one

TALK, TALK

Get the hell off my stage.

—JANIS JOPLIN

WHEN CHARLES MANSON SQUEEZED OFF THE FIRST ROUND from his .38 automatic inside the Sound City Recording Studio in Van Nuys, California, no one knew what to do. But one bullet was all it took. Before the future serial killer could even think about firing a second shot, everyone in the place dove for cover.

It was early 1969, over six months before the grizzly Tate-LaBianca murders for which Manson and his “family” would forever be associated, when the diminutive ex-con was simply known to most as “Charlie.” A lifelong petty thief, Manson had migrated to California during the mid-sixties, in part to try his hand at a career in music. As a self-taught singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar ever at the ready, Manson had written a number of songs by the time he hooked up with the Beach Boys’ cofounder and drummer, Dennis Wilson.

Wilson, a ruggedly handsome, naïve, fun-loving character with an eye for the ladies (and they for him), came across a couple of Manson’s female followers one day as they hitchhiked along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. After giving Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey a ride back to his palatial home on Sunset Boulevard, the young women quickly dropped their clothes and made themselves available to Wilson in any way he wanted, an opportunity the free-spirited musician could not resist. From there the girls invited their beloved Charlie, along with a busload of his other followers, to move right on in with them. And for a time it seemed like one big party to Wilson. He had sex with any and all of the girls whenever he pleased, no questions asked and no condoms required; it was his own private Gomorrah.

But after Wilson talked his friend, the record producer Terry Melcher (and Doris Day’s son), into giving Manson a tryout in the studio, things went downhill in a hurry. Melcher disliked Manson’s singing even more than he disliked his personality and declined to offer him a recording contract. In turn, an infuriated Manson came down hard on Wilson, demanding that he make good on his alleged promise to help him become a star.

Not knowing what else to do and growing more fearful by the day in the face of Manson’s increasingly menacing ways, Wilson finally told Manson he would pay for him to cut some songs at Sound City in Van Nuys, out in the San Fernando Valley, which was a new studio Wilson had heard about that apparently wasn’t too expensive. Which all went as planned until afterward, when Wilson neglected to pay the bill for the recording time. Accordingly, the studio chose to hold onto Manson’s master tapes until the money appeared, as per industry custom.

And that’s when the gunplay began.

“Give me my fucking tapes,” a wild-eyed Manson snarled, waving his Smith & Wesson as he stepped inside the studio’s front door. The petrified sound engineer and receptionist on duty that day didn’t have to be asked twice. Manson got his tapes and Sound City ended up with a nice bullet hole in a metal cabinet for its trouble.

Which, on many levels, was the perfect metaphor for the rapidly changing American music business itself in the sixties.

BY MID-1969 THE SIMPLE, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY WORLD OF 45-RPM singles and Top Forty AM radio in America was beginning a slow, inexorable decline toward irrelevancy. Once the twin titans of delivering hit songs to the public, 45s and AM were gradually being supplanted in popularity by vinyl LPs and the newly created “underground” free-form radio found on the high-fidelity FM stereo bandwidth.

Album-wise, the seeds of sonic change came two years prior with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles in 1967. The first true rock-and-roll concept album (though some would argue that Pet Sounds in 1966 by the Beach Boys got there first or even the Beatles’ own Revolver), the artistically adventurous Sgt. Pepper’s astonished listeners in countless ways, perhaps chief among them because every song on the LP was good. As in, really good.

While other successful rock-and-roll acts of the day such as Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Buckinghams, and the Grass Roots remained perfectly content with the status quo of putting out a new album every six months that contained a couple of hoped-for hits and eight or ten unremarkable “filler” tracks, the Beatles would have none of it. They raised the bar for one and all with Sgt. Pepper’s by making every tune matter. The melody, the lyrics, the instrumentation, the arrangement, the cohesion, the sequencing, the message, the cover art—it was all inextricably entwined. Albums were now to be listened to from beginning to end. No more cherry-picking among the cuts just to hear the latest hit song from the radio. The record labels, of course, still tried to pick the hits via 45-RPM releases to AM radio, but the public increasingly wanted the entire album to matter. Listening had become a full-blown, immersive, even communal experience. Accordingly, new LP releases were alternately ogled, examined, discussed, dissected, deconstructed, reconstructed, criticized, embraced, rejected, cherished, and generally played until the grooves wore out.

Dozens of popular albums released in the late sixties, including such classics as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere by Neil Young with Crazy Horse, To Our Children’s Children’s Children by the Moody Blues, and Volunteers by Jefferson Airplane, became virtual manifestos among American youth yet contained exactly zero Top Forty hits. Times were changing fast, at least in terms of music consumption Record buyers now expected more.

As a consequence, rock and roll was growing up in a hurry, getting bigger, badder, and more sophisticated—not to mention more thought provoking—almost by the day. With all apologies to the Archies and the Partridge Family, the prevailing national mood in America at the dawn of the seventies, at least among those under the age of thirty, had very little to do with sugary-sweet love songs and virtually everything to do with a reexamination of the nation’s direction. The still-raging Vietnam War along with rampant poverty, political corruption, and long-festering civil rights issues made peppy pop ditties like “Sugar, Sugar” and “I Think I Love You” almost laughable to anyone not in elementary school.

And with these changing times came a new breed of Los Angeles–based musicians, producers, engineers, and recording studio owners all intent on achieving a similar goal. They aimed to take popular music to places their forebears—pioneers such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis—could never have imagined.

AS SOON AS KEITH OLSEN CRASHED TO THE GROUND IN THE FALL of 1963, he knew he was hurt. Bad. A five-foot-seven, 135-pound freshman trying out for wide receiver for the University of Minnesota’s frosh football team, Olsen—on paper anyway—had no business even being in the same zip code as the rest of the Golden Gophers’ gridiron goliaths. He was a boy in a man’s world, a very big man’s world. But the will to impress the opposite sex can sometimes make an adolescent do head-scratching things, including obliterating a much-needed finger.

A standout musician and natural-born electronics whiz from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Olsen came to campus out of high school to study cello, hardly the ideal background for catching footballs at the collegiate level. Yet there he was, on the third day of practice, arms outstretched, gamely getting pulverized all over again. Only this time around things were different.

At the conclusion of one particularly ill-fated slant route, a defender’s sharp cleats inadvertently ground Olsen’s right hand into what looked like a mass of uncooked hamburger. As he lay on the turf writhing in pain at the sight of what previously had been a perfectly healthy middle finger, Olsen instantly knew his season was done. Probably his football career too, such as it was. A wide receiver needs all ten digits, especially if he is the size of the team’s water boy.

After the Minnesota team doctor examined Olsen’s mangled hand and declared that he would need to spend the rest of the season on the team’s injured list, Olsen was actually elated. With being cut from the squad likely to occur anyway before the regular season opener, he had hit the jackpot. Guys on injured reserve got letterman’s sweaters. And guys with letterman’s sweaters got the girls.

With extra time available while his finger healed and in between going to classes and dating one of the cheerleaders (the letterman sweater had paid off handsomely), Olsen, a talented all-around musician, one day found himself being asked by an acquaintance if he could help put a band together as support for Jimmie Rodgers, the pop singing star best known for the 1957 Top Ten smash “Honeycomb.” Though Rodgers hadn’t had a hit record in some years, it was still an opportunity that the ambitious, cherubic-faced Olsen wouldn’t have passed up for the world, blurting out “Yes-I-can” so fast it sounded like all one word.

While getting ready to hit the road as part of an upper Midwest hootenanny tour, Rodgers needed some locals to play along with him for a stretch of dates. Along with various musician possibilities from around town, the quick-thinking Olsen, now that he could at least bend his finger, offered up his own services on bass, an instrument he had also been playing for years. And it proved to be a shrewd move. Six months of touring with Jimmie Rodgers later, after feeling like he had learned more about the music business than he ever could have in school, Keith Olsen officially dropped out of college for good in order to embark on what would become the musical adventure of a lifetime.

WHEN FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOBBY WACHTEL SAW A GUITAR IN A NEW York City store window one day in 1952, he instinctively knew then and there what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Walking along with his mom, Wachtel happened to spot through the glass a man on the screen of a small, flickering black-and-white television set holding a hollow-body, jazz-style Gibson L-5 electric guitar. To the wide-eyed youngster it seemed as if the instrument had come straight from outer space.

“What is that?” Wachtel cried out, pointing.

“A guitar” came his mother’s reply.

“I want one.”

And that was all it took. The notion of owning and playing a guitar—no matter that at the time he had no obvious musical talent or any kind of know-how—became the fixated and persistent Wachtel’s unrelenting mantra for the next four years, even after his beloved mother passed away from lung cancer not long after his sixth birthday.

Finally, at the age of nine the redheaded, pint-sized Wachtel’s fondest dream came true. His father, in an effort to silence his son once and for all, bought Wachtel a cheap Kamico archtop acoustic guitar for Christmas. Though Jewish by origin, the Wachtel family’s holiday orientation proved to be a rather mixed bag, with presents being opened on the morning of December 25 every year just like their Christian counterparts, yet always in the shadow of Hanukah lights on display throughout the house. But whatever the occasion, little Bobby Wachtel at long last had a guitar of his own. And from that moment forward he jammed on his new axe like his life depended on it, quickly learning to play virtually any song by ear.

But being a naturally gifted musician and having a viable future can often be two different things. A miserable truant from the age of ten, the opinionated, four-letter-word-spewing Wachtel hated school with a passion. For him it felt like a prison with no useful purpose. How was geometry or geography or, worst of all, PE going to help him become a better guitarist? Wachtel learned to lie his way through his first three years at tough Newtown High School in Queens in regard to his attendance (or lack thereof), only barely staying ahead of mandatory expulsion and, worse yet, narrowly avoiding the wrath of his suspicious father. Eventually the suggestion came from the administration that it might be in everyone’s best interest if Wachtel perhaps found another, more suitable school.

Wachtel ended up transferring for his senior year to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals in Manhattan, a last refuge for the artistically talented and behaviorally free-spirited. A place from which virtually everyone graduated. Or at least so it seemed. On the last day of class, when handed the final exam he needed to pass in order to get his diploma, Wachtel simply stared at the pages before him. He had no earthly idea how to answer the questions. Being able to reel off a blistering fifth-position, minor-pentatonic solo on his Les Paul electric guitar faster than most people could blink was of no help. The permanent label of “high school dropout” seemed assured. But good fortune came to Wachtel’s rescue at the last moment.

“Just answer what you can,” the sympathetic teacher said with a knowing look, “and I’ll mark you only on what you get right.”

By this time Bobby Wachtel’s first name had also been supplanted by the bizarre-sounding mash-up nickname of “Waddy,” courtesy of a fellow band member who could take no more of Wachtel’s bossy ways. “What’s the matter, Waaadddy?” the exasperated musician whined in a child-like voice one day during band rehearsal. Though Wachtel hated it at first, the new appellation stuck anyway, giving him a hard-to-forget name to match his equally hard-to-forget small size and red hair.

From his near brush with flunking out of Quintano’s, it was immediately off to Newport, Rhode Island, for the self-admitted “fuck everything” rebel Wachtel in order to play with his band, the Orphans, a tight little rock-and-roll outfit that had been gaining a bit of a weekend following throughout New England. But it wasn’t meant to last. With the Orphans splintering several months later in the wake of several members leaving for college to avoid the draft, a depressed, broke Wachtel formed a new band out of the remnants, called it Twice Nicely, and hoped for the best. Music was all he knew. It was all he wanted to know. It somehow would have to see him through.

WHILE RIDING ALONG IN AN OLD GREYHOUND-STYLE TOUR BUS on an interstate highway somewhere deep in America’s Heartland, Keith Olsen shook his prized shoebox one more time. Yep, they were all still in there. The container’s contents, much to his satisfaction, comprised a large and growing collection of motel room keys with the names and phone numbers taped on them of all the groupies he had managed to “befriend” while crisscrossing the country as the bass player for a new band called the Music Machine. It was December of 1966, and the group had a hit record in heavy rotation on AM radio called “Talk Talk.” A nasty, raspy, attitudinal affair, the song personified sixties garage rock at its most potent, a proto-punk precursor to the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and even Green Day. And that was saying a lot when fluffy pop fare such as “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees and “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” by the Royal Guardsmen held the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100 the same week “Talk Talk” hit its peak at number fifteen in early January of 1967.

With jet-black hair, equally black clothes, and a single black leather glove (more than a decade before Michael Jackson sported a similar affectation), the Music Machine looked like they sounded—dangerous. The Lovin’ Spoonful or Herman’s Hermits they were not. Which also proved to be their eventual undoing. The Music Machine’s uniqueness made them interesting to the point of almost immediate obsolescence. The unavoidable economic truth remained that most teenage music listeners during the mid-sixties still preferred their music sunny-side up, not dark and foreboding.

By mid-1967, after a good six months on the road squeezing every last dollar and round of applause out of their one and only hit, the Music Machine decided to call it quits. Creative differences between Keith Olsen and the band’s lead singer (and main songwriter), Sean Bonniwell, along with a mysteriously disproportionate split of revenue among the members, became too much to overcome.

But not before one evening in Newport, Rhode Island, when Olsen met a guitarist backstage after a Music Machine show who would become central to his and many other’s as-yet-unimagined futures in the music business.

“Man, you guys are good,” the guitar player enthused.

“Thanks,” Olsen replied, turning to see a weird-looking twenty-year-old kid with long, frizzy red hair staring at him. It was Waddy Wachtel.

As Olsen and Wachtel chatted for a few minutes they realized they had the same musical sensibilities.

“I’ve got a band too. Can we go somewhere and talk?” Wachtel asked. He burned to know what it was like to have a record deal and a nationwide hit. After they shared dinner and Olsen had the chance to watch Wachtel’s band play the next day, Olsen couldn’t believe what he had seen.

“So who the hell is this guy ‘Waddy’?” an incredulous Olsen asked the concert’s local promoter. The answer came back simple and to the point:

“He’s our Clapton.”

WITHIN SECONDS AFTER THE MOMENT KEITH OLSEN FIRST SAW Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham open their mouths and begin harmonizing together onstage, he knew he had stumbled upon something special. Something so special, in fact, that he instinctively knew he could turn them into a hit-making act if given half a chance. The only question would be how fast he could get the pair out of their band and into a recording studio.

It was 1971, and following the dissolution of the Music Machine several years earlier, Olsen had spent his time working his way up the studio ranks in Hollywood. The knowledge he had gained about the recording side of the music business from being a member of a popular band, even if only for a short time, had served him well. He realized he wasn’t a good enough singer or songwriter to strike out on his own or to even front a band, yet he was equally certain of something else: Olsen felt he knew exactly how to put together a hit record.

Accordingly, Olsen hooked on as an independent staff producer for a stretch at Columbia Records on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, then joined a small label nearby called Together Records so he could continue working alongside his old college friend, Curt Boettcher, an established talent who had produced Top Ten singles for the Association (“Along Comes Mary”) and Tommy Roe (“Sweet Pea” and “Hooray for Hazel”). When Boettcher decided to move on after several months, Olsen elected to do the same: it was time for him to finally go out on his own.

Having cut a few demos over time at Sound City for various projects that never really happened, Olsen found that he liked the acoustics of the place, especially for drums. Though the tracking room inside Sound City’s Studio A was nothing more than a generic-looking giant box (it previously had been a warehouse space and a Vox amplifier showroom), the enclosure somehow helped snares, tom-toms, and bass drums come alive like no other studio in town. It could make even a basic four-piece kit, if properly mic’d, sound huge. Notably, the band Spirit, featuring Mark Andes, Randy California, and Jay Ferguson (later of “Thunder Island” fame), made great use of the studio’s unique sound qualities when recording their classic 1970 LP, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. Also, with scant business, the lightly used Sound City would be a perfect musical laboratory within which Olsen could conduct his ambitious music production experiments with little interruption. To that end, he managed to work out a deal with Joe Gottfried, Sound City’s genial yet perpetually broke owner-founder, that gave Olsen a one-third stake in the facility as well as unlimited free studio use in exchange for an immediate and desperately needed $4,000 cash infusion to pay off an outstanding IRS lien.

With plenty of recording time now at his disposal, Olsen began actively searching for promising acts he could sign and produce. Anybody who had a tip on a hot band knew whom to call. Olsen would give a listen to anyone and everyone, from rock to blues to R&B, as long as they were good at what they did. Amateurs need not apply. From there, he figured, it would just be a matter of cutting a strong demo and then shopping it around town to the scores of hungry record labels who were always looking for the next chart topper. With combined 1970 US retail LP and tape sales coming in at an eye-popping $1.7 billion (a 9 percent increase over the year before), label heads wanted more. Lots more.

For their part, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had been toiling away within the Bay Area’s club and fair circuit for the better part of four years as members of a popular five-piece band called Fritz. Jokingly named after a former classmate of theirs from Menlo-Atherton High School (it originally had been the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band), the group played an eclectic mix of covers, self-penned ballads, and rockers while often appearing as the opening act for a series of big-time artists such as Jimi Hendrix, the Moody Blues, Leon Russell, Steve Miller, Chicago—and, on July 12, 1970, at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds—a brilliant-yet-temperamental singer by the name of Janis Joplin.

On tour with her new backing band, Full Tilt Boogie, the hard-drinking, hard-drugging Joplin seemed agitated from the start. To compound matters, the show had begun late, causing Fritz to run past their agreed-upon cut-off time—a big no-no for an opening act. Joplin, who was watching from just offstage, didn’t take kindly to being made to wait her turn, especially from some punk-ass local band she had never heard of. As the minutes ticked by, the recent Woodstock headliner became ever more vocal about her displeasure, demanding that Fritz end their set now.

“What the fuck are you assholes doing?” Joplin yelled while staring daggers at a horrified Nicks, who was in midperformance.

“Get the hell off my stage.”

At the end of the song a frightened Fritz did just that. After saying a quick thank you to the audience and grabbing their gear, the band members scrambled out of sight as fast as they could. But not Nicks. Despite the caustic tongue lashing she had just received, she stayed behind to watch. This was her chance to see the biggest female rock-and-roll artist in the world do her thing. And Janis didn’t disappoint.

Hitting the stage in silky purple bell-bottom pants, a frilly white blouse, and Native American jewelry along with a trademark set of feathers haphazardly placed in her hair, Joplin proved to be mesmerizing. Her scratchy, plaintive vocals were heartfelt, aching even, with the reality of an unhappy life painfully evident in every note. The woman who had been screaming at Nicks only minutes before was now Stevie’s hero.

Though Joplin was hardly a conventional physical beauty, in that moment she nonetheless became beautiful to Nicks by making such a powerful and deeply emotional connection with the audience—something Nicks longed to bring to her own stage work. That single performance on that day by a woman who would live less than three more months (Joplin died of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1970, just days after recording “Me and Bobby McGee”) inspired Stevie Nicks like no other. It stirred her to find her own voice and style, no matter what it might take or where it might take her.

Which proved to be perfect timing for Keith Olsen.

Having learned about Fritz through their manager, who had been dialing every producer in Los Angeles in an attempt to stir up at least some kind of recording interest in the band, Olsen agreed to fly up to San Francisco on their dollar to check them out. After being picked up at the San Francisco airport by a scruffy, twenty-two-year-old Lindsey Buckingham and the group’s drummer in their beat-up instrument-filled van, Olsen rode along with them to that evening’s concert at a private girl’s high school, where he gamely helped load in the gear.

Then, ten minutes before showtime Stevie Nicks walked through the door. And roughly eleven minutes after that, Olsen knew all he needed to know. Buckingham and Nicks were standouts. Their talent and chemistry were obvious, not to mention they both looked and acted like rock stars. They had presence. And Olsen had been around long enough to know the difference. He had to sign them. Immediately following the show he made his pitch.

“Let’s get together at my studio. Can you do it next week?”

Fritz didn’t need to be asked twice. The band members were exultant. A chance for success beyond the confines of the Bay Area finally seemed possible.

A couple of days later, on a Sunday morning, the fivesome drove five hours south to Van Nuys and set about cutting a demo with Olsen at Sound City. As they labored all day on just one song, Olsen’s creative instincts had not changed regarding the individual members of the band. He felt the same way he did when he saw them play live. Only two of them had star potential—Buckingham and Nicks. The rest were ordinary at best. Now came the hard part. Stepping out of the studio with Buckingham and Nicks at the end of the day’s marathon twelve-hour recording session, Olsen decided to lay it on the line. He knew his bluntness would likely sting.

“You two are good, but the rest of the band is going to hold you back.”

So there it was. Olsen was willing to move forward with them as a duo but not with their existing bandmates in any capacity. He would need to bring in musicians of his own choosing if the three of them were to record anything more. The song they had cut that day sounded to Olsen like any other garage band—it simply wasn’t worth shopping around. The uniqueness of the Buckingham-Nicks vocal blend was nowhere to be found. They needed to be spotlighted, not buried. Even Sound City’s vaunted drum sound couldn’t put the production over the top.

Understandably, Olsen’s words hurt Stevie and Lindsey. The other three in Fritz were their friends. How could they just ditch them? They had all been working long and hard to make it. This was to be the band’s big break. The two told Olsen they would think about it. The group then drove back up the coast to ponder their career direction.

In the meantime little did Buckingham and Nicks know that the decision about their professional future was about to be made for them. It would come as if from the heavens by way of a bizarre combination of events involving a British drummer named Mick Fleetwood, a bad case of mononucleosis, and the help of guitarist Waddy Wachtel.