Читать книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns - Страница 19
Оглавление4 Horses, Kids, Forgotten Women: Are You Ready for Country Rock?
‘We wanted to turn away from all the intensityand social foment and just sort of go have a picnic.’
BERNIE LEADON
The night of 22 June 1966 found an unusual-looking group taking the stage of the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Four men in buckskin jackets and cowboy boots ambled into the spotlight and performed a short set of country and western songs. The response to the ensemble, led by departed Byrd Gene Clark, was one of brow-furrowing bafflement. Here was the Tambourine Man himself, the Prince Valiant of folk-rock, rigged out like some cornpoke Opry veteran and singing that music – the songs of Southern racists. Just how unhip could you get?
For Clark, country songs were simply what you were reared on in Tipton, Missouri. It was no small coincidence that he returned there shortly after his Byrds meltdown. Connecting with his roots seemed to ground him in this dark passage of his fitful career. While the Byrds flew on into the Fifth Dimension, Clark lost interest in Roger McGuinn’s ‘jet sound’. His brief if heady trip as a mid-’60s pop star only confirmed his need to dig down into the original sources of the folk boom: bluegrass, Appalachian balladry, old-time string-band instrumentals.
Not that the trappings of LA stardom were a total turnoff for the Missouri Kid. Brooding and introverted he may have been, but Clark was as wowed by women and cars as the most clichéd of rock idols. At a party at Cyrus Farrar’s Laurel Canyon house, he met Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and began an affair with folk-pop’s überbabe. ‘John [Phillips] and Denny [Doherty] were having parties every night and they were screwing everybody,’ Michelle remembered. ‘And then very innocently this thing started with Gene.’
The romance scandalised the little village of Laurel Canyon, filling Gene with guilt and leading to Michelle’s departure from the Mamas and the Papas in early June. ‘He was an odd guy,’ says David Jackson, who played bass with Gene. ‘But he had his Ferrari and we went to Vegas one time. The guy was going at 150 mph. Now this is a guy who’s quiet, sensitive, a little weird, so it was incongruous to me. There was a discrepancy between the Ferrari and the art.’
Clark wasn’t the only LA folk-rocker flirting with country music. Chris Hillman had sneaked Porter Wagoner’s ‘Satisfied Mind’ on to the second Byrds album, Turn! Turn! Turn!. As the group geared up to record Younger than Yesterday, Chris drew still deeper from the bluegrass well by penning two stone-country tunes, ‘Time Between’ and ‘The Girl with No Name’. He also brought in guitarist Clarence White and former Hillmen singer Vern Gosdin to play on them. ‘It all begins with the Byrds, and I will argue that point with anybody,’ Hillman told author John Einarson.
Hillman would be the first to acknowledge that country music was already an integral strand in California’s musical fabric. The ‘western’ part of the country and western classification did not denote California per se but it certainly encompassed the Golden State: western swing and cowboy songs were as big west of the Rockies as they were down in Texas. The roots of country rock lay in the music of migrants uprooted by the Depression – Okies and other Southwesterners who’d drifted towards the Pacific from the drought-blighted dust bowls in the ’30s and ’40s. Many such migrants settled in the small city of Bakersfield, north of Los Angeles in the sun-baked San Joaquin Valley of California. By the early ’60s Bakersfield had unofficially become a ‘Nashville West’, spawning the gritty, unsentimental honky-tonk of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Los Angeles itself swarmed with displaced Southwesterners: its thousand and one suburbs boasted hundreds of dance halls, havens of drinking and fighting. And Capitol Records, the city’s biggest independent label, attracted the cream of country music talent, from Owens and Haggard to Wynn Stewart and Tommy Collins.
‘Most of us that came out of bluegrass didn’t like Nashville music,’ says Chris Darrow. ‘We liked country music, but we liked country music from California – from Bakersfield. We were really true to our school: we loved Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.’ For John Einarson, the sound of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos was ‘the first real electric country rock’. Owens, a conventional man next to brooding ex-jailbird Haggard, had a profound influence not only on a generation of country rockers but on such far-flung stars as the Beatles, who covered ‘Act Naturally’, and Ray Charles, who hit with ‘Together Again’.
Like Gene Clark, brothers Rodney and Douglas Dillard hailed from Missouri. In late 1962 they packed themselves into a beat-up 1955 Cadillac and brought their fiery little bluegrass combo to Los Angeles. In no time they were the talk of the folk underground, thrilling fans at the Ash Grove and the Troubadour. Their first album bore the title Back Porch Bluegrass. ‘Everybody went, “Oh my God, this is astonishing,”’ says David Jackson. ‘Everybody else was kind of folkie and nice and genteel and white, and here come these guys just ploughing through.’ Of the brothers, Rodney stayed the truer to his rural Christian upbringing. Douglas, on the other hand, took to Sin City immediately. Tall and rake-thin with a weaselly Ozark Mountains face, Doug would play his relentless, bubbling banjo licks wearing an unearthly grin. The smile, more often than not, was the result of the substances he had ingested. ‘Doug became the focal point for anything anybody wanted to say or do,’ says David Jackson. ‘All the girls wanted to show him their tits and all the guys wanted to play him their new songs.’
As galvanising and irreverent as the Dillards were, the bluegrass craze that swept through Southern California was rooted more in nostalgia than in eclecticism. ‘The wave hit LA, which was ripe for something like that,’ said Ry Cooder. ‘It…suggested that there might be a carefree, simple-minded world beyond all the stress and strain of Los Angeles, and that people could wear cowboy hats and boots and play banjos and be cowboys…’
For all the success the Dillards enjoyed, brother Douglas was more interested in fun and frolics than in steady employment. He was also keen to move beyond traditional bluegrass. So were several other musicians. Clarence White, the hottest guitarist on the scene, was tiring of the acoustic, bluegrass-based music he played in the Kentucky Colonels. One of his chief accomplices was pedal steel player ‘Sneaky’ Pete Kleinow, a veteran of California western swing bands. ‘We were fooling around there with country rock but we didn’t know what to call it,’ Kleinow says. ‘Clarence was one of the ringleaders of all that, but there wasn’t a label for it at the time.’
Troubadour hootmaster Larry Murray led Hearts and Flowers, a trio playing an uncategorisable mix of folk, pop and bluegrass that got them signed to Capitol Records subsidiary FolkWorld by A&R man Nik Venet. ‘[Hearts and Flowers] were probably the closest thing to what we were all flowing into,’ said Jimmy Messina, a new guitarist recruited by Richie Furay to help patch up the Buffalo Springfield. ‘They were the cutting edge of where the rest of us were going.’ Venet, who had been instrumental in the career of the Beach Boys, wasn’t exactly hip to the new direction; he even fought Hearts and Flowers on their cover of Merle Haggard’s ‘I’m a Lonesome Fugitive’. Yet inadvertently FolkWorld became a creative Petri dish for country rock, especially after Venet signed ex-Kingston Trio singer John Stewart and the Linda Ronstadt-fronted Stone Poneys to the label.
Venet figured he could sell the Stone Poneys as a kind of Sunset Strip version of Peter, Paul & Mary. The young Ronstadt, puppyishly eager and grateful, was happy to go along with the plan. But when Venet added sweeping strings to ‘Different Drum’, a song by her boyfriend Mike Nesmith, the barefoot chanteuse was appalled – especially when, in late 1967, the track became a hit. ‘I hated it,’ Ronstadt says. ‘I never set out to make it. If I was playing some pizza place in Westwood or the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach, I was happy.’
With her dark skin and doe eyes, Ronstadt was already turning heads and breaking hearts. ‘Linda was young and she was very cute,’ says Nurit Wilde. ‘She was adorable. You could tell right away that she was the Stone Poneys.’ Flirtatious and precocious, Ronstadt seemed only semi-aware of her sexual power. When Judy Henske took the unhappy Phil Ochs to visit her in Topanga Canyon, he asked her out. ‘Linda says to me, in front of Phil, “Phil just asked me out,”’ Henske remembers. ‘She says, “I told him no. I decided I didn’t dig him.” And she started giggling.’
Ronstadt, who recorded her debut solo album Hand Sown…Home Grown in the fall of 1968, was just one of the artists on the post-folk LA scene who sensed the move towards a new kind of country music. ‘Everybody’s going to the country,’ she said in October 1970. ‘Everybody’s trying to get some air. Obviously we screwed it up here pretty badly for human beings. They’re trying to seek shelter in any way they can.’
‘I think it was unconsciously a reaction to the volatility of the times,’ agrees Bernie Leadon, a bluegrass-schooled picker who’d gigged with Chris Hillman back in the early folk days. ‘By 1967 we all already knew people we’d been to school with who’d been killed in Vietnam. And then in 1968, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King got killed. So you had all this intense political stuff going on but at the same time you were struggling with questions like “Am I going to have a family? Is that a wise thing to do?”’
When Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding appeared early in 1968, its sparse Nashville sound and biblical imagery confirmed his apparent retreat from the exploding plastic counterculture. His former backing group the Hawks – or The Band, as they became known when their 1968 debut Music from Big Pink was released – had if anything more impact in LA than their mentor. While country music was only one of several rootsy ingredients in their Americana brew, the use of such old-timey instruments as fiddles and mandolins made them a key part of this retrogressive trend. When Time magazine put the group on the cover in 1970, the headline read ‘The New Sound of Country Rock’. And when The Band came to record their second album in 1969, they chose to cut most of it in California in a pool house overlooking the Sunset Strip.
Nashville Skyline, released in the same year, took Dylan’s retreat one step further. Sung in a strangely plummy voice at several removes from the caustic timbre of Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, Skyline was another rebuff to the politicos who’d looked to Dylan for militant leadership. It also changed the image of Nashville for ever. ‘It broke the city open,’ says Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, who grew up in Nashville. ‘After that, things started to get interesting as far as other people coming to town to record on a fairly regular basis.’ In Nashville at the same time was John Stewart, working on an album called California Bloodlines. Employing the same Music Row session players that Dylan used, producer Nik Venet wanted to cross the Nashville Sound with LA country rock. The resulting record – an Americana classic flecked with the influences of John Steinbeck and Andrew Wyeth – sounded like some missing link between Johnny Cash and Gene Clark. ‘I wanted to do a sort of modern folk thing, not LA country,’ Venet said. ‘By making this cross, John made it possible for Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers to happen. I wanted to define a new folk movement with Stewart and Ronstadt.’ The ‘new folk movement’ was on its way, but it had little to do with folk as Nik Venet had known it.
