Waging Heavy Peace (8 page)

With the Stray Gators in the barn at Broken Arrow Ranch, 1971. Left to right, Tim Drummond, Jack Nitzsche, me, Kenny Buttrey, Ben Keith.

Chapter Thirteen

I
n 1970, when I was twenty-four years old, I visited Northern California, and CSNY’s road manager Leo Makota told me about a piece of property that was available. I wanted to see it right away. I was ready for a change from Los Angeles where I was living and had seen this beautiful area of land from the airplane on my trips to the Bay Area. Looking out the window, I saw rolling hills above the ocean with the grass a wheat color, looking like velvet on the hillsides. In the canyons, redwoods had stood for centuries.

There used to be an airline called PSA that had stewardesses who dressed in short, short skirts and white go-go boots. That was a great airline. You could fly between LA and San Francisco for $9.95. Flights left every half hour. I flew up one day from LA, got directions from Leo, and went down to see the property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I knew I liked the place even before I got to it. It was on a long road through the forest, actually at the end of the forest, where it opened up into pastureland and a breathtaking view of the Pacific coast. I knew I couldn’t get on the property, because there was no realtor involved yet. I loved the place, though I only got as far as the outside gate.

Later I found out that wasn’t even the right place! The place Leo had pitched me was even farther down the road! The realtor and I made arrangements, and I went down there and saw the whole thing. A ranch foreman named Louis Avila was living on the property. He lived there with his wife, Clara. Louis gave me a ride around the ranch, all 140 acres’ worth, in an old blue army jeep I still have today. The property had two lakes, two houses, and a beautiful old barn. It was owned by a couple of lawyers, Long and Lewis, and was called the Lazy Double L.

“How does a young fella like yourself have the money to buy a place like this?” Louis asked.

“Just lucky, I guess,” I replied.

Later, while I was living there in my first months, I wrote the song “Old Man” about Louis. My dad thought it was written for him, and I never told him it wasn’t, because songs are for whoever receives them. It was a beautiful place to live. I was absolutely in love with it. I decided to call it Broken Arrow Ranch.

Driving up north to the ranch from Southern California to move in to the house was a great trip. I had a ’51 Willys Jeepster that I had purchased in Santa Ana, California. It had a top speed of only fifty-five miles per hour. Loaded with all of my worldly possessions, mostly gold records and musical instruments, I took off north from LA. I had been living in the Chateau Marmont hotel for a while because I had broken up with my first wife, Susan, and it felt good to get on the road to start again in a new place. Johnny Barbata, CSNY drummer (and former member of the Turtles), wanted to live up north, too, and was going to look for a place, so he was riding with me. As we left LA, there was a fire burning on both sides of Highway 101. Through the smoke and flames we went heading to the future!

Behind me was Bruce’s white 1958 Caddy limo. It took about eleven hours to reach the ranch. Late that night, on September 23, 1970, we reached the ranch. It smelled unreal, all the plants and the redwood forest; there was just something about that smell I loved. Home. It was the smell of home. I had finally made it.

As soon as I got there with my friends Johnny, Bruce, and Guillermo, who were going to live in the area too, we started tearing the house apart. It was just a little ranch house built on a lake in the fifties out of plywood siding, and it had some pretty cheesy interior features as well. We took down the cheap plasterboard paneling with phony wood grain that was on the old cabin walls. After a few days, we replaced it with beautiful redwood planks I picked out myself at the lumberyard. I went through stacks and stacks of twelve-inch-wide planks of rough-sawn A-grade redwood, choosing the ones with the most beautiful sap and grain. Maybe I took one out of every twelve. I loaded them carefully into the back of my ’51 Willys pickup truck. When we got the redwood to the ranch and inside the house, we cut the planks carefully to length, choosing the exact grain detail we wanted to see on the wall, and then put them up. I chose every piece and placed each one carefully, taking my time to examine the grain, then deciding where to put it. These planks had a lot of sap in them and a unique grain. They were not the best grade for structure, but they were my favorite and I was using them only for a wall covering. Pegi and I still enjoy them in the living room today.

Since we also tore out the low ceiling and exposed the fir roofing and beams, I thought it would be a good idea to stain them with some teak espresso stain. I had learned about this stain because it was used in my first house in Topanga Canyon. That house also had redwood A-grade inside. Anyway, after a little application of the teak espresso stain, I decided it wasn’t working. It was way too dark. I stopped right there. It is still there in one small corner of the living room. It makes me feel good to look at it because it reminds me of how innocent I was. I feel good just thinking about it. That was a really good time for me. I love new beginnings.

The house stayed basically like that for about eight years, until 1978, when Pegi and I were married. We expanded and built on a whole new wing that was designed to house the whole future family. It was four times the size of the original house, but even with all that room, who could have foreseen the arrival of Ben Young, our spastic, quadriplegic, nonverbal spiritual leader, with all of his special support equipment and his team of caregivers? So onward we went, designing a space for Ben and his crew . . .

If there is one thing I love almost as much as making music, it is building things. Houses, boats, cars, buildings of all kinds, control systems, sound playback systems, and model railroads have all been built and rebuilt either by me or people I have commissioned during my time on the planet. Why do the processes of people, artists, designers, and engineers involved in building or developing things fascinate me? I suppose it’s because I am not sure if an idea will work when a project begins. This creativity is fascinating. I love to watch and try to guide what is happening, expanding the goals and reach of a project as it unfolds. Some people think that is the wrong way to do things, but I think it is the true way to discover. Each tangent offers new possibilities for exploration and discovery. A job is never truly finished. It just reaches a stage where it can be left on its own for a while.

—

N
ext to the ranch there was a place called Star Hill Academy. It was my neighbor Jimmy Wickett’s place, and it was sort of a commune. (California communes, places where hippies lived together on the land, were popular in those times.) I heard about it, and one day I went over to see it. That’s where I met Mazzeo. He was calling himself Sandy Castle at the time. A lot of people were living there in makeshift dwellings. One of the most interesting was Ken Whiting’s tree house. Mazzeo took me over there. It was accessed by going out on a funky gondola type of thing, which was hanging from a steel cable between the tree and a building left behind by the loggers who had used Star Hill as their headquarters while they were harvesting the native redwood growth from the forest. Ken’s tree was way down in a canyon, and the building was up on the rim of that canyon. So the cable extended straight out to Ken’s house, about a hundred feet up in the big redwood tree. It was a straight shot. The canyon was full of big redwood trees, and Ken’s house was in one of the biggest.

I was convinced to ride out on the cable car, which was actually just a sheet of metal hanging from some clothesline pulleys that ran along the cable out to the tree. I jumped on a little hesitantly to ride out. The sheet of metal plating hung from the cable, and away I went. I got almost all the way out there when the car stopped moving and started traveling backward toward the middle of the sagging cable. I hung out there in midair! Then Ken started pulling me in toward the tree with a safety rope that was part of the design. There were no railings on the metal sheet. They hadn’t been added yet. Just wire connectors to the four corners. These connectors were joined at the top to a big clothesline wheel that was turning over the cable as the “car” moved along.

I began to notice some of the weaknesses in the overall design. It was important to stay in the middle of the metal plate and maintain good balance. People were cheering. Ken was pulling me in, and the car tilted more and more as I reached the tree. I realized when I arrived at the tree that I was the first person other than Ken who had used the cable car. It took a while for me to get up the nerve for the return trip. Getting in and out of the device was a difficult move from the tree. There was a beautiful girl up there with Ken who had climbed up the tree to get to the house. She was impressive. Her name could have been Sun Green, and she was part of the inspiration for Sun Green, the heroine of a film/album I did,
Greendale
, years later. Or maybe that is all in my mind, where my imagination has taken charge. That kind of thing can easily happen.

—

W
hen I was buying my house in Topanga, Billy Talbot was already living nearby. He was in a place up Fernwood Pacific that he had rented from the music historian Michael Ochs, brother to the great songwriter Phil Ochs. That house was a small place farther up another side of the ridge from mine. It was smaller than what the previous renters needed, so they had moved out and Billy and his family—his wife, Susan, and baby son, Chris—moved in.

They had Chris’s crib set up in a little room, and there was a really creepy painting on the wall above it. The painting was so creepy that Billy covered it with wood paneling. The previous renters had created it and left it there. It was only later that Billy realized the previous renters were Charlie Manson and a small group of girls.

Around the same time, just a bit later, I was visiting with Dennis Wilson, who I had met with Buffalo Springfield when we toured the South with the Beach Boys, doing three shows a day in different cities, leapfrogging across Florida. Dennis and I had become pretty good friends. I wanted to show him some songs I had written. At the time, Dennis had a nice place on Sunset Boulevard near Pacific Palisades—it had been Will Rogers’s old compound, a single-story mansion with a huge pool and a great main room, a very gracious design I remember as being really impressive, with a huge front room featuring a magnificent old fireplace. I really appreciate the old Spanish architecture in the Los Angeles area because it is art and reflects the culture and the times of old Hollywood. Those must have been great days to live in.

Anyway, I went to visit Dennis there and found him living with three or four girls who were kind of distant. There was a detached quality about them all. They were not like the other girls I had met in Hollywood or Topanga, or anywhere else for that matter. He had picked them up hitchhiking. They had a pretty intense vibe and did not strike me as attractive. After a while, a guy showed up, picked up my guitar, and started playing a lot of songs on it. His name was Charlie. He was a friend of the girls and now of Dennis. His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along, and they were never the same twice in a row. Kind of like Dylan, but different because it was hard to glimpse a true message in them, but the songs were fascinating. He was quite good.

I asked him if he had a recording contract. He told me he didn’t yet, but he wanted to make records. I told Mo Ostin at Reprise about him and recommended that Reprise check him out. Terry Melcher was a producer at that time who made some very influential hit records. Apparently Melcher had already been checking out Charlie and decided not to go for it.

Shortly afterward, the Sharon Tate–LaBianca murders happened, and Charlie Manson’s name was suddenly known around the world. We couldn’t believe we had played with him. Those grisly murders took place in Terry Melcher’s recently vacated house. Sharon Tate was the new tenant who had just moved in.