Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (8 page)

After Boston, we had a day off in New York before playing the Fillmore East, a newly opened 2,400-seat theater operated by soon-to-become-legendary rock concert promoter Bill
Graham. It was only the second show he had presented at that venue. Big Brother and the Holding Company had officially opened it the week before. During the wild ride in the DC-3 to Boston, Morrison and I had been chatting, and he asked if I wanted to spend some time with him on our free evening. Sober, he seemed sweet and somewhat shy. I knew that Bob Neuwirth would be going with us and figured he could keep him under control, so I agreed. Neuwirth suggested that we go to hear the Kweskin Jug Band, which was playing in New York.

My friend Liisa, a flaxen-haired, doll-faced beauty from Finland, had an apartment in Greenwich Village. We had been best friends in Tucson during our high school years.

In her teens, she was abruptly transplanted from Finland to the Arizona desert by her father, a physicist working at the university on the project to land a man on the moon. Her parents were divorced, so my mother took Liisa under her wing, and they spent hours sewing together. She and my mother sewed my favorite stage dress from a pattern that Liisa created. A talented designer, she had a job in New York and had decorated her tiny apartment beautifully. I liked to stay with her whenever I was in New York, and we would renew our cozy friendship.

Liisa’s apartment was only a few blocks from the Cafe Au Go-Go, where the Jug Band was playing. Neuwirth and Morrison came to the apartment to get me, and Liisa declined our invitation to come along. We were walking along the street looking for a good place to have dinner when a man driving by recognized Morrison, slammed on his brakes, jumped out of the car, walked up to Morrison, and punched him in the face. I managed to get in between them, and Neuwirth ran the fellow off. We proceeded to dinner. Morrison ordered a drink to steady his nerves and a few more after that. By the time we got to the Cafe Au Go-Go, he was quite drunk.

Backstage before the show, Maria took me and Neuwirth
aside and confided that she was in low spirits because the band was breaking up. It would be one of their last shows together. Neuwirth and I were huge admirers of the Jug Band, and truly sad to hear it. We resolved to give her all the support we could from the audience. Morrison, clearly impressed by their musicianship and Maria’s earthy glamour, wanted to join in our enthusiasm, but in his extreme condition, all he could do was to stand up and slur “You lil’ fuckerz!” at the top of his voice. Neuwirth and I, mortified, decided to get him out of there so he wouldn’t ruin the show.

We walked the few blocks back to Liisa’s building. It was early still, and Morrison said he wanted to come back up and hang out. Thinking of Liisa’s pristine jewel box of a home and remembering the fate of the girl’s apartment on our first night, I slipped inside the building and closed the door firmly. I didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of another friend. Morrison was pounding on the glass, ringing doorbells, and yelling that he wanted to come in. I smiled sweetly at him through the glass and pantomimed that I was sleepy, hoping to calm him down. He grew more belligerent. I ran up to Liisa’s apartment and slid the security bolt in place. From the window, I could see him still yelling and Neuwirth pulling on his arm.

We went to sound check at the Fillmore East the next afternoon. Bill Graham was walking around barking orders and wearing a yellow hard hat. He explained that the last time the Doors played one of his events, Morrison hurled the heavy microphone stand into the audience, injuring some people. He had made it contractually clear to the Doors that if the incident was repeated, they wouldn’t get paid, but he put on the hard hat just in case.

Morrison arrived eventually. He was accompanied by a beautiful girl with long red hair. She was bruised from her jaw to her collarbone. “Oh,” she said, when someone asked what had happened to her. “I ran into a door.”

3

Going Solo

Photo by Henry Diltz.

W
E RETURNED TO
L
OS
Angeles and an uncertain future. Kenny left the band and traveled to India. Bobby took a job running a concert series at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, where we had first met Kenny. It was to be a deeply satisfying experience for him that lasted many years. Sometime later, Kenny joined my backup band, and we recorded and toured together for years. We all remained friends.

Kenny and Bobby were officially taken off the accounting books at Capitol Records, which meant that, as they were no longer members of the Stone Poneys, they weren’t responsible for paying back the production costs of the three albums we had made together. However, they then began to share in the royalties accrued by the sales of “Different Drum.” I assumed the debt burden by myself, and it would be eight years before I would see any money from record sales. Meanwhile, if I wanted to earn a living in music, I had to hit the road.

I was painfully unprepared to be a solo act, as I had been mostly a harmony singer in the Stone Poneys. We had relied on
Kimmel to write the songs, and I had no repertoire of my own. I began to think what I could use from the music I had loved as a child in Tucson. The obvious answer was to experiment with the 1950s country songs I had learned from my sister’s collection of 45s and the jukeboxes in rural Arizona. They had simple chord progressions, so I started to work up songs like Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” and Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)” on my guitar.

Herb thought I was wasting my time. He said I would be too country for the rock stations and too rock for the country stations. I ignored him and began to look for musicians who could play the songs that had come out of Nashville but with a California twist.

Clarence White, the poker-faced bluegrass flat-picker I so admired in Tucson, had joined the Byrds and was playing what he called his B-Bender guitar. With drummer Gene Parsons (no relation to Gram), he had designed and installed on his Fender Telecaster a device that raised the second string a whole step, making it sound like a pedal steel guitar. The lever that raised and lowered the string was attached to the guitar strap and activated by pushing down on the guitar neck. It became a cornerstone of the California country rock sound.

Other guitar players got wind of the device and began to incorporate it into their own styles. One of them was Bernie Leadon. Bernie, a musician who had played bluegrass, folk music, and rock and roll, had the most musically integrated overview of all the seminal country rock guitar players in the Troubadour pantheon. In his early twenties, he was already an outstanding player who had mastered a variety of styles. He was also a solid, reliable guy, more ambitious for the music to be good than he was to make himself noticed. Players like that
are crucial to any emerging musical process and often make essential contributions that remain hidden because they lack the showboating gene. Like Clarence, Bernie became another pioneer of the country rock guitar style—one that exerted a powerful influence on all of popular music when he became a founding member of the Eagles.

I met him in the Stone Poneys days when he was in the psychedelic country folk band Hearts and Flowers. He and Larry Murray, also in the band, had been in the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers with Chris Hillman, before Chris joined the Byrds. Hearts and Flowers recorded on Capitol and Nik Venet hired Bernie and Larry to play on the Stone Poneys recordings. Larry left the band in 1969 to write for Johnny Cash’s new music variety TV program,
The Johnny Cash Show
, and Bernie eventually joined the Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris and Gram Parsons. We all hung out at the Troubadour and began jamming together, united by our mutual desire to weld country music songs and harmonies to a rock-and-roll rhythm section.

Putting together a band for a style of music that hadn’t yet coalesced was no easy task. Herb, who saw things in business terms only, had no musical ability and was unable to help me. His advice was to call the musicians’ union, ask them to send over any guitar player, and tell him what to play. Of course, music is not made this way.

When I hire a musician to record or perform, the first thing I look for is a shared sensibility. Whatever the musician listened to or read or saw or where he lived growing up informs every note he plays in a myriad of ways. There are so many choices to make—how loud or soft to play a note, exactly where to place it rhythmically, what kind of textural or melodic embellishment to incorporate, where to add a harmony, how to voice a chord—all done in a split second. It simply can’t be done on a conscious
level but becomes a matter of instinct enabled by long practice. When a compatible group of players is assembled to serve a clearly defined musical vision, the result can be pure joy. If the group lacks a shared sensibility, it is pure misery.

Since I’d had a hit record, it was fairly easy for Herb to get me on television. I thought that TV, with its small screens and tinny speakers, was a bad medium for music. Also, artists had no say in how they were presented in those days, and one might be expected to wear a costume of the show’s design that was color coordinated to its sets. The musical director also might burden the music with cumbersome orchestral arrangements not in the style or spirit of the artist or the original recordings.

In the spring of 1969, I went to Nashville to perform on
The Johnny Cash Show
. I had traveled with a fellow from Herb’s office charged with getting me to Tennessee and making sure everything ran smoothly once we got there. He apparently had more important things to do and, after getting me settled at the hotel, flew on to Detroit.

I was a little worried about being left to fend for myself but soon connected with my Troubadour pal Larry Murray. He and the other writers for the show, plus production staff and guests, were being housed at the Ramada Inn, where I was staying. I wound up in Larry’s room in a jam session with a few of the up-and-coming Nashville songwriters that Larry knew. Mickey Newberry and Kris Kristofferson were among them, and not yet well known. They had piles of good songs that no one had ever recorded.

Everybody played his best new stuff, and then we got into a conversation about culture shock and what it was like for Larry to be a long-haired hippie working in the South. Larry confessed
that he often felt out of place and lonely, even threatened, and that he missed hanging out at the Troubadour, where he looked perfectly normal.

It was beginning to get late, so I went back to my room to get some sleep for the read-through and rehearsal the following morning. Immediately after I closed my door, the phone rang. It was one of the show’s producers, whom I had met briefly earlier in the day. He wanted to come to my room and discuss some of the details of the show. Since I had no one from my management to help negotiate for me, and since he was essentially a stranger and might have less than honorable intentions, I declined and said I would see him in the morning. I was a little sharp with him, and after I hung up, I felt bad about it. He was not from the South, and I thought that, like Larry, he might also be feeling out of place. About three minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the same guy, saying that he really did need to talk to me that night and it wouldn’t take long. Thinking I might have misjudged him, I relented and told him he could come up.

I should have followed my first instinct, because as soon as he entered my room and closed the door, he removed every stitch of clothing he was wearing. I was embarrassed and frightened. He was hardly the Adonis of show business, and there was an element of icky self-loathing to his exhibitionism. I started edging toward the door. He wondered why I was so shocked. Wasn’t I a hippie? Didn’t hippies believe in free love? In case this wasn’t enough to impress me, he mentioned that he could make things go well for me in the television business. Thinking how little I liked performing on television, I rolled my eyes and told him I was leaving and that he had better be gone when I returned, or I would call hotel security. He said no one would believe me because of the way I looked and dressed (jeans, long, straight hair, and no bra in the panty-girdle, big-hair South).
Then he said that no one on the show would believe me either, so I had better keep my mouth shut, or he would make things very unpleasant for me.