The Answer’s Still Blowin’ in the Wind : Remember when it seemed like a song could save the world? A few of us haven’t given up on that notion.

Where have all the protest singers gone, long time passing?

Just now, a dozen of them are packed into a conference room seven floors above Hollywood and Cahuenga for a monthly workshop called Songs for Social Change.

Here, an odd squad of aggressively independent question-authority types sit around politely trading insights like scholars in an English Lit seminar. It’s part hootenanny, part “Gong Show,” part support group, part graduate tutorial in the rhythm and rhyme of revolutionary rhetoric.

At the moment, Richard Honig is singing “Walk Together,” his tale of a well-intentioned public servant named Honest John:

I’ll be your politician

to understand your position

and find solutions both of us can live with.

I’ll take a wrecking ball

and knock down all the walls

that separate the differences between us.

Honig is a slender chap of 31 with pointy boots, a tidy mustache, a day gig as a financial analyst and the stiletto stare of a bard itchin’ to make a point.

Just what that point might be, precisely, seems open to debate.

“Um, I like the irony of having a politician named ‘Honest John,’ ” offers tonight’s moderator, Ross Altman.

“I wasn’t trying to be ironic,” Honig says. His character is a guy who sincerely tries to do what’s right, although things keep happening to make that more difficult.

What kind of things?

Well, like the L.A. riots.

Aha. “Did you have some direct experience that inspired this?” asks Altman, curious for a couple of reasons.

One, he believes that the strongest songs sprout from real life. And two, his own repertoire includes a ballad called “All the King’s Horses,” inspired by his nervous retreat from Inglewood on that ugly afternoon and a long night listening for the shattering of store windows downstairs that would tell him it was time to flee his La Brea Avenue walk-up.

“Just as an observer,” Honig replies, “reading newspapers and watching TV.”

A few others offer gentle comments--a word choice here, a rhyme there--but Jerry Atinsky cuts gruffly to the chase:

“Look, you’re trying to straddle the fence and the trouble with that is you can fall and hurt your you-know-whats,” he says. “Write about the cops or write about the blacks, but you need to get Honest John off the fence by making up your own mind.”

Honig says this song is a big hit when he sings it in coffeehouses. Later, he says: “I knew (Atinsky) wouldn’t like it. He’s real confrontational, like a storm trooper just looking for somebody to rail against.”

Atinsky might well find that description flattering. He and his guitar have been railing against one thing or another since World War II.

Now 76, he’s among the last of the People’s Songs crowd led by Waldemar Hille at L.A.’s First Unitarian Church from the 1940s through the ‘60s.

“We weren’t writing love songs,” Atinsky says. “During the McCarthy era, we wrote songs against McCarthyism. During Vietnam, we wrote songs about that.”

Several workshop regulars describe Atinsky as a fine writer of single-issue, hit-’em-between-the-eyes protest songs. To each month’s workshop he brings a somewhat impatient sense of history, tradition--and skepticism.

“Our group was very politically astute, politically hep,” he says wistfully. “Some of this group have a lot to learn.”

*

In a crowd that shares little except a vigorous distaste for rules and formalities, the monthly routine works like this:

* Sign in at the door and take a seat in the circle of chairs.

* When your turn comes, pass out copies of your lyrics and perform your song, either live (many bring guitars, and there’s a piano in the corner) or on tape.

* Smile and nod as everyone picks apart your message and how well you got it across. Some will scrawl comments on your lyric sheets, which will you collect and take home.

“That kind of feedback sort of validates writing those songs,” says Carl Gunther, 37, who organized the loose-knit group last summer. “Before, there wasn’t any place to get critiqued.”

Gunther, a software systems analyst, brings prodigious organizational chops to this band of merry anarchists.

A songwriter since childhood, he compiled a list of likely candidates last July and sent out mailings. Of 105 names on his neatly computerized list, about 30 have attended one or more sessions.

Everyone agrees that Gunther does a great job of making the workshops happen, although some take the feedback with a sizable grain of salt.

Altman, 47, is a full-time chronicler of current events who has self-released half a dozen albums with songs about everything from the Supreme Court to the L.A. Zoo. He performs about 35 shows a month, including many at schools, hospitals and nursing homes.

Altman says he attended the first session out of curiosity but left midway through: “I’m not sure how much most people really benefit from what’s called ‘constructive criticism.’ ”

At that first session, he recalls, “People would listen, then say, ‘I really like the title of your song, but . . . ‘ and then there’d be 15 minutes of why this is the most worthless thing ever written.”

He returned the following month as one of several veteran performers who take turns as moderator. Although he often asks singers to elaborate on their songs, he steers clear of faultfinding.

Gunther, however, believes that those searching for feedback deserve to get some--no matter how painful: “I’m determined not to let someone leave with a song that is poorly crafted, that doesn’t communicate. We’re not being fair to them if we do. And some of them don’t come back because of that.”

*

To keep things moving and assure equal time, at the January session Gunther presents moderator Paul Baker with a kitchen timer and instructions to divide the number of minutes in the four-hour session by the number of names on the list.

Baker, 54, a Scotsman and former monk who plays a guitar he handcrafted decades ago from scraps of monastery wood, eyeballs the timer as if it were one of Gunther’s computer systems.

Tonight the room is full, and numerous lively discussions are cut short to hear from everyone.

Altman starts with a tune he wrote before the ground had even stopped shaking from the Northridge quake. Everybody joins the chorus:

It wasn’t the Big One but it’ll do,

till the Big One comes along.

Next up is Thomas Valle, a young Nicaraguan with a gently impassioned song “in honor of my family and what they went through, though it can relate to almost any situation”:

Is this the price the innocent must pay

for the ones who follow in their own greedy ways?

Hope, how long must we wait before we are too late?

Altman and Baker ask Valle about his family’s experiences in the Nicaraguan turmoil.

His responses make their point: While the song is lovely, it would have more punch if he made it more personal and less general.

“What you just said--that your family lost everything but they didn’t have all that much to begin with--is more powerful than any line in this song,” Altman says.

“I tried to keep it general,” Valle says with a shrug.

“You have to be specific to connect,” adds Kim Friedman, who writes wickedly witty tunes about relationships.

“Well, I just wrote it yesterday,” Valle says. “I can work on it.”

*

Joanna Cazden, a 20-year veteran of folk festivals and clubs now at work on her sixth album, offers a lilting country waltz that starts with the caller at a hoedown announcing a ladies’ choice dance, then follows our heroine through a romance and marriage to a surprise pregnancy:

It’s a lady’s choice

when she has a voice

in dancing or standing alone.

Leave it in her hands

give her the chance

‘cause the life that she’s making

is finally her own.

Reactions veer onto what role her partner should play in this abortion decision, amid a flurry of male points of view, even Supreme Court citations, until Cazden throws up her hands: “This is a song, not a brief.”

Valle scans the lyric sheet and shakes his head: “I got a little confused. In the first verse they’re at a dance, and then they’re married and having a kid, and I’m thinking ‘Wow, she hasn’t even kissed him yet.’ ”

Next!

Daniel Hersh, 45, a big Israeli army vet in batik pants and a blond ponytail, does a lot of pro-labor appearances and is still bummed that union leaders weren’t interested in doing anything with his buy-American anthem, “American Hands.”

“The Teamsters’ spokesman told me, ‘There’s no room for songs in unions today,’ ” Hersh says, to groans from everyone present. “He said if I want to help, I should go register people to vote.”

Tonight, he’s at it again. “Those of you who think I’m xenophobic are gonna hate this one too,” he says cheerfully, strumming his guitar and introducing “Oh Say Can You See”:

So when we pick up a hammer

a toaster or a broom

a pair of shoes, a shovel

or the fruit of the loom

Before slappin’ down our money

as we go to pay

We’ll make darn sure the label says

“Made in the U.S.A.”

Skimming the numerous verses, Seth Jackson says Hersh is “blaming the consumers, the unions, the Congress. It seems to me you’re blaming everybody except the people most to blame for this--the corporations who make these decisions.”

A budding NAFTA debate is soon cut off, as a roomful of eager singers check their watches.

Jackson is primarily a commercial songwriter more concerned with record sales than messages, but tonight he has brought lyrics for a heavy metal rock song about the corporate rat race:

Breaking their necks to earn their checks,

counting by the hour

While gray-suited men collect dividends

as they’re playing Higher Power.

Although the very words heavy metal cause muttering throughout the room, there’s enthusiasm for the message and most of the imagery. Several people ask him to clarify specific phrases.

“What is this ‘Higher Power,’ ” Gunther asks. “Is that a game, like Monopoly?”

“Carl! You mean you’ve never been to a 12-step program?” Altman crows in disbelief. “You mean you’re completely functional? “

As if rehearsed, the entire group choruses: “It means playing God.”

*

Gunther’s songs tend to be edgy morality tales of latter-day alienation, fully arranged and slickly recorded in his home computer studio.

Tonight’s sample, a revision of “Doctors of Disaster”:

They drug you up

They cut you up

They take your money

And they sew you up

And though there are honest healers, still, the thieves are thick as flies

Those Doctors of Disaster are gonna leave you paralyzed

Unless you open up your eyes.

Jackson cheers the changes from an earlier version, which didn’t include the “honest healers.”

Others think that the line sounds as if it were added by a lawyer, or pulls the punch of a song that is clearly just about dishonest ones.

Altman quotes one of his idols, protest songwriter Tom Paxton: “If you’re not comfortable going for the jugular, then stay away from satire.”

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The next meeting of Songs for Social Change is Feb. 23. Call (310) 657-9296 for details.