Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (6 page)

Alan drove up from San Diego, and he and I spent the evening with Bobby at Malcolm’s little place at the beach. Bobby was playing in small clubs and said that if I wanted to come over, he could find us work. There weren’t many opportunities left for me in Tucson. David hadn’t been able to succeed with the First Step and had to close it. I decided to think about it. I was eighteen and enrolled for the spring semester at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

I made plans to drive to the coast and visit Bobby again during spring break of 1965. I traveled with some friends who were going to get summer jobs in canneries in California and return to school in the fall. We all slept on the sofa or the floor or anywhere we could fit.

Bobby was eager to introduce me to a guitar player he had met named Kenny Edwards. He worked at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, which was in the front lobby of the Ash Grove, a club on Melrose, then the mecca for West Coast folkies. We jammed all of us into somebody’s car and drove to West Hollywood. We found Kenny seated with a guitar, playing a flashy finger-picked version of “Roll Out the Barrel.” It was a nightly ritual that he engaged in with another guitarist who worked there. They would try to outplay each other and also show off the guitars they had for sale. Kenny was tall, with the athletic body of a surfer. He was skeptical and intellectual, dark featured and handsome. He
dressed like a disheveled English schoolboy, and at nineteen, his guitar playing was impressive. He suggested we move from the lobby into the performing space of the Ash Grove to hear a new band call the Rising Sons. Kenny loved their two guitar players, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Though just young kids, they played like demons, with confidence and skill far beyond their years. They were dead serious about the music.

Driving back to the beach, Malcolm and Bobby started talking about a new L.A. band called the Byrds, who were playing folk rock, a new hybrid taking hold on the West Coast. Eventually, we went to see them at the Trip, a new club on the Sunset Strip that had a light show and was supposed to give you a psychedelic experience with your music. As soon as I heard their creamy harmonies, I was mesmerized. I recognized Chris Hillman from a bluegrass band I’d heard, the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. In that band, he had played mandolin. Now he was playing bass guitar in an electric band with Beatle haircuts. It was clear to me that music was happening on a whole different level in Los Angeles. I began making plans to move to L.A. at the end of the spring semester.

I turned in my final exam to my English professor, the noted Arizona poet Richard Shelton. He was also an autoharp player and sometimes joined us at family jam sessions. The final was an essay on something from Yeats that he had written on the blackboard. He said he hoped he would see me in the fall. I told him I was moving to Los Angeles to sing in a folk-rock band. Justifiably bemused, he replied, “Well, Miss Ronstadt, I wish you luck.”

I still hadn’t told my parents. I knew they would insist that I was too young, hadn’t finished school, and had no real way to support myself. I also knew they were right, but I had to go where the music was.

I waited until the night I left to tell them. A musician friend
had offered me a ride to the coast. He had gigs north of L.A. and offered to drop me off on the way. My parents were upset and tried to talk me out of it. When it became apparent that they couldn’t change my mind, my father went into the other room and returned with the Martin acoustic guitar that his father had bought brand new in 1898. When my father began singing as a young man, my grandfather had given him the instrument and said, “
Ahora que tienes guitarra, nunca tendrás hambre
” (“Now that you own a guitar, you will never be hungry”). My father handed me the guitar with the same words. Then he took out his wallet and gave me thirty dollars. I made it last a month.

The only thing I remember about that long ride through the desert night was searing remorse for having defied my parents. I was still very attached, and they had always been so kind to me. I felt terrible for hurting them and causing them worry. There was nothing to be done. My new life was beginning to take shape.

On the front steps of a Hart Street bungalow. I am wearing the denim divided skirt that my mother bought in the 1930s so she could ride a horse “Western style.”

2

Hart Street

T
HE HOUSE WHERE
I lived with Bobby and Malcolm was a little clapboard bungalow in Ocean Park, the neighborhood between the Santa Monica and Venice Piers. The Santa Monica Pier had an early-twentieth-century wooden carousel with beautiful hand-carved fantasy horses. Lacking the flesh-and-blood variety, I would ride the wooden ones and dream. There was only a parking lot between our house and the broad sands of Santa Monica Beach. The area was filled with ramshackle Victorian beach cottages, and the rents were cheap. Some interesting people lived in the area, most notably Charles Seeger, the eminent musicologist (and father of Pete Seeger), who lived directly across the street. He can be seen in the neighborhood crowd picture that we used on the back cover of the third Stone Poneys album, along with singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, who lived around the corner. Our friend Ron Pearlman, a writer for the hit TV comedy
The Beverly Hillbillies
, lived at the other end of the block. He told me that his old college roommate was an agent who had worked his way up from a job in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. He was moving to the West Coast and was interested in getting into the music business. Ron said he was an unusually bright guy and very charming. He was eager to introduce us. His name was David Geffen.

We settled into a nice domestic routine on Hart Street. Malcolm was a serious cook and laid out a feast for the entire household on a nightly basis. He made everything from complicated Indian dishes to matzo brei. On Sundays we baked bread. While
the dough was rising, we would walk down the beach to the seafood market on the Santa Monica Pier and buy fresh clams to steam for breakfast. I cleaned. The rest of the time Bobby, Kenny, and I rehearsed until we had enough songs to play a show. Our school friends from Tucson would come stay for a few days on their way to their summer jobs, sleep on whatever bit of floor space they could claim, and we would sing our new stuff for them. The house was full, and there was always an interesting conversation.

The Troubadour is a nightclub in West Hollywood, about twenty minutes from where we lived in Santa Monica. Like the Ash Grove, it featured a lot of acoustic acts but also included some mainstream music and comedy. It had an open-mike night on Mondays, called Hoot Night, which also served as a way to audition. Playing there under any circumstance guaranteed you exposure to people in the music business. It was well attended by record company executives, managers, and agents. Other performers also hung out in the bar and kept an eye on new developments in the burgeoning L.A. music scene. Bobby, Kenny, and I, calling ourselves the Stone Poneys after a Charlie Patton blues song, played a Hoot Night and were hired to open for Odetta, one of my folk music heroes. We were politely received by Odetta’s audience. It was our first time to perform in such a high-profile place, and we were excited just to have the chance.

Soon after that, a man came up to me in the Troubadour bar. I recognized him as the owner of a restaurant nearby. It was a wonderful place to eat, but we could rarely afford it. He asked me to come to his restaurant the next afternoon. He wanted to talk business. I assumed that he might be interested in helping us buy some equipment or getting us a record deal. The next day, I took the bus from the beach up Wilshire Boulevard and walked the few blocks from the bus stop to the restaurant.

Considerably older than I, he was still handsome, European,
and had rather formal manners. I sat across the table from him in the empty restaurant, and he got right to the point. He told me that I was still very young, didn’t seem to have a dependable source of income, was likely to be facing some difficult times ahead, and he could make life much easier for me. He would pay for a nice apartment, buy my clothes, and give me a generous allowance of spending money. In return, I would be expected to sleep with him. I was dumbfounded. I stammered that I couldn’t imagine sleeping with someone for any reason other than love. Furthermore, I thought I was doing well. I was getting paid for singing and lived with Malcolm and Bobby in our cool hippie crash pad at the beach. My mother was still making my clothes for me on her sewing machine. He remained perfectly polite as he accepted my refusal, and we concluded our conversation.

I returned to Santa Monica on the bus. I hardly knew what to say to Kenny and Bobby, who were back at Hart Street waiting to see if we were going to get some new amps. When I told them what had happened, they were as astonished as I was. In the era of free love, no one we knew thought about paying for sex. He was from another generation.

Another man approached me at the Troubadour the night we auditioned. His name was Herb Cohen. We had just come down from the stage, when he appeared at my side and said he wanted to talk. A British comedian that I knew leaned between us and said to me, “Linda, this is an important man. Listen to what he says.” Herb took a firm hold on my elbow and guided me out through the Troubadour bar to a restaurant next door. Bobby and Ken were following behind.

Herb wasn’t one to mince words. He looked straight at Kimmel and said, “I can get your girl singer a record deal. I don’t know about the band.” I was distressed by this remark. I felt I owed them my loyalty. I wasn’t ready to be a solo act, and I
knew it. We didn’t know much about Herb, either. He said he could try for a deal that included the band but no guarantees. We told him we needed some time to talk about it. People told us that Herb had a reputation for being a tough guy.

Dick Rosmini, the guitarist I had met earlier in Tucson, was a well-established studio musician in Los Angeles. He also worked as a photographer and a commercial artist. He seemed to know a lot about the music scene there. Dick had turned up at our Troubadour shows to shoot pictures, and he continued to give advice and encouragement. We asked him what he knew about Herb. According to Dick, Herb was a complicated guy, but he liked him. Herb had strong political convictions. He had fought in Cuba on the side of Fidel Castro. After that, he was a soldier of fortune in Sudan. He then began to run guns for the Congolese rebels. He would take a load of Algerian hashish to Paris, sell it, and use the money to buy guns. Then he would smuggle the guns back into the Congo.

One afternoon he was in his hotel in Paris with the cash from the hashish sale, waiting to make a gun deal. His phone rang, and he picked it up. “Leave” was the only thing he heard from the voice at the other end. He looked out the window and saw the police coming in the front door. Herb threw the money in an empty suitcase and walked out the back door. At the airport, he bought a razor, shaved off his beard, and boarded a plane for the United States. He arrived at Rosmini’s apartment with the suitcase full of money and a strong desire to find a safer line of work. Herb used the money from the gunrunning operation to open a Los Angeles folk music coffeehouse called the Unicorn. Lenny Bruce worked there regularly, and they were friends. Judy Henske worked there too, and he became her manager.

Judy was a striking brunette, really tall and really smart. She was a kind of chanteuse who sang blues and told incredibly funny
stories onstage. She had a wicked tongue. I had met her in the Troubadour bar. I was newly arrived from Tucson, and she might have felt a surge of pity for me sitting there looking neither hip nor savvy. On the other hand, it could have been a surge of pure contempt. “Honey,” she said at the top of her voice (Judy always talked at the top of her voice), “I am going to tell you something. In this town there are four sexes: men, women, homosexuals, and girl singers.”

I decided to accept her remark in the spirit of solidarity. It was a valuable piece of information.