Читать книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns - Страница 17

With Joni Mitchell established at Reprise, Elliot Roberts now capitalised on his relationship with Andy Wickham and Mo Ostin to bring them Neil Young. ‘It’s hard to define that period,’ Roberts says. ‘It wasn’t a money market yet – everyone was just shooting craps. Warners got more of the folk/writer-oriented end of it: the James Taylors and Van Morrisons and Van Dyke Parks. All these people reflected Andy Wickham’s taste in particular.’ But it was really Jack Nitzsche, one of Mo’s most trusted ears, who got Young in the door at Reprise. Young, for his part, felt immediate trust in Ostin. ‘Warner Brothers,’ he later told his biographer Jimmy McDonough, ‘was making music for adults rather than children.’

‘Warners was a big standard-bearer for the hip Hollywood fraternity,’ said Bob Merlis, later the company’s head of publicity. ‘It said that you didn’t have to be in the Village to be hip, and I think that was one of the reasons a person like Joni Mitchell was prepared to risk leaving New York for Hollywood Babylon.’ For Lenny Waronker, the fact that sensitive, introspective artists like Mitchell and Young were signing to Warner/Reprise was vindication of the label’s artist-friendly approach to the music business. ‘Neil and Joni were coming at it from a less trained place than Randy Newman or Van Dyke Parks,’ Waronker says, ‘but it was basically the same. There was a line that connected everybody.’

Newman claims, affectionately, that Waronker exploited their boyhood friendship to get him cut-price. Lenny’s father and Randy’s uncle had worked together in the 20th Century-Fox orchestra, and the two boys – Lenny was two years older than Randy – played together constantly. ‘I told Lenny that A&M were offering me $10,000,’ Randy says. ‘He said, “How can you do this to me? Don’t you understand that money isn’t important now?” But Warners matched A&M’s offer and I went with them.’

Artists such as Newman and Parks posed problems for Reprise. Scholarly, almost nerdish writers, they weren’t part of the counterculture in the way that Young, Mitchell or the Grateful Dead were. But then neither were they Top 40 hacks. ‘Randy and some others weren’t joiners,’ says Waronker. ‘Their goals were a little different. It was almost self-consciously trying not to join the game. But everybody wanted to be the best. That was a big deal – “Who’s the best?”’ Newman did not aspire to rock credibility. One glance at his hopelessly square, polo-necked appearance on the cover of his 1968 debut album makes that clear. Nor did Randy hang out with the Laurel Canyon crowd: by now he was married with a son. ‘There was marijuana but I never liked it that much,’ he says. ‘I’d see Harry Nilsson sometimes. But I wasn’t part of anything. If they had a club I wasn’t in it.’

‘Randy was sadder than I was,’ says Van Dyke Parks. ‘He’d seen the dark side of the moon, for some reason that I couldn’t figure out. He got more nervous and upset about it all.’ 1968’s Randy Newman, co-produced by Parks and Waronker, was an astounding debut. The jump from the candyfloss Randy had written at Metric to the wry satire of ‘Laughing Boy’ and the bleak self-pity of ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ was clear to anyone paying attention. Sadly, just as Joni’s debut had done, the album struggled to find an audience. More recherché still was Parks’ sown Song Cycle, a highbrow concept album about Southern California that included the track ‘Laurel Canyon Boulevard’ (‘the seat of the beat’). ‘I was trying to ask questions like, “What was this place? What does it mean to be here?”’ Parks claimed. ‘I wanted to capture the sense of California as a Garden of Eden, a land of opportunity.’

‘Warners was comfortable,’ says Russ Titelman, a guitarist/producer whom Waronker brought into the Burbank fold. ‘It was people who knew about music and had a lot of fun making it. The signings were incredibly hip. Lenny turned Arlo Guthrie into a pop act, which wasn’t easy, and he made hit records with Gordon Lightfoot. It created a certain vibe and a certain perception. In a way – a good way – it was all things to all people.’ One Warner/Reprise insider who could not have been described as comfortable was Jack Nitzsche. If his unhappy adolescence had been alleviated by a worship of James Dean, his mind now wandered to darker places of comfort: alcohol, cocaine, the occult. ‘Jack’s mother was a medium and Jack believed in all that stuff,’ says Judy Henske, who often visited him in George Raft’s old house in Mandeville Canyon. ‘If you went around with Jack for long enough, you believed in it too. One time, Jack and I were playing with a ouija board and his mother came in and snatched it away, saying, “That’s a pipeline to the Devil!”’

It was no coincidence that Nitzsche was so infatuated with the Rolling Stones, on many of whose mid-’60s albums he had played. In the summer of 1968 the English band was flirting heavily with Satanism and the occult, as ‘Sympathy for the Devil’– lead track on that year’s Beggars Banquet – made only too clear. At the same time they were delving deep into their love of the root American music forms – blues and country – and spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. The song ‘Sister Morphine’, which derived from a lyric by Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, was written at Nitzsche’s house. ‘That was quite a summer,’ Denny Bruce recalls. ‘Everyone was listening to Music from Big Pink, and Marianne and Anita Pallenberg were swimming nude in Jack’s pool.’

When Jagger agreed to play Turner, the debauched rock star in Donald Cammell’s and Nic Roeg’s Performance, Nitzsche was asked to create the film’s soundtrack. That he did so with the help of Lenny Waronker’s Burbank ‘team’– Ry Cooder, Russ Titelman and Randy Newman – didn’t change the fact that the Performance soundtrack was sonically the antithesis of the cosy Laurel Canyon vibe of 1968. Indeed, one would have to say that, like Beggars Banquet, the Performance music was a lot closer to the Zeitgeist than the debut album by Joni Mitchell. Acoustic introspection was less a response to race riots, protest marches, and assassinations than a retreat from them.

Composed in a witch’s cottage in the canyon, with Donald Cammell – godson of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley – plying Nitzsche with cocaine, Performance remains one of the scariest collections of music ever: a brilliantly creepy mix of malevolent Moogs, graveyard gospel vocals, and voodoo blues guitar that fit Cammell’s dark vision perfectly. ‘Death is always part of the music I make,’ Nitzsche once said. No wonder Warner Brothers shelved the film for two years after an executive’s wife freaked out during an advance screening.

Neil Young, a Stones fan, loved the Performance music. The very things that alarmed others about Nitzsche were what fascinated Neil, who asked Jack to help him with his first solo album. In August 1968 he moved from Laurel to Topanga Canyon, putting more distance between him and the Hollywood scene in which Stephen Stills and David Crosby were so engrossed. Tellingly, the first vocal track on Neil Young was called ‘The Loner’. ‘Neil wasn’t as social as other people,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘He wasn’t as out-there, getting buzzed and drunk. He wasn’t partying. He was more serious about his life and music. Unlike Crosby he never had a big entourage of people partying around him.’

Young’s flight to Topanga was in one sense a flight from the shock of the ’60s. Shy and still prone to epileptic fits, Neil was ill-equipped to deal with the sexual and narcotic adventures of the time. He was also the victim of a shaming, invasive mother who’d profoundly affected his ability to relate to women. Neil tended to become passive in the presence of girls. He felt marginally safer living off the beaten track in Topanga. Neil Young was the logical extension of songs that he had written in the Buffalo Springfield – songs such as ‘Mr Soul’, ‘On the Way Home’, and ‘Out of My Mind’, that spoke of his struggle and disorientation within the swirling Sunset Strip scene of 1966–67. ‘Here We Are in the Years’ was a statement about rejecting the smoggy city for ‘the slower things/That the country brings’.

Assisting Young with the record was another Topanga outcast, producer David Briggs. Like Nitzsche, Briggs was a macho misfit – the kind of truculent outsider whom Young adored and fed off. Along with Elliot Roberts, a frontman masquerading as a manager, Nitzsche and Briggs formed a human shield that protected and insulated Young from the outside world. Behind this shield he began to write from a deeper, more intuitive place. ‘When I was very young and first came in contact with these musicians, I thought that the ones whose lyrics I loved must be really smart,’ says Nurit Wilde. ‘And I found out that some of them really weren’t smart, they just seemed to have some sort of instinctive feel for words. Neil was one of those.’

Released in early 1969, Neil Young wasn’t quite the record Young had intended to make. When he listened back to it, it was overarranged and overproduced. But it was shot through with distinctive riffs and passages of spooked beauty that made it a minor landmark. ‘The beginnings of the singer-songwriter school were the first albums by Neil and Joni,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘After that you started to get songs that only the songwriter could have sung – that were part of the songwriter’s personality.’