This was quite a thrill to hear Dan and band bring to live the demo he had sent a few weeks earlier. Dan asked if the audience was having as much fun as he was. 

Not sure if they only sold these t-shirts because I kept making little demos of my version of it: DON’T LET YOUR HEART GET BROKEN BY THIS WORLD. In truth, I did not remember ever having heard this song until after I asked Dan Bern to meet me in New Mexico. Albuquerque Lullaby from New American Language. There was an awkward moment where I asked Dan if a lyric in a previous song from early in his career — his glory days —  was about his personal life. 

The three deaths in the story or song are Wallace Stegner, Gerber Sani and Paul Weiss, my father, who sold Chevy; also, my first car, in January, 1980, was a blue Camaro. After my mother took me to DMV on my 16th birthday, we went by my father’s car lot, Key Chevrolet in Cupertino, across from De Anza College – its now a Whole Foods — to pick out my own car — or a demo, which I demonstrated for about six months or 5,000 miles. All through high School, when people asked me for a ride, I would usually comply — an early prototype for “ride service” which I later sold to the founders of UBER and Lyft for SMB – six million bucks. Inside joke, my father had a car with a license plate Something Something SMB. 

and 1: a note from my brother: