The Erica Pomerance Interview

What was your childhood like growing up in Canada? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically song-writing, and was this something that was relevant around your household when you were young? Who were some of your earliest influences and when did you realize you wanted to pursue a path in the arts?

I grew up in Montreal, Quebec and went to an English-language public school. My grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Romania. My parents were both born in Canada. I have a younger brother M, Rk, now deceased, and a younger sister, Shelley, a journalist, translator and specialist in literature. As young adults, our parents were left-wingers, and we grew up with humanist values and hung out with our parents' friends' kids on the weekends. I took drama, dance, singing lessons and read profusely. We weren’t religious and hardly ever went to synagogue except for weddings and bar mitzvahs. We moved neighborhoods a lot as my parents' situation improved, so I changed schools several times until high school. When I was in elementary school, I went to a leftist summer camp where I was exposed to folk and blues musicians Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, who came to play for us. I have an early memory of sitting on Paul Robeson’s lap as a young child when he visited our house - he’d come to give a concert in Montreal. I also remember my parents and their friends leaving the Communist party after Krushchev revealed Stalin’s persecution of Jews. My parents had a rather eclectic record collection that included classical folk music and Broadway musicals like "Porgy and Bess", "Finian’s Rainbow" and later, "West Side Story". My father loved opera and would often sing along with the arias. My mother was an occupational therapist and my dad had an advertising agency. My brother played classical cello and I studied the piano, but didn’t like to practice much. I always knew I’d have a career in the arts. I drew and painted but also wrote poetry and some fiction before I began to play guitar and write songs. In high school, I got my first guitar at 16 and began to sing Joan Baez songs. I was enamored of her. I actually got to meet her when she gave a concert in Montreal. She answered my letters and I visited her in New York with my close friend Wendy, who was a teenage photographer and took numerous pictures of Baez at the concert.

With Wendy on trips to New York, we went to the Folk Dance House and met interesting NY friends. After high school, I attended McGill University as an English lit major and played in a duo with my friend Fran Liberman (now Fran Avni, an accomplished musician and producer with the Jewish Renewal movement in the US). I acted in university musical productions and was president of the McGill Folk Society for one year. Members included the McGarrigle sisters, who taught us madrigals. We all hung out at folk clubs that featured The Mothers of Invention, Bob Dylan and various blues greats, such as Reverand Gary Davies and Howling Wolf. I even had a fleeting romance with John Hammond Jr, who I still admire exceedingly. During my university years, I also became friendly with Leonard Cohen just as he was moving from an accomplished career as a novelist and poet to a singer-songwriter. When he came through his hometown of Montreal, young people would flock to his feet on the campus grounds. With Leonard, I would hang out with Marianne and his good friend Derek May, a filmmaker. We’d play a little music, but in those days I never thought he would become a world-renowned singer-songwriter. I attended his first big Montreal concert during Expo 67. Everyone had candles. It was a mystical experience. I also met Suzanne Verdal, his muse for the song “Suzanne”. She and I remained close friends for many years. She later expressed disappointment with Leonard not acknowledging her role in his early musical career. She’s had a tough life - a highly innovative contemporary dancer, she suffered a serious back injury several years ago that has affected her deeply.

In the winter of 1968, you put together an incredible group of talented musicians such as Ron Price, Tom Moore, Trevor Koehler and many others to help bring your immaculate debut to life, entitled “You Used To Think”. What was that initial chemistry like between everyone, and what would you say was one of the main sorts of ingredients that tied everyone together to help make this album so special? Tell me about the process of writing and recording and how the deal with the legendary label ESP Disk came about. 

You didn't mention Richie Heisler, (now NY playwright and songwriter Richie West), who was the strongest influence on that recording. Several musicians on the session were friends of Richie’s and Gail Pollard (who plays sitar). In winter and spring 1968, I spent quite a few months in France busking on the streets of Paris and, taking part in the May of '68 social revolution, even occupying the Sorbonne and the Odeon Theater. It was then I wrote “La Revolution Francaise” and started to compose songs in French. Juluis was written about an African American boyfriend who ended up busted for dealing hash in Paris. I used to visit him in prison disguised as his sister, I wore dark lipstick and pretended I was Mulatto to get in to see him. In those days, no one talked much about cultural appropriation. Back in North America, in New York, I met Bernard Stollma, head of the ESP Disk label, when I was performing on an open mic night in a Village club. He offered me a job working at the ESP office and eventually proposed I record my material. The main recording session was a bit crazy. We only had a single live session that survived on the album. We were all high on acid during a huge snowstorm the night we went into the studio. The entire New York City was paralyzed. ESP didn’t have much money, so the producer didn’t spend a lot of time mixing and mastering songs that were mostly all recorded live in one take. Several songs were improvised, such as "We Came Via". I had no idea, till much later, that we would spend a good deal of time in Africa. It was premonitory. After we recorded the album, Richie, Gail and Richie’s girlfriend Janet went to an ashram on Paradise Island in the Bahamas where we taught Asana to elderly people in search of spiritual enlightenment. The ESP album was released while we were in the Bahamas at the end of 1968. (It got a great review in Vogue comparing me to Lotte Lenya, the Avant-garde German artist.)

We fell out with the Swami and left for San Francisco where we rented an inexpensive apartment on the same street as the Jefferson Airplane. It was during Woodstock, but things were also happening on the West Coast. We hung out in Golden Gate Park playing music, attended concerts promoted by Bill Graham, who was then emerging as the king of the new psychedelic rock scene. I remember one concert turned violent due to infiltration by the Hell's Angel. I also did a short stint as a topless dancer in SF Chinatown, and realized after a couple of nights that it was not my thing. We bought an old truck and headed to Mexico for a few months. In the mountains of Oaxaca, all the hippies were arrested for taking magic mushrooms. The Mexican army was financed by Nixon to round us up as part of his 'War on Drugs'. The fields of Acapulco Gold were being set on fire at the time. Our motley group were sent back to San Francisco, and then I returned to Montreal, where I eventually got the lead role in the Montreal version of "HAIR" in the fall of 1970. Those were complicated times in Québec. While we performed "HAIR" nightly at the Comédie-Canadienne theater, the city was under military surveillance through the War Measures act, after the FLQ (Front fe Libération du Qubec) murdered a prominent politician in the throes of the separatist movement. A group of our cast were arrested in a red Volkswagen because Robert, who played Hud, had a prop pistol and the police assumed he was a member of the Black Panthers. Our producer, Linda, got us out of jail after a few well-placed phone calls.

What was the ultimate vision that you had in mind for this album, and would you mind giving some background to songs that are featured on the album, such as “Burn Baby Burn”, “To Leonard From The Hospital”, “The Slippery Morning” and the album’s title/opening track? I understand you’re also a poet and documentarian. Were these mediums you also practiced and worked in simultaneously while pursuing music?

The lyrics of “Burn Baby Burn” were written by an African American poet living in Paris at the time. His name is Lee. I remember his last name offhand. See album credits. The poem has also been attributed to Malcolm X, but I’m not sure if it’s the same poem. "To Leonard from the Hospital" was dedicated to Leonard Cohen and composed while I was in the maternity ward of a Paris hospital recovering from a botched abortion. "The Slippery Morning" is a song about racism and the search for identity. I still perform the last two songs with slightly different arrangements. "The Slippery Morning" and "The French Revolution" both have English and French lyrics I translated myself. In the 60s and early 70s, I both directed documentaries and performed music. When I left for the Magdalen Islands in 1973 (where I lived for 15 years), I continued to play music. I taught, and eventually worked as a researcher and director for the Télé-Québec public television network. When I moved back to Montreal in 1987, I became very involved in documentary films and stopped performing music in public. I was a founding member of the Rencontres Internationales du Dococumentaire de Montréal, an important French-language documentary festival that thrives today. I have also made many documentaries on African and First Nations (Native) issues. In 1997, I released "Tabala, Rythms in the Wind", a documentary about musicians from Africa and its diaspora who have immigrated to Québec. In West Africa for several years, I researched and filmed my first feature doc, "Dabla! Excision", which was released on Canadian television in 2003. It documents efforts by African women to stop female genital mutilation. I eventually married my Malian researcher and fixer, and we have been working together on various films and cultural projects, including the promotion of the craft of Ingio textiles from his Dogon culture. I now spend about 3 months every year in Mali and other West African countries. I also produce demos for African performers in Montreal. I do subtitle work as well, mostly documentaries, but some fiction films, translating from French to English and vice versa. 

What eventually happened to your music career after the release of “You Used To Think”? Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?

While I stopped playing in public for many years, I continued to jam with friends, at parties etc. Another recording was released in 2021 of a French language concert recorded live in Quebec in 1972. I have now resumed performing, mostly at venues on the Magdalen Islands where I spent several months as a summer resident. I hope to record another record soon of material never previously recorded and reworkings of some of my older songs. A few of my French language songs have been recorded by other artists' groups, such as the Acadian trade group Vishten, and various artists have recorded versions of the song “Pêcher aux Iles de la Madeleine”, which I translated and adapted from the English original.