Читать книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns - Страница 16

The Los Angeles scene that Joni Mitchell and Elliot Roberts found in the early months of 1968 was in a state of transition. The departures of Gene Clark and David Crosby from the Byrds were symptomatic of a general fragmenting. ‘Groups had broken up over 1967–68,’ Ellen Sander wrote in her 1973 book Trips. ‘Everyone was wondering what was next, a little worried, but grooving nonetheless on the time between. Days were permeated with a gentle sense of waiting, summer blew up the hills, past the painted mailboxes and decorated VW buses, and musicians were floating about.’

Crosby, outside whose Beverly Glen house Cass Elliott’s dune buggy was often spotted, was struggling to land a solo deal. His new best friend Stephen Stills offered consolation. To Paul Rothchild, Crosby touted such new songs as the beautiful ‘Laughing’ and the brooding ‘Long Time Gone’. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, killing time in LA, helped Crosby demo tracks for Elektra. But, as with Jackson Browne, Jac Holzman couldn’t make up his mind.

Now Stills’s band, too, was unravelling. Neil Young’s on-off member-ship of the Buffalo Springfield was perplexing to some but understandable to those who saw how Stills bullied him. ‘It would make me really angry, because Stephen pushed Neil back constantly,’ said Linda McCartney, who photographed the Springfield. ‘Neil was painfully shy. I thought, “Well, he just doesn’t stick up for himself.”’ Jack Nitzsche, who’d worked closely with Young on the Springfield’s ‘Expecting to Fly’ and ‘Broken Arrow’– fragmented orchestral epics inspired by the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’– was among several people encouraging Neil to go solo. Young was over at Nitzsche’s house in Mandeville Canyon one night when they heard a hammering at the door. It was Stills, hunting for his errant bandmate.

‘I know that fucking baby is here and you’re hiding him,’ Stills sneered when Nitzsche answered the door. Finding Neil in Nitzsche’s living room, Stills seized him by the lapels and yelled, ‘Listen, you fuckin’ pussy, this is a band!’ He reiterated to Neil that Richie Furay was the lead singer, that he himself was ‘the second lead singer’, and that Neil was merely ‘a guitar player and occasional vocalist’ whose songs had already failed to crack the Top 40 three times. Then he stormed out of the house.

‘The Springfield had started to dissolve,’ Elliot Roberts recalls. ‘By the time I was around them, Neil and Stephen were never in the studio at the same time.’ At a band meeting to discuss a motion to replace Charlie Greene and Brian Stone with Roberts – rooming with Young at the time – Young rose to his feet and left the room. Roberts was devastated, so shocked by Young’s brusqueness that he moved out of the singer’s Laurel Canyon pad and found his own place. Two weeks later, after the Springfield’s final live performance on 5 May 1968, Young showed up at Roberts’s new place and asked if he would manage him as a solo artist. ‘Oh, he’d plotted it all out,’ Roberts reminisced years later. ‘I thought, Wow, cool – this guy is as devious as I am.’

Young’s decision to fly solo was a pivotal moment. In time he would become rock’s ultimate loner, partnering up with his peers only when it suited him. ‘Everyone thought of the group as the strongest unit for success,’ Dickie Davis said. ‘And Neil didn’t. In the end, of course, he’s right. The managers, the professionals – they know those groups aren’t going to stay together. Jack [Nitzsche] knew. But we didn’t.’

‘I think Neil always wanted to be a solo artist,’ said Richie Furay. ‘And I can’t hold that against him. It just seems there may have been a different way to make that point clear, rather than just not show up.’ The tendency to avoid confrontation would be one of the themes of Young’s long career. ‘I just had too much energy and so much creative flow coming out,’ Young would tell Cameron Crowe. ‘…when I wanted to get something down, I just felt like, “This is my fucking trip and I don’t have to listen to anybody else’s.” I just wasn’t mature enough to deal with it.’

Matters accelerated still faster for Roberts when Graham Nash came to Los Angeles at the start of July 1968. Struggling to make things work with Brit invaders the Hollies, Graham urgently needed to recharge his musical batteries. First port of call was Casa Crosby and a big hang with Crosby, Mama Cass, John Sebastian and – most significantly – Stephen Stills. Nash had got to know Crosby slightly during a Byrds tour of England. ‘I’d never met anybody like him,’ Graham said. ‘He was a total punk, a total asshole, totally delightful, totally funny, totally brilliant, a totally musical man.’

Already intrigued by Los Angeles, where the Hollies had played several times, Nash was also the archetypal Cass Elliott pet. ‘Cass showed me many wonderful things in a very gentle way,’ he told Dave Zimmer. ‘She was the person who introduced me to grass. I’d always been curious.’ Cass wasn’t alone in warming to this personable Mancunian. Five months before, Joni Mitchell had had a fling with the married Hollie when their touring schedules coincided in Canada. Now Mitchell accompanied Roberts and Stephen Stills to see the Hollies play at the Whisky a Go Go. Afterwards they took Nash back with them to Joni’s new house on Lookout Mountain.^*

‘Joni’s place was a little different from Cass’s,’ says Mark Volman. ‘It was not so much maternal but about holding court in terms of songwriters who could find themselves there on any given night and would present their music to a kind of inner circle of people. If Joni did drugs it was pretty well hidden.’

At the Mitchell gathering, Stephen started fooling around with a new, country-flavoured song called ‘Helplessly Hoping’. Crosby joined in with a tentative harmony vocal. As he listened, Nash heard a toplayer falsetto harmony in his head. When Stills and Crosby came back in with the second verse, Graham laid his high harmony over their voices. Everyone in the room beamed simultaneously: it was as though three angels had been reunited in space and time. ‘I was in there on top,’ Nash told B. Mitchel Reed, ‘and we all fell down laughing. It was really joyous.’

Although he wouldn’t officially leave the Hollies until November of that year, Nash was now deeply smitten with Laurel Canyon. For a boy who’d grown up on the rainy streets of north-west England, Lookout Mountain was simply idyllic. ‘I can only liken it to Vienna at the turn of the century, or Paris in the ’30s,’ Nash reflected many years later. ‘Laurel Canyon was very similar, in that there was a freedom in the air, a sense that we could do anything.’

‘There really was an ethic of peace and love and art and poetry amongst that crowd,’ says Elliot Roberts. ‘Poetry, even more than musicality, was revered, and Joni was the best poet at the time. She had a lot to say, and everybody wanted to hear it.’ Nash, in particular, was all ears: he and Joni were falling in love. When he got back to England he made plans to leave his old life – and wife – behind. ‘England was boring me,’ he told Ritchie Yorke the following year. ‘I decided to leave everything there, every single thing, every penny I earned is still there and I brought $500 with me and my suitcase to start a complete new life.’