Three other songs stood out in the Shankar set. "Cheparte," meaning spicy or "hot stuff," received standing ovations following a rousing battle between the veteran Alla Rakha on tabla and T.V. Gopalkrishnan, a younger man, on the mridangam-a barrel-shaped drum he struck with his hands at both ends. The two sat side by side, and overhead lights switched between them as they took their solos, slapping and hammering away at different pitches until they joined together. The crowd whooped like it had just heard a ten-minute, heavy-metal drum workout.
"Zoom Zoom Zoom" introduced the audience to singers Lakshmi Shankar and her daughter, Viji. Both recipients of India's highest musical honor, the President's Award, they stood at each side of their in-law conductor.
Lakshmi stood still, arms crossed in front of her, and with her three-octave voice glided easily through "Zoom Zoom Zoom." The lyrics had a taste of Brazil '66 and her voice reminded one of Norma Tanega, for those who remember "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog."
Shankar's one turn at the sitar was reserved for a song called `Anurag" ("Love"), and even this one was a surprise, a hot-beat number featuring interplays between his instrument and two violins, with Ravi fingering decidedly bluesy figures, then conducting, from his perch, several solos, among them the tabla tarang, a group of twelve waterbowls, and the santoor, an instrument that resembles an autoharp and is played with delicate mallets. Again, the sound was symphonic and dynamic. I heard the number performed five times and never once thought of hot dogs.
"I have always been-what is the word?-`dilemma'?-to my listeners the last thirty years," remarked Shankar one day in San Francisco.
"By the time they form an opinion that I am doing this, I am doing something else. So it's puzzling for them, and that's why I have been criticized more than anyone-sac- rileging Indian music or jazzifying Indian music, breaking the tradition, all sorts of things you might have heard yourself. But I keep my base very strong."
On the tour, all of Shankar's songs were about five minutes, for many a relief from the long ragas he plays at his own concerts. He wrote (and edited) many of them specifically for the Harrison audience, he said.
`And none of the songs are, in the Indian sense, classical. They are different, because, imagine, with all those impatient kids, if I sat down and started playing for a half hour. And it wouldn't blend together; the wholeness of the show wouldn't be there.
"It's only lately that I've been hearing a bit more of rock music," he said. "I find that there's a lot of great things in that music, but I personally believe that 50 to 75 percent is the loudness of it."
Shankar, in recent years, has avoided huge rock concerts and festivals, for reasons that transcend technical difficulties. 'After I went to Woodstock and one or two others, I thought maybe I should not go any more. It has changed from the atmosphere at Monterey to, maybe not violence, but too much drugs. And I thought maybe there's no use in my going, because it's not my type of music."
I N THE S U M M E R o f 19 6 7, less than a year after the Candlestick Park concert, Harrison, then 24, came back to San Francisco with his wife, to have a look at the hippies who'd blossomed out of the Haight-Ashbury district.
This year, he was back. Before the tour he had decided that several concerts would be benefits, and he had heard about the plight of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Opened the year of Harrison's first visit, the Free Clinic survived the district's speed/rip-off/deterioration phase, and, like the Haight itself, had recently grown. The medical clinic is now only one of eight concerns, the others including a Women's Needs Center, a therapy program for heroin addicts, and a vocational rehab center. This year. federal revenue-sharing money marked for 19 7 5 was diverted by Mayor Joseph Alioto, and after two months of applying for grants and of trying to set up a rock benefit, the clinic was almost resigned to shut down the medical sector, which last year spent $67,500 to treat ten thousand patients. Harrison donated net profits from his first San Francisco concert to the clinic. A week after the show, the clinic's medical director, Dr. Elizabeth Anthony, said the donation would be $66,000.
The day after the benefit, Harrison, along with manager O'Brien, publicist Pat Luce, and Olivia Arias (a representative of Dark Horse) visited the clinic for about a half hour, just before a concert. His party toured the facilities and, in a back room, chatted with several staff members. He gave them gifts, among them a Dark Horse necklace and pieces of embroidery, and asked for a Free Clinic T-shirt.
"He said he hoped to start a ripple with other musicians doing the same kind of things," writer Amie Hill, a clinic volunteer, said later. "The doctors gave him a plaque, and-I didn't hear this, but someone told me he said, 'Don't thank me; it's not me, it's something else over us that acts through people like me. I'm just an instrument."'
AFTER THE v i s i T , back in the limousine, something kept nagging at George Harrison. It was the plaque, and all the gratitude of the Clinic workers. He really meant it when he said not to thank him, that he just wanted to help cause a ripple.
He turned to Pat Luce as the car headed toward the freeway for the Cow Palace. "I'd like to get that out somehow," he told her. "Do you think Rolling Stone might want to do an interview?"
George Harrison, it seemed, had gone to as much trouble as he could to avoid interviews during the tour. He had done a press conference in Los Angeles and helped prepare an official press-kit interview ("Tell us about Dark Horse Records"; "Tell us about the group Splinter that you recently produced for Dark Horse Records"; "Tell us about your new album").
But now he wanted to talk. Luce set up a dressing-room visit between shows at the Forum. We waited through the visit by Dylan and watched Harrison's father and brother mingling with the musicians in a room decorated with Indian bedspreads on all walls.
Finally, just a half-hour before Harrison had to return to the stage, we met. He was friendly, direct, strong willed, tugging at his fingers now and then, digging into me with his blue eyes. Behind him, Olivia Arias smiled knowingly at all his remarks.
More than anything else, Harrison was thinking about his concerts, and about the response so far. He spoke with more earnestness than the anger and impatience his words, on paper, might imply.
"This show is not just by chance we all bumped into each other in Vancouver. I mean, that's how some people come and review the show, as if it was simple just to get it there. I mean, we went to great length and great pain and through a lot of years of life and experience to be able to be grateful to even meet each other, let alone form it into a band and then put it on the road.
"There's a lot more to it than just walking in and shouting if you're drunk oryou know, the people have to think a little bit more. The audience has to sacrifice a little bit of something. They have to give a little bit of energy. They have to listen and look, and then they'll get it, they'll get something good. They think it's going to be this or that, then that itself is the barrier which stops them enjoying, and if you can just open your mind and heart, there's such joy in the world to be had."
I was tempted to speak for those who, once their ears were open, heard a destroyed voice doing rearranged songs. But that could wait. I asked him to evaluate the shows so far.
At every concert, he said, something good has gotten across to the audience. "There's been bad moments in each show, but I mean it doesn't matter, because the spirit of everybody dancing and digging it. And if you get fifty drunkards who are shouting, bad-mouthing Ravi or whatever, and you get seventeen thousand people who go out of there relatively pleased, some of them ecstatic and some of them who happen to get much more from it than they ever thought....
"Because I'm taping the audience every night and asking them about it, and I know we get ten people who say the show sucks, and we get a hundred who, when you say, `Did you get what you wanted?' say, `We got much more than we ever hoped for."'
He had no control over his rehearsal and recording schedules, he said. "I don't have control over anything. I believe in God, and he is the supreme co
ntroller even down to the rehearsal." So his voice on "Dark Horse" is husky, "and it's more like I am right at this minute. I'm talking about the emphasis that gets put on a thing. People expect so much. If you don't expect anything, life is just one big bonus, but when you expect anything, then you can be let down. I don't let anybody down."
What about those who scrounged up $9.50 wanting at least a taste of "Beatle George"? Harrison leaned forward:
"Well, why do they want to see if there is a Beatle George, I don't say I'm Beatle George."
"Well, one of the things you don't control..."
"I do control..."
"...is how the audience feels about you. The conceptions..."
"Okay, but I certainly am going to control my own concept of me. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice. The image of my choice is not Beatle George. If they want to do that they can go and see Wings, then.. .Why live in the past? Be here now and now, whether you like me or not, this is what I am."
At his press conference, Harrison had made an opening statement: "I really didn't want to do this for a living. I've always wanted to be a lumberjack." What did he mean by that?
"Well," said Harrison, "What I mean is like Billy Preston says, 'I ain't tryin' to be your hero.' But I'm just a lumberjack." Softly Harrison began to sing the lumberjacks' lusty and ludicrous anthem [by] Monty Python and His Flying Circus. He was finally drowned out by laughter from Pat, Olivia, Tom Scott, and me.
"You know what I mean?" he asked. "I mean, I'd rather try and uphold something that I believe in than destroy something I don't believe in. Because it's a waste of time."
I tried again. I was thinking of Bill Graham's heartfelt criticisms, but Harrison was thinking of that pack of shut-minded reviewers.
"There will always be, but.. .fuck it, my life belongs to me." Quickly, he corrected himself. "It actually doesn't. It belongs to him. My life belongs to the Lord Krishna and there's me dog collar to prove it. I'm just a dog and I'm led around by me collar by Krishna.. .I'm the servant of the servant of the servant of the servant of the servant of Krishna. I'm just a groveling lumberjack lucky to be a grain of dirt in creation. That's how I feel. Never been so humble in all my life, and I feel great."
So George Harrison is a grain of dirt. A happy grain of dirt. I accept that, and I'm happy for his happiness. And yet he is in show business, which, from where I sit, requires at least some responsiveness to the audience. Harrison's voice rose.
"So I am in show business. And this is my show, right?" He broke out in song again: "Take me as I am or let me go..."
"You know, I didn't force you or anybody at gunpoint to come to see me. And I don't care if nobody comes to see me, nobody ever buys another record of me. I don't give a shit, it doesn't matter to me, but I'm going to do what I feel within myself."
Harrison was singing again, a snatch of "What the World Needs Now Is Love."
And he was smiling again.
"I mean, if it's going this well, as I feel, with no voice, I can't wait to have a voice!"
Out in the hallway, performers headed for the stage. Behind the curtains, behind the building mood of expectation, Bill Graham supervised last-second details. How did the interview go? he asked.
Fine, I said. Harrison was strong-minded and quite happy with his shows.
"If he's happy, then I'm happy," said Graham, all in the spirit of show business.
-December 19, 1974
Rolling Stone
Linda Ronstadt:
HEARTBREAK ON WHEELS
hen I first met Linda Ronstadt, back in 1971, the conventional wisdom was that she was all about sex. That, of course, was not true. She was about sex-and music. Early on, she downgraded her own talent, describing her voice as "nasal" and saying she never listened to her own recordings. That left appearances, and her appearance. Ronstadt was a doll, and, before she learned to keep her mouth shut about her personal life, was delightfully candid about love and lust.
But appearances are deceiving. The Ronstadt I met in 1971 was serious, self-critical, and frustrated with being a woman in the rock industry. "I'm tired of the hassles of being a girl,"she complained.
Four years later, after she broke through with her first Number One hit, "You're No Good," I met an artist who'd transcended sex. She had found a manager and producer, Peter Asher, who treated her as an equal in the recording studio. Ronstadt was in charge.
But at heart, she was also still a girl, helplessly, hopelessly romantic as we spent St. Valentine's Day together in Honolulu.
LINDA R O N S TA D T ARRIVED I N HONOLULU, drowsy and a little on the dowdy side, in a red T-shirt, blue overalls and sandals. Her hair was a postflight brunette tangle, with a string of gray here and there. On the eve of one of her favorite holidays-St. Valentine's-she was Number One on the pop charts with her album, Heart like a Wheel, and her single, "You're No Good." The flip, "I Can't Help It if I'm Still in Love with You," was in the Top Five, meantime, on the country charts. And after the show tomorrow night at the Waikiki Shell, her latest tour would be over, pau, as they say here.
Flying with Linda.
At the gate, before she'd even had a chance to rub her eyes, the local concert promoter, a young, earnest-looking Korean named William Kim, stepped up and greeted her: "I'm here to give you your first lei," he cracked. A photographer maneuvered into position. Ronstadt blinked her eyes and backed off. She turned to Peter Asher, her manager. "What is this crap all about?" she asked. Finally, properly introduced, she accepted the lei and allowed herself to be pecked on the cheek-but not to be photographed. As she climbed the steps of a Wiki bus headed for Baggage Claim, she turned to Asher again. "Was that rude?" she asked.
The day before, in Hollywood, Linda was reconsidering something she had said in an interview for the book, Rock 'n Roll Woman-that she was basically an unhappy person. That was in early 19 74, shortly after the release of Don't Cry Now, an album that had taken over a year, some $150,000 and three producers (not counting herself) to complete.
Now, she had her first hit single since 1970's moderate success, "Long Long Time." She was about to finish a smooth and successful tour, a five-week run that showed off a more musically assured Ronstadt than ever. And in Peter Asher she seemed to have found an astute manager and a compassionate, trustworthy producer. Could she possibly still be unhappy?
Well...yes. "I'm more confused than ever about that," she said. "I went through an intensely happy period for about six months, and then it changed, real fast, last summer and that's when I got fat." She wailed, as if betrayed: "I went, 'Oh, no! It's all a lie!"'
Away from the album covers, Ronstadt still has an open, Sally Fields-cute, country-cousin appearance (with a shape she describes as approximating "a fire hydrant"). At age 28, she often looks, acts, and sounds like a little girl. To punctuate unpleasant thoughts or flashes of guilt or excitement, the wide eyes widen, the comic-strip perfect lips stretch out in dumbfounded anxiety, and the voice revs up, sometimes getting loud and strident. Now, she is quiet, reasoned:
"I don't know, I may be just an unhappy person forever. I'm very dissatisfied with everything. I'm hard to please and very restless, so it's always a battle between that and my real deep desire to have a home and roots, which is a kind of contentment which is beyond description when you find it. And I've only had glimpses of it."
For her body, Ronstadt joined a health club in Los Angeles and went through a rigorous program of running seven miles a day. For her head, she has been seeing a psychiatrist for the last six months. "I think it's helped," she said, "but I'm getting restless about that now, too. I do everything for about six months, then I go, `Pftt- next!'
"I had to start going because I couldn't perform. I just felt very alienated. I would stand onstage and look at the audience, and they would appear dehumanized to me; they weren't human beings and I wasn't a human being and I couldn't understand why anyone would want to be there to bear it. I didn't have anything to say to anybody, and I foun
d it very difficult to concentrate. But it's changed; I don't feel that way anymore." She shifted around in the sofa.
"It's harder, though. There are more people looking at me and people come up and say, 'Gee, you're dada-dada-da!' and I don't like that. I feel dehumanized and sort of insulted. People intimidate me like mad, so I try to be as polite as I can be and stay as withdrawn as I can. But very often I come off rude."
Onstage at the Waikiki Shell, Linda Ronstadt was reserved: she made only a brief mention of Valentine's Day. She wore her standard tour apparel: blouse tied at the waist and blue jeans. No lei. She barely moved onstage, holding the mike stand with both bands and allowing her hips to sway on the fast numbers only as much as a tapping foot seemed to require. Still, when it got down to the singing, she checked in strong and clear. The little girl has always been a woman in song, but now the powerful voice is more controlled; Linda is able to express multiple emotions in a single phrase, snarling out one word and crying another in "I Can't Help It If I'm Still in Love with You." Hot-pointed anger and heartbroken concession all at once. Despite a lingering flu, her control of falsetto and of the mid-glide up from falsetto back to chest voice was remarkable.
But some in the crowd were not there for musical appreciation. One fan tossed a heart-shaped box of chocolates to her in midsong and it startled her. "I thought it was a bomb," she said with a decided lack of diplomacy after inspecting the contents. And, as she began a fragile number, "Keep Me from Blowing Away," she was suddenly faced with a large blond man who'd swayed his way up to the stage apron, then somehow vaulted up onto the stage.
Just as he was getting a good look at Linda-who kept singing-a security guard caught up with him, and Ronstadt's stage manager hauled the young man backwards off the stage and back onto earth. For the next minute, the dazed man was shuffled, pushed, and dragged around while members of the audience yelled for the authorities to leave him alone. Ronstadt stayed at the mike, trying to concentrate on the song, eyes intently focused somewhere above the audience in the trees and the carbon blue skies. After the song, she attempted to shrug it off: "Looks like `Kung Fu Fighting' here tonight," she said.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 33