. Both of us are past 70 now and we have four marriages between us. We have rarely lived less than a thousand miles apart, but it’s not the miles that matter. As Tennessee Williams wrote in his beautifully poignant play “The Glass Menagerie,” “Time is the longest distance between two places.”
Three years on — 49 years ago — what had happened became distant enough to try and write about it.
My first effort may have been as trite as it gets. June moon spoon stuff, rhyming rain and pain. But I got past that, and if I can’t recreate the sound for you, maybe I can paint a picture.
“Once there was a woman who came into your life. You thought that she could save you, that she could make it right. You told her you could love her if she would show you how. She said her love was freedom, but you’d do fine for now.”
Then came the chorus, the three-word title I loved without ever knowing how it had come to me.
“How did it feel when she loved you in those golden morning days? And how did it feel when she walked out of your life? Have your tears washed the memories away?”
The second verse starts happy and ends with premonition.
“Wasn’t it so easy when every day was spring? You walked with arms around her, your love was everything. Your days were filled with dreaming of nights spent in her arms. You thought that you could keep her, but time would prove you wrong.”
After a repeat of the chorus, we have the third and final verse.
“Then one day she left you, she said her love was gone. And even though you needed her, the girl was moving on. Now your life’s an empty shell surrounded by the past. You call for her, but all that’s there is love once gone too fast.”
One last time through the chorus …
“How did it feel when she loved you in the golden morning days? Was it worth all the pain when she walked out off your life? Will the years wash the sadness away?”
Not a great song, but not a bad one either. Especially for 1973.
And I’ll always love the title.