by Paul Zollo
How about your 45 of “Up In Mississippi” that you recorded in 1973?
We thought we were way ahead of that. So we didn’t really present that. We thought we were much better than that. And we probably were.
California chapter two
So you went to California with the intention of getting a deal?
tp: Yeah. We sent tapes out to L.A. from Florida. And most just got rejection after rejection. And all we knew about record companies was that in Rolling Stone magazine, there were addresses of companies, so we would just send a tape to that address. And Playboy had a record label in those days, called Playboy Records. And we got a response from a guy named Pete Welding, who was actually a really respected writer, I found out later. He was really respected in the jazz field, and he was A&R for Playboy. He rejected us, but he was nice enough to send us a song-by-song analysis of why he was rejecting us, and what could be better, and what we should work on. So I took this to be really encouraging. And we drove out to see Pete Welding in L.A.
We drove there. Me and our roadie, Keith McAlister. And Danny Roberts had a van, so we drove. Tom Leadon was already out here. He had left our group. The idea was to come out here and see him, and try to hook up with something. It was the greatest trip of my life, really. It was this incredible journey through the country. I had never been west of the Mississippi. To suddenly see cactuses, we would pull the car over and get out and say, ‘Shit—look at this!’ We were so naïve.
We got here, and we had to sleep on the floor of a friend of a friend. And I could see that we really weren’t welcome. [Laughs] And it was kind of really uncomfortable. I don’t think they thought we would really come, but we did. So they let us sleep on their floor for a couple of days. In their living room.
We drove in to Hollywood. And then it seemed really easy to me, because we went down Sunset Boulevard, and in those days, there were record companies everywhere! Everywhere you looked, there was a record company. There was MGM Records, and of course, there was Capitol. I just thought, ‘Well, all we’ve got to do is go in to every one, and we’ll get a deal.’
And we fell in love with L.A. within an hour of being there. We just thought this is heaven. We said, ‘Look—everywhere there’s people making a living playing music. This is the place.’
A lot of people who arrive in Hollywood expecting glamour are disappointed or confused by the reality of the place. Was it that way for you?
No. To me it seemed like everything I wanted it to be. There were literally record companies all down Sunset Boulevard. You could see them, with their names on them. There’d be A&M, MGM, RCA. You just saw them down the road. So we would just go in the front door of every one with a tape and say, ‘Hi, we just got here from Florida, can we play you this tape?’ We didn’t know that that just wasn’t done. So I think just having the balls to do that got a lot of people to listen to us.
The only addresses we had, we’d written down from record ads in Rolling Stone. And I was trying to find some more, so I went into this diner, I think it was Ben Frank’s on Sunset, and I went to a phone booth to look up record companies. And on the floor of the phone booth there was a piece of paper. And I picked up the paper and it’s a list of twenty record companies, with their phone numbers and addresses. And at the same time, I kind of went, ‘Shit—there’s a lot of people doing this.’ But I swear to God it was there. And that’s how I got the number of Shelter Records. Which was out on east Hollywood Boulevard. And we drove out there with a tape.
Did that hurt your enthusiasm at all, the thought of so many others vying for a record contract?
No. We were young and the world was at our feet. At that age, anything seems possible. We’d get turned down, but I just kept thinking that there are so many of them, we’re bound to hit one that’s gonna take us. And that’s what happened. We hit paydirt at MGM, where they wanted to do a single. The first day out. And the next day London Records. Which was a big label then. And they wanted to sign us right away.
Then Capitol Records had a great interest in us. And wanted to book demo time in their studio. We were so silly and indignant that we didn’t want to do a demo, and we didn’t know there was a difference between record companies. We were really green. We just felt that if they put out records, that was fine with us. We didn’t know there’d be any difference between Shelter Records or Capitol Records. They all put out records nationally, or internationally. That’s all were interested in.
Yet Capitol had their big building on Vine, and was the label for The Beatles. Didn’t that impress you?
Yeah, that impressed us. London Records impressed us. They had the Rolling Stones. ‘Any of them will do.’ That was how we thought then. We turned down Capitol because we didn’t want to do a demo. I think we had, in the back of our mind, this idea that if we had to, we would come back and do a demo. But the truth is that we’ve got another label and they’re willing to sign us, so why would we go back to Capitol and do a demo? We didn’t know the difference. We didn’t even know what music publishing was. We had no idea what it was. We thought it was songbooks. We didn’t have any idea.
Were all of you bringing in tapes, or were you the main guy doing that?
Yeah, I was the messenger. [Laughs] We went to Playboy Records to see Pete Welding, but he no longer worked there. We walked in, and we said we’d come all this way, and they put the tape on, and the guy turned it off in thirty seconds, didn’t even hear the whole song, and said, ‘No, we pass.’ thought, ‘Shit. This is going to be a little trickier than I thought.’ He didn’t even hear the song. So we just kept going to record companies and walked in. This is how different it was then. We’d just walk in and say, ‘Hey, we just drove here from Florida. Would you just listen to this?’ And some of them did. They would say, ‘Oh okay. Let’s hear it.’
That first day MGM liked the record. And the guy said, ‘Well, you know, we’d like to make you a singles deal for your first single.’ And we went crazy.
He said, ‘Who is your manager?’
And we said, ‘We don’t have no manager.’
‘Well, who is your lawyer?’
‘Lawyer? We don’t have no lawyer.’
And he said, ‘Okay, we can fix you up with all that. Come back, and we’d really like to make a single.’ And I told him a single wasn’t really what we wanted to do. We wanted to make an album. He said he’d be interested in cutting this one song, but he didn’t know about an album.
And then we went to London records. And there they showed some real interest. The guy said, ‘Yeah, I’m really interested in signing you.’ That was the first day we were here. I remember calling Mike that night and saying, ‘Hey, we got a record deal, you ain’t going to believe it.’ And I don’t think he could believe it. He said, ‘Are you kidding?’
We stayed for a few more days, and on the last day we were here, we went by Shelter Records, and gave the tape to this girl named Andrea Starr, who became a lifelong friend of mine. She opened the door, and she thought we were cute, she told me later. She took the tape to Simon Miller Mundy, who was their A&R guy.
We went home [to Florida] and sold everything we owned, and got ready to come to California. And literally, in a rehearsal, the phone rang and I answered it, and it was Denny Cordell. I thought he was calling about a car we had for sale. And it was him, and he said, ‘I really want to sign your group. I think you guys are really great. I think you guys are like the next Rolling Stones.’ I was like, ‘What is this?’
But we knew who Denny Cordell was. We knew he had done “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” and the Joe Cocker stuff. We knew that he was a real guy we were talking to on the phone. But I had to say, ‘Well, I’m really sorry, but we already promised London Records we would sign with them.’ And he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you’re going to drive out here, I’ve got a studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And that’s going to be not far out of your way. Why don’t you stop in Tulsa and meet with me, and then you can see if you like us.’
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Leon Russell had a place in Tulsa, and Shelter was built around Leon. And there was a whole scene of Tulsa musicians there—there was J.J. Cale and Carl Radle. Jim Keltner. Lots of really great musicians. So we stopped in Tulsa, and we met Cordell in the middle of this windstorm on the street. He took us to a little café and talked to us, and then he took us over to the studio they built in a church. It was called the Church Studio. It was a really nice studio. He said, ‘So spend the night, and tomorrow we’ll go in and do a session. And we’ll see how you like it.’ And we were like, ‘Wow, we get to do a session in a studio! Hell yeah, we’ll spend the night.’
We spent the night, and we spent the next day recording, and he went, ‘That’s it. I’m sold. I want to sign your band.’ And we liked him a lot, much better than the guy at London, who was an executive type. We liked Denny a lot, so we said, ‘Okas, we’ll go with you.’
What songs did you cut?
There was one he particularly liked called “Making Some Noise.” Not the one that came out later on Into The Great Wide Open, but a different song with the same title that was about going to a rooster fight. And he really liked the idea of rooster fight.
And he signed us. And we were really short of dough. So he said, ‘Okay,’ and gave us a wad of cash, and told us to drive to his office in L.A., to the Shelter office. We literally drove off the freeway to the Shelter office and walked in. And said, ‘We’re here.’ [Laughs] But we were broke. They gave us some money and put us in this place called the Hollywood Premiere Motel, that was really a hooker place on Hollywood Boulevard, east of Western Avenue, way down there. Their offices were also down there.
We went to Shelter the next day, and that became our hang-out, the Shelter Records office. It was in a house on Hollywood Boulevard. They had this big office there. We would just hang out there every day.
This is how different it was then: They got us two houses in the valley. And moved us in. Nice houses with swimming pools. In Canoga Park. We didn’t know. We thought this was normal. We didn’t even know what the Valley was. We just went where we were told. There were two houses, because there was quite a few of us. We brought all the girls and dogs and everything. This was heavy shit, man. A house with a swimming pool. Wow, you know? No furniture. No beds, nothing. We had lawn chairs for furniture. [Laughs] And we found some mattresses to sleep on. But this was heavy shit. I remember thinking, ‘I’m living in a house with a swimming pool.’
Did you mind being so far away from Hollywood?
Well, I didn’t know it was far away from [Laughs] I didn’t know. I did think it was a quite a long drive to Hollywood. But I was really just finding my way around L.A. I didn’t really understand it, that you only use a certain part of it. We were still driving all over it for anything.
In those years we quit playing live. There were a couple of years there when live playing stopped altogether. Because there was nowhere to play. There was the Whisky and the Starwood. But if you didn’t have a record out, you couldn’t play there. So we didn’t play live. There weren’t all these little clubs like there are now. That didn’t happen until the middle Seventies. And I think we had a lot to do with that, and people like Elvis Costello, and when the New Wave thing broke, then a lot of clubs started happening. But there was only a handful when we got here in ‘74. And the ones that were worth playing, you had to have an album or record of some sort. So out focus went completely to making a record. So that just stopped till we had made records.
How long did you live in the valley?
For a while. I moved to a little guest house in Burbank. Literally a two-room guest house with a bathroom. It was me and my first wife. We moved there, and then I went from there to Leon Russell’s house in Encino. I was put there to watch the house when he was on the road. So I went from this two-room place into this big mansion. That’s how I met Leon. I would just look after the house when he was on tour. Not a bad gig, really.
Did you meet your former wife, Jane, in L.A. or Florida?
I met Jane in Florida. I think I first met her when she was dating Tom Leadon, and came to a gig. And we got married the year I came out here. It was ‘74. We got married about a week before we came out here [to California].
Soon after we moved to Los Angeles, I was told she was pregnant. So my first kid was born nine months later, Adria. I think some people think we got married because Jane was pregnant, but that wasn’t the case. We didn’t know she was pregnant. And we were married for a long time, and had another kid in ‘82, Kim. And it was a tough thing to hold together, really, because I was gone so much of the time. I toured all the time. In those days, I was a really, really busy guy.
Being on the road all the time, was it tough being away from your daughters?
I was so young, I didn’t know really how to do that. I just improvised as I went along. And I’m lucky, because I came out with these fabulous kids. They were just the best kids, always upbeat and really good, and bright, and just the best kids. So that was a help. I was gone quite a bit of the time, but I tried to be the best dad I could be. But it’s tough, man. Pulling off a marriage and being in a rock ‘n’ roll band, especially one that is successful, is tough. I think I had come from a really dysfunctional family, and deep down. I really wanted a family. I think Mike was the same way. We both never really had that as kids. Mike came from a broken home. He also married that same year, I think, and has been with the same girl to this day. I think that was what I was looking for—some stability, somebody who was home.
After staying at Leon’s house, I went from that back almost to the street. I went to the Travelodge Hotel, living in one room. And by then I’d had a kid, a baby. I actually used to put Adria in a drawer. I’d pull out a drawer and she slept in it. And then I was so busted that Adria and Jane went back to Florida, for a while, and I was out here on my own. And moved into the Winona, which was really just a hooker stop on Hollywood Boulevard. It was across the street from Shelter, so I lived there for a while.
How come they left and went back to Florida?
There was no dough. I couldn’t afford a family. Now I had a kid. And I didn’t have the money. I didn’t want to live in that situation. In a motel. You didn’t even know if you were going to eat. So they went back and stayed with Jane’s family for a while. Not for really long, and I just kind of worked on my own out here. And then I got a little more money, so I rented an apartment that was not far from Leon’s house. In Encino. So I got to know Encino pretty well, because Leon lived there. And so I just based myself there so I could go to Leon’s to work. I rented a small apartment, and didn’t have much money or anything. But life seemed good. I wasn’t complaining.
Did Leon hire you to write lyrics?
Yeah. I was signed to his publishing company. He had heard a song of mine, and wanted me to just be on call to write with him whenever he wanted to write. He was living this kind of life where he recorded a lot every day at his own studio. And I’m really grateful to him, because he did give me a shot at seeing a lot. A lot of people working. I met a lot of people. Some of them very famous people. And I got to see them all work. I don’t think I ever wrote much there. I don’t think we sat down very often to work. We did sometimes. But it never really came out. It never really came to fruition. I might sit and write lyrics for an hour, but it never really seemed to happen.
I always felt more like I was watching the house. [Laughs]
How long did that period last?
A year. Or close to a year.
Did you like Leon?
Yeah. He actually came and picked me up from this little motel in Hollywood where I was staying.
The Winona?
Yeah. Another whorehouse motel. He picked me up in a Rolls Royce. I had never been in a Rolls Royce. And that went on for a while. Leon was making a record with all different producers for every track. And I met all these guys. I met Brian Wilson, and went to his house. And Terry Melcher. And George Harrison and Ringo.
Y
ou met George and Ringo? How did that strike you?
Oh man, I’m just this shit-kicker from Gainesville and I’m sitting in a room with The Beatles, you know? George was really nice to me, as he would be. He gave me a Dark Horse T-shirt. So there was a lot of mind-blowing shit going on at that time.
You must have eventually bought a car?
Yeah, I got a car when I got a record deal. We all got cars. We got $10,000 between us. I got two grand, and I spent about $1,800 on an Opal GT, that was really old, but it got me around. Mike bought a Karmann Ghia. It was the first cars we ever had, so we were really quite pleased with ourselves. [Laughs]
So Shelter eventually look Mudcrutch over to Village Recorder, and we started to try to make a record. That’s when we realized we didn’t know anything about recording. We knew how to play live, but we didn’t know anything about recording. It didn’t come back the way we thought it would. And [Cordell] was very patient with us. He’d have us practice, and then he’d bring us back. All that we cut which was very good was the single that came out. “Depot Street” and “Wild Eyes.” And those were pretty good tracks.
But before they even came out, he sent us back to Tulsa. He said, ‘I’m gonna send you to Tulsa, and just leave you in the studio for two weeks with the engineer there and let you figure out the process that you need to learn about.’ So we went to Tulsa. We stayed there for weeks with an engineer. And there we started to learn how to make a record.
Did you like that idea of going back to Tulsa?
Not really. I didn’t want to go to Tulsa much, but I was into the idea of being in a studio every day. Which we were. And he would come check on us. Look in on us. See what kind of progress we were making. And he liked the progress we were making.
When you went to Tulsa, did you teach yourself how to record?
There was an engineer. The house engineer. He taught us a lot about how to mike things up. How to make this sound or that one. We got to overdub a lot. And there’s an art to overdubbing your voice. It’s a bit like being an actor. You have to keep yourself in that moment. And re-create it.