77

I was up on the roof of my garage with Johnny Cash, looking out over the city of LA. The house was the one I had built high in the hills near Mulholland during the days of The Monkees. I had made the flat roof of the garage into a kind of deck, and even though I seldom used it, this particular evening I took John up there to show him the view. From there one could see down the coast of Southern California—almost into Long Beach on a clear day. Just before that was Santa Monica, and just at the foot of the hills the house stood on, Beverly Hills spread out.

This was in late 1969 or early 1970. John had come for a gathering that was sort of my return hospitality for his gracious hosting of me and Davy and Micky at a breakfast at his lake house in Tennessee when the three of us went to Nashville to perform on his TV show after The Monkees was off the air.

I made something of a friend of John then, and we had some nice moments together. If I was in Nashville I might call him, and I heard from him sometimes when he came to LA. For the most part we touched each other’s lives lightly and infrequently, but when we did, it was usually marked by a memorable occurrence. There was a connection between us that was atypical for me, and he said the same for him. Odd twists happened when we were together and persisted when we were apart, shared events that were unexpected for both of us. These events were few and slight, but they made for good dinnertime stories.

For instance, a year or so after this garage-top summit, I was working at my office in LA and had gone out on some business errands with my assistant, Esther. As we were coming back to the office, I told her I wanted to stop and grab a bite of lunch. I was used to eating at a few regular places around, but we weren’t near any of those. I spotted a small Italian restaurant not too far from the office and said, “Let’s just hop in here.” I had never been there before, nor had Esther.

Esther and I went in, ordered, and were going over a few things when the maître d’ came over with a portable phone. He said, “Johnny Cash is on the phone for you.”

I looked quizzically at Esther, who shrugged as I took the phone. “Hello?” I said.

It was Cash all right, and I was flummoxed. How had he known where I was? I hadn’t called the office, and neither had Esther, as far as I knew. I was in a restaurant I had never been in before, chosen at random as we drove along. How could he possibly have known where I was?

Before I could ask the question, John said something like, “Mike, I need to get your OK. I’m writing a book and just turned it in to my publisher. You’re in it, and I want to make sure that what I said was OK with you. I wrote about the conversation we had on the roof of your garage, and I want to read it to you. I need to do it now, because they’re waiting for me to get the approval right away. Can I read it to you? Have you got a minute?”

Things were spinning, but I said OK, sure. Happy to.

John read the few sentences that recounted the conversation we’d had on the roof overlooking Beverly Hills. It was in essence correct, and I said that was pretty much how I remembered it. He asked if it was OK for him to put it in the book, and I agreed. He said he wanted to talk more, but the publisher was waiting for his answer with my answer, so he rang off.

I was dumbfounded. I looked at Esther, who seemed as puzzled as I was, and wondered aloud how he had gotten the number—or even known where I was. And what about the way the waiter said, “Johnny Cash is on the phone for you”—as if the waiter was in the habit of taking my calls? It was the weirdest announcement of a phone call I’d ever had at a restaurant. I couldn’t figure it out.

When Esther and I got back to the office, I checked around, and Cash had not called there, and no one seemed to know how his call had found its way to me.

I never figured it out. I am not a supernatural-interventionist of any type, and I assume there was and is some plausible answer to the little mystery, but I have never known what it was.

The paragraph in John’s book worked its way around the publishing and press world and into several different accounts of the same conversation. Our short talk seems to have been something of a turning point for John, but the story has mutated a little as it’s been reiterated. In one instance, it happened at his lake house instead of on top of my garage. It doesn’t surprise me that it has found its way into his legacy, though. It was a moment between us that was genuine on all fronts: two guys facing the Hollywood Mind from the top of my garage, staring straight-on at Beverly Hills.

Standing on the roof of my garage that day, we became a touch philosophical. I said I thought of Hollywood as something of a trap, a gentle trap perhaps, but I still felt as if it would rob one of integrity as easily and in the same way it would confer it. By “Hollywood” I meant celebrity, fame, money, drugs, sex, cars, and all the orbiting weirdness that went with them. John said he knew this too, and the conversation seemed to sink into him. Hollywood, California, was the epicenter of this nonsense, as we both knew, but we were speaking metaphorically.

We were both aware of the importance of sidestepping the dark and disturbing downside of fame, cruel or kind. He said it was important to keep in mind this duplicity of fame. It was to be avoided if possible, but he said that it could be beaten in any case.

By that time, I think, he had become a devout Christian, and I suppose the ideas of basic worth and spiritual causation were active and important in his thinking. He said he hoped to avoid the pitfalls that he saw. I offered that there was no reason I could see that they were unavoidable. All it took, I assumed, was a little self-knowledge, determination, humility, and help from friends. He agreed.

The conversation drifted back to less weighty things, and we came down from the roof. The evening turned out to be a very good time.

At that time, I was facing the slow unraveling of the world I was living in, a process that John had already lived out and apparently moved beyond. My Celebrity Psychosis had taken a grave turn by then and was metastasizing as it morphed into some twisted thought process that served to confuse and cloud every simple issue. Celebrity Psychosis makes it so that being recognized is simultaneously a nuisance and a necessity. It creates a double-bind paradox, becoming an eerie obsession when pursued-avoided. CP’s most famous symptoms are observed in celebrities who yell and throw things at paparazzi for interfering in their lives at the same time they pose and smile in hopes of landing a prime position in the popular press.

CP often shows up in the bearer as temper tantrums in public places and, most disturbingly dangerous, as the intensely real-seeming delusions of a narrowed local reality. Under the delusion of CP, celebrities have no qualms about leaving their car parked in a fire lane while they go shopping. They are celebrities, so the rules don’t apply.

The first time CP showed up in my life was at the entrance gate to Columbia Studios, where we were filming The Monkees. My hair was long, my clothes were shabby, I was in an old car, and the guard would not let me in. I flew into a rage. I started screaming at him—I might have even said, “Don’t you know who I am!?!” or some other such foolishness—and no doubt there was a personal insult mixed in as an affront to the poor guard. Of course, he had no idea I was supposed to be there, nor should he have recognized me. It was my second day on the job.

I found out the next day that Davy had been stopped at the same gate but drove through the barrier. The producers gave Davy the broken gate as a souvenir and posted our pictures all over the inside of the guard gate.

That’s how it starts—and it just gets worse from those simple seeds. The terrible fact is that those seeds take root and grow, hidden and unseen, tuber-like, underground, until at last they push their hideous bloom to the surface.

This highest and most aggressive form of CP was active in my life right after The Monkees went off the air. It had grown to outrageous size and shape and was bigger than my house in the hills. CP was no longer resident in my consciousness; I became a resident in Celebrity Psychosis. I felt the weird, ever-present insistence of some imaginary divine right to be recognized wherever I was—and the entitlement to be there. As one might suspect, it was not a useful approach in any but a society of sycophants who traded on it, and I parked in a lot of fire lanes, mentally daring the parking authorities to tow my car—which they usually did. Like many afflictions, CP slows the learning process.

My early experience in music production was with The Monkees and all the ancillaries: the records, concerts, huge distribution systems, and Celebrity Psychosis that went with it. Even though that conglomeration of forces was unrealistic as a paradigm for building a new musical group, it was all I had when I started the First National Band. So along with learning songs and rehearsing, I began to unconsciously gather about me the smoke and sparks of the Screen Gems fireworks factory. I had no experience in actually building a successful band, even though there had been some early fits and starts and over time I had met many of the best players in town. Meeting a great player is, to the Celebrity Psychotic, the same as knowing them well and being intimately familiar with their skill and talent; it involves the perception of being an actual part of a productive unit because you happen to have met a key player at a party, gotten drunk with them, and gone out to a club, where you got a good table.

My first tries at a band had been when John Kuehne first arrived in LA. I thought we could use a drummer among us, so I called my high school friend Bill Sleeper and asked if he had any interest in coming out west and joining up. I had no clear idea of Bill’s general situation there in Dallas, but I knew he was a decent drummer and had a shared taste with me in music, so that was enough for me to ask him. He said he would give it a try, made the trip to LA, and got an apartment in the same complex that Phyllis, John, and I lived in.

We rehearsed some, and after a short while I met some characters who pushed us along a path of recording and doing some live performances in clubs. The only real job we got was in an outlying casino near Las Vegas, in the tiny town of Searchlight, Nevada.

I was writing songs regularly, but they weren’t much more than wild grabs for the brass ring of popularity, attempts to make a living playing and singing the songs of my life—wherever that might lead. However, the problem remained that I couldn’t really play well, nor did I know the theory of music, how to read it or write it, or how to lead and inspire other players I might be with. When the casino owner insisted we do covers of pop hits, I was stumped.

He also insisted we have go-go dancers, as they were called, so we brought two dancers with us, one for each side of the stage. One of them had a good voice and knew some popular hit songs, so she ended up singing a lot more than I did. In this way, the Mike, John, and Bill Band, as we named ourselves, ended up actually being the backup group for the dancers we had hired to provide interpretive movement to music we couldn’t play. Other than that, we were in great shape.

The band came apart pretty quickly and easily when Bill’s mother, who seemed to be well motivated and a good person, came out to LA and took our drummer back home with her. I think she may have saved him from an awful fate, but as I say, I had no real understanding of his circumstances, so who knows?

The band of Mike, John, and Bill had made one record—two songs, one front and one back side—played a few dates, and that was it. The fragile soul of that band never developed enough to be detectable, and that fragility made me wonder if I was missing something, if there was more to a band than just getting together and playing songs.

I was learning, by experience, a little bit of “bandology”—that having songs and players and uniforms and a bit of skill does not by itself create great music, or a great product, or even a good time. There is something more in the glue that creates and holds a great band together than just playing and making a little money. Besides loving the music, it takes inspiration, a point of view, and a workable sense of artistry—and after all that, very hard work and perseverance.

I had only this slight experience in band building, combined with the Monkees and its dreadful CP, as I sought out an agent and a manager and road crew for the First National Band. With my new RCA contract in hand, John Kuehne, John Ware, Red, and I went into the RCA studios in LA and recorded Magnetic South, our first record.

The idea of inclusion weighs strongly in the formation of a band: what to include and not include is an essential and defining question. It would seem that broad inclusion is a good idea, that the edges of a band might be extended so that many different ideas are working at once. And it is to some extent, but it does not always work harmoniously. Selecting the elements one includes in a band, or any artistic endeavor, becomes an important matter of defining which ones will resonate harmoniously.

With a band, the search starts with songs and then expands to the sounds and instruments and design key that make up the style. A design key is the design element to which all the other elements of the art at hand refer. Often, this design key is thought of as a genre, but genre is too loose and imprecise a word for describing the styles of certain music. One gets lost near the edges of genre distinctions. One person’s blues is another’s jazz.

Nonetheless, there is a widely accepted sense of what defines country music. In the 1950s, country had a style that was different from what it would become later, but the historical and general idea of country music persists. A country-music fan of today has an unequivocal sense of what makes country music country music: it’s the background music, or score, if you will, to the life of the working class.

By the time the First National Band was coming together, I had been thinking for years about how the country music that surrounded me in my youth included oddball elements, like “Tico Tico” and “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” as well as elements of early rock and roll, which in my case meant Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

John Ware seemed to get the idea of this amalgamation right away, and Red Rhodes was happy to contribute to it. Red was in his forties and a punctuation-laugher, placing at least a chuckle after every three or four sentences, like steam-valve relief. When I talked with him about playing “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in a country style, he laughed more than usual and said he had no idea what to play. What he did play turned out to be inspired.

John Kuehne, who adopted the stage name of John London, was along for the ride as well, especially because he had a good foundation in playing standards from the big-band era of the 1940s recreationally with his dad. We all could play twang, but just as important, we all had hours of jukebox-lounge-time coupled with a deep love of rock and roll.

I had a sound in my head that I had first heard in those Nashville sessions I did under the Monkees banner, but until we all played as the First National Band and started learning and rehearsing the songs, I had no idea whether this ensemble could happily or even comfortably play it.

The four of us did as good a job as we could recording. John Ware was generally a strong force in the artistry and direction the band was taking, and he was able to bring Glen D. Hardin, a great pianist who had already backed up musicians like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, into the studio to play with us for a song or two.

The finished album, which included some of the songs I had recorded in Nashville during the Monkees period, was satisfying. We all were proud of it and felt as if we had found something new and interesting in the musical direction we were taking. But though we were all proud of the album, I was also confused by it. I couldn’t tell whether it was good or not. My usual metrics were not revealing much.

The business side of things was also confusing, driven as it was by my CP-certainty that the Monkees model would suffice, which of course it wouldn’t, because The Monkees was a television show. As an operating enterprise, it was frustrating; it didn’t appear to work for starting a band. I discovered that a band’s musical system would not govern the outriggers I had lashed to the side of our friable craft—the finance, management, and career captains of the operation. I had thought that the Monkees structure would function well, but it didn’t.

I had been greatly affected by the organizational systems of the arts in LA but was more and more confused by them. I could not fathom where the foundations of the music, movie, and television industries were—whether they were “First good business, then find the art” or “First good art, then find the business.” I was impressed by businesspeople with artistic flair, like Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, but it always seemed as if the bottom line was money. There was a certain limited logic to this, no doubt; bill paying was bill paying.

I tried to learn from the successes I noticed, but they were all clouded in a fog of sorts. In the ambiguities of the Hollywood Mind, art and commerce each occlude the other, making their relationship unclear. More than once, I tried to reverse-engineer the processes of show business only to find myself perverse-engineering them: inverting not the sequence of processes but the nature of their original intent. There may have been a Principia for the Hollywood Mind, but I had no idea what it might contain. The Hollywood Mind was pretzel logic at its saltiest.

In the record business of the 1970s, the road to a hit record was pretty well traveled. Its steps were clear thanks to the control of corporate enterprise. Or maybe not.

It went something like this:

The record was made, and the artist was told to “stand over there for now,” meaning, “Don’t get too involved in the business; we’ll take care of everything.” The record would then be manufactured by large East Coast factories and shipped out to stores that took the goods on consignment. The record was identified numerically, something like “RCA Victor 22719,” in order for everyone to understand it just enough to get it into the system. 22719 was, more or less, blindly ordered by record stores, which ordered however many copies they were told to order since the goods were free to the store until they were sold.

At the record company’s command and expense, the artist waiting in the corner would now visit the record stores and perform the song to a playback of the recording, or maybe with a couple of instruments. Radio stations would play records according to the pressures and inducements of the record-company promotion men, who would tailor these free offerings to the music programmer. The radio station would know whether the public responded to the airplay because the Arbitron rating service monitored the number of listeners at any given time and would tell them how many were tuning in to either 22719 or 14298. The radio station would play more or less of one or the other, depending on what the rating service said the public said in response to what the sales and promotion people from the record company said the record stores were selling from their consignment.

When Magnetic South was released, it was the first time I stared into this abyss. It was much deeper and darker than I thought. In the same way that some of the best people might make bad records, and some of the worst people might make good ones, so it was with bad and good business. It was a dense, confusing business on all fronts.

The promotion person from Screen Gems came in excited one day soon after the release to tell me that WFIL, a radio station in Philadelphia, was playing the song “Joanne” from the album. He was thrilled at the break we got. WFIL normally played only pop records, but nevertheless, one disc jockey there had gone against the tide and started playing “Joanne,” a nearly acoustic countryish ballad-with-a-yodel-in-it, which to everyone’s surprise at the record company had gotten good response from the public. This put “Joanne” solidly in the system and on its way to becoming a mild hit all across the United States.

In a train of thought whose tracks I have never pieced together, my manager—our manager, of the First National Band—thought this would be a good time to leave the US and go over to England and play obscure clubs across the English countryside.

So we made the obviously intelligent move that one makes when he or she stands at the threshold of success: we left town. In the English countryside we played the faraway clubs, to crowds who had never heard the record and whose only familiarity with me was as a television personality. We did the press conference, well attended only because of Hendrix’s and Ringo’s gracious generosity, and wandered around English society until the specter of success had passed in the US and “Joanne” had drifted into the margins.

It is hard to know, even with amarcord, whether it is better in such times to be bitter, crazy, heartbroken, mad, sad, or loony. Not that there is much of a choice. Like trees, artists grow where they are planted, grow the way the wind blows, and grow toward the sun. In the end that is nature’s way.

In retrospect, none of this seems as weird as it was or as confusing as it became. The 1970s record business was obviously not natural. It was almost entirely corrupt, and the artists were relegated to pawns, curious and disoriented pawns, not in a game of chess but in a game of checkers.

Each new First National Band record that came out—there were two that followed the first—was issued into the same miasma as Magnetic South. Red, John, John, and I played well as a band—we were good as a band of musicians—but the business and the times and the circumstances were working their excoriations deep. The FNB was not sustainable, as promising as it was.

There was another important factor in this picture: my personal life was in shambles. My moral compass looked like a spinning top.

I had three children with Phyllis, my wife, and another child with Nurit, who was not my wife. Both of these women in their own way salvaged what little they could from my misbehavior. Phyllis was resolute and kept trying to make our marriage cohere. Nurit was resolute in making me take responsibility for my child. In both cases, these women were on higher moral ground than I, and I am grateful to them for expecting me to join them—and in some ways forcing me to.

Nurit was more successful than Phyllis in getting me to face my responsibilities. Nurit only wanted me to take responsibility for our child and to support him, whereas Phyllis wanted our whole marriage to become a bastion of mutual affection and trust, and a safe haven for our children. This was not to be, because in addition to all the other lapses of ethics, I fell into yet another sordid and awful affair with a friend’s wife, and that affair made me unfit for any relationship on any terms, and I knew it. I cared for Phyllis and our children as best I could with money. It wasn’t enough, and I knew that too.

When I saw that the first three FNB albums were not going to be successful, instead of changing the environment or the management or the administrative overhead, which were where the problems lay, I changed the band. The Second National Band came and went in a flash, with only one album. At this point the powers at RCA gave me notice that if I were to continue there, I needed to concentrate on making hit records.

I was back in the same waters I assumed I had just swum out of. I made a record with only Red and me playing that I titled And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’. Contrary to the title’s promise, the record went nowhere, traded only among friends and hardcore fans. Then I made one final try, with an album titled Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash, using the band I had formed for my new record label, Countryside.

Countryside came about when Jac Holzman, who was then president of Elektra Records, and I put together a deal where I would start a label that would in essence be Elektra’s country division. Elektra had enjoyed great folk and pop successes, and Jac said he “followed the music,” so an LA-based country label seemed like a good idea to him. It did to me too. I proposed that we build a studio in the San Fernando Valley, home of the Palomino Club, and for that studio I would put together a house band around Red Rhodes. Jac seemed to think it was a good plan.

Building a studio band around Red was easy. He knew all the country players in town, the best and the worst, and the idea of joining a house band—kind of like the ones at Stax/Volt in Memphis and at Motown/Hitsville USA in Detroit—had players lining up for auditions. The band that came together around Red was first rate, and the sound was pure Southern California.

Garland Frady was our first artist, and we made an album called Pure Country with him. Garland spent a lot of his time during the day selling stuff at a flea market in the valley, and then at night he would record. On weekends he would try to find bookings around town so he could perform. It was a hard life, and he sang like it. He was the real deal.

As Countryside was starting up I still had one more record to make for RCA, and I set about juggling the calendars so I could fully attend to the Countryside start-up and the new album for RCA, and found that I faced solving the unusual problem of which band to use for the RCA album.

The Countryside band was new, and while staffed with very good players, they were not used to the studio work the way the first-call session players around town were. I puzzled over which way to go, whether to go off for a few weeks on my own and use a band of session players, leaving the Countryside band alone to rehearse and make demos, or whether to take the new band into the studio with me. It was my call and I wanted to make the right one.

David Barry was something of a standout in the Countryside band. He was a good piano player and a real spark plug for the rest of the band as a team leader. Country music was not exactly native to him, however. He was a Harvard graduate who was working as a journalist and wanted to be a country music piano player when we hired him to join the band. Red liked him a lot as a person and a player, and David gave the whole endeavor a decidedly classy feel, which as near as I could tell was not his original intent. He seemed to love the country-piano-player culture on its own and for a good while left his background and pedigree untold.

I asked David whether he thought it would be OK with the other players if I used LA studio musicians for my RCA record. He said he thought it would be devastating for the band at Countryside and advised very strongly against it. I took his advice and brought the Countryside band into the RCA studios in LA for Ranch Stash. David had been right. The record and the playing were excellent, but there was more there than just playing. Ranch Stash had a cinematic and poetic mission that required some subtlety and some nontraditional thinking by the players. It was clear from the downbeat that an LA session ensemble, however technically superior, would not have had the patience, or the bandistry, for this kind of trek.

It was because the Countryside band was a real band coming together around an announced aesthetic that the effort we made paid off. Ranch Stash came out exactly as I had directed. The band played the songs exactly as I had hoped, and each member provided real inspiration individually.

The Countryside band had a cohesion and focus that a selected or curated group would not have. This even though the Countryside band had been selected and curated for work at the Countryside studios and with Countryside artists. This common ground provided a kind of shelter for the assembled muses.

A band needs at least three players, and thrives with four, because of the nature of harmony. It also needs a place to be and try things out. This place can be a garage or a skunk works or a kitchen or a crucible. Countryside was all of the above—and even more. There is a certain pride of membership that develops and a care for the quality of the work that gets passed around among three or four people.

In the early going I needed to buy a good piano for the studio, an important piece of equipment, and looked around for just the right one. David went shopping for it and finally found a Yamaha C7, a seven-foot-three-inch grand piano that had a crisp, clean sound. He made a great deal for it, and when it was delivered he was thrilled and played it for hours. He pasted a note on it just above the keyboard that said “Please refrain from placing cigarettes, cigars, or other carbonaceous materials on or near this piano. If at all possible, use the piano in the Palomino!”

Ranch Stash closed my RCA career in fine style, and again, poor sales. Sadly, by then the world had turned a little and the songs were no longer as fetching as youngsters, and they were lost into the vaults of RCA until RCA itself was finally lost.

I turned my full efforts to making Countryside work, and although I did not know it, I also started turning my life into a country song.