9
While James Taylor hung fire in North Carolina with his folks, or hung out in London with the Beatles, his old buddy Kootch was preparing to save the world. Or at least end the war.
Reflecting on his best friend’s final days in New York, Kootch lamented, “It was breaking his heart. We were getting nowhere, it was destroying his health, and so he left finally and it was probably the best thing he could have done. And a week later I got a gig with the Fugs.”
The Fugs were a looming presence on the New York City scene of the late 1960s, a loose union that poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, and drummer Ken Weaver first schemed in 1964, and which had been creating an unholy racket ever since. Ferociously political, but utilizing music and performance as the most potent means of pushing their message ahead, the Fugs were at the forefront of the civil rights movement as it bled into the antiwar protests, and though they were never likely to top the charts, the Warner Brothers label picked them up in 1967 and the band began preparing to record their major-label debut.
Kootch was introduced to the Fugs by Ken Pine and Charlie Larkey of the Myddle Class, “buddies…who were working for the Fugs as side Fugs. So I went over there and did the audition. I got the gig and for eight or nine months I played with the Fugs. I recorded one album with them, Tenderness Junction, which was their first for Warners, and amazingly enough, Richard Avedon took all our pictures, so somewhere there is a Richard Avedon portrait of me.”
His membership also coincided with what would become the Fugs’ most dramatic and audacious escapade yet—the exorcism of the Pentagon as the climax to the largest peace march yet to descend upon Washington, D.C. Up to 150,000 people, representing the combined might of some 150 different protest groups, then joined hands and encircled the building to stage an exorcism, while the cops and the national guard looked on in bewilderment.
Kootch details the day on his blog. “Abbie Hoffman was promoting the idea of getting enough freaks together to ‘levitate the Pentagon’.… [T]he peace march ended at the Pentagon and the plan was to circle the building and raise it up in the air by sheer good vibes…yeah, we used to do stuff like that! Somehow, the Fugs had commandeered a flatbed truck that we [were] gonna use as a makeshift stage in the huge parking lot right next to the Pentagon.”
There was some delay as the marchers made their way into position, and more as the crowd settled down to the sound of Ed Sanders’s rabble rousing. Then, as Abbie Hoffman held back the national guard by waving around a water pistol filled with what he insisted was liquid LSD, the chant began.
“Out, demons out! Out, demons out. Out, demons, OUT!!” And then something happened.
Not according to official reports, of course. Official reports insist that the crowd simply stood around and made some noise, and then went its shiftless way.
But according to some of the march’s more volatile organizers, the Pentagon rose thirty feet into the air, turned orange, and vibrated. And if that seems a little hard to believe, even Kootch is adamant that the building shifted and rose, just as Hoffman had predicted it would. “Amazingly, the Pentagon did levitate about a foot off the ground. Only for a short time.… [M]ost everyone missed it but me and few others.…” But it did move.
“So I played with the Fugs and we did all kinds of stuff; they were obviously politically active and it was a really fascinating time. At the time, everyone I knew, including me, was marching against the war, and so we were all politicized to some degree, but the Fugs more so.”
Kootch quit the Fugs in early 1968. “The way I got out to California, I was really sick of playing with the Fugs, because the Fugs really weren’t a musical endeavor. They were more of a freak show. It was a funny freak show, but I was serious and I wanted to play with a serious rock band.
“So this band called Clear Light came through town. They were signed to Elektra records, and they were supposed to be the new Doors. They did one album and then they fired their guitar payer and they were in New York auditioning guitarists, and the woman I ended up married to, Abigail Haness, introduced me to them.
“I auditioned, got the gig, and then flew out to Los Angeles with them.”
Clear Light started life in 1966 as a Sunset Strip club band called the Brain Train, changing their name when they were signed to Elektra by producer Paul Rothchild (who also took over their management).
Lining up as vocalist Cliff De Young, lead guitarist Bob Seal, bassist Doug Lubahn and twin drummers Dallas Taylor and Michael Ney, the band had already dispensed with one guitarist, Robbie “the Werewolf” Robison, by the time they reached New York, replacing him with keyboard player Ralph Schuckett during the sessions for their debut album. Now it was founding member and principal songwriter Seal who was out, apparently after his own disagreement with Rothchild. De Young followed, and Kootch came in for the very last days of the band. But, like he said, it got him out to Los Angeles.
Clear Light was a shoestring operation. As a Fug, Kootch was earning $100 a week. As a Clear Lighter, he cleared just $30 a week plus $70 a month for rent, “which is kind of difficult to live on. But at that point I fell in with some people from Elektra.…” Including Barry Friedman, a promoter and producer who readily threw one of the spare rooms at his home on Ridpath and Laurel Canyon open to the new arrival.
Not quite the center for mythical hedonism that it would become over the next couple of years, Laurel Canyon was already established as a loose and not always friendly community into which a host of stars, star-fuckers, and would-be wannabes of all persuasion were thrown to learn, as one of their number, singer Linda Ronstadt, once put it, “about drugs, philosophy, and music.”
A tangle of wooded roads and secluded homes that wound through the hills and valleys overlooking Los Angeles, Laurel Canyon was home to many in the music industry. A list of local residents certainly reads like a who’s who of some description: Neil Young and Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, English bluesman John Mayall, “Happy Together” hit makers the Turtles, sundry Monkees, and Frank Zappa all lived within a partygoer’s throw of one another.
Kootch: “On the block, Penny Nicholls lived down the road, and the engineer John Haeny. Paul Rothchild also shared the same house but he ended up moving out, and that was action central up there. Everyone was coming out there. Barry was producing everyone. He produced the Holy Modal Rounders [the seminal The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders album], he was producing Kaleidoscope, he was producing Nico, he was producing all these various acts. He’d come home with these acetates and we’d all sit around and go ‘Wow.’”
One day David Crosby came by with Joni Mitchell, carrying the acetate for her first album. “He was telling everyone, ‘You gotta hear this,’ and Joni was very shy.… [S]he isn’t really but she was that day. She went outside and Crosby played Barry and me this album, her first solo album that he’d produced, and it was brilliant. We all sat there and went, ‘Oh God, she’s got it.’”
Another day, he met Jackson Browne.
Browne had been back in Los Angeles for almost a year by now, returning to the city at the end of his New York adventure to discover his mother living in an apartment in Silver Lake, back in the Highland Park neighborhood, and his father in Japan, working for the U.S. forces’ Stars and Stripes newspaper.
Silver Lake made a convenient base for him while he reacclimatized to California life, although that was not going to prove too great of a hardship. California was still the center of the universe. Back on the East Coast, the city had been thrilled by the lineup at Murray the K’s Music in the Fifth Dimension show. Out west, an even more stellar gathering was being brought together for three soporific days and nights in the open air, the Monterey Pop Festival. Browne had a ticket for the show, of course, and Mark Bego, author of the Browne biography His Life and Music, credits Monterey with “strengthen[ing Browne’s] drive to become a stage performer, as well as a songwriter, although circumstance as a whole was consolidating that ambition.”
No matter that the Dom had turned sour in Browne’s memory, his humiliation even prompting, five years later, a major and very public falling-out with his old friend Richard Meltzer, following the publication of the latter’s memories in Rolling Stone in June 1972.
The fact was, his appearances there had afforded him the opportunity to debut his songs in front of one of the toughest audiences in America, at the same time as they found a home on one of the highest-profile LPs of the year. In certain circles, at least.
Nico’s Chelsea Girl was released in October 1967, the putative soundtrack to Warhol’s smash movie of the same name. Nico herself hated it; the recording finished, producer Tom Wilson and string arranger Larry Fallon worked on, and then called Nico back to hear what they’d done.
“The first time I heard the album,” she lamented, “I cried.” They had destroyed it. “I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! They added strings and—I didn’t like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! I cried and it was all because of the flute.”
In her eyes, everything about Chelsea Girl was shattered by that intrusive flute. But for other ears, the soft beautification of what might otherwise have been a very sparse listening experience only enhanced the songs that she had chosen. And just weeks after the album was released, Browne was contacted by a small music publication called Cheetah, for an interview that ran in the January 1968 edition.
Writer Tom Nolan caught Browne in expansive if occasionally cagey humor. “I’ve written a few good songs,” Browne reflected, but “nothing really heavy yet”; in those days, the term had yet to be co-opted by the loud-guitars-and-grinding-vocals brigade, and still reflected upon a song’s emotional content.
He was “headed that way,” however, “just trying to be real. Trying to write what’s around me, inside of me.”
Something that was still inside him was the pain of his breakup with Nico. He told Nolan he had written a song for her following their breakup, “The Birds of St. Marks,” “and that’s all I’m prepared to say about that song.” Twenty-some years later, however, he allowed Nico’s biographer, Richard Witts, to reprint the lyric in The Life and Lies of an Icon, and almost every word that has ever been written about Nico, describing everything from the doomed beauty that she wore like a shroud, to the gothic splendor with which she paced her publicity, is present in Browne’s evocations of “her throne of melancholy sighing”…“her dying midnight roses”…and his own “frozen words” and “weary secrets.”
The Cheetah interview prefaced a period of considerable activity for the Jackson Browne songbook. A local band, Gregg and Duane Allman’s Hour Glass, included Browne’s “Cast Off All My Fears” on their self-titled debut LP for Liberty Records. His old friends in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were preparing their second album and took “Shadow Dream Song” and “It’s Been Raining Here in Long Beach” for their own.
And Elektra had two artists raiding his catalog in search of material. The Tom Rush album that Browne’s “Shadow Dream Song” shared with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell was followed just weeks later by Browne’s old friend Steve Noonan’s debut LP for the same label.
No fewer than five Browne compositions made it onto Noonan’s record: “The Painter” (written about the artist Steven Solberg), “She’s a Flying Thing” (dedicated to Pamela Polland), “Tumble Down,” the now-seemingly ubiquitous “Shadow Dream Song,” and “Trusting Is a Harder Thing,” a poem that Browne passed to Noonan one day with no intention of turning it into a song. The others, Noonan later reflected, were simply songs that Browne had abandoned in his own sporadic live performances. “I thought he might be leaving some nice ideas behind, so I kind of adopted them.”
It was the success of a song Noonan contributed to the first Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album that brought him the Elektra deal, first alongside Browne as a songwriter with Nina, but then as a recording artist in his own right. “Buy for Me the Rain” reached #45 on the Billboard singles chart in the summer of 1967, seemingly confirming the old Orange County buzz that placed Noonan alongside Tim Buckley (and Jackson Browne) as the next surefire folk scene breakout. Noonan’s demos were already circulating the office, in the form of one side of a two-LP set Nina had put together around their two Orange County prodigies, and it is an indication of just how prolific Browne was at this time that he spread no fewer than thirty of his own songs over the other three sides.
Noonan’s ten (all but one of which was a Greg Copeland cowrite) were crammed onto the end. But it also indicates just how uncertain Elektra were of Browne’s abilities that they viewed Noonan as the writer most likely to translate to the studio. Browne, in Elektra’s eyes, was simply a songwriter.
And Noonan, it seems, was a troublemaker, unable to comprehend why the label wanted to cut an album with him and then load it down with a crew of rent-a-riff session men who simply played what they were told. No feel for the music, and not even much respect; he felt like a puppet, jerking to strings he had never known would be attached to him, and it was all the more shocking that the puppet masters were people he had been brought up to respect, the world-renowned kings of Elektra Records.
Instead, they were treating him like Cat Stevens, putting him into a studio and expecting him to do precisely what he was told. The difference is, Noonan fought back.
The final bust up came when Paul Rothchild saddled one song with an arrangement that Noonan could not stomach, but which the producer refused to budge on. They argued, Noonan rebelled, and Rothchild walked out, the album half finished and the singer’s career seemingly in shreds. It would be six months before Noonan and producer Peter Siegel were able to complete the album, to be released with Rothchild’s name completely whitewashed from the album credits.
The result was a subtly lovely album, but one that left nobody feeling especially happy, apart from a young New York photographer named Linda Eastman, whose cover shots of the singer rate among the most atmospheric pictures she would ever take, at least until she married Paul McCartney.
Browne was visiting New York City as these albums came out, opening for Judy Collins back in the familiar margins of Stony Brook College, and preparing, albeit briefly, to embrace a far more dramatic future than he had ever envisioned. Richard Meltzer had just introduced him to a local booking agent named Sandy Pearlman, at the same time as Pearlman was taking his first steps into rock management with a local band he had discovered, the Soft White Underbelly. The group had just one problem: They had yet to find a suitable vocalist. Perhaps Browne would like to try out?
Browne was keen to give it a go, taking up residence in the nearby house that the entire band (guitarist Allen Lanier, bassist Andy Winters, keyboard player John Wiesenthal, and drummer Albert Bouchard) shared, and where they could rehearse and jam twenty-four hours a day, and throwing himself into the proceedings.
“They were great musicians, they really were.… I’m afraid I was the least proficient musician among them,” Browne told Joe Smith. He spent a week with Soft White Underbelly, rearranging his songs for their lineup, and “they played my songs really well.”
But while jam sessions were trouble free, actually translating the songs to a style that both Browne and the band were happy with was another matter entirely. The new look group’s projected live debut at Stony Brook was canceled, and the entire affair was abandoned. But the experience was not a waste, at least for Soft White Underbelly. Seven months later, on October 18, 1967, Soft White Underbelly accompanied Steve Noonan onstage at Stony Brook, on a bill shared with the Holy Modal Rounders and Phil Ochs, and so they got to play some Jackson Browne songs after all. It was Soft White Underbelly’s first proper gig together, although it was only a few years later that anybody reflected what an odd beginning that was for the band that would (with manager Pearlman now their manager and producer) become Blue Öyster Cult.
For Browne, however, it was back to square one.
Kootch: “I met Jackson at Barry [Friedman]’s house. Everybody was falling by there all the time, probably because there was so much good weed there, and after I moved out of that house to another place in Holly Hill, Jackson used to hitchhike over to my place and we’d sit there and jam.
“He was a kid, he was like nineteen, and then I went to see him at a little club down in Hollywood and he was just performing solo. I sat there and listened and I said to myself, ‘There’s no question this guy is going to be huge, listen to these songs, listen to his voice.’ It was the way he presented this stuff, it was irresistible, and he was playing ‘Jamaica Say You Will’ and songs like that, and he was obviously great. Everyone felt that way.”
“You’d meet all sorts of great people at Barry’s house,” Browne recalled in Jac Holzman’s Follow the Music memoir. “That’s where I met Warren Zevon. I met David Crosby there. He and Stephen Stills and Graham Nash would come over and play their demo.” It was host Barry Friedman, or Frazier Mohawk, as he preferred to call himself, who made the greatest impression on the young Browne, however, just as Browne made an impression on him. An evening spent listening to some of Jackson’s songs ended with Friedman introducing Browne to one of his pet ideas.
In late 1966, Bob Dylan had taken himself off to the then utterly secluded hamlet of Woodstock, in the wilds of New York State, to hang out with a group of musicians he knew in the basement of a rental house, a band known prosaically as the Band. Recovering from the motorcycle accident that almost ended his career at age twenty-five, Dylan threw himself into recuperating around the music he had grown up with, writing that legendary body of songs that history would come to know as The Basement Tapes, but which are more properly viewed as the birthplace of modern pop Americana.
Dylan’s John Wesley Harding LP and the Band’s own Music from the Big Pink both resulted from the ensuing collaboration and, across the Western world, musicians were scrambling to try and replicate the natural, almost rural feel of the music that emerged from that basement.
For a star like Eric Clapton, this would entail breaking up the super-bombastic Cream and forming a new band, Blind Faith; for a star like Steve Winwood, it involved breaking up Traffic and joining forces with Clapton. At the other end of the scale, the budgets were less spectacular, but the mood remained the same. With Friedman molding the logistics, Browne and a handful of other local musicians were packed off to make the most of a newly acquired six-month lease on the Paxton Lodge in Paxton, California, a tiny spot on the map of the Pulmas National Forest. There, Friedman assured all and sundry, they would create music at least as organic and original as anything Dylan or Clapton was making.
Jac Holzman and Elektra bankrolled the deal to the tune of $50,000, the label head recalling that Friedman first voiced the notion some months before the Band album ever came out, on the final morning of the Monterey Festival in June 1967. “He proposed a music ranch. Take talented kids out of the struggles of trying to make it in the city, give them fresh air, good food, and the freedom to create whatever music came to them. It just struck me as a worthy notion and out of that enthusiasm came a ‘yes.’”
The idea was simple. What the musicians viewed as a loose gathering of like-minded friends and associates, and Friedman called the foundation of his Los Angeles Fantasy Orchestra, would be installed to spark off one another; each working toward his own finished LP, but all throwing ideas into one another’s pot.
Guitarist Ned Doheny, bassist Peter Hodgson, keyboard player Rolf Kempf, and banjo player Jack Wilce joined Jackson in the wilds, while Barry Friedman had only one regret. For reasons that he insisted were utterly self-evident, he had convinced himself that Jackson Browne’s first album needed to be recorded in a cave.
A lodge-cum-resort-hotel built by Western Pacific Railroad in the early twentieth century, that had also served time as both a Prohibition-era speakeasy and a drying-out farm for alcoholics, was never going to match the grandeur of that initial scheme, as was soon proved.
As with every other utopian ideal—and the commune was certainly that—reality quickly got in the way of the dream. Girls were imported to brighten up the musicians’ lonely nights and days. Friends. Drugs. Friends of drugs.
Five hundred miles from Laurel Canyon, Laurel Canyon was being re-created. There were joints for breakfast, joints for lunch, joints for dinner, joints for supper, and joints to chase away the munchies brought on by too many joints at mealtimes. In fact, the only thing that the band didn’t seem to do much of was make music. They probably did, all concerned agree; it is difficult to leave a bunch of musicians alone in a house with a pile of musical instruments and not have them bash and bang around occasionally. But that was all they did, as eyewitnesses came away from Paxton with their memories apparently wiped clean. It wasn’t the drugs, either. It was just the vibe. The ever-present haze of life in the lodge.
Elektra persevered. Minnesota bluesman Dave “Snaker” Ray was flown in to record his Bamboo LP with the Paxton Lodge band; and so were “Spider” John Korner and Willie Murphy, whose resultant Running Jumping Standing Still is rightfully regarded today as one of the all-time great roadhouse boogie LPs.
Such minor triumphs did little, however, to shake a growing belief that the entire project was not going anywhere, and probably never would. But before it all fell apart, one further conceit was placed into action, the recording of that long promised and, for Friedman and Browne at least, much anticipated Jackson Browne solo album.
Built around the best of the twenty songs that he had published with Nina, and titled for the name Browne found on a stillborn child’s tomb in the local cemetery, Baby Browning was recorded in a matter of days, and then premiered for a visiting Jac Holzman. He closed down the enterprise within days. The music he heard, he insisted, was never going to make the cut; could never be packaged onto a disc and sold to unsuspecting members of the general public. It was time to end the experiment.
“I don’t know quite what happened,” Friedman mourned later. “Jackson wasn’t ready and I was not at my best. It spun out of control. An incredible psychodrama was unfolding there, and I just escaped to my bedroom and hid under the pillow. Many musicians passed through Paxton. I run across them to this day and they say, ‘I was there.’ But I don’t remember them.”
Browne agreed. “I’ve never been able to collaborate with others. Another person with an idea is a problem for me. I’ll be thinking of something and then another person will say, ‘Hey, what about this?’ And I won’t even know what they’re saying because I’ve been off in my head, thinking about something else.”
Baby Browning, he sighed, “was badly played and badly realized. [Elektra] were a very image-minded company in those days and they wanted this to demonstrate what they were up to, but the people involved ought to have been able to make their own albums. As an album it was very unsuccessful, because we didn’t have time to get to know each other, and, to be honest, I was terrible. Even if I’d made my own album, it would have been awful. It takes a long time to become a musician, and I hadn’t been able to learn everything.”
Elektra washed their hands of an expensive failure, paying off the $10,000 worth of damages that had been executed during the musicians’ stay (several rooms had been repainted in a somewhat psychedelic style, while the hotel’s pink neon sign had been demolished), moving out the studio that had been built into the place, paying for everyone involved to get as far from Paxton as they wanted to.
The label even surrendered the publishing contracts that had been built into the original arrangement, including Browne’s two-year-old deal with Nina Music. Clyde Browne III was back to square one, back in Los Angeles, back on the street.
So he hung out with friends on Pico and Vermont. He goofed around with his old friends in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and, when they shot a short film for inclusion on television’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (on February 12, 1968), Browne was glimpsed within. Two weeks later, back at Stony Brook, he opened for Judy Collins.
He slept on people’s floors and couches and wandered barefoot around Laurel Canyon. He gave up smoking dope, because he wanted to be taken seriously, and he found a new girlfriend, television model Janice Kenner. But most of all, he lived for Monday nights at a club on the far end of Sunset Boulevard, where Monday night was hootenanny night. The club was called the Troubadour and it was suddenly becoming a very hot spot.