Meet me in the middle of the night / Let me hear you say everything's all right / Let me smell the moon in your perfume*

I was talking with a financial advisor the other day and he told me he had been to hear the rock group Phish dozens of times – I think he said over fifty actually. I told him I doubted I had ever seen a rock act more than three times, and that that would be the Stones.

But then I thought about it some more and realized that I had seen Steve Forbert four times. Last night I heard him for the fifth time.

He was at The Kate, or, formally, the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook, CT. It was a great show in a small and intimate, beautifully appointed space. I wish I could show you pictures but my g-d, not-an-iPhone, won’t-hold-a-charge-for-even-one-day LG cell phone did not have enough power for me to use the camera. So I couldn’t take a shot of the Emmy Hepburn won for 1975’s Love Among the Ruins with Laurence Olivier, or of the full size movie poster for The Philadelphia Story, or any of the other Hepburn memorabilia on display. Nor, of course, could I take a picture of the performance space or of Forbert.

But the concert images will live in my mind, and the sound still reverberates. When his first album, Alive on Arrival, was released in 1978 Forbert was the critics’ darling. “The next Dylan,” he was called, long before that became an all-too-trite sobriquet for all-too-many folk rockers. His follow-up album, Jackrabbit Slim, led off with Romeo’s Tune, Forbert’s number two smash that is, alas, the only song of his most people know.

Not me. My iTunes library holds 450 Steve Forbert recordings. It would take more than 24 hours to listen to them all. I've never understood why he didn't become the star he deserves to be. He writes about it in I Blinked Once, a song from his 1988 album Streets of this Town, wherein he sings of the long years of struggle to find an audience and the one soaring hit that wasn't repeated:

     The nineteen seventies was ten long years

     Was ten long years to sing a song

     It kicked off madly with a New Year's cheer

     I blinked once and it was gone

Right time, right place, luck – the stars have to align, and, unfortunately, they don't always. It’s your loss, America. Thirty-five years after the release of his first album, Steve Forbert is still releasing great music and certainly putting on great shows.

Note to Malette: September 14, 2013, Wilmington, NC, The Soapbox

*Lyrics from Romeo’s Tune

Steve Forbert CDs, 1978-2012