I was actually painting. Without being able to afford an empty rental property in the Hollywood Hills, Dianne and I were fixing up the Canyon house, packing up the Treasure Trail rental, and preparing to move in. It was a big step back up the ladder of self-respect to be on top of the hill again: swimming pools, movie stars. We were living there by the time Marc Bolan returned to L.A. in mid-February, and I was glad that he never had to see me in that rental, at the bottom. He crashed on our comfy couch a couple nights in a row. T. Rex played a great show at the Palladium and afterward, it was party time again with Micky Dolenz and Harry Nilsson. It was always a party with those guys.
Ona had landlord problems. Well, of course you can live with us. We’ve got a guest room. What could possibly go wrong? It was a lot easier getting the work done with six hands instead of four. We made hanging curtain rods a project. It was fun. We all got along great.
Mark and I needed a record deal and we needed it yesterday. We brought Jim Pons into Ike Turner’s little studio in Inglewood, where Frank’s engineer, Barry Keene, often worked on side projects, and cut five demo recordings. Everything had been arranged, flights and all. Harry Nilsson called on Monday morning to make sure that we had our flight information. We took a 747 into New York, spent the evening at Barbara DeWitt’s apartment with her husband, Tim, and her brother, the famous fashion photographer Bruce Weber, and crashed at the One Fifth. Bruce took some great pictures of us. I wonder where they are.
The next morning, we took our little tape to the ominous RCA building, where my father had proposed marriage to my mother twenty-six years before. RCA loved it. They bought us lunch. They talked big picture. They shook our hands. They flew us home. Barbara played the tape for everyone at United Artists. They loved it.
Paul Williams liked the songs too. He took us to see the higher-ups at A&M. They said they loved it. Dunhill loved it. We took a big United Artists meeting. Things looked good. We still had no management. The two of us were, foolishly, representing ourselves.
♦ ♦ ♦
Ray Davies and the Kinks came to L.A. in March and we partied with the boys, of course. Dianne was apologetic for being loud and passing out, but that was her MO and I guess I was used to it. I made another tape copy for Don Schmitzerle at Reprise. When I went to see Joni Mitchell a few days later at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, the Warner’s rep there told me that he had already listened to our stuff and that Don really liked it. There was a buzz.
Dianne got a Kelly Girl job at Western Union, but got wasted celebrating her first day and called in sick for her second. They let it slide. The bank was sending me repossession papers. Things happened fast. The bus blew up again, Ona got busted the night before her birthday and Dianne appeared to be avoiding life altogether. I needed to get her out of L.A. for a minute.
We went to Baja, the five of us. There was me, Dianne, Tim and Barbara, and Dianne’s visiting Detroit friend, Kathleen, a stunning blonde who had been crashing with us for few weeks. It was the best week ever. No one got out of line. In fact, there were friendly faces everywhere. When we got back, Lixie and Kathleen were hanging out together. Marc and June Bolan came to town again and treated us to dinner at the Rainbow. Even Jeff Simmons called from out of the blue.
Some faces weren’t so friendly. A Bank of America clown came to my door before 8 A.M. one day to threaten me about repossessing the bus—I should have let him just take the thing right then and there. That very afternoon, Volman and I met Marc and Tony Visconti at Elektra Studios on La Cienega. Mark and I then drank champagne, sniffed a bit of magic powder, and sang on eight new T. Rex songs.
Larry Heller put the deal together. We signed to Reprise, the label that I had always dreamed of. Shit, Hendrix was on Reprise. Joni, too, and Neil. And even Soupy! It was Sinatra’s company that he had sold to Warner Bros., but it still had the class of its founder. Ring-a-ding-ding! Sinatra always pronounced the word “Re-preese” and so did the people who worked there. So do I.
Everything was falling into place. We had meetings with Henry Diltz about the album cover and Gary Burden about the art direction. Barry Keene was going to engineer the project, Mark and I would produce ourselves, and we made a deal with Ike Turner to cut the entire record at his Bolic Sound Studio in Inglewood. The Zappa years had been but a momentary distraction. Now we could get back to the sophisticated Laurel Canyon acoustic rock that we had been born to play. We could pick up exactly where the Turtles had left off.
♦ ♦ ♦
By May, we had received a large advance from Warner’s, had paid off all of our bills, and were cutting basic tracks at Ike’s. The deal that Larry and Mutt put together with Mo Ostin was pretty amazing. Not only were all of our wishes granted, but as part of the deal, we received four season passes to the L.A. Kings home games, right behind the goal. In fact, Gordie Howe and Ralph Backstrom joined Mark and me on the ice to take the press release photographs. It was amazing. We also each got to choose one electric and one acoustic guitar from the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard. I picked a Gibson D50 to write songs on and a gorgeous blond hollow-body Telecaster. I might not be a great player, but I knew a great guitar when I saw one.
The Kaylan-Volman project, or whatever it was going to be called, was now a band. None of the Mothers of Invention had been contacted by Herb’s office or even called on the phone by their pal Frank. Silence. No one returned their calls. Zappa didn’t yet know what he wanted to do. But Mark and I had an album to do. And a deal to be signed. Which it was, on May 9.
A word about Ike’s. Upon our arrival there at 6 P.M. on the previous Monday, we couldn’t help but notice what appeared to be a gigantic Fabergé egg sitting on the mixing console. It begged opening. It was filled to the tip with cocaine. When Ike heard us come in, he joined us from his suite behind the studio. “Welcome to Bolic Sound, boys. Enjoy yourselves!” Then he scooped a mighty fingernail into the egg, inhaled its bounty deeply, and walked back to his office. We were in that studio for two weeks of heavy indulgence. That damned egg was never empty.
And Dianne, the wild child from the heart of Middle America, sat in Laurel Canyon, crocheting and making dinners. When we finally had the album playback party on the night of May 19, she had driven home from the studio, annoyed and frustrated, and was the only “lady” not in attendance. She was on her way to clear her head somewhere in San Francisco.
Weekends were always reserved for Emily, although God knows what the kid made of my relationship with Dianne or what her mother had told her about me. Excursions to Busch Gardens or Disneyland weren’t exactly the same as parenting.
Zappa was recording again, and I stopped in one night to watch George Duke lay down some tracks. He never said a word about the guys in our band. We were invited up to Warner Bros. to meet with Schmitzerle. It was a drug fest. We felt right at home. Larry found an office. It was a fantastic Victorian mansion on Sunset, corner of Stanley, a huge space we’d eventually wind up subletting to Chrysalis Records for their headquarters. We named our company Dharma. Can’t you just feel the shit about to hit the fan?
And what of our professional name? We certainly weren’t Turtles anymore. And Volman and Kaylan, or the other way around, sounded like either lawyers or butchers. Reprise suggested that we had built a huge following with Zappa who knew exactly who we were and who would be waiting voraciously to snap this record up. These were the people that we needed to reach, the people who knew us as the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie. The music didn’t fit the name, but they didn’t care. And since they weren’t 100 percent sure that they had been correct, the credits would have our real names too. It would be foolproof and we’d draw from all of our diverse audiences.
Henry took the photos in Mark’s backyard. I wore a terribly British shirt with cute baby ducklings on it and Mark had a bright yellow cowboy shirt made for him at Nudie’s in North Hollywood. It was a great picture. But Warner Bros. printed it the wrong way. Now Mark was on my right instead of my left. It was
all backward, but it was too damned late. Despite all the planning, all the care and all of the professionals involved, Mark was now the Phlorescent Leech and I was Eddie. We could have stopped the release, I suppose, but since no one knew who we were anyway, it seemed like a dumb thing to do.
The entire name was a dumb thing to do. Anyone in their right mind, anyone who really intended on having a career in the music business, would eschew such a moniker in a heartbeat. I mean, Air Supply is a better name than the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie! But the die had been cast and fate had decreed that, for the rest of our career as a duo, the two of us would never be able to shake that moronic handle. Without it, we coulda been a contender.
TWENTY-THREE
Perception Is Everything
The album came out. It was produced by me and Mark, supervised by our manager, Larry Heller, engineered by Barry Keene and recorded at Ike Turner’s Bolic Sound. It had a matte-finish cover, like the albums by real L.A. singer-songwriters had, and had handwritten, sensitive, lady-of-the-Canyon calligraphy printed on a recycled brown paper sleeve. Aynsley played his ass off, but the songs really didn’t call for his level of expertise. Don Preston, as well, was playing in the band to pick up a check, although he was a monster on the road. Mark and I had no time to do much writing, so most of the album was composed of material that would have been included on the next Turtles album, had there been such a thing. It was all Joni-approved. We tried to retain a little of the Zappa insanity, but there wasn’t much humor in those acoustic songs.
At home, it was me, Dianne, and Ona, and our Volkswagens. We befriended a weird Topanga couple named Allen and Saudi, and before we knew it, Dianne and I were swingers and heroin snorters. We went together to a famous naturist camp, and our naked bodies intertwined in the so-called meditation rooms in a junkie stupor. I screwed a couple of people I hope were girls. Preston was having domestic problems and moved in, briefly, across the hall from Ona. Shit, he never wore clothes either. He just floated in the pool all day.
Our very first show was at a tiny rock club in San Diego called the Funky Quarters, and it was a harbinger of things to come. Flo and Eddie were an unknown band without a hit record or even a local following. For the first times in our lives, we were, literally, starting at the bottom. From Carnegie Hall to the dumpiest dives in America—I had made my commitment to show business and this is where my decision had brought me. I was touring on a level that I hadn’t thought about since 1965. I knew the bubble was going to burst eventually. Hell, this wouldn’t be so bad.
♦ ♦ ♦
On July 7, Mark and I sang on a demo record for our pals Donald Fagen and Walter Becker at some little studio in San Diego before saying goodbye to Tom Ross, our agent, and our lady friends and heading off to Davenport, Iowa, for parts truly unknown. We played at armories, ballrooms, and shit clubs. We had a road manager named Larry, a real piece of work, who used to crush and snort phenobarbitals.
Warner Bros. decided to release “Feel Older Now,” an autobiographical rocker of mine, as a single. We also mastered “Nikki Hoi,” a silly Hawaiian riff that we had written the year before with Jeff Simmons, as the B-side. Reprise had no idea at all what to do with us.
But the reports from the road were amazing. Aysnsley’s drum solos alone were bringing audiences to their feet. We killed opening for the Morrisonless Doors and for Dr. John and got standing ovations at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. So we were pretty damned cocky going into the Hollywood Bowl to open for the Allman Brothers on August 6, 1972. We looked good, we were well rehearsed, and we were road buddies by now. How were we to know that the lines of coke on that table weren’t coke at all but heroin? Someone thought they were doing us a favor. The entire band indulged. I felt like I was trying to sing in an ocean of honey. Every note seemed to take hours. I’ve never had to concentrate so hard in my life, and throughout the whole concert, the little voice in my head was screaming, “You’re not going to get away with this. Everyone’s going to know. Your career is over. “
We escaped with our lives. No one knew anything at all. Bill Graham was there and hired us to do some shows. That Bowl concert exists on the Internet and I’ve seen it many times over the years. We were great. Perception is everything.
♦ ♦ ♦
Speaking of Bill Graham, I loved the guy. Rock promoters are notoriously shady guys, but every hundred years or so, a true gentleman emerges from the ooze and such a man was Bill. If you played straight with Bill, he’d play straight with you. Of course, if you didn’t, I’m sure that you’d walk with a cane for the rest of your life. And he loved the Turtles. He had been there for every show of ours that he booked, standing in the wings and laughing his ass off.
Regardng our brand-new Phlorescent Leech and Eddie incarnation, all Bill knew was that we were funny and, having just left Zappa, probably dirty. And that’s what he was looking for, something with a little edge to open the show he’d booked just before Halloween of 1972 in San Francisco’s Winterland for this new Brit sensation, David Bowie.
I had just begun hearing this guy’s songs on L.A. radio. RCA was giving him an unprecedented push, promoting both the previous year’s Hunky Dory and the new Ziggy Stardust simultaneously. He was androgynous and, evidently, so were we. We would open and Sylvester and His Hot Band would go on before Bowie. Sylvester was a full-on drag queen. We felt a bit out of place.
Also, Winterland was dark and weird and more than a few of the hippies in attendance were in outrageous femme couture. The stage was high and so were we. We hung backstage with Bowie’s band, the Spiders from Mars, specifically Mick Ronson, the genius guitar player. Then it was showtime. The intro, the first song started: It was “Thoughts Have Turned” from the Reprise album.
I sang. I looked to my right and the Phlorescent Leech was gone. He had fallen off of the stage chasing his tambourine yet again. I’m sure that it was funny, but people were helping him now. Mark was wrapping his hand in something and security rushed him into the kitchen, presumably to procure some ice.
But he didn’t come back. And the show must go on. And so it did. All forty minutes of it. With just the band.
AND EDDIE.
Somehow, I remembered enough lyrics to get me through the set, albeit without the planned jokes and the Hippo Limbo, a stupid circus trick that went nowhere but used to make Zappa laugh.
During the final song of our set, Mark returned from a local emergency room with his broken arm in a cast. The crowd let out an enormous cheer, the set was done, and we walked off to the approval of applause.
Backstage, we laughed it off with Ronson and Bowie. What else could we do? Bowie was a gentleman and his show was unbelievable. We watched the future of rock music. Again. It would be a few years before we would cross paths with David again. It was another auspicious beginning but by now I was getting used to it.
♦ ♦ ♦
Dianne and I took a road trip up to Canada that featured an extended stop at Lin’s house on Vashon Island. Hmmm, in hindsight, I’d have to say that one was a mistake. It didn’t make us any closer.
The shows were doing great. The album, not so much. Warner’s talked Shep Gordon into throwing us out on tour with Alice Cooper, with whom we soon became the closest of friends. Alice’s producer, Bob Ezrin, came out to see one of the shows in Connecticut and was suitably impressed with us, I guess, as he signed on to produce our next album. The next morning, Larry Heller informed us that we’d be doing the entire School’s Out European tour. It was going to be a monster. Dumb luck one more time.
On October 3, I spent the day in divorce court for the first time. Martin Cohen was my attorney. It didn’t matter. I was going to lose more than half of everything. Fuck it! Two days later, Dianne had some sort of massive seizure and we spent the day in ambulances and hospitals. Stress, they said.
We toured on, sandwiching in a Toronto meeting with Bob Ezrin and his partner in Nimbus 9 Productions, the legendary Jack Richardson. It was at Bob’s house that Dianne reached
me by phone to announce that she was pregnant! “Yay,” I wrote in my diary. But, inside, I don’t think I was saying “Yay.” I loved her to death, but I wasn’t feeling anything. One month later, I returned from a brief tour to find her at Valley Presbyterian Hospital, having miscarried. The next day, I left for London on the Alice Cooper jet, beginning the coolest tour of all time.
TWENTY-FOUR
Spinning in Some Hippie Delirium
This time, the flight to London wasn’t on Air India. Instead, Mark and I flew TWA business class and over the pole into Heathrow, where we were met by Warner’s people, who drove us to the comfort of the Portobello Hotel. There were receptions for us—meaning the Alice tour—at the label and then at the BBC. We were presented with stickers that the label had created to announce our European swing. They said MARK VOLMAN AND HOWARD KAYLAN, FLO AND EDDIE, with a tiny Reprise logo, and were round and white, and predominantly featured a photo of a single human hand flipping the bird.
What? This was to be our new image? What happened to the sensitive singer-songwriters? Once again, no one knew what to do with us, least of all ourselves. We had FUCK YOU T-shirts too. Nice. Good will abroad.
Happily, Marc Bolan had been invited to the reception, as had Harry Nilsson, so I was surrounded by my closest pals and lots of drugs. I was adjusting well. They went with us to Radio London, where we recorded shows on radio and one for BBC television called The Old Grey Whistle Test. After the show, Shep Gordon had booked Morgan Studios for a recording free-for-all. Keith Moon showed up: Alice and Marc and Keith and Harry and Mark and me. Bob Ezrin recorded it. I have no idea what we did in there that night, but Ezrin has the tapes. One day, I expect to be blackmailed by the boy.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 20