Laura Nyro / The First Songs / 1966
Flim Flam Man
wry, admiring, cautionary
A warning song disguised as a character sketch, built around a con artist who charms everyone he meets while owing money to all of them. Nyro uses playful, bluesy repetition and folk-tale imagery to turn a simple caution—don't trust this man—into something closer to admiration than denunciation.
deception and charm folklore and trickster archetypes desire versus warning unreliable allure survival by wit
Who's speaking
A narrator addressing an unnamed listener directly, warning them off a man she clearly finds fascinating; the voice is more amused than angry, which makes the warning feel ambivalent rather than purely protective.
What happens
The song opens with a blunt warning and a string of accusations, then builds out the man's mythology—he's compared to a Trojan horse and a fake Santa Claus, figures who hide harm or emptiness behind an appealing surface. A middle verse widens the lens to show his effect on everyone, police included, and reveals the mechanics of his survival: he has no money but gets by purely on magnetism. The final section collapses back into repeated refrains and exclamations, the words breaking down into short denials, as if the narrator is trying to talk herself (or the listener) out of being charmed.
How it's built
The song works like a folk blues built on a repeating refrain rather than a conventional verse-chorus arc. Each stanza adds a new image or comparison to the central figure, and the song doesn't so much resolve as wear itself down, the final section fragmenting the refrain into short, almost chanted denials that mimic losing an argument with yourself.
Section by section
Opening refrain
The song announces its subject immediately and bluntly, naming him a fraud before any evidence is given. The accusation that his thoughts live in his sleeve establishes the core idea: everything about him is staged, nothing spontaneous.(He's a performer of sincerity.)
Trojan horse / Santa Claus verse
“making out like he's Santa Claus”
This verse elevates the man from a petty cheat to a mythic figure, comparing him to two stories where appearance conceals intent. The comparison implies that his victims, like the Trojans or children expecting gifts, are complicit in their own deception—they want to believe.
Middle verse on broad appeal
Widening from the narrator's personal warning to a public phenomenon, this section shows the man's charm working on everyone, including authority figures meant to catch him. The detail about his rent being paid in charm rather than cash crystallizes his method: he trades presence for provision, literally monetizing likability.
Closing breakdown
“don't believe him, he's a no”
The final lines dissolve the song's narrative coherence into clipped, repeated denials, as if language itself is failing to hold the warning together. The breakdown mirrors the emotional difficulty of actually refusing someone this magnetic.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The con man is mapped onto two mythic swindlers—the Trojan horse and a fake Santa Claus—linking personal charm to larger stories of deception hidden inside something that looks like a gift.
- refrain
- The repeated branding of the man as a 'flim flam man' functions almost like a chorus-less chant, reinforcing the warning through sheer repetition rather than argument.
- anaphora
- The cascading repetition of denial in the closing lines pushes the song from narration into something closer to incantation, dramatizing the narrator's attempt to resist the man's pull.
- irony
- Calling him an artist and a fox after listing his frauds suggests the narrator respects his skill even as she condemns it, undercutting the song's surface moralism.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on charisma's power to override judgment—the narrator isn't naive about the man's fraudulence, she's simply documenting how useless that knowledge is against charm. A secondary reading positions the song as early feminist commentary on manipulative men who survive on female attention and forgiveness, given the specific mention of women disarming around him and his 'daily charm' functioning as currency; both readings can coexist, since the personal and social critiques reinforce each other.
Context
This song appears on The First Songs, a compilation of Nyro's earliest, more conventionally structured material before she developed the more harmonically adventurous, confessional style of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry. It reflects a period when she was writing in a bluesier, folk-pop idiom, with clearer narrative arcs and refrains compared to her later impressionistic songwriting. I don't have reliable information on the song's specific composition date, inspiration, or chart history.
Listen for
- the shift in tone between the accusatory refrain and the admiring details about his charm
- how the Trojan horse and Santa Claus images recontextualize a personal warning as something mythic
- the breakdown into short repeated denials at the end, which plays almost like a vocal tic or loss of composure
- the blues-inflected phrasing that gives the warning a swaggering, almost playful quality rather than pure moral condemnation
About Laura Nyro
Laura Nyro was an American songwriter and singer. She achieved critical acclaim with her own recordings, particularly the albums Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968) and New York Tendaberry (1969), and had commercial success with artists such as Barbra Streisand and the 5th Dimension recording her songs.
1947 - 1997 / United States
Full biography and catalogue