Now Performing

Her recording career started and ended in 1970. Four decades later, a new generation of fans discovered her work

- Linda Perhacs

IT LANDED IN MY MAILBOX LIKE A blast from the past. A small manila envelope with a return address from Brooklyn, New York, and a name I didn’t recognize. Inside was a CD, its title, Parallelograms, in loopy script over the image of a young woman with long hair in a miniskirt and boots, walking in a blue-tinted field.

I flipped the CD box over. Had I really written and sung all those songs? It seemed impossible. These days I might sing to myself, driving to work as a dental hygienist. My 12-string Martin was buried deep in a closet, the reel-to-reel masters of those long-ago recording sessions gathering dust somewhere. Linda Perhacs, the CD said. That was me all right. Me a million years ago.

It was 1970, to be exact. I was a dental hygienist working for a Beverly Hills periodontist on Rodeo Drive. The patients were a roster of Hollywood stars—Paul Newman, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda among them—who depended on their perfect smiles for their work.

My then husband and I lived in a tiny bungalow out in Topanga Canyon. It seemed tinier still when we fought, which was always. To get away, I’d grab my Martin and sit under an old oak, the scent of eucalyptus in the air, a sea breeze rustling the mustard in the fields. Songs would come to me. Lyrics spilled out of me: “In the soar of the leaves, and needle tufts and form, in the grasses and the reeds, and the spilling over stones…”

Not that anyone would mistake me for Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez. Yet the music was healing. I soothed myself with song and felt close to God. I need you more than I ever have, Lord.

One day, one of our patients, Leonard Rosenman, looked at me while taking his bib off. “Linda, you must have talents besides scaling teeth,” he said.