The Wrecking Crew (24 page)

“We're not recording for you
anymore,
” Nesmith exploded, staring down a stunned Kirshner. “We want to do our own thing.”

A tense silence instantly filled the room. The line had been drawn.

Wide-eyed, the other three Monkees could do nothing but watch the showdown now unfolding between a determined Nesmith and their equally intransigent music bosses. Screen Gems, with Kirshner at the helm, was making a bundle off the Monkees, and there was no way they were about to jeopardize any of it just to assuage some guitar player.

Feeling the need to set an obviously misguided employee straight, Kirshner's fellow executive (and lawyer) Herb Moelis stepped into the fray.

“Don Kirshner, as the music supervisor on
The Monkees,
has every right to pick whatever songs he wants for release,” Moelis reminded.

Nesmith, however, would have none of it. To him, the whole thing had become insipid.

“We could record ‘Happy Birthday' with a beat and it would be a million-seller,” he replied in disgust. “If something doesn't change, I'm out of here.”

Moelis then reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

“You had better read your contract, Mr. Nesmith,” he said sharply, wagging a copy of the document. “We have a legally binding agreement with you.”

As the two alpha males warily eyed each other during what had now become a standoff, a frustrated Nesmith suddenly lost his temper. Whirling around, and with all his might, the guitarist slammed his right fist through the hotel room's wall, sending out a shower of plaster. Turning back toward Moelis, Nesmith then made sure his position was perfectly understood.

“That could have been your face, motherfucker.”

*   *   *

Around the time of the Monkees' incandescent debut, another pop act that routinely relied on the Wrecking Crew's services also found itself squarely in the spotlight. Such was the worldwide impact of “I Got You Babe” back in 1965 that Sonny & Cher had been able to coast on its success for the better part of a year. Several songs they had recorded before anyone knew who they were, such as “Just You” and “Baby Don't Go,” had also swiftly skated onto the higher reaches of the national charts. The funky-dressing couple with the almost atonal singing style had become, by mid-1966, one of the hottest acts in show business.

But Sonny Bono was nothing if not honest with himself. The latest records he had been putting out were doing okay, too, but
just
okay. They were creeping their way into the teens and twenties, a moderate success by most music industry standards. But singles like “What Now My Love” and “Little Man” were far from turning anyone's heads. And with this, Bono could feel the duo's momentum beginning to slide. The sweetly sentimental love songs that he and Cher favored could no longer adequately compete in an increasingly hip marketplace. Music was changing once again. Folk rock, with its often-overt social commentary, had become the new darling of Top 40 radio. Songs like “The Sound of Silence,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” were now setting the musical tone. Alienation was in.

Riding high though he and Cher might have appeared to the outside world as the months passed in 1966, behind closed doors Bono knew they needed to develop a different sound fast if they were going to keep their recording careers alive. They needed a hit song that would make them relevant again. Something that grooved, something that
mattered.

Once again, Sonny Bono found himself sitting alone in a lousy mood late one fall evening in front of his battered piano. While messing around for several hours, he unexpectedly hit upon a melody idea that he especially liked. Adding some autobiographical lyrics about his belief in the need to persevere no matter how life seemed to change, Bono sensed that he might just have a winner on his hands.

Gathering at Gold Star with the Wrecking Crew several days later, Bono got to work on trying to shape his song into a possible hit. On hand were many of his favorites, including Michel Rubini on piano, Frankie Capp on drums, and Carol Kaye, this time on acoustic guitar. Another familiar face was that of Barney Kessel, and the old pro just couldn't resist giving Sonny Bono the business one more time.

As the musicians ran through the song, called “The Beat Goes On,” for over two and a half hours, they began to wear down. Not just from the repeated playing but also from the unprecedented monotony of it all. Bono had written the whole thing in just one chord (F), and the musicians were about to fall out of their chairs from boredom.

Finally, the Kerouac-cool, bebop-schooled Kessel could take no more. His world was about anything
but
strumming the same chord over and over. He was a flat-out jazz guitar legend. Rising to his feet, with instrument in hand, the normally silent, poker-faced guitarist announced to one and all, “You know, guys, this song has got a
great
change.”

As the musicians all chuckled, Kessel then turned toward the control booth and grandly proclaimed in his finest stentorian voice, “Never have so many played so little for so much.” With that, he sat down. Everybody in the place—even Bono—dissolved in laughter.

But the all-important session also had a very serious problem. With no chord changes and a relatively ordinary melody line, the song just wasn't happening; it didn't swing. Sonny Bono's last-gasp hope for a hit record was in danger of never making it onto vinyl. He needed help, and he needed it now.

*   *   *

In 1963, Betty Friedan, a freelance magazine writer and suburban New York housewife, dismayed by the prevalence of what she called “the problem that has no name,” published a book called
The Feminine Mystique.
In her expository essay, Friedan analyzed the trapped, imprisoned feelings that she believed many women (including herself) secretly held regarding their roles as full-time homemakers. Friedan vehemently argued that women were as capable as men to do any kind of work or to follow any kind of career path and that they would be well served to recalibrate their thinking accordingly.

Some considered it a call to arms; others found it to be an outrage. Either way, Friedan's groundbreaking treatise not only ignited a nationwide firestorm of controversy and debate; it also became an instant bestseller, in the process helping to launch what came to be known as the “second stage” of the Women's Movement.

At the same moment in time, deep inside the rock-and-roll recording studio world of Los Angeles existed an important, pioneering exception to the female status quo that Friedan wrote so passionately about. And that exception was Carol Kaye.

With Kaye self-reliant from an early age, it never entered her mind that she couldn't perform either in the same profession or at the same level as men. She had played alongside many women in her earlier jazz days, when greats like the organist Ethel Smith, the pianist Marian McPartland, and the alto saxophonist Vi Redd were at the height of their careers. So the notion of being a woman who happened to play guitar seemed as normal to her as any other line of work. And when rock and roll came along in the late Fifties, Kaye naturally made the transition, where other women, for reasons of their own, decided to leave the business or stick purely with jazz. There was no particularly evident gender bias in the studios, either. If you could play, the producers would pay.

Over the years, Kaye had more than held her own while moving up the studio ladder, too, and she was not at all shy about defending her turf. Whenever some wise-guy male musician would comment, “Hey, that's pretty good for a woman,” she would immediately counter his backhanded compliment with, “Well, that's pretty good for a man, too.” That was also a big part of why Sonny Bono liked having her on his sessions: she was quick and she was creative.

As Kaye carefully listened that day in the studio as she and her fellow musicians ran through “The Beat Goes On” several times in order to try to make sense out of it, she knew that she was going to have to come up with something inventive. In her opinion, the droning, one-chord tune was a real dog; it just lay there. Playing around with several bass lines on her acoustic guitar, she then came upon a particular pattern that had some real hop to it.
Dum-dum-dum-da-dum-dum-da-dum-dum.

Bono immediately stopped the session.

“That's
it,
Carol,” he whooped. “What's that line you're playing?”

Maybe he couldn't really play an instrument himself, least of all the bass, but Bono instinctively knew a signature lick when he heard one. And Kaye had just come up with an all-timer. As she dutifully played her creation once more for the producer, Bono had Bob West, the electric bass player on the date, learn it on the spot. Kaye and West then proceeded to play the simple yet transformative line in unison on the final recording, turning a previously lifeless production into a surefire hit.

Entering the charts in January of 1967, “The Beat Goes On” made it all the way to number six, giving Sonny & Cher their biggest Top 40 showing in almost two years. Stepping in as the song's de facto arranger, the independent-thinking Carol Kaye had just saved Bono's composition, and likely Sonny & Cher's tepid recording career, from an almost certain demise.

But the beat also went on for scores of others trying to gain a measure of their own fame and fortune in the high-flying, competitive Top 40 marketplace of the mid-Sixties. There was always another Sonny Bono or Jan and Dean or Roger McGuinn waiting in the wings someplace, anonymously dreaming the same fevered dream. The “kids” music that label execs like Mitch Miller at Columbia had once derisively dismissed as a passing fad had now become firmly entrenched as the biggest-selling genre of them all. Rock and roll had gone mainstream. Which gave the Wrecking Crew players more session work than they knew what to do with. And it provided an inevitable destination for every kind of struggling garage band, vocal group, and wandering minstrel. Even if they didn't always know it yet.

*   *   *

Sitting at a table in a tiny outdoor café overlooking the Mediterranean Sea on the sun-bleached island of Crete, tall, lanky, twenty-one-year-old Chuck Ertmoed could visualize his future as clearly as he could see the local fishermen returning with their catches on the sparkling blue waters of the harbor below.

As part of a folk-singing group called the New Californians, out on a two-year-plus, shoestring-style world tour, the young vocalist and guitarist had recently arrived in Greece for a series of small concerts. He now found himself enjoying dinner late one afternoon with a married couple from Oregon after randomly having met them during a bit of sightseeing in Crete's capital city of Heraklion. As their impromptu alfresco get-together merrily rolled along, with one glass of ouzo becoming two and two glasses soon enough becoming several bottles, the well-oiled conversation between the three tablemates eventually made its way around to the subject of dreams.

“You know, I can see it all in my mind's eye,” Ertmoed confided, taking a last bite of his
karidopita,
a rich walnut cake flavored with cognac. “I'm going to go back home and become successful in music. I can feel it.”

Whether it was the shared liquid fortification or the powerfulness of his conviction, the musician's newfound friends instantly became fellow believers in his career prospects. They even went so far as to pick possible stage names for him to use, writing them on individual scraps of paper. One thing everyone agreed upon for sure was that the surname of Ertmoed would have to go; it sounded too much like somebody in the throes of upchucking.

After a number of hours together under what had become a coal-black sky illuminated by a galaxy of glimmering Greek-named constellations, the woozy threesome finally decided to call it an evening. “Maybe we'll run into each other again sometime back in the States,” the woman said brightly.

Grabbing his ever-present rucksack, Ertmoed warmly hugged them both good-bye, gave a quick wave over his shoulder, and then disappeared down a dark cobblestone street to the old-world-style inn where he and his group mates were staying. With a big show scheduled for the next day, it was time to get some sleep.

As he gratefully crawled into bed inside his small room, just like every night, Chuck Ertmoed mentally tucked away his career aspirations for safekeeping, content in the knowledge that he was now one day closer to realizing his musical destiny, whatever it may be.

*   *   *

As the local band known as the 13th Floor entered the offices of Dunhill Records in early 1967, it was with a great sense of anticipation and excitement. The quartet's managers had scored them a hard-to-get record deal, and they were there that day to sign the contracts. Eagerly stepping forward with pens in hand, Rick Coonce, Warren Entner, and Rob Grill immediately signed their names on the line, no questions asked. The fourth member of the group, however, hesitated. Wordlessly he began fishing around for something in one of his pockets, finally pulling out a crumpled slip of paper. After carefully smoothing it out on the table and reading its contents, the guitarist then proceeded to add his signature to all the rest.

“Creed Bratton?” one of his bandmates asked, looking over his shoulder. “Who is
that
?”

“That,” Chuck Ertmoed said proudly, “is my new name.”

Having returned to the United States from his vagabond days abroad, Ertmoed had finally settled down to form a rock-and-roll band with three like-minded musicians. Based in Los Angeles, they played popular nightspots like the Middle Earth in the Valley and the Fog Cutter on the Sunset Strip and soon began building a following. With one of their songs, “Beatin' Round the Bush,” being good enough to get them a recording session for Dunhill over at Eldorado Studios on the corner of Hollywood and Vine (a smaller facility sometimes used when Western 3 was unavailable), the next thing they knew the foursome had a contract. And their timing couldn't have been better.