I met Jack Nicholson because Peter Fonda was a motorcycle-riding buddy of mine. Peter and I met at a local Topanga Canyon music gathering put on every so often by the musicians and artists who lived in the Canyon; everyone would hang out, play music, and socialize. Band potential teetered there like a boulder on the edge of a Southwestern mesa, since everyone played something or other and we all played together at these gatherings, listening and learning.
Peter and I hit it off because of our motorcycles. I had a Triumph Bonneville and he had a Harley, and we started riding around the canyons soon after he had his Harley chopped but before he got the Captain America helmet. Dennis Hopper came into those circles as a friend of Peter’s, and Jack was a part of an even bigger concentric circle that slowly drew us all together by various means.
When Jack joined up with Bert and Bob to help make movies, I thought he was a perfect bandmate for them, and Bert, Bob, and Jack seemed like they would be a great band for me to be in (after Uncle Chick and after Bo, Peggy, and Jerome).
By the time Jack showed up, the Monkees were nearing the end of the second season and were pretty much worn out. No one said so to me, but I think Bert and Bob were fed up. Kirshner had filed suit against them, they were suing him, and everyone around me was unhappy with the way things were going.
Bert and Bob said they were close to a decision to not do another season of The Monkees, and I was glad to hear it. They wanted to make movies, starting with a Monkees movie. Because I was friendly with Peter and Dennis, I also knew about Easy Rider. Peter would tell me the story of the movie nearly every time he came to the house or we were out together for dinner, and rumors were drifting around that Bert might give them the money to make it.
The story of the movie changed a bit each time Peter told it to me, so I couldn’t get my head around it completely. It seemed to me that a movie with Fonda riding a motorcycle was a good commercial idea in any case. A Monkees movie did not sound like a good idea to me, because I assumed it would be an extension of one of the television episodes. But I was not thinking too much about either movie in depth.
As it turned out, working on the Monkees movie, Head, would be the best time I had with the Monkees and also the time I started regularly hanging with Jack, Bert, and Bob.
When Jack came on the scene of the Monkees TV production, he was not yet famous and was one of the few people I met who seemed self-aware and grounded. At the same time, his demeanor and sense of humor were exceptional and like catnip for me. I thought he was the coolest guy, and since this was long before the term bromance entered the US lexicon, some people in my crowd of friends thought my fascination with him was beyond the pale.
They also thought there was something abnormal in my preoccupation with Bert and Bob. It was true that my attraction to those three men was not usual for me. It wasn’t in any sense sexual or even emotional, but I felt an affection for them that I imagine one feels as a member of a great sports team or, as I was to learn, a great band. Bands naturally coalesce, but the coalescence is not usually or easily seen. It is a close kind of affection that revolves around a love for a project or shared pride in work. At its root is an appreciation for another player. It is a feeling that can make for great times together socially, over meals and on adventures. It is a very strong attraction and can create a tight bond over time.
My discovery of the talent of these men started, as many such discoveries do, in Paris. Even though I had known Bob Rafelson for a while by then, it was only in the context of his duties on The Monkees. I finally got a good close look at Rafe (as I called him; Jack and Bert called him Curly) one crazy grass-and-acid-spiked night as we crawled the streets of Paris together looking for food.
No adventure seems to have quite the same spectrum of subtleties as trying to find some place to have dinner. Rafe and I started out around 4:00 p.m. with a little smoke and some cognac, and by the time we got through all the psychotropic substances we had with us, traded discourse about all the addled ideas we had on our minds, and walked miles through the ever-increasing shine of the wet streets of the city, we floated into the light of a Hungarian restaurant around 4:30 a.m. I thought it was the most beautiful restaurant in the best city in the world. I thought it was the best Hungarian goulash I ever had. I thought I was with one of the greatest guys I had ever met.
Since I was loaded to the earlobes with psychedelics, this seemed like a reasonable assessment. As the years passed, and as I now see the evening through amarcord—the lens of the present applied to the past—I realize that it was not only reasonable but also accurate. For me it was a nearly perfect night. We got back to the hotel just after dawn.
In that time I also got to know and understand Bob better, but not well. I realized I was probably locked out of his society and sophistication the same way I was locked out of many things. I didn’t understand them; I didn’t get them.
This had not mattered much when the only band I was playing in consisted of my Uncle Chick, but as I began to wish for more, being locked out of places started to feel more like being locked in somewhere I didn’t want to be.
Bert, Bob, and Jack were heavy players: smart, educated, classy in their own way, and weird beyond all measures. I had no chance of keeping up with them, but I could and did enjoy them from afar, so I was happy to take whatever opportunity arose to walk the streets of beautiful cities with any or all of them, searching for food.
This wasn’t a band I could ask to audition for, so I just had to wait it out to see if circumstances ever got to the point where I would be able to sit in with them and play a little. Right at the time I was suited up and waiting on that band bench, Dennis Hopper and I talked about the possibility of me doing the music for Easy Rider. Dennis was another of the movie types, as I called them, and I instantly connected with him through his nourishing visual sense. He would point out paintings and works around him, and just his acknowledgment would identify something as a work of art, define it as fine, and my eyes could see through his, to my great benefit. His moods were jagged and I never knew which way he might bounce, so he was not a dance partner, but as a player he had my attention and respect and he always brought something unique with him. So when he asked me if I was interested in supplying the music for Easy Rider, I was astonished and nearly speechless. I said yes and came up quickly with the notion of using a brass big band. I was thinking Memphis horns meets Harry James, but it was a bit like saying yes to someone who asks if you know how to drive an aircraft carrier.
The terrible truth was I didn’t have any idea for the music, but I was so surprised that he even considered me I just said something offbeat, something I thought Dennis might like to hear. Dennis, because he had the sight of a master artist, looked at me for just a second to see if I might be kidding. But then he was courteous and let the subject drop. I was heartsick and not a little embarrassed that when Hopper threw me a chance to play with this band, I came up with amalgamated riffs of “Hold On, I’m Coming” and “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Really, what could I have said that was more natural to me? But it was the wrong riff at the wrong time.
Thus I sat alone on the side of the Easy Rider highway as they all rode off on their choppers. Later Bert and the rest came up with the master stroke of using popular music of the times—starting with Hendrix.
Rafe was very friendly but very competitive, and he seemed like an older brother, at least as far as I understood that role from movies. Bert was more severe and seemed wicked in a convivial and appealing way. Jack was another type of player altogether—carrying a deflation spear that he used on windbags, along with a drug-sharpened flair for hilarity that neither Bert nor Bob displayed. Jack and I could crack each other up and laugh until we both ran out of breath and collapsed, coughing.
Jack also had a deep understanding and appreciation of fine art, which he unintentionally conveyed to me during the times we were together. His house was full of paintings by unknown local artists, and as Jack got more money, the art got better and better. The then-unknown artists he selected, like Ed Ruscha, would become part of the pantheon, and the well-known artists he curated were selected by the Jack-knack, as I called it. For spotting authenticity across any room and under any makeup or any attire, Jack was unequaled in my experience.
I trusted Jack more than I trusted Bob and Bert, but that didn’t mean he was more trustworthy. He may have been, but the truth was I liked him better. He was easier for me to be around, and that translated into trust. It may have been misplaced, but when a band starts forming out of cosmic dust, a lot of mistakes are made in terms of who does what, whom one may or may not trust, and who should or should not be part of the band in the first place.
With the Monkees movie, Bert and Bob had decided to kill the monster they thought they had created, and Bob asked Jack to help. They also asked the four principal cast players—Davy, Micky, Peter, and me—to participate.
At first I thought the suggestion was simply for the four Monkees to join in on a trip to Ojai to smoke dope, hang out with Bert and Bob and Jack, and race golf carts around the hotel. But no, they were serious about the four of us actually contributing to the screenplay. The idea was that we would all talk as a tape recorder was running—tell jokes and make up stories—and in that way come up with an idea for the movie. This produced about six or seven reels of recorded tape, as I recall, but there was not enough goodwill among us, so it was not a script by any definition. All the points of view were scattered in a way that revealed nothing except an occasional funny joke. We were not drawn together. The initial hopes for the Monkees had become the detritus of a collective dream we were all waking from, each in our own room, and each afflicted with our own case of Celebrity Psychosis informing us about the furniture in that room.
In my room, the CP was a full-blown raging pathology that my meager efforts were failing to control. CP was starting to make me believe that things that had never happened had happened, to think about myself in ways I never had before, and to say things I never ordinarily would have—mostly insults I meant ironically but that were taken as offense, given what and who I had become within the Monkees enterprise.
Instead of coming across as teases, my feints and irony revealed the fissures in the uneasy collection of people around the Monkees, who were getting angrier by the day. Jack and Bob took the tapes and went to work on the script. I had not contributed as much as I would have liked during the Ojai riffs, but what came to light was a clear revelation that under any circumstances, I could not have helped them create the script that they ultimately made and named Head.
When the script was finished but before I read it, I was discussing it with Bert, trying to get a sense of what kind of movie it would be. He described it to me as a wild gamble. He said he thought it would be either recognized and revered, or reviled and unsung. There would be no in-between, no ambivalence. Love it or hate it were the only options. Millions would attend or no one would attend. He was right.
Even as we were filming it, I did not see that the focus of the script, as well as the intent of the movie, was the assisted suicide of the Monkees; Head was the coffin Bert and Bob had created for the whole endeavor. Everything was expected to drown in the revelations and surreality of the movie. The entire Monkees project, from the first TV show to the recordings to the live concerts, including the slightest artifacts—all were sacrificed in the opening shot of the movie, where the four of us jump off a bridge described as the “largest man-made object in the world.” Either because of or in spite of the fact that Pinocchio had started to come to life, Geppetto threw the marionette off that bridge.
That the Monkees did not, in fact, die or disappear is another story. For in the end, Jack and the remarkable insight he embedded in the script provided an existential truth to the original fantasy of the show and revealed what happened in the minds of Bert and Bob; the writers, directors, and producers that surrounded them; and Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike. Drug-addled, bizarre, obtuse, and ignored as it was, the movie still became an actual driving force. Instead of destroying all things Monkees, it emblazoned them on pop culture permanently.
Bob, who realized the script and brought out all the subtle elements that careful writing and good psychotropic drugs could place there, was clearly on record as wanting to be a film director and had chosen this as his first, and maybe only, film. He said the whole project fit on the canvas he was stretching for himself and his future works. It was an opportunity to show who he was as a director, and according to Bob, if Head was the only movie he ever got to do, then at least he would have had a chance to include all his favorite genres, from Westerns to David Lean–type epics to the “darkest thing on the planet.”
At one point, Bob recounted that in a writing session he once told Jack that he was distracted because he was thinking about “the darkest thing on the planet.” When Jack asked what that would be, Bob said, “that would be Victor Mature’s hair.” Mature was a good-looking stage and screen actor who had earned the nickname “Beautiful Hunk of Man” based on a line from the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, in which he’d starred. By then he had for years been dyeing his still-fulsome head of hair an inky black, giving it remarkable opacity.
Jack, in a psychedelic flash of the first order, seized the moment. “That’s it!” he said. “The whole movie takes place in Victor Mature’s hair.”
Had I been in the room, I would have laughed for hours at the darkness of Victor Mature’s hair—such was Nicholson’s grip on my drug-induced sense of humor. As drug riffs go, it is one of the greats, and it would serve as the magic carpet for the film, the serene fantasy behind the panicked psychedelia. Victor Mature’s hair would be Head’s diegesis. The film would have no fourth wall to break. It would have five walls, all of which would be broken to start with.
Getting Victor Mature’s actual hair in the movie was a problem I unwittingly provided a solution for. It was to be my only acceptable riff in this band of Bob, Bert, and Jack, but it was a flourish that I was and am proud of—a flourish with, as Dylan sang, “one hand waving free.”
I was in the production offices at the close of a day, and Bob and Bert were discussing the right way to get Victor Mature to consider doing the picture. I asked why they didn’t simply call him up, and Bob said, “Why don’t you just call him up, Mike?” It was a challenge that came from an assumption that such an act was impossibly brave. “I will if you have his number,” I said nonchalantly.
Bert said he did have it, in fact, so I called it, and Victor Mature answered the phone. I said something like “Is this Mr. Mature?” and he said “Yes.” “My name is Mike Nesmith,” I said, “and I am one of the Monkees on television.”
He said, “I know who you are,” and told me he liked the show. I thanked him and explained that I was calling because we were about to make a movie and would very much like it if he would be in it.
At this point Bert and Bob started saying, very loudly, “Yeah, right. Sure, Nishwash [my nickname from the TV show], like you’re really talking to Victor Mature. Bullshit, baby! You are so full of shit! There’s nobody on the phone!” The jabs were mean-spirited, but they were also funny.
I assumed that Mature heard all this, but I kept going. “I’m here with the producers now, and if you have a second, maybe they could describe the film to you.”
Bert and Bob were now laughing as hard as I ever heard them laugh, certain that I was pulling an uproarious prank. I handed the phone to Bob.
When he said hello into the phone and heard Mature’s voice, his laughter instantly stopped and his face registered the shock. Bert looked at him quizzically, and Bob silently nodded yes to Bert as he handed the phone to him.
All I remember after that is the satisfaction that comes from hitting the perfect riff, right at the moment when someone in the band says, “Take it!”
In my own way, I loved those guys. I even said to Bert one time at a dinner with just the two of us, “I love you, man,” and I meant it as sincerely as I could, given the substance that had caused me to say it. But drugs or no, there was depth to my desire to hang out and play with Bert, Bob, and Jack. After Head was finished they kept me at a distance, so I never had too much to say to them. Jack told me to always call him before I came over, a real change in our usual MO.
Celebrity Psychosis had so entered my mind-stream that there was no possibility of anything happening like a band. Had I been of clearer vision, I would have seen the seeds of sorrow that Bert and Bob had already planted in the Raybert enterprise that would become BBS Productions, and I would have known to be grateful that I never got any closer to it than I did. I was almost desperate to land my little plane in their field and play whatever games they were thinking up, but some grace flagged me off, and I flew away into my own countryside.
Bert told me I should seriously think about suing him as part of the suits between Columbia and Screen Gems and Kirshner and Raybert Productions. He felt I personally had valid, actionable claims somewhere in all that, but I refused and told him I could never sue him. I told him I was grateful for what he did for me, giving me the job in the first place, and letting me share in the things I did. Overall, I thought of the experience as a gift, an odd gift to be sure but with a deep message for me that I am still parsing and for which I am never less than thankful.
Some time later, in the early 1980s, I asked Bob if he would direct a music video I was producing for Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” He agreed, but during that shoot, Bob told me that I had no chance as an actor and no real place in the movie business. It was in a misplaced and out-of-step conversation that was part of the sputtering of an engine that has lost its power because it has lost its fuel. I didn’t pay much attention to the remark except to feel that Bob was reinforcing the fact that he was in a different league. To him, I was ping-pong and he was lacrosse.
The band of Bert, Bob, Jack, and Nez never realized itself. By the time the second season of The Monkees was over, the idea of it had been reduced to nothing but my own fantasy.
I was once in a major city listening to a large symphony orchestra play Mahler, and it sounded horrible to me. I was familiar with Mahler and knew that I liked the compositions, but not being a trained musician, I didn’t really know why it sounded so bad, and not understanding the intricacies of classical music, I kept my mouth shut about it afterward. But I was really surprised at how little I enjoyed it.
As I became a better musician and my ear became more attuned to what made music good, it dawned on me why: the musicians couldn’t play well. It was a bad band playing Mahler. The composing was first rate, but the orchestra was stumbling through the performance of it. The conductor looked wrong to me as well, but what did I know? That was only my opinion. The music, however, clearly sounded like a car wreck, with both of the cars playing Mahler on their radios.
Then I went to see the LA Phil—I can’t remember the conductor—and heard what I thought was some of the best music ever. It was Mahler again, but the orchestra sounded great this time. After a short while I realized that the LA Phil is one of the great symphony orchestras in the world because many of the players in it are session cats. They play daily on cinema scores and commercial scores and theme songs, so when they get onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, they are razor sharp. They sounded celestial, the way an orchestra should sound, where all one hears is the music.
In mid-1968, just after filming Head, it came to me that I had the opportunity as never before to work with some great session players like this. The LA guys were superb, and I knew there were outstanding players in New York and London, but there was a very strong pull in my own notions of music toward Nashville.
The Nashville cats were becoming legendary as far as country music was concerned, but I couldn’t just fly off to Nashville and record country songs in direct opposition to the stated needs of the show. It was still their money and their show.
But I could see that the Monkees project was entering its final phase. Many who were connected with the show were starting to look down other avenues and in different directions for activity. I thought if I could round up some session players in Nashville to record the music that Kirshner and the Brill Building had rejected, songs that were not hardcore country, I might be able to demonstrate their appeal to the masses. I didn’t have much confidence that I would succeed at that, but at least it would be a legitimate effort, I could avoid hardcore country music, and by this reasoning I could do Monkees sessions in Nashville under the protection of Bert and Bob’s production umbrella and with Screen Gems’ approval.
I had never recorded my songs the way I wanted, and it looked like now would be the time. I was not disgruntled, but I did have the notion that this was my last chance at a session like this, and if I was going to complete my Monkees obligations unrequited musically, then at least I would come home with my own recordings.
I asked Lester Sill at Screen Gems if he could set me up with a producer who could put together a band for me in Nashville. Felton Jarvis was his choice, so Felton called his best guys together and I headed east to record, with sessions set up between RCA Studios A and B. The two studios were different-size versions of each other and didn’t sound that different to me, and while this was a time when the sound of a studio was supposed to matter, the sound I was looking for was still unclear to me.
I was more pointedly looking for a band—a group of players. The idea of sitting with a group of first-call Nashville musicians and playing my songs was thrilling, enough for me to go to Nashville even if we just sat in somebody’s yard and played. That there would be a recording of the sessions was icing on the cake. What I didn’t know was that Felton had hired players from all around the Nashville area, including the members of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, who were soon to become legendary in their own right. What I didn’t know was that I was about to fall into a tub of butter.
Just as we started the sessions, I got delayed and was extraordinarily late for one of the dates. While the guys were waiting, David Briggs, the pianist, started playing “Lady Madonna,” which was the resonant Beatles piano lick in the world of music at the time, and the band there joined in to jam with him. Norbert Putnam was on bass, Jerry Carrigan on drums, Buddy Spicher on fiddle, Charlie McCoy on harmonica, Wayne Moss on guitar, and Lloyd Green on pedal steel.
The groove got so deep they couldn’t see out of it, and Briggs started singing funny scatological lyrics to the tune, at which point the song picked up even more life and the groove hovered just above the core of the Earth.
The recording engineer had the good sense to hit Record while they were down in this canyon groove, and that was about the time I walked in. The studio that day was RCA Studio B on Sixteenth Avenue, in an area that’s known as Music Row for good reason.
When I walked in, the place was full of virtual smoke and fire. It was full of the wisdom of sailors stuck in a landing craft singing about the girl they left behind—or maybe had in the boat with them. It was one of the best-sounding things I had heard in a while. The lyrics were ribald and crazy-funny in a hillbilly-porn sort of way, and I knew I was in for a good time with this band. I’m not a fan of the scatological, but I loved “Lady Madonna,” and I loved what they were laying down musically. Briggs sang it “Lady Medushka,” though he had no idea what that meant. It rocked. It was funny. It was solid gone.
We listened to “Lady Medushka” a few dozen times. After a while the band understood that I didn’t care too much about the producing constraints prevalent at the time in Nashville, which was to get fifteen songs cut in three hours. I was where I wanted to be and doing what I wanted to do: hanging and playing with great players and cutting the grooves as deep as they would go just to see what was down there. I was thrilled to learn that everything I’d heard about the Nashville cats was true.
When I started playing them the songs I wanted to record, they listened and made little notes. It was markedly different from cutting a demo on my own in the Screen Gems Publishing demo studio and shipping it off to the Brill Building to see if it would be approved. Here, there was no competitive rush for control of a TV show score and no jockeying for fame or money. These players were immediately responsive and inspired by the music alone—most of the time.
If there was just a single nod and a “Yeah, man” or two, with no eye contact between the players, then I knew I had missed the mark. But if I got “Cool!” with nods and smiles among them, then the moment was a wonderful boost and my confidence soared. Even discounting the fact that I had hired them, which is roughly a 99.9 percent discount, the opinions they expressed still had the shimmer of sincerity, and I was encouraged. I had roughly twelve songs in different stages of completion, and nine of them made the cut.
Even with some songs biting the dust, I still had a buzz of satisfaction from the validation of my songwriting. This was unprecedented. The Wrecking Crew, the top LA session guys who played on many of the Monkees records, had been careful not to make too many comments about the songs because of the overwhelming political dynamics in the studio, but these guys from Muscle Shoals and Nashville homed in on the music and stayed there, and if they liked it, then they said so, and if they didn’t, they said nothing. The whole session vibes started from this point of departure, and it was as real and as solid as anything had been in my musical life to that point.
Coming off the “Lady Medushka” jam session, these players wanted music they could get into and get down with and build tone palaces out of. When they said “Cool, man,” they were looking me in the eyes and speaking my language. Thankfully, by then I knew enough to leave them alone and let them play my songs the way they wanted—to drop the reins, point across a new open field toward the distant horizon, whisper “Go there” in their ear, and hang on.
We recorded several songs over about five days, and during those days, the signature song that emerged—that almost stopped the whole session—was “Listen to the Band.” After we recorded it and got it as we wanted, we started listening to it over and over and over again. When a recording is born, everyone wants to stop playing and just listen, especially if they are getting paid for it. It is a great moment, up one tier from Boone-ing: we knew that this recording would become the reference standard. We were not only hearing something for the first time, but something at the first time it could be heard. We were present at a birth, and while no one had a clue about the future of the song—whether it was great or lame-o, a hit or a miss—it was alive, and it was ours. I recall that we sat in the control booth listening to “Listen to the Band” one entire afternoon and evening.
Pretty soon other Nashville cats, friends of friends, were stopping by the studio during listening breaks as word got out that the sessions were easygoing and more or less open. People started showing up with weed, wine, and very, very good vibes. I could tell that news had spread that the music coming out of the sessions was exciting and new and worth stopping by to hear.
Even though I assumed the music would not get far in the pop world’s burgeoning Monkees disaffection, it was still an exquisite and high moment for me. I was ecstatic.
After that, David Briggs and Norbert Putnam and a few others from that band of players kept playing together, recorded their own material, and went on the road for a while. The seminal Muscle Shoals records they did marched into the pantheon of truly great, culture-altering records. To my mind, when musicologists try to find the date and players and songs to pin to the start of the country-rock genre, I think of those sessions and those times and those players. They invented country rock, if anybody did.
After those sessions, the end of the TV show, and the unsuccessful release of Head, I was left to fly on my own, and things of the most mundane type took horrifying turns. I descended into the strange world of the incomplete, wandering through a personal closed-system entropy and heat death without the cerulean trousers.
The IRS, which I had ignored for several years, showed up with a huge bill for unpaid taxes and started seizing property. I ran away from the few assets I had, left money at Screen Gems in return for being let out of my contract there, and explored the land of turpitude with friends and foes alike. I did not think of myself as evil and mean, but I have little doubt that other people did. I don’t know for sure because I didn’t bother to explore. I was lost in a wilderness and desperate to find any path.
The one I uncovered was densely overgrown, choked by television, celebrity, and money. It was hardly a path—more of a depression in the natural grasses that grow untended in woods and by streams. The trails here were barely distinguishable from the undulations of the land itself, but as I stared into the distance I saw a little light.
The moment I perceived this faint path, I could see it was a tendril leading ultimately to a forest of beautiful trees and exotic birds. This slender vestige was just visible through the open door of the Palomino Club, a country-western bar and restaurant in the San Fernando Valley.
The house band there consisted of some players who were not yet famous but one day would be. Leon Russell was playing piano, and the bandleader, Orville J. “Red” Rhodes, was playing pedal steel.
I started going to the Pal, as it was called, just to listen to the band and drink alcohol. I never drank much; I was a happy drunk, but alcohol, like all drugs, did not really pull me in.
I only mention alcohol here because of its presence in the country-western ethos of the time. An evening out for me would consist of a meal and a couple of cocktails at the Pal and then listening to the band as they played the country hits of the day. Late nights on weekends, a country star like Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings would perform a show.
Because of the politics of the times, country music was seen as a voice for the conservative right wing, and under that wing were racism, bias, fear, hatred, and the intolerance that marked the conservatives of the time.
I was appalled, but I could at least tolerate, and at most ignore, the shabby politics, because the music, especially the old country-western standards and artists like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, touched something deep within me, very much like the blues had done.
In the same way that Louann’s in Dallas had exposed me to the great bluesmen and early rock pioneers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, so the Pal revealed to me not only a house band of inspired players but also the best of the traditional and new country performers and singers. I loved seeing the great players who came to perform at their peak: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others.
The night Jerry Lee played, I talked Nicholson into going with me to the Pal. This was still before Jack was a movie star, and he was unrecognizable to the general public as an actor, so he could travel freely and go to clubs without causing a stir. Jack made it clear that the society and politics of C&W music were very far from his nature, but I assured him he could set all that aside once he heard the music.
I was right. The minute Jerry Lee took the stage, the whole place went electric, and Jack’s eyes never left him. At one point Jerry Lee began to introduce me from the stage, having no idea who I was or what I looked like. He had been told only that “one of the Monkees” was in the audience.
I had a table right in front of the bandstand, and the party with me was about eight people, including Jack. Jerry Lee started the intro, looking directly at Jack, finally pointing at him with a flourish and saying to the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, one of the Monkees! Please stand up and take a bow.”
He waved for Jack to stand up. Jack waved him off, as Ringo had waved the reporter off in London, and pointed to me sitting across from him. Jerry Lee looked embarrassed, and then looked at me, then back to Jack with curiosity. I did a hunched-over, aw-gosh stand-up, looked around, waved, and sat down. There were a few pops of applause, faint praise indeed.
Later, on the way home from that performance, Jack told me he thought it was the greatest live show he had ever seen. I don’t know what shows Jack saw, but I sort of agreed with him, leaving Bo Diddley and Jimi Hendrix aside. Jerry Lee was a fireball and lots of fun. Jack mentioned it to me over the years after that, still talking about the power of that evening.
What I saw that night was different, and Jerry Lee was only a part of it. Foremost to me was the power of Nicholson, even in a crowd. Jerry Lee Lewis had been certain that Jack was the famous one in the audience and introduced him as such. Nicholson’s light was shining so bright even then, even when he was unknown, that Lewis pegged him for a standout.
Second was the playing of Red Rhodes in the house band before Jerry Lee came on. I had watched Red play many evenings before and would watch him many more. There was something about the construction, tone, and touch of the way he played that surpassed all the other pedal steel players I knew of.
The pedal steel guitar is an unusual instrument. It sits like a card table in front of the player, who also sits and stares down at the strings. There is almost no detectable external movement from the player, but all the limbs are at work as well as the musical mind. The notes are mixed between percussive bell-like tones and a swirling, continuous sound much like strings in an orchestra but very different sonically. There are sustained tones, in harmony with others, that soar over the top, creating a rich and soft bed of sonority, ghost notes, and phantom chords. The player can manipulate the sound with a steel bar in one hand resting on the strings, steel finger picks on the other hand, and both feet on eight or ten pedals that can change the length and pitch of the strings. The whole thing is electrified and put through an amplifier, where the player can choose the echo or delay, creating a stunning wall of continuous tones and harmonies. The pedal steel is the signature instrument of many country songs, and very recognizable once you know what to listen for.
Few people can play the instrument well, and Red Rhodes was an undisputed master of it. Red was a string section and a brass section and a Mars section all in one. The lines and fills he played inside the regular country tunes were like smoke and magic, wafting in and out of the soundscape like surreptitious sprites.
A band won’t really work unless it creates its own complete ecosystem. As with any ecosystem, there must be a foundation. In the case of music, this is a tonal center, a design key, which sets the focus and direction of the whole system in its larger environment.
Red was the foundation of the Palomino house band’s ecosystem, and while there were other notable players who came and went in that band, Red’s pedal steel playing was its nexus. His playing consisted mostly of the phrases of traditional country-western music of the 1950s, from Patsy Cline to George Jones, rendered with his exquisite touch. It was music I honored and respected but didn’t like as much as blues—or, for that matter, blues-and-organ music in a lounge. For, despite its country-western ranch overlay, the Palomino was a lounge, full of strange folk, blue-collar workers, and women with big hair reflecting the lights from the beer signs and polished, practical nails clicking and clacking on Formica bar tables to the rhythms from the stage. A lounge with a look and feel that united the randomly strewn wagon wheels into an oasis of music—that is, if one was thirsty for alcohol, adultery, and intermittent mayhem in a desert of sobriety, rectitude, and civility.
When I had first started playing in San Antonio and connected with John Kuehne, he only played bass and did not sing, but his bass playing filled out my playing, rounding out the sound of the solo guitar enough so that it would fill a nightclub or an auditorium as needed. He was easygoing and patient with me, a good friend, and came to LA shortly after Phyllis and I did. He was part of my early efforts there, including my night at the Troubadour.
That night, when Randy Sparks offered me a deal, he also offered me the chance to play in a group he was creating that was to be like the New Christy Minstrels, which was a very big enterprise for him. I accepted under the condition that John be offered the same opportunity, and fortunately for both John and me, the new band Randy was assembling needed a bass player.
The pattern of my including John in all opportunities that came my way was interrupted when I was hired for the Monkees, but I was at least able to get him a job as my stand-in. I was worried this would insult him, but it was quite the opposite. The pay was good, and the job seemed to fit John perfectly. He was there for all the shows, came on the road as part of the crew when the Monkees did concerts, and was an active part of my social life.
He was not in any sense a professional friend or a hanger-on, even when we were not making too much music together. He was still foremost a bass player and very much his own man. He worked in various ensembles playing bass, always trying to get in a group that might go somewhere in the world of popular music, but it was not to be. He befriended John Ware, a drummer, and Kuehne and Ware became a rhythm section for various bands, including some I produced here and there, and part of my professional and social circles in general.
As such, the two of them were familiar with most of the proceedings of my life and were there to witness the steep descent I made after the show was off the air, when the air was let out of the tires on the Monkeemobile.
It was John Ware who suggested that he and John would make a good backup for me and my new songwriting efforts, but I was wary. I didn’t want to try going out as a singer-songwriter, since that was not precisely what I was aiming at, but I knew I would need another player or two whatever I did.
I had asked Harry Jenkins, the head of RCA Victor, the Monkees’ record company, if they were interested in me as a solo artist, and he asked me what kind of music I wanted to record. I didn’t know exactly. I said I had been steadily writing and had songs ready to record, but in my head they were a kind of country music that was a cross between cafeteria-organ-Latin blues music and Hank Williams.
To my delight, he indicated that RCA might be interested if I would let the Nashville arm of RCA be my home for recording, and I quickly agreed. RCA Nashville was run by legendary country star Chet Atkins, and I thought he might even understand what I was hearing in my head. In any case, it would be a long way from the Screen Gems music factory.
I hoped I might even get to use the Nashville cats I had already recorded with. Ware wisely pointed out that if he and John were my band, we could not only record but could tour in support of the records we made, something the Nashville first-call session guys seldom did for a new band. We would be a real band rather than a pure studio effort.
Ware’s idea had a solid feel to it, but I couldn’t think who might join with us besides him and John Kuehne. I had become expert in alienating helpful friends and betraying loyal coworkers, and in the recent past I’d seen the dim light of torches coming up the road, carried by angry villagers who sought to kill me and my monster. In short, I didn’t think I could get anyone to work with me.
Ware suggested otherwise and asked me to allow him to try to find other players. He wondered who I might like to approach, and my first choice was Red Rhodes. I had no hope of his accepting, but he was my first choice. A pedal steel guitar player—especially a magical-reality player like Red—was critical-path for the music in my head.
I thought I would also need a piano player to realize that certain sound, but Leon Russell was long gone from the Pal by this time. Red was still in place, however, and John said he could start by asking Red if he was interested in joining with us. I agreed to let him ask, but not gratefully. I still had much to learn about gratitude, and worse, was enmeshed in entitlement, one of the more repulsive elements of Celebrity Psychosis. One of the first casualties CP exacts, one of the first limbs it atrophies, is gratitude in the bearer.
To my good fortune, Ware pressed on, even without my proper and well-deserved gratitude and acknowledgment, or even much encouragement. He went to Red and asked him to join our band. To my great surprise, and everlasting good fortune, Red agreed.
Thus was born my next band, which I called the First National Band.