13

The Cat Came Back (They Thought They’d Seen the Last of It)

Jackson Browne did not want to become a part of the Troubadour furniture. But he could not turn his back on the place, either. He was now sharing a house at 1020 Laguna Avenue, Echo Park, with J. D. Souther (Linda Ronstadt’s boyfriend) and Glenn Frey (her guitarist); and late into the night, their conversations would revolve around the sights and sounds of their last evening in the club, images that, years later, Frey’s next band, the Eagles, would include in their own tribute to the Troubadour, “The Sad Café.”

“[The Troubadour] was and always will be full of tragic fucking characters,” Frey mourned to journalist Cameron Crowe. “It is true that a lot of artists got their so-called big break at the Troubadour. But it’s also infested with spiritual parasites who will rob you of your precious artistic energy.”

Browne had no intention of being robbed.

One night in late summer 1969, Doug Weston pulled him aside and voiced the musings that had been bedeviling him for a few weeks now, as he marveled at the still teenage boy’s songs and wondered what might happen if he did get that “big break.”

It wasn’t idle speculation. The previous year, in her groundbreaking Rock Encyclopedia, journalist Lillian Roxon happily predicted that “when [Browne] does happen, when he’s good and ready, the wait will be worth it.”

Weston agreed with her. In a decade-plus of promoting, he had long since learned to split the lucky one-timers from the lasting talents, and he was a long way to certain which camp Browne fell into.

It was not only the boy’s open mike appearances that intrigued him. So many other people were calling Browne a star in waiting; through 1968 and into 1969, Browne only had to pick up his guitar for great swathes of the Troubadour family circle to fall silent in readiness for the performance.

But Browne simply didn’t play ball. Monday nights notwithstanding, he rarely played out. There was one night back in March 1968 when he joined a virtual festival bill, a dozen or so acts lining up behind Danny Kotchmar’s Clear Light at the Pasadena Music Hall; another in April when he popped up at the Ash Grove, opening for the folk duo Hearts and Flowers. Occasionally he would make his way out to small clubs in San Clemente, and he was still around the McCabe’s Guitar Shop scene too, strumming the occasional guest performance there, and playing a full set at the store’s first ever “official” concert.

But that’s all he did, one-offs and surprises, pickup performances and zero-promotion hoots. It was time, Weston determined, to put an end to Jackson Browne’s meanderings and, as he put together a week of shows by Linda Ronstadt for September 16–21, 1969, he may have had a moment or two when he questioned his decision, but he went ahead with it. Jackson Browne would be her support act.

The granddaughter of the man who invented the flexible ice-cube tray, Lloyd Groff Copeman, Tucson, Arizona–born Linda Ronstadt was just shy of eighteen when she moved to Los Angeles in 1964. A friend, Bob Kimmel, was already out there, writing and demoing songs with guitarist Kenny Edwards, and impromptu sing-alongs convinced the trio to form a band together. The Stone Poneys signed with Capitol in summer 1966 and over the next two years cut three albums together. They broke up before the release of the third…whose title, Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III, perhaps suggests one reason for the break.

Devastatingly beautiful but possessed of a voice that pushed her looks into the shade, Ronstadt was one of those rare performers who was a star before she had even been heard of. Andrew Gold, the local songwriter who would join her band in the early 1970s, recalled, “Nobody could believe Linda was so young, even during the Stone Poney days. Sometimes you hear a record and you just know the singer has lived every word of the song he or she is singing, and it’s a one-off. Usually it’s a one-off, because nobody can pour that much of themselves into every song they perform. Linda could. It didn’t matter who wrote the song in the first place, or who else had sung it; when Linda took a song, she made it her own.”

Ronstadt herself discovered this one night at the Troubadour. She had recently taken possession of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” the country ballad that made Mike Hurst and Dusty Springfield’s Springfields into stateside superstars, and recorded it for her debut LP, Hand Sewn, Home Grown. Now she was on her way to the bathroom, midway through a performance by a band called Shiloh, when they suddenly kicked into that same song, strummed to her own rearrangement. She was, she later laughed, “flabbergasted.”

Ronstadt adored the Troubadour. “We all used to sit in a corner…and dream. The Troubadour was like a café society. Everyone was in transition. No one was getting married, no one was having families, no one was having a particular connection, so our connection was the Troubadour. It was where everyone met, where everyone got to hear everyone else’s act. It was where I made all my musical contacts and found people who were sympathetic to the musical styles I wanted to explore.”

Ronstadt’s week was a guaranteed sellout. Hand Sewn, Home Grown, already six months old, had not charted, but her two-year-old hit with the Stone Poneys, Monkee Mike Nesmith’s “Different Drum,” was still a radio favorite, and the album’s eye for songwriters as far afield as Bob Dylan, Fred Neil, Chip Douglas, Randy Newman and, unsurprisingly, her old Stone Poneys mate Kenny Edwards, suggested an interpretative talent that any aspiring songwriter would want to keep an eye on.

Gold continued: “There were a lot of songwriters around at that time, myself included, and boy were we competitive. We’d meet up, people like Jackson, J. D. [Souther], Warren [Zevon], all of us, and the first thing out of our mouths every time would be, ‘Well, so-and-so is interested in one of my songs,’ or, ‘I sang whatever to this or that person and they might record it.’ And for all of us, Linda was the one we dreamed of, not because we’d make the most money or anything, but because if Linda sang one of your songs, you could not get a better storefront.”

The audience for her Troubadour week may not have been wall-to-wall writers and musicians, but there were certainly enough of them there for Browne, at least, to see his future spooling out before him. When he came offstage after one night’s performance, it was to find David Crosby waiting backstage, demanding to know whether the singer had a record deal yet, and offering to produce his first LP when he did.

They were not simply hollow words, either. Crosby had already cut his teeth as a producer, handling Joni Mitchell’s Songs for a Seagull debut the previous year. Now he was boasting to all and sundry that Browne was as great a talent as Joni, even telling Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres, “that cat just sings rings around most people, and he’s got songs that’ll make your hair stand on end.”

And Browne botched it again. Or he refused to be robbed. His friends were split on that score.

Doug Weston’s policy for recruiting talent to the Troubadour at that time was simple. If an artist struck him as worth persevering with (which, as Browne discovered, usually did mean taking advantage of every bone thrown your way), he would offer him a contract, effectively guaranteeing him live work, whatever happened to his career. Which would be great if you were a slow mover, happy to simply inch up the ladder, but not so hot if you came out of the traps with your clothes on fire.

For an unknown at the outset of his career in 1969, Weston’s guarantee of $1,000 a night was great money. But the wily old entrepreneur wasn’t signing artists for a night at a time. He was signing them up for five years, at the same rate of pay throughout.

“He was smart,” Andrew Gold laughed. “But nobody forced you to take the deal. Later you’d hear people complaining that Doug ripped them off, signing them up play for a grand when they could have earned ten times that amount playing some other place. But the way I looked at it was, it was the artist’s way of thanking the Troubadour for giving him the break in the first place. Besides, playing a few nights in front of the greatest audience in the world was not exactly a punishment, was it?”

Nevertheless, Browne would not play the game.

“I did a week at the Troubadour and they passed on my option because I hadn’t taken up any record offers that came in, so they thought I wasn’t interested. Doug Weston, who’d been very helpful to me really, was disgusted and didn’t hire me.”

Neither was he interested in Browne’s reasoning, the fact that he wasn’t one of those people who could just be popped onto the rock conveyor belt, signing a deal on Monday, taping the album on Tuesday, and touring the country in support of it Wednesday. Browne didn’t want to belabor terms like sensitivity and artistry, but he had not come as far as he had (however far that might have been, he’d add on darker nights) to just throw everything into the mangler and see what got spat out.

Even David Crosby’s offer left him less than impressed. Yes, he agreed, there was talk about him being sent into the studio with some superstar overseer, but he turned his back on it. When it was time to make his record, he said, it would be his record and his alone. And it would stand or fall on his terms.

But some things did emerge from the Troubadour’s exposure, and Browne wasn’t so self-immolative that he was about to turn them all down. Criterion Music stepped in with a big vote of confidence, signing Browne to a songwriting contract and, over the next few months, dispatching him to the studio to turn out the string of demos that would show the world what he could do.

Some twenty-two songs made it onto acetate between fall 1969 and spring 1970, sparsely strummed out with voice and guitar alone, a remarkable coterie that included some of the finest songs of Browne’s career so far, and some of his most lasting, as well. “Song for Adam,” “Doctor My Eyes,” “The Birds of St. Marks,” “Mae Jean Goes to Hollywood,” “From the Silver Lake,” “Nightingale,” and “Rock Me on the Water” all eased out of these sessions, with Linda Ronstadt declaring herself so impressed by the last that she had already earmarked it for herself. (It would appear on her self-titled third album, in 1972).

Yet just one song from this enviable clutch, “Jamaica Say You Will,” was to prove to be the charm. In February 1970, Browne sat down to make a list of everything he needed to take a serious leap in the direction he needed to. He had never doubted that, at some point, somebody would come along, offer him the chance to make a record, and actually see it through with him. Now he began to understand that maybe, just maybe, he needed to let that person know he existed.

His friend Essra Mohawk, the Philadelphia born singer-songwriter whose Primordial Lovers album was the talk of the town, had recently had some business handled by David Geffen, and she reported back nothing but good things. If Browne really was serious about finding himself a manager, he should start at the top.

Browne nodded and set about getting a demo together.

David Geffen was twenty-eight years old, a graduate of the William Morris Agency, where he met and mentored his future business partner Elliot Roberts. Geffen had originally hoped to work with movie stars but, having been assured that his youth was against him, he turned instead to rock management. Quitting the agency, he took singer-songwriter Laura Nyro as his first client, followed by Crosby, Stills and Nash; now, despite his relative youth, he was already a feared figure in the world of West Coast rock managers, as David Crosby affectionately mused.

Everybody knew that the music business was full of sharks, most of them out to rob an artist blind. Geffen, said Crosby, was the man you wanted on your side when that happened, and even the mere mention of his name was sufficient to get a recalcitrant promoter or record label back in line. “We’ll send Dave Geffen over; he’ll take your whole company and sell it while you’re out at lunch.”

Andrew Gold agreed. “We all knew Dave, and we all liked him, but there was always that feeling when you shook hands with him that you should count your fingers afterwards. Not because he was a thief, but because if he saw something and he knew he could do a better job with it than anybody else, he would do everything in his power to get it.”

Geffen was handling one raft of artists that Browne knew his music could be aligned with. His partner Roberts managed another: Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were both in his stable. Together, they had all but sewn up the Laurel Canyon scene.

Rounding up J. D. Souther, Glenn Frey, David Jackson, and Ned Doheny, Browne laid down what, by his usual standards, was a passionate performance of “Jamaica Say You Will,” which he promptly and publicly regretted having done. The whole song sounded wrong, he shivered. Back to front and upside down and all round terrible. But he was about to leave town for a few weeks in Colorado, and had neither the time nor the money to try again. So he packaged up the acetate with a newly taken photograph and dropped the lot in the mail.

“I am writing to you,” Browne’s carefully crafted letter began, “out of respect for the artists you represent.” But Geffen took one look at the photograph that accompanied the note, and he didn’t even play the acetate that had been packaged up with it. He just dropped the lot into the wastepaper bin.

From whence, goes the legend, his secretary Dodie Smith retrieved it while she was tidying the office, glanced at the picture, and liked what she saw. She salvaged the disc and played it at home. It was as good as the photo. The following morning she was back at work to tell her employer that he maybe shouldn’t be so impulsive in the future. She sat while Geffen gave the acetate a spin, and at last Browne had a manager. Or he would, once he returned from vacation. Browne arrived home to find a mass of messages from Geffen, all urgently seeking to set up a meeting. But when they actually met face-to-face, Geffen had another surprise in store. He told Browne to simply relax and have some fun. Geffen would figure out what to do next.

And he would…eventually.

No matter how much Geffen seemed to believe in Jackson Browne, no matter how encouraging his words, or how enthusiastically he listened to all of the young man’s dreams and plans, Geffen didn’t believe Browne was ready to record. He had three albums’ worth of songs in his catalog, and Criterion, his publishers, were already sitting on offers from Columbia and Vanguard Records. But Geffen swatted them aside as effortlessly as he batted away Browne’s insistence that he should take them.

In fact, Columbia all but committed suicide as label head Clive Davis invited Browne and Geffen in to audition in his office, and then had the temerity to take a phone call in the midst of Browne’s performance of “Doctor My Eyes.” Seated beside his protégé, Geffen flipped. Incandescent with rage, he instructed Browne to stop playing and pack up his guitar. “We’re leaving.”

In truth, Geffen had no intention of signing Browne to Columbia. Laura Nyro was already there, and that was all Geffen required. He accepted Davis’s offer to meet because it was good to appear polite, but he spurned the old man’s apologies because he wanted to make a stand. Davis might have been the head of one of the biggest record labels in America. But that was all he was, a record company man.

Geffen was in the business of talent, and when Browne protested, Geffen waved his concerns aside. Instead, he handed him $300 and told him to go off and have a good summer. Management would be back in touch when it was time to begin managing.

***

While Jackson Browne seethed and James Taylor soared, Cat Stevens celebrated. He too had a new label expressing an interest in him, and he wasn’t going to be turning his back on it.

Island Records was launched by Chris Blackwell in 1962 as a UK outlet for its Jamaican-born owner’s love of the island’s ska and bluebeat sounds. Britain’s Caribbean population was booming, but if there was one thing that the newly arriving immigrants missed about home (apart from decent weather and familiar food), it was the music they had grown up with.

Licensing the hottest island sounds from their producers back in Kingston, and then selling them in the UK, Island moved through the first half of the 1960s as a niche concern but little more, at least in the eyes of the major labels of the day. But Blackwell had ambition. As manager of the Spencer Davis Group, he had already proved his dedication to homegrown rock sounds, and when vocalist Steve Winwood announced his intention to leave the band and form a new group, Traffic, Blackwell saw his chance.

Overnight, it seemed, Island was realigned from a minority concern pumping reggae into the inner cities, into a major player on the now-burgeoning British underground rock scene, as it surged from the last days of the psychedelic era and mutated into something more organic.

Bands like Mott the Hoople, King Crimson, and Spooky Tooth, with their rocking guitars against earthy atmospheres, or Quintessence, Traffic, and Fairport Convention, electrifying notions that they developed in the folk clubs, all were bonded beneath Blackwell’s bright pink label to create a musical doorway that was as eclectic as it was wide open.

Cat Stevens himself may not have immediately seen how he could fit into this brittle community. But Chris Blackwell had no doubt, all the more so after he told Stevens that he agreed with the Cat’s last pronouncement: All he needed was his guitar.

A contract slipped into place that was the absolute corollary of anything Deram had ever placed on the table.

How does it feel, asked the Record Mirror, to know you are expected only to deliver one album a year? Stevens’s smile would have answered the question even before he spoke.

“I think that accounts for good quality. A load of people bring out two albums, one might be good and one might not be what they want, but they have to bring it out anyway, and that’s terrible for music and for everybody.”

In the past, Stevens insisted, his best performances were his demos, the homemade tapes he would take to Mike Hurst before they even got into a recording studio. “Those were the best,” he averred, “with just me double-tracking, playing piano, guitar. I realized that was the way.”

At almost precisely the same time as Peter Asher understood that what James Taylor required was less, not more; and just as Mike Hurst would realize after the fact; it was the little vocal embellishments that the producer would hear as orchestral opportunities, but which Stevens intended to be merely wordless lyrics, that gave those demos their initial flavoring. And that was what Stevens intended to concentrate upon.

In the end, Stevens would add a rudimentary rhythm section (a pure solo route, he shuddered, might have felt “too contrived”). But the mood remained the same, “shaving things down to the bare minimum.” The songs were so important to him, he said, that he didn’t want there to be anything that could detract from their meaning, cloud his lyrics with any other impressions. And, for the most part, his Spartan approach wasn’t simply triumphant, it was only the beginning. He had recently spent some time in Spain, where he entertained the local children with his guitar and some impromptu children’s songs. Now he talked of writing songs aimed specifically at children. In an age when so many rock bands (even those on Island) were becoming more flash and dramatic, Stevens was adamant that he was heading in the opposite direction entirely.

He relished the Island Records regime. At Deram, he complained, the only feedback he ever received from the record company hierarchy was the constant call for another song like “Matthew and Son.” And it didn’t matter how often an exasperated Stevens told them that there had already been one song like that, and that the world did not need another; the chorus remained incessant.

At Island, the demand was likely to be the complete opposite, and that suited him fine.

One thing that Stevens was determined about was that there would be no reprising his past; no attempt to grasp the audience that had followed him two or three years earlier, and drag them screaming into adulthood alongside him. He sought, he said, a whole new audience, a crowd that might have overlooked him completely in the past not because they didn’t like his music, but because they didn’t like what he was perceived as representing, the teenybop poster boys with their pictures in Fabulous 208 every week.

That was another reason why he signed with Island. Because the label’s name alone marked its artists out as serious business. When Island had hit singles (and they’d had a few, despite their almost dour devotion to long-playing discs), it was because the record deserved to be a hit, not because the promo men had greased the right palms at the prerelease stage.

But there was another motivation: the knowledge that the days when a slick producer and even slicker arranger would take the song and craft their own creation around it, dubbing on anything they thought would help it fly, were over, at least so far as Stevens was concerned. He was proud to have landed with a label that agreed with him.

“My only consideration was to write what I liked, and what I hoped my friends would like. Before I had an audience, I wrote for them. This is the age of sharing your thoughts, and that’s what I am doing—that’s the only way you become established. People who like good music share it with their friends, and your reputation spreads by word of mouth. It’s a good, honest way for it to happen.”

He wasn’t interested, he said, in becoming a part of a larger scene. Again, he had done that when he glanced at Deram’s marketing plans and saw himself being aimed at the same pubescent female crowd that lapped up Scott Walker and Engelbert Humperdinck. Walker too had rebelled, plunging his solo career into the baroque nightmare fantasies of the Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel; Stevens would not go there but, like Walker, he was fascinated with self-expression all the same.

“My aim,” Stevens told writer Keith Altham, “is to communicate something very personal and to have working with me those people who are sympathetic enough to help me present those ideas in the best way.”

That was why he was so thrilled to be working with producer Paul Samwell-Smith.

A former member of the rock band the Yardbirds, whom he left to pursue a career on the other side of the studio console, Samwell-Smith had done his best-known work so far with Renaissance, a group formed by fellow ex-Yardbirds vocalist Keith Relf and guitarist Jim McCarty, and which had since developed into a staggeringly original folk rock outfit.

Stevens admitted that recruiting Samwell-Smith was a gamble of sorts, one that was predicated solely on what he’d heard of Renaissance. But it was a gamble that paid off, because it was Samwell-Smith who passed on the names of the musicians who would wind up accompanying Stevens around the world for the next two years: guitarist Alun Davies, bassist John Ryan, percussionist Harvey Burns. Plus, for one afternoon only and strictly in the name of additional embellishment, a nervous young flautist named Peter Gabriel.

Samwell-Smith had recently recorded some demos with an aspiring young band named Genesis, who were coming down from a nonperforming LP on Decca and were yet to emerge as the prog rock supermen they would ultimately become.

“It was excellent. He really heard the music,” Genesis front man Peter Gabriel enthused of the sessions once they were complete, and though Genesis’s attempts to lure Samwell-Smith into working with them on further projects were always politely rebuffed, the producer was nevertheless captivated by the fresh-out-of-school band. With work on Cat Stevens’s album already underway at Olympic Studios, Samwell-Smith invited Gabriel down to the sessions, to add flute to the song “Katmandu.”

It was not Gabriel’s finest moment. Samwell-Smith detailed, “[He] came into the studio, very young and very, very nervous. He almost couldn’t play the flute because his lip was shaking, and his hands were shaking. I had to go out and tell him, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.’” After the guest was gone, however, his very audible fear became something of a standing joke among the more experienced musicians in the studio—Gabriel’s hard pants of breath were recorded and spliced into a track of their own, for the studio to laugh at later.

Gabriel would not be invited back. Guitarist Alun Davies, however, would not only serve alongside Stevens for the remainder of the 1970s, he was the first musician Cat contacted upon his return to action in 2005.

Welsh-born Davies was another of those youthful wannabes who launched their musical careers with ukuleles; he played along with the reinterpreted American folk of Lonnie Donegan and the rest of the mid-1950s British skiffle crew. From there he graduated to acoustic guitar, by which time he and a school friend, Michael Burchell, were already performing and writing songs together.

Burchell, who would soon adopt the name Jon Mark, was destined to become one of the 1960s’ most in-demand and versatile guitarists; his work on Marianne Faithfull’s early albums, for example, is exemplary. Before that, however, he had already secured a berth at Decca Records, as he and Davies were signed to cut an impossibly enjoyable folk album, 1963’s Relax Your Mind.

Cut in one day with producer Shel Talmy, then best known for his work with the Irish singing group the Bachelors (and still a year or more from his groundbreaking work with the Kinks and the Who), Relax Your Mind could have set the pair up in the folk clubs of the land. Instead, they landed a job with Cunard, the shipping line, and were hired to provide entertainment on the company’s transatlantic liners. They made eight trips across to the U.S. and back before returning to dry land and a career in session work.

Davies joined Mark in Marianne Faithfull’s camp; he also became a house session musician at Fontana Records, before he and Mark reunited in a new band, Sweet Thursday. Completed by another session legend, pianist Nicky Hopkins, drummer Brian Odgers, and bassist Harvey Burns, the group signed with the American label Tetragrammaton, recorded an LP—and then saw both album and record company vanish when Tetragrammaton went bust on the day Sweet Thursday was released. The band split, and all concerned returned to session work, which is where Paul Samwell-Smith found both Davies and Sweet Thursday bandmate Burns.

“Paul has a very clear mind,” Stevens enthused. “He can see things clear. He’s very technical. Immensely so. I’m just ‘anything as long as it feels good and sounds good.’”

He admitted there were flash points between the two modes of operation, but that none was more than a passing misunderstanding. One morning, early in the sessions, Stevens arrived at the studio to do a vocal take and found himself surrounded by ten microphones. Stevens knew instinctively it was wrong; and Samwell-Smith listened while he outlined the reasons why, even helping Stevens to express himself when his explanation foundered on the gut response that it just did not feel right. And that was why the team worked. They understood one another.

Samwell-Smith would remain the dynamic glue that held the gestating album together, his musical sensitivities allowing him to appreciate not only the artist’s requirements, but also an audience’s demands. But his own instincts would be firmly balanced throughout by Stevens’s.

The artist’s input did not end with the music, either. Intending Mona Bone Jakon, as the album would be titled, to be all his own work, Stevens seized upon Chris Blackwell’s offer to allow his artists to design their own record sleeves, and handed in a striking portrait of a battered old garbage can, with one tear forcing its way out of the lid.

It was an enigmatic image to match an enigmatic title; following the record’s release, purchasers around the country would fiercely debate the significance of title and sleeve design; and so inventive (not to mention obscene) were some of the solutions that it was a positive disappointment when Stevens admitted that the cover was originally designed while the album labored beneath an altogether more prosaic title: The Dustbin Cried the Day the Dustman Died.

“What we did…was deliberately not have a photograph on it, so that people wouldn’t accuse me of going back and doing the [teenybopper] thing again. I didn’t want that; I just wanted completely nonbiased appreciation if the album was due to get it. So we went straight for the music. I mean, the trash can on the front of Mona was the same thing. I was understating everything, the arrangements—the whole thing was done as subtly as possible. I didn’t want people to think I was trying to hype them. Basically I just wanted the music to be heard, that’s all, and the words.”

Indeed, on every level where he had the opportunity, Stevens approached his second breath of musical fame with considerably more caution than before.

A hit single in the form of the lovely “Lady D’Arbanville” drew no more than the necessary minimum of promotional activities. Stevens refused to be drawn out by comparisons between his song and the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane,” or on the rumor that the lyric somehow espoused necrophilia. He rejoiced, however, in the reviews that discussed the song in more intellectual terms, which admired the words of soft tender sweetness, which acknowledged the care that had clearly been lavished on the backing track.

Yes, there were moments when it sounded as though the studio door had been left wide open, for anyone to wander in and add an instrument to the unfolding spectacle, but people said that about Ravel’s “Bolero” too. It was a valid observation, and it was one to be proud of.

Other observations. “I Think I See the Light” highlighted the similarities between Stevens’s “new” singing style and that of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson; a comparison that was not only predicated upon both singers’ penchant for harmonizing just a few sonic inches away from the expected melody. They shared tonality as well, and the way Samwell-Smith teased the guitars in the mix, rendering them sometimes quiet, sometimes jarring (“Katmandu”), only amplified the match.

Kevin Coyne, too, was invoked, albeit at a time before many people even knew who he was. But a pair of well-received LPs for disc jockey John Peel’s Dandelion label had pushed the cornflake-tonsilled former nurse into the critical estimation, and when Stevens unleashed “Pop Star,” a knowingly ironic mantra that mercilessly skewered the life he’d left behind, he did it in tones that were achingly familiar to anyone who had heard Coyne perform. The similarity would become even more pronounced a couple of years later, when Coyne released the song “Good Boy” on his masterpiece Marjorie Razorblade. Was there, he was asked in the early 1980s, any reason he should write such a familiar-sounding song?

“Whatever makes you think that?” Coyne responded, his face cracking wide with a mischievous grin.

Hopes that Stevens would tour in support of either the single or its parent album, too, were dashed by his refusal to throw himself back into that circus. If he toured, he said, it would be as a duo with guitarist Alun Davies alone, and the one UK show he did agree to, at the Plumpton Festival in August 1970, was to his mind quite enough. He’d worked with bands, he’d worked with orchestras, and neither had left him feeling at all satisfied. At last he had settled upon a format that succeeded.

Officially billed as the tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival, a forerunner to the Reading Festival of later years, the Plumpton Racecourse bash was very much overshadowed by the truly international events staged at Bath and the Isle of Wight that same summer. The festival spread over an unprecedented four days regardless, with performances from the likes of Jellybread, Family, the Groundhogs, Deep Purple, Peter Green, Black Sabbath, the Incredible String Band, Van Der Graaf Generator, and Wishbone Ash.

Stevens appeared to be in bizarre company, then, but the success of “Lady D’Arbanville,” as it rose to #8 in the UK that summer of 1970, gratified him and painted a far warmer welcome-back to the fray than he had ever expected, or even hoped for. The festival show, too, was a success. The folk-tinged Saturday afternoon during which Stevens headlined over Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay, Magna Carat, and the Strawbs was, declared the New Musical Express, the afternoon in which “the Cat Came Back…or, to be far more accurate, Cat Stevens made his most welcome return to public performing.

“With just guitarist Alun Davies for both musical and moral support, plus a happy if rather mysterious gentleman on tambourine, he sang his very own personal songs in his very own distinctive manner, then shyly announced, ‘Here is the song that’s made me a pop star again…“Lady D’Arbanville.”’ Next songs were ‘Longer Boats’ and ‘Father and Son,’ which went down so well that he just carried on with an extension of the song. Without a doubt, Cat Stevens gave the best solo performance of the entire weekend.”

Later in the month, Stevens appeared at the Bilzen Jazz Festival in Belgium, and Alun Davies had a choice to make. His old friend Jon Mark was forming a new band with John Almond, the very sensibly titled Mark-Almond. There was, of course, a place reserved for Davies if he wanted it. But Cat Stevens, too, was making an offer now, and his was even more exciting.

“By that time I was getting to know Steve quite well. One day he said: ‘Why don’t we go out on the road together?’ At that time, Mark-Almond were forming, and as I’d known Jon for so long I had to toss up to decide. But I was getting a buzz off Steve’s music, and I wanted to follow that path through.”

He made his decision just in time. An American visit, at long last, was scheduled for November 1970. But one reason for Stevens’s reluctance to launch into any time-consuming touring was his need to get another album out.

No matter that his contract demanded no more than one album a year. Tea for the Tiller Man would be released just five months after Mona Bone Jakon, its release hastened not only to let Stevens plow through the colossal backlog of songs he had accumulated in the nearly three years since New Masters, but also to confirm in the outside world’s mind that, this time, he was back to stay. And that his new direction was one he intended to pursue.

A sneak preview of what the album might contain, in the form of Jimmy Cliff’s version of Stevens’s “Wild Child,” appeared in the singles charts in September, rising up the Top 20 at the same time that “Lady D’Arbanville” commenced her graceful descent. While Island was introducing the new Cat Stevens to a modern rock audience, the label was also busy presenting reggae singer Jimmy Cliff to the same constituency; the marketing of Cliff served as a dry run for what they would later attempt and achieve with Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Jimmy Cliff was reggae music’s first international superstar. Already a Jamaican chart veteran by the time the anthemic “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” gave him his first U.S. hit, in 1969, Cliff opened the door through which a host of his countrymen would pass over the next few years. Prior to Cliff, reggae artists spoke to reggae fans alone. The erstwhile James Chambers, however, appealed across the board.

Cliff was just twenty-one when he was thrust into the international spotlight, but he wrote and performed with the assurance of someone who already had seven years’ worth of Jamaican success behind him. His first single, “Daisy Got Me Crazy,” was released in 1962, and the decade also saw him performing as far afield as London, Paris, Brazil, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Further evidence of his abilities was revealed when Cliff won the 1968 International Song Festival with “Waterfall.” But it was the next four years that truly established Cliff among the most significant artists of the age, as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” was followed into the chart by “Vietnam,” an antiwar number that Bob Dylan described as the best protest song he’d ever heard.

The success of “Vietnam” confirmed Cliff’s arrival on the scene. It also evidenced his versatility. At a time when reggae was still regarded as a minor force on the world musical stage, songs like “Vietnam,” “Come into My Life,” and the sufferer’s anthem “Hard Road to Travel” brought him to the thoughtful attention of the same fans that bought records by the other adult-oriented troubadours of the day.

Indeed, that same linkage was strengthened first when Cliff covered Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” for his next hit single (Stevens himself produced the record); then when Paul Simon traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, to record with the same producer (Leslie Kong) and musicians, and in the same studio that Cliff had utilized on his earlier hits.

Released four months before its composer’s version, “Wild World” returned Cliff to the upper reaches of the chart and confirmed what “Lady D’Arbanville” had already suggested (by echoing what “Matthew and Son” and “Here Comes My Baby” had achieved). The Cat was back.

Three decades after its release in fall 1970, Mojo’s Colin Irwin would seize upon Cat Stevens’s fourth album, Tea for the Tillerman, as the consummate illustration of the singer’s “search for a spiritual meaning from a mean material world…articulat[ing] the confusion felt by many people at that time with songs like ‘Father and Son,’ ‘Where Do the Children Play,’ ‘Hard Headed Woman,’ and ‘Wild World.’”

So had he, Irwin asked, realized what a genre-defining album he was making at the time?

Stevens shook his head. “No. I was just following my heart, and the music was coming out and was being dressed absolutely appropriately with the musicians that I had, and kept very sparse and pure. It was a very purist period of songwriting and recording. I had a feeling there was something special, but I didn’t know how people would take it.”

Discussing his UK audience in that same interview, Stevens confessed, “Some people…weren’t quite sure whether to believe what had happened when I came back. To me it was just as natural as growing the beard. I had simply matured. Other people were saying: ‘What’s going on?’ I think that’s the cynical side of the record business. They couldn’t quite understand it.”

Which, he explained, was why the United States was so important to him. “In America, where they had never really heard me before, they understood immediately. And it happened.”

Stevens’s newly acquired American representative, lawyer Nat Weiss, would be coordinating the tour, with the aid of Peter Asher, with whom he recently set up a management company. Named for the region of London that Asher still thought of as home, but stoically planted across the road from his Los Angeles abode, Marylebone Productions would now be handling both James Taylor and Cat Stevens’s American activities.

Stevens arrived in the United States for the first time in early November 1970. His maiden tour was a short hop that introduced him immediately to the sheer enormity of the country; his U.S. stage debut on November 18, 1970, saw him ambling nervously onto the Fillmore East stage, ahead of the rock band Hammer and labelmates Traffic, to fill that first half hour or so while the audience were finding their seats.

It was a terrifying baptism, preserved for posterity in the words of Rock magazine’s Bud Scoppa. “From the Fillmore East balcony, Cat Stevens and [Alun Davies] looked hopelessly tiny. Just two seated figures holding guitars; no banks of amps, no massed drums, no sparkle suits.”

Scoppa portrayed the concert as a battle of wills; an audience impatient for the headliners, talking over the “funny little songs” that the little men on the big stage were strumming, but then pausing in midsentence as the singer started talking to them, speaking “between songs as if he were in someone’s apartment for the first time—polite, friendly, warm. This kind of intimacy was practically unheard of at the Fillmore, with its reputation for toughness. The kid must be awfully naive. Forty minutes later, this unknown who called himself Cat Stevens had the audience on its feet.”

The following night Stevens repeated the exercise at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and there would be other mismatches in New Orleans and Chicago before Stevens flew back to New York for what he, and history, would record as his true American debut, an intimate performance in a very intimate club.

Later to find lasting glory as the man who wrote “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” for Joan Jett, guitarist and songwriter Alan Merrill was already a teenage superstar in Japan when he returned to New York for a short break, just before Christmas, 1970. It was his cousin Laura Nyro who ensured he would be at Stevens’s Gaslight performance; she wanted to introduce Merrill to her manager, David Geffen, who was also intending to be at the show.

“It was Cat Stevens’s first ever New York gig,” Merrill recalled. “It was winter 1970—my passport shows I visited NYC in late November that year—and there are probably photos of me sat in between Odetta and Laura in some archived audience shots from the show. Cat was very good, and I liked his material. ‘Wild World’ was a standout of course, a great song.”

Backstage, Nyro, Geffen, and Merrill gathered to meet the star of the moment and Nyro, as she always did when her young cousin was around, promptly started looking around for a guitar so that he could throw in an impromptu audition. She seized upon Cat Stevens’s own instrument, while instructing Merrill to perform “Knot Tier,” a song he had recorded for his first solo album, and which she had helped him arrange.

“Cat generously allowed me to play the song on it for Geffen. There were quite a few people backstage who clapped when I finished the tune, and Laura sang the harmony on the chorus with me, which was intimidating since she was so amazing and had such a huge voice. Geffen was mildly impressed with my strumming and singing the song, but he didn’t offer me a deal. And Cat shot off to talk to other people backstage. So he never even heard it.”

Those were the stars that shone at Stevens’s New York debut. On the other side of the country, however, a very different galaxy awaited him, but not necessarily because he was the cat. They were curious because he was an unknown Brit, and the last act of that description to walk into the Troubadour was now making a lot of people an awful lot of money. His name was Elton John

What was it about these Englishmen and their craze for funny names?

An underachiever both at home and abroad, by early 1970 Elton John had more or less been rejected by every reputable concert promoter in the United States. His first album had picked up a smattering of encouraging reviews, and it was no secret at all that pianist John and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin were influenced by Americana to the point of near obsession. There was no reason on earth why America shouldn’t take such devoted disciples to its bosom. No reason beyond the recalcitrance of a network of head-in-their-ass concert promoters.

That is when John’s UK agent, Vic Lewis, decided to take matters into his own hands and start making contacts of his own. He had recently seen the English folk band Pentangle make a successful appearance at the Troubadour, and he was convinced that Elton John could make a similar impression if he was only given the chance.

So, it transpired, was Doug Weston, who booked the solo pianist into the venue for one full week in August 1970, apparently on the strength of one promise: that if he took a chance on this English unknown, he would be guaranteed a club full of watching stars. And Vic Lewis followed through on the promise: Gordon Lightfoot, David Gates of Bread, and Beach Boy Mike Love were in attendance; Neil Diamond (who shared Elton’s U.S. label, UNI) was on hand to introduce him.

The media flipped. Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Hilburn headlined his review with the simple phrase “Elton John New Rock Talent,” and his opening line was a simple “Rejoice.” Within days of John’s first Troubadour concert, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Hollywood Reporter, the Chicago Sun Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle had all made similar pronouncements; within two weeks, his hitherto unheralded Elton John album had sold more than 30,000 copies. Elton John was a superstar and, for the moment, his flare eclipsed that of everyone who attempted to follow him.

Including Cat Stevens, which was ironic, because just a few months earlier, Elton would gladly have swapped places with Stevens—he had, in fact, already done so. The pair had already met when Elton was hired to add piano to some demos Stevens was recording at Pye Studios in January 1970. And a few months later, Elton was moonlighting as a session man for Pickwick Records, a budget label whose raison d’être was a series of albums that featured anonymous musos playing the big hits of the day, and doing their best to sound like the originators.

In truth, Elton’s efforts for the series rarely sounded like anybody other than Elton John, but such was his obscurity at the time that nobody paid attention to that. And so it was that in June 1970, Elton found himself singing and playing his own interpretation of “Lady D’Arbanville” for a cheapo LP’s worth of soundalike hits.

Thanks to the Troubadour shows, it would also be one of the last jobs he ever did for Pickwick.

Stevens did not receive the same plaudits as Elton. “The receptions were more mild than wild,” Rolling Stone continued, “but it’s a strange time for troubadours like him. The audience at the Troubadour somehow reflects the whole pop scene of Los Angeles, and maybe Cat came in a little too soon after the city’s collective orgasm over Elton John. That gave Cat a few friendly strokes and just one encore call, and the trade press, which doesn’t come that often anyway, also held back.”

It could have been that Vic Lewis’s gamble had failed. But FM radio was less resistant, picking up on the best of Tea for the Tillerman and then, when that had been thoroughly absorbed into the medium’s DNA, gratefully devouring the rest of it.

A&M, the label that handled Island’s American releases, sprang into action. The marketing department struck a deal with Rolling Stone that offered a copy of the LP to every new subscriber; and by April 1971, Cat Stevens had no fewer than three albums on the U.S. charts: the Top 10 smash Tea for the Tillerman, the lesser-selling but still registering Mona Bone Jakon, and a hastily conceived (some might say mercenary) double pack of his two Deram albums. By comparison, Mona Bone Jakon had languished at #63 on the British chart and remained on the listings for just one month, while Tea for the Tillerman barely kissed the Top 20, although it did hang around for thirty-nine weeks.

April 1971 saw Stevens back in New York, back at the Gaslight, a venue which critic Nancy Ehrlich condemned as “brutally uncomfortable,” only to then praise Stevens for making the pain “worth enduring.” Stevens’s music, she told Billboard readers, combined “unforgettable lines of melody…filled with wonderful interlocking chains of internal rhymes,” and her words set the tone for the remainder of Stevens’s next tour, a six-week scouring of the United States, the longest outing of his life so far, which Marylebone Productions rendered a true family affair by slotting James Taylor’s sister Kate in as his support act.

He was rewarded on arrival with the news that Tea for the Tillerman had gone gold (it would eventually hit triple platinum), not merely completely outperforming its UK counterpart, but outstripping every bard this side of James Taylor.