Herb and his wife had left a few days before us and were already enjoying the sun in Honolulu. Also, it was a Sunday, so there wasn’t anyone at his office. I called Herb’s brother, Martin Cohen, at home and explained what had happened. He was a lawyer who handled all Herb’s legal affairs. It took him most of the day to find a bail bondsman to get us out of there. I was freezing to death in the Levi’s shorts and sandals I had worn for the beach in Hawaii, and the jail matrons were making fun of my Porky Pig T-shirt. John and the band were in the drunk tank under more crowded and sinister conditions, but at least they were together. After we were bailed out, John took us back to the airport and bought new first-class tickets on his American Express card.
When we finally got to Hawaii, we found out that both the band Santana and singer Eric Burdon had been arrested at other airports on the same day for the same reason, and they were using the same travel agency. Herb said he used that agency because it gave him huge discounts on tickets. He insisted that he hadn’t known they were stolen. I wondered what he had meant to do with the difference between the money he had received from Capitol and what he paid for the hot tickets, but I didn’t ask him. It was not different from the way many people operated in the music business. But I knew my father would not do business in this way. It bothered me.
In Hawaii, we were introduced to Cannonball Adderley and his brother, Nat, the jazz trumpeter and cornet player. They were very sympathetic to our tales of false accusation and incarceration. We spent some time listening to them play in the hotel room, and then, in the evening, Nat and I went walking by a lagoon and talked for a long time about music. It was the opposite of being in jail. I loved a Frank Loesser song his brother had recorded in 1961 with singer Nancy Wilson, called “Never Will I Marry.” She was barely out of her teens when she recorded it, and it was a stunning performance. I admired it for years and finally sang the song on Hummin’ to Myself, an album I recorded in 2004.
I confided in John that I was not happy with Herb’s wrecking-ball management style, and he urged me to see what other management situation I could find.
I had recently met Peter Asher in New York when he and his wife, Betsy, had come to see me at the Bitter End. Peter’s experience in the business was deep and varied, and he was one of the rare individuals who understood the music as well as the business. Born in London, Peter had begun his long career as a child actor in the British theater, and had worked regularly both onstage and in film and television. After his preadolescent stint singing in a boys’ choir, he became enormously successful as one half of the duo Peter and Gordon, which he had formed with his school chum Gordon Waller. His sister, Jane Asher, herself a highly regarded stage and film actress, became sweethearts with Paul McCartney during the days of the Beatles’ early success, and Paul wrote four of Peter and Gordon’s biggest hits, including “Woman” and “A World Without Love.” A few years later, when the Beatles decided to form their own recording label, Apple Records, they enlisted Peter to head their A&R (Artists and Repertoire) department. He signed James Taylor to the label, then later left Apple and moved to the United States, where he became James’s manager and producer.
Betsy was a good cook and a sympathetic listener. She and Peter gave lovely dinner parties. Jackson Browne, John Boylan, Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Don Henley, John David, and I were among the regulars at Peter and Betsy’s cozy dinners. Boylan suggested that I ask Peter to manage me, and I told Herb I was going to end our professional relationship. This was not so easy, as I had just signed a five-year contract with him.
We hired lawyers and went to an endless, boring deposition. Herb and I rolled our eyes and giggled with each other even though we were supposed to be on opposite sides. During our lunch break, we went to eat together, and he suggested to me that the lawsuit would drag on forever and be weighted in his favor because his brother was his lawyer and his legal bills would be far less costly than mine. “Linda,” he said insistently, “if we could agree on a figure, it would save us from having to sit in boring depositions, and the money you’ll end up paying to a lawyer could just go straight to me.” We agreed on an amount and shook hands. It took me a couple of years to pay him off, but we parted on good terms. I was sad because I was genuinely fond of Herb and still consider him one of the more interesting characters I met in the music business, but I needed someone who understood music and took a more gentlemanly approach in his business dealings. Peter Asher was a gentleman to his core.
John made an appointment with Peter and went with me to ask him to manage me. Peter agreed to do so. But a few weeks later, he called me over to his house to tell me that because he had already agreed to manage James’s sister, singer Kate Taylor, also managing me could create a conflict of interest that might be unfair to both of us—and so he would have to decline. I was disappointed, and John, who was a record producer and not a manager, agreed to fill in until I could make other arrangements.
Photo by Henry Diltz.
The Eagles founding members: (left to right) Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner, Don Henley, Glenn Frey.
5
The Eagles
JOHN BOYLAN AND I were at a Troubadour Hoot Night one evening, scouting musicians to back me up, when a Texas band called Shiloh began to play and stopped us in our tracks. They were playing my arrangement of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” and they were playing it really well. I was impressed by the drummer, who was a strong player with a lean, unfussy style. Better still, he seemed to have an awareness of the rhythm traditions of country music, which included the subtler, unamplified styles of bluegrass and old-time string band music. This was rare for rock drummers, who often hammered over the delicate nuances of traditional songs and rhythms, draining them of their charm. This made him ideal for playing with a singer.
John introduced himself and asked him if he would like to play some shows we had coming up at the Cellar Door, a club in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. The drummer’s name was Don Henley. Bernie Leadon was busy with the Burrito Brothers, so I asked John David’s Longbranch Pennywhistle partner Glenn Frey if he would come along and play guitar. We added a bass player and a lead guitarist, and Boylan played keyboards.
In those days, we couldn’t afford to get single rooms for everyone, so the guys had to double up. Glenn wound up rooming with Don and discovered why Don played so well for singers. It turned out that Don was a singer himself, and a good one. Like Glenn, he was also an accomplished songwriter, and the two began playing music all night and ignited a musical friendship. Glenn referred to Don as the “secret weapon” and said that they had decided to form a band together.
John offered to help them and suggested that they continue to tour with me while they were waiting to get a record deal and gigs of their own. That way they would have an income, and I would have a solid band for several months. John suggested they get Randy Meisner to play bass. Randy had just recently left Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band and John thought he was a strong bass player and a great high-harmony singer. I suggested Bernie Leadon, also a strong singer, to play guitar. They liked one another and started to work together right away.
One day they needed a place to rehearse their vocal parts. John David offered the living room of our little house on Camrose Place. The room wasn’t very big, so we went out to the movies to give them some space. When we walked in a few hours later, they sounded fantastic. They had worked out a four-part-harmony arrangement of a song that Bernie and Don wrote and had spent some time getting their vocal blend just right. In that small room, with only acoustic guitars and four really powerful voices, the sound was huge and rich. They called the new song “Witchy Woman.” I was sure it was going to be a hit.
6
Beachwood Drive
Photo by Henry Diltz.
JOHN DAVID AND I moved into an apartment on North Beachwood Drive, under the Hollywood sign. We took it over from Warren Zevon and his girlfriend, Tule, who needed space for their small ch
ild. It was in a charming Mediterranean building, constructed in the 1920s, with large Palladian windows that bathed our living room in California sunshine. The apartment had battered hardwood floors, a wood-burning fireplace, and enough room for John David’s baby grand piano. MGM Studios had a sale, and I bought some old lace curtains that had been used on one of its movie sets and hung them on the windows.
There were four units in the apartment complex. Harry Dean Stanton, the actor, lived in the back over the garage. He and I struck up a friendship right away because he loved the Mexican huapangos that I knew, and he had learned to sing and play them on his guitar. Sometimes we would go watch him perform them at McCabe’s, the performing space managed by my old Stone Poneys’ bandmate, Bob Kimmel.
Lawrence “Stash” Wagner, guitarist for the group Fraternity of Man, lived with his wife and child in the tiny ground floor unit. He had cowritten that immortal song with Elliot Ingber, featured in the Dennis Hopper film Easy Rider, “Don’t Bogart That Joint.”
John David and I lived on the top floor, and comedy writer Bill Martin, who later went on to a long career as a TV writer and producer, lived directly below us. Bill coined a phrase when he wrote a deeply philosophical song called “The Whole Enchilada Marches On.” He was a funny guy who hid an alert intelligence behind a half-lidded, slow-moving exterior. His apartment was fitted out with the latest hippie essentials. He had a great stereo system with big speakers, a beanbag chair, and a water pipe. He and his wife had a knack for horticulture and grew their own incredibly strong marijuana in terra-cotta pots.
They took pride in their hospitality. This consisted of settling a guest comfortably in the beanbag chair, playing Otis Redding loud enough to induce hemorrhage, and pounding paralyzing doses of marijuana in a water pipe. With the guests immobilized by cannabis, Bill would tell a story of the grisly murder that had apparently been committed in their apartment before they occupied it. At the story’s climax, he would flip back the rug to show a large bloodstain that had never come out of the floor.
John David and I, both avid readers, were happy to have the quietest space in our little complex, where we could hole up with our books and our music. He wrote a lot of good songs in that apartment, including “Faithless Love,” “Prisoner in Disguise,” and “Simple Man, Simple Dream,” all of which I would later record.
I played the Dutch housewife, scrubbing and applying layers of wax to the floors, trying to coax a shine out of the old floorboards that had seen too many generations of indifferent housekeeping. While waiting for the wax to harden, I worked out my guitar parts to new songs I liked. By the time the floor was gleaming, I had the song learned.
Sometimes the doubts and fears that were generated by trying to create something of our own would circle us in a menacing way, and we would seek safety in the recordings of some of our most revered music masters. It was a great pleasure to float around in these little pools of perfection, happy to be relieved of the intimidating task of trying to invent them ourselves. Some of the standout recorded performances I remember listening to with him were “Drown in My Own Tears” on the Ray Charles in Person album, Brahms’s Trio in B Major played by cellist Pablo Casals, and Donny Hathaway’s masterful rendition of the John Lennon classic “Jealous Guy.” These were bricks that we tried to cement into our musical basements.
One album always seemed to finish up the evening, and we would play the whole thing straight through. It set a devastating mood and required strict concentration from start to finish. This was Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, the record I had first heard at Alan Fudge’s house in Tucson. I learned some beautiful songs from that recording, including “What’s New,” the title song from the first collection of American standard songs that I eventually recorded with Sinatra’s arranger, Nelson Riddle.
John David was a great listening partner. The pleasure and learning experience of hearing music increases exponentially when done with someone of a deeply shared sensibility. Years later, the head of my record label thought that I was throwing away my career by wanting to record “What’s New,” with a full orchestra and a jazz band. John David understood what I was chasing, and he encouraged me.
After about a year and a half, John David moved to a house a few blocks away. We remained friends but had drifted into different webs of our own needs and interests. He was writing a lot, and I was traveling nonstop. We’ve always had feelings of affection and sympathy for each other. I still want to know about the songs he’s just written.
The last shows I played with the Eagles as my official backup band were at Disneyland in 1971 for a week of end-of-school-year festivities called Grad Night. We were on a bill with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, plus the Staple Singers. The Disney Company paid well but had many particular requirements of the talent it booked in the park. We played several shows a night, finished up around three in the morning, and weren’t allowed to wander through the park in between shows. Also, our contract stipulated that I was required to wear a bra, and my skirt had to be a certain number of inches from the ground while I was kneeling.
When no one was onstage performing, the Eagles played poker with Smokey and the Miracles in the backstage artists’ lounge. I prissed around the room hoping to get Smokey to notice me. He didn’t. It would be hard to overstate the impact of Smokey Robinson’s magnetism. First of all, there are his beautiful gray-green eyes. After that is his cool flame of devastating charm that makes women sigh and men admire. Failing to impress him in any way, I went home and started learning his songs. A few years later, I had big hits with two songs that he wrote, “The Tracks of My Tears” and “Ooh Baby Baby.” He invited me to sing them with him on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary television special in 1983, which also featured Michael Jackson singing “Billie Jean” and performing the moonwalk for the first time in front of a national audience. Smokey was unfailingly supportive and gracious, but my knees were knocking together. Singing “Ooh Baby Baby” while staring into Smokey’s eyes was both intimidating and exhilarating, and remains one of the highest peaks of my career. In 2009 I listened to Smokey speaking as one musician to another in a most encouraging, inclusive, and generous way as he gave the commencement address to the graduating class of the Berklee College of Music. We were both awarded honorary doctorates.
By late 1972, John Boylan had helped me to build a solid following performing at colleges, but my records seemed to have hit a discouraging plateau, both artistically and commercially. I was running in one direction trying to please the record company, and in another one trying to please myself. I had been trying to interest the people at Capitol in letting me record “Heart Like a Wheel,” but they saw no commercial potential for it. They wanted me to work with a Bakersfield-style country producer. I thought some good records had come out of Bakersfield, particularly Merle Haggard’s, but I didn’t feel that the style had anything to do with my more eclectic aspirations.
I owed Capitol only one more record. Offers were already coming in from heads of other labels, including Clive Davis at Columbia, Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., and Albert Grossman at his new label, Bearsville. Grossman was Bob Dylan’s manager and he also handled the careers of Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band, and Janis Joplin. The best offer was from David Geffen at his new company, Asylum Records. It was a small label, and its few artists would get a lot of personalized attention. John had spearheaded a successful attempt to get the Eagles signed to Asylum, and it was rapidly becoming a home to singer-songwriters and the L.A. country rock sound, including Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, J. D. Souther, and Judee Sill. I knew I would be in the company of other like-minded artists.
Geffen felt that I could lose the momentum I’d gained if I put out another record that wasn’t promoted properly by a team that understood the direction I was trying to take with my music. He said he thought I should ask Capitol to let him have the next record, and it could have the one after that.
John arranged a meeting with Bhaskar Menon, who wa
s then president of Capitol. I felt a little embarrassed meeting Menon. Herb Cohen had tried unsuccessfully to get me released from Capitol earlier. He had threatened Menon with bad public behavior on my part that could put Capitol in a bad light. It was a bluff, because I hadn’t agreed to any such thing, and it was precisely that kind of artist-as-battering-ram management style that had made me leave Herb. He also encouraged me to think of Menon as the enemy. I had never met him before and was surprised to find a charming, refined, and intelligent gentleman from India with beautiful manners. His sensitive, kindly demeanor was quite a change from the cigar-chomping, hookers-and-cocaine American record industry men I had come to see as a defining stereotype. I listened quietly while my attorney, Lee Phillips, spoke for me. Menon replied that they would like to keep me on the label, suggesting that I needed to choose whether to sing rock or country. I didn’t want to choose. And I wanted to sing “Heart Like a Wheel.”
Menon seemed unpersuaded by Lee Phillips’s skillful presentation, so I decided to speak up for myself. I said, “Please, Mr. Menon, let me go. I don’t want to be here, I don’t fit here, and, besides, you don’t need me. You have two other female singers, Helen Reddy and Anne Murray, selling lots of records for you. Let me go!” To our collective surprise, he relented. I was free to sign with Geffen.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 7