Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (10 page)

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 me 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.

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.