Читать книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns - Страница 22

Up on the Strip, the live scene was hurting. Name bands were now too big to play small clubs like the Whisky: they’d be booked into bigger venues like the Kaleidoscope or the Shrine Auditorium. And the Strip itself was hardly the bustling beads-and-bells mecca it had been in 1965–66. It was a different story down on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Doug Weston’s Troubadour was now the de facto clubhouse for LA’s denim in-crowd. ‘The Sunset Strip sort of shut down after Monterey,’ says Domenic Priore. ‘Doug managed to ride the storm out. He had the place, and the people that had been involved with the folk-rock scene on the Strip gravitated to the Troubadour.’

‘When the Troub came along, that was right up our alley,’ says Linda Ronstadt. ‘It was small enough that you could really hear the music well and get close to it. Of course we were all so self-centred that to us it was already the centre of the universe.’ On any given night one might see the angelic Jackson Browne emerging from the kitchen with a bottle of Dos Equis. Arlo Guthrie, newly signed to Reprise by Lenny Waronker, would flirt shamelessly with any girl who worked at the club. In a corner would be comedian/banjo player Steve Martin, who, in the recollection of Troubadour mainstay Eve Babitz, sat with ‘a single glass of white wine in the midst of all that cigarette smoke’, unwilling ‘to look on the bright side of total debauchery’. Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison might be holed up with a small entourage and a bottle of Jim Beam. Later they would be poured into a Red & White cab after becoming belligerent and abusive.

‘If you sold out the Troubadour, that was it,’ says Tom Waits, who played the club early in his career. ‘At the Troub they announced your name and picked you up with a spotlight at the cigarette machine, and then they’d walk you to the stage with the light. Then Doug would go out onstage naked and recite “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.’ At the Troubadour the waitresses – Reina, Black Sylvia, Big Tit Sue – and the bartenders – Ray, Kevin, Gatt, Jim Maxwell, John Barrick – were almost as famous as the entertainers who hung out there. ‘There was Big Tit Sue and Bigger Tit Sue, and there was Black Sylvia behind the bar,’ recalls Robert Marchese, a tough-talking former football player from Pittsburgh who produced Richard Pryor’s first album at the club in September 1968. ‘The Troub nearly brought the Whisky to its knees. Everybody started hanging out at the bar on Monday night hoot night. They would all get together, get drunk, talk about how great they were, and go home.’

Few went home alone. Fornication was on tap at the Troubadour. Eve Babitz said you could smell the semen on the street. Drunk or wired, boys and girls fell into bed with each other and retained scant recollection of their couplings the next day. ‘It was such a sexual experience being in that place,’ says Michael Ochs. ‘You could fall asleep there and wake up in bed with some woman.’

For fastidious executives such as Jac Holzman there was ‘too much posturing and moving around’ at the club, but for good-time guys like Doug Dillard the place was very heaven. On one deeply cherished occasion Doug broke into the opening lines of ‘Amazing Grace’, joined moments later by a lustrous Linda Ronstadt harmony – and then by David Crosby, Gene Clark, Harry Dean Stanton and Jackson Browne, all pitching in a cappella. Dillard was also the chief protagonist in umpteen extra-musical legends. On one occasion a frenziedly jealous Suzi Jane Hokom – whom Doug had stolen away from Lee Hazlewood – attempted to run the banjo player over in the street, instead missing him and crashing into the karate studio next door.

Doug Weston still made artists sign contracts that obliged them to return to the Troubadour long after they’d made it big. Many resented it bitterly. ‘Weston would sign you for five years and pay the same amount for every performance – $1000,’ Don McLean said. ‘Sure, in 1970 this was good money, but when I became No. 1 all over the world with “American Pie” I still had to play his goddamned lousy club because he had me under contract.’ At least as important as the stage at the Troubadour was the club’s front bar, where everyone on the scene congregated. ‘The bar was the place where it all happened,’ says Judy James. ‘The Monday night hoot was fabulous and people just poured in.’^*

‘The Troub was the only place where you could go and showcase for record companies,’ remembered Jackson Browne. ‘If you were lucky you might get to sing three or four songs that night.’ Most importantly, the club was the crucible for LA’s burgeoning country rock sound – the HQ for ‘the people who had grown their hair long but who still loved country music and wanted to play it’, in the words of Texan pedal steel player Al Perkins.

‘There was a sort of music community at that time,’ says Browne. ‘With the Byrds and the Burritos came a whole resurgence of interest in country music that led eventually to the Eagles.’ If any one event can be said to have ignited LA’s country rock scene it would have to be the debut show by Pogo at the Troubadour in November 1968. Formed out of the ashes of Buffalo Springfield, Pogo set the club on fire with a tight, ebullient set that was as good as any performance the Buffalo Springfield had given. (The group renamed itself Poco after Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly threatened to sue.) Jim Messina’s love of Bakersfield country was even more pronounced than Richie Furay’s Midwest immersion in country pop. With drummer George Grantham, Rusty Young on pedal steel and Nebraska-born bassist/harmony singer Randy Meisner on bass, Pogo/Poco was a group polished to perfection. And everyone was there at the Troubadour to witness them, from Rick Nelson to Linda Ronstadt.

‘There’d been a long period of time where country music had not impacted on pop music or rock and roll,’ says Ronstadt. ‘There was pure country stuff, where someone like George Jones might have had a crossover hit or something, but people weren’t mixing the two.’ For all that Poco presented a fresh and genial version of the Springfield’s California–country amalgam, Furay’s songs secreted bitter feelings towards his former bandmates. Quietly livid at the way he’d been squeezed out by the overbearing egos of Stephen Stills and Neil Young, Richie used Poco’s debut album Pickin’ Up the Pieces to attack them. It was ironic, therefore, that bassist Randy Meisner decided to leave Poco because he felt excluded by Furay and Jimmy Messina. With a seamlessness endemic to country rock, Meisner immediately transferred to Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band, named after the affluent Brentwood Canyon where Nelson lived. Taken with Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, Nelson made the Bakersfield connection explicit by hiring former Buckaroo Tom Brumley as his pedal steel player. When the Stone Canyon Band played six nights at the Troubadour at the start of April, it was another country rock landmark.

So much was happening at this time, and most of it centred on the Troubadour. The club’s former hootmaster Mike Nesmith – Texan-born and country-steeped – quit the Monkees and formed his own back-to-the-roots group, the First National Band. The Frank Zappa of country rock, Nesmith was less interested in making country hip than in using the genre to paint his own singular portrait of America. The First National Band’s trilogy of albums – Magnetic South