Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  We woulda done a lot better if we’d stayed with Barry. I firmly believe that. He made some recordings of us. They sounded good. No one knows where those are. His sound was better. See, he shoulda produced the Buffalo Springfield. Barry was much more artistic than Dickie. That’s the guy—he shoulda had it.

  Energetic, gung ho and a bit of a hothead, the diminutive Richard “Dickie” Davis ran lights at Sunset Strip clubs like the Whisky A Go-Go and the Trip. He was also Barry Friedman’s neighbor, and when Friedman began to negotiate the publishing deal with Screen Gems, Stephen Stills called him over to take a look at the contract. After surveying the low royalty rates and finding out the band would lose the rights to their name, he told the Springfield not to sign. The end result was, Davis said, “Barry never spoke to me again, and the Springfield were sort of my responsibility.”

  On the strength of Chris Hillman’s word, the Springfield got a gig opening for the Grass Roots on May 3 (or possibly May 2), 1966, * at the Whisky, the hottest club on Sunset Strip. There, amid bikinied dancers in cages, the Springfield wowed all of Los Angeles (except the lion king himself, David Crosby, who initially told Hillman they “sucked”). A fight to sign the Springfield ensued, and the discussions were navigated by Richard Davis, a novice to the music business. The Springfield came close to signing with Lenny Waronker at Warner Bros.—Davis said he met with him to discuss Jack Nitzsche producing the band—but at the last minute, the notorious management team of Greene and Stone entered the picture. Overwhelmed by the deal machinations, Davis had called upon them for advice, and they quickly took over. It would change everything for Buffalo Springfield. “Greene and Stone,” said Bruce Palmer with a sigh. “They were the sleaziest, most underhanded, backstabbing motherfuckers in the business. They were the best.”

  “Reckless Abandon—they’re the 1993 version of the Buffalo Springfield. This kid plays as good as Neil Young, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. You’re gonna freak. Geffen is going crazy over ’em.” Charlie Greene is on the phone, talking a mile a minute in that thick Brooklyn accent, demo tapes of his latest discovery blasting in the background. You gotta love Charlie. I’m trying to interview him, and he’s hawking some band like I’m Ahmet Ertegun. A true manager.

  Greene and Stone, Charlie will tell you, were the greatest fucking managers that ever roamed the earth. Greene and Stone gave the world Buffalo Springfield, Iron Butterfly and Sonny and Cher. Greene and Stone were the first to smoke bananas. Listen to Charlie’s rap on how he brought “heavy” into the lexicon of hippie lingo: “The Butterfly had this new album called Heavy. So I take it in to our deejay at KRLA, the ‘Real’ Don Steele, and I say, ‘Look—after you play a Beatles record, just say ‘HEAVY.’ When you play anything that is really happening, say ‘HEAVY.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Do me a favor—just do it.’ And all of a sudden, ‘heavy’ became something other than a measure of weight. I invented heavy.” The hype is so fucking funny, who gives a shit if it’s true.

  Greene and Stone were happening guys on Sunset Strip in 1966. They had a limo. An $18,500 Lincoln limousine with a Blackglama mink interior, a bar with full sterling silver service and a goddamn eight-track player to boot, all presided over by an elegant white-gloved black chauffeur with a sideline in all sorts of contraband.

  Inside their headquarters at 7715 Sunset Boulevard, chaos reigned twenty-four hours a day. Band members, bill collectors and supergroupies all took turns trying to get past June Nelson, the hip, manic secretary who was usually on the phone to some deejay, plugging the latest Greene and Stone sensation. Back in their respective offices—connected by means of a secret door—were Charlie and Brian, dressed in some outrageous approximation of hippie chic, wired on God knows what and jazzing some beleaguered record exec on their next big thing.

  They were the classic good cop/bad cop routine. Short, tightly wound Charlie, a walking explosion of hype, twirling a trademark drumstick between his fingers with a gun never out of reach; * and tall, too thin Brian, the quiet bookkeeper who waited for the dust to clear, then drove home the terms. “I’d dance on the desk and he played the businessman,” said Greene proudly.

  Despite the roach-clip personas, the pair certainly weren’t hippies, but they were far from square. Greene and Stone held the keys to a world many mid-sixties rockers found unfathomable: establishment showbiz. “We weren’t really rock-and-rollers,” said Stone. “We came from the school of dressing like Sammy Davis Jr. and Bobby Darin—New York sharp. Me and Charlie came out of a whole other milieu.”

  As teenagers they had broken into the publicity racket running errands for stars. They opened their own agency in 1959, amassing bills all over Manhattan in the process. They fled to California the following year and, after a series of mishaps found themselves broke and homeless—until they snuck onto a huge production lot known as Revue Studios one drunken night. From an empty dressing room furnished with office supplies from the prop department, the pair operated an on-the-lot publicity firm right under the noses of studio executives, until they were thrown off the premises by security guards. “I remember they forced us to take the typewriter,” said Stone. “It was their typewriter.”

  The dynamic duo then decided to open a folk/jazz nightclub, the Hootenanny. The club was miles from nowhere and the employees robbed them blind, leaving Greene and Stone to contemplate another career change. “The day the club closed we thought, ‘What are we gonna do now?’” said Stone. “‘Hey—how about the record business?’”

  Greene and Stone began bankrolling sessions for producer/arranger Jack Nitzsche, and it was at a Darlene Love recording date that they first encountered Sonny and Cher. Masterminding a meteoric ascent, they sold the duo—together and separately—to every record executive in town, including Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., who already had them under contract (albeit unsigned) as Caesar and Cleo. It was Ahmet Ertegun who wound up with “I Got You, Babe,” a monster hit that cemented Greene and Stone’s relationship with Atlantic Records. “Sonny and Cher was Ahmet’s first white rock and roll act ever, other than Bobby Darin,” said Stone.

  Sonny and Cher had hit after hit, yet somehow finances remained shaky at 7715 Sunset Boulevard. “The back offices overlooked the parking lot, so Charlie and Brian could watch their cars getting repossessed,” recalls Marcy Greene, Charlie’s wife. “I’d be standing in front of the window going, ‘Oh, Charles, there’s a man getting into your Corvette.’ He’d buzz Brian on the intercom and say, ‘They just got the car—we gotta go get another one!’ In an hour they’d be back, and now they had a Caddy convertible.” Things got so desperate that Charlie had their royalty checks sent directly from BMI to Martoni’s, a music-biz watering hole. “I was buying drinks for every motherfucking disc jockey who lived,” he groaned.

  Even while Charlie and Marcy were getting married at the ritzy Plaza Hotel, a prestigious event attended by Atlantic executives Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the IRS was padlocking Greene and Stone’s Los Angeles offices for back taxes. After the ceremony, Greene had to go to Wexler and ask for a very sizable loan. “The man just attended our wedding, and now Charlie needs seventy-eight thousand dollars,” said Marcy. “I mean, this is a very expensive night.” *

  Tumbling into this insanity came Buffalo Springfield, five naïve kids hungry for success. According to Charlie Greene, it was the limo that got them. “Stephen once told me, ‘I saw you driving down Sunset Boulevard in that limousine and I knew I had to have you. That’s what I wanted, man—those fucking guys in the limo.’” Added Richard Davis, “Greene and Stone were all flash and sizzle. They had the act down. Being counterculture business types, they were one of us … so it seemed.”

  So it seemed. Greene and Stone immediately hyped the band to Atlantic. Jerry Wexler remembers getting the call. The renowned producer of much of Atlantic’s R&B and soul had a profound distaste for dealing with what he called “the rockoids” and passed the information on to his partner, Ahmet Ertegun. Balding, goateed, Ertegun was a rare commodity in the low-rent
world of the music business: a gentleman.

  “When Ahmet walked into the room,” Young told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame audience in 1995, “you got good.” The son of a Turkish diplomat, Ertegun was capable of charming everyone from Otis Redding to heads of state, and beneath the gravelly hipster voice lurked a killer businessman. New York-based, Atlantic Records had become famous for the sophisticato R&B of such artists as Ray Charles, Ruth Brown and the Drifters, but in the mid-sixties Ertegun was anxious to expand into the burgeoning white rock scene. After Greene and Stone delivered the gold mine of Sonny and Cher, Ertegun was all ears, and once in L.A., he was knocked out by a short demo tape the Springfield had cut at Capitol with Barry Friedman—Ertegun recalls Young’s “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong” as one of the songs—and met with the band at Greene and Stone’s office.

  “There were other people interested in the Springfield,” said Ertegun. “I had to make a really strong pitch to get them, and it wasn’t over money—it was over ‘Who’s going to understand our music.’ And they finally believed in me.

  “I remember I sat on the floor with them and we chatted. We hit it off…. I think they liked the fact that I sat down on the floor. When I like an artist, I treat them like a star, and to me these guys were exceptional stars. I thought they were going to be a revolutionary kind of group. It was fantastic to have three great guitar players who were also three outstanding lead singers.”

  Ahmet was in, and he would remain an ally to the bitter end. Over the next two years he would forge a particularly tight bond with Stephen Stills. Ertegun didn’t deny that Neil Young was a bit difficult to figure, both personally and commercially. “Neil was a very, very different person,” said Ertegun, who recalls that Young had one last question before that first meeting was over. “I’m a golfer,” he told the head of his new label. “Can you get me in a country club out here?”

  “Stephen’s poetry was earthy, based more on the blues, with a penchant towards Latin grooves,” said Ertegun. “Neil’s music was much more abstract. He had a lot of musical thoughts which didn’t make sense to me right away. His voice was odd, shaky. It’s like looking at a Cubist painting in 1920—if you just look at one Picasso, you would say, ‘I don’t know what this is.’ But when you see the whole body of work, it’s a great thing.”

  On June 8, 1966, the band entered into a contractual agreement with Greene and Stone. In a deal that mirrored Sonny and Cher’s, Buffalo Springfield were leased to Atlantic’s subsidiary label Atco, but actually signed to Greene and Stone’s label, York/Pala Records.

  Included in the deal was a publishing arrangement that would cause some acrimony down the line. Atlantic wound up with 37.5 percent of the rights, as did Greene and Stone, through their company Ten East. Through Springalo Toones, a publishing company created by the managers, the Springfield wound up with only 25 percent, which was to be split six ways (Richard Davis, considered an auxiliary member of the band, was given a share).

  Greene and Stone set the band up with instruments, apartments and expense accounts, enabling Young to buy another Gretsch and pay for a $12.50-a-week one-room apartment in Commodore Gardens, a complex not far from Hollywood Boulevard. Lastly, Greene and Stone appointed themselves producers of Buffalo Springfield’s records. “They slowly talked us out of Jack Nitzsche and into themselves as producers,” said Davis. “It was probably the biggest mistake that happened.”

  The buzz on the Springfield spread like wildfire. John Hartmann, an excitable young William Morris agent, went with Greene and Stone to a gig in San Diego and “decided to put my entire reputation on this act.” Returning to the staid confines of his very uptight agency, Hartmann and fellow agent Skip Taylor concocted a notorious interoffice memo that nearly got them fired. According to Hartmann, it read, TO ALL AGENTS: THE COAST, NEW YORK, CHICAGO. RE: BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD. PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT THEY ARE THE NEXT BIG THING TO HAPPEN TO THE WORLD. BUT DON’T WORRY—THEY’RE IN OUR HERD. At the bottom of the memo was the real blasphemy: a buffalo, with the William Morris logo tattooed on his posterior.

  “I got yelled at by my boss,” remembered Hartmann. “I said, ‘Yessir—I won’t do it again.’ He didn’t know I’d already sent out the second one.” Hartmann would snag the Springfield a gig opening for the Rolling Stones at the Hollywood Bowl—a neat trick for a band that didn’t even have a record out—and lined up six guest shots on the conservative Hollywood Palace TV variety show, unheard of for a rock band at the time. “John Hartmann,” as Young put it, “was on the side of the Buffalo.”

  Hartmann threw his weight behind Greene and Stone, and this, along with the clout of Ahmet Ertegun and Atlantic Records, should’ve pushed Buffalo Springfield over the top. Instead, things immediately began to fall apart. Stephen Stills would say ruefully, “That’s when we peaked, at the Whisky, and after then it was all downhill.”

  —Was your apartment at Commodore Gardens a cool place?

  It was for me. It was really my first own place. Everything was kinda psychedelic. I had a blue lightbulb in my refrigerator. Got this bamboo wall-covering stuff at Pier 9. Went down with Donna and Vicki and bought a whole shitload of stuff. Grass mats on the wall. Very funky. My apartment looked like the dressing room at the Fillmore.

  That’s when we were playin’ the Whisky A Go-Go. I was able to pay for my own place for a while—that was a first. It was fun. I got so far in arrears that I skipped out on the rent.

  I wrote “Out of My Mind” and “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong” at Commodore Gardens on Orchid Avenue. “Flying on the Ground” wasn’t written for anybody in particular. It’s about drugs. It’s about bein’ straight and takin’ drugs—mixed in with life.

  If you want to know me and you don’t wanna get high, you won’t get to know me. That’s kinda what that song’s about. We can’t be together because we’re too different. It’s like “I love you, but you’re not with me.”

  “Stephen is the leader but we all are,” it said ominously on the back of the band’s debut album. This nebulous organizational concept would lead to trouble, but early on Stills was considered the driving force of the group. “Hey, listen, as far as I’m concerned, Buffalo Springfield was Stephen Stills’s band,” Richie Furay has said over and over. “His creativity at the time was incredible.”

  Eve Babitz, a writer who created two of the Springfield’s distinctive collage album covers, was involved with Stills briefly and remembers his maniacal intensity. “Stephen used to play Buffalo Springfield records over and over on my horrible mono record player so he could hear how it would sound on a car radio. He told me from the day I met him, ‘I want to write great songs, be very popular and have lots of groupies.’”

  “Success, stardom—Stephen wanted to hang out in London with the Beatles as soon as possible,” said Richard Davis. Unfortunately, Stills was in a band with Neil Young, whose methods and goals were considerably more ambiguous. The cowboy and the Indian were soon at war. At one Whisky rehearsal, Davis remembers Stills saying, “I want to do my song”; “I don’t know why, but it struck me. It was the first time I heard an attitude.” Stills not only saw his role in the band as singer/songwriter, but “Stephen wanted songs where he could play lead guitar,” said Davis.

  “There were major fights at the Whisky,” said Donna Port. “Screaming matches. Stephen would pick on the stupidest little things—‘You missed a note!’ Neil was not that petty. He’d have to think to come back at him.” Port and her friend Vicki Cavaleri, both waitresses at the club, had instructions from the band to listen very carefully to the two musicians during each set so they could agree or disagree in the dressing-room battles that followed. “It was like we were supposed to keep score,” said Cavaleri.

  As long as the friction between Stills and Young played out in front of an audience, it could produce artistic dividends. “He’s on top of the beat and I’m on the back of it,” Young told Sylvie Simmons in 1996. “It was a constant battle.” Those fortunate enough to see the Sp
ringfield in their heyday recall the call-and-response between the two guitarists as thrilling, with Stills provoking incendiary leads out of Young. “Neil would just fuckin’ smoke amps,” said roadie Miles Thomas. “He’d be on eleven every night.”

  But Young wanted to sing the songs he wrote, and his strange vocal abilities weren’t a hit, particularly with Stephen. “Stills was out of his mind if Neil was singing,” said Brian Stone. “The band didn’t even want him to sing harmony.” * Donna Port remembers one gig where Young nervously approached the mike to sing a song and Stills, in an attempt to be funny, apologized to the audience in advance for his bandmate’s voice. “After the show, Neil went into the dressing room and broke down,” she said.

  Many feel it was Stills’s insecurities driving the conflicts. “I always felt Stephen had something to prove, that he was as good or better than Neil Young,” said Nurit Wilde, a friend of the band. “I felt Neil didn’t have to prove who he was musically. I don’t think Stephen understood his own talent.”

  Wilde believed that once the band got into the studio, Charlie Greene “really tried to encourage a rivalry between Stephen and Neil. It wasn’t like ‘Okay, today we’ll do this Buffalo Springfield song,’ it was ‘Today we’ll do Stephen’s song. Tomorrow we’ll do Neil’s song.’ I think Charlie felt he’d get optimum work out of it. Instead there was competitiveness.”

  Intensifying the conflict was backseat driving by the dominating mothers of the two musicians. “Rassy would come up to me and say, ‘My son’s the star of the group, they should do more of Neil’s stuff, they never let Neil sing,’” recalled Elliot Roberts, who attempted to manage the band briefly. “If there was a pamphlet or an article that said, ‘Lead guitar, Stephen Stills,’ she freaked. Stephen’s mother was the same way.” Both Rassy Young and Talitha Stills were prone to drink, and their quarreling often turned, in the words of Roberts, “bitter, cutting, drunken, mean.”