The crowd then heard Courtney tell them on tape not to put “any stock” in the tough-love tactics that had failed in the end to save Kurt. Courtney said, “I’m really sorry, guys.” Her message ended by her asking his fans to “tell him he’s a fucker, okay? Just say, ‘Fucker, you’re a fucker,’ and that you love him.”
Two months later, on June 16, Hole’s bass player, Kristen Pfaff, died in her bathtub of a heroin overdose.
The warm July night I ran into Courtney at Jones restaurant, she seemed beaten up and bruised from the inside out. She was pale and dazed, damp-eyed and disheveled, sitting with a bunch of rock stars in a dark booth. When she saw me she opened up her arms and I held her for a long, sad time. She told me it was hell being a rock widow, and that mourning didn’t suit her. “I miss Kurt so much,” she said over and over, “but I will survive.”
And she has. With rage, passion, and unshakable courage, Courtney has yanked herself out of her anguished fog and fucked with the odds. From her abrasive rants on America Online to the admission that she drowned her sorrows in too many rock guys, Courtney parades through the award shows like a risky princess and curses out Hole’s packed crowds while entertaining them to the hilt. She continues to stun and titillate, making headlines like all good rock stars are supposed to do. She recently pleaded guilty to assaulting Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at Lollapalooza, and the judge suspended her sentence on the condition that she “refrain from violence for two years and take anger management courses.” But nobody will be able to tame Courtney Love. When we did our interview, I asked her if she felt power by being a rock star. “Fuck yeah, man,” she shouted. “I’m a rock star girl!” Kurt would be proud.
EDDIE COCHRAN
Untamed Youth
Thirty-five years ago on a dark, rainy Saturday night, a talented, sweet-natured American kid was thrown through the windshield of a British taxicab and killed. At twenty-one he was just beginning to cause a stir in the rock world with his lighthearted, wildfire songs about teenage problems. He dressed really cool, he shook his shoulders just right, and when he swung his flashy orange guitar from side to side, a lock of blond hair fell over his forehead in a way that made the blossoming girls swoon. He had just started to raise a fuss and holler—and then he was gone.
The adored baby of a large, seemingly close-knit family, Ray Edward Cochran loved to play cowboys and Indians and shoot off his capguns, pretending to be Hopalong Cassidy or his hero, Roy Rogers. He led parades through his picture-perfect Albert Lea neighborhood in Minnesota, banging pots and pans for drums, and on Saturday afternoons twelve-cent double matinees at the Rivoli Theater were a big treat. He was a true practical joker, a mischief maker, always pestering the daylights out of his many nieces and nephews.
Eddie enjoyed fishing with his cane pole and taking his fancy western-style BB rifle hunting with his dad. He loved scarfing up his mom’s soup beans and corn bread, and he played a mean guitar.
When Eddie’s older brother, Bill, went into the service, he left the five-year-old in charge of his old Kay acoustic guitar, and soon Eddie was hanging blankets on the clothesline, entertaining the neighborhood kids, who paid a penny each to sit inside the blankets and listen to him play. When his music teacher wanted him to play clarinet in the school band, Eddie insisted that he wouldn’t join the band at all if he couldn’t play his guitar.
When the Cochran family had to move to California in 1953, childhood friend Shirley Oman says she’ll never forget what Eddie said to his mother. “Eddie was standing in his backyard with his silly little cap on, and he said, ‘You know, Mom, when we go to California I’m going to make something of myself and you’re going to have everything, Mom, you’ve never had.’”
As I drive down Bernice Circle in Buena Park, I’m struck by the picturesque, unchanged, fifties quality of the suburban stucco bungalows, and the neat, tidy squares of lawn. Except for the glare of ever-present sunshine, I could be Anywhere U.S.A., Anytime U.S.A. Birds chirp, a lawnmower hums. Boys in jeans toss a ball. I’m here to see Eddie Cochran’s sister, Gloria, and her son, “Little” Ed—I’m taking them to lunch so we can discuss a beloved family member, lost all those years ago on a rainy night in England.
Little Ed, who was eight when Eddie died, answers the door—a large fellow, now in his mid-forties, with a ready, shiny grin—and leads me into the living room, which is pretty much a shrine to Eddie Cochran. Lots of gold records, posters, portraits, and an oil painting that’s such a good likeness, it’s scary. Sister Gloria is seventy years old, a sweet little lady with a quiet and gentle demeanor, cloaked in polyester. Everybody has gotten a whole lot older, but Eddie is still twenty-one years old. He always will be. His presence is so overwhelming, I’m curious if Eddie spent any time in this house. “Yes,” says Gloria, wistfully. “We moved in here three months before he died.” I knew it.
The all-American Cochran family. “When we go to California,” Eddie told his mother, “I’m going to make something of myself.” (COURTESY OF GLORIA JULSON)
“I thought we’d go to Black Angus,” says Little Ed, and although I’m a vegetarian, I charmingly agree and we pile into his mid-eighties Lincoln and cruise through Anywhere U.S.A. to the local steak house.
Unmistakable: It’s baby brother Eddie’s joyous full-throttle shout coming from the speakers. “I can’t listen to him all the time,” says Gloria quietly. “It hurts. But this is a special occasion.” I listen to Eddie’s earliest country-punk efforts with Hank Cochran (no relation), all about a pair of pegged pink slacks, and marvel at his masterful guitar playing and wailing wit.
We settle into the high-backed booth and I order the Black Angus specialty, baked potato soup, while my guests order hamburgers. How did Eddie get so good on that thing so young? I ask his sister. “California was a strange place, and Eddie was alone a lot, so he played that guitar constantly.” She smiles. “He didn’t think about college. Music was it. He even took his guitar out on dates!” Gloria recalls with a glint in her eye. “He admitted music was his first love.” There had to have been girls, right? I know I would have been prowling around. “He had one girl in high school—her name was Johnnie. He went with her for a little, but when he got so interested in his music … he took ’em as they come, you know.” Gloria seems a tad embarrassed by this revelation, and giggles. “The young girls, when they found out where we lived, would drive by and drop notes in his car.”
Eddie got a three-piece band together and played local dates, one of which was the opening of a market, getting his first paying gig a few months later at South Gate Auditorium. He met Hank Cochran at the Bell Gardens music store, and the two teamed up early in 1955, writing songs together and getting a record deal almost instantly with Ekko Records. Eddie was sixteen and decided to drop out of school, against his family’s wishes. “Mom didn’t like it, but Eddie stuck to his guns,” Gloria told me. “He said, ‘I want my music, I got this, and this is what I want to do.’ He sure was stubborn.” The duo took their country-shuffle-with-a-backbeat into barn dances and eventually landed a regular spot on the California Hayride TV show. But the three Cochran Brothers singles flopped dismally and, due to Eddie’s increasing desire to rock out, the two went separate directions—Hank to Nashville, where he became a successful songwriter, and Eddie back into the studio with Jerry Capehart, who would soon become his manager and writing partner.
Eddie’s sister Gloria pulled this picture straight out of the Cochran family photo album. (COURTESY OF GLORIA JULSON)
Eddie was redefining his style, mixing his country swing with some Ray Charles and Little Richard. He played all the guitars on these early sessions and, listening to his natural ace virtuosity, it’s hard to believe Eddie was barely sixteen years old. (He went on to overdub lots of guitars on all his records, a highly unusual practice back then.) Jerry and Eddie signed with a publishing company, American Music, and cut some demos (known then as “dubs”), one of which—a raucous little number written by Capehart, “Skinny J
im”—got Eddie a deal with Crest Records. Though it got decent reviews, the record didn’t set the charts on fire, so Capehart took the single and dubs of Eddie singing “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Long Tall Sally” in search of a new deal. Rock and roll was shaking up the Billboard charts, and Liberty Records founder Si Waronker dug the dubs enough to sign the teenager, hoping the gifted kid might become a blond Elvis Presley. Coincidentally, while recording some backing music for a low-budget flick, producer Boris Petroff got a load of Eddie in the studio and offered him a cameo in The Girl Can’t Help It, Jayne Mansfield’s trashy, tawdry rock classic. It was a double shot of success that seemed to sit just right with Eddie Cochran.
I spoke to big brother Bill Cochran, and he said Eddie was just brought up right: His family came first and his music second. “He was so down to earth, it was kinda scary. Like I say, he loved his family, and he had music in his heart.” Well, Eddie may have had an entire band in his heart, but his familial ties were questionable, says Jerry Capehart. “Eddie’s mother, Alice Cochran, was a complete control freak,” he insists. “Eddie’s dilemma in life was trying to maintain a relationship with his family and having a career. His family wanted to tell him exactly what to do.”
It’s a brief but potent three minutes in The Girl Can’t Help It when somebody turns on a TV set to watch Eddie perform “Twenty Flight Rock,” a nutty ditty about being “too tired to rock” with his girl after climbing twenty flights of stairs. It almost became Eddie’s first single, but someone at Liberty suggested a John D. Loudermilk tune, “Sittin’ in the Balcony,” for Eddie’s big-label debut, giving Jerry and Eddie a day to think it over. When his manager asked the singer what he thought, Eddie said, “Well, Dad, I think it’s a hit.” He was right. The song was recorded in eight hours with Eddie on guitar and Capehart using a cardboard box for drums, and when it came out in the fall of 1956, it went straight into the Top Twenty. The song was a little schmaltzy and a tad sweet and croony, but Eddie played up the heartthrob angle with a twinkle in his eye, suggesting “There’s a whole lot more where this came from.”
Back at the house, Gloria and Ed take me into the den and pop in a long-ago black-and-white video clip from Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.” Dick was doing one of his retrospective shows a couple of years back, and Eddie’s mother, Alice, and sister Gloria were invited to the festivities, taking with them Eddie’s precious Gretsch guitar. We watch the baby-faced blond swinging the same orange guitar, kissing gooey-eyed girls in the balcony, and then, sure enough, there’s Gloria and her late mother, Alice, beaming from the audience as Dick sings Eddie’s praises, touching the Gretsch like it was God’s own instrument. “Dick was talking to Mother, asking if there was anything he could do for her,” a misty-eyed Gloria recalls at the end of the mini-Eddie screening, “and she said, ‘Yeah, you can give me the tapes you have on Eddie,’ and he did. It’s so funny,” she goes on, “because when this accident happened, Mother tried to buy the tapes and he wouldn’t sell ’em.” Then Little Ed interjects, “Well, he would have, but the price was so high … .”
I call Eddie’s other sister, Pat, a soft-spoken lady who runs an office-supply store in Garden Grove. “I consider Eddie the last of the innocents,” she begins. “Our teenage kids could use more people like Eddie today. He was a delightful individual for the short time he was with us.” She sighs. “Sure, he may have had one too many beers sometimes, but he wasn’t into the dope scene or anything like that. I don’t want to paint him as not being human—he was terribly human. He loved people, he loved his family, but most of all he loved his music.”
“I’m going to tell you some information that very few people have,” Jerry Capehart tells me. “Eddie was cast in a feature motion picture called Rally Round the Flag with Paul Newman. He had the part, it was all set. I went to pick him up for the first day’s shooting, and Alice says, ‘We’ve decided that the part isn’t big enough for Eddie.’ I argued, but she wasn’t going to change her mind. If Eddie had done that part, he would have been as big as James Dean. I used to try and instill in Eddie the positive side of life, but that family of his … he felt totally oppressed.” What about his father? I query. Did he get involved in the decisions? “Are you kidding? I bet I didn’t see Frank a half a dozen times during the years I knew them. He would go to work, come home to his bedroom, and get drunk.”
After the success of “Twenty Flight Rock,” Eddie put out another single, “Drive-In Show,” which didn’t quite hit, and made another movie, Untamed Youth, starring Mamie Van Doren (in her tell-all tome, she recalls seducing the young rocker). The Warner Bros. film about kids picking cotton in Bakersfield, California, features the charismatic Eddie in the role of “Bong,” and one reviewer loved him: “There’s a guy who works with Mamie whom I never before heard of—one Eddie Cochran, who writhes through ‘Cottonpicker’ in a manner that could make Elvis envious. Real frantic, this boy.” Eddie may have had some private moments with the blond bombshell, but most of the year was spent touring the country in his white (with wood paneling!) Country Squire station wagon.
I call Gene Ridgio, Eddie’s drummer from the very beginning, now working in the gaming industry in Las Vegas, and he’s still full of abounding love for the boy snatched from their midst a long time ago. Gene recalls his glory days like they were just yesterday, telling me how he and his band met Eddie at the Rainbow Roller Rink, backed him on a couple of songs, and became his touring band. “Once we did ten weeks of one-nighters,” he remembers. “Everyone hated the promoter. We’d go north, then south, then north, west, east, north, south. We would leave a job, pack up, load the trailer, and take off. We didn’t sleep in motels; we had to sleep in the car and keep going. Eddie would sleep skewed down in the front seat with his feet up on the dashboard.” Gene tells me about the time they were spotted in a gas station after a show with their pay wrapped in rubber bands. Because a local bank had been robbed that day, the station attendant called the cops on the greasy-haired delinquents. “The police pulled us all out of the car,” Gene says, “one cop in front, one in back, and one on each side, and they proceed to question us.” He laughs heartily. “So they call in to headquarters and say, ‘We got the money and it’s all in rubber bands.’ ‘Did you say rubber bands? The money was taken from the bank in paper bands.’” It seems the jerkwater cops had messed up big-time. “Eddie says, ‘Sarge, do you have a daughter?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ Eddie says, ‘She’s gonna be very mad at you’—that’s how cool he was—and the cop says, ‘What’s your name, son?’ ‘Eddie Cochran.’ ‘The rock-and-roll singer?’ ‘Yessir.’ And the cop says, ‘Yep, she’s going to be mad, all right.’ So Eddie says, ‘Tell you what, you want me to give you an autograph so she won’t be that mad?’”
Capehart, who was ten years Eddie’s senior, tells me that Eddie’s family wouldn’t sign for his station wagon. “Guess who put his name on the dotted line? Nobody in his family thought enough of their son or their brother to put their name on the dotted line for him to buy a car. So I did.”
It’s hard for me to imagine sister Gloria being so hard-hearted. Recalling how hard her baby brother had to work, she tells me that when Eddie came home from a road trip, he was beat. “He’d take about three or four days off and go up into the desert with his Buntline,” she says. Buntline? What’s that? I wonder. “A big gun,” Ed fills me in, beaming with pride. “Like Wyatt Earp.” Ah. “That poor kid,” Gloria goes on, smiling sadly. “He’d go out on these tours, you know, and work his bottom off.” Then Ed chimes in, “The band members would get paid, but Ed just didn’t get paid!” Little Ed is obviously appalled. His mother continues, “He’d come home broke. I’d feel so sorry for him, putting out all that work and not getting a penny.”
Though there wasn’t much dough on the road, it was a whole lot of fun, according to Gene Ridgio. “We were doing a show and Eddie, being his beautiful self, was entertaining like you can’t believe, and of course the girls loved him, and whether they’re with thei
r boyfriends or not, they’re gonna show it.” Gene is gleeful as he goes on. “Well, this one young man got uptight, a typical guy back in them days—white satin vest, white pants, and white buck saddle shoes. After the show we’re packing up, this fellow shows up and says, ‘Hey Cochran!’—I don’t know if you can print this—‘I’m gonna kick the livin’ shit outta you!’ And Eddie says, ‘What?’ In other words, ‘I don’t even know you, sir.’ But he persists on being the bully and Eddie says, ‘You mean to tell me that you and I cannot discuss this thing and resolve it?’ And this guy says, ‘No way, man, I want a piece of you right now!,’ so Eddie says, ‘Well, I guess I’m just gonna have to kill you.’ With that, Eddie draws his Buntline .45—not pointing at the guy, pointing to the right of him—and fires, and he has a blank in it! The guy stands there in the snow and pees his pants. The snow around his shoes is getting yellow!” Gene is delighted, right there with Eddie again, reliving the moment one more time. “The flame shot out of Eddie’s Buntline and just scared the hell outta that guy.”
In March 1958 Eddie went to Capehart’s pad in Hollywood to go through material for the next day’s session. He had a riff running around in his head that he just couldn’t shake. He played it for Jerry and, in less than an hour, “Summertime Blues,” three minutes of pure, shining, unadulterated rock-and-roll majesty, was finished. The song spoke for all the teenagers who felt they were being bugged, hassled, and bossed around. Eddie Cochran understood their plight: how hard it was to hold a job, to get a car, to take your girl on a date. “Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do but there ain’t no cure …” You know the rest.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 12