Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976

Hotel California

Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons 1967–1976

Barney Hoskyns

Praise

From the reviews of Hotel California:

‘A terrific account of the interface between idealism and squalor, art and commerce’

Guardian Guide

‘Takes you right into the backyards of Laurel Canyon…A masterful history’

Observer Music Monthly

‘A comprehensive account of the Golden State’s denim-clad, narcissistic heyday’

Mojo

‘Barney Hoskyns brings a genuine love as well as an outsider’s keen eye to the rise and fall of the California scene in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s a riveting story, sensitively told’

ANTHONY DECURTIS, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone

‘If you are looking for the ingredients required of a good rock ’n’ roll story, Hotel California has got the lot…a murky tale in which a sprawling cast of A-list celebrities nurture their collective inner child with a steady diet of promiscuous sex, hard drugs and soft tunes spiced with appropriately confessional lyrics…an ambitious and authoritative account

which makes overdue sense of a spectacularly decadent period of pop history’

DAVID SINCLAIR, Guardian

‘The scene is small, intimate and hopeful, and Hoskyns writes about it with a similar delicacy and verve’

The Times

‘Fantastic’

PHIL JUPITUS

‘Brilliant’

LAUREN LAVERNE

For Natalie

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Introduction

1 Expecting to Fly: Byrdsong and the California Dream

I: Impossible Dreamers

II: Claims to Fame

III: So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star

2 Back to the Garden: Getting It Together in the Country

I: Little Village

II: Back Porch Majority

III: Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon

IV: Human Highway

3 Out of the City: New Kids in Town

I: A New Home in the Sun

II: Outside of a Small Circle of Friends

III: Both Sides, Then

IV: The Elf on Roller Skates

4 Horses, Kids, Forgotten Women: Are You Ready for Country Rock?

I: Hand Sown…Home Grown

II: Wheatstraw Sweet

III: Rural Free Delivery

IV: Big Tit Sue and Bigger Tit Sue

5 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Escape from Sin City

I: Home Is What Makes You Happy

II: Ain’t No One for to Give You No Name

III: Free My Gypsy Soul

IV: The Straight Guy

V: Sympathy for the Devil

6 Let It Be Written, Let It Be Sung: A Case of Me

I: Music from Big Ego

II: Old Ladies of the Canyon

III: Me, Myself and I

IV: All We Are Saying Is Give Smack a Chance

V: You Probably Think This Song Is About You

7 Sittin’ In: With a Little Help from Our Friends

I: Degrees of Separation

II: Play It as It Lays

III: ‘WHO IS DAVID GEFFEN AND WHY IS HE SAYING THOSE TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME?’

IV: Don’t Even Try to Understand

V: Exile on Sunset Boulevard

8 Paradise and Lunch: The Machinery vs. the Popular Song

I: Fool’s Gold

II: Song Power

III: On the Rox

IV: Postcards from Hollywood

9 I Hate Them Worse than Lepers: After the Thrill Is Gone

I: Show Biz Kids

II: Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow

III: The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get

IV: Paradise in Trouble

10 Go Your Own Way: Los Angeles in the Long Run

I: You’ll Never Eat Pussy in This Town Again

II: Bombs Away, Dream Babies

III: End of the Innocents

Coda Like a Setting Sun

Appendix Mellow Gold: The Tape from California

Notes

Further Reading

References

Index

P.S.

Kicking Against the Pricks

Life at a glance

TOP TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS

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Introduction

On a baking day in August 1971, five naked young men sit in a sauna in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. Four are musicians, three on the cusp of unimaginable success. Two are out-of-towners, come to sunny Southern California to find fame, glory, girls. All are lean, rangy, good-looking –‘like Jesus Christ after a month in Palm Springs’, in the words of their friend Eve Babitz.

The fifth naked man in the sauna is the one who owns it: a short, skinny agent who’s moved to LA from New York and established himself as a talent-broker of fearsome repute. Among his clients are Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. As the sweat pours off their suntanned limbs, David Geffen tells the four musicians – Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Ned Doheny – about his plans for his record label. ‘I want to keep Asylum very small,’ he avers. ‘I’ll never have more artists than I can fit in this sauna.’

Twenty years later, Geffen will sell his second label – one he modestly names after himself – for a cool $550 million. At the same time the first Greatest Hits album by the Eagles – the group formed by Glenn Frey and Don Henley – will officially be pronounced the biggest-selling album of all time. ‘David took the crème de la crème from that scene,’ says Eve Babitz, ‘and signed them on the basis of their cuteness.’ Not bad work for an afternoon’s Nordic ogling.

Hotel California traces the incredible journey from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era in the mid-’60s to the peak of the Eagles’ success in the late ’70s. It is the story of an unparalleled time and place, the first in-depth account of the scene –‘the mythically tangled genealogy’, in the words of writer John Rockwell – that swirled around the denim navel-gazers and cheesecloth millionaires of the Los Angeles canyons.

At a time when the influences of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and the Eagles have never been more pervasive, the moment has come to reappraise this remarkable group of artists. To re-evaluate, too, the powerful movers and shakers who shaped their careers: men like Geffen, the agent-turned-mogul who established an unparalleled power base of LA talent; his partner Elliot Roberts, manager of Young and Mitchell; and Irving Azoff, who made multimillionaires of the Eagles.

This is an epic tale of songs and sunshine, drugs and denim, genius and greed. The setting is the longhair Olympus of Laurel and adjacent canyons. It’s about the flighty genius of Joni Mitchell, the Janus-like volte-faces of Neil Young, the drugged disintegration of David Crosby, Gram Parsons, Judee Sill and others. It’s about the myriad relationships, professional and personal, between these artists and the songs they wrote; about the love affairs between Joni and Graham Nash, Joni and James Taylor, Joni and Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills and Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt and J.D. Souther. More than anything it’s a narrative of Rise and Fall – from ‘Take It Easy’ to ‘Take It to the Limit’, from the hootenanny innocence of boys and girls with acoustic guitars to the coked-out stadium-rock superstardom of the mid-’70s.

Inevitably the recollections of the story’s characters are coloured by their sometimes selective memories, not to mention their own agendas. As Tom Waits, who began his career on Geffen’s Asylum label, puts it: ‘The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened aren’t talking and the people who don’t…well, you can’t shut ’em up.’

Whatever the ultimate truth, I have over the past decade elicited invaluable reminiscences from the following artists, managers, executives, producers, session musicians, writers, photographers and scenesters: Lou Adler, David Anderle, Peter Asher, Eve Babitz, Walter Becker, Joel Bernstein, Rodney Bingenheimer, Dan Bourgoise, Joe Boyd, Jackson Browne, Denny Bruce, Allison Caine, Gretchen Carpenter, Cher, Ry Cooder, Stan Cornyn, Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, John Delgatto, Pamela Des Barres, Henry Diltz, Dave DiMartino, Tony Dimitriades, Craig Doerge, Ned Doheny, Denny Doherty, Mickey Dolenz, Donald Fagen, Danny Fields, Bill Flanagan, Ben Fong-Torres, Kim Fowley, David Gates, David Geffen, Fred Goodman, Carl Gottlieb, Barry Hansen, Richie Hayward, Jan Henderson, Judy Henske, Chris Hillman, Suzi Jane Hokom, Jac Holzman, Bones Howe, Danny Hutton, Jonh Ingham, David Jackson, Billy James, Judy James, Rickie Lee Jones, Phil Kaufman, Nick Kent, Martin Kibbee, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Russ Kunkel, Bruce Langhorne, Bernie Leadon, Arthur Lee, Steve Lester, Mark Leviton, Nils Lofgren, Roger McGuinn, Robert Marchese, Ted Markland, Frank Mazzola, Bob Merlis, Joni Mitchell, Essra Mohawk, Frazier Mohawk, Graham Nash, Randy Newman, Tom Nolan, Michael Ochs, Anita Pallenberg, Van Dyke Parks, Billy Payne, Robert Plant, Mel Posner, Neal Preston, Domenic Priore, Nancy Retchin, Keith Richards, Perry Richardson, Elliot Roberts, Jill Robinson, Linda Ronstadt, Ed Sanders, Bud Scoppa, the late Greg Shaw, Joe Smith, J.D. Souther, Ron Stone, Bill Straw, Matthew Sweet, the late Derek Taylor, Ted Templeman, Russ Titelman, the late Nik Venet, Joe Vitale, Mark Volman, Waddy Wachtel, Kurt Wagner, Tom Waits, June Walters, Lenny Waronker, Jimmy Webb, Jerry Wexler, Ian Whitcomb, Nurit Wilde, Tom Wilkes, Jerry Yester and John York. My thanks to all for their time and their willingness to revisit the (sometimes painful) past.

A major debt is owed to two people in particular: my editor Matthew Hamilton, and Hannah Griffiths, briefly my agent before she switched horses to become an editor herself. They conceived the book in the first place and were a dual source of inspiration and encouragement. My gratitude also to Nicholas Pearson at Fourth Estate, and to Nick Davies, who shepherded the project through key later stages. Also to Merlin Cox for an exemplary copy edit. Tom Miller of Wiley & Sons had much to do with the shaping of the book. My thanks to Euan Thorneycroft at Curtis Brown, who seamlessly succeeded Hannah Griffiths, and to Sarah Lazin and Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books in New York.

For assistance and facilitation, often beyond any possible call of duty, thanks to the following: the indefatigable Harvey Kubernik; Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde for their timelessly evocative images; Debbie Kruger for trawling through Henry’s considerable archives and unearthing unseen treasures; to Eve Kakassy for getting those and other images to me; Jim McCrary; Dede at Redfern’s Picture Agency; Johnny Black, esteemed keeper of the Rocksource Archive; Billy James, who corrected factual errors and made many helpful comments; Roger Burrows, who generously burned CDs for me; Eddi Fiegel, Barry Miles, Matthew Greenwald, John Einarson, Richard Bosworth, Paul Scanlon, Kevin Kennedy, Richard Cromelin, Steven Rosen, Marc Weingarten, Susan Compo, Carrie Steers, Jonh Ingham, Neil Scaplehorn, Richard Wootton, Rob Partridge, Val Brown, Oscar Thompson, Annene Kaye, Diedre Duewel, Tony Keys, Mark Pringle, Martin Colyer, William Higham, Paul Lester, Allan Jones, Ted Alvy, Dale Carter, Rod Tootell, Mick Houghton, Davitt Sigerson, Brendan Mullen, Andy Schwartz, Mick Brown, Nic de Grunwald, Erik James, Michelle Kort, Jon Savage, Johnny Marr, Ian MacArthur, John Tobler, Pete Frame, Julian Humphries, Catherine Heaney and Silvia Crompton. A special thank you to Simon McGuire, the heppest cat in all of Glendale.

1 Expecting to Fly: Byrdsong and the California Dream

I: Impossible Dreamers

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.’