I am severely allergic to alcohol and have never been able to tolerate it in any amount. I attempted to get drunk a few times by drinking tequila, my father’s drink of choice. The result was a bright red face and several days of throwing up. I never got any buzz, just went immediately to the hangover. Cocaine sent me straight to the doctor with a bloody nose, which required cauterization. While I was there, my doctor cheerfully explained to me that cocaine causes the cilia in the ear canal to lie down, and many never get up again. This can cause permanent hearing loss. As I recognized that my ears were an important item in my musical toolbox, it was the end of my interest in cocaine.
Max had given me a strong body and a welcome alternative to the drugs and carousing lifestyle of the music business. This was a rich gift indeed.
I bought a dappled gray Arabian horse and tried to resurrect my childhood adventures, but threading my way through overdeveloped suburban Los Angeles was never the same as the wild freedom I had experienced with my childhood friend Dana and our ponies, Murphy and Little Paint, in the Arizona desert.
Nicolette came out to the beach one day with a new pair of roller skates. They were not like the in-line Rollerblades used now or the rickety metal ones I had as a child, which fitted to my saddle shoes with a key that hung on a ribbon around my neck. They were shoe skates with wide vinyl wheels that gave a surprisingly smooth ride. It was like having a Cadillac on each foot.
Nicky and I started skating on Venice Beach, which we liked because it was full of extreme Southern California characters. There were old Jewish lefties playing chess, whatever was left of the Beat Generation, Muscle Beach bodybuilders, and street performers. There were also slackers and stoners of every description lying around enjoying the warm sun and the great-looking girls in skimpy clothing. Skating liberated us from car culture. If we saw something we liked, we could stop and join in immediately without having to park. If we didn’t like what we saw, we could roll on by.
The two of us were both novice skaters and could stop only by grabbing on to a pole or a tree. We had a pal named Dan Blackburn, who worked as a news correspondent for NBC. He was a good skater and offered to meet us at the beach and give us some tips. Dan said he would bring a friend he wanted us to meet.
He arrived at the designated hour and introduced us to a slender brunette, quiet and pretty, with a refined, well-brought-up manner. Her name was Leslie. We skated for an hour or so, until we were accosted by a tangle of people who were lying on the ground, trying to grab our ankles and begging for water. Some of them were eating dirt. They were obviously wasted on something strong. Somebody said it was “angel dust,” which was the street name for PCP. The analgesic effect of angel dust can prevent users from realizing they need water, and by the time the drug starts to wear off, they are desperate with thirst.
We managed to slide away and skated to a nearby restaurant for lunch. After we ordered, we began to talk about how we felt sorry and embarrassed for the people we had seen, that they had been shorn of any dignity they may have possessed, and that angel dust looked like a bad drug. Nicky and I had never tried it and wondered what could be its appeal. Quiet Leslie became animated and said that yes, it was a very bad drug and could cause one to do things one would never do when sober. She said she knew this because she herself had done some bad things under the influence of drugs and had gone to jail. Remembering my own jail experience, I naively asked her what she was arrested for. “Murder,” she replied.
“Well, who did you murder?” Nicky sputtered.
Leslie replied that her full name was Leslie Van Houten and that she had been part of Charles Manson’s “family.”
Nicolette and I were choking on our burgers. She seemed so nice and normal. We wondered as politely as we could how she had gotten out of jail and could be lunching and roller skating with us instead of sitting in a cell with the rest of her cohorts. She was out on an appeal because her attorney disappeared during the trial and so she was found to have had ineffective assistance at trial. As she saw it, the combination of Charles Manson’s influence plus the drugs he had encouraged her to take would convince the court that she was not in her right mind and therefore innocent.
Dan and Leslie left us pondering how someone’s life could change so irrevocably from normal to grotesquely tragic. As we skated back to where the car was parked, we wondered, could this happen to either of us? Or someone we loved? It definitely reinforced the hearing-loss argument against drugs. I remember feeling so disturbed and distracted that I lost track of what my feet were doing and fell hard on the concrete. This, added to my fall down the stairs at the Capitol Theatre a few years earlier, caused years of back problems. Leslie’s appeal, no surprise, was ultimately unsuccessful, as she was retried and ultimately found guilty. After close to a year of freedom, she was returned to prison, where she remains to this day.
The phone was ringing in my Malibu cottage. It was Emmylou, saying that she had Dolly Parton sitting in her living room, and she wanted me to come over. Needing no more encouragement, I jumped in my car, pushed it as fast as I dared through the winding curves of Sunset Boulevard, and arrived at her house in Coldwater Canyon in record time.
Emmy and Dolly were sitting on the sofa, trading stories and laughing together. Emmy had her guitar out, and, very shortly, we began to play music. Dolly suggested a Carter Family jewel, “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” and we sang it in three-part harmony. All of us were surprised and stunned by the effect of our voices together. Emmy and I had played and sung together in lots of situations with lots of different people, including Neil Young, Roy Orbison, George Jones, and Ricky Skaggs. As we are all accomplished singers and players, it generally sounded pretty good. This new sound, however, was something different. We each seemed to realize it at the same time and immediately began to scratch around for other songs that we could sing together.
In American traditional music, there are lots of trio configurations for men but not so many for women. Bluegrass singing has been a man’s domain, and rightly so. It is the attempt to push the male harmonies so high—a wail one notch below a scream—that gives the vocal blend an edge and a tension creating what is called the “high, lonesome sound.”
Styles of harmonizing for women seem to me no less urgent and a great deal more reflective. Both men and women worked hard in the rural communities that gave us our rich treasury of Americana music. For men, it was the bone-crushing work of farming, mining, or building railroads and bridges. For women, it was seven days a week of laundering, cleaning, looking after children, and putting three meals on the table. When they did have some time to steal away and play music, I imagine them sitting in a tidy parlor, sharing their sorrows, joys, and disappointments with sisters or bosom friends. They would be playing whatever instruments and at whatever musical proficiency they were able to acquire; then they would scurry back to the unrelenting business of running a household.
The sound we were making wasn’t bluegrass and it wasn’t honky-tonk country music.
It wasn’t even restricted to what Dolly referred to as “old-timey music,” as we also wanted to explore more recently written material like the songs of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, or Linda Thompson, who was making remarkable records with her then husband, British musician Richard Thompson. We came to regard it as “parlor music”—something subtler and more genteel than bluegrass, honky-tonk, or the current pop music we heard on the radio.
We decided we would like to make a record together. While the merits of this idea seemed obvious to us, it was not immediately apparent to our respective managers or record companies.
There had been a number of attempts to forge and record “supergroups,” which were composed of hugely successful and easily recognizable names from various rock bands. Sometimes the music from these groups turned out well, and sometimes not. We weren’t trying to exploit the fact that we were three established names. We wanted to do it because at our deepest level of instinct, we suspected musical kinship.
Of course, trying to sort out the conflicts and demands of three different careers being represented by separate managers, agents, and record companies made singing together professionally almost impossible. We never did manage to align the planets for a concert tour, but we eventually carved enough time out of our schedules to make two albums over the years.
Musically, I found the experience very satisfying, with each of us bringing something different to the sound. Emmy usually found the best songs. Dolly’s Appalachian style, with its beautiful ribbon-bow embellishments, lent an authenticity to the more traditional songs. Dolly and Emmy are both natural harmony singers, but the process of sorting out the more difficult harmony parts usually fell to me. We would try singing the songs in every vocal configuration, shifting around who sang high or low harmonies and who sang lead, and then choose what sounded best for that particular song. We also could duet successfully in any combination: Emmy and I, Dolly and I, or Dolly and Emmy. My favorite approach, which we used, for example, on “My Dear Companion,” was for Emmy to start the lead, me to join her with a harmony underneath, and then have Dolly soaring above, dipping and gliding like a beautiful kite. I found I was able to sing with them in ways that I was not able to do by myself. I am seldom happy listening to my own recordings because I will hear something I think I should have done better, but the sound that the three of us made together seemed altogether different from our individual sounds and could be listened to with a rare sense of objectivity.
It was 1987 by the time we sorted out the logistics of synchronizing three busy careers and released Trio. Our earlier attempt to make a record when we first started trying to sing together in the mid-1970s was disappointing and never released. We each chose favorite tracks from those sessions and incorporated them into our individual projects. Still, we wanted very much to release an entire album of the three of us singing together. With Dolly between recording contracts, and Emmy and I each signed to labels that belonged to the Warner Bros. conglomerate, it seemed like an ideal time to resurrect the idea. We decided to have George Massenburg produce, as he had shown extraordinary sensitivity to the recording requirements of acoustic instruments when he worked with John Starling and the Seldom Scene. We called Starling right away and asked him to come out to play guitar. Emmy and I had great trust in John’s musical sensibility, so we also asked him to help us shape our vision of what the trio should sound like.
As usual, Emmylou came in with an armload of beautiful songs. Mostly traditional in style, they also included the unlikely choice “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” the Teddy Bears’ 1958 classic written by Phil Spector. We recorded it with a band that we had assembled from the community of virtuoso acoustic string band instrumentalists that Emmy and I had long admired and played with. They included Mark O’Connor playing mandolin and guitarist Ry Cooder playing a seductively indolent, sleepwalking electric sound that only he can coax out of his equipment. We also had British guitarist Albert Lee and my cousin David Lindley. My old Stone Poneys bandmate Kenny Edwards played a Ferrington acoustic bass guitar. With Emmy’s angelic, soaring lead, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” was a number one country hit for us. Emmy also suggested Linda Thompson’s withering, sorrowful ballad “Telling Me Lies.” It, too, succeeded as a single, and both songs won awards.
Dolly, Emmy, and I had a lot of fun recording together, and we even managed to squeeze a few television appearances and one later album into our three already overbooked schedules, but finding time to tour together was impossible, so we felt lucky to have such a musically satisfying experience and let the rest of it go.
In 1987, with artists like the Beastie Boys and Bon Jovi topping the charts, it was easy to understand why the record companies were scratching their heads trying to figure out how to sell such an eclectic stew. Dolly was no longer with her longtime label, RCA Records, so that left my company, Elektra/Asylum, and Emmy’s company, Warner Bros., to figure out which one would release it. I suspect the negotiations more closely resembled a game of hot potato than it did a determined competition for a desired product. It was eventually decided that since Warner had a country division, it would take our record and construct an ad campaign aimed at the country music market.
To make matters more difficult, the marketing geniuses on the corporate side of the country music labels had decided to start using focus groups to test their products before they were developed or released. An example of this would be to ask the focus group whether they liked sad songs or happy songs. “We like happy songs!” the focus group would chirp, and the word would go back to the writers and producers to come up with “happy” songs to record. This made it especially hard on the songwriters, who rarely feel a need to write when they are happy, as then they are busy luxuriating in the pleasure of happiness. When something bad happens, they want to find a way to transcend it, so they write a song about it. When Hank Williams, one of the greatest and most successful country artists of all time, wrote a song like “Your Cheatin’ Heart” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” he wasn’t writing “happy” songs, yet they made the listener feel better. The listener could feel that someone else had gone through an experience similar to the listener’s own, and then went to the trouble and effort to write it down accurately and share the experience like a compassionate friend might do. In this way, hearing a song like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” could make the listener feel better, or “happy.” Our record, with songs like the traditional “Rosewood Casket,” which told a story of a dying and heartbroken sister’s last request, didn’t meet the focus group’s requirements.
Jim Ed Norman, who had been the keyboard player in Shiloh, the band Don Henley played in before the Eagles, had very recently been made head of the Warner Bros. Records’ country music division in Nashville. I suspect he had as little patience for the focus group approach to marketing music as we did. He seemed happy that the project had bounced into his lap and did his best to promote it.
When Trio was released, it went to number one on the country chart and remained there for five weeks. It rose to the Top Ten on the pop album chart and won a Grammy and an Academy of Country Music Award. It had four country hits, including the number one “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Within a year, it was certified platinum.
In the winter of 1979, the West Coast was hit with one ferocious rainstorm after another. The Pacific Coast Highway collapsed in a series of spectacular mudslides, making it impossible for me to drive home for weeks at a time. I found that I could take a long detour through Las Virgenes Canyon, but it also was subject to mudslides. This went on for three months, as the overburdened California Department of Transportation tried to fix a road that, due to inherent geological instability, never should have been built in the first place.
Trapped in Malibu, I watched the high waves strip the sand off the beach in front of my house, which was built with no foundation. Most of the houses in Malibu Colony have a glass-enclosed room, called a teahouse, which extends from the house proper out onto the beach. One night the waves were so high that they swept away the last of the sand from under my teahouse. With no support beneath, it splintered off the main house, my sofa cushions churning in the seawater as though they were in a giant washing machine. I realized I had broken the first rule of the desert: never buy a house in a flood plain.
I was keeping company with then-governor Jerry Brown, and he came out to look at the damage. By this time, the newspapers had begun to speculate on whether the governor was going to spend state money to protect his girlfriend’s house. Precisely because of such speculation, Jerry had already decided not to, so I loaded my furniture and belongings into a moving van and sent them to storage, as I knew my house would surely collapse with the next surge of waves. Meanwhile, the other Malibu residents had heard that he wasn’t going to spend money to protect the Colony because I lived there and felt they were being treated unfairly. After all, they weren’t his girlfriend. I was expecting people to show up with torches and
pitchforks, demanding his hide. Poor Jerry was being cornered in a situation he didn’t cause and for which he couldn’t offer a permanent solution.
Eventually, after Jerry talked at length to residents up and down the beach, the National Guard was called in to sandbag, and the houses were saved. I decided to look for a house in town, far from the recurring menace of the waves. I left Malibu believing that the California Coastal Commission was correct in insisting there be no new building on the beach, as the houses are too vulnerable, and development can disrupt the natural distribution of sand, resulting in precisely the situation I experienced. I also believe that the beach should not be owned as private property and the public should have unrestricted access to it.
I found a pretty house on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood that was designed by the architect Paul Williams, whose work I have long admired. It had a blue slate roof, lots of bedrooms for guests, and a pretty garden for my two Akita dogs to run. Adam’s songwriting career had begun to heat up, and he moved to Santa Monica. Nicolette eventually moved into the Rockingham house with me. So did our pal Danny Ferrington, a luthier from rural Louisiana who built beautiful guitars entirely by hand. He made them at the behest of various musicians who sought him out to build their dream guitars. They included Johnny Cash, Keith Richards, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Richard Thompson, and Ry Cooder, to name a very few. He would customize them by incorporating design suggestions from the musicians, accommodating both their visual and musical requirements. The guitars always sounded wonderful, with the acoustics tweaked for the particular playing style of the individual, whose technique and sound he knew in intimate detail. His brilliance lies in the fact that he can make the musician’s wildest decorative fantasy seem tasteful. He made a tiny guitar for me that I could play while riding on our tour bus. Constructed of rosewood, ebony, spruce, abalone, and mother-of-pearl, it had a normal width neck and a small body for fitting in cramped spaces. The finished piece was elegant, even though I insisted the design elements include bunnies and tweeting birds. To each her own.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 10