Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine

I was still having acid flashes when I got back to New York. It wasn’t unusual that summer to see young people roaming the streets in an advanced state of distraction, and I didn’t want to look like that. But it took several days to banish the perception that the wood in my floor was a living thing. Trees pulsed before my eyes, and, yes, I wanted to hug them. I’d become a hippie trapped in the body of a hard-driving, working-class Jew, not an easy fit.

The only thing that tethered me to reality was journalism. Writing had always served to cohere me, and now it came in very handy. I filed a celebratory piece about the local hippie scene, with no mention of my acid trip. I didn’t want to describe the feelings it had awakened in me. I was sick of reading about finding God in a flower, and there was nothing admirable about melting in the California sun. New York didn’t reward such states of being, so I kept myself out of the article. But I couldn’t keep reality at bay, and I was haunted by the feeling that there was a bigger story than flower power out there, something that would shock the counterculture away from its beautiful aspirations. The onslaught of rape and hard drugs in the Haight was part of it, but the real impediment to building a society of love was the war in Vietnam.

There were already close to half a million American soldiers there, but the hippies I’d hung out with believed that the violence would end on its own once people dropped acid and expanded their consciousness. It was still possible in certain drumming circles to speak of summoning the Aquarian Age, and the Beatles were chanting, “All you need is love.” The deranging experience of combat was as foreign as Communism to these kids. Either they were too young for the draft or they managed to evade it one way or another. It wasn’t hard for children of the middle class to do that—a note from a sympathetic shrink was usually enough—but the boys I’d grown up with in the project were shoveled into the military, and some of them would never come home. At the Voice I got letters from soldiers in Vietnam, often with peace signs on the envelopes, letting me know how much rock music meant to them, how it was all that kept them alive. The knowledge that I was safe and free to pursue my career while those guys were in mortal danger left me with a gnawing sense of guilt. It was clear that, at some point, I would have to write about Vietnam. But the antiwar movement was still largely a campus phenomenon, and I wasn’t a student anymore. The counterculture was my area of expertise, and my shelter from the firestorm.

By 1967 the music industry had mastered the art of appealing to writers like me. Record executives wore their own version of the hippie look: a requisite Nehru jacket with a discreet string of beads. Publicists would flash a peace sign at the end of a pitch. At the major labels, there were rooms set aside for previews of albums not yet released. I remember being invited to one of those special private concerts. The president of the company, which specialized in rock with vaguely folkie credentials, greeted me personally. He ushered me into a sound-baffled chamber with huge speakers and plush chairs. He pointed to a butterfly-shaped box on the table, and then he left the room. Inside the box was a small pipe and a block of hashish. The music started. I sank into a chair and lit up. It was much harder than payola to resist freebie drugs.

I was beginning to feel apprehensive about where rock was headed. Some of the musicians I’d met in San Francisco were being offered advances of $100,000, the equivalent of about $700,000 today. Still, I told myself that Bob Weir was right: as long as the bands controlled the product, money wouldn’t change anything. After all, the lyrics were as subversive as ever. Sexual references and allusions to drugs were no problem as long as the message was couched in code. If all else failed, the band could deny that the double meanings were actually double. (I was particularly amused by the Byrds’ insistence that their song “Eight Miles High” was merely about their trip to London.) Code words for marijuana were constantly being invented, and as long as the FCC was happy, the record labels looked the other way.

I, too, was riding high. Life magazine had commissioned me to write an essay on rock lyrics, to accompany a set of pictures of the top bands. You could tell that these photos were psychedelic because they were shot with wide-angle lenses. (Heavy!) The words didn’t really matter, so my anxiety about the Time-Life house style was unneeded. My piece appeared pretty much as I’d written it, but the title got changed. My valiant attempt at cultural synthesis was now called “Wiggy Words That Feed the Mind.” The loss of control was devastating; I fell into another media-inspired depression, and it led me to conclude that I had to back away from the mainstream, not just in the assignments I took but in the things I wrote about. Acid rock was getting all the attention it needed. The real story was how the music actually got made. Notwithstanding the San Francisco attitude about playing live, in the new era that Sgt. Pepper had created, the recording studio was where the real action was.

If you’re not interested in the men who turned Neumann mikes, Pultec equalizers, and eight-track tapes into an instrument, you can skip the rest of this section and go right to the stuff about celebrities. But any backstory of pop music in the sixties has to acknowledge the key role that producers played. They did everything from arranging and mixing to discovering acts. John Hammond had a major impact on rock by signing Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The Beatles could never have realized their sonic fantasies without George Martin. And then there were the girl-group classics created by Phil Spector. His Wall of Sound was as close as rock ’n’ roll got to being Wagnerian. His production of “Unchained Melody,” with the Righteous Brothers, is impossible not to sing in the shower. But Spector’s greatest masterpiece was “River Deep, Mountain High,” with vocals by Tina Turner. She was still under the suasion of her husband Ike when the song was recorded, but Spector banished him from the studio, and he virtually imprisoned Tina, putting her through so many takes that she quipped about singing the same lines five hundred thousand times.

I remember watching one of the many studio sessions for this song in 1966. When I arrived at around ten P.M., Tina was perched on a high stool, sipping tea. She was a rather uncertain presence, far from the icon she would become. Spector sat behind a glass partition, hunched over the recording console, bringing bits of her vocalizing up and down as snippets of the arrangement surged by. He was easy to mistake for a wiry nerd. After an almost wordless greeting he barely noticed me, and he didn’t seem very focused on Tina. He kept asking her to redo clusters of bars, and she complied, her hands cupping the mike. I could imagine how difficult that must have been, since she was singing only phrases, like an actor reciting a line of dialogue for a certain shot. I’ve always thought that the emotional valence in Turner’s voice could only be captured in a flowing take, but Spector saw it as an element in a larger composition. He was essentially sampling her live.

This was my first glimpse of a studio master at work, and I didn’t know how to read his attitude. To me it seemed like indifference. I wondered whether he’d felt that way about the girl groups he recorded as a teenager; after all, he’d married one of the Ronettes. I thought it was sexy to manipulate a woman’s voice, to set it like a jewel, but it was also eerie to watch, and the fact that Turner was a black woman being styled by a white man made it even more discomforting. I told myself that it was just the usual way performers were handled by men who made an art of processing “talent.” This was not the only time when I would assuage my conscience by deciding that I was only witnessing professionalism. They went at it for hours; when I left at three A.M. they were still working on the same stanza. I didn’t hear the bridge until the record came out.

At some point, even the Grateful Dead lost their optimism about making a recording. “We just don’t have the same fire in the studio,” Bob Weir has admitted. But some producers knew how to stoke the flame. One of them—my favorite of the bunch—was Jerry Wexler. He played a central role in the fortunes of soul music and its greatest singer, Aretha Franklin. She’d begun as a gospel performer, but once she was signed by Columbia Records she found herself snared by the classic strategy of whitening up a black voice for the crossover market. That meant adding strings. For Aretha it was a disaster, like a thick coating of pomade. Her career languished until her contract was bought by Atlantic, where Wexler paired her with R&B-savvy sidemen. He knew how black music should sound the way I knew how to write a story.

Wexler started out as a writer and editor for the trade weekly Billboard. During his time there, in the forties, he convinced his colleagues to change the term for black music from “race records” to rhythm and blues. He became a partner in Atlantic Records thanks to its founder, Ahmet Ertegun. They were old friends. As young men, Wexler told me, the two of them would prowl the music dens of Harlem, and in the wee hours, stoned and sated, they would ride downtown on the Fifth Avenue bus, which still had an open top deck. (In those years, only hipsters and jazz buffs smoked pot.) By 1967 they were very rich. Ertegun was a snazzy socialite, but Wexler stayed pure street. That was probably why, though I met them both, I bonded with Jerry.

With his gruff accent and unruly beard, he reminded me of Allen Ginsberg sans lotus position. I spent a very fruitful afternoon at his home in Long Island. He said he was going to teach me about rock ’n’ roll. I listened intently as he played record after record from his collection, pointing out details I’d missed in very knowing though hardly academic terms. Finally he pulled out an album by a performer from the postwar era named Mama Yancey. I’d never heard of her, but every riff I loved was in her piano playing. I was hearing classic blues overlaid with boogie-woogie, the great matrix of rock ’n’ roll. Jerry’s demonstration was probably a sales pitch, since Mama Yancey’s old discs were being reissued by Atlantic. But he got me to see the power in her technique—it was animate—and he walked me through her rhythmic riffs with great patience. In the end there was no payoff for him, since I never wrote about her. But it was the most important music lesson I ever had, and it made me even more uneasy about the relationship between black blues and its brocaded British heirs.

If I’d been more honest with myself I might have admitted that I needed the racial mediation that groups like the Rolling Stones provided. James Brown, who had the most unregenerately black sound of the sixties, made me uncomfortable, though I never understood why. Now I do. He lacked the signifiers of whiteness that made a black artist like Jimi Hendrix palatable to ears like mine. Brown’s refusal to adapt those signs is part of what made him a great performer. But to me he was a fairly threatening mystery, and I never tried to interview him.

Wexler, I think, understood the commercial paradox of admiring black music until the point when it became really black. His fortune depended on walking that line. But he was pessimistic about the future of R&B, even in its crossover form. He predicted that rhythm tracks would soon be synthesized, and that tonality would become utterly precise, killing the imperfection that was central to soul music. “No more backbeats,” he said sadly, referring to the rhythms that circulated under and around the main one. Of course he couldn’t have imagined that technology would open up the liberating possibilities of sampling. But he was right about perfect notes and processed voices. Pop singing today, especially by black women, is typically either an orgasmic purr or an anthemic roar, the swoops and flights flawlessly shaped. Performance is often a gloss on prerecorded tracks, and it has to be, since no one could duplicate the sound live. To me it feels as stylized as the moans and cries in a porn film added after the fact. This is nothing new, I guess. Devotees of classic blues complained about the amplified sound of R&B, and I’m sure Mick Jagger’s rendition of Robert Johnson songs (e.g., “Love in Vain”) sounded just as flat to Wexler as dubstep does to me. I think he took so much trouble with my education because he thought I could stem the standardizing tide. Of course, neither of us could have steered the beast we were riding, he on its broad back and me on its swinging tail.

In 1967, rock became a billion-dollar baby, and I added a section to my column about the machinations of the recording industry. I called it “Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine,” a phrase I’d borrowed from the Doors song “The End.” The beast had begun its feast, Cuisinarting everything it couldn’t digest. But there were still outposts of local musical sensibility. I never got to see the studios in Muscle Shoals or Memphis, but I did make it to Detroit, where the greatest factory of black music was located. This was Motown, the only black-owned record label in the sixties, and also the only major black company in entertainment. The label’s founder, Berry Gordy, had plucked a lot of his acts from the city’s housing projects. This gave Motown a rich connection with the doo-wop and girl-group traditions, apparent in the funkiness under its sleek sound. But its presentation of the female body was more conservative than in most black acts—the singers wore gowns, and they were likelier to sway than to shake their booties. These elaborate moves were assembled in one of the many tiny rooms where the Motown sound was made. It was the oddest operation I’d ever come across.

When I got out of the cab on Grand Boulevard I thought I was on the wrong street. All I could see was a row of small private houses. But there was a whole finishing school inside, including a choreography room, a costume department (where the Supremes were given their prom-night look), and of course the recording studios, all contained in a series of connected basement spaces. It was warrenlike—there was a rumor that Motown used a hole in the ceiling as an echo chamber. I never got to see that, but during my visit I watched Harvey Fuqua, a veteran producer, work the studio console while the Four Tops recorded a song. I think it was “Seven Rooms of Gloom,” but I may be confusing that title with the cramped feeling of the place. When I recall my visit to Motown I see creaky floors and narrow passageways. It reminded me of the writers’ floor at the Voice.

I figured it was only a matter of time before Motown closed up shop in Detroit and moved to L.A. (It did, in 1972.) All the major labels had offices there, and the city offered state-of-the-art studios. It was where you had to go in order to meet the new crop of producers, who were young, hip, and sometimes part of the band. The most eccentric of them was Brian Wilson, the genius behind the Beach Boys.

They weren’t exactly darlings of the rock press. Their songs were considered simple-minded and certainly not blues based—hence, not manly enough to be serious rock. But I loved the Beach Boys, even in their earliest incarnation as architects of surf music. To my ears, their car-crazed optimism was the realization of Chuck Berry’s American dream. I don’t think you can beat “Fun, fun, fun (till your daddy takes the T-bird away)” when it comes to the poetics of hedonism. This was a fantasy, of course, and a banal one at that. But then Brian Wilson dropped acid and began to create remarkable elegiac songs, with barbershop harmonies gone psychedelic. I watched the Beach Boys’ evolution with awe.

“Good Vibrations,” their mega-hit of 1966, was as complex as anything the Beatles thought up a year later on Sgt. Pepper. It had a multiple melody and a musical palette that included the first use in rock of the theremin, an electronic instrument whose spooky sound had mainly appeared in horror films. When you play Beach Boys tunes from that era it’s hard to believe that the arrangements weren’t MIDI-generated, but of course such programs didn’t exist then. Wilson used the recording technology of the time to maximum effect, but he also played with found sounds. To apply a critical term I didn’t know at the time, he was a rock auteur.

In the fall of 1967 I wrote a piece for the Times on the Beach Boys’ latest album, Smiley Smile. I was struck by its fragile melodies and their relationship to sacred music; those familiar ride-the-curl voices, now “hushed with wonder,” reminded me of the Fauré Requiem, but they were utterly American. I was listening to proof of my belief that pop could produce a mass culture that was at once accessible and profound.

I don’t think my editor at the Times bought the Fauré comparison, but he agreed to pay my expenses so I could travel west, and I guess Brian Wilson was impressed by my piece, because he invited me to his home in Bel Air. Judith came along, and we stayed at L.A.’s hippest hotel, the Chateau Marmont, with its Spanish-colonial lobby and windows that actually opened. Our room had a view of Laurel Canyon, but if we craned our necks we could see the Sunset Strip. It was quite a contrast—on one side verdant slopes and on the other a barren avenue with billboards the size of drive-in movie screens. Everything about L.A. seemed incongruous to me, so the interview with Brian fit right in.

His wife, Marilyn, answered the door. One look at her and I could tell that she was another strong Jewish woman with an introverted artist for a husband. Pointing to a limo sitting on the lawn, she said, wearily, “He’s hiding.” I’d heard about that car—it had once belonged to John Lennon, and Brian bought it as a totem of the group toward which he felt the most competitive. He was determined to beat the Beatles at their elevated game, so he’d teamed up with Van Dyke Parks, a member of the L.A. pop avant-garde whose style encompassed everything from Stephen Foster to blank verse. To this remarkable range Parks added a wry affection for the Disneyesque. The open harmonies and quirky touches of the Beach Boys brought out the whimsy of his lyrics, as in:

I know that you’ll feel better

When you send us in your letter

And tell us the name of your … favorite vegetable

Little of what Parks wrote made linear sense, but his lyrics were enchanting, and I championed his solo album, Song Cycle. That was when I realized how far my critical taste could stray from the judgment of the record racks. The album was a flop—even rock had its limits when it came to free-form obscurity.

Parks never got very far as a songwriter, but he did co-author the most legendary sixties record that never was. This was Smile, Brian Wilson’s uncompleted “teenage symphony to God.” I can only imagine what that work would have been like if he had ever finished it. But he blew deadline after deadline, and the final product, Smiley Smile, was a truncated version of what he intended. The most ambitious piece—a suite based on the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water—was missing. Later I would hear that Brian had destroyed the master tapes. A fire had broken out not far from the recording studio, and he became convinced that the music would cause things to burst into flame. This was the story that made the rounds, but it seems that he didn’t actually trash the masters; he only said he had, perhaps to avoid admitting that he was uneasy about the work. At the time I accepted his original explanation, because it sounded like something he was capable of.

Brian’s emotional state, which was fragile to begin with, had deteriorated under the pressure from his record label. It must have seemed to him that he would never again be able to produce a hit. I didn’t know anything about that when we met; he kept the details hidden from me. But his instability was evident, and, I think, directly related to his audacity as a producer. He was capable of creating moment of sheer tonal whimsey, pellucid choral interludes (“Wind Chimes”), and cartoony riffs as twisted as the stuff in comix. (Give “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,” aka “W. Woodpecker Symphony” a listen and you’ll hear the origins of Animal Collective.)

I’ve read monographs on the Beach Boys that describe Wilson as a self-conscious artist, fully aware of musical history. That wasn’t my impression. He came across as a typical rock autodidact, deeply insecure about his creative instincts, terrified that the songs he was working on were too arty to sell. As a result of this ambivalence, he never realized his full potential as a composer. In the light of electronica and minimalism, you can see how advanced his ideas were, but they remain bursts of inspiration from a mind that couldn’t mobilize itself into a whole. This was the major tragedy of rock in the sixties. It set out to shatter the boundaries of high and mass culture, but there was a line, invisible yet rigid, between violating musical conventions and making truly popular music. Anyone who couldn’t walk that line was doomed to a respectful rejection, and a few albums with disappointing sales usually meant silence. The market was a fickle mistress. (What else is new?) You needed a strong ego to read the public’s taste, and an even stronger one to resist it. Dylan succeeded because he was supremely willful, and the Beatles would have succeeded at anything. But the California performers I admired—and sometimes loved—were deeply insecure. They yearned for fame, as only needy people can, but they also wanted to make art, and when both of those impulses couldn’t be achieved they recoiled in a ball of frantic confusion.

I walked over to the limo where Brian’s wife, Marilyn, said he’d be waiting. The windows were tinted brown. Down it rolled, and there was Brian, eyeing me with suspicion. I flashed him my biggest grin. “Meet you in the tent,” he said warily.

The structure in question stood in his spacious living room. It had a very Arabian Nights vibe. I remember rugs, an oil lamp, and a hookah, or maybe it was just a joint. We got stoned; I’m certain of that. I pressed him to agree that his music resembled Fauré’s—I wanted to prove my point to the Times. He looked like I had pulled a knife on him. “I never heard of that guy,” he muttered. I switched gears, asking about those dazzling harmonies. Where did they come from? “Barbershop,” he replied. Yes, of course, the traditional heartland style, but hadn’t barbershop originally been a black form? And what about Chuck Berry? Wasn’t Brian actually producing a grand synthesis of American pop styles? I was tempted to point this out, but then I remembered that another reporter had been careless enough to ask about the black roots of his music. Brian’s response, as the reporter related it to me, was: “We’re white and we sing white.”

The Beach Boys were mostly a family affair, and the Wilson boys were sons of the great migration west from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl. So the author of “Fun, Fun, Fun” was a spawn of The Grapes of Wrath, the first generation in his clan to take security for granted. It struck me as moving, even poignant, that Brian had crafted the icon of the blithe surfer, since he was a chubby introvert who never went near a board, preferring the safety of his room. But I understood his fixation. Surfers were the Apollos of SoCal. When I saw them on the beach, perfectly tanned, or when I watched them twirling in the waves, I grasped the transcendental element in surf music. It was all about freedom from the rules of life, the whole of your being concentrated in the act of shooting the tube. For several years after that trip to L.A. I subscribed to Surfer magazine, and I practiced the Atlantic Ocean version of the sport, though only with my body and on rather tame waves. With my voice muffled by the water I would shout a line from “Surf City.” To me, this was the ultimate fantasy of plenty: “two girls for every boy,” except I sang it as “Two girls for every goy.”

Fortunately, Brian has survived the schizoid tendencies that seemed close to the surface when I met him. He’s still performing and writing songs. But it was his emotional battle and the intersection of that struggle with the acid-dosed aesthetic of the sixties that produced his most astonishing music. He was hardly the only rocker torn between the warring gods of art and popularity—merely the most erratic. He needed critical validation even as he rejected it. I suspect that was why, at the end of our rather inconclusive chat, he invited me to join the band for a photo shoot in Palm Springs. Judith and Marilyn came along for the ride, and quite a ride it was.

When I think of that weekend I flash on Brian running around the desert with his wife trying to corral him, shouting, “Pick up your pants.” He was high; so was I. (We’d stopped along the way to pick up some weed from one of the Byrds.) We ate lunch at a coffee shop that was playing Muzak versions of Beach Boys songs. Then we hopped on a funicular that took us from the desert to a mountaintop, where the baked sand changed to snow. Everyone rolled around in it, including Dennis Wilson, who, not a half hour earlier, had been frolicking among the cacti. At some point during that excursion, Dennis hit on Judith. He was too stoned to succeed—she claims. I wouldn’t have objected. It was the sixties; possessiveness was a cardinal sin. And winning the admiration of a Beach Boy was a dream come true for her. She’d grown up in a household where playing Hindemith on the stereo was prime-time entertainment, but she was a secret Beach Boys fan, just like me.

By the end of the day I’d forgotten why we were in Palm Springs. But I can still picture Dennis’s face as I saw it at night, in the green neon glow that suffused the porch of our motel. It made me feel like I was trapped inside a lime Life Saver. Southern California lighting in those days was a bad trip in itself, and the tikis that graced many courtyards put me in mind of umbrella drinks. But for Dennis this emerald excess was just another jewel in the pleasure dome. With his well-shaped jaw and sandy hair, he was the all-American member of the group, the only Wilson brother who wasn’t chubby and, as far as I know, the only Beach Boy who had actually ridden a wave.

Dennis had a soulful side, but it was hidden behind a well-developed set of sybaritic impulses. He never made it past the age of thirty-nine. In 1983, after a day of heavy drinking, he drowned while swimming in a marina. It wasn’t exactly a shock. I still hadn’t forgotten the trip from Palm Springs back to L.A., with Dennis at the wheel. “Whoa!” he said, clearly still high. “The road is doing these weird things.” I thought, If I survive this I promise never to do drugs again.

The piece I produced for the Times was decorous enough to suit my editors. I had learned to leave the viscera out of my copy after they censored my description of Diana Ross farting during our interview. (“Ooh,” she said, “my tummy is upset.” I thought this was a wonderful moment of self-revelation, but it didn’t suit the paper’s definition of news “fit to print.”) Once I filed the Beach Boys story, I had several days to kill before my flight home. I dreaded spending them alone. Judith had already left, and L.A. is a place where isolation can feel like death. At least in New York the odor of car exhaust is masked by garbage, but out here it mixed with tropical blossoms, giving me the impression that I was entering a room-deodorized gas chamber. But one of L.A.’s distinctive charms for a pro like me was the chance to party at homes of the media elite. Though I preferred the ambience of a crash pad in San Francisco, I couldn’t resist the invitation to cocktails chez Hugh Hefner.

I remember more about the driveway, which seemed miles long, than I do about the house, except that it looked unlived-in, like a movie set. I don’t know which wife Hef was on, but I recall catching sight of him surrounded by women so slick in their beauty that I could have varnished a car with it. He was the only VIP in the room; everyone else wore the expression of serenity masking envy that I associate with Hollywood. I suppose he had set up the guest list so that no one outranked him, certainly not me. I considered schmoozing up a Playboy editor for an assignment. They paid better than any magazine I wrote for, but I didn’t think anyone actually read the articles, and I wasn’t interested in competing with a centerfold. (It wasn’t the sexism but the processed quality of these images that appalled me.) So I retreated to the grounds, which included a menagerie with all sorts of animals. The wildlife followed me as I strolled along, monkeys in the bushes and even fish in the stream that ran through an artificial grotto. They were hoping for a handout. I’d never been stalked like that, and it was an eerie feeling. But it struck me as a metaphor for my role in the music industry. There was no escaping the procession waiting to eat from my hand, and I was addicted to the feeding frenzy.

It was a troubling thought, and I buried it in a Mexican dinner, one of my main consolations in L.A. I felt incapable of grasping whatever made this city the metropole it was. The money was here, and so were studios of all sorts, but most of what the city produced didn’t seem homegrown. The local bands I’d heard were as artificially psychedelic as the flaming Polynesian fakes that were everywhere. There was no funk. Black styles were barely relevant to the scene, and without that scaffold everything just … flowed. If I’d been able to stretch myself I might have understood that L.A. offered a harmonic blend of folk rock and mellow jazz, which would blend with the more rough-edged San Francisco sound to dominate pop in the late sixties. The city also hosted a music milieu that I knew nothing about, until I got to meet some of the local singer-songwriters. They were bohemians without the New York defensiveness and the encrustations of chic. Thanks to them I discovered an alternative sensibility, different from the one in San Francisco but no less distinctive. The mood I’d mistaken for terminal mellowness was actually acuity.

I owe my initiation into the real rock culture of L.A. to a transplanted New Yorker who worked as a publicist and talent scout. When he called, inviting me to drop by his house, I assumed he was just another company freak, but I had learned by then that those people were often excellent judges of quality. And I was intrigued by the name of his street, which I remember as Blue Jay Way. I may be confusing that with the title of a Beatles song, though to me every byway in Laurel Canyon should have been called Blue Jay Way. I took a cab up the slopes, which seemed to my urban eye like a fragrant jungle. Music wafted from every door, along with the smell of weed. This was the lane where Billy James lived.

Billy was an amateur in the original sense—he worked the rock scene with a loving touch. He shared his house with a teenage son—I recall a sign on the kid’s room that read, WARNING! A SENSITIVE SOUL LIVES WITHIN. Many of Billy’s discoveries used his place as a mail drop and crash pad. They were not quite ready for prime time, but very talented. I remember a lovely woman who’d grown up in perhaps the ugliest stretch of California, the stagnant Salton Sea. She wrote ballads about empty landscape and hardscrabble dreams, so poignant that I doubted she would get very far, even with a name like Penny Nichols, which she’d been born with. Thanks to the Internet I know that she now directs a retreat for singers and songwriters, and she looks like a vagabond troubadour who made a life—no small accomplishment. In 1967, there were many music strays in L.A, as gentle as the hippies of the Haight but more knowing. Most of them never hit the big time, and this is a city that has never honored obscurity.

I had much more faith in another of Billy’s clients, who would become the essential singer-songwriter of L.A. mellowness, Jackson Browne. Under his studied casualness he was a savvy dude, but as an Angeleno of the Aquarian Age he knew how to hide his ambition behind a sublime vibe. To a New Yorker like me, it was like watching the suave alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Jackson was lean and chiseled without being done up, and he radiated worldliness. I remember hearing him talk to a woman on the phone, clearly someone much older. He called her by her first name and acted like a trusted advisor, giving romantic advice about dealing with her new boyfriend. Billy told me later that she was Jackson’s mother. I’d never heard someone address a parent with such blithe intimacy. He was an incarnation of the laid-back polish I could never achieve—I was all edge, and still am. I will always associate his song “Take It Easy” with my California fantasies of no-stress sexuality.

We may lose and we may win

Though we will never be here again

So open up, I’m climbing in

My most vivid memory of Jackson is the offhanded way he greeted his friends. “Taj Mahal, on the ball,” I heard him say to one of the few black musicians in the local rock scene, another of Billy’s clients. “Jackson Browne, back in town!” Taj replied. I don’t know why this exchange still stays with me, except that it’s the essence of L.A. style in the sixties, a wry imperfection, like the imprecise notes that make a solo personal. On subsequent visits I would notice the same quality in the L.A. comedy scene. I had a brief affair with a wealthy woman who’d given up her class privileges to become a social worker (though she hadn’t given up her BMW). She’d bought a house in Venice, which was still blessedly shabby, and she opened it to a group of young creative types, one of whom was Harry Shearer. Even then he had a gift for irony without the hostile edge that New York stand-up specialized in. The same was true of Richard Pryor; for all his subversiveness, he never lost his affection for the absurdity of human beings. Nor did Lily Tomlin, or Cheech and Chong. Randy Newman has this same sly humanism. By now it’s been upgraded into a whole meta sensibility, like the city itself, but back in the sixties L.A. demanded not to be taken seriously, which was the most serious thing about it.

I’m sure Billy James hoped I’d write about his roster, and that was fortuitous, since he tipped me off to a local band he had recently brought to Elektra Records. Their name was an homage to Aldous Huxley’s book about his experiences with LSD, The Doors of Perception. This was all I knew at the time about the Doors.

Billy took me to the Whisky A Go Go, the premier rock club on the Strip. I feared that, with a name like that, the floor show would feature girls in high boots and miniskirts dancing in cages. There was a romantic mystique around these babes—check out the ballad by Gordon Lightfoot: “Only a go-go girl in love/With someone who didn’t care …” The girls were there, twirling behind bars on a platform above the stage. It was not a very big room, and that stage was tiny, as I recall. We were so close to the musicians that I could see the bulge in the singer’s leather pants. Jim Morrison gripped the mike, black hair curling around his angelic face. I knew right away that he would be a major rock star.

Morrison had a feral intensity, riveting to behold. But his persona was shaped by a shrewd sense of theater, and he sang with the measured ranting of a beat poet. The musicians backing him up—I was most struck by keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who looked like a groovy schoolteacher in his round glasses and neatly long hair—had devised a sound that was both tight and trancey. The slash-and-burn of rock might have fought Morrison’s wildness, but this style seemed to incite it. “We may look cool,” Manzarek would tell me when I interviewed him, “but we are really evil, insidious cats behind Jim. We instigate the violence in him. A lot of times he doesn’t feel particularly angry, but the music just drives him to it.”

The set I saw at the Whisky was stunning, and the first thing I did when I got back to my hotel was to pound out a piece about the Doors for the Voice. When I returned to New York an advance copy of their debut album was waiting. I’ve already mentioned my blooper about “Light My Fire,” but I praised the record as a whole, and as a result I had easy access to the band. Within a year of watching them perform at the Whisky I was back in L.A., on assignment from New York to interview Morrison. I got to watch him slither down the Strip in a snakeskin jacket, oblivious to the teenyboppers fluttering around him. I also spent an afternoon riding around with him in a little red sports car, with his girlfriend at the wheel. I noticed that she did the driving. It was further evidence that fragile male rockers needed the support of strong women. That was an emotional necessity for these guys, who courted collapse. I don’t think I was introduced to Jim’s “old lady” by her name, or maybe I’ve forgotten it, but I do remember that she was an ad exec, not an easy career for a woman circa Mad Men. She had invented a very successful concept for Alka-Seltzer. The product was a remedy for “the blahs,” a condition that fell short of illness but merited medication. The term, she told me, had come to her while tripping.

Morrison was wearing a slept-in pullover and the requisite leather pants. He turned up the radio and fiddled with the bass control as the DJ announced one of his songs. This was the first time he’d heard himself on the air, and I wasn’t sure whether he looked happy or anxious—he pulled his lumpy hat down over his eyes. We were headed for one of his favorite spots, an ashram called the Garden of Self-Realization. Gandhi’s ashes were reputed to be there. (This was the L.A. equivalent of pieces of the true cross.) We plopped down on the lawn, beside a stucco arch with a cupola sprayed gold. I pulled out a tape recorder, but I put it down too far from him. When I played back the tape most of what I heard was the sound of Jim’s fingernails scratching nervously at the dirt. Fortunately I also took notes, and the quotes that follow come from the piece I wrote. Years later I was astonished to hear bits of that interview used as dialogue in Oliver Stone’s dubious film The Doors. You wouldn’t know from this movie that Morrison ever had an intelligent idea in his head.

“When you started, did you anticipate your image?” I asked him.

“Nah. It just sort of happened … unconsciously. See, it used to be I’d just stand still and sing. Now I … uh … exaggerate a little bit.”

He shot me his famous half smile. “I’m beginning to think it’s easier to scare people than to make them laugh.”

He didn’t hold much back, except the circumstances of his birth. “I don’t remember it,” he said drolly. “Maybe I was having one of my blackouts.” Like Brian Wilson he’d had a rough relationship with his father, an admiral who moved the family around—Jim still lived with friends or in motels. I learned about his fondness for alcohol (which, in those days, was not something hip people bragged about). But mostly we talked about his ambitions as an artist, how he wanted to combine the charisma of Elvis with the power of incanted poetry. “See, singing has all the things I like. It’s involved with writing and music. There’s a lot of acting. And it has this other thing—a physical element, a sense of the immediate. When I sing I create characters.”

He wasn’t exactly an intellectual, but he had a feeling for philosophical concepts in an art-school kind of way. What I remember most about him is that he radiated neediness, but that was nothing unusual in a California rocker. Far more striking was his imagination, erratic but sophisticated. I came away thinking that he was a serious artist, piecing together myths he’d gleaned from various readings. His mentor, the San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure, had taken in this SoCal stray. There’s a relationship between Morrison’s fixation on the phallus and McClure’s play The Beard, which got the actors arrested. (I’ve forgotten most of it, but I remember the moment when Jean Harlow describes Billy the Kid’s dick as “a piece of meat hanging from a bag of meat.”) Jim studied acting at film school and spent his down time in the Venice creative scene. Manzarek was the one who thought of setting his poems to music. His songs, his verse, his persona—all of it was a pastiche held together by his desire to create a role that could bring his warring impulses together. In our interview he was pretentious and revealing at the same time, as in this aperçu, meant to be quoted, I’m sure: “A game is a closed field, a ring of death with … uh … sex at the center. Performing is the only game I’ve got, so I guess it’s my life.”

He had read about the figure of the shaman and its function in primitive societies, and he wanted to bring that power to rock by combining visionary lyrics with a physical ritual. His aim was to unleash the subconscious. “The shaman,” he said, “was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already an … uh … unusual individual. And he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs—however. Then he would go on a mental travel and … uh … describe his journey to the rest of the tribe.”

Morrison was dead serious about this agenda. Say what you will about the bombastic quality of his lyrics, but they were remarkable in a hard-rock context. Not even Bob Dylan dared to write a song about incest.

Father … I want to kill you

Mother … I want to …

[Insert shrieking here.]

I’ve emphasized Morrison’s artistic ambition because that’s usually the part left out of his hagiography. But I realized, as I often did when talking with rockers known for their sizzle, that this was another borderline personality. The conflict between fame and aesthetics would be especially hard for him to deal with, because he wasn’t just known for his songs, as, say, Dylan was. Morrison was most famous for his voice and body, especially his crotch, which he unveiled during a concert in an act of drunken spite that got him arrested and made him even more notorious. I knew instantly, when I read about the incident, that it was a gesture of rage at the audience for failing to take his message about reaching into the subconscious seriously. “Break on through to the other side,” he would bellow. But he was swallowed up by the spectacle he thought he could shape. When I met him, before he lost what there was of his balance, he could still speak hopefully about his mission. As in this observation about the relationship between rock and play: “Play is not the same thing as a game. A game involves rules, but play is an open event. Actors play—also musicians. And you dig watching someone play, because that’s the way human beings are supposed to be … free.” If I had to sum up Morrison’s achievement I’d say that he combined rock with Method acting. He performed himself.

There’s a video of me interviewing him. (You can locate the clip online.) It was one of several programs on rock that I hosted for PBS, mostly on speed, since I was terrified about appearing on TV. That may be why I look so spacey, though I can’t account for the puff-sleeved flower shirt I wore. Morrison, bearded by then, looked great, and he made a very smart prediction about the future of rock. He said it would be created by just one person working a machine. This is basically what electronica is today. He was, as I’ve said, a fitful but perceptive artist. All the more reason why he freaked out before his appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This was an obligatory ritual for famous rockers, had been ever since Elvis Presley’s performance, famously shot from the waist up. It was a tradition on that program to censor lyrics that were too sexual. Even the notorious Rolling Stones had caved, changing a key line in one of their best songs from spending the night to “spending some time together.” When it came to “Light My Fire,” the Doors were faced with a double whammy. “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” could refer to sex, drugs, or (most likely) both.

I was present at that broadcast, standing backstage with the group. A deal had been struck—the Doors would leave the offensive line out of the song when they sang it on the air. It was a small price to pay for shamanizing the nation. But then they caught sight of the set. It was a series of doors—big ones, little ones, fancy and plain ones, but doors! This was an egregious insult for a band that had named themselves after a meditative book on psychedelics. Jim threatened not to go on. A conference followed, and a decision was made. He would sing the forbidden line—and he did, snarling, “Girl, we couldn’t get much HIGH-ER.” I caught the livid look on Sullivan’s face. The Doors were never invited back.

That incident raised my respect for Jim, though he’d always had my sympathy. I never saw his legendary aggression. He was gentle and vulnerable around me. But I did get to witness one of his drunken outbursts. It happened at a recording session. Morrison had envisioned an album called The Celebration of the Lizard, a twenty-four-minute “drama” he’d been working on. The band was in the studio. The producer, an earnest longhair named Paul Rothchild, sat at the console. Jim arrived wearing his favorite snakeskin jacket. He had brought the notebook in which he wrote his verses. That wasn’t unusual—no one knew in advance what words he would be singing. Morrison would enter a glass-enclosed booth to record the vocals while the band played behind him. This is why the Doors sound so spontaneous on their albums. They were.

I could tell from Jim’s wobbly posture, and from his girlfriend’s dire expression, that he was plastered. In fact, he guzzled from a bottle of brandy. “I’m the square of the Western hemisphere,” he boomed. “Man … whenever someone said something groovy it’d blow my mind. You like people?” he grunted at me. “I hate ’em. Screw ’em—I don’t need ’em. Oh, I need ’em … to grow potatoes.”

He was teetering and belching. “Hafta break it in,” he said, fingering his jacket, which crinkled like tinfoil. His girlfriend tried to distract him by mentioning a Mexican wedding shirt he’d commissioned from a custom tailor. “We have to get you measured,” she said.

Jim bolted backward, his eyes large with fear. “Uh-uh. I don’t like to be measured.”

“Oh, Jim,” she muttered. “We’re not gonna measure all of you. Just your … shoulders.”

By that point in my career I had learned to take notes in the dark or without looking at the page, holding a pad discreetly on my knee. As Morrison ranted I scribbled it all down in an ersatz shorthand only I could read, and I wrote about that recording session, including the moment when Rothchild summoned Jim to the glass booth. The plan was to put him where he wouldn’t interfere. The other musicians were really pissed, but they had learned to work around him when he was like this. They were Apollonians to his Dionysus—so Jim had told me. He would constantly prod them to “get into the Dionysus thing,” but they would stare at him blankly and say something like, “Oh, yeah, right, Jim.” Now they hunched over their instruments, trying to ignore him as he entered the vocal booth. He fit himself with earphones and began to sing in breathy grunts. The words were too slurred to be recorded, and the musicians were trying to play over them, but his voice intruded, bigger and blacker than ever. Finally the producer turned off the sound. Jim looked like a silent-movie version of himself, a pungent but necessary prop. Suddenly he burst out of the glass chamber, sweat drunk. “If I had an ax,” he slurred, “man, I’d kill everybody … ’cept … uh … my friends.”

There he stood, a lizard-skinned titan in a helpless fit. As useless as he had probably felt when he was a child. Every attempt he’d made to escape from that sense of insignificance, of dreaded obscurity before a rejecting father, surfaced in this tantrum. His girlfriend sank back in her seat and gave herself over to a cosmic case of the blahs.

I’ve already said that Morrison reminded me of Brian Wilson, but there were other West Coast rock stars who had the same effect. The greatest of them were terribly fragile. The more emotive they were onstage, the more insecure they seemed up close. In New York we were better at hiding our vulnerability, but showing that side was easier out here, perhaps because it was part of the culture of honesty that made the local scene so ridiculous—and appealing. I certainly was surprised by the readiness with which these rockers confided their doubts to me. There were no publicists to intervene; no time limit or subjects off-limits. They didn’t present me with a fake mystique, and I didn’t have to be shy around them. I began to feel something I’d never let myself experience as a reporter; I started to care for the people I wrote about, and I struggled to balance the need to make a story out of their lives with the desire to represent them in all their complexity. I was learning to drop the stylization that my role required, to break on through to the other side. But there were unintended consequences. As I watched these performers sink under the churning currents of fame, with no ego strength to buoy them, it heightened the sense of helplessness that would eventually overwhelm me.

Rock stars in those days were expected to be priests in a rite of fucked-upness, and it reinforced their most self-destructive impulses. Madness was its own reward, and the crazier and more volatile they got, the greater the fascination it produced. I suppose that’s always been the case in show business, the worship and devouring of vulnerable personalities; it explains the cult of Judy Garland, and of Marilyn Monroe, both of whom ended up drugged and dead. But in the counterculture, where love was the watchword, it seemed especially painful to witness this emotional cannibalism. The luckiest stars were buffered by lovers, loyal managers, or members of the band who formed a protective phalanx. But often a forced tolerance prevailed, because, after all, these freaks were bringing home the soy bacon. A vicious indifference hid under the insistence that dangerous, sometimes fatal behavior was simply “doing your thing.”

Well, I got to do my thing in California, for better and for worse. But I’m getting ahead of myself yet again. I keep wanting to jump the sequence in which these events occurred, probably because that’s the way I remember them. I know who I hung out with in L.A, but I’m not sure about the order of these encounters. Maybe it doesn’t matter; why should I presume to be a fact checker of my own mind, when the most accurate way to describe it is as a light show of pulsing shapes that suggest the image of people who exist only as images anyway, since most of them died long ago—and long before their time. My most vivid memory is the feeling that everything out here was fungible. At any moment the earth might shake and it would all be swept away. Dennis Wilson’s words still resonate within me when I think of California in 1967: Whoa! The road is doing these weird things.