Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll
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Mitchell regularly sees two close women friends-neither of them musicians. "They're women you can entrust your intimacies to without fear of betrayal," she says. "We meet once a week for what we call `Ladies' Night Out,' and now it attracts other women." She laughs, thinking back to childhood friends. "I had that kind of sorority with women when I was a preteen, just before the race for men occurred, or whatever that thing is that happens between women."
We're zipping down Melrose Avenue in the rented Mercedes, whizzing by the latest shops and hangouts. I ask Mitchell if she's aging gracefully. "I could do better," she says and breaks out in laughter. Then, she asks, "Think I should get nipped and tucked?" I, of course, say no. But is she seriously considering it? "We all thought about it after we saw Cher," says Mitchell. "Usually it looks grotesque and shiny and weird, but Cher's plastic surgery has inflamed the Hollywood community!" Mitchell laughs again, enjoying her dip into showbiz gossip.
She has no regrets about not having had children. "The children of artists are nearly always a terrible mess. They end up being emotionally deprived." Besides, she adds, "The creative drive is a family in itself."
Arriving at the photographer's studio, Mitchell apologizes for wearing black. "I'm in mourning for my car," she says. But she's brought a bright chief's blanket that she can toss over her shoulders and cinch with silver belts and a neckload of Tibetan beads.
In her dressing room, she discovers that the makeup artist and a woman from her management company are from Canada, and the three dive happily into home-country talk, about the weather, restaurants, Mounties, and dialects. "There's that oldcountry accent," says Mitchell. "It's like"-she drops into a drawl-"Don't forget to throw the cow over the fence some hay, eh?"
Mitchell moves into the studio, and the photographer's first few rolls capture a lackluster woman near the end of a long day of explaining herself. But a break and quick costume adjustment later, she's a different woman. With the chief's blanket on, she brightens. Peter Gabriel's on the CD player, and, long day to the wind, the stopsand-starts woman begins shuffling and swaying, smiling blissfully, as if it's a weekend night in Saskatoon many songs ago.
-June 1988
Chatelaine
Epilogue: llhij Back Pages
n 1999, I taught a course in magazine editing at San Francisco State University, and, to give my students an occasional break from rock journalism anecdotes, brought in guest speakers. One of them, Kevin Berger, a senior editor at San Francisco magazine, turned out to be a former rock journalist. "But," he told the class, "I soon realized that music writing was a dead end."
"I wish I'd known that before," I quipped.
Actually, my music writing career has taken me down many different avenues-from magazines to newspapers to radio to books.
I was still writing for the Chronicle when, one day in the spring of 1989, Sarah Lazin, who'd been an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone, and was now a book packager and agent in New York, suggested that I consider writing a biography of the late country-rock pioneer, Gram Parsons.
Sarah was contacted by a publisher who'd been hearing Parsons' name bandied about, even though he'd died sixteen years before, of an overdose of hard liquor and harder drugs in a motel room in the high desert of California. He left behind a legacy of bittersweet music that seemed, every few years, to influence another artist, another band. Every year, it seemed, someone, somewhere in this world, wanted to pay tribute to Parsons, with a concert, a recording, a nomination in some musical hall of fame. So why not a book?
Having written a piece on Parsons for Esquire a few years before, I found it easy to put together a proposal. Sarah and I made a deal, and by fall, I had begun work on the book, hiring an assistant of hers, Holly George-Warren, to help on research and on planning trips to Parsons territory-the South.
Hi-ho, Steverino! With Steve Allen on Fog City Radio.
Just as we nailed down plans for a trip in January 1990, Sarah called in a panic. She was putting together a book about Motown Records, and the writer of the main text-a history of the label and biographies of all its artists-had dropped out of the project at the last possible minute. She knew I'd written frequently about Motown artists, and she knew I could meet ridiculous deadlines.
It was January 9. I was headed for Florida and Georgia on the 15th, and I'd be immersed in Gram Parsons for a week-at least.
No problem, said Sarah. I had till February 10th-or nineteen days, counting weekends, after my return-to research and write the main body of the book. She and the editor, Marianne Partridge, another former Rolling Stone editor, needed about fifteen thousand words. And-oh yes-the pieces had to be written to specific word counts, since the book had already been designed.
Not to brag-well, just a little-I beat the deadline by three days. But I cheated. I brought Motown cassettes on the trip, and while Holly drove us from Jacksonville, Florida, to Waycross, Georgia, and back to Jacksonville by way of Winter Haven and Tampa, we listened to the Sound of Young America and had a ball.
Back in San Francisco, after a few days of reading my old articles-on the Temptations, the Miracles, Gladys & the Pips, Stevie, Marvin, the Spinners, Ashford & Simpson, and the Jackson 5-and a ton of others, I dove into what amounted to a two-week term paper, forgetting family, friends, many meals, and even, for the moment, Gram Parsons.
Suddenly, before I'd done my first book, I'd done my first book.
Soon after finishing the Parsons biography-entitled Hickory Wind-and returning to the Chronicle, I got an offer to write another book. This time, it was Leslie Wells, who'd been my editor on Hickory Wind. With an eye to the success of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, she wondered whether I might consider a non-fiction story about growing up Chinese-American, with a male, sixties, rock and roll slant.
I really had to think about that. I've been well aware that one reason I became a reporter was that, while I never shied away from the spotlight, I preferred to tell other people's stories. When I thought back to my youth, I recalled how, at parties, I always asked more questions than I answered. I liked it that way. Although I'd revealed myself in a few articles over the years, and on radio, those occasions couldn't compare with a book about my life.
And then there was my family. The Chinese (especially the first generation) are said to be particularly protective of their privacy. Outsiders are way outside. But I spoke with my parents (through a family friend who translated for me, such was the enormity of our language gap) and siblings, got the requisite approvals, and agreed to write what became The Rice Room.
Needing to take time off for the book, I left the Chronicle and didn't return. Instead, I joined Gavin, a radio and music industry magazine, as its managing editor. I'd long admired its late founder, Bill Gavin, for his pioneer work in programming and charting popular music for radio. He was the unseen, uncredited man behind Lucky Lager Dance Time, the show that, in the early fifties, introduced me to rock and roll and R&B as well as pop hits.
At Gavin, I continued to write about music, the subjects ranging from Atlantic Records' co-founder Ahmet Ertegun to a wide range of artists, among them Alanis Morissette, Garth Brooks, and Pat Boone.
Away from the office, I hosted a weekly show on KQED, the NPR affiliate in San Francisco. This was no DJ stint. Fog City Radio was a live, two-hour program of performances and interviews with artists, musicians, actors, authors, comedians, filmmakers, broadcasters-whoever we thought fit under our umbrella of the literary and performing arts. Streaming in at a clip of six or seven guests a show, I found myself interviewing a wildly wide range of talent. The music ranged from classical to swing, jazz, blues, lounge, R&B, folk, country, and rock. And a capella. And handbell orchestras. Kris Kristofferson and Tracy Nelson performed on one show; Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers on another. Amy Tan, dolled up in dominatrix gear, sang "These Boots Are Made for Walking." Arturo, a man who performed as Patsy Cline, sang with Elvis Herselvis, a woman who...well, you know.
My personal highligh
t came in March 1995, when the guest lineup included one Steve Allen.
Along with Gary Owens, the disc jockey who went on to mellifluous fame and fortune on television, Allen was one of my idols when I was in high school. Now, we sat together on the stage of the George Coates Theater in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, and I was as nervous as Don Knotts doing his quivering man-on-the-street routine with Allen. I'd heard that Allen, now in his 70s, could be cranky, and that he'd walked out on one local radio host. I was in luck, however. One of our musical guests was Richard Olsen and his swing band, and, after playing "Memories of You," the song Allen performed when he starred in The Benny Goodman Story, Olsen struck up Allen's theme song, "The Start of Something New," to bring him on.
He was in great humor, and we wound up exchanging falsetto "SMOCK! SMOCK! "s. I asked about his experimentations with LSD in the early sixties (as part of a university study of creative people) and about his hosting Elvis on his Sunday night show. "I recognized right away that he had something," said Steve, who first saw Elvis on the Dorsey Brothers' summer replacement series, Stage Show, on CBS in 1956. "It certainly wasn't a glorious voice, in the sense of Sinatra or Perry Como. It was kind of a weird noise. But he had something much more important-he had a weird, freaky, charismatic, star quality."
For the year that Fog City Radio was on the air, Saturdays couldn't come soon enough.
In late 1997, Gavin, which had been founded as a radio programmers' tipsheet in 1958, began making plans for its 40th anniversary, and wanted to launch a series of books. I'd write the first one, a history of Top 40 radio.
From one book to another, and from the printed page to the airwaves to cyberspace, life continues to be a string of deadlines, met to the sound of music.
And life continues to yank me, on occasion, into the realm of the unreal. Shortly after Cameron Crowe, my once-young discovery, wrote the foreword for this book, he announced that his first film after his smash Jerry Maguire would be based on his own adventures as a beginning rock journalist. Once again, Rolling Stone is in the movies. And, for the first time since 1979, when I appeared in Americathon, one of the undisputed worst movies of all time, they're gonna put me in the movies.
At least they're gonna put my character in the movie. Soon after auditions began, I received a stream of e-mails from twenty-something Asian-American actors hoping to play me, and asking how I dressed, spoke, walked, and acted back in the day. I resisted the temptation to refer them to a video of Americathon, and tried to be helpful. It was the least I could do, in the face of these young men, so taken with this rare opportunity for a decent Asian-American role in a mainstream motion picture, that they were surfing all over the Internet looking for Fong-Torres nuggets, not to mention rolling stones.
Having just had my memory refreshed by Crowe's foreword, I told one actor, Parry Shen, that I apparently used to say "crazy" a lot, as an approving response.
"Ben, I just got my interview with Guess Who."
"Crazy."
Shen wrote back, laughing through cyberspace. He had a piece of the script, for audition purposes, and in it, I was saying "crazy" the way Cuba Gooding, Jr., was saying, "Show me the money."
Shen told me that he was reading my memoirs, The Rice Room. "From the first ten pages, I was already saying to everyone, 'Man, I can totally relate to everything this guy's saying'...1 felt like you wrote it for me."
In Los Angeles, Parry performs in an Asian-American theater group called hereand now. In a piece called "Good/Bad," he wrote, "the ensemble rattles off good and bad things about being Asian ...A good thing about being Asian is...living in America... having parents that always ask, 'Did you eat?' A bad thing about being Asian is...not being able to hug your dad... if you don't like rice, you're screwed... living in America." Signing off, Shen promised: "For my next performance of 'Good/Bad,' I'll mention your name as one of the good things about being Asian."
Thirty years after making the break from Chinatown to attempt a career in radio and rock and roll writing, what can I say about such a compliment?
Crazy.
INDEX
BIOGRAPHY
Ben Fong-Torres first contributed articles to Rolling Stone in 1968. He joined the staff as news editor in 1969, and began interviewing and profiling top performers and celebrities in popular music and entertainment. In 1974, he won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his interview with Ray Charles. During his 11 years at Rolling Stone, Fong-Torres wrote more than 400 articles, including 37 cover stories, and edited the magazine's music and "Random Notes" sections as well as several anthologies.
Fong-Torres has written for dozens of magazines, including Esquire, GQ (where he was pop music columnist), Playboy, American Film and Harper's Bazaar, and has been a staff feature writer and radio columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was a weekend DJ on the acclaimed rock station KSAN for nine years, and the host of a weekly live arts and interview show, "Fog City Radio." Fong-Torres also wrote and narrated the syndicated radio special "San Francisco: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been," which won a Billboard Award for Broadcast Excellence. He recently served as managing editor of Gavin, a trade magazine for the radio industry.
Fong-Torres continues to write for various national print and online magazines, and currently is editorial director of the music Web site MyPlay.com. His books include The Hits Just Keep on Coming: The History of Top 40 Radio, Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons, and his best-selling memoirs, The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese-American-From Number Two Son to Rock 'n' Roll.
"Rick Nelson: A Travelin' Man at His Own Pace" ©San Francisco Chronicle and reprinted by permission.
"James Brown: The Godfather's Back, With a Bullet!" is reprinted with the permission of BAM MEDIA, INC.
"Joni Mitchell Rocks Again" is reprinted with the permission of Chatelaine.
"Rickie Lee Jones: Say Goodbye to That Slinky Black Dress" is reprinted with the permission of GQ.
"Iggy, We Hardly Knew Ye" is reprinted with the permission of GQ.
p. 8: Collection of the author.
p. 11: Photo by Dianne Fong-Torres.
p. 11: The Corporate Giggle, No. 1, courtesy of Rolling Stone.
p. 12: BAM, December 3, 1976.
p. 12: Collection of the author.
p. 17: Photo by Stephen Paley From Rolling Stone, March 19, 1970. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1970. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 30: Photo courtesy of Baron Wolman Photography.
p. 33: Photo by Henry Diltz From Rolling Stone, April 29, 1971. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1971. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 34: Courtesy Gavin.
p. 44: Photo by unknown From Rolling Stone, August 5, 1971. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1971. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 45: Photo by Dianne Fong-Torres.
p. 49: Courtesy of Cynthia Bowman Public Relations (photo of Jefferson Airplane by Herb Greene).
p. 57: Photo by Annie Leibovitz From Rolling Stone, October 14, 1971. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1971. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 73: Courtesy Gavin.
p. 74: Photo by Edward Bailey
p. 90: Photo courtesy of Globe Photos.
p. 100: CBS, Inc., 1985.
p. 118: Photo by Annie Leibovitz.
p. 119: Photo by Annie Leibovitz.
p. 119: Photo by Dianne Fong-Torres.
p. 131: Photo by Annie Leibovitz.
p. 139: Courtesy Gavin.
p. 140: "What's That Sound?" @ Anchor Books 1976.
p. 149: The Official Dick Clark American Bandstand Yearbook.
p. 158: Photo by Barry Feinstein From Rolling Stone, February 14, 1974. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1974. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 159: "Knockin' on Dylan's Door" ©Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc., 1974 (Cover photography courtesy of Island Records).
p. 172: Courtesy
of Scotti Brothers.
p. 185: Photo by Terry O'Neill.
p. 197: Courtesy of FPG International (Photo of George Harrison ©Research Photographs).
p. 209: Photo by Annie Leibovitz From Rolling Stone, March 27, 1975. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1975. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 210: Collection of the author
p. 221: Photo: Aaron Rapoport/1 989.
p. 233: Photo by Annie Leibovitz From Rolling Stone, June 17, 1976. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1976. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 234: Collection of the author.
p. 244: Courtesy of FPG International (photo of Neil Diamond ©Arthur D'Amario, 1982).
p. 256: Photo by Hiro From Rolling Stone, June 30, 1977. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1977. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 266: Collection of the author.
p. 269: Photo by Annie Leibovitz.
p. 270: Photo by Dianne Fong-Torres.
p. 272: Photo by Annie Leibovitz.
p. 279: People Weekly, September/October 1995 (Cover photograph by ©Herb Greene/Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.
p. 280: Photo by Annie Leibovitz.
p. 289: Photo by Annie Leibovitz From Rolling Stone, February 18, 1982. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1982. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
p. 299: Reuters/Herwig Prammer/Archive Photos.
p. 302: Deborah Feingold/Archive Photos.
p. 306: Express Newspapers/4866/Archive Photos.
p. 313: Globe Photo, Inc.
p. 318: Photo by Dianne Fong-Torres.
p. 319: Robert Scott/Fotos International/Archive Photos.
p. 324: Courtesy of Epic Portrait Associated.
p. 325: BAM, April 11, 1986, Issue No. 229.
p. 331: Archive Photos/Jon Hammer.
p. 335: Photo by Baron Wolman from Rolling Stone, May 17, 1969. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1969. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.