Rock 'n Roll Ironic
Buffalo Springfield in 1966 photo by KRLA Beat page 21/Beat Publications, Inc.
We viewed a good documentary last week–watched it over two nights because one of us had to go to bed at a reasonable hour ‘cause it was a school night–not to mention names–and the other was going back in his history.
Laurel Canyon. It is possible to tell a whole chunk of California rock n’ roll by diagramming the artists and bands that passed that way, and if it’s all fading away for some of you, sign it up: Laurel Canyon trailer
Laurel Canyon wasn’t just another west coast hippie haven. Sitting just above Los Angeles, and its recording industry, not to mention that other industry named for Hollywood, it was a serious counter-culture movement in three chords. Those who were working on musical careers in rock, folk, et al., as opposed to those who’d already made it, looked to rent space up in the hills instead of Venice Beach and Malibu, equally cool with nice ocean views if a bit higher priced.
Bob Seger’s Hollywood Nights comes to mind. I heard tell Seger knew another midwestern boy ‘all on his own’ by the name of Glenn Frey. May have run across the name.
The documentary says Frank Zappa and the Mamas and Papas were early pioneers in Laurel Canyon. Hard to write Frank Zappa and Mama Cass into the same sentence, despite his naming an offspring Dweezil, let alone living in the same neighborhood with that gorgeously endowed person, but evidently they knew each other.
The Turtles and Monkeys (though it pains to say it) passed through. Several Turtles (another dumb band name, but they did OK pop tunes) ended up with Zappa’s band. One of the Monkeys was friends with a weird dude named Charles Manson who smiled at inappropriate times. Sharon Tate’s place wasn’t too far from there. After Altamont, the movement seemed cursed.
If I’d ever gotten caught up in Laurel Canyon in the 60s, they’d have written a brief obituary–poignant story that it might have been. My mother wouldn’t have approved of my going out to CA, though she let me hang out with Byron who was growing his blond hair out long. I had a guardian mother who didn’t lecture so much as look at me sadly, so I didn’t step over the edge. A lot of people don’t have one of those angels.
Of course, I was hoping for sex and rock and roll, and liked some weed, but I wouldn’t race a sports car around a bad turn like James Dean. The boy used his first full name? Never heard too much about him until the Eagles recorded that record. Too fast to live; too young to die, bye bye.
At the heart of my very long-distance claim on Laurel Canyon was/were the Buffalo Springfield–named for either a steamroller or a moving company, not clear which. Byron, Mack and I listened to them in high school. Don’t know why the music grabbed me like it did. Compared to the bubble gum on AM radio, they had music with real lyrics. Neil Young, the Canadian and Steven Stills, a Southern boy with mean guitar licks, plus Richie Furay. Then they disappeared, three albums and out.
Stills knew David Crosby from the Byrds, and Crosby introduced him to Graham Nash. Graham was living with Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon. Furey hooked up with Jim Messina and Randy Meisner to form Poco, later joined by a bass player who could sing–Timothy B. Schmidt – when Meisner joined the Eagles, followed by Schmidt leaving to join the Eagles when Meisner left the band. Jim Messina found his place in the music world helping Kenny Loggins get started. Getting all this?
Later, Furey joined JD Souther and Chris Hillman (ex-Byrds) in the Souther Hillman Furay Band. Kind Woman is one of Furey’s best known Buffalo Springfield songs, rerecorded by Poco.
“The band was formed in 1973 at the suggestion of David Geffen, then head of Asylum Records. Hillman brought three other former members of Manassas to the group: keyboardist/flutist Paul Harris and percussionist Joe Lala, both of whom had also worked with Barnstorm; and pedal steel guitarist Al Perkins, who had also played with the Flying Burrito Brothers. The septet was rounded out by Jim Gordon, a noted session drummer and former member of Derek and the Dominos and Traffic.”
from Wikipedia article Souther Hillman Furay Band
“A documentary, Through It All: The Life and Influence of Richie Furay is currently in post-production. It is narrated by Cameron Crowe.” from Wikipedia Furay article.
The Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Lowell George, Jim Morrison (not James). LA was into commercial success, but a lot of others came to Laurel Canyon for the music.
Later, Glenn Frey listened to Jackson Browne upstairs learning to write on a piano, borrowed a few songs from Souther. Along with Don Henley, Frey backed up Linda Ronstadt for a tour. Henley and Frey picked up Randy Meisner and Timothy B Schmidt from Poco and went on to do a few tours and recordings.
Linda was the kid with the voice. She had an ear for good songs and an even better ear for musicians who could sing harmony. Heart Like A Wheel On the same album, Linda recorded Jackson Browne’s Rock Me on the Water which has always struck me as his take on a spiritual with Black lady singers.
In addition to putting a stamp on California rock and role, the Byrds produced a few musicians. McGuinn was the star, but with bandmates the likes of David Crosby, Chris Hillman… and later Gram Parsons and Clarence White. Their recording of Mr. Tambourine Man hit the country and they took off. Sweetheart of The Rodeo was a seminal recording, melding rock to country music, but at the core of the Byrds were the harmonies, and when some of the members went off to form other bands they took the harmonies with them.
Gram Parsons’s love was country, and it was his influence that produced Sweetheart of The Rodeo; he later introduced Emmylou Harris to the world. I have a standing offer to marry Emmylou. Just saying.
When Bonnie Raitt came into the documentary–holy shit, she was there too? Anyone else from that scene want to speak up about Laurel Canyon?
My ex-girlfriend, Joni, was there and recorded Ladies of the Canyon written about the place. You can drive up from LA into the canyon–by now it probably has its own Fodor’s entry. Joni won’t talk to me these days. She probably won’t talk to Jackson Browne either, after that dust-up they had.
Here’s a recording of Bonnie, Freebo, Lowell George and John Hammond: Can’t Find My Way Home . Steve Winwood wrote the song. It’s interesting to hear Bonnie killing time before the song starts.
The Hollies (some English lads chasing after the Beatles) had a singer named Graham Nash who drifted west and wrote this sappy song Our House about living with Joni in Laurel Canyon. Love may make you feel all warm inside, but it doesn’t always translate into poetry. So why didn’t Graham and Joni ever record together?
Lowell George–I miss him every time I listen to Fat Man in the Bathtub. You can’t just make up that kind of irony; you need to be born with it. Which was what I thought about the first time I saw Bonnie Raitt in concert and she ‘presented’ her good friend, Lowell George. I took photos, but I don’t have them anymore. Out of focus photos need tossing, right? Linda singing ‘Willin’–another take on a Lowell George’s anthem–what a beautiful voice.
Then there’s Dixie Chicken, live Little Feat with Emmylou and Bonnie as backup singers.
Mamas with they Papas. Yes, well, they did some good hooks and nice harmonies. By the time their first song came out on FM radio, pretty much the entire country under twenty already understood California was dreaming.
I’ve listened to Jackson Browne since forever. But the first song of his that caught my attention was recorded by Tom Rush, folk singer with a world weary tone. When I heard a sixteen-year-old Jackson Browne had writtenThese Days, it didn’t sound right–what the hell was a skinny teen writing stuff like an old man? Browne got better. Jackson Browne’s best album in my opinion came late; I'm Alive followed a breakup with his girlfriend, Daryl Hannah. It was a messy separation, judging from the songs: they’re fatalistic, melodic and urgent. Eventually in a life you get to what’s important.
All this was going on in Laurel Canyon? Where the hell was I?
We paid a sinful amount of money to sit in the infield at National’s Park to see the Eagles coming back to town one wing down. Glenn Frey had died, but they pulled together a lineup including his son, Deacon Frey and Vince Gill (who writes good country) to fill his shoes. It’s getting so neither D nor I can count on seeing them but for so many more times. We listened to Don Henley at Constitution Hall back during the sniper incidents in Washington, when his comment was “Boy, are you guys brave coming out tonight.” Henley’s the man I hope sings at my funeral.
I need heroes, right now.
So I’ll finish this with some blues: Warren Haynes with Joe Bonamassa tearing it up on dueling guitars. Warren sings he just wants to break up someone’s home, and that’s what the blues are all about. If you’re not crawling out the window like Greg Allman, y’all it just ain’t natural.
Tom Wolfe, 1988 photo by MoSchle
Tom Wolfe Was My Hero
Michael Lewis wrote a magazine article about taking his thirteen-year-old daughter, Dixie with him to interview Tom Wolfe. Lewis uses this as his story’s fulcrum. The hook is his daughter’s comment about Wolfe’s white suit:
“We find the writer in his kitchen, with his wife, Sheila, whom he met when she worked as the art director at Harper’s. The streets near his house are teeming with people in shorts and T-shirts, but he still wears his white suit and has it dressed out with a white fedora. Dixie meets him and sweetly hides her alarm (“When I saw him I was like, Whoa! That’s a very outgoing fashion choice,” she says later), then takes off for the beach with his dog. The next couple of hours Tom Wolfe supplies the answers to questions I’ve had since I was a child, along with some new ones.”
from How Tom Wolfe became… Tom Wolfe by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair, November 2015
You can catch whiffs of Wolfe in a lot of Michael Lewis’s writing–quick quips and sharp observations–like he studied the New Journalists. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a witty, dead-accurate story about the collapsing housing bubble in 2007. What struck me as genuinely original was it written from the perspective of the only people who saw it coming, shorted the market and made a killing without lying about the packaging of poisoned housing tranches.
You couldn’t miss Wolfe’s books in the 70s, with names like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool Aide Acid Test. With book covers to match.
I read the latter of those first. Then charged out and bought Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. It didn’t seem likely that someone could drive a day-glo bus stoned on acid near-daily and survive with a brain capable of writing One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. But both of Kesey’s books from that time still hold up well. Kesey, as written by Wolfe, in his bus-driving days was a man bent on messianic goals: sex and drugs and rock and roll. Kesey published his third and last novel in 1992, some thirty years after the second.
“Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart.. Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade. According to Kesey, ‘Without Faye, I would have been swept overboard by notoriety and weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulbous breasts.’ Married until his death at the age of 66, they had three children: Jed, Zane, and Shannon. Additionally, with the approval of Faye Kesey, Ken fathered a daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and her stepfather, Jerry Garcia.”
from Wikipedia article on Ken Kesey.
That was California in the 60s and 70s. Same time zone as Laurel Canyon. Before AIDS, when all you could catch was a case of the clap–the good old days. Maybe it’s just true west coast writers are different.
Though the book by Wolfe that has stayed with me is The Right Stuff. In Michael Lewis’s article, he focused on Wolfe’s own description of what girds the book:
“ ‘It’s not really a book about the space program.’ [quoted from a letter by Tom Wolfe.]
It turns out that it’s not even, really, about flying. It’s about the importance of status to men, and what happens when the rules of any status game change.”from How Tom Wolfe became… Tom Wolfe by Michael Lewis
That wasn’t my biggest takeaway from the book. Yes, the astronauts cum test pilots were always measuring themselves against the competition, but my sense that was just to relieve the tension from facing death in an unproven machine with a single 286 processor. The reason they had jobs.
What was revealing went to the book’s title, that certain determination and drive that causes a handful of people to put themselves out beyond limits–in pursuit of–adrenalin.
In high school, a few of us passed an ROTC scholarship test, myself included (I was a respectable test-taker) and Michael, Connie’s brother, a girl who blew me off early on. Michael was a daredevil par excellence. Climb a cliff, you bet, he’d be in for that. Their father was an Air Force pilot. Two of the Air Force brats I hung out with in high school. Connie said she wasn’t ready to commit, but all I wanted was a date.
Elena’s Letters came from that time.
When it came to the in-person scholarship interviews, I didn’t impress the officers, but Michael sure did; he graduated from the Air Force Academy. And become an Air Force pilot like his old man. One night, flying over the Appalachian Mountains, his single-engine prop plane cut out. All he could see were the lights of a car below on a twisting mountain road, so he followed it down, crash landing, both wings clipped off by trees, coming within feet of another that should have killed him. Michael had the ‘right stuff’, that combination of thrill-seeking, skill and good fortune Tom Wolfe describes in the book. As Wolfe explained, if you died, it proved you didn’t have the right stuff.
You want that person who doesn’t fall apart trying to land his jet at midnight on the back of a rolling aircraft carrier in heaving seas. And dumb me, I’d been pursuing a Navy ROTC scholarship so I could fly F-4 Phantoms. Those were some bad ass fighter jets in the 60s. I didn’t have what Michael did.
My later running buddy, Doug, said the biggest kicks in his life came from flying in on a ‘copter in Vietnam into clearings smaller than the ‘copter’s rotors, manning his machinegun facing the open door. To see him, you’d never know it, but hang around the guy long enough, yeah, that fit. It was an itch, you could say, he always tried to scratch.
Doug’s on the left. Win is in the middle, and Steve’s on the right. Two out of three were crazy about running.
Wolfe wrote with such verisimilitude his nonfiction was hard to dispute. Though it irritated any number of critics who refused to buy in on his being able to quote people in situations he’d never lived himself. They couldn’t grasp how good an interviewer a man in a white suit hailing from Richmond, VA could be. He drew stories from people like a magician’s rabbit from a hat, he had an instinct for who might make the best stories and a wicked pen to boot.
In Michael Lewis’s article he says Wolfe was friends with Hunter S. Thompson, the bad boy of journalism. They would have made a strange pair, the one dressed in white and the other in the grip of intoxicants of one kind or another. While Wolfe was interviewing Leonard Bernstein, Thompson was hanging with the Hells Angels for his book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
Me, I sure wish I’d spent time in Laurel Canyon, just sittin’ in. Like Jim Messina.