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the jenny hall tapes

By Eric Goodman

In the winter of 1976, having dropped out of Columbia Law School the preceding fall after a remarkably quick and long five weeks, I returned to New Haven and Yale. Working with my undergraduate songwriting partner, Kevin Kane, I wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the book for The Good Fortune of Matthew Mann, a rock musical that was produced during the spring of 1976 at Yale. Our director of publicity, who like many of the talented individuals working on the technical and business side of the production (including playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who choreographed one of the production numbers), was a first year student at the Yale Drama School, looking for something interesting to do. Pat, the publicity director sent a recording of the show to John Hammond, the legendary A & R executive at Columbia Records. Mr. Hammond (I never could make myself call him by his first name), who had signed Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the first generation of black jazz artists for Columbia Records, liked the tape, and invited me to New York to meet him. He would later write a blurb praising The First Time I Saw Jenny Hall.

Mr. Hammond later introduced me to Jim Zimmerman, who would be my songwriting partner for Jenny Hall. Jim, originally from the Chicago area, was making his living in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in New York as a singer-songwriter.

My idea for the Jenny Hall “soundtrack” was pretty straightforward, and may have been the only time in my life that I was significantly ahead of the curve technologically. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if readers could listen along to the songs Jenny, Steve Potts and the rest of the band write and perform in the novel? I raised production money from a friend and benefactor, Coleman Norris, to pay for studio time. The idea was to include a flexi-disk in each book that readers could tear out and play on their turntable (This was the state of advanced technology in 1982, when I was hatching these plans.)

Jim and I wrote and polished two pop-rock tunes—“Love Is No Reason” and “Waiting for Love”—as well as a ballad, “You Belong To Me.” As we prepared to go into the studio, we faced one significant challenge. Who would sing the part of Jenny Hall? Shortly before the recording date, Jim came up with the name of a relatively unknown redhead who sang back-up to a New Jersey band, Southside Johnny. Patti Scialfa and Jim shared a manager. Like many musicians hustling around New York back then, Patti was looking to get her own recording deal. She’d work with Southside Johnny then come back to New York to work on her own demos. She agreed to do our session, singing the part of Jenny Hall for the then-going rate of $100. Cash.

Patti’s work on the recording was supposed to take an hour or two. But she seemed to like the material, and she and Jim re-worked the songs quite a bit in the studio. The session lasted most of the night, and we later went out for coffee as the sun was rising in New Jersey.

As luck and fate would have it, my editor at William Morrow (the publisher of The First Time at Jenny Hall), decided that including a flexi-disk in the novel was too radical an idea. “Not literary enough,” she sniffed. And I had been her literary reward for making Morrow a good deal of money with commercial projects.

The flexi-disk did not appear in Jenny Hall. I never wrote another rock lyric. Not long afterwards, Jim went to graduate school to become a therapist (I don’t know if he finished that degree, but suspect he did. Jim, are you out there?) And Patti Scialfa, the relatively unknown redhead of 1982? In 1984, she joined the E Street Band a few days before the Born to Run tour. She and Springsteen were later married; they have three children. The rest you know.

And now, due to the magic of up-to-date technology, and a rediscovered tape, you can listen to the soundtrack of The First Time I Saw Jenny Hall. Try to imagine what it would have been like to tear a flexi-disk out of your copy of the novel and pop it onto your turntable.