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Erica Pomerance
- Wesleyan University Press
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205 Erica Pomerance For many years now, Erica Pomerance has been known as a documentary filmmaker based in her native Montreal. But in the ’60s and ’70s, she was just as active working as a singer-songwriter. In December 1968, on one of her extended visits to New York, ESP produced her only record, You Used to Think, a stylistic amalgam of folk, jazz, Eastern inflections, and rock. Fresh from a stay in Paris during the student uprisings, she was attuned to movements for change both at home and abroad, along with the hopes and disappointments of a generation. Were you aware of the ESP label before coming to New York? These friends of mine made a r ecord for ESP before I did, Bruce Mackay and Tanya Mackay—both eventually became filmmakers as well. Then I went down to New York and somehow bumped into Bernard Stollman, who heard me sing at a café in Greenwich Village. I ended up becoming a member on staff at ESP. I would work in the oἀ ce; at the same time he was p reparing me to make an album, because he thought that the stuff I was do ing was original. I had b een performing for years. I was a J oan Baez clone and actually was f riendly with Joan Baez. I had s een her in C alifornia and met her in M ontreal because a friend of my father’s was an impresario here who brought in many famous folk and other performers. Because I sang her songs so well and looked so much like her, he arranged for me to meet her after a concert that she gave here. So, when I was in New York, I was sort of hooked into the folk and blues scene. As office jobs go, working at the label must have been a little unusual. It was a way for me to keep living in New York, because I had this cockroachinfested apartment in t he East Village. My friend Richie Heisler, who was on the album with me, we were hanging out together and playing music and doing hippie things in those days. So, I was on some kind of stipend for a couple of months working at ESP, classing albums and shuffling papers and taking phone calls, basically being an oἀ ce girl. Th e oἀ ce was in a building downtown, and I used to go there every day. Musicians would breeze through, and we’d meet all 206 esp-disk’ as lived and witnessed the jazz musicians. It was really kind of an exciting place to be for me. Th at area was the heart of the folk music scene too. I met Izzy Young. He had the Folklore Center and a radio program on WBAI, and I would be on that program occasionally . Eventually my recording date came up, and we went into the studio. Had you visited New York before? I was like an adopted New Yorker. I had started coming down to New York on vacations when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I’d gone to a summer camp for progressive Jews and met some friends from New York. Was music your main artistic outlet in the ’60s, or were you already interested in film? I was de veloping both interests at the same time. When I was in M ontreal, I worked for a film company and after Expo 67 the money died down for small independent production companies. When I lost my job, I went to Paris. A lot of the songs on that ESP record reflect my stint in Paris during the student uprisings that became May ’68. I had a very exciting time in Paris. I was actually holed up in the Sorbonne with all these students and singing. Th e y considered me an anarchist, because the place was dominated by sort of left-wing communist trade union people who didn’t like anarchists, people like me who were part of that new generation. My song “The French Revolution” was a bout that, because I was right in the thick of it. I was there when young people would go out at night—they called them the Amazons—women and guys that used to go throw cobblestones at the CRS, the police. I came back for a short while to Montreal, then I went to New York and started to work for ESP. I had been...