Skid Row and Laguna Hills Meet in Stanzas of a Song

She always had the music and the conscience working in two-part harmony. She started playing guitar at 13. As a waitress at a cafe in Orange in the mid-’70s, she sang Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez songs to help pay her way through college. She protested nuclear power and the arms buildup and rallied for the tuna and dolphins. She remembers feeling ashamed as a teen-ager for having money when others didn’t.

For whatever reasons, Leslie Baer-Brown, now 32, has always heard that voice inside that told her of the plight of others. But compassion doesn’t pay the bills, so as she hit adulthood in the ‘80s, she built a modest career in publishing and communications and settled into a comfortable life in Laguna Hills with her husband, Alfred.

And life rolled merrily along until a July morning this past summer, when the inner voice again began speaking to her.

Through business, Baer-Brown met L.A. radio talk show host Frank Sontag, who told her about Ray Castellani, the man behind a project to feed the homeless in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Although Leslie and Alfred, a data-processing manager, weren’t luxuriating in their Laguna Hills home, the world of the homeless seemed a long way away from the comforts of Orange County.

On a Saturday in early July, she went to Skid Row. She got there in midmorning. Six hundred people were waiting to be fed.

“I don’t think you can prepare yourself for it,” she said. “I imagined it being much more antiseptic than it was. I didn’t realize I’d go down to Skid Row and smell urine. I knew I’d smell sweaty people, but I didn’t know they urinated in the streets. There was no place for them to go.”

She also didn’t realize that water ran short or that the roof over their heads meant a cardboard box. Even for someone attuned to social inequality, it was a paralyzing moment.

“I was numb. I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t know yet how I fit into the picture. This huge problem, it’s overwhelming, so I said to take it slow, and I went back the next week. By the second week, I was overcome with the pain of the situation. I still didn’t know how much I could do.”

She went back a third Saturday and bought a bracelet from a homeless man. Like her, he’d gone to college. She was struck by his speech and clarity of thought. “The line between him and me was shattered. We thought the same, we’d both been through college, we have aspirations, we care about people. Why was he there and how could I leave him? How could I get in my car and just drive back to Laguna Hills?”

She was driving home the third Saturday when the angel of inspiration touched her. “I was crying and it was like, ‘What can I do? The problem is too big. It’s not enough to come down every Saturday.’ I said out loud, ‘I really want to help.’ ”

What poured out in the next 15 minutes was a song she scribbled in a book as she drove home.

She called the song “There Go I.” It represented “all the pictures of what had happened and what I felt” from her Skid Row experiences. With Leslie singing lead vocals, she and Alfred, a former musician, recorded it on a miniaturized eight-track studio at home. They sold some cassettes at a mini-concert they set up in August. They gave Frontline Foundation, Castellani’s homeless project, a couple hundred dollars in proceeds.

But they didn’t stop there. Through various contacts, they got free studio time at the Great Scott Studio in Los Angeles to give the song a professional recording. For the final mix of “There Go I” and for the complete recording of a B side--”We Can Change This World,” written four years ago by Leslie and Alfred--jazz pianist Chick Corea donated his Mad Hatter studio in Los Angeles, where Prince and Paul McCartney have recorded. Mad Hatter manager Dee Barrett said the Browns’ studio time would normally have cost about $10,000, but Corea donated it because of the homeless cause and the quality of the Browns’ material.

On Friday night, the Browns and some friends pulled an all-nighter at Corea’s studio and finished recording “We Can Change This World,” which Alfred arranged and longtime friend Rick Latham produced.

Now comes the waiting. The Browns are shopping the record around. They say Warner Bros. has expressed interest. Leslie and Alfred have already arranged for any proceeds to go to Frontline.

Leslie gave me a copy of “There Go I” to listen to this weekend.

There but for the grace of God go I,

I used to say Until I looked into a brother’s eyes

downtown in the food lines Such a rude awakening to recognize

a smile That’s so much like my own, my

very own.

Who knows whether the record will ever hit the big time. But in a world where youthful idealism often flames out, it’s heartening to know that Leslie’s voice and conscience still harmonize as they did 15 years ago. I asked her whether her efforts helped ease the pain about the homeless. That isn’t the point, she said. She doesn’t want Skid Row and Laguna Hills to be mutually exclusive.

“I don’t try to separate it out,” she said, “because pain is part of the passion in life. I let the pain motivate me.”