The next few years were difficult. I felt I was floundering as a singer and my style hadn’t jelled. In 1969 I opened for Jerry Jeff Walker at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Jerry Jeff, probably best known for writing the classic “Mr. Bojangles,” a song about an old street dancer he’d met in a New Orleans jail, was accompanied by one other guitar player, David Bromberg, a musician of eclectic brilliance and great sensitivity. I continue to revere David as a songwriter, provocative performer, and cherished friend. In those days, I was much taken by his youthful, earnest sincerity. He came to me one night after the show and said I must go with him to the nearby Cafe Au Go-Go to hear his friend Gary White. He said White had written some good songs, and there was one in particular that he felt would be perfect for me. I was prepared to be disappointed. I thought it difficult for someone else to know what I looked for in a song.
At the Cafe Au Go-Go, Gary was playing backup guitar for songwriter Paul Siebel. We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise, and then went backstage to meet Gary. He had already packed up his guitar, so he took it back out of its case, sat down, and began to sing a song called “Long Long Time.” I told Gary I wanted to record it immediately.
At that time, my producer was Elliot Mazer, who eventually produced albums by Neil Young, and had already recorded with Jerry Jeff Walker, Gordon Lightfoot, Richie Havens, and Ian and Sylvia. He worked closely with a group of studio musicians from Nashville called Area Code 615. Weldon Myrick, the pedal steel player, had an electronic device on his instrument that generated a sound he called the Goodlettsville String Quartet. When combined with Buddy Spicher’s violin playing the top note of the chord, it sounded like a gritty orchestra string section. It was an unusual sound for the time, with a touching emotional quality. Norbert Putnam, the bass player, quickly organized the arrangement. I thought the musicians played it beautifully. I never liked my performance on the record. It was recorded at ten in the morning, somewhat early for a singer, and we used the live vocal. I learned to sing it better later. It was a big hit for me in 1970, and it bought me time to learn.
I went back to New York to reconnect with David, Gary, and Jerry Jeff, and find some more songs. I was introduced to Eric Kaz, who taught me a song he wrote with Libby Titus called “Love Has No Pride.” We made the rounds of the then current hangouts in Greenwich Village: the Dugout, Nobody’s, the Tin Angel. We saw Paul Siebel perform again at the Cafe Au Go-Go. We took Paul with us and spent the rest of the night at Gary’s little apartment in the Village playing music. He taught me how to play the song about the illfated Louise: “Well, they all said Louise was not half bad / It was written on the walls and windowpanes.”
At dawn, Jerry Jeff and I shared a cab back uptown. Jerry Jeff’s face was barely visible in the gray light when he turned to me and said, “I heard these two sisters from Canada sing at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. They wrote a beautiful song you should hear.” He bent his head low, closed his eyes, and softly sang for me all he could remember of the song:
Some say a heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it
You can’t mend it
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
I felt like a bomb had exploded in my head. Even in those few lines I could tell that the song, both plainspoken and delicate, had a highly original approach to describing the deadly peril of romantic love. I begged him to ask them to send me a recording of it. It arrived in my mailbox a few weeks later on a reel-to-reel tape. Titled “Heart Like a Wheel,” it was written by Anna McGarrigle, and she sang it with her sister Kate. It rearranged my entire musical landscape.
The McGarrigles defied categorization and were not understood by all. Not exactly pop music composers, they sprang more from the artistic bloodline of American composer John Jacob Niles, and, along with fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen, have made a significant contribution to the world of American art song. They soldiered on amidst a pop music world devoted to exploring the concepts of bigger and louder, tougher and more disaffected, and planted their musical flag in an emotional realm of unabashed sentiment and artless candor. A line from “The Work Song,” one of my favorites of their early compositions, says, “Label it garbage, label it art. / You couldn’t call it soul, you had to call it heart.”
They wrote heart music, indeed.
Onstage, their sibling dynamic made one think of unseparated littermates. In the audience, it felt like we had entered their living room unannounced and discovered them squabbling, working out harmonies, or sweeping up after a boisterous party. They wore odd clothing, even by show business standards. Canadians are quite different from Americans and I have always thought that, where clothing is concerned, they are more invested in quality, while we are more invested in glamour. This can make their tweeds and hand-knitted sweaters (things I adore) seem stodgy.
The two of them onstage pressed whatever musical agenda they pleased and seemed completely unconcerned about the framework of a professional show. They never failed to move people, and profoundly. I remember sitting next to my pal John Rockwell at a club in New York City listening to them sing their devastating song “Talk to Me of Mendocino.” I was already blubbering into my root beer float and looked sideways at John. What I saw was a seasoned and highly discriminating music critic from The New York Times with two large tears rolling down his face.
Their children continue what they started. The most notable among them are Martha and Rufus Wainwright, two singers who, like their mother, Kate, and their Aunt Anna, never fail to make me cry. When the extended families of McGarrigles and Wainwrights give a concert, which they will do occasionally, it is like being caught in a genetic whirlwind of talent and inspiration.
Kate and Anna opened a door for me, and I scooted through it as fast as I could.
4
California Country Rock
Playing the Palomino Club in Los Angeles: Ed Black on guitar, Mickey McGhee on drums.
BACK IN LOS ANGELES, I continued to look for musicians who would be sympathetic to the new songs I was finding. I put together a band with Bernie Leadon and Jeff Hanna, who was on hiatus from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. They called themselves the Corvettes. We played some shows around the country, but eventually Jeff went back to the Dirt Band and Bernie joined the Flying Burrito Brothers. Jeff, one of the friendliest, sweetest guys in the music business, introduced me to Steve Martin, who had the same manager as the Dirt Band, Bill McEuen. He was the brother of the band’s dazzling multi-instrumentalist, John McEuen. We all wound up playing various shows together, some at the Troubadour, and some at the Boarding House in San Francisco. When we weren’t onstage we would watch Steve perform his brilliant early material: Balloon Animals, The Great Flydini, The Cruel Shoes, Arrow Through the Head. No one had achieved any great success in those days. Steve was just our pal, and we thought he was hilarious.
Bernie and I both lived north of Los Angeles in Topanga Canyon, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with him. I watched him hone his country rock guitar style by going to school on Merle Haggard. Every morning, Bernie would put on a pot of coffee, plug in his red Gibson ES-335 semi-hollow-body guitar, and drop the needle on the latest Haggard record. It was a double album called Same Train, A Different Time, and it was a tribute to Jimmie Rodgers. He learned all the guitar parts, and I learned the harmonies sung by Merle’s wife, Bonnie Owens. We learned all the other Merle Haggard records too, plus George Jones and Tammy Wynette.
Bernie still played in my band when he had time off from the Burrito Brothers, and one night we performed on a TV show called Playboy After Dark. After we finished the show, we went to the Troubadour to see what was going on at the bar. We ran into Bernie’s Burrito bandmate Gram Parsons. He said he was going to the Chateau Marmont, a Hollywood hotel where he was in residence, to play some music. He wanted u
s to come along. We got in Bernie’s car, and Gram directed us up a winding road in the Hollywood Hills to a large modern house that was definitely not the Chateau Marmont. When we went inside, we were introduced to Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones were in town putting the finishing touches on Let It Bleed, and Keith and Mick Jagger had rented a house for the time they would be working in Los Angeles.
Gram and Keith had struck up a friendship over Keith’s interest in learning about country music. We got down to business immediately and sang all the Merle Haggard songs we knew. Gram was singing lead, and Bernie and I added the harmony parts. Keith was playing guitar and soaking up everything Gram had to show him. All good musicians learn from one another this way. After a few hours, Bernie noticed it was two in the morning and said he needed to make the long drive back to Topanga Canyon. I had moved to Hollywood by then, and he said he would drop me off. Gram twisted his choirboy face into a pout and asked if I would stay and go through the George Jones repertoire. Jones’s material was based on duets with Tammy Wynette, so we could sing them without Bernie supplying the third part. Gram assured me that he could take me home because my house was close to the Chateau Marmont. I stayed. We went through George Jones, and then Keith played “Wild Horses,” a new song that he and Mick had just written.
Gram was salivating over this song and begged Keith to let him record it before the Rolling Stones did. This was a bold request, as writers who record don’t usually give up a song before they release it themselves. I was surprised when they allowed him to use it on the next Flying Burrito Brothers record, a year before they would include their own version on the album Sticky Fingers. I wanted the song too but knew I wasn’t going to have it.
It was about five in the morning, so I asked Gram if he could take me home as promised. He knit up his brow. “You see, dearie,” he said (Gram called people dearie, maybe because he was condescending to me, maybe because he grew up in the South, or maybe a little of both), “I only have my motorcycle up here, and I’d have to take you home on it.” I blanched. I wasn’t about to climb on a motorcycle with Gram in any condition, and his had deteriorated considerably after Bernie left. I hadn’t been smoking the joint they were passing back and forth. I had tried marijuana several times, but in the words of my friend and longtime assistant Janet Stark, “When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share.” I didn’t have any objections to them smoking but knew it didn’t get you as loaded as Gram seemed to be when he came back from one of his little excursions out of the room.
It had been a long night, and at about six, we went into the kitchen to see if we could find something to eat. Gram hoisted himself up on the kitchen counter and began to sing something, except we couldn’t make out what it was. He was swaying in a large circle from his perch on the counter, and I was afraid he would fall and hurt himself. He was talking, but we had no idea what he was saying. I had never seen anyone in his condition. Keith and I hauled him off the counter, wrapped his arms around our shoulders, and helped him back to the living room. We lowered him down on one of the sofas, where he passed out, saying something about a blinky. I took it to mean that he was cold and covered him with a blanket.
Keith moved under his own steam to the next horizontal surface and proceeded to dreamland. That left me sitting for the next several hours, still in my itchy television makeup, wishing for my flannel nightgown. There was nothing to do but wait until ten o’clock when Herb’s office opened, and I could call and ask someone to come and get me. I never went to another all-night jam session without my own very sober ride home.
In the spring of 1970, I met two people in the Troubadour who would become important to me later. One was David Geffen, the former college roommate of my Hart Street pal, Beverly Hillbillies TV writer Ron Pearlman. David introduced himself to me one evening, and I found him to be as Ron had described, with a saucy sense of humor and a restless, penetrating intelligence. He had a cozy manner, a confidential way of conversing, and unrelenting, irresistible charm. He and his former William Morris mailroom coworker Elliot Roberts became Troubadour regulars. Keen observers, they started a management company and assembled an impressive stable of thoroughbreds. It included Laura Nyro; Joni Mitchell; Neil Young; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and, eventually, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and John David Souther. David went on to form a hugely successful label called Asylum Records.
The other person was John Boylan. John was introduced to me as the man who had produced the latest single for Rick Nelson, “She Belongs to Me.” In addition to being a big seller, the record was tasteful and thoughtfully produced. John had helped put together a band to back Nelson called the Stone Canyon Band. It featured steel guitar legend Buddy Emmons, plus a number of L.A. country rock stalwarts. It sounded like my dream band. I asked him if he would consider putting together a band for me, and he agreed.
John stood with the best of the grownups among the Troubadour regulars. As a young man in his twenties, he had a head of thick, gray hair, and faded blue eyes to confirm his Irish surname. He was smart, well behaved, and well educated, with a degree in theater arts from Bard College. He knew his way around a stage, and he knew his way around the music business. He was a healthy specimen, slender and fit. We called him Fat John. He produced some recordings for me, and we started to build a touring band.
I was living with John David Souther on Camrose Place, which was a little court of bungalows on the hill below the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater. He had the flint-eyed, dusty-wind squint of the Texas Panhandle, where he had been raised. When I met John David he was playing drums for Bo Diddley, but it was his songwriting that impressed me.
Jackson Browne lived in the bungalow adjacent to us. Jackson was younger than most of us by a couple of years, but he always ran in front of the pack. In the Troubadour community of blistering raw talent, he was a little smarter, a little further evolved in his thinking, a little more refined in his writing practice. He could use his relatively small voice to great advantage. Jackson has a Doppler effect way of starting a musical phrase that seems to be coming from far away at great speed. It builds in intensity till it disappears in the distance, leaving the listener sprawling. He was sixteen when I met him on Hart Street, shortly after I had arrived in Los Angeles, and he had already written “These Days,” a beautifully crafted song that stands with his best.
Later, we toured together, often alternating as headliner, depending on who had the bigger regional hit. In our little circle, Jackson was touched earliest by tragedy. His beautiful young wife, Phyllis, who was a troubled girl long before they met, committed suicide, leaving him a small child to raise. Jackson, devastated, did his best to step up to the task. I remember him and his little son running up and down the aisle of our tour bus. Jackson had a beach towel tied around his neck to resemble Superman’s cape, trying to make touring life seem like it was something normal—trying to ransom his boy’s childhood from the fate he’d been dealt by the death of his mother.
John David Souther and Glenn Frey had been a duo called Longbranch Pennywhistle, and they spent a lot of time with Jackson, swapping ideas and writing songs together. Warren Zevon, with his literate, quirky sensibility, was also included. I never got to know Warren well. I remember him as someone who mostly stayed quiet, his complicated gaze directed at the floor. He was the only person I ever knew with a subscription to Jane’s Defence Weekly. There was a lot of competition among those individuals, with no lack of silverback posturing, yet I always had the sense that they admired and respected one another’s work, and weren’t stingy about giving support and encouragement.
I recently came across an old cassette tape recorded in my living room in Malibu, sometime around 1976, of Jackson teaching me to sing Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” plugging a song for his buddy whose writing he so admired. Listening to the tape, I wonder why Jackson didn’t record it himself, because he sang it better than I did. Later on in the tape, John David teaches m
e Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou,” which also made it onto the Simple Dreams album. That was a profitable evening.
After time on the road with Herb Cohen as my manager, I was beginning to feel some wear and tear. Herb was known for not pampering his artists. He would tell me in the bluntest terms when he thought I was out of line or getting an exaggerated sense of my own importance. Most artists, and especially girl singers, can wind up living comfortably at the center of their own universe, and I am grateful for the efforts he made to restrain this tendency—even though they weren’t always successful. When he would look at me in exasperation and say, “Linda, you’re full of shit,” he was usually right. Unfortunately, he didn’t know much about music, and his keen instincts didn’t include an ability to even guess what goes into making it. More troubling to me was the fact that his business practices were somewhat irregular.
One afternoon, John Boylan and I were sitting in Herb’s office when a call came through from Capitol Records. We could hear only his side of the conversation, but it was something about me being invited to sing at the 1970 Capitol Records sales convention, along with Glen Campbell, then at his peak of popularity as host of his own weekly musical variety show, and the great jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. The convention would be held in Hawaii, and we would have all our expenses paid first class to Honolulu. I remember Herb telling the fellow from Capitol that it would be easier if they just sent him the money, and he could buy the tickets out of his office, not an unreasonable request.
The night before we left for Hawaii, we had played a concert in San Jose, so the tickets we had from Herb’s travel agent were for a flight leaving from San Francisco. We were pretty excited about going to Hawaii, and even more excited about flying first class. As we approached the boarding gate, we noticed a few police officers standing nearby. It turned out that they were interested in talking to us. We were traveling with a fiddle player, Gib Guilbeau, and I played a second fiddle part on some of the songs. We both carried our instruments on the planes so that they wouldn’t be smashed by the baggage handlers. I thought the police might have suspected that we were concealing weapons in our violin cases. I opened mine to show that it really did contain a violin, but that was not their concern. Herb’s office had given our tickets to John, and when he’d handed them to the person at the boarding gate, they matched the numbers on tickets that had been reported stolen. The police arrested us and took us directly to the San Mateo County Jail. At first it seemed funny to all of us, and as long as I was with the rest of the band, I wasn’t too concerned. Of course, as soon as we arrived at the jail, I, being the only female, was taken to a separate facility.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 6