Читать книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns - Страница 8

For decades Los Angeles was synonymous with Hollywood – the silver screen and its attendant deìties. LA meant palm trees and the Pacific Ocean, despotic directors and casting couches, a factory of illusion. LA was ‘The Coast’, cut off by hundreds of miles of desert and mountain ranges. In those years Los Angeles wasn’t acknowledged as a music town, despite producing some of the best jazz and rhythm and blues of the ’40s and ’50s. In 1960 the music business was still centred in New York, whose denizens regarded LA as kooky and provincial at best.

Between the years 1960 and 1965 a remarkable shift occurred. The sound and image of Southern California began to take over, replacing Manhattan as the hub of American pop music. Producer Phil Spector took the hit-factory ethos of New York’s Brill Building songwriting stable to LA and blew up the teen-pop sound to epic proportions. Entranced by Spector, local suburban misfit Brian Wilson wrote honeyed hymns to beach and car culture that reinvented the golden state as a teenage paradise. Other LA producers followed suit. In 1965 singles recorded in Los Angeles occupied the No. 1 spot for an impressive 20 weeks, compared to just one for New York.

‘California was so far removed from the mainstream of the recording industry,’ says Joe Smith, a Boston disc jockey who moved to LA in 1960 to work for a local record distributor. ‘Then all of a sudden the Beach Boys and Dick Dale and Jan & Dean were making music that nobody else was making, and that was the hallmark of the West Coast.’

Simultaneously a folk music movement swept across America and reached Los Angeles. Hootenannies – small gatherings of folk singers – had been staged in Los Angeles since the end of World War II, but the folk scene in LA was scattered, with few performing venues to focus it. In 1957 local promoter Herb Cohen responded to this lack by opening the Unicorn coffee house on Sunset Boulevard.

On and around Sunset, west of old Hollywood before one reached the manicured pomp of Beverly Hills, clubs and coffee houses began to proliferate. Although LA had always been geared to the automobile, the Strip now became a living neighbourhood – and a mecca for dissident youth. Epicentre for LA’s dawning folk scene was Doug Weston’s Troubadour club, south of the Strip at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard. Weston had opened his original Troubadour on nearby La Cienega Boulevard, but jumped across to Santa Monica east of Doheny Drive in 1961. The more commercial-minded members of the folkie crowd went with him. Typical of the tribe was a cocky kid from Santa Barbara called David Crosby. A lecherous teddy bear with a playful brain, David warbled plangent protest songs in emulation of Woody Guthrie.

Herbie Cohen, with the help of his lawyer brother Mutt, ruled the acoustic demimonde in Hollywood. His avuncular exterior concealed a streak of pure ruthlessness. ‘Herbie was a lot scarier than people would think,’ says folk singer Jerry Yester. ‘They’d think he was a kinda pudgy Jewish guy, but he was absolutely terrifying in conflict.’ In his way, Doug Weston was no less ruthless than Cohen. At six foot six he towered over everybody. ‘Tallest queer I ever knew,’ says actor Ted Markland. Weston’s sexual preferences were an industry secret. What wasn’t secret was his canny practice of tying artists to contracts that obliged them to return to the cramped Troubadour long after they were big enough to sell out amphitheatres.

For all the lip service it paid to folk protest, the Troubadour always had one beady eye on success. The clubhouse for the more commercial folk music epitomised by the Kingston Trio, it rapidly became a hootenanny hotbed of vaunting ambition. Pointedly different was Ed Pearl’s club the Ash Grove, which had opened at 8162 Melrose Avenue in July 1958. LA’s self-appointed bastion of tradition, the Ash Grove held fast to notions of not selling out. It was where you went to hear Doc Watson and Sleepy John Estes – blues and bluegrass veterans rescued from oblivion by earnest revivalists. ‘The Ash Grove was where you heard the roots, traditional stuff,’ says Jackson Browne, then an Orange County teenager. ‘Lots of people went to both clubs, but you didn’t stand much of a chance of getting hired at the Ash Grove.’

Another Ash Grove regular was the gorgeous Linda Ronstadt. She had deep soulful eyes and a big gutsy voice and she’d grown up in Arizona dreaming of freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. During the Easter break of 1964 Linda followed Tucson beatnik Bob Kimmel out to ‘The Coast’, moving into a small Victorian house on the beach at Santa Monica. ‘The whole scene was still very sweet and innocent at this point,’ Ronstadt recalls. ‘It was all about sitting around in little embroidered dresses and listening to Elizabethan folk ballads, and that’s how I thought it was always going to be.’ Among Ronstadt’s contemporaries were obsessive young folk-blues apprentices: kids like Ryland Cooder, John Fahey, Al Wilson. Some of them got so good that they were even allowed to play at the club. Cooder, 16 years old in 1963, backed folk-pop singers Pamela Polland and Jackie DeShannon. The nascent Canned Heat – a blues band formed by Wilson after Fahey had introduced him to man-mountain singer Bob Hite – played at the club.

‘The scene was just tiny,’ Ry Cooder reflects. ‘It was by and for people who were players, not for the general public. Ed Pearl was some sort of socialist, whereas Doug Weston was just an opportunist clubowner. We’d go down in the evening, mostly on the weekends. At that point Ed must have had a supply line, because he had Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and he had Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt and then Skip James. Sleepy John Estes was the one I was waiting to see. He seemed the most remote and peculiar – and I’d assumed dead.’

Ash Grove regulars looked down their noses at the Troubadour coterie. But it was at the Troubadour that the times were truly achanging. ‘The Ash Grove was supposed to be the more authentic place, but it was at the Troub that you really heard authentic regional music,’ says Ronstadt. For Henry ‘Tad’ Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, ‘it all came out of the scene at the Troubadour’. Yet the MFQ had trouble breaking out of the region to the rest of America. None of the local record companies was truly alert to what was going on under their noses. ‘The business for the kind of music we were playing then was all on the East Coast,’ says Chris Darrow, a folk-bluegrass multi-instrumentalist whose Dry City Scat Band was a fixture of the scene. ‘We all wanted to be on New York labels like Vanguard or Elektra, and the only thing that came out of here was the commercial stuff like the Kingston Trio.’

Yet something was starting to change. When the Modern Folk Quartet travelled to New York in 1964, they ran into young acoustic dreamers who longed to learn about the LA scene. A blond Southern boy named Stephen Stills came to the Village Gate to soak up the rich four-part harmonies the Quartet had honed. Accompanying him was an amiable kid from Ohio called Richie Furay. When Henry Diltz told Stephen and Richie what was happening in California, they were all ears. Ambitious beyond his years, Stills was disillusioned with the Village folk scene. Income for him and Richie was whatever found its way into the baskets that passed round after their sets at coffee houses such as the Four Winds on West 3rd Street. Manhattan felt cold and unfriendly. You might be broke in LA, Stills thought, but at least you’d have a suntan. John Phillips, a member of a group called the New Journeymen, had the same hankerings as he shivered through another New York winter with his lissom Californian wife Michelle. A song entitled ‘California Dreamin’’ started to take shape in his mind.

It was no coincidence, perhaps, that record companies in New York were waking up to what snobs called the ‘Left Coast’. Paul Rothchild, a hip A&R man with Jac Holzman’s classy and eclectic Elektra label, flew out to LA to scout the 1964 Folk Festival at UCLA. Smitten with what he found, Rothchild began to commute regularly between the East and West Coasts. ‘LA was less the promised land than the untilled field,’ says Holzman, himself entranced by Southern California. ‘We’d picked over the East Coast pretty well.’

Columbia Records, a far bigger entity than Elektra, was also casting a wider net from its Manhattan headquarters. If its meat-and-potatoes income came from such pop and MOR acts as Patti Page and Andy Williams, the label was also home to Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. On New Year’s Day 1964, Columbia publicist Billy James flew to Los Angeles to begin work as the company’s Manager of Information Services on the West Coast. Already in his late twenties, Billy was pure beat-generation, his sensibility shaped by Kerouac and Ginsberg. Thrilled at the way pop music was becoming a vibrant force in American culture, he plunged into the scene at the Troubadour and the Ash Grove. ‘Billy was a wonderful guy,’ says record producer Barry Friedman. ‘He was a charming, well-read, interesting fellow. In some ways I think he played the corporate game very well.’

James also felt the seismic impact of the Beatles’ first visit to America. The Liverpool group had done something no Americans were able to do: legitimise pop stardom for hipsters who despised identikit idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon. All of a sudden young folkies like David Crosby saw that you could write your own songs, draw on rock and roll, rhythm and blues and country music and still be stampeded by young girls. ‘The Beatles validated rock and roll,’ says Lou Adler, then an LA producer and label-owner. ‘People could listen to them knowing that these guys were really writing their songs.’

‘What started happening was that these young talented kids would band together,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘It was like double or triple the excitement.’ At the Troubadour and the Unicorn, David Crosby hung around the MFQ, envious of their gang-like camaraderie. Soon he was fraternising with other folkies who’d gravitated to California in search of something they couldn’t find elsewhere. Jim McGuinn, a slim and cerebral graduate of Chad Mitchell’s Trio – and of a stint in the employ of Bobby Darin – was slipping Beatles songs into his hoot sets at the Troubadour. Gene Clark, a handsome, haunted-looking balladeer from Missouri, finished up his apprenticeship in the LA-based New Christy Minstrels. Shy and slightly bewildered, Clark approached McGuinn after one of his Beatle-friendly sets and told him he dug what he was trying to do. ‘You wanna start a duo?’ Clark asked.

McGuinn had crossed Crosby’s path before and was wary of him. Clark, however, figured Crosby’s velvety tenor was just the additional harmonic element they needed. One night at the Troubadour, Crosby took Tad Diltz over to meet McGuinn and Clark. With a smug grin he announced they were going to form a group. ‘Crosby and McGuinn and Clark were in the lobby of the Troub every night in 1964,’ says Jerry Yester. ‘They’d sit there with a 12-string guitar, just writing songs.’ Taken up by manager Jim Dickson, a worldly and well-connected veteran of the folk and jazz scene in Hollywood, Crosby, Clark and McGuinn rounded out the lineup with drummer Michael Clarke and bluegrass-bred bassist Chris Hillman. From the outset the band was conceived as an electric rock and roll group. ‘At some point the groups started plugging in their instruments,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘Doug Weston saw the MFQ rehearsing at the Troub with amps and was horrified.’

‘It was kinda like a tadpole growing legs,’ says Jerry Yester, briefly a member of the Lovin’ Spoonful. ‘We just got closer and closer to being a rock band. Everybody else was doing the same thing – raiding the pawnshops for electric guitars. Inside of a year, the whole face of West LA changed.’ Secretly Chris Hillman was appalled by the electrification of folk. ‘Chris told me he’d joined this rock and roll band,’ says David Jackson. ‘He said it with this real sheepish look on his face, like he was betraying the cause.’

After one insipid single on Elektra as ‘The Beefeaters’, the group became the Byrds, complete with quaint Olde English spelling. Signed to Columbia, the band was adopted by Billy James. ‘In my opinion Billy was more responsible than anyone for the Byrds’ success,’ says Barry Friedman. ‘It was all down to his corporate manoeuvring at Columbia. The in-house stuff he did is what made that band happen.’ On 20 January 1965 the band cut Bob Dylan’s druggy ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ with dashing producer Terry Melcher and a bunch of sessionmen. Released in April, after the group had established themselves at gone-to-seed Sunset Strip club Ciro’s, the single went to No. 1 in June and instantly enshrined the new electric folk sound. ‘You mainly just went to parties and to hear people play,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘But then the Byrds happened, and you heard them on the radio and they had a huge pop hit.’

‘We all came over and went, “Ahhh! They got record contracts!”’ said Linda Ronstadt. ‘I mean, as far as we were concerned they had made it, just because they had a record contract. David Crosby had a new suede jacket; that was affluence beyond description.’ Pop life in LA would never be the same again.