Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (15 page)

Canadian songwriter Adam Mitchell moved into the apartment over my garage. He was an ideal roommate. Adam wrote beautiful songs, was an excellent guitar player, and had a pure, falsetto-infused singing style that I loved, with the Celtic twang of his native Scotland. His family had emigrated from Scotland to Canada when he was still a boy. After getting his nose broken by a hockey stick, he took up the guitar and became a member of the Paupers, a successful Canadian rock band. He was also a runner. I was touring constantly, so having him live there meant that I had someone to look after my house while I was gone. Adam wanted quiet and solitude to work, and I had a piano that he could use whenever he needed it.

Emmylou introduced me to Nicolette Larson, who had been singing with Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, and we became friends immediately. Emmy and Nicolette had recorded a duet of a Carter Family song called “Hello Stranger,” which had gotten a lot of airplay at Country Radio. Nicky had an
earnest, midwestern prairie-girl sweetness and could make the dreariest chore fun. She had the most beautiful hair: thick and curly and falling past her waist. We traded clothes and luggage and deepest confidences about our romances. She would come out to the beach and spend days at a time. We baked cherry pies and whole wheat bread and sang harmonies with Adam.

John David Souther and Don Henley lived a little farther north of Malibu Colony and they would stop by occasionally and play their new songs. Sometimes they’d bring Jackson Browne or Glenn Frey, and it would be like our days on Camrose Place.

Neil Young asked me to sing harmonies on his
American Stars ’n Bars
album and came over to show me the songs. Nicolette was there that night, and he liked the way we sounded together, so we traveled to his beautiful ranch in Northern California and worked for several days. He called us the Saddle Bags.

I had first met Neil in 1971, the second time I performed on
The Johnny Cash Show
, which included Neil and also James Taylor. We taped the show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, legendary for being the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. On one of our nights off, I was invited by Earl Scruggs’s teenage guitar wizard son, Randy, to a performance of the Opry and was introduced to Dolly Parton. I remember thinking that she had the most beautiful skin I had ever seen. She had an effervescent charm to go with it. I had heard her recording of a song she had written called “Jolene,” and told her how much I admired it. I also admired the huge, fluffy skirt she wore, and she told me I shouldn’t think she was a dumb country girl because of the way she was dressed. The idea hadn’t occurred to me, but I took her at her word.

After working all day taping the Cash show, John Boylan and I went over to Quadrafonic Studios just south of Music
Row, where Neil was recording
Harvest
. Neil had asked James and me to sing backup harmonies on “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man.” James also played a six-string banjo that was tuned like a guitar. They wanted us to sing on the same mike. This created a problem, as I am short and James is very tall. He wound up sitting on a chair to accommodate his banjo playing, while I knelt on the floor beside him, stretching to reach the mike and the ridiculously high notes that I had to sing to get a harmony above James. This went on hour after hour until morning with no complaints. When the music is good, you don’t get bored and you don’t get tired. “Heart of Gold,” one of the songs we recorded that night, became the biggest single of Neil’s career. We walked out of the studio into a freezing dawn and a record snowstorm. We found it delightful.

By the time we recorded
Stars ’n Bars
, several years later, Neil had a complete recording studio at his ranch. It included the old tube mixing board that had been removed from Hollywood’s legendary Gold Star Recording Studios, where producer Phil Spector had recorded his “Wall of Sound” hits. As I had learned on the
Harvest
sessions, Neil was a bit of a reactionary in his recording style. Instead of recording a basic track and overdubbing for days, Neil liked to have everyone playing at once, giving his records a raw, spontaneous sound that was unmistakably his.

There is no one right way to record. It is a matter of personal style. When I recorded on
Graceland
with Paul Simon in the mid-1980s, he built his records a few tracks at a time, layering sound like the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Vermeer layered oil paint. Neil’s work is more like a pen and ink drawing. They are both masters.

At my suggestion, Nicolette recorded a song of Neil’s called “Lotta Love” and had her first hit as a solo artist. In gratitude,
her producer, Ted Templeman, had a great sound system installed in my new Mercedes convertible. I cruised up and down Sunset Boulevard, from Pacific Coast Highway to Hollywood, blasting the Beach Boys and admiring the way the salt crystals hung in the air, reflecting a rosy glow. Life was good.

I started working out with a trainer named Max Sikinger. He was about five feet tall and incredibly wise about the mysteries of the human body. I learned that he was the person about whom Eden Ahbez wrote his beautiful song “Nature Boy,” recorded by Nat “King” Cole in 1948, which I have always loved. The song’s description of Max is starkly accurate.

Max had been born in Germany and told me that when he was five years old, toward the end of World War I, he was with his mother in a train station and bombs began to explode. He was never able to find his mother again (“A little shy, and sad of eye”). He was taken in by a gang of street kids, his short stature probably due to many years of near starvation in the rubble of postwar Germany. At around age fifteen, he lied about his age and got a job on a merchant ship that docked in New York. Max jumped ship and worked his way across the United States, winding up in Southern California. Along with musclemen like Jack LaLanne, Max Gold, and Steve Reeves, he became one of the original fitness advocates found on Muscle Beach, a stretch of sand south of the Santa Monica Pier. Max started training contestants for the Mr. Universe contests, and by the time I first connected with him in the mid-1970s, he was training movie stars and teaching them about raw diets, juice fasts, and weight lifting. Now gyms are full of women working out with weights, but in those days, Max’s girls were the only ones. He taught me that a long hike was a better cure for depression than years of
then-fashionable Freudian analysis or drugs, whether obtained by prescription or on the street.

I am severely allergic to alcohol and have never been able to tolerate it in any amount. I attempted to get drunk a few times by drinking tequila, my father’s drink of choice. The result was a bright red face and several days of throwing up. I never got any buzz, just went immediately to the hangover. Cocaine sent me straight to the doctor with a bloody nose, which required cauterization. While I was there, my doctor cheerfully explained to me that cocaine causes the cilia in the ear canal to lie down, and many never get up again. This can cause permanent hearing loss. As I recognized that my ears were an important item in my musical toolbox, it was the end of my interest in cocaine.

Max had given me a strong body and a welcome alternative to the drugs and carousing lifestyle of the music business. This was a rich gift indeed.

I bought a dappled gray Arabian horse and tried to resurrect my childhood adventures, but threading my way through overdeveloped suburban Los Angeles was never the same as the wild freedom I had experienced with my childhood friend Dana and our ponies, Murphy and Little Paint, in the Arizona desert.

Nicolette came out to the beach one day with a new pair of roller skates. They were not like the in-line Rollerblades used now or the rickety metal ones I had as a child, which fitted to my saddle shoes with a key that hung on a ribbon around my neck. They were shoe skates with wide vinyl wheels that gave a surprisingly smooth ride. It was like having a Cadillac on each foot.

Nicky and I started skating on Venice Beach, which we liked because it was full of extreme Southern California characters. There were old Jewish lefties playing chess, whatever was left of the Beat Generation, Muscle Beach bodybuilders, and street performers. There were also slackers and stoners of
every description lying around enjoying the warm sun and the great-looking girls in skimpy clothing. Skating liberated us from car culture. If we saw something we liked, we could stop and join in immediately without having to park. If we didn’t like what we saw, we could roll on by.

The two of us were both novice skaters and could stop only by grabbing on to a pole or a tree. We had a pal named Dan Blackburn, who worked as a news correspondent for NBC. He was a good skater and offered to meet us at the beach and give us some tips. Dan said he would bring a friend he wanted us to meet.

He arrived at the designated hour and introduced us to a slender brunette, quiet and pretty, with a refined, well-brought-up manner. Her name was Leslie. We skated for an hour or so, until we were accosted by a tangle of people who were lying on the ground, trying to grab our ankles and begging for water. Some of them were eating dirt. They were obviously wasted on something strong. Somebody said it was “angel dust,” which was the street name for PCP. The analgesic effect of angel dust can prevent users from realizing they need water, and by the time the drug starts to wear off, they are desperate with thirst.

We managed to slide away and skated to a nearby restaurant for lunch. After we ordered, we began to talk about how we felt sorry and embarrassed for the people we had seen, that they had been shorn of any dignity they may have possessed, and that angel dust looked like a bad drug. Nicky and I had never tried it and wondered what could be its appeal. Quiet Leslie became animated and said that yes, it was a very bad drug and could cause one to do things one would never do when sober. She said she knew this because she herself had done some bad things under the influence of drugs and had gone to jail. Remembering my own jail experience, I naively asked her what she was arrested for. “Murder,” she replied.

“Well, who did you murder?” Nicky sputtered.

Leslie replied that her full name was Leslie Van Houten and that she had been part of Charles Manson’s “family.”

Nicolette and I were choking on our burgers. She seemed so nice and normal. We wondered as politely as we could how she had gotten out of jail and could be lunching and roller skating with us instead of sitting in a cell with the rest of her cohorts. She was out on an appeal because her attorney disappeared during the trial and so she was found to have had ineffective assistance at trial. As she saw it, the combination of Charles Manson’s influence plus the drugs he had encouraged her to take would convince the court that she was not in her right mind and therefore innocent.

Dan and Leslie left us pondering how someone’s life could change so irrevocably from normal to grotesquely tragic. As we skated back to where the car was parked, we wondered, could this happen to either of us? Or someone we loved? It definitely reinforced the hearing-loss argument against drugs. I remember feeling so disturbed and distracted that I lost track of what my feet were doing and fell hard on the concrete. This, added to my fall down the stairs at the Capitol Theatre a few years earlier, caused years of back problems. Leslie’s appeal, no surprise, was ultimately unsuccessful, as she was retried and ultimately found guilty. After close to a year of freedom, she was returned to prison, where she remains to this day.

The phone was ringing in my Malibu cottage. It was Emmylou, saying that she had Dolly Parton sitting in her living room, and she wanted me to come over. Needing no more encouragement, I jumped in my car, pushed it as fast as I dared through the winding curves of Sunset Boulevard, and arrived at her house in Coldwater Canyon in record time.

Emmy and Dolly were sitting on the sofa, trading stories and laughing together. Emmy had her guitar out, and, very shortly, we began to play music. Dolly suggested a Carter Family jewel, “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” and we sang it in three-part harmony. All of us were surprised and stunned by the effect of our voices together. Emmy and I had played and sung together in lots of situations with lots of different people, including Neil Young, Roy Orbison, George Jones, and Ricky Skaggs. As we are all accomplished singers and players, it generally sounded pretty good. This new sound, however, was something different. We each seemed to realize it at the same time and immediately began to scratch around for other songs that we could sing together.