HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME
(1972)
Donna Weiss, my buddy from the White Station High School talent show, was in L.A. trying to be a songwriter. She had been one of the four female background singers in the super big deal Mad Dogs and Englishmen Joe Cocker tour band, fronted by Leon Russell. Later, she would sing the haunting background on Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” She sent me a plane ticket to Hollywood to help her rehearse and record a vocal supergroup of the other girls from the tour: Donna Washburn and Claudia Lennear, “Brown Sugar” herself. Ironically, the Dixie Flyers were in L.A., rehearsing as backup band for Rita Coolidge, the fourth and final lady from Leon’s traveling circus. I had cut Rita’s demos at Ardent when she first came to Memphis, before she took up with Don Nix, and later, Leon. She hired the Dixie Flyers after Atlantic fired them.
I still wasn’t crazy about air travel, but flew west. Donna had a ranch house in the Valley. My first night in town, the three girls and I crashed the Rita and Flyers rehearsal on A&M’s back lot, the old Charlie Chaplin studio. When we walked in, time froze. Sammy Creason ran to the nearest telephone. He called his bitch wife and gleefully reported, “Jim Dickinson just walked in with three Hollywood hookers.” She called Carol Freeman, who naturally called my wife, who told me about it the next day. I could see the smile on Mary Lindsay’s face when she relayed the tale to me. “Some people never learn,” she said.
We rehearsed the killer trio. It’s impossible to describe the beauty of Claudia Lennear singing “Blue Kentucky Girl.” The girls sang bluegrass harmony as Donna Weiss played acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, Claudia developed vocal nodes and a stupid white manager jammed it all up. We were close, but the group went south. Rita and the Dixie Flyers were jealous. Leon was pissed. My trip was cut short by a big earthquake. Donna had an abundance of sleeping pills and I slept through it. I returned to Memphis. Later I cut Claudia Lennear’s only solo record for Warner Brothers, but as they say, that’s another story.
Dan Penn was producing an album on Ronnie Milsap, the blind phenomenon from Herbie O’Mell’s nightclub in Midtown. Herbie was Milsap’s manager and had made a sweet deal with Warner Brothers Hollywood rather than Nashville, making it a pop signing rather than country. We started in Nashville at Quadraphonic, a new studio owned by the rhythm section from what I considered Penn’s high school band, Mark V., Jerry Carrigan, Norbert Putnam, and David Briggs were now Area Code 615, the hottest rhythm section in Nashville (named after Nashville’s long-distance code). Penn hired Eddie Hinton from Muscle Shoals for rhythm guitar and James Burton, Elvis’s sideman, on lead guitar. Briggs was on keyboard. Ronnie Milsap also was a remarkable piano player. I played xylophone in the hallway, like on the Ivory Joe Hunter session with Chips. Things were tense. Milsap was nervous as a horse before the race. He didn’t like Hinton’s vibe and fired him on the spot. I heard him ask Herbie who was playing vibes. I figured that was it. Herbie said, “That’s Jim Dickinson.”
Ronnie said, “Oh good! He’s a musical genius.”
Right on, Ronnie. I stuck to the session like glue.
Penn didn’t like the restrictions of the union clock Nashville session. He especially didn’t like cutting off at midnight. Penn, Eddie Hinton, and I stayed in the studio into the small hours. On the second night, as Penn ran two-inch tape onto the floor, protesting working in Nashville, someone knocked on the door. Two vagabond pilgrims in dusty hats and cowboy boots stepped in, looking like they had just gotten out of prison. The big one had two missing fingers and a greasy brown paper sack. Dan knew him: Billy Joe Shaver. He wanted to play the demos of a new song. Billy Joe pulled a tape out of the greasy sack. Dan put it on the reel-to-reel. We listened to song after song. It was killing me. The tunes were pure gold, as real as death and raw as chitterlings. Funny, sad slices of life, as they say in Nashville. Penn rewound the tape, and shook his head. “I don’t know, Billy Joe. I just don’t hear ’em.” I couldn’t believe it. Billy Joe was crushed. He and his little buddy stumbled into the night. Six months later every song Billy Joe played for us was on Waylon Jennings’s Honky Tonk Heroes, by far the Outlaw movement’s greatest album.
We left Nashville and headed for Muscle Shoals. Penn was pissed off. His old high school buddies had treated him badly.
The Muscle Shoals leg of the session was a safari. We took our female companions—Dan’s wife, Linda, and Herbie’s girlfriend, Baby Jane (with her obnoxious toy poodle)—and joined Mary Lindsay. Herbie hired a bodyguard, Campbell Kensinger, an East Memphis tough guy I knew from my days as a Toddle House cowboy, to care for the women while we worked. Kensinger, the firstborn son of a rich, socially prominent family, was one of Herbie’s bouncers from TJ’s. His mother collected dolls on an enormous scale; his father had trained him in seven martial arts from childhood, like Doc Savage, the pulp fiction hero of old. His father had taken him at age twelve to a New Orleans whorehouse, and gotten him his first tattoo, a cartoon buzzard on his upper left arm. Down the road Campbell made a wide left turn, and ended up facing prison time at age eighteen. He chose a Marines enlistment instead, and was a special training instructor in Hawaii to the Alpha 66 troops who had failed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Asked if he had been at the invasion, Campbell replied, “shooting women and children.” I think we got along because he remembered me from his past.
Our safari was to meet Chris Ethridge, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ legendary bass player, when we got to Muscle Shoals. Ethridge, whom Willie Nelson nicknamed Easter, was originally from Meridian, Mississippi, and as a teenager had gone to L.A. with Johnny Rivers. He played on Rivers’s huge hit album Live from the Whiskey A Go Go, and many other Hollywood hits. He was a great guy. We hit it off instantly. Penn used the rest of the Muscle Shoals Swampers’ current lineup. Tippy Armstrong and “Lightnin’” Wayne Perkins were on guitar; the superhuman Roger Hawkins was on drums. Penn’s writing partner, the incomparable Spooner Oldham, played extra keyboard. Spooner is hard to describe: a soft-spoken southern gentleman who plays piano like no one else on Earth. My personal theory is that Spooner is an angel.
The session went much better in the old coffin warehouse where I recorded with the Stones. Penn felt at home and was treated like royalty. The girls were having a big time. Linda Penn was a pistol. She and Dan were high school sweethearts; she could match him blow for blow. She loved to drive her new Cadillac with a fifth of Wild Turkey between her legs (she has since cooled her act).
We went back and forth between Muscle Shoals and Memphis. Easter Ethridge and his wife, a waitress from the Troubadour in Hollywood, went with us. She taught Mary Lindsay and Kensinger to embroider. I vividly recall Campbell, tattooed and in motorcycle boots, with the girls in a Muscle Shoals laundromat embroidering blue jeans.
As the album session wound down, we did a couple of days at American with Chips Moman’s rhythm section: Bobby Woods, Bobby Emmons, Gene Chrisman, the great Reggie Young, and my old buddy, bassist Tommy Cogbill. Penn cut “Sanctified,” my song that McDill and I had pitched to Wexler. Dan wanted me to play piano. I was nervous. Bobby Woods outplayed me hands down. I managed to hold my own. The Thomas Street boys were courteous and friendly (believe me, they didn’t have to be). I greatly appreciate professional courtesy.
We went to Muscle Shoals Sound for the mixdown. The local studios were holding the first Muscle Shoals music celebration, a self-promotional honors ceremony attended by locals and members of the industry nationwide. Of course Wexler was there; he was closely associated with Muscle Shoals Sounds and Rick Hall’s Fame Studios, where he had first cut Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. We had trouble getting hotel rooms, so Herbie and I doubled up.
Memphis songbird Brenda Patterson came to meet Wexler as a potential producer of her first album for Epic. I didn’t know Brenda well, but greatly respected her vocal chops. She came from rural North Arkansas and, with the Coolidge sisters, Rita and Priscilla, had been a regular fixture at the Little Abner Roadhouse. Brenda had an odd request. She wanted me to attend the meeting with Wexler and sit between them. Brenda had good instincts. Jerry hit on her repeatedly and shamelessly. I helped Brenda ward off his advances; she later asked me to produce.
My first Hollywood session, and I got my new friend Chris Ethridge to book the musicians. Whenever anyone mentioned Duane Allman, Chris replied, “Man, you gotta hear Ry Cooder.” It became a joke on the Milsap session. I told him, “Get me your Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner too.” Chris complied gladly. I booked “Lightnin’” Wayne Perkins and Dr. John. We recorded in the world-famous Capitol Records studio and had rooms at the Continental Hyatt House.
I worked hard on the material. I had a tight arrangement of “Wallflower” by Etta James (commonly known as “Dance with Me, Henry”), a jacked up version of “Jesus on the Mainline,” and “Big Party,” an obscure Stax record produced by Chips Moman that featured the amazing Lowman Pauling–like guitar of my old American cohort, Clarence Nelson.
The first night went almost too well. Dr. John did not show up, so I played piano. We cut the Jerry Lee Lewis “B” side, “The End of the Road.” Cooder was amazing. Tall and tanned from the sun, he claw-hammer finger-picked the guitar like a mountain banjo, suspending the 4 chord over the blues progression and adding the 5 of the 5 as an extension of the typical blues progression in ways I had never heard.
There are special people. You see it in their eyes. They shine. They sparkle. You see through to their souls. Some are politicians, some are religious leaders, and some are everyday people on the street. You can see it in the way a musician holds his instrument, the way he carries it into a room, and walks—what we called “their rhythm” at Baylor. Ry was special.
Ry asked me to join him for lunch the next day. He picked me up at the Riot House in a vintage woody station wagon, and we drove to an over-lit fern bar for a lunch of tuna and bean sprouts on hippie bread. He discussed music and stared over my shoulder. I couldn’t figure it out. He seemed to be talking about working together. I thought he was discussing going on the road and playing live. It was like the Mar-Keys European tour goes Hollywood. I was trying to figure out how to turn him down and still be cool. Then I realized he was talking about production. He wanted me to produce him. What do you think I said? He had worked with Van Dyke Parks, but they were having creative differences. Cooder had to run it by A&R at Warner Brothers, but as far as he was concerned we were ready to rock.
I still had Brenda Patterson to finish. Epic vice president Larry “the Fed” Cohn—he had worked at the FBI—was in charge of the project. He wanted to do the producing and hung around too much. The Columbia engineer wouldn’t smoke dope while Larry “The Fed” was present. He had gotten some killer blond hash from Andy Williams.
Second night I launched into “Wallflower (Dance with Me Henry),” with an elaborate rhythm guitar part based around open D tuning. Cooder, it turned out, played in open G, an old banjo tuning. He was happy to accommodate and eager to learn.
I had booked the mighty Jim Keltner, but he had cancelled at the last minute to play George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. What could I say? Ethridge made a good call: Johny Barbata, from the Turtles’ road band. Johny was hard in the pocket and tried to do whatever I gave him.
“Wallflower” was a handful. I could see Cooder respond to the beat. I played acoustic guitar with a matchbook to get the Bill Black dumbstrum sound. I tried to get Barbata to skip eighth notes on the chorus. He said, “Let’s get this fast. This is the beat that Muddy Waters was looking for for forty years. I’m just barely holding onto it.”
As we played back the master take, I got the message Dr. John was at the door. The studio go-fers were afraid of him and wanted me to go get him.
Mac stood in the hall, draped in beads and chains and a long embroidered robe, full New Orleans voodoo regalia. He carried a long crooked walking stick and his gris gris bag. I tried to steer him into the studio, but he veered into the green room and sat at a table. He fished for something in his bag. “Want to show you my union card” he said, calling it his “onion card.” In vain, I assured him such a formality wasn’t necessary. As he fumbled thru God knows what in his bag, he asked “What do you want me to play?”
“Piano,” I replied but he didn’t seem to hear.
“I could play bass,” he said.
“I’ve got Chris Ethridge playing bass.”
He pulled out his passport and showed me it, shaking his head. “Naw, that ain’t it,” he said, “or I could play guitar-a.” He added the extra “a” to guitar. Mac speaks his own mixture of New Orleans patois and hipster bop talk, not always easy to understand.
“No Mac, I’ve got Ry Cooder and Wayne Perkins on guitar.”
“Well, what do you want me to play then?” he asked.
“I thought you could play piano, Mac. That’s what I wanted,” I said.
“Well, do you want me to play FULL piano?” he asked. “’Cause FULL piano, that’s my thing. And I got to get double scale if you want me to do my thing.”
It was a negotiation. “Sure, Mac,” I said. “Whatever you want.” He pulled a light green credit card–looking object, his New Orleans Musicians Union card with nothing on it but his name and the musical notes from the treble clef spelling out “Way down yonder in New Orleans” in musical notation.
Mac sat at the piano. I played the Stax recording of “Big Party” by Barbara and the Browns over the studio speakers. Cooder marveled at Clarence Nelson’s unique guitar. Chris Ethridge made a chord chart. Brenda worked a handheld 57 microphone, which seemed to relax her. Studio tension was considerable. She sang her ass off. You could hear pain in every note, the pain of a poor Arkansas girl who had married a truck driver at fourteen to escape a life of picking cotton.
Then I did a stupid thing. I asked Mac to count off the tune and instantly realized the mistake I made: it was his intro to play and did not need a count-off. It was not cool. Mac paused for a minute. Then he did it. The song was in 12/8, so Mac counted “1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8-9, 10-11-12.” He stopped a full count and began the intro, which was all him anyway and required no count. He ate the song up. Cooder converted the Clarence Nelson licks into bottleneck and tore thru them. Brenda delivered the song about seduction and betrayal beyond anything I had heard her do. When it was over, Dr. John disappeared before I could discuss another selection. I learned from Leland Rogers not to be greedy. Enough is enough. I called the session for the night.
The third night we recorded Memphis Minnie’s “In My Girlish Days” and the hymn “Jesus on the Mainline.” That was all I had. We returned to Memphis with hopes of finishing the record in a more familiar environment.
In Memphis, we cut “I Smell a Rat” with Lee Baker and Jerry Patterson, the drummer from the Pharaohs. Patterson was the best white boogaloo player I had heard. I overdubbed the Bar-Kays horn section on “Wallflower.” It was my best horn chart ever, building to a syncopated horn breakdown into the last verse. Larry “The Fed” said the horns were out of tune and finagled the project away from me. I had done the heavy lifting. He ended up pulling the record from Epic, and using it to get a job at the brand new Playboy Records. He put the Tower of Power snow-white horns on “Wallflower,” playing whole note pads where my Afro-Cuban syncopated dance pattern had been. He ruined the record. “Big Party,” probably Brenda Patterson’s best vocal performance, was never released. I lay up in my Collierville horse ranch and licked my wounds. Freeman and his wife, Carol, came out for a weekend of commiseration. Atlantic had rejected the Dixie Flyers’ instrumental album and fired the band, which was talking to Rita Coolidge about touring.
Charlie and I took the remaining blue mescaline, four or five hits each. We were flying. Charlie pulled out a bag of coke he said Terry Johnson found in a deserted house down in the ghetto. Freeman often had some elaborate story regarding the source of drugs. In the grip of a psychedelic substance, we thought the cocaine crystals seemed alive, a cubist animation of maggots crawling on the old piano bench where Charlie dumped the drug. “That’s the devil,” Freeman stated. “That’s a pile of dope,” I replied. “Let’s take it.” We did.
We ran out of pot in the middle of the second night, and called Bobby Ray Watson, who grew his own. Bobby Ray showed up with a bale of Delta Delight, and we kicked back.
We sat on my screened porch. The Sunday sun rose over the neighbor’s pasture. A thick fog drifted up over the spirit pond and started to glow pink. “You got to admit,” I said, “this is pretty cool.”
Charlie did not like admitting he was high. “It’s pretty good,” he replied.
“What would make it better?”
“Well,” he said, “Fred Ford could be standing in that pasture wearing a white tie and tails and a full Indian headdress, playing ‘Green Dolphin Street.’ That would be cool.” I had to admit he was right.
Charlie didn’t like primitive country blues. He said, “I just don’t get your Furry Lewis. He’s just a nice old black guy that can’t play anymore. I don’t get it.” I told Bobby Ray to take Charlie to see Fred McDowell. They split. My wife was asleep. I sat there and vibrated.
We were broke. The Atlantic deal was sweet, but it ran out. Local work was sketchy, and Memphis music industry types were not used to me being home. Our telephone was broken and had not rung in weeks. In the middle of our mescaline weekend, with my head full of the coke from the deserted ghetto house and Bobby Ray’s Delta Delight, out of nowhere the phone came to life. Ring! I was shocked and almost didn’t answer. “Is this Jim Dickinson?” Affirmative. “This is Ry Cooder,” the voice at the bottom of the well stated. “What’s it going to take for you to come to Hollywood and finish up this damn record?” He had fired Van Dyke Parks. I tried to clear my mind. I said the only thing I could think of. “Fifteen-hundred dollars and a plane ticket.” “Done,” he replied.
A few hours later the phone rang again. It was Charlie Freeman. First thing he said was, “OK. I get it. This guy is the real thing. I understand the blues in a whole new way.” I heard Fred McDowell playing guitar in the background. Charlie spent the better part of the day and night listening to the blues master.
I still feared flying, but sucked it up. Cooder met me at LAX. I settled into a bungalow at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, walking distance from Cooder’s minimalistic little house on Ocean Way. It was simple, filled with light, air, and a slightly oriental flavor. His wife was an artist. He had rented a spinet piano so we could work in his living room. We shared interest in more than a few obscure records, especially Joseph Spence and the collection Sounds of the South. I studied his books, his hanging art, and his speech. I wanted to think with his mind. We ran over various pieces before going into Warner Brothers’ Amigo Studios. Cooder’s co-producer was a short Jewish guy roughly my own age, Lenny Waronker, a vice president of Warner Brothers, head of the A&R department, and son of the infamous president of Liberty Records from the fifties. We worked with Lee Herschberg, a contemporary of Tom Dowd, with a light touch and an easy way.
The first order of business was overdubbing my piano on an existing track, replacing three tracks of Van Dyke piano. He had a unique convoluted technique that sounded like turn-of-the-century light-classical parlor piano. Stephen Foster meets Jelly Roll Morton. Lenny instructed me to “play across” a dramatic stop in the middle of the brilliant Jim Keltner drum track. Ironically, the song was “Money Honey,” my debut from the Blue Ridge talent show long ago. It was in B flat. I killed it, blasting across the drum stop like a runaway train. Lenny said, “That was the best save I’ve ever heard.” The drum track sounded like it was exploding, like the drummer had kicked the drums down a long, winding stairway. I loved it. Keltner, the jazz drummer I had met at Leon Russell’s home studio on my first trip to L.A., had taken a giant step into rock ’n’ roll; it was like working with a drum god. Imagine Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, playing with Muddy Waters in Sonny Boy Williamson’s band with Chris Ethridge pumping the bass.
Milt Holland, the greatest white musician I’ve worked with in the studio, played percussion. I’m reluctant to use racial differentiation but there’s that magic difference, the light shuffle over a tight four on the floor that defines rock ’n’ roll, that separates old-world Europe from swing funk of Mother Africa. I’d heard stories about Milt from Donna Weiss and Mary Unobsky, who had worked with him on a John Hurley session. Tiny, white-haired, and Jewish, he had been the fourth man in the otherwise black Nat King Cole trio in the forties and fifties. He traveled the world in search of master musicians from whom he could learn and obtain exotic percussion instruments. He laid down a groove like nothing and no one else.
My second task was tracking live from the floor. I figured I was still auditioning, which Charlie Freeman had taught me not to do. This was worth it. The song was an old New Lost City Ramblers regular, “Taxes on the Farmer Feeds Us All.” I suggested a pump organ or harmonium. Cooder was delighted. We rented the antique instrument from the newly formed Studio Instrument Rental Company; it was delivered within the hour.
Probably the best rhythm track I ever produced was an old Wilson Pickett semi-ballad, “Teardrops Will Fall.” It took me a day and a half to get the near-perfect basic form from Ry, Keltner, and Ethridge. After I overdubbed my own convoluted part, Milt played vibraphone on a huge African thumb piano, with a Communist Chinese gong at the end. I loved it. I put the female trio of Donna, Donna, and Claudia on background voices, though Ry much preferred male singers in the old quartet tradition. Ry and the girls’ voices had a dramatic contrast. “Billy the Kid,” a chestnut from my old Tex Ritter album from childhood, was another standout track on Into the Purple Valley. Throw in a little Joseph Spence, some Blind Willie and Woody Guthrie, and we had an album. Cooder was happy and that wasn’t easy.
I was in. Lenny took me to the Warner Brothers A&R office, and introduced me to Teddy Templeman and Russ Titelman, Ry’s brother-in-law.
I walked around Santa Monica, getting familiar with the territory. I found a health food store with a good tuna and sprouts sandwich, and a pretty good record store where I picked up a cassette copy of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, which became my traveling companion for the next thirty years.
I liked walking down the Santa Monica Pier at the end of Route 66, as far west as you can go without getting very wet. Cooder kindly gave me Raymond Chandler paperbacks, which I read for the second time with a new, more native viewpoint. My cabana cottage at the Miramar had a forties black-and-white film noir atmosphere, stronger than the reality of 1971.
After a few weeks the company flew Mary Lindsay out, and we enjoyed the full services of Warner Brothers’ cordiality. While I worked, she toured the movie lot and wandered the mall. On the weekends we lay on the beach. The ocean was too vile to swim in, but we tried. We spent Thanksgiving with old friends John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, who had a Hollywood hill-hugger up on Mulholland Drive with the full-tilt Hollywood view. Thanksgiving is big in Nashville, and John and Ronnie, old-school Nashville cats, put on the big turkey dinner with a trash fire roaring in the gas log fireplace. Donna Weiss was there, and would soon pen “Betty Davis Eyes,” changing her life.
Mary Lindsay returned home as we began the mixing process for Into the Purple Valley, Cooder’s second album. The record company wanted Cooder to tour in support of the new release. He was to open for and back up Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son. It was several years after his monster antiwar hit “Alice’s Restaurant.” I surprised myself by agreeing to play piano in the touring band. Ry was delighted. I enlisted Gimmer Nicholson from home to play bass. He was friends with Arlo’s sideman and sidekick, guitarist John Pilla. Ry hired the fabulous “Johnny C” Craviotto from Santa Cruz, the drummer who played with Cooder on the Jack Nitzsche–produced soundtrack for the Mick Jagger movie, Performance. He played on “Memo from Turner,” a track most people assume is by the Stones. We rehearsed at Arlo’s farm in upstate New York.
I sat at Guthrie’s baby grand piano in his living room and looked out the window as snowflakes fluttered to the ground. This is the way to make a record, I thought. All we needed was a Scully eight-track with mic-in capability. Charlie Freeman often fantasized about building a studio at Jack’s Boat Dock in the Ozark Mountains. Why endure the sterile environment of a modern recording studio when it would be easy to record in a scenic rural setting? I watched the snow; a single cow wandered past the window.
Arlo was managed by Harold Leventhal, the Godfather of fifties folk music. He had managed Arlo’s father. His befuddled nephew, Bruce, was our tour manager. We were to travel like hippies in a VW van. I didn’t see that working.
Sure enough, the first gig was a cluster fuck. The van was too crowded. Johnny “C” and I volunteered to ride with Bruce in the equipment rent-a-truck. The vehicle was equipped with a speed governor, which Leventhal blew out. The truck lunged down the highway, accelerating up to 45 mph and then shutting off. Bruce was losing it. Craviotto began speaking in leaping octaves, like Hylo Brown, the bass player for Flatt and Scruggs. Johnny sounded like a man doing two voices in a ventriloquist act. “Oh, Jimmy, what are we gonna do?” the “Fabulous Johnny C” octavated. When we arrived at the gig, Arlo, Cooder, Pilla, and Gimmer were faking it with half the equipment and PA. We finished the gig, and retreated to Troy, New York, where we had motel reservations.
After a restless sleep, I stumbled downstairs in the morning, headed for the coffee shop for a universal motel breakfast. As I walked into the restaurant, someone called out “Hey, Memphis!” Blues legends Bukka White and Mississippi Fred McDowell were sitting behind platters of fried eggs and hash brown potatoes.
“What are you doing here, Little Muddy?”
“Same as you, Bukka. Playing my gig.”
The men laughed. I walked over to Cooder. “Goddam!!” he stammered. “That’s fucking Fred McDowell!” “And Bukka White,” I added. He grumbled something I didn’t get. He seemed pissed they knew me.
The tour went into high gear. We abandoned the VW van, and per Arlo’s request, flew long hauls and traveled short runs in limos. Arlo sensed my reservations about flying. He told me, “Don’t worry as long as you’re with me. I know I won’t die in a plane.” Silly as it seems, that did it. I overcame my fear of flying.
We had a Halloween show at the Main Point in Philadelphia, one of the route’s famous venues. We would do two sets with a crowd change. We were in the basement when Dickey Betts and a couple of guys from the Allman Brothers road crew came in. I could see something was wrong. Dickey said, “Duane is dead.” Killed in a motorcycle accident. He loved to ride his cycle naked, high on LSD. “Just like Captain America,” he used to say. One more rounder gone.
We toured down the East Coast to Miami, where we had three days off. It was the middle of nowhere and my thirtieth birthday. I made a deal with Charlie Brown for his little cottage in Coconut Grove and flew my wife down for the layover. We were trying to get pregnant, with no luck.
We worked our way westward. Our tour manager, whom we lovingly referred to as “Loose Bruce,” had two solutions to any problem. If it couldn’t be fixed with duct tape, he had a gallon-sized bottle of Quaaludes. Cooder, otherwise drug free, didn’t count Quaaludes as drugs. Gimmer and I saved our doled out Qs, and gave them to Ry. One night in Austin at the Armadillo World Headquarters Auditorium Ballroom, Ry took a few too many. Thank God we played the show sitting down. I doubt he could have stood. He played up to six solo verses instead of one in a very loose, freewheeling set. After that, no more Qs for Mr. Cooder. He told me later he was hallucinating, watching a railroad train plow thru the venue. It was a great show, the run’s highlight.
Warner Brothers had an Arlo session scheduled with Lenny Waronker producing. The session featured Cooder, Keltner, R&B master Wilton Felder on bass, Spooner Oldham on B3, and me. We cut “The City of New Orleans” in three takes. Everyone knew if we went to cut seven or eight, we would have something special. Arlo wouldn’t go. He had what he wanted on the third take. It was his biggest record since “Alice’s Restaurant.”
After a hiatus in Hollywood, I flew to Palm Beach, Florida, to play what would be the best gig of my life. Alan Pariser, Bonnie and Delaney’s manager and the possessor of the best pot I ever smoked, specially grown for him in Mexico, was marrying the Dixie Cup heiress (some kind of minor English royalty). On the Tonight Show Johnny Carson referred to it as “the wedding of the season.” Pariser booked a lineup of blue-eyed soul musicians, most of whom knew each other by reputation only. The band was Chris Ethridge, Jesse “Ed” Davis on guitar, Dan Penn on vocal and acoustic, Jimmy Karstein from J.J. Cale on drums, Jimmy “Junior” Markham on harmonica and vocal, and me. Markham was the notorious “Jimmy” from Leon’s famous song “Shootout on the Plantation” and a front man bandleader of the old school.
We converged at the Breakers, a super classy hotel resort on the ocean, where the waves broke against the walls. An upscale joint not used to the likes of us. We all looked pretty bad. Chris and I arrived together. Dan and Herbie O’Mell showed up in motorcycle jackets and cowboy hats. Herbie sported a Mickey Mouse T-shirt from Disneyland. Jesse “Ed” had the sleeves torn off his blue jean jacket and looked like he was ready for the ghost dance.
We hauled in our gear and set up in the ballroom. Jesse was thirsty. He walked to the long mahogany bar and asked a bartender doing nothing for a highball. The bartender didn’t respond. Jesse reached across the bar, picked him up by his white starched jacket front, and said “I want a fucking drink!” The tone for the evening was set.
We didn’t make a set list, and played songs everybody knew. After “Hold On, I’m Comin,”’ Jesse said, “I get it. The old frat party songs.” Sure. Dan, Jesse, and I alternated singing leads and harmony. The crowd, classy upper-crusters unaccustomed to the world of rock ’n’ roll, loved it. They wanted to know who we were. Herbie told somebody we were Crosby, Stills, and Nash. They didn’t know any better. He told somebody else we were the Doobie Brothers. The Duchess of somewhere was there in a sequined silver evening gown and diamond tiara in her silver-blue lacquered hair. At one point, I saw the Duchess doing the dirty bop with a twelve-year-old boy in a tuxedo. She was smoking a huge cigar and having the time of her life. Jerry Wexler, the only industry type in attendance, stood on a chair, holding up a microphone to capture the event for posterity. After the gig Alan Pariser gave us each a plane ticket to wherever. I returned to L.A. to rejoin Cooder and Arlo for the remainder of the tour.
We broke for the holidays. Thanks to pressure on Wexler from Sam Phillips, Atlantic finally released Dixie Fried. By this time I was so immersed in Cooder’s career that I hardly noticed. I did some press but played no gigs in support. There was talk of another Arlo/Cooder tour in the spring. We were booked into the Troubadour in Hollywood. Ethridge was back in the band. I was always glad to work with him. Chris and his wife lived in a camper-back pickup truck in the parking lot of the Troubadour, where she worked as a waitress. We split the bill with Todd Rundgren, “the Duke of Puke,” opening one night and closing the next. Purple Valley was well received and reviewed. Billboard said, “Waronker and Dickinson have created a timeless masterpiece.” But it was a musical enigma, a modernized history of American roots music painted in broad strokes and basic colors.
The Stones’ Sticky Fingers finally came out with my credited performance on “Wild Horses” and Cooder’s classic slide on “Sister Morphine.” Also there I was in Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers’ documentary of the Altamont concert. I was creeping up the ladder of my fifteen minutes of rock stardom.