The Motels at the Masque, Hollywood, 1979: (left to right) Marty Jourard, Brian Glascock, Michael Goodroe, Jeff Jourard, Martha Davis. Permission of Marvin Rinnig.
GOLDEN YEARS
1977–present
“Night in the City” » Joni Mitchell
“Ain’t No Sunshine” » Bill Withers
“To a Flame,” “Love the One You’re With”» Stephen Stills
“American Girl,” “Listen to Her Heart,” “I Need to Know” » Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
“Already Gone,” “Hotel California” » The Eagles
“Only the Lonely,” “Total Control,” “Suddenly Last Summer” » The Motels
“Whisper/Touch” » Code Blue
Between the late sixties and the mid-seventies about two dozen or so Gainesville musicians migrated to Los Angeles, and a surprising number of them found success in the music business as recording artists. Those who had arrived earlier were continuing their initial success, as newer arrivals began to establish themselves. Their paths varied, but they all sought involvement in the music industry and were bringing new energy, experience, and ability to the rock music scene, each of these traits fostered in Gainesville’s intense and varied musical culture and the live music opportunities the city had provided them.
CARRY ON
By his own count Stephen Stills attended five high schools during his youth, making it somewhat tenuous to claim him as an exclusively Gainesville musician. Having said that, Stills’s relationship with Gainesville has continued through the decades up to the present day.
Stills’s nickname of “Captain Manyhands” is appropriate for this musical prodigy equally adept as a songwriter, singer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, bass, percussion, and keyboards. Stills played bass on Joni Mitchell’s 1968 “Night in the City” and guitar on Bill Withers’s 1971 hit “Ain’t No Sunshine.” According to recording engineer Bill Halverson, Stills played the acoustic guitar track in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” in one take, all seven and a half minutes of it, later overdubbing the bass and percussion. He played organ, bass, piano, and electric guitar on Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s song “Marrakesh Express.” During recording sessions for a 1977 Crosby, Stills, and Nash album, Stills found his friend Barry Gibb down the hall in a separate studio, working on a song for the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. At Gibbs’s request Stills played timbales on the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing,” resulting in the “only platinum single I ever had for a long time.”
His career as a singer, songwriter, musician, and bandleader remained in high gear through the seventies: Stills released a solo album, a live solo album, and a compilation solo album; partnered with Neil Young on the Stills-Young album Long May You Run; made a Crosby, Stills, Nash album, CSN, that sold four million; and as a member of the group received a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Stills showed up one night at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and sat in with the Knack (a band that signaled the beginning of the end of disco in our last chapter). Basically, Stephen Stills played whatever he wanted with whomever he wanted, and has been a welcome participant in many recordings, including those of Al Kooper, Dave Mason, and Ringo Starr.
Stills liked Gainesville, and in 2003 he donated one hundred thousand dollars toward a rehearsal facility for the University of Florida Marching Band, named appropriately enough the Stephen Stills Band Rehearsal Room. During dedication ceremonies in 2008, Stills commented, “I went to the first, second, and third grades here and sold Coca-Colas in the stadium when I was about nine, so I’ve been part of the Gator Nation since I was about ten years old.” The house built by his father in the northwest section of Gainesville came up for sale in that same year, and Stills bought it, where he occasionally stayed in order to attend Gator football games and, as he puts it, chill out. “You eventually pick a place where you are most comfortable, so I always had a little special feeling for Gainesville,” he says in a 1993 interview, calling the city “a real nice little town.”
Stills remains the only person inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice in one night as a member of two bands—Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. From his 1967 hit record, “For What It’s Worth,” up through the present day, he continues to create a vast and diverse body of music.
MAKE THAT CONNECTION
During the second half of the seventies, Tom Petty’s singular obsession with rock and roll was beginning to pay off. In the months following the release of their eponymous debut album in late 1976, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers began the new year by playing a couple dozen shows in the United States. The band then flew to England, where they were unexpectedly greeted at the airport by reporters from the music press; apparently the album was a hit in England. As the opening act for Nils Lofgren, they gradually stole the show from the headliner as the tour progressed.
After completing the Nils Lofgren tour in Great Britain, the group continued on to France, Germany, and Holland before returning to England as a headliner. The excitement of performing to enthusiastic audiences across Europe was a thrill; in Petty’s words it was “such an exhilarating thing, the biggest mainline shot of adrenaline you could have.”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stood out as edgier than such current American chart-toppers as the Eagles, Hall and Oates, ABBA, and Leo Sayer. The energy and attitude of the band appealed to British audiences and journalists already engaged in covering the new punk music and culture. Although musically the Heartbreakers were a straightforward American rock band, their lyrics and rebellious image aligned them with acts such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash much more than with top-selling groups such as Fleetwood Mac, whose album Rumours spent twenty-seven weeks topping the U.S. charts, or the Eagles, whose Hotel California spent seven weeks at the top. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had arrived, and they were making their own distinct sound and image in the current pop musical environment.
Back in the States by the summer, the group began building a domestic fan base through extensive touring, sometimes as headliner and at other times opening for acts such as Kiss, Be Bop Deluxe, The J. Geils Band, Rush, and Meatloaf.
The turning point for the band came in August 1977 in the form of a two-night stand at the Whisky a Go-Go in Los Angeles, where the road-tested band’s live performances were met with universal acclaim. Record producer and mentor Denny Cordell described the shows: “The place was absolutely packed, and they came on, and they just did it. Everything was perfect. The band rocked; every solo was a burner; everybody was in cracking form; they looked phenomenal. And that was the day the tide turned really.”
Tom Petty’s songwriting and the musical fluency of the Heart-breakers led the group to increasing successes on stage and in the recording studio. The second album, 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It!, reached number twenty-three on the charts and included the two singles “I Need to Know” and “Listen to Her Heart.” The album quickly achieved gold-record status and was followed by 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes, which peaked at number two and earned a platinum-record award and two songs in the Top Fifteen: “Don’t Do Me Like That” (number ten) and “Refugee” (number fifteen).
A dispute over album pricing for the band’s next release led Petty to declare if the record company raised the list price to $9.98, he would name the album Eight Ninety-Eight. The label backed down, and Hard Promises was released at the standard album price.
Many more albums, lengthy tours, various legal woes, personnel changes, triumphs, near tragedies, and real tragedies have transpired over the years, including the departure of bassist Ron Blair in 1982, drummer Stan Lynch’s exit in 1994, the death of bassist Howie Epstein in 2003 from a drug overdose, and, on a more positive note, the return of Ron Blair on bass twenty years after he had left the band.
A survey of the Tom Petty discography reveals the length and breadth of his songwriting and recorded output: thirteen studio albums and six live albums as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, three Tom Petty solo albums, two Mudcrutch albums, two albums as a member of the Traveling Wilburys, a band boxed-set compilation (Playback), and more than sixty singles, ten of them reaching the top of the Billboard Rock Singles chart. The group’s videos, many directed by the band’s lighting and set designer, Jim Lenahan, received wide acclaim during the early years of the MTV video revolution. The 2007 documentary film Runnin’ Down a Dream, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, won a Grammy for best long-form video, and the group’s Greatest Hits album has sold twelve million, with the group’s total sales of more than eighty million records worldwide. Petty has played rock and roll music for more than fifty years, the band for nearly forty. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers continue to do what they do best—play rock and roll.
I CAN’T TELL YOU WHY
Don Felder’s cowrite of “Hotel California” had brought great critical and financial success to both him and the Eagles, while at the same time his years with the band presented Felder with a real-life example of Henley’s lines from that very song, “This could be Heaven / This could be Hell.” It seemed to be both.
Along with increased success came increased tension in a band of alpha males, none of them apparently willing or capable of backing down from any stance—artistic, personal, or business. Manager Irving Azoff apparently viewed the band members as mutually antagonistic and kept the constantly bickering multimillionaires apart from one another through separate hotel suites, separate stretch limousines, and separate backstage dressing rooms until show time, each member in their own space. This management strategy led to a seemingly inevitable falling out between Felder and the team of Henley and Frey, whom Felder refers to sarcastically as “the Gods” in his tell-all memoir.
For reasons that remain vague and disputed, Felder was fired from the Eagles in February 2001. Felder filed a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit for wrongful termination, which was followed by countersuits from attorneys for the Eagles. An out-of-court settlement in 2007 for an undisclosed amount probably assured Felder financial security but left him at odds with Henley and Frey, although he remains friendly with former bassist Randy Meisner and longtime friend Bernie Leadon.
Felder moved on, including recording-session work with the Bee Gees and Stevie Nicks, songs in movie soundtracks, hosting a television comedy show, two solo albums, and touring as a solo artist and as guest guitarist with various bands, including Styx and Foreigner. His 2008 best-selling memoir reveals details of his acrimonious split from the Eagles, including his opinion of Henley’s and Frey’s behavior, details that no doubt continue to harsh the mellow that once existed amongst these talented and highly successful rock musicians.
WE CAN WORK IT OUT
Bernie Leadon also went his own way after his split from the Eagles, starting by recording an album with musical friend Michael Georgiades in 1977. In the mid-eighties Leadon’s career continued as a session musician in Nashville, where he recorded an album of bluegrass and gospel favorites with Ever Call Ready, a group that included Chris Hillman and Al Perkins, and played with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the late 1980s. He joined Run C&W in 1993, a novelty group singing Motown hits “bluegrass style” that recorded two albums for MCA Records. In 1998 he rejoined the Eagles for one performance in New York City as part of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2004 Leadon released his second solo album, Mirror. Leadon rejoined the Eagles for their History of the Eagles tour in 2014. Yes, Bernie Leadon, the band member who poured a beer on Glenn Frey’s head decades ago, was now reunited with Frey each evening, performing “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Witchy Woman.”
The music business is funny that way.
NEW WAVE
Two other Gainesville musicians had moved to Los Angeles and eventually became members of a band signed to a major label, Jeff Jourard and his younger brother (me).
After the demise of RGF, Jeff was determined to join another band and in early 1978 decided to contact the Motels, a group he had seen at a local club. After tracking down lead singer Martha Davis, he found the band had broken up on the very eve of their signing with Capitol Records. Dean Chamberlain, the Motels’ original guitarist, went on to form Code Blue, a power trio that included former Mudcrutch drummer Randall Marsh and whose 1980 Warner Brothers Records album contained “Whisper/Touch,” a song included in the hit movie Pretty In Pink.
Davis was from Berkeley, California, and had been writing songs for years before relocating to Los Angeles. After various auditions, a band formed that eventually included me on synthesizer and saxophone.
The Motels shared a rehearsal space with the Go-Go’s at the Masque, a punk rock rehearsal and concert facility that was created by rock promoter Brendan Mullen and located in the basement of an adult movie theater on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue. With Davis fronting a new Motels lineup, the band played clubs for six months around the city, primarily at Madame Wong’s, a Chinese restaurant turned rock club in Chinatown.
The phenomenal story of the Knack playing the L.A. club circuit, getting signed, and recording a debut album for eighteen thousand dollars—an album that stayed at the top of the album chart for five weeks and spawned the hit single “My Sharona”—had led major record companies based in Los Angeles to take a much closer look at local club acts. The Motels were among the many that generated record-label interest, signing to Capitol Records in mid-1979 and in September releasing their debut album, Motels, which reached only number 175 on the Billboard album chart. The band played forty shows that year in support of the record in Europe and in the United States, and the song “Total Control” became a hit in Australia, where it reached number two, resulting in Australian gold records for both the single and album.
The Motels at the Masque, Hollywood, 1979: (left to right) Marty Jourard, Brian Glascock, Michael Goodroe, Jeff Jourard, Martha Davis. Permission of Marvin Rinnig.
A band is in many ways a marriage, and some marriages break up. Jeff Jourard exited the band after one album, replaced by Davis’s boyfriend, Tim McGovern. The second album, Careful, produced a Top Twenty hit in France with the single “Danger.”
In 1981, soon after the third album, Apocalypso, had been rejected by the record company as not commercial enough, McGovern was fired, and the band remade the album as 1982’s All Four One, resulting in the Top Ten single “Only the Lonely” and their first U.S. gold album award. Two videos directed by Russell Mulcahy, “Only the Lonely” and “Take the L,” received extensive play on MTV during the television music channel’s first year, and Davis won an American Music Award for her performance of “Only the Lonely.”
A new synergy between music and promotional videos led to a period of highly successful cross-marketing between the film and music businesses as movies generated soundtrack albums featuring songs from a multitude of rock and pop artists. This connection resulted in the movie and the soundtrack album promoting one another, as well as an abundance of easily made MTV videos of an artist’s performance of the song intercut with scenes from the movie. The teen-oriented movies of the 1980s often used rock songs playing in the background behind the dialogue in key scenes, and movie soundtrack albums were collections of these songs. Phil Collins’s “Against All Odds” is an example of a movie’s theme song reaching the Top Five and winning a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance (Male) in 1985.
The basic process of having a song placed in a movie began with a screening of a rough cut of the film, and a sample song would be dubbed in where a song was needed. In many cases it was “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” by Eurythmics, the favored song of the season, and after a few screenings it became increasingly comical to hear this song on a variety of rough cuts.
The Motels contributed songs to three movies, Moscow on the Hudson, Teachers, and Soul Man, and their fourth album, Little Robbers, yielded another Top Ten single with “Suddenly Last Summer” and a second gold album. Tours of Australia, Europe, Japan, and the United States followed over the years. After the release and lackluster sales of 1984’s Shock, the group worked for a year on a new record but broke up in 1986, and the project was reconceived as a Martha Davis solo album that yielded two songs that charted in Australia. After a break from the music business as the eighties ended, Davis returned to writing and performing and reassembled various versions of the Motels; the current lineup includes Martha Davis and me as the only original members.
TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME
Gainesville musicians who migrated to the West Coast in the sixties and seventies had joined or formed bands that eventually achieved success, collectively selling hundreds of millions of records. But there are many other ways to be involved in the music business, and several Gainesville musicians who began as members of a band took a different path as they found themselves drawn to other pursuits in the broad world of music. They had been drawn to the relatively open social climate of Gainesville that also attracted many of the region’s education seekers, cultural misfits, entrepreneurs, and free thinkers. For creative types the city was a welcoming beacon in the wilderness of a mostly conservative state. The Gainesville area was, and continues to be, full of musical folks who through either choice or chance have found their own path through the far reaches of the music business. After the initial wave of Gainesville players migrated out West, a second wave of musicians and music-oriented entrepreneurs brought even more local talent to the wide world of music. Their contributions are significant despite taking place outside the spotlight, and are explored in the following chapter.