And the Winner Is …
In 1968, when we were recording Crown of Creation, we were still new enough at the business of delegating authority that each member of the band wanted to control his own knob or fader on the board.
For those of you who don't know the ins and outs of a recording studio, “the board” is a slanted desk with an enormous number of knobs, faders, dials, wires, VU meters, and electric gizmos that both record and mix the music. “Mixing” happens after the song is completed, when the volume of each instrument gets placed at precisely the desired level in relation to the overall sound of the piece.
Usually, the producer is the master of the board, but of course, each of us wanted to be louder than everybody else. That meant six egos were busy sending the meters into the red, indicating OVERLOAD. Add to that consistent snorts of cocaine, and you have a formula for major cost overruns if not chaos. Apart from its expense and its tendency to cause people to babble, cocaine also has a tendency to make musicians want to try at least seventy-five different ways of mixing a song before they'll surrender to a popular opinion that the fifth take was just fine. That can be great fun if you have $250 an hour to throw away on studio time, or if you have a couple thousand dollars to get everyone else in the room as fucked up as you are.
I know I've fried my share of engineers by replaying a particular song in every possible permutation of sound until the janitors imposed their vacuum cleaners on me at dawn. God love the patience of all recording engineers. Producers and stars will argue or walk when they get miffed, but the engineer stays right there until the end. It was during one of these six-man mixing sessions that Paul's and my hands were constantly touching due to his fader being located right next to mine on the board. After about forty-five minutes, I still had my hand on the fader, making adjustments that had nothing to do with the song. I just wanted to see how long it would take before the skin-touching registered as a proposition. It did make Paul friendly, not to the point of making lewd remarks, but I noticed that he'd begun moving to the left a bit more, talking in my direction, keeping his hand on the knob even when the tape was rewinding—that sort of thing. Slow buildup. But not yet.
What was building was the popularity of the group, and we were suddenly being approached by various film people who were interested to see if we could join forces and make some money together. The director Otto Preminger was one of those people. He apparently thought he was a certified hippie because he'd been doing some psychedelics at radical chic parties with Leonard Bernstein. Burning to direct a comedy about the counterculture, he talked up my being in a movie called Skidoo, about an old guy (ultimately played by Jackie Gleason) who takes acid. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for those moviegoers who would have had to sit through my performance—there was something so absurd about Preminger's cocky presentation, I said no thanks to his offer of a role.
I also turned down what was eventually Lauren Hutton's role in Little Fauss and Big Halsy. Hollywood was still making mass-appeal color trivia infused with Doris Day cleanliness—not exactly my area. But in 1969, Airplane said yes to a collaboration between the group and Jean Luc Godard, thereby bringing together two bizarre artistic elements.
Here's something to do if you have a band and you want free publicity: play 150-decibel rock music from a rooftop in midtown Manhattan. We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist for the same “volume” of public exposure. Speaking of exposure, do it nude. That last part we didn't think of, so Jean Luc Godard, shooting from across the street through the window of the office of Leacock-Pennebaker studios, filmed us, fully clothed, as we perched on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel.
When we were ready to begin, Marty took his microphone and shouted, “Wake up, New York. Wake up!” The actor Rip Torn, in a bright red scarf, and Paula Matter, dressed in a bedsheet, arrived to join us. Unfortunately, they weren't the only ones who showed up. After two songs, “Somebody to Love” and “We Can Be Together,” a cop appeared and told us to stop the music because we were disturbing the peace. We figured it would make a better film if we kept on playing, so we did, while cars screeched to a halt, pedestrians froze in their tracks, and office workers leaned out the windows waving. Five more cops showed up and started shoving Rip and Paula around. When they resisted, they were arrested and taken to the Eighteenth Precinct.
And the band played on.
The film, called One American Movie, opened at an art house in Berkeley on December 17, 1969, to this review by film critic Ralph Gleason:
It is a fascinating sequence—the film, itself, actually only a work print of a series of interviews plus some footage of Rip Torn which hints at what the flick might have ultimately been, does something which I find quite important—in a way, it is an exact mirror of the political scene today. …
It is a collection of open-end raps which eventually becomes boring. If it were not for the presence of the rock band and the fact that its footage is not only interesting visually, but also listenable, the whole thing would have been hard to take.
But, Ralph, you've heard the old line “You had to have been there.” Some jokes exist for their own sake, and most of us thought that the film was meant to be a comedy of errors. Maybe tighter editing would have helped, or the addition of at least one cop with a lamp shade on his head. But the incongruity of it combined with the illegality were enough to make the entire production a worthwhile farce—as far as I was concerned. And there was another plus: Siskel and Ebert would have hated it.
By the way, decades later the rock group U2 did the same thing in L.A. in the process of shooting a video. There were no arrests.
One more Hollywood turndown for me: Milos Forman's Ragtime. This time I was offered the part of a radical Communist rabble-rouser, which wouldn't have been a big stretch for me. Unfortunately, it cut into our touring time and I declined. My movie career was short, uneventful, and over in one poorly reviewed underground flop.
No Oscars for Grace.
No Grammys either. We were playing in Florida once, and the word was out that I was GOING TO GET A GRAMMY. In fact, it was supposed to be a sure thing. So sure that cameras were set up onstage the night of the awards. There was a monitor showing the ceremony in L.A., and the idea was that we'd stop the concert when the winner—me—was revealed, so I could blush, look humble, and say thanks to my Aunt Frieda, Uncle Trot, etc. But when the announcement finally came, the presenter said, “And the Grammy goes to … Linda Ronstadt!”
The camera guys onstage looked confused, the audience booed, and I was pretty embarrassed. I remember thinking, What kind of “inside” information made someone sure enough of my win to go to the trouble of interrupting our set, shutting up the audience, and dragging cameras onstage? Hot tip, indeed.
The screwup left me standing there with vinyl on my face. I knew people were looking at me to see how I'd respond, so I immediately flashed that no-problem-isn't-this-an-amusing-fuck-up look so we could finish the rest of the set without everybody feeling sorry for Grace. The truth was that although not getting “the coveted prize” was awkward, I didn't feel sorry for myself. I was saved by the part of me that was disdainful of the straight world's award show circus. Besides, when you compare notes, Ronstadt does have better pipes.
My second Grammy nomination was for “Female Solo Album” or “Female Rock Star with the Best Teeth” or “Female Rock Something or Other.” These were the days before there was a major category called “Best Performance by a Female Rock Singer.” In the early eighties, rock was a subcategory, so this particular category, as well as having a name not worth remembering, wasn't even televised. As I remember, the event took place in Radio City Music Hall in New York, and I went to the actual ceremony. But I was beaten once again—this time by Pat Benatar. I never was able to pile up those statues, but I'm grateful the Grammy guys considered my efforts, when they easily could have avoided me altogether, what with my lazy and somewhat sloppy attention to cranking out the hits.
As well as never winning a Grammy, I also have never been able to get a grip on the Top 40. When it did happen with a song that I recorded, it was either written by someone else (Darby Slick, Diane Warren, Bernie Taupin) or a one-hit fluke like “White Rabbit.” My inability to successfully mainstream anything hasn't bothered me much, but had I achieved mega–mainstream success it would have been an interesting test of the distorted pride I seem to take in my idiosyncratic behavior.
My “Mainstream Star of the Year Award” acceptance speech would have gone something like this: “Thank you for your amusing lack of taste in popular icons.”
I did get four Bammies (Bay Area Music Awards), but that's a ballot-stuffing process. All you need to do is get enough of the same people to write in to the award office seventeen times. I wasn't aware of “the award-winning procedure” until about the third nomination, when Jackie Kaukonen, the group's executive secretary, who was then married to Jorma's brother Peter, was giggling in the office one day about how many nice people were going to great lengths to get grocery clerks, distant cousins, and parolees to send in votes for Yours Truly.
Scour the country for ballot-marking. No sealed Price Waterhouse envelopes. Just good old Bay Area clout.
I did legitimately win three wooden bears in a toy store raffle in Tiburon a couple of years ago, however. Not for any particular talent—just luck of the draw.
With so many performances and my style of shouting out the lyrics as loudly as I could, my voice was suffering, a condition for which I place a great deal of the blame on deficient monitor speakers. Or the lack of them altogether. All of it was rough on the pipes. Before monitor speakers became available at all, I had to scream every night to hear what notes I was singing over the amplified guitars. When they were cheap or broken, which was the case far too often, I wanted to destroy them. Which is exactly what Roger Daltrey did when The Who, Airplane, and B.B. King played at the Tanglewood Festival. When I watched Daltrey kick the monitor speakers and toss them in pieces off the stage, I cheered. It may sound like I'm overreacting, but since the speakers are the only means by which singers have to hear themselves, they're extremely important—if the singer cares how the performance sounds.
All that screaming created nodes on my throat, and between concerts, rehearsals, touring, and recording, if I had a minute, I would have Dr. Ripstein (perfect name for a surgeon) rip another one out. I had three operations in about three years, and after each surgery, I couldn't talk or smoke for about six weeks. In order to avoid a fourth trip to the hospital, I asked a singing coach if there was anything I could do, short of quitting singing altogether, to keep from destroying my throat. She asked if I smoked menthol cigarettes.
“Yes.”
“Well, smoke if you have to, but lose the menthol.”
“Okay.”
I don't know if it was the switch to regular cigarettes or the increasing technology of the monitor speakers, but after 1970, I had no more problems with nodes.
It was sometime after I'd recovered from the second node removal that we played the International Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. We rented a grand Spanish mansion right on the beach and enjoyed tropical flowers, piña coladas, and hot sun cooled by misty showers—the whole brochure.
One afternoon, Jorma and Margaretta and Paul and I went for a long ride around the island in a jeep. This was the first time I'd had a chance to be with Paul outside a work situation or a fully packed party. Instead of being his preoccupied self, on this day he was animated, relaxed, and apparently unconcerned about the girl he had waiting back at the beach house. I was still hanging onto a dead relationship with Spencer (also back at the house, shades down, nursing a hangover), and the last vestiges of loyalty kept me, once again, from going with the moment.
It didn't take me long after that, however, to get uncharacteristically domestic by offering to make Paul some dinner up in his room. He brought the champagne, I brought the meat and potatoes, so to speak, and as Bill Thompson remembers, “When they came down the next morning, she had a sheepish grin on her face, he looked pretty satisfied, and I thought, ‘Oh no, here we go again.’”