Live Fast, Die Young

by Chris Price

  More cooing all round. What a find! The Road Mangler's front door! For rock and roll bounty hunters it didn't get much better than this.

  Music, it almost goes without saying, is the product of the people that make it. But it's also the product of the place in which it is made. At The Alley those two things came together in an extraordinarily powerful way. Stumbling upon a direct connection to the very inspiration for our travels in so secret a setting as this caught me completely unawares. I nearly blubbed.

  Finally Joe reflected on the magic of the place. 'Every room looks like it's from a movie, except that a set dresser could spend a lifetime trying to get this look and they wouldn't because it's real. There's something quite unsettling about it. That there's somewhere so atmospheric that's just a place to hang out. You feel like it's the entrance way to some sort of ride. Is this queuing time fifteen minutes for the rock and rollercoaster ride?'

  The rock and rollercoaster ride, it turned out, was just beginning.

  20 OCTOBER

  ANARCHY IN THE USA

  I like to sleep. I have a young son, so it has become a commodity as prized as gold. Except that I don't ever spend an entire day in a daze because I didn't get enough gold the previous night. Chris is – and I didn't know this until, ooh, let's see, er... today – an insomniac.

  Insomnia is no doubt a debilitating and madly frustrating condition, and all you insomniacs out there, you have my sympathies. What I don't understand though is why insomniacs go to such lengths to explain to the somnolent among us just how badly they slept, quite how grating they found their pillow or how much another person's mere breathing prevented them from passing through the fluffy gates to the Land of Nod. Let's say you go to a party, plop yourself down on a sofa and get into conversation with someone who is in a wheelchair. If they were they to start ticking you off for sitting on a sofa next to them as if it were a gratuitous waste of two perfectly good legs when they had none, you would think them a tad unreasonable. Insomniacs, however, never fail to start my day by telling me how awfully they slept, how I don't understand what it's like, and how my snoring sounds like Chewbacca with his tackle caught in a blender.

  As I said, today I found out that Chris is an insomniac. Because when I woke up he told me. And all that other stuff too.

  I made a brief trip to the bathroom to check my swelling tonsils, and then we headed out in search of breakfast. We had a day to kill in LA before the drive to Joshua Tree late in the afternoon, time enough to do a little more sightseeing, possibly even some celebrity spotting. We made a pretty good start as we exited the lift in the hotel lobby by almost bumping into Lyle Lovett waiting to go up. All those hit songs, I thought, all those arenas sold out, critical acclaim, and yet forever destined to be known as 'the funny looking bloke that shagged Julia Roberts'. (Better than being known as 'the funny looking bloke that didn't shag Julia Roberts' I suppose.)

  When you walk out of the Four Seasons Hotel – and for that matter most LA hotels – you become acutely aware that you are both 'somewhere' and 'nowhere'. You are geographically in the heart of the world's entertainment capital, but psychologically the fact you're not heading out for a meeting with Spielberg and Darabont means that you know you don't really belong.

  The other reason you realise you're nowhere is that you're walking. Much has been written about LA's love of the car, so it feels a tad clichéd to bang on about it here, but the usual anti-California rant goes like this:

  'Seriously, they get in the car to go to the shops round the corner.'

  'Really? What terrible, wasteful, polar-bear-killing scumbags they are.'

  But there really is no choice but to drive. The shop around the corner is at least thirty minutes' drive away. Not because of jams, but because the streets are huge, and long, and many, and long, and huge. The city evolved alongside the car in a state where space was to be celebrated and exploited. Why put shops next to each other when gas is tuppence a gallon? Spread 'em out, enjoy the drive. See the city as you shop. So don't think of LA as a road planner's wet dream. Think of it as an open air mall where you use a car instead of a shopping trolley. That's how the city has ended up this way.

  Inspired by the surroundings, Chris was quoting lots of Beverly Hills Cop. Never having been a fan of the film, I was a little confused by this and kept mistaking his one-liners for genuine conversation – bananas in tailpipes, wrecked buffets at the Harrow Club, and how the average American has five pounds of undigested red meat in his bowels by the time he's fifty.

  'Must be all those hamburgers,' I said.

  'You're supposed to say "Why are you telling me this?"'

  'Oh. Sorry.'

  'You really don't know it at all do you?'

  'Nope. And I never will.'

  The story of the making of Beverly Hills Cop has been frequently told. Sylvester Stallone, hot on the heels of the success of First Blood and Rocky III (but before he descended into arm-wrestling pics), decided he was going to make an LA action flick. Creative differences caused him to abandon the project. So off he goes to make Cobra with his vision of what Beverly Hills Cop should have been, and in comes Eddie Murphy who, so the story goes, improvised most of the great performances in the film.

  I have various issues with it, chief amongst them being that it's not very funny and therefore I don't see why so many people I know get all whoop-de-doo about it. And secondly the claim that 'the best bits were improvised'. A great many performances are purportedly improvised, with the claim invariably coming from the actor. Which all seems rather disrespectful to the writer, and greedy on behalf of the star. If Eddie Murphy was that good off the top of his head, how come he couldn't do it ever again? And lastly, as I dismount my soapbox, I ask you to consider a genuinely improvised performance by way of comparison. Marlon Brando did Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now right off the top of his tubby dome. Rambling, nonsensical, incoherent – that is what improvisation looks like. So I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Daniel Petrie Junior for his work on the Beverly Hills Cop screenplay. Because even though I don't like it, he deserves the credit.

  But back to the breakfast quest. Dizzy with the heat, and determined not to let our growling stomachs go unanswered, we carried on. And on. And then we found ourselves, instead of filling our bellies, outside Doug Weston's Troubadour, where Chris got very excited and distracted us from our hunger with a history lesson.

  On the 25 August 1970 a British singer-songwriter just starting to make a name for himself in the UK, but who was so far a complete unknown in the US, played to an almost empty room at a venue on LA's Santa Monica Boulevard. Another unknown by the name of Glenn Frey, who would later find fame, fortune and much else besides in a band called the Eagles, caught a few minutes of the visiting performer's set, having only interrupted his beer in the bar out front to go to the gents. Mesmerised by what he had seen, Frey dragged his drinking partner through to the room at the back of the venue to see the rest of the set. In doing so they witnessed the first performance on American soil of what would turn out to be one of the most enduring – not to mention glittering – careers that the music business has ever seen.

  The performer was Elton John, and the venue was Doug Weston's Troubadour. Six consecutive performances at the venue, each more explosive and more talked about than the last, catapulted Elton from visiting unknown to chart-straddling superstar in under a week, and sealed the Troubadour's reputation as the most influential popular music venue in the US, if not the world. That another Troubadour ace face and soon-to-be-colossus-of-country rock, Glenn Frey, was there to see it happen only added to the sense of magic that surrounded the place.

  And our aimless meanderings around Beverly Hills, in a vain attempt at finding some breakfast, had seen us vainly and aimlessly meandering right past its front door. This place is a major entry in the rock and roll history books and as such it had been close to the top of the list of places to seek out when we reached LA. So it came as a shock to find it here,
bang in the middle of, well, not very much, as the most diverting places our breakfast quest had thrown up so far were a dry cleaners, a change management firm called Shift Happens and a warehouse store specialising in pet food.

  But it wasn't Elton John, or even the Eagles particularly, that we were interested in. For a decade prior to the epoch-changing moment described above, the Troubadour had been steadily growing its reputation as the birthplace of countless new West Coast stars from Jackson Browne to Linda Ronstadt, Don McLean to Joni Mitchell, with Doug Weston as the dictatorial, truculent midwife at the helm. Other regulars at the club included Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, James Taylor and Carole King. Most importantly though, for us at least, the Troubadour was the closest thing there was to a birthplace of country rock. This was where The Byrds and the Burritos were born. It was also, regrettably, where they in turn gave birth to a bastard child called the Eagles.

  It was at the Troubadour that a young David Crosby announced to Jim McGuinn (later to change his name to Roger – presumably because it had a much sexier ring to it {The truth is even crazier than that. In 1965 McGuinn joined a 'spiritual association' called Subud, whose leader and founding member Bapak (that's 'leader and founding member' – rings alarm bells straight away, doesn't it?) told him he should change his name, suggesting that something beginning with R would help him to 'vibrate with the universe'. McGuinn came up with a series of names reflecting his fascination with aviation and science fiction, such as Ramjet, Rocket and Roger (as in 'Roger that, Charlie foxtrot'). Bapak selected Roger because it was the only 'real' name on the list.}) and Gene Clark that they were going to form a group. That group became The Byrds, who would define the marriage of folk and rock by releasing a version of Bob Dylan's as yet unrecorded 'Mr Tambourine Man', bagging themselves a number one hit on both sides of the Atlantic into the bargain. All of a sudden folk music was commercial, and the new breed of hipsters, shaking off the folksy image in all but the way they looked, were loving it. Crosby typified the ambitious, entrepreneurial spirit that now flowed through the nascent LA music industry, and the Troubadour was the most natural home for it. It was a place where connections could be made, deals done, contracts signed; a place where a determined individual with a handful of songs and a little coke could make friends and influence people. It was where you got on.

  Later the club would become the epicentre of another growing LA scene, this time the amalgamation of country and rock – first when The Byrds were joined by Gram Parsons and 'went country' and later with Poco, formed from the ashes of Buffalo Springfield. Finally, Gram's post-Byrds project The Flying Burrito Brothers found a more soulful take on the country/rock hybrid, but none of these prototype twang-rockers found any real commercial success, chiefly on account of Gram's voracious appetite for hard drugs, and the fact that his head was jammed so far up Keith Richards' behind for most of the time that his own band became something of a distraction.

  But the Troubadour also had another more personal musical connection for me in the form of the song which brought me to this music in the first place. 'Different Drum' was written by the venue's former 'hootmaster' (and later Monkee) Mike Nesmith, who had given the song to his girlfriend and Troubadour debutante Linda Ronstadt, who in turn had a hit with it in 1967. It came to my attention, like so many of my musical mainstays from the time before I was born, via The Lemonheads' Evan Dando, who covered it on Favourite Spanish Dishes. I loved it instantly. Along with The Lemonheads' cover of Gram's 'Brass Buttons' on the Lovey album, it had been the key which unlocked the door to virtually all the American artists I have since come to love.

  Joe insisted I try a piece to camera for our imaginary documentary. Despite a touch of nerves about the prospect of trying our hand at presenting, we felt confident that two wizened media execs such as us had seen too much broadcasting talent in action over the years not to have picked up a trick or two. Really, how hard could it be?

  It was then that our preparation for filming – that is, the complete absence of any preparation at all, not even say, working out how to use the camera or thinking about what you're going to say before recording – threw up a few early lessons in documentary film-making.

  I fumbled for something to say while Joe squinted into the viewfinder. 'Rolling!'

  'Behind me is the legendary Troubadour music venue, where lots of really legendary things happened during the sixties, not to mention the seventies and likewise even the eighties… Sorry, I'll start that again.'

  Shit. This wasn't as easy as Kevin McCloud made it look. Take two.

  'Behind me is Doug Weston's legendary venue, the Troubadour, the home of live music in Los Angeles for nearly half a century,' – better – 'and pheeeewy, this place was exciting in the sixties.'

  Joe dropped the lens a couple of inches and peered over the top of the controls. 'Gonna stop you there mate. Wasn't sure about "pheeeewy".'

  'Yep, sorry, not sure what happened there. Couldn't think of anything to say.'

  'Take your time,' he said, settling into the role of producer-director-cameraman far more comfortably than I was into the role of presenter. He hoisted the camera back onto his shoulder. 'Rolling!'

  I paused for a second to collect my thoughts. All it needed was something about Elton John, a bit about folk rock and The Byrds, and a couple of sentences on Gram's connection to the place. No problem.

  'Doug Weston's legendary Troubadour music venue, the home of live music in LA for nearly fifty years. It was here that Elton John became dead… er, famous, the Byrds did likewise and … pheeeewy, there was music aplenty.'

  Phewy? Music aplenty? What was going on? I hadn't used either phrase before in my entire life, ever. One more try.

  'Boy oh boy, am I excited to be here… Shit!' Apparently I was now filing a Blue Peter special report on the birthplace of country rock.

  'Sorry mate.' I squirmed. 'This may take some time. The light on top of the camera is erasing everything just as I open my mouth. Mind if we pop back to the hotel for a bit to do some research?'

  Which is how we came to learn a valuable lesson about talking to camera. Work out what you're going to say, write it down even, so the laser beam can't make you say things you've only ever heard in Roy Rogers movies, then say it. We got better, honest.

  Once we'd finished admiring the Troubadour (a less time-consuming pursuit than you'd imagine – when the history lesson is over you realise it's just a closed-up bar and you're still hungry), we decided we needed a tour guide. It was time to visit Punk Rock Mike.

  'Punk Rock Mike' is not one of those tiresome, ironic nicknames in the vein of Robin Hood's Little John or Bill 'The Hotness' Gates. Punk Rock Mike is thus known because punk rock – specifically the contemporary form of punk rock coming out of Los Angeles, California – is his life. It's the reason for his abundant and impressive tattoos. It's the reason he married his punk-band-fronting wife Stacey, and it's the reason he is the host of Radio 1's Punk Show. Mike lived in London for many years and recently moved back to the States, which is why Punk Rock Mike with his punk rock wife and his punk rock tattoos lived with... his dad.

  Mike's home was in Culver City, which is in fact not really a city but one of the many suburbs which have coalesced into what we now know as Los Angeles. Like Tooting but with film studios instead of kebab shops.

  After introducing us to his genial dad, a retired Welshman who had been one of Hollywood's finest location managers, Mike offered to show us around his manor while we captured the tour on film. Punk Rock Mike may be steeped in the ethos of London circa 1976, but he's very much a twenty-first-century tour guide. We jumped in the wheels and drove all of two yards.

  'Pull over. We've reached our first landmark.'

  'Really?'

  'Yup. Gentlemen, that piece of sidewalk right there is where Erick Estrada sat me on his bike during a break in filming for CHiPs. You can carry on driving.'

  Three right turns later we approached the entrance to a huge golf course – or
something that looked very like one – that looms over Mike's house. The sign above it read 'Holy Cross Cemetery'.

  Mike was very proud of his turf, even – in fact especially – turf that contained dead people. And understandably so. The roll call of famous and infamous personalities interred in the hill overlooking his pool was impressive. It was an enormous place. So big in fact that after twenty minutes of driving around we couldn't actually track down a single famous dead person. For us there was no Bing Crosby to pay our respects to. No Rita Hayworth, no Sharon Tate. We couldn't even find John Candy's grave, which is surprising as unlike most of his films his final resting place apparently has a sizeable plot. We cut our losses and gave up.

  From the graves we went, if not to the cradle, then to one of the places Mike first made his mark on the world. Bill Botts Field is the baseball pitch where he found little league fame as a heavy hitter before his rotator cuff failed and forced him into early retirement at the ripe old age of eleven.

  There can't be many sports fields with the sort of views enjoyed by Bill Botts. The whole of LA lay before us like a dirty Legoland. The Pacific glinted to the left, muscular hills rose to the right. You could even see the Hollywood sign. Behind the batting cage a handful of nodding donkeys loped and clanked at depleting wells of oil. 'Mike, have I seen those pumps somewhere before?' I asked.

  'You seen LA Confidential, Beverly Hills Cop II, Swordfish?'

  'Yeah.'