The first time we heard the recording of “Different Drum” on the radio, we were on our way to Hollywood for a meeting with Nik Venet and Jimmy Bond to discuss material and arrangements for a third album. We were out of money. Our meager advances had already been used to pay rent and bills and repair Bobby’s car, the only one we had among the three of us. It still wasn’t running well. Somewhere in West L.A., something froze in the engine, and the car began its death cry—a hideous sound of metal straining against metal. We rode our screaming vehicle several blocks, turning heads in the street. When it finally refused to budge, we got out and pushed it into a gas station. The mechanic, who had heard us from blocks away, explained to us that the car, which was loaded with our guitars, Bobby’s huge acoustic bass, and, recently, us, would never run again and could only be sold for scrap.
The jingle for KRLA, an L.A. Top Forty AM station, sounded weakly from the back of the station’s garage. It was followed by the four measures of acoustic guitar–harpsichord introduction to “Different Drum,” and then me singing. We strained to hear it. We knew that it was getting airplay in San Francisco but didn’t know if it would make the national playlists. Hearing it on KRLA meant it had.
Someone eventually showed up to rescue us, and when we got to Nik’s office and began to discuss our new recording, we realized being carless in L.A. wasn’t our only problem. Capitol was adamant that the new record be titled Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III. They wanted me to step out firmly in front so that I could be identified as the lead singer. No boost to band morale, it was the beginning of the end for the Stone Poneys.
We had been performing as a harmony band featuring Kimmel’s compositions and me as an occasional soloist. Now we had to assemble a repertoire that made me sound like a lead singer with material and a style we didn’t have, and we had to do it fast. “Different Drum” was a national Top Forty hit. To expose us to larger audiences, Herb Cohen had gotten us some dates opening for the Doors, who had just had a huge hit with “Light My Fire.”
In March 1968 we started the tour in Utica, a college town in upstate New York. As the opening act, we were well tolerated by the audience and the Doors members were nice to us. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger were all excellent players who seemed to be solid guys. Their singer, Jim Morrison, was moody and distant, and I noticed that he liked to drink. I watched their show with a great deal of curiosity. The dynamic between the audience and the performers was different from what I had observed in the folkier musical environment that had been my previous experience. Some individuals in the audience seemed to be projecting themselves onto Morrison. This was followed by a kind of needy, narcissistic frenzy that seemed dangerous and unhealthy. Morrison would pick up the microphone stand like it was a javelin and posture with it, as though he needed to protect himself from the identity-bending onslaught of the crowd’s adoration. I found it troubling.
Backstage after the show, some girls invited us to their apartment. Kenny went with us and some of the Doors, including Morrison. The girls were college students, earnest, young, and excited to have Morrison in their tidy little apartment. He had brought along a bottle that he emptied steadily, and after a while, he began knocking things over. The girls looked embarrassed, as if they weren’t sure whether or not it was an accident. Kenny and I were sure it wasn’t and hightailed it out of there immediately. In the morning, we heard that he had trashed their little place, and a hefty bill was presented for the damages.
The following day in nearby Rochester, Bob Neuwirth joined the tour. I believe the Doors’ management sent him to be an auxiliary road manager to try to keep Morrison out of trouble. I had met Neuwirth through mutual friends in the Kweskin Jug Band, and he had also made an appearance in the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back as Dylan’s sidekick. Himself a capable musician and songwriter, he was smart, funny, and socially adept.
The next day we had a show in Boston. We went to the airport early in the morning to find that a massive snowstorm had grounded all the planes. Herb didn’t want to lose money from a canceled show, so we waited several hours while he chartered a DC-3 passenger aircraft. But we still didn’t have a pilot. After more time waiting around, Herb found someone who flew in his spare time—he worked for a used tire company—and was willing to take us there in spite of the weather. The turbulence was extreme. We were all green faced with motion sickness, and in a propeller plane, it took us two and a half hours to get to Boston. I had to dress in the tiny airplane lavatory. Mohawk Airlines had lost one of my suitcases on the way to Utica, and all I had was my wrinkled Betsey Johnson striped singing dress that I had stuffed into my purse. No shoes or tights. I ran across the snowy tarmac in bare feet and a lightweight coat, hopped into a waiting station wagon, and was driven directly to the 3,200-seat Back Bay Theater. When we walked onstage, we were greeted by the audience chanting “We want the Doors!” They were furious that they had been kept waiting, and their patience was exhausted. I sang “Different Drum” and beat it off the stage.
After Boston, we had a day off in New York before playing the Fillmore East, a newly opened 2,400-seat theater operated by soon-to-become-legendary rock concert promoter Bill Graham. It was only the second show he had presented at that venue. Big Brother and the Holding Company had officially opened it the week before. During the wild ride in the DC-3 to Boston, Morrison and I had been chatting, and he asked if I wanted to spend some time with him on our free evening. Sober, he seemed sweet and somewhat shy. I knew that Bob Neuwirth would be going with us and figured he could keep him under control, so I agreed. Neuwirth suggested that we go to hear the Kweskin Jug Band, which was playing in New York.
My friend Liisa, a flaxen-haired, doll-faced beauty from Finland, had an apartment in Greenwich Village. We had been best friends in Tucson during our high school years.
In her teens, she was abruptly transplanted from Finland to the Arizona desert by her father, a physicist working at the university on the project to land a man on the moon. Her parents were divorced, so my mother took Liisa under her wing, and they spent hours sewing together. She and my mother sewed my favorite stage dress from a pattern that Liisa created. A talented designer, she had a job in New York and had decorated her tiny apartment beautifully. I liked to stay with her whenever I was in New York, and we would renew our cozy friendship.
Liisa’s apartment was only a few blocks from the Cafe Au Go-Go, where the Jug Band was playing. Neuwirth and Morrison came to the apartment to get me, and Liisa declined our invitation to come along. We were walking along the street looking for a good place to have dinner when a man driving by recognized Morrison, slammed on his brakes, jumped out of the car, walked up to Morrison, and punched him in the face. I managed to get in between them, and Neuwirth ran the fellow off. We proceeded to dinner. Morrison ordered a drink to steady his nerves and a few more after that. By the time we got to the Cafe Au Go-Go, he was quite drunk.
Backstage before the show, Maria took me and Neuwirth aside and confided that she was in low spirits because the band was breaking up. It would be one of their last shows together. Neuwirth and I were huge admirers of the Jug Band, and truly sad to hear it. We resolved to give her all the support we could from the audience. Morrison, clearly impressed by their musicianship and Maria’s earthy glamour, wanted to join in our enthusiasm, but in his extreme condition, all he could do was to stand up and slur “You lil’ fuckerz!” at the top of his voice. Neuwirth and I, mortified, decided to get him out of there so he wouldn’t ruin the show.
We walked the few blocks back to Liisa’s building. It was early still, and Morrison said he wanted to come back up and hang out. Thinking of Liisa’s pristine jewel box of a home and remembering the fate of the girl’s apartment on our first night, I slipped inside the building and closed the door firmly. I didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of another friend. Morrison was pounding on the glass, ringing doorbells, and yelling that he wanted to come in. I smiled sweetly at h
im through the glass and pantomimed that I was sleepy, hoping to calm him down. He grew more belligerent. I ran up to Liisa’s apartment and slid the security bolt in place. From the window, I could see him still yelling and Neuwirth pulling on his arm.
We went to sound check at the Fillmore East the next afternoon. Bill Graham was walking around barking orders and wearing a yellow hard hat. He explained that the last time the Doors played one of his events, Morrison hurled the heavy microphone stand into the audience, injuring some people. He had made it contractually clear to the Doors that if the incident was repeated, they wouldn’t get paid, but he put on the hard hat just in case.
Morrison arrived eventually. He was accompanied by a beautiful girl with long red hair. She was bruised from her jaw to her collarbone. “Oh,” she said, when someone asked what had happened to her. “I ran into a door.”
3
Going Solo
Photo by Henry Diltz.
WE RETURNED TO LOS Angeles and an uncertain future. Kenny left the band and traveled to India. Bobby took a job running a concert series at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, where we had first met Kenny. It was to be a deeply satisfying experience for him that lasted many years. Sometime later, Kenny joined my backup band, and we recorded and toured together for years. We all remained friends.
Kenny and Bobby were officially taken off the accounting books at Capitol Records, which meant that, as they were no longer members of the Stone Poneys, they weren’t responsible for paying back the production costs of the three albums we had made together. However, they then began to share in the royalties accrued by the sales of “Different Drum.” I assumed the debt burden by myself, and it would be eight years before I would see any money from record sales. Meanwhile, if I wanted to earn a living in music, I had to hit the road.
I was painfully unprepared to be a solo act, as I had been mostly a harmony singer in the Stone Poneys. We had relied on Kimmel to write the songs, and I had no repertoire of my own. I began to think what I could use from the music I had loved as a child in Tucson. The obvious answer was to experiment with the 1950s country songs I had learned from my sister’s collection of 45s and the jukeboxes in rural Arizona. They had simple chord progressions, so I started to work up songs like Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” and Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)” on my guitar.
Herb thought I was wasting my time. He said I would be too country for the rock stations and too rock for the country stations. I ignored him and began to look for musicians who could play the songs that had come out of Nashville but with a California twist.
Clarence White, the poker-faced bluegrass flat-picker I so admired in Tucson, had joined the Byrds and was playing what he called his B-Bender guitar. With drummer Gene Parsons (no relation to Gram), he had designed and installed on his Fender Telecaster a device that raised the second string a whole step, making it sound like a pedal steel guitar. The lever that raised and lowered the string was attached to the guitar strap and activated by pushing down on the guitar neck. It became a cornerstone of the California country rock sound.
Other guitar players got wind of the device and began to incorporate it into their own styles. One of them was Bernie Leadon. Bernie, a musician who had played bluegrass, folk music, and rock and roll, had the most musically integrated overview of all the seminal country rock guitar players in the Troubadour pantheon. In his early twenties, he was already an outstanding player who had mastered a variety of styles. He was also a solid, reliable guy, more ambitious for the music to be good than he was to make himself noticed. Players like that are crucial to any emerging musical process and often make essential contributions that remain hidden because they lack the showboating gene. Like Clarence, Bernie became another pioneer of the country rock guitar style—one that exerted a powerful influence on all of popular music when he became a founding member of the Eagles.
I met him in the Stone Poneys days when he was in the psychedelic country folk band Hearts and Flowers. He and Larry Murray, also in the band, had been in the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers with Chris Hillman, before Chris joined the Byrds. Hearts and Flowers recorded on Capitol and Nik Venet hired Bernie and Larry to play on the Stone Poneys recordings. Larry left the band in 1969 to write for Johnny Cash’s new music variety TV program, The Johnny Cash Show, and Bernie eventually joined the Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris and Gram Parsons. We all hung out at the Troubadour and began jamming together, united by our mutual desire to weld country music songs and harmonies to a rock-and-roll rhythm section.
Putting together a band for a style of music that hadn’t yet coalesced was no easy task. Herb, who saw things in business terms only, had no musical ability and was unable to help me. His advice was to call the musicians’ union, ask them to send over any guitar player, and tell him what to play. Of course, music is not made this way.
When I hire a musician to record or perform, the first thing I look for is a shared sensibility. Whatever the musician listened to or read or saw or where he lived growing up informs every note he plays in a myriad of ways. There are so many choices to make—how loud or soft to play a note, exactly where to place it rhythmically, what kind of textural or melodic embellishment to incorporate, where to add a harmony, how to voice a chord—all done in a split second. It simply can’t be done on a conscious level but becomes a matter of instinct enabled by long practice. When a compatible group of players is assembled to serve a clearly defined musical vision, the result can be pure joy. If the group lacks a shared sensibility, it is pure misery.
Since I’d had a hit record, it was fairly easy for Herb to get me on television. I thought that TV, with its small screens and tinny speakers, was a bad medium for music. Also, artists had no say in how they were presented in those days, and one might be expected to wear a costume of the show’s design that was color coordinated to its sets. The musical director also might burden the music with cumbersome orchestral arrangements not in the style or spirit of the artist or the original recordings.
In the spring of 1969, I went to Nashville to perform on The Johnny Cash Show. I had traveled with a fellow from Herb’s office charged with getting me to Tennessee and making sure everything ran smoothly once we got there. He apparently had more important things to do and, after getting me settled at the hotel, flew on to Detroit.
I was a little worried about being left to fend for myself but soon connected with my Troubadour pal Larry Murray. He and the other writers for the show, plus production staff and guests, were being housed at the Ramada Inn, where I was staying. I wound up in Larry’s room in a jam session with a few of the up-and-coming Nashville songwriters that Larry knew. Mickey Newberry and Kris Kristofferson were among them, and not yet well known. They had piles of good songs that no one had ever recorded.
Everybody played his best new stuff, and then we got into a conversation about culture shock and what it was like for Larry to be a long-haired hippie working in the South. Larry confessed that he often felt out of place and lonely, even threatened, and that he missed hanging out at the Troubadour, where he looked perfectly normal.
It was beginning to get late, so I went back to my room to get some sleep for the read-through and rehearsal the following morning. Immediately after I closed my door, the phone rang. It was one of the show’s producers, whom I had met briefly earlier in the day. He wanted to come to my room and discuss some of the details of the show. Since I had no one from my management to help negotiate for me, and since he was essentially a stranger and might have less than honorable intentions, I declined and said I would see him in the morning. I was a little sharp with him, and after I hung up, I felt bad about it. He was not from the South, and I thought that, like Larry, he might also be feeling out of place. About three minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the same guy, saying that he really did need to talk to me that night and it wouldn’t take long. Thinking I might have misjudged him, I relented and told him he could come up.
I should have followed my first instinct, because as soon as he entered my room and closed the door, he removed every stitch of clothing he was wearing. I was embarrassed and frightened. He was hardly the Adonis of show business, and there was an element of icky self-loathing to his exhibitionism. I started edging toward the door. He wondered why I was so shocked. Wasn’t I a hippie? Didn’t hippies believe in free love? In case this wasn’t enough to impress me, he mentioned that he could make things go well for me in the television business. Thinking how little I liked performing on television, I rolled my eyes and told him I was leaving and that he had better be gone when I returned, or I would call hotel security. He said no one would believe me because of the way I looked and dressed (jeans, long, straight hair, and no bra in the panty-girdle, big-hair South). Then he said that no one on the show would believe me either, so I had better keep my mouth shut, or he would make things very unpleasant for me.
I went out the door and downstairs to sit in the tiny Ramada Inn lobby, where I felt bored, annoyed, and sleepy. After about an hour, I went back, found my room empty, and put the chain on the door. I called Herb and told him what had happened. He was furious at the guy from his office for leaving me alone in Nashville. He decided that it would stir up trouble if we complained about the producer, and I was likely to be dropped from the show. Herb felt the best way to handle it was to act like it didn’t happen, and he sent another person to help me for the rest of the time that I had to be there. The next morning at the read-through, the man who had been in my room turned to me and said for everyone to hear, “I left my watch in your room last night. Could you get it for me later?” I don’t remember his name, only that he was soon to be married. I felt sorry for his bride-to-be.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 5