by Jimmy Webb
I would measure my response for a moment. “Well, this second interval is really holding over from the last chord and I just love this ‘aug five’ move, you know?” I banged it out on the piano: kachong, kachong. He would scratch his head for a minute and then reply.
“Well, listen.” Splonk! Splonk! He would play it on his guitar real loud and pull the corners of his mouth down in a badass grimace as he pumped his guitar.
“Well, I think that’s fonkey, just the A chord.” Splonk! Splonk!
He did his best to collaborate but ultimately he would become frustrated with the musical niceties and revert back to the rocker from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The guy who used to hang with the late Hank Williams’s wife and drive around town in Mrs. Williams’s pink Cadillac.
“Let’s get down to the real nitty-gritty,” he would insist. “Let’s make a record, man. Let’s put it in the groove. This isn’t a symphony.” Splonk! Splonk!
I kept my mouth shut as we got ready to go to Monterey. Hal Blaine, Larry, Mike Deasy, Joe, me, and our front man Johnny Rivers, who had been carefully grooming a curly kind of Italian Afro along with a painstakingly maintained mustache and goatee.
At rehearsals, I gradually became responsible for playing a concert chime part in Johnny’s arrangement of Smokey’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” I privately thought this belonged further back, in Hal’s department. The chimes, a sort of keyboard arrangement, were rolled over to the piano within reach. When the conspicuous four beats of silence rolled around just before the dramatic last verse, “So take a good look at my face…,” I was expected to pick up a little wooden hammer and whack the A above middle C. It was awkward. I had to stop playing, halfway rising to my feet, and then locate and clobber the correct chime in a nest of silvery tubes that all pretty much looked the same, all this precisely in the middle of a big rest. As summer grew hotter and the day of the Monterey Pop Festival drew nearer, a nagging question persisted at rehearsals: “Are we going to drag all these goddamn chimes to Monterey just so Webb can bang on one note?”
When the plane took off on June 14, 1967, I carried a single chime across my lap.
Johnny had simply walked over to the rack, rented from S.I.R., and without ceremony, detached the A chime and handed it to me. “This is your responsibility,” he said grimly. “Whatever you do, Jimmy, don’t lose this damn chime!”
In the documentary film Lou Adler created, I can clearly be seen disembarking from the jet and walking down the stairs with a silvery tube under my arm. There was no horde of adoring fans. A half-dozen bored roadies dully watched the nation’s number-one male vocalist walk across an empty expanse of cracked concrete. On the limousine drive to the hotel, Johnny looked out the window at the twisting highway and said a little wistfully, “I wonder where all the hippies are?”
Twenty miles north, a hundred thousand hippies, highwaymen, peasants, and fans slept in fields or vans or standing up, waiting for a moment they could not describe. They would know it when it happened.
For Johnny it was an image crisis. He was clad in hippie apparel, 100 percent. There was the long, curly hair piled up like a helmet, sideburns, goatee, and mustache. He wore the unavoidable leather vest and blue jeans. It was a stark change from the handsome, clean-cut Italian kid with expensive suits and hair by Jay Sebring who had kicked ass at the Whiskey. It was worth trying, breaking the type cast of traditional showbiz, which had become a kind of curse.
Driving toward the venue, traffic slowed to a standstill half a mile out. Here and there stood a perplexed traffic cop, his motorcycle decorated with chains of wildflowers contributed by ladies dressed like Arthurian damsels who danced free-form all around us like Terpsichores.
I could hear distant music like strange thunder. Sometimes bass notes would punch through the din, irrelevant and feeding back. At a snail’s pace, gently nudging our way through a human ocean, we found ourselves at a cyclone fence at least seven feet tall with a gate. The stage loomed beyond like twin launching gantries for moon rockets. At the gate several members of the Monterey Police Department and a score of security guys in red MPF T-shirts eyeballed the kaleidoscope of swirling confetti that was the crowd: the hippies milled in random motion, dressed in every color of the rainbow.
Johnny was riding shotgun and opened his window to talk to a meaty patrolman who shouted down at the goateed figure in the Leon Bennett lid. “Who’s in there?” bellowed the sweaty, red-faced cop trussed up in his full summer uniform and yet unaccountably not wearing a sidearm.
Johnny looked him right in the eye and deadpanned with aplomb and sincerity, “We’ve got Paul McCartney in here,” in his Louisiana twang.
There was a short pause. The policeman peered through the rising dust and the dirty windows and focused on my babyish and Beatle-coiffed face and my De Voss cotton turtleneck shirt.
“Hot damn!” he yelled as his mouth fell open. “Let these sumbitches through!” Scarcely a minute later we were exiting the limo in the strictly controlled compound behind the stage.
Johnny was laughing with tears in his eyes. “Paul McCartney, whoa!”
Harv met us, looking as usual like he had gotten little or no sleep. Lou joined the powwow in unusually high spirits. Even he was impressed by the noise and the crowd. Somewhere along the way Shapiro’s free concert had died. Every skinny-ass had paid to get in. Within seconds we had bright red passes stuck to our jeans that said we could go anywhere and do anything short of walking out on the stage during somebody else’s routine.
The first thing I did was to get out of the rarified backstage area with its twenty-four-hour green room, never-ending buffet, and array of private trailers reserved for important artists. I wanted to see my brothers and sisters, the ones who were going to change the world, if we could amass enough love. I walked into a dizzying storm of faces elevated toward the stage, carrying my shining silver chime like a baton. I had sworn to Johnny that I would keep it in my hands.
Our people were embracing one another … anybody’s other. They sang and clapped their hands. They lay in the hot sunshine and snored. They poured beers over their heads to stay cool. Pretty girls with tan thighs wearing white short shorts perched on the shoulders of college linebackers with “Property of UC Berkeley” stenciled on their bare backs. A lot of the kids had what Jack Nicholson once referred to as “that dreaded bandana look” with calfskin vests and Day-Glo war paint on their cheeks and foreheads. Hair was all over the color spectrum from Kool-Aid red to the ever-popular green, blue, and purple mix. Blacks and whites and Hispanics were fairly evenly represented. Most of the crowd was tripping on anything from Professor Owsley’s acid to mescaline, psilocybin, and peyote as well as other substances unknown. The smell of cannabis was sweet and unilateral.
My mind holds on to some indelible impressions of the Monterey Pop Festival.
Johnny’s guitarist for the day, Wrecking Crew member Mike Deasy, bearded and in a Robin Hood hat with an eagle feather and hand-laced leather tunic complete with a red velvet swag bag tied around his waist. He walked through the crowd like the Fisher King and the kids made a path for the man with the best costume in his pointy Byzantine slippers with little bells announcing his approach. The kids were a swaying ocean of human waves, congregating and then breaking apart. A dance line would appear and then turn into a giant circle only to fragment a moment later. Some stood alone, eyes closed and swaying to the music. If there was a little open space they would dance, though a lot of the music, strictly speaking, wasn’t danceable.
Ravi Shankar on a bright yet cool Sunday afternoon, in the lotus position under a flowered panoply with his tabla player, his fingers singing through the liquid notes of his sitar. All the rockers sat as though at Sunday school, paying careful attention.
Laura Nyro was playing on Saturday night, a shy girl in appearance with large, wide-set and deep brown eyes, long dark hair and dark, old-fashioned, floor-length velvet dress. She looked like a pioneer woman, playing her Martin D-18 and singing
her memorable, chantlike songs. All seemed to be going well until she sat at the grand piano, the only solo piano performance at Monterey. The festival-goers callously booed her off the stage and no gallant guitar-playing rock star rushed on to defend her honor. A couple of beer cans flew. Weeping, she walked past me as I stood in the wings and into the arms of a man later pointed out to me as David Geffen. He would reassemble her.
Allen Ginsberg had first defined the meaning of “hip” in the fifties. He was quoted as saying that to be “hip” is an honorific, meaning “innately understanding and all-tolerant.” “Hippie” is a designation that was coined from this word “hip.” There were a lot of people at Monterey who didn’t actually belong to the club.
Our turn came on the very first night, after a long afternoon of carrying that silver tube with me everywhere I went. We performed after British folk musician Beverley Martyn, a personage that I am no more familiar with today than I was that afternoon. The crowd behaved as abominably to her as they did to the emotionally scarred Laura Nyro.
The fact that the crowd was somewhat discourteous didn’t intimidate Johnny. “All right, let’s rock!” he said to the band as Beverley exited to boos and we took to the boards. I carried my chime and little wooden hammer dutifully to the piano. All of us, Hal, Joe, Larry, Mike, Johnny, and I, stared point-blank into the faces of ten thousand people. My fingers were stuck together as though in preparation for some karate blow. The P.A. shrieked simply “Johnny Rivers!” and Johnny strolled out carrying his beautiful white Stratocaster. We were immediately playing “Help,” a cover of The Beatles hit, and the fear was pushed back by the thumping, pulsating rhythm. As long as Johnny rocked, the audience was ecstatic. When he trotted out his Motown covers, such as “Baby I Need Your Loving,” their attention ebbed and out came the whistles and catcalls. One had the sensation of playing on the edge of a great abyss where only bona fide ear-busting rock ’n’ roll would prevent the whole show from sinking into oblivion. Johnny had plenty of guts. He stuck with the playlist, performing “Poor Side of Town,” such a smash, to a listless and distracted audience.
Finally, it was time for “The Tracks of My Tears.” I anxiously played the whole song waiting for “My smile is my makeup, I wear since my breakup with you…” 2, 3, 4, with one eye on my hammer and one on my chime. The song’s rest came. Chime on the second count. I assumed a half crouch, grabbed my little wooden hammer from the top of the grand, and lifted the chime from the floor barely in time to take a mighty swing at the little metal lip that ran around the top. I swung and hit—at best—a grounder. The timid ka-ping that issued off the miss-hit chime caused Johnny to shoot me a look straight from Sicily. I sat down suddenly seeking anonymity but I needn’t have worried. My big moment didn’t register with the crowd. We left the stage after playing “Secret Agent Man,” which the audience liked, and we received a warm round of applause.
At the end of the first day, Paul Simon and Artie Garfunkel were just two guys and a guitar after a day of loud, rigorous music. Their perfect two-part harmony drifted into a tired crowd of sunburned and psychic voyagers come to port. Couples hugged each other as the two sang: “Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Remember me to one who lives there…” And there we were, we happy few with the luck and the buck to make it to Scarborough Fair. Paul and Artie were a highlight.
The next night, Otis Redding closed. He took the stage and presented probably the most nuclear-powered forty-five minutes in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Some would say it was properly rhythm and blues and some would say lines were blurring. It was ironic that after all the costumes, after the Who blew up the whole goddamn stage, after Janis Joplin had torn her voice into a tattered flag, after Springfield and Canned Heat and Quicksilver and Steve Miller, it was the humble and unpretentious man from Dawson, Georgia, who is most remembered when people speak of the festival. The crowd stood and beat their hands raw and screamed themselves hoarse through his entire performance. This was the moment they had been unable to describe, the one they had come for.
The closing slot of the entire festival was reserved for the Mamas and the Papas. Just before their expected triumph a relatively unknown guitarist named Jimi Hendrix was booked with his “Experience.” Jimi looked like a suburban housewife’s worst nightmare or most exquisite daydream, an avenging wraith, streaming plumes and scarves, the colors of the rainbow, bracelets and breastplate, a warrior poet standing alone in front of a stack of amplifiers that towered several feet over his head, played like a demon. “Purple Haze” reverberated over the Monterey Peninsula and I found myself looking at him in awe. How could one person create so much goddamn sound?
He played guitar like he had four arms. Some of the deep feedback techniques and super chords were created electronically, but live on stage! The show reached a climax of cacophonia. It was a tone poem to the apocalypse. Johnny was standing backstage with Lou Adler and a fire marshal in full regalia watching the increasing mania. Pyrotechnics were being routinely detonated on stage and the fire marshal was there to watch for any illegal shenanigans. Hendrix was remarkably accommodating. With his amps turned up to S.E.D. (Serious Ear Damage) he started swinging his Strat over his head and pounding it into the stage. The guitar’s destruction was audible in head-rending impacts and shrieks of protest from the pickups and amps. After a few hefty swings there was a pile of kindling and guitar strings in front of him. The crowd was rabid, he had gotten them in the mood, and now they wanted to break something.
Jimi kneeled down, took out a can of lighter fluid, and squirted the entire contents onto the remains of the guitar. He took out a matchbook. The fire marshal freaked and started to dive onto the stage yelling, “Shit! He can’t do that!” Lou Adler, wily as ever, dared restrain him.
“Hold on, officer, that’s just part of the show. That’s just his act for cryin’ out loud!” The official hesitated a half second. Jimi dropped the lighted match onto the saturated mess, and it exploded into a ball of fire big enough to set flame to the whole festival. Jimi must have taken a gigantic leap as he released the match because he came through unscathed. The crowd lost their chops. They had seen what they came to see. They screamed, they salivated, they pumped fists, they roared like ten thousand lions. This was it. This was the high point. The Monterey Pop Festival was officially over.
If there was ever a moment more inappropriate for a performance by the Mamas and the Papas, Adler and Phillips had managed to create it. So as some of the crowd began to pack up and head for the highway and journalists rushed to meet their deadlines, the remaining crowd heard what the real Mamas and Papas sounded like without the reverb cocktail and three layers of hand-edited vocals.
Johnny Rivers’ performance was later omitted entirely from the film Monterey Pop by editors John Phillip and Lou Adler. Our world-famous Wrecking Crew was thus ignominiously passed over as well. If this was peace and love then you didn’t want to mingle with a less tolerant group of friends.
1972
I was on my way to London to play the Albert Hall. It would be recorded on multitrack and hopefully become an album. The concert was already sold out. This would only be my second attempt at performing with a big orchestra. The Albert Hall was as round and nearly as big as the Roman Colosseum. Derek Taylor had promoted the hell out of the show and Warner Bros. was generously continuing to sponsor me. Derek and Harry met me at Heathrow in a new Daimler limousine, liberally stocked with brandy and cocaine.
We had a week or so to get ready. These preparations consisted primarily of rehearsing the arrangements on at least two occasions with the whole orchestra, a group of some eighty men and women. Sound was checked over and over, the mic-ing of the band and piano accomplished. A run-through of the entire show with lighting cues was preplanned for the day before the performance.
The whole week I was running around like the proverbial headless chicken from BBC II to BBC I radio and television as required. I did a morning talk show on Channel Three and was having a terrible
time with my voice because of all the yakking. One of my fellow guests was Twiggy, who fixed me up with her patented vocal cure: tea with honey, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Twiggy was wonderfully sweet and intelligent, and her cure did work somewhat, but it seemed inevitable that I would go into the all-important concert hoarse. I spent light-years in the Tardis booths of BBC Radio talking to Scotland and Wales and Yorkshire, spreading the word that I was in England, and then finally I was done. Any more talking and there would have been no show.
The day of the performance I holed up at my hotel with lots of tea and honey. Harry came over to help me plan the after-concert blowout at my place and insisted we come up with some decent coke because “I think George is coming.” He meant George Harrison. Harry had a guy’s number and said we could go fifty-fifty on the “girl,” a hipster name for coke. “Boy” was heroin. “I could just call the dude and have him drop the girl off at the hotel.” I agreed, trying to confine communication to facial expressions, hand motions, and grunts.
Halfway through the afternoon a rakish-looking young ruffian appeared at the door with a very substantial package and I gave him the three hundred pounds Harry and I had put together and closed the door as quickly as possible. I had no interest in drugs for the moment but cracked the wrapper enough to get a finger file inside for a sample. My impromptu analysis of the contents was that it was one part Drano, one part Novocain, and one part Benzedrine. It was one of the most bald-faced frauds I’ve ever encountered. I put it in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the bedroom where I was sure no one could possibly find it, threw some underwear over it as a further obstacle, and shoved a chair up against the dresser just to make sure it wasn’t disturbed. I intended to show it to Harry and insist he get our money back.