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

II: Claims to Fame

Paying close attention to the Byrds’ ascent were local industry figures, many of them caught off guard. Lou Adler, the canny and highly focused LA entrepreneur who’d turned nightclub guitarist Johnny Rivers into a million-selling star, watched as ‘folk-rock’ caught fire in California.

‘The influx of the Greenwich Village folkies in 1964 and 1965 was very important,’ Adler reflects. ‘Music changed drastically. When Dylan plugged in his guitar he took a lot of people from the folk field to the rock and roll field. Folk-rock swept out the teen idols, and it gave pop a hip political edge.’ With his new Dunhill label, Adler homed in on folk-rock. Former surf-pop tunesmith P. F. Sloan was given a hat, a pair of Chelsea boots and a copy of Bringing It All Back Home and instructed to write some protest songs. He returned a few days later with ‘Eve of Destruction’, duly recorded by ex-New Christy Minstrel Barry McGuire. ‘Folk + Rock + Protest = Dollars,’ noted Billboard after the song topped the charts.

One afternoon, Barry McGuire brought a new folk group along to an Adler recording session at Hollywood’s Western Recorders studio. John Phillips, their leader, had tried his luck in LA some years before but his timing hadn’t been right. He’d even married Michelle Gilliam, a beautiful California blonde who sang with him alongside Denny Doherty and Cass Elliott, former members of Greenwich Village group the Mugwumps. Now here they were in LA, chancing everything on a move to the new promised land. The Mamas and the Papas’ moment eventually came. Breaking into the pealing harmonies of Phillips’s ‘Monday, Monday’, they followed up with ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, ‘Once Was a Time’ and ‘Go Where You Wanna Go’. Shrewdly, they left the best for last: the soaring anthem ‘California Dreamin’’. Adler was duly blown away. Released late in 1965, ‘Dreamin’’ summed up what the rest of the nation was already feeling about the Golden State. Except that this time it wasn’t the clichéd California of surfing and blondes and hot rods that was being hymned. It was the blossoming hippie milieu of the Sunset Strip and its bucolic annexe Laurel Canyon.

After ‘California Dreamin’, John and Michelle Phillips did what all self-respecting musicians were doing in Los Angeles: they moved from a decaying dump in the West Hollywood flatlands to a funky pad on Lookout Mountain Avenue, up in the canyon, high above it all. Cass Elliott, born Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, followed in their wake. A rotund Jewish earth mama, she began to hold court in the canyon in what was a kind of folk-pop salon. Among her close friends was David Crosby, with whom she’d bonded on a folk tour two years before.

Observing the success of both the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas were the savvy executives at Warner/Reprise Records in Burbank, north of Hollywood. It was a testament to their acumen that the conjoined labels were still in business at all. Warner Brothers Records, launched merely because the rancorous Jack Warner thought his movie studio should have a music division, had nearly gone under just three years earlier. Nor had Reprise, bought from Frank Sinatra in a deal that was laughably generous to the singer, launched promisingly. But Morris ‘Mo’ Ostin, who’d come into the Warners fold as Sinatra’s accountant, turned out to have instincts and ears. He was a bean-counter with soul. ‘The company had learned some good lessons coming out of the Dean Martin era,’ says Stan Cornyn, who became Head of Creative Services at the company. Warner/Reprise had missed the Byrds and the Mamas and Papas but were swift to sign the Kinks and Petula Clark to North America. ‘We got on the London express, because we weren’t getting fed artists here,’ says Joe Smith, who joined Warners in 1961. ‘We had to go dig out our own and sign them for North America.’

Mo and Joe were determined not to let the next Byrds pass them by. Helping them was a young A&R man named Lenny Waronker. ‘It’s amazing how little I paid attention to the Byrds,’ Lenny says today. ‘I’m embarrassed to even talk about it, but we were so focused in our own world.’ Waronker was the son of Si Waronker, founder of LA label Liberty Records. He’d got his grounding at Metric Music, Liberty’s publishing arm, overseeing a stable of songwriting talent that was the closest California came to New York’s Brill Building. Among Metric’s writers – Jackie DeShannon, David Gates, P. J. Proby, Glen Campbell – was Lenny’s boyhood friend Randy, nephew of movie composers Alfred and Lionel Newman. ‘We were a kind of poor man’s Carole King and Barry Mann and Neil Sedaka,’ Newman recalls of his Metric days. ‘I was trying to do the same things as Carole and I knew I wasn’t doing them as well.’

‘We used to crank out songs for singers like Dean Martin,’ says David Gates, who packed his wife and kids into a battered Cadillac in 1962 and drove from Oklahoma to California. ‘Seeing some nice songs go down the drain, you started to think, maybe I ought to do them myself.’

‘Dylan exploded the universe of folk songwriting,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘Suddenly there was a whole wealth of ideas out there, and you could discuss anything in a song. You also had Jackie DeShannon on pop TV shows talking about songs she’d written herself. Normally you wouldn’t even wonder where the songs had come from, so it was really something to learn that Jackie had written them.’

When an opening at Warner Brothers came in April 1966, Waronker jumped on it, exploiting the fact that Joe Smith had done business with his father. ‘There was a real sense that there was a change,’ he says of the mood at Warner/Reprise. ‘Mo convinced Frank to let go. He had an amazing sensibility – very sharp, very intuitive.’ Ostin and Smith became a formidable duo: Mo the reclusive mastermind, Joe the more gregarious public face of the company. Lenny, shy like Mo, fitted in perfectly behind the scenes.

There were others, too. Ostin’s greatest gift was delegating taste, cultivating an inner circle of trusted talent-spotters. More often than not these men were mavericks. Bernard Alfred ‘Jack’ Nitzsche, who’d come from Michigan on a bus in 1955 and had arranged the early ’60s hits of Phil Spector, was a difficult and belligerent man but a typical Ostin confidant. He even gave Reprise one of its earliest hits, the 1963 instrumental ‘The Lonely Surfer’. ‘Jack was helpful and supportive,’ says Waronker. ‘He really understood what we were trying to do at Warner/Reprise.’ Others had a different slant on the bespectacled oddball. ‘Jack was very interesting and very talented,’ says Judy Henske, whom Nitzsche produced for Reprise. ‘But he was really crazy if he ever took a drink. I mean, he completely changed. And you didn’t want to be anywhere near that person.’

Another man who had Mo’s ear was Derek Taylor, a suave Liverpudlian who’d moved to LA after working as the Beatles’ press officer back home in England. Dapper and witty, Taylor was a conduit to British talent, but he was also doing press for the Byrds and the Beach Boys. ‘I had two and a half per cent of the Byrds and no fee,’ Taylor remembered. ‘That became quite a lot of money. I didn’t really have to do a lot for them except express what I wanted to. Billy James had really done all the work, but he was such a generous soul he just said, “Over to you.”’

By the spring of 1966, Warner/Reprise was poised to strike – to become a true power on the West Coast. ‘New York itself was going through enormous financial problems and became very hostile to the music business,’ says Joe Smith. ‘So a lot of it shifted out here. California was now regarded by people as the place to go.’ Among the freewheeling folkies who pitched up in Los Angeles in the late summer of 1965 was Stephen Stills. A tenacious Texan with thinning blond hair, Stills had spent time in a military academy and brought the discipline of the place to bear on his musical career. He quickly found the Troubadour more receptive to his talent than Greenwich Village. Hooking up with folk scenester Dickie Davis, he began networking, befriending several key people. Among them was Van Dyke Parks, a diminutive genius who looked like a child and spoke in a camp Mississippi drawl.

Parks and Stills knocked about together, sharing a love of Latin and Caribbean music. Parks was fascinated by calypso; Stills had spent part of his adolescence in Costa Rica. But it was Barry Friedman, former carny and fire-eater, who started making waves for Stephen. A native Angeleno, Friedman had done publicity for the Troubadour. When the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl in August 1964, he was the publicist for the show. ‘Stephen ended up at my place,’ Friedman says. ‘I guess the floor was softer or something. He was pretty focused. He said he wanted to put a band together, and I thought that would be fun to do. So we just started finding people and phoning around.’

Van Dyke Parks himself passed on the opportunity, as did a young Warren Zevon, then eking out a living as one half of folk duo Lyme & Cybelle. Stills’s abrasive personality may have had something to do with their reluctance. ‘Stephen was not really a very nice guy,’ says Nurit Wilde, a photographer and Sunset Strip scenester of the time. ‘He was definitely talented, but he was not a nice guy then and he continued being a jerk as long as I knew him.’ Drawing blanks in LA, Stills summoned Richie Furay from New York, lying to him that he had a recording deal in place. Furay, a friendlier soul who conformed closer to the archetype of the optimistic folk singer, arrived in California in late 1965.

Parks remained pally with Stills but made his basic living from sessions and arrangements. His work with Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys’ Dumb Angel/Smile – the unfinished psychedelic masterpiece that should have been America’s Sgt. Pepper – had everybody in LA talking. Elbowed out of the Beach Boys picture in April 1967 by the play-it-safe Mike Love, Parks was devastated. Then a call from Lenny Waronker at Warners got his attention. Parks knew Lenny was a rich kid like Terry Melcher, son of actress Doris Day, but it was obvious he was as determined as Mo Ostin and Joe Smith to make Warner/Reprise a home of credible and innovative artists.

Not long after Waronker joined the company, Joe Smith took him up to San Francisco to evaluate the catalogue of Autumn Records, a label Warners was proposing to buy. Co-founded by larger-than-life DJ Tom Donahue, Autumn had a roster of promising groups that Smith fancied: the Beau Brummels, the Tikis, the Mojo Men and more. For Waronker this was an instant opportunity to experiment with ready-made pop acts. Along with Parks he brought in Randy Newman and Leon Russell, an Oklahoman writer and arranger who’d worked on hits by Gary Lewis and the Playboys. The records that they wrote and produced at Warners – particularly those by the newly formed Harper’s Bizarre – were interesting and significant. They pointed backwards to the Brill Building and early Beach Boys pop era, but were also in sync with the complex orchestral psychedelia of Smile. ‘We wanted hits,’ Waronker told writer Gene Sculatti, ‘but we wanted them on our own terms.’

Hit versions of Stills’s ‘Sit Down, I Think I Love You’ (by the Mojo Men) and Paul Simon’s ‘59th Bridge Street Song’ (by Harper’s Bizarre) helped to build a creative nucleus around Waronker. Following Mo Ostin’s lead in making A&R the primary focus at Warners, Lenny gradually introduced – and blended together – the company’s backroom talent: Newman, Parks, Russell, Templeman, Ron Elliott, and guitarists Ry Cooder and Russ Titelman. ‘We never made profit the thrust,’ says Joe Smith. ‘It sounds very self-serving, but that was the reputation we wanted. Van Dyke we were in awe of. This little drug-ridden crazy kid from the South was so talented.’

Yet Waronker could also sense that the days of pop groups like Harper’s Bizarre, in their matching suits and ties, were all but done. The new template for bands was the Rolling Stones, who looked and sounded more threatening than the Beatles ever did. Here was the ultimate gang of rebels, openly flaunting their sexuality and drug use. Meanwhile Mo Ostin, who’d already signed the Kinks for North America, was checking out another UK export, a flamboyant guitarist born and bred in the US. Jimi Hendrix wasn’t Waronker’s personal style, but he rightly identified him as the avatar of a new sensibility in pop – or ‘rock’, as it was starting to be known.

A native Angeleno, Waronker was himself more intrigued by a new strain in the LA sound: a countryish, back-to-the-roots feel heard in songs by the Byrds and other groups. ‘My goal was very simple,’ he says. ‘It was to find a rock band that sounded like the Everly Brothers.’

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

‘I’m sitting in Barney’s Beanery,’ says Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas, ‘and in walks Stephen Stills. He looks kinda down, so I ask him what he’s doing. He says, “Fuck all, man, I ain’t doin’ nothin’.” Two or three weeks later I walk into the Whisky and Bam! – there he is onstage with a band. I said to him, “What the fuck? Did you add water and get an instant band?!”’

Early in April 1966, Stills and Richie Furay were stuck in a Sunset Strip traffic jam in Barry Friedman’s Bentley. As they sat in the car, Stephen spotted a 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates on the other side of the street. ‘I’ll be damned if that ain’t Neil Young,’ Stills said. Friedman executed an illegal U-turn and pulled up behind the hearse. One of rock’s great serendipities had just occurred.

Young, a lanky Canadian with bad teeth, had just driven all the way from Detroit in the company of bassist Bruce Palmer. They’d caught the bug that was drawing hundreds of other pop wannabes to the West Coast. ‘I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing,’ Young said. ‘We were just going like lemmings.’ A week later Stills had the band he’d fantasised about for months. With drummer Dewey Martin recruited from bluegrass group the Dillards, the lineup was complete: three singer-guitarists (Stills, Young, Furay) and a better rhythm section than the Byrds. Van Dyke Parks spotted a steamroller with the name ‘Buffalo Springfield’ and everyone loved it. It was perfect, conjuring a sense of American history and landscape that interested all of them – Neil Young in particular.

Young was skinny and quiet and more than a little freaked out by the bright automotive sprawl of Los Angeles. His intense dark eyes, framed by long sideburns, mesmerised women. ‘Neil was a very sweet fellow,’ says Nurit Wilde, who’d known him in Toronto. ‘He was sick and he was vulnerable. Women wanted to feed him and take care of him.’ At least Young and Palmer didn’t have to sleep in the hearse any more. When Stephen and Richie took them over to Barry Friedman’s house on Fountain Avenue, a floor and mattresses were proffered. ‘The whole thing was…a tremendous relief,’ Young told his father Scott. ‘Barry gave us a dollar a day each for food. All we had to do was keep practising.’

‘People thought Neil was moody, but he didn’t seem moody to me,’ says Friedman. ‘He seemed like just another guy with good songs, though he did have a funny voice.’ To Young, the affable Richie Furay was ‘the easiest to like’ of the Springfield members, though he told World Countdown News that Richie’s ‘hair should be longer’. Furay had a small room in a Laurel Canyon pad belonging to Mark Volman of successful LA pop group the Turtles. ‘Our living room was the frequent meeting place for Stephen, Neil and Richie,’ Volman recalls. ‘Dickie Davis was always coming by. With the Springfield, a lot of it was created around the energy of Dickie.’

Between Davis and Friedman, the Springfield’s career took off with a flying start. Their first performance was at the Troubadour on 11 April, barely a week after their formation. Little more than a public rehearsal, the set was the prelude to a mini-tour in support of the Byrds, whose Chris Hillman was an early and ardent champion. To the other Byrds, the Springfield came as a galvanising shock. Within a space of weeks the group had developed a fearsome live sound that was rooted in the twin-engine guitar blitz of Stills and Young. ‘ The Springfield live was very obviously a guitar duel,’ says Henry Diltz, who took the group’s first publicity shots on Venice Beach. ‘They’d talk back and forth to each other with their guitars and it would escalate from there.’

Friedman wanted to sign the Springfield to Elektra, but Jac Holzman wasn’t the only record executive interested in the band. Nor was Friedman the only person keen to manage them. When the Springfield returned from their tour, Dickie Davis introduced them to a pair of Hollywood hustlers named Charlie Greene and Brian Stone. The duo had hit town five years before, ambitious publicists who set up a phoney office on a studio lot. With Greene as the frontman schmoozer, Stone hovered in the background and controlled the cash flow. Inspired by flamboyant svengalis like Phil Spector, Charlie and Brian rode around in limos and played pop tycoons.

For Van Dyke Parks, schemers like Greene and Stone changed LA’s innocent folk-rock vibe. ‘There was a severe competitive atmosphere in this scene,’ Parks recalled. ‘The Beatles had exploded and the youth market had defined itself.’ Greene and Stone set about wowing the Springfield, fuelling Stephen Stills’s fantasies of stardom. And they were ruthless in cutting Barry Friedman out of the picture. Taking him for a limo ride, the duo sat Friedman between them. Minutes into the journey, Greene quietly placed a pistol on Friedman’s thigh. By the end of the trip Barry had signed over his rights to Buffalo Springfield on a hot dog napkin. ‘People like that do what they do,’ Friedman says. ‘I don’t, though I’m still waiting for a cheque. I read in Neil’s book that he owes me money, but he must have lost my address.’

When Lenny Waronker saw the Springfield live they were wearing cowboy hats, with Neil Young positioned to one side in a fringed Comanche shirt. He went berserk: ‘I thought, “Oh my God, this is it!”’ Waronker got Jack Nitzsche interested early on: ‘I needed weight behind me, and Jack had that weight. I talked to him about co-producing the group.’ Nitzsche instantly bonded with Neil Young, intuitively recognising a fellow square peg in LA’s round hole. ‘Jack really loved Neil,’ says Judy Henske. ‘He told me Neil was the greatest artist that had ever been in Hollywood.’ Young, aware of Jack’s pedigree, reciprocated. Nitzsche’s approval wasn’t enough, however, to land the Buffalo Springfield in Burbank. Greene and Stone turned to Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun in New York. Upping Warners’ offer of $10,000 to $22,000, Ertegun was only too delighted to whisk the group from under Mo Ostin’s nose, assigning them to Atlantic’s affiliated Atco label.

By the time Greene and Stone were in the studio with the Springfield, having imposed themselves as producers of the band’s Atlantic debut, it was too late. The group’s career was obviously in the hands of charlatans. For the naive Neil Young especially, the sense of scales falling from the eyes was almost too much to take. ‘There were a lot of problems with the Springfield,’ he later said. ‘Groupies, drugs, shit. I’d never seen people like that before. I remember being haunted suddenly by this whole obsession with “How do I fit in here? Do I like this?”’ Compounding Neil’s unease was the growing competitiveness between him and Stills. The band wasn’t big enough for the both of them. Neil acknowledged and respected Stephen’s drive and versatility, but the guy’s ego – the presumption that Buffalo Springfield was his group – was beginning to grate. Although Buffalo Springfield’s first Atco single was Young’s fey and slightly pretentious ‘Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing’, Stills was soon coming down hard on Young’s material. To the consternation of the hippie chicks who nursed Neil’s emotional wounds, Stephen undermined Neil at every turn.

Robin Lane, briefly Neil’s girlfriend, recalled Stills storming into the small apartment his bandmate had rented. Irate because Neil had missed a rehearsal, Stephen picked up Lane’s guitar and only just restrained himself from smashing it over Neil’s head. ‘You’re ruining my career!’ Stills screamed at the cowering Canadian. Dickie Davis thought it no coincidence that Young had the first of several epileptic fits just a month after the Springfield formed. During the band’s residency at the Whisky in the groovy summer of 1966, the sight of Young thrashing around onstage in a grand mal seizure was not uncommon. The real truth was that Stills and Young were both driven and egomaniacal – Stills’s pig-headedness was merely more overt. Neil, a classic passive-aggressive, stifled his resentments and licked his wounds in private. ‘We know each other,’ Stills would later say of his relationship with Young. ‘There was always a kind of alienation to the people around us. They are old things that no amount of analysing and psychotherapy and all of that stuff can wash away.’