7
Neil Young Tour
Photo by Henry Diltz.
IN JANUARY 1973 DAVID Geffen called John Boylan and said that he wanted me to join the upcoming Neil Young tour as the opening act. I was reluctant, to say the least, because my show and my band were set up to play small clubs, and our first concert with Neil was going to be at Madison Square Garden. David and John knew what a boost the huge exposure to audiences across the country would give my record sales, and they talked me into it. With just a few days’ notice, we were off to New York City.
That night, a few songs into Neil’s set, someone handed him a note saying that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had reached an agreement in Paris ending the United States’s involvement in Vietnam. Neil announced simply, “The war is over.” The audience of eighteen thousand exploded, cheering, crying, and screaming for the next ten minutes. In the middle of all the pandemonium, I was huddled in a corner wrestling with the fact that I was still a club act with a not very loud kind of folky band, no discernible stage patter, and no clue how to reach a crowd like that.
I changed backup singers, stage clothes, and attitudes for three months (seventy-eight shows), as we worked our way back west across the country. I was encouraged nightly by the side stage presence of Neil’s piano player, Jack Nitzsche, who, in addition to being a really good piano player, was a really mean drunk. He told me with metronomic regularity that as a singer and performer, I was not up to the task of opening for Neil, and that he was going to talk Neil into hiring soul singer Claudia Lennear or singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon to replace me. Even though I basically shared his opinion, I wasn’t going to let a mean drunk shove me off the stage, and I continued to see what I could do to improve. I also watched Neil, who was nothing but nice to me, play his show every single night, and I continue to find him one of the purest singers and most uniquely gifted songwriters in contemporary music. Hearing his eerie, prairie-wind howl of a voice—a boy soprano fuel-injected with testosterone—in such regular and concentrated doses was a huge part of my musical education and an enduring pleasure.
The tour was traveling in a chartered Lockheed Electra turboprop airliner. On board were assorted managers, Neil’s band, my band, and a few members of the sound crew. The stewardess was Linda Keith, who was married to Neil’s pedal steel player, Ben Keith. She did her job with friendly efficiency and appeared cheerfully unaware of the substances that were being ignited or hoovered by some of the passengers during the flights. I was happy that she also kept us supplied with fresh fruit. She probably saved us from scurvy.
In late February, we landed at Houston Intercontinental Airport. We were booked for a concert at the Sam Houston Coliseum, a ten-thousand-seat hockey arena, with the following night off in Houston before we pushed on to Kansas City, Missouri. When we got to the hotel, we ran into Eddie Tickner, who was Gram Parsons’s manager. He told us that Gram and Emmylou Harris, the new girl he was singing with, were playing at a well-known Houston honky-tonk called Liberty Hall.
Chris Hillman of the Byrds, and later Gram’s bandmate in the Flying Burrito Brothers, had told me one night that he and Gram had met Emmylou in Washington, D.C., and loved her singing. He said he felt we really needed to meet each other—that we were pursuing similar ideas in our music—and he was certain we would like each other. I was excited to get the chance to experience for myself what Chris had been talking about and asked John Boylan if he would make arrangements for the two of us to see their show after we finished playing ours that night.
We arrived at Liberty Hall to find it filled with members of a club called the Sin City Boys. They were plenty rowdy, but when Gram and Emmylou started to sing, it got very quiet. Clearly, something unusual was taking place up on that stage, and we in the audience were mesmerized. Emmy has the ability to make each phrase of a song sound like a last desperate plea for her life, or at least her sanity. No melodrama; just the plain truth of raw emotion. The sacred begging the profane.
My reaction to it was slightly conflicted. First, I loved her singing wildly. Second, in my opinion, she was doing what I was trying to do, only a whole lot better. Then came a split-second decision I made that affected the way I listened to and enjoyed music for the rest of my life. I thought that if I allowed myself to become envious of Emmy, it would be painful to listen to her, and I would deny myself the pleasure of it. If I simply surrendered to loving what she did, I could take my rightful place among the other drooling Emmylou fans, and then maybe, just maybe, I might be able to sing with her.
I surrendered.
Back at the hotel, we told Neil about what a great show it had been. He and his band, the Stray Gators, plus members of my band, went with us the following night. Gram and Emmy did another great show, and Neil and I sat in at the end. Someone had given Gram and Emmy jackets with the words Sin City stitched on the back. One of the Sin City Boys came up to the stage and presented one to me. I wore it for years. After the show, the owner of Liberty Hall hosted a party in the big dressing room upstairs.
That’s when the trouble started. Jack Nitzsche came over, put his arm around me, and began to speak in a very complimentary way. Then gradually what he said became abusive. I was used to the nightly routine of cutting remarks and tried to move away. Because he was a keyboard player, he had powerful arms and had me locked in a tight grip. He continued to slur the cruelest and most insulting things he could muster in his inebriated state. I asked him to let me go. He said that he was going to make me fight my way out. It became obvious to me that he wanted to make an ugly scene, and I didn’t want a big fight with Jack to spoil the wonderful evening we had just had with Gram and Emmy. Still, his mean-spirited bullying had frightened me, and, though I tried hard not to, I began to cry. John Boylan, my drummer, Mickey McGee, and my pedal steel player, Ed Black, noticed from across the room that I was upset, and moved in to help me. With three husky men in my corner, Nitzsche backed off.
We decided to go back to the hotel. Downstairs, there were two or three waiting limos. We climbed into the first one in line and found Gram and his wife, Gretchen, already waiting inside. Just as we began to pull away from the curb, there was a knock on the window, and Jack stumbled into the front seat. He turned around and began talking through the partition. “You’re a mess, Gram,” he said. “You’re fucked up.” Gram’s reaction was to wonder out loud why the kettle was calling the pot such a deep shade of black. Jack kept at him. “You’re a junkie, Gram. You’re going to die. Danny Whitten’s dead, and you’re next,” he said, referring to the Crazy Horse guitarist who had died of an overdose just three months before. Gretchen started to cry. Boylan reached forward and closed the partition to shut Jack up.
Gram and Neil wanted to play music some more, so we went to Neil’s suite and began to play all the country songs we knew. Emmy wasn’t there. We were going through the familiar George Jones, Hank Williams, and Merle Haggard repertoire. Gram and Neil were showing some of their new songs. We were having fun for a while, but Jack went over to the electric keyboard in Neil’s room and began pounding nonsense chords. Then he stood up and said, “Your music sucks! I’m going to show you what I think of your music!” He walked over to the middle of the room, unzipped his pants, and began to pee on the floor. Gram threw Jack’s hat under the stream, and he wound up peeing in his own hat.
I was out the door. John took me back to my room. I was exhausted and in floods of tears. There was a knock at the door. It was Emmy. She had heard about what had happened with Jack and had come over to try to make me feel better. She brought me a yellow rose. I pressed the rose, and I still have it in a box somewhere. I still have Emmy too.
Years later, after Jack had experienced a period of sobriety, he apologized to me. Looking back, I imagine he genuinely didn’t care for my singing, and he was entitled to that. He’d have found me somewhat in agreement, as I was still learning and, in the beginning, way over my head while struggling to perform in those huge arenas. It turned
out that I was plenty tough enough to survive the nightly onslaught of his drunken insults. Jack was a stellar musician and arranger, with impressively written arrangements for Phil Spector (“River Deep, Mountain High” by Tina Turner) and the Rolling Stones (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) already to his credit. What I thought was tragic, seeing him act that way, was that he deprived himself of the opportunity to operate in the world with the grace and dignity of which he was fully capable.
The morning after the unfortunate incident in Neil’s hotel room, everyone climbed on board the plane and acted like nothing had happened. Someone from Neil’s organization must have leaned on Jack and told him to get off my case, because after that, he left me alone. The tour lasted five more weeks. I had a great time.
Six months later, Gram was dead of a drug overdose.
8
Emmylou
Photo by Henry Diltz.
Performing at the Universal Amphitheater.
I HEARD ABOUT GRAM’S death somewhere on the road, and my immediate concern was for Emmy. I didn’t know exactly what the bond between her and Gram consisted of, but I knew it was deep. No one who had seen them sing together would have doubted it.
I called her and could hear in her voice that she was grieving hard. I asked her if she would like to fly out to Los Angeles and spend a little time with me. I had a booking for a week at the Roxy, which was the newest hip Hollywood performing space and bar, founded by Lou Adler and Elmer Valentine, and co-owned by David Geffen, Peter Asher, and Elliot Roberts. I asked her to sit in with my show, thinking it might stir some interest in Emmy as a solo act without Gram.
The first thing she did after she arrived at my apartment was to take out her guitar and play a song she had just written called “Boulder to Birmingham.” It brought me to tears and established Emmy as a songwriter to be taken seriously. I was delighted to see she had written such an impressive song, and heartbroken for her about what had inspired it.
We spent a couple of days going through songs that we could harmonize on for the Roxy shows. We worked up a few Hank Williams songs: “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You),” and “Honky Tonkin’.” Emmy taught me an old song she knew called “The Sweetest Gift (A Mother’s Smile),” and we made it into a duet.
When she opened her suitcase, she showed me some clothes she had been given by Nudie, the haute couture fashion designer to all the biggest country-and-western music stars. Nudie and his son-in-law Manuel Cuevas, the brilliant designer from Mexico, had created the suits that Gram and the Flying Burrito Brothers had worn on the cover of their debut album, The Gilded Palace of Sin. These clothes were treasures and far too expensive for us to buy. There was a pink Sweetheart of the Rodeo–style jacket that Emmy wore, and a red sparkly vest with white horseshoes on the front that Emmy brought for me to wear. Originally made for country singer Gail Davies, the sparkly vest had short sparkly cuffs to match. I wore them with the Levi’s shorts that I had worn to the San Mateo County Jail.
I don’t remember much about the shows that we played at the Roxy, only that, in Hollywood, word traveled lightning quick about the beautiful brown-eyed girl with the blazing talent who had been left by Gram Parsons’s death to wonder what in the world to do with her musical self. Not too long after that, Emmy signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records. The label paired her with Canadian producer Brian Ahern, who assembled the Hot Band to play behind her. It featured some of the finest musicians in Nashville, including Glen D. Hardin from Elvis Presley’s band, early rock-and-roll guitar hero James Burton, and up-and-coming songwriter Rodney Crowell. They made a string of great records together, records that further helped to define country rock as a serious musical discipline.
Back out on the road, we were playing a show in Atlanta, and my band got word that a favorite band of theirs, Little Feat, was playing in a club nearby. I dimly remembered having once met Lowell George, their lead singer and principal songwriter, at my house in Topanga Canyon. I hadn’t heard the band. We went to see them after our show, and when we walked in, they were standing on the stage playing “Dixie Chicken.” Their Atlanta audience was in a frenzy. Little Feat, to this day my favorite rock-and-roll band, sounded like no other. It had layers of oddly syncopated New Orleans parade beats, with Bill Payne pounding out a keyboard part that conjured the spirits of Professor Longhair, Louis Gottschalk, and Claude Debussy. Sailing over the top of this was Lowell, playing slide guitar with an 11/16 socket wrench from Sears, Roebuck and Co. on his little finger. The socket wrench, heavier than the usual glass bottle top or lipstick tube preferred by blues musicians, gave him a languorous, creamy sound that was completely his own. Lowell had a rich, amber-toned voice that he could whip into and out of falsetto. His blues-saturated vocal embellishments had glimmers of classical Indian singing, and he had unerring pitch and rhythmic savvy. His songwriting style was unrestricted by conventional pop music forms, with quirky lyrics that suggested a prodigious intellect.
Backstage, Lowell walked up to me, opened his fist to reveal a large pill, blinked at me several times, and said, “Hi, want a Quaalude?” No, I didn’t want a Quaalude. I wanted to know the open tuning to a song of his, about a truck driver, that he had sung in the show. He called it “Willin’.” We all went to someone’s house for a long jam session where Lowell played the song for me in open G tuning. We soon discovered that for my voice, it sounded better in the key of E. We agreed to meet when we were both back home in L.A., and he would show me how to play it in the new key.
True to his word, Lowell showed up at my apartment with his big blond Guild acoustic guitar and taught me the song. One of the problems with changing a song from its original key is that it can lose the charm of the way the chords are voiced. Also, the G tuning gains some resonance from having the strings loosened, or slacked, to make the G chord. Open E tuning is not a slack key. The relevant strings have to be tuned higher to form the chord, so it is not as big a sound. Still, the E tuning came roaring out of that big Guild, which he left with me for a few weeks so that I wouldn’t have to retune my own guitar every time I wanted to play the song. I played it till my fingers blistered.
A few nights before I met Lowell, I was in my room at the now infamous Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., with a night off and nothing to do. The phone rang. It was Emmy, saying that she was spending the evening with a group of musicians she felt I just had to get to know, and would I meet her at one of their houses. She gave me the address and directions to a place in the suburbs in Bethesda, Maryland. It was the home of an ear, nose, and throat specialist named John Starling and his wife, Fayssoux. When John wasn’t taking out people’s tonsils in the OR, he played guitar and sang baritone in a bluegrass band called Seldom Scene. Fayssoux, a speech pathologist, was a beauty with a cameo profile and shimmering coppery hair to her waist. She spoke in the refined tones of southern aristocracy, kept an immaculate home, and was an even more immaculate harmony singer. She, Emmy, and John had spent countless evenings working up three-part arrangements to traditional songs and country music classics and blended like family when they sang together. There were two other Seldom Scene members: Ben Eldridge, a mathematician, was the banjo player. Mike Auldridge, a graphic artist, played dobro.
Most dobro players have a lot of swagger and growl in their sound, but Mike was an original. Quiet and shy, he approached the music with a kind of hushed reverence that gave his playing an unusual lyrical quality. His was a seminal style that has influenced many younger players, including current dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas.
We played and sang long into the night, and the next evening I went back and we did it all again. Emmy, who has an infallible ear for a song with integrity, was beginning to explore material for her major label debut record, Pieces of the Sky. She played us Billy Sherrill’s “Too Far Gone,” Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Sleepless Nights,” and the Stanley Brothers’ “Angel Band,” John and Fayssoux harmonizing flawlessly. I couldn’t wait to get
another night off in D.C. so I could sing with them again.
9
Peter Asher
KATE TAYLOR TURNED UP backstage at a show I played with the Eagles at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey. We talked about knitting for a while. She had taught me how to knit woolen socks on five needles, and I told her about the pattern of hearts I had plotted on graph paper and how cool it was to watch the socks take shape. After a while, she changed the subject and told me she no longer wanted a singing career that involved constant touring; she preferred to play music at home and not perform very much. She urged me to ask Peter Asher to manage me again and said she thought he would agree.
We were walking toward a staircase that would take us from the dressing rooms to the stage on the floor below, where the Eagles were beginning their show. I was studying her face closely, to make sure she was comfortable about what she had told me, and I wasn’t watching where I was going. I caught my heel on the edge of the top step and tobogganed all the way to the bottom. I had the wind completely knocked out of me, and as I lay in a heap struggling to catch my breath, I made a decision to speak to Peter as soon as I returned to L.A.
Back home in California, I phoned Peter’s wife and told her what Kate had said to me. I asked if she thought Peter would still be interested in working with me, and she said she thought it was possible. Why didn’t I come for dinner, and we would all discuss it? Betsy made us a casserole out of pork medallions, onions, and potatoes, and we ate it in front of the fire in the dining room of their charming house in Beverly Hills. By the time we got to dessert, we had an agreement. Neither of us wanted a written contract. We sealed the deal with a handshake and a hug.
Having Peter on board meant that John Boylan could go back to doing what he loved most, which was full-time record production. He became a vice president of A&R for Epic Records and produced a series of hits for numerous artists.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 8