Chapter 13
Evolution of a bi-coastal life form ... Other carbon-based structures ... Standing on the corner of Broadway and La Cienega ... Ten pounds of Hershey bar ... Goodbye and Hello
JAC: Once you bring a major group home everything gets bigger. There is more money and a heightened expectation by others. Drive and ego are yoked together to show the world that the Doors were more than a lucky fluke. Finances, opportunities, needs, and risks all moved to a higher level. We were at the table now with the other big independents—Atlantic, A&M, Warner—and the major labels. The decision to grow a company is often a choice not consciously made. Sheer momentum is carrying you along, and the time to reflect on future directions and personal costs whizzes by, usually without even being noticed. The negative repercussions of growth are easy to lose in the thrill of riding the tiger. But what a ride!
JAC: By early 1967 Elektra had outgrown the Sperry-Rand building. Fortunately we were able to acquire one entire floor plus half of another, with almost twice the square footage, at 1855 Broadway at 61st Street. It was not as central as 51st and Sixth, but it had the virtue of plentiful space. The crowding was relieved, at least for a while. Bill Harvey's art department still had eastern and southern exposures, and the odd geometry of the exterior wall gave my office an interesting angularity.
BOB ZACHARY: The twelfth floor of the building was A&R, the tenth was the offices.
BRUCE HARRIS: Elektra was the first record company office I was ever in. While at Hunter College, I reviewed a Love album, and Steve Harris invited me over. I was a freshman, and the place was impressive to me for three reasons: miniskirts, miniskirts, miniskirts. And it was a wonderful creative atmosphere, with people very intent on what they were doing, very ardent in their concern for the music.
KEITH HOLZMAN: A lot of our musicians—and staff—couldn't stand the fluorescent lights in the studio. I had worked in theater and I knew about lighting design. So, I bought colored theatrical gels, and people made collages of them, and laid them over the plastic diffusers, our own modern art.
JOHN HAENY: You walked through this door at the end of the hall, and all of a sudden the light changed to soft muted colors. There were Indian fabrics on the walls, and incense.
JAC: And other aromas in the air.
BOB ZACHARY: Floors two, three, and four were the New York state bureau of narcotics and addiction control.
KEITH HOLZMAN: It used to drive our musicians absolutely bonkers when they came in and saw the narc names on the sign by the elevator.
BOB ZACHARY: Also on the second floor was A&M Records. Down the street were Atlantic and Roulette.
SUE ROBERTS: And the ground floor had the best Chock Full O' Nuts.
The most famous Elektra logo
JAC: This was the year we went to a new logo. Bill Harvey designed the Elektra butterfly, a beautiful thing with a sense of airy freedom.
I was flying too, but not like a butterfly, shuttling back and forth between coasts like a jet-powered badminton bird. I was still New York-based, but I had become a bi-coastal life form.
My West Coast reconnaissance in 1962 was ahead of its time, but from the mid-Sixties the scene was building. Both San Francisco and LA were hot. I was in LA often, dealing with A&R, marketing, recording, administration and, most importantly, keeping artists happy.
In 1964 Dave Hubert, a music publisher friend, had offered me a loaner office in his facilities in the Vine Tower on Sunset, but mostly my West Coast office was in my briefcase and my head. I thought Elektra deserved a West Coast presence of its own.
I loved New York's vitality, ease of movement around Manhattan, its air of self importance and open ambition. It had everything but a feeling of expansiveness, room to breathe. LA was a city of low-rise buildings, offering reasonably priced space, an agreeable climate and a chance to be present at the beginning of something very new.
In addition to opening an office, I longed to build a studio. The studio would anchor our presence, give us a creative core and help us to more actively pursue the music. A good studio could be a draw, and I believed we could keep it busy with Elektra and non-Elektra artists. And this would be my chance to build a facility with the latest technology, always an irresistible impulse.
In 1966 I bought, for $69,000, a nondescript building and some land in the heart of West Hollywood, at 962 North La Cienega Boulevard, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. This was the start of Elektra's permanent commitment to California.
JIM DICKSON: In LA you did a lot of giggling. There was a lot to giggle about. It had gone from a very poor, hardly getting along bunch of people who just sort of had each other, to where everybody was just doing fine. And having a good time. It was a continuous party.
HERB COHEN: I never slept. Things were happening in Topanga, in Venice, nonstop. I made money, I spent money. I never bought clothes, or houses. I gave money to people hanging around to do things—people getting abortions, going to Mexico. Money wasn't an issue, it was a question of what else can we do, what else can we find?
JIM DICKSON: Right up to Monterey Pop in the summer of 1967 it was always exciting and fun.
JAC: Rock, as music or as a social force, could not be contained within four walls and a ceiling. In the open air of the Monterey Stadium it found its natural venue. For impact, Monterey Pop was like ten Newports rolled into one. The Saturday evening highlights were Janis Joplin, who essentially repeated the high points of her afternoon set, and Otis Redding, in his first exposure to an almost entirely white audience. The explosive cappers were the Who and Jimi Hendrix, who outdid each other in volume, theatrics, and in multiplying the possibilities of what one could squeeze out of a guitar. Hendrix, who had flipped a coin with Pete Townshend to decide who would go on last, won, and played with such ferocious intensity that the line between man and instrument completely disappeared. Hendrix and his guitar blended into a frenzied rapture that pushed the guitar envelope in a hundred directions at once. And the future of rock and of a generation never seemed brighter.
JIM DICKSON: Monterey was about all anybody could handle. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen, and I think anybody who was there ever saw.
DAVID BRAUN: It moved the action to the West.
JIM DICKSON: Monterey was a mixture of two elements: people who thought it was a great new community happening, everybody excited and having a good time, and people who saw the commercial potential to it, to really score or promote with it.
DAVID ANDERLE: The LA club scene was so explosive. You could go for three days just naming LA bands starting to form, getting signed.
JAC: Judy Collins had hit for us in 1964 and Love in 1965-1966. By the spring of 1967, the Doors were smoking, and by Monterey the label was on fire. LA was the place. Nailing down real estate on La Cienega was the easy part. I also needed people I could trust to oversee the West Coast operation. My life has been blessed with great luck in finding the people I need just when I need them. Suzanne Helms and David Anderle both appeared on cue.
SUZANNE HELMS: I was working at Dave Hubert's office, where Jac was sharing space. Jac was in the Xerox room and I heard him call out to me, "There's a fire in the Xerox machine!" I went in to help him, and somehow in the middle of the smoke and getting his pieces out, he said, "I'm thinking of opening an office on the West Coast. Would you be interested? Think about it, dear."
DAVID ANDERLE: I had met Jac years before when I was working in LA at Auto Stereo, a company founded by Mad Man Muntz, duplicating record albums onto four-track cartridges for car stereos.
JAC: The Muntz proprietary four-track car stereo was a bulky device by today's standards, but the first. LA, being such a car-crazy, entertainment town, was the perfect environment to launch a music system for the automobile.
DAVID ANDERLE: One of the earliest companies we contracted with for music was Elektra. Jac came out from New York to negotiate the agreement. On a scale of one to ten for meticulousness about quality he was an eleven. Somehow he was impressed with my diligence, and he wrote a letter to the president of Auto Stereo saying he would allow his product—
JAC:—Selected releases—
DAVID ANDERLE:—To be put on our cartridges if I personally were to oversee quality control. After that I didn't see him for three years.
I worked in the record business, took time off to paint, then worked again. At the time of Monterey Pop, Al Kooper was staying at my house. He was looking to get his new band signed—Blood, Sweat and Tears. Al knew Jac from Newport, and Elektra was one label Al was interested in. I was at Monterey for a few days, came home, and Al and his friend Judy Collins were there. I loved Judy's work. We sat up all night talking and playing music, and she said, "You must come and work at Elektra." I had lunch with Jac, and—bingo.
JAC: I was looking for an attractive magnet to lure talent and keep our artists content and thinking kindly of the company. David could have been sent from central casting. Darkly handsome, with a jaunty Zapata mustache and a knowing air, he defined hip LA, laid-back and cool.
PAT FARALLA: Tall and lean, long-sleeve shirts, leather jacket, jeans, dark colors always.
JAC: There was much more to David than looks and leathers. He had a caring nature, and as a painter himself, he dealt with issues from an artist's viewpoint. His music experience had broadened considerably since the days of Muntz. Although we were both highly contained people, in our discussions of music we could get very excited. Music was my easiest portal to emotion, and I believe that was true for David.
SUZANNE HELMS: For the time being, David and I were working out of offices at 6725 Sunset. I was buying lots on La Cienega under different names with different brokers, because we didn't want it known that we were looking for contiguous property.
JAC: The building of a studio is a heavy responsibility, like creating a child. For me, the recording studio is a holy place. A studio is never turned off; perpetually powered up, it has a window on immortality. It is a galaxy of electronic variables and carbon-based elements flying in formation: integrated circuits, relays, transformers, motors, tape, capstans, coils, knobs, sliders, exotic materials, wood and glass, all in the service of music. It is the bridge of our own music-making starship, which it resembles to a remarkable degree. The studio controls us as much as we believe we control it. It is a living, breathing organism with a metabolism that is everchanging, acoustically, electronically, psychologically. It can be a beast, benign or treacherous. It has a pulse, a voice, an opinion and a soul. Certainly, from the first moment it is switched on, a studio generates ghosts. It gets sick, tired, it makes funny noises trying to tell us what is wrong. It cries for a kind word or a gentle hand laid on its ailing insides. We nurse each other back to health and service.
I wanted our new studio and base of operations to reflect sunny energy, taste, and my belief that business, responsibly conducted, was an honorable pursuit, transcending mere work.
During my previous one-year tryout phase in Los Angeles, I had been charmed by Southwestern Mission-style architecture, so I decided to create our new studio and office facility from natural woods with beams, tiles, distressed wood floors, and very homelike furniture, tables instead of desks, rugs in lieu of carpet. The brightness, the color in the office would come from the fabrics and the people.
In practical terms, we needed a studio large enough to record groups, with an isolation booth to thwart loud or percussive instruments from bleeding into several microphones at once. Orchestras or large ensembles were not a consideration, but the room had to be friendly to small string and horn sections, of the type we had used so effectively on Love's "Forever Changes."
I was looking for a tight sound, meaning not a lot of uncontrolled reflections, but colorful acoustically and bigger than life. To pull it all together required a seasoned pro. Bruce Botnick thought he knew the ideal candidate, Allan Emig.
SUZANNE HELMS: Allan was a wonderful man, middle-aged, gay, odd, bizarre, but brilliant, kind and good.
JAC: He had worked for the majors, knew recording and mastering, and knew what he didn't know. Allan, in turn, recommended a noted acoustical engineer, Paul Veneklassen, who had helped improve the thin sound of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York.
Paul constructed a three-dimensional paper model and began to shine tightly focused pinpoints of light through it, studying the reflective patterns and adjusting the splay of a wall to give the room more volume and better control. This was years before computer-assisted design software, which I believe often falls short of the older craft methods.
The door to the studio was to the right. You came from the outside world into a small, triangular air lock with thick windows, shut the first door behind you, then opened the next door, keeping all outside noise outside. The control room had double glass walls separated by a nine-inch air space for acoustic isolation. You looked from the mixing board to the long end of the studio with every corner in clear view. I wanted the walls to help create the Elektra sound: bright, clean, tight and in front of your face. On the left wall was a rack of moveable panels, pushed to one end of the studio along a large track. Panels could be unfolded and arranged to selectively deaden the sound. Each panel had two sides, one for greater and the other for lesser absorption. In contrast, the right wall was solid brick, rough-hewn and irregular. Behind the brick facade were floating walls, isolated from the floor and from each other, with concrete poured between many layers of plastered and impermeable dry wall. The entire studio was like a hand-crafted shell inside a thick concrete bunker.
For our floors, Mission style meant either tile or wood of some antiquity. Tile was hard on the feet and much too sound-reflective, so wood was the obvious choice.
SUZANNE HELMS: Two old Italian brothers did them.
JAC: Once the oak flooring was laid and had settled, the brothers began distressing it, hitting it with lengths of chains, gouging it with chisels, carving it with jack knives, stomping on it with hobnail boots. Suzanne was so entertained watching them that she could hardly find time to work. When they were finished, it looked as if Hannibal's army had practiced crossing the Alps in my studio—awful and grand at the same time. We sanded off all the dirt spots, gave it several layers of maple stain, and it glowed.
Lighting was critical. I wanted to be able to vary the mood and color of the studio from the control room. Sunset Sound, where we recorded Love and the Doors, had industrial fluorescent lights, which always struck me as too cold—to warm that room we had to kill the overheads and burn candles.
Nearby was the Home Silk Shop, owned by a Jewish family, with an inventory of thousands of square feet of the most beautiful imported fabrics. John Haeny, who had joined us in engineering, and Suzanne had a field day buying wild, wacky patterns. Nothing was too outrageous; after all, this was the flamboyant Sixties. The acoustic panels on the left wall of the studio screamed in paisley. There were Persian carpets, throw rugs and mounds of fluffy velour cushions, everything to make it seem less like a studio and more like a living room.
FRITZ RICHMOND: We had a famous piano, a Yamaha G-7. They didn't make very many of those. Allan Emig and John Haeny got together over at the piano store and said, "Listen, we want you to do something special—get rid of those cheesy Japanese bass strings and install these German bass strings, and it'll give the piano a unique quality." Which it did. You could have a rock band going full tilt and then you could have the piano take a solo live, which is very hard normally. Nobody had a piano that could cut through like this one.
Studio "B" Elektra Studio Control Room
JAC: I had found a mixing board in England with control features unusual for its day, great flexibility to fine-tune equalization at many frequency points. And we went for full Dolby noise reduction, a first. Plus four live echo chambers, isolated from the building structure and mounted on the roof. In the late Sixties, artificial echo devices were gaining popularity, and we had them also, but I always preferred the purity of live chambers, like the famous one at Sunset Sound that we had used to such good effect. We could gang our chambers together, or take an artificial reverberation device and run the output through the live chamber, and adjust the two in relationship to the primary tracks. That kind of arcane stuff always tickled me.
FRITZ RICHMOND: With Paul Rothchild or any other producer that I was going to work with, I always wanted to have the studio just right, and if it was the first session of cutting basic tracks, I would take three or four hours to set it up to where I would be quickly able to put a hand on any piece of gear that I might need, to move a microphone easily, or to take a setup out and put in a different one. If I knew we were going to be in there for a couple of weeks, I would set the lights so that everybody had a personal pool of light to sit in, because people often wanted the lights down, and when that happens in a studio, where you tend to have wires here and there, cables running, you don't want people tripping, so you arrange the lights in such a way that people can find their way around without an accident. I would get everything in the control room ready, make sure there were enough reels of tape ready to go, that the machines were aligned, and that no one had walked off with the rolling papers. There was a ritual that Paul and I would go through. Paul bought one of the first of the Mister Coffee-type coffee makers, and we'd have that sitting there, and you'd walk in and smell this fabulous coffee and you'd just want to have a cup and sit around, smoke a cigarette and he'd want to clean some pot and roll a joint . . .
Studio "B" The Room
JAC: The studio was also very persuasive for product presentations. Each summer we invited our independent distributors for a mini-convention that lasted for two days. We'd blast the new releases through our studio playback system and wow that jaded group. And of course it was ideal for parties, great for dancing and general hanging out.
No other recording facility looked or sounded like it. It was the first from-the-ground-up hip studio. Artists ritually signed their names on the brick wall with indelible markers. As time went on, having your signature on that wall was a mark of having arrived.
To the outside world, the construction budget for the studio and office was $60,000, but knowing I would get carried away, my secret number was $100,000, without any equipment. It came in at $120,000, which would be $375,000 in late Nineties currency. I didn't care. It was the fulfillment of a dream.
JANN WENNER: A fantastic place. Before any of the other record companies, Jac built a headquarters in paradise. It's a model for what came after. Those were great days, and Jac was one of the movers and princes of the business.
JAC: All a casual passerby on La Cienega might see was a Mission-style structure with no sign, and a wooden gate with an intercom leading into a small garden. The front door was set back twenty feet from the sidewalk.
FRITZ RICHMOND: You would come in, and there was a cloud of smoke and Pall Mall packs and piles of files, and Suzanne Helms.
JAC: Suzanne didn't go for this hip nonsense of sitting at a table. She insisted on a proper desk with lots of drawers, overflowing with important stuff to which only she was privy.
RUSS MILLER: All the other girls were running around in miniskirts or jeans or tie-dyes, and Suzanne was dressed as if she was working on Wall Street.
PAT FARALLA: Tight sweater and tight skirt always well matched and very nice looking, well coiffed, and stiletto heels.
JOHN HAENY: She had a mysterious position, never had a title, but you had better call her Mrs. Helms, and you had to go through her to get to anybody. There was a wooden bench, the most uncomfortable bench in the modern world, and it didn't matter who you were, Jim Morrison, anybody—
SUZANNE HELMS:—I would always make Jim sit up straight. He liked to hunch his shoulders, and I hate that—
JOHN HAENY:—You had to sit on that bench, with Mrs. Helms glaring at you at point-blank range until you were allowed to go in.
BILL SIDDONS: She was physically intimidating.
GEORGE STEELE: She could be a terror. She would have people shaking in their boots. She never shouted or screamed. Her silence spoke. She said more with her eyes and the way she puffed on her Pall Mall. And no one ever raised their voice at her. Well, maybe once, but then you were never invited back.
RUSS MILLER: A great protector. The archangel of Elektra.
ROBB ROYER: She was the mama.
BILL SIDDONS: I thought she was a great lady. She was the source of all information.
MARTY RICHMOND: In the months before La Cienega was built, when there wasn't all that much going on, to occupy her time she took out the Los Angeles yellow pages and started with A and went through the listings, and anything she found fascinating, she'd call up and talk to these people about it. And she developed an encyclopedic knowledge of where you could get things in LA. You could ask her, "Who's got Japanese fans?" And she could say, "Well, this store has those, and if you want bigger ones they've got 'em, if you want green ones they've got 'em, but if you want the best—" It was truly amazing.
BILL SIDDONS: She knew what was going on everywhere. She had great wisdom, and direct access to the decision makers. She actually made everything happen.
PAT FARALLA: She was definitely the captain of Jac's ship. She was his right-hand barracuda. I think if it were not for Suzanne, in terms of books and money and finances and getting things done—who in hell would have done it? I think she's a queen. God bless her.
GEORGE STEELE: She was the vortex. She had to do a lot of tasks simultaneously. She had to marry and counter-balance dealing with a Paul Rothchild and a Bruce Botnick and a John Haeny and a Judy Collins from the artistic and administrative standpoint, administering all their contracts, and deal with the unions, and with contractors wanting to know where the plumbing should go, and city officials about ordinances, and copyright owners wanting to know about licenses. There would be miles and piles of paper, and if you didn't know the tributaries, where to get hold of a particular note or a particular file, there would be no way anyone else could ever do it, but she would be able to lay her hands on it instantaneously.
JAC: Suzanne would wave her hands over the disaster area that was her desk, either in blessing or in supplication, and then dive into it like a starved pelican, and, with forefinger and thumb, extract precisely the piece of paper she was looking for.
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: She was a polyphasic thinker and talker, extraordinarily intelligent, very streetwise, unshockable, and a pillar of self-strength. She took no shit from anyone. She did not need or seek approval even from Jac or David. She could deal with everyone on their own terms. She allowed Jac to be Jac and David to be David. She was the perfect player to sit between them. A chameleon—she could be on the phone with Jac, dealing with his Holzmanisms and having him trusting her implicitly, then do the same with David.
JAC: I absolutely loved Suzanne. Women of enormous energy and high capability were so much fun to work with. I had Teresa Sterne at Nonesuch on the East Coast. Now Suzanne managed the West Coast. They could not have been more different in style, but each in her own way was indispensable.
Suzanne was one of God's most wonderfully eccentric creations. She did her own automobile repair. And she adored dogs. David Anderle and John Haeny gave me a Siberian husky for my thirty-seventh birthday which I named Max, after my beloved grandfather. On a trip to Laguna, Max vanished. Adam and Jaclyn were heartbroken. I posted a $500 reward and Suzanne would field the reports of sightings, driving an hour and a half to Laguna, in the middle of the night, to check them out.
FRITZ RICHMOND: Some people you feel like doing little things for, and I felt like doing nice things for Suzanne.
MARTY RICHMOND: I knew that one of her biggest loves in the world was chocolate, and I conspired with the milkman to deliver a quart of chocolate milk every day to Mrs. Helms. It bugged her, trying to figure out who did it. I finally copped, and after that we were friends forever.
FRITZ RICHMOND: She seemed to have an incredible capacity for candy. She had a certain size and shape and she never changed, no matter how much she ate. Finally someone gave her a three-pound Hershey bar.
JAC: It was a ten-pound presentation bar which I had found in a catalog. The moment I spotted it I knew it belonged to Suzanne, so I gave it to her as a gag gift. Within a week Suzanne had polished it off. And ice cream—Suzanne could go through a half-gallon of Rocky Road a day. Once, when she needed to lose weight for some minor surgery, she shed thirty pounds in a month, and I calculated that she metabolized seventy-five hundred calories a day. She chain-smoked but stayed pleasingly Junoesque. At a movie studio clearance sale, Suzanne bought the forest-green gown that Jane Russell had worn in "The French Line," and proudly confided that she had to take it in at the hips and let it out at the bosom. She sashayed into a company party tucked less rather than more into this dress. Fritz Richmond could not take his eyes off her cleavage. "Well, Fritz," Suzanne said, "I'm not Mrs. Bitch tonight, am I?"
ELLEN VOGT: On my first day at work, Suzanne pointed to a desk which was totally empty except for one piece of paper and one sharpened pencil, and said, "Your job is to take messages, that's all you do, you don't do anything else. David Anderle"—she explained to me who he was—"talks to three people, his wife, his lawyer, and Jac. And some artists. You're going to get a lot of phone calls, but he speaks to no one else." I never laid eyes on David for weeks. He was just through the wall, but I never saw him. He would drive his Porsche in back and come through the sliding glass doors to his office. His front door would be shut, and he never came out. And Suzanne never spoke to me. I thought, "This is the weirdest thing, I'm answering the phone for a man I never see, and a woman who doesn't talk to me all day long." Suzanne and David became my best friends, and have been forever. But it was very strange to begin with.
PAT FARALLA: Ellen was a great second to Suzanne. She was sweet, devoted to taking care of David in her own method and manner. In much the same way that Suzanne was to Jac, Ellen was to David.
ELLEN VOGT: David lived in that office, which was pretty much pitch dark, except for candles, and it was like a sanctuary.
FRITZ RICHMOND: He had like a tent, with pillows all over the floor and incense going, and he would sit there like a potentate and talk with artists.
DAVID ANDERLE: Sometimes on nothing, sometimes on joints, sometimes acid—
PAT FARALLA:—I remember getting lost in David's office one day shortly after lunch. As I recall it had something to do with opium, and the next thing I knew it was about nine o'clock at night. Those were the days, my friends.
FRITZ RICHMOND: It was Southern California, 1968, taken as far as you can take it and still do business.
RUSS MILLER: David was the best artist hanger-outer. Artists absolutely loved him, and for good reason, because he was an artist himself and a very lovable and very beautiful man.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Instant salon. His great gift was his ability to be a bridge between the people who are actually making the music and the people who are actually making the money.
DAVID ANDERLE: There was no such thing during those lucky years as work time and play time. It was Elektra time.
So much of the charm of Elektra in those days was that we didn't know what we were doing. Some of it worked and some of it didn't. If it didn't, good-bye, next. It was a real spirit and an attitude of no fear.
The company was growing so fast, the presence of Elektra was like fire. We did jillions of demos. I was demo-ing everything that could walk and perform. That's what the studio was all about.
I tried to steal Grace Slick away from Jefferson Airplane to be a solo act on Elektra. Crosby, Stills and Nash formed their band on my patio. We had the Holy Modal Rounders, trying to make an album with them, and that was about as bizarre as they come. Sam Shepard was the drummer. A great band of eccentrics, one doing speed, another doing smack, the producer doing both, and the only productivity is when the drugs balance each other out.
Nico "The Marble Index" EKS-74029
We did an album with Freddy Engleberg, a great big husky good-looking guy, built like a football player, used to be the bouncer at the Unicorn. He wrote the most fanciful little poems, originally written to be performed in the dark behind a mime show. We did an album with Nico—
PAT FARALLA: She came in the back door like the veil of death. I didn't know squat about her, but she had things on her mind and she decided she would speak to me about whatever it was. I remember the line, "I like to sleep with dead men."
JAC: Nico was an apparition, a sprite with a spike, floating hazily in and out of focus. She would suddenly . . . materialize. Turn around and she wasn't there, turn back and she was filling the bench. Then she would . . . dematerialize. She'd call up and, in her low moan, tell you, "I'll be in on Tuesday, set up some interviews." Tuesday would come, and no Nico. Eight months later, she'd call again. "I'm back in town." You would say, "What about those other times?" "Oh, I couldn't do those, I had to go to Rome."
DAVID ANDERLE: Tim Buckley was already signed when I came to Elektra.
JAC: Herbie Cohen had sent me Tim's demo.
"Goodbye and Hello" EKS-7318
HERB COHEN: One of the great voices of our time. He had a four-octave range, five if he wanted to stretch it. Just brilliant.
JAC: I listened to it over and over. If I was down I would play it and it would lift me. And as an artist to sign so gifted, so original, the talent and the vision still unfolding.
DAVID ANDERLE: When I came, Tim had done his first album, and he was just finishing "Goodbye and Hello." I remember Jac and I listening to it together, both of us being so in love with that album—
JAC:—The pain and purity of the songwriting, the plaintiveness of his melodies, the nakedness of his vocals, the artistic risks. I had believed in Tim from the beginning, and the enchantment of "Goodbye and Hello" exceeded anything I could have hoped for.
DAVID ANDERLE: Tim and I became very close. We just had a feeling for each other. It was like an instant thing. Sometimes when things would get too weird at the office, I would sneak out and go to the beach at Venice with him and just sit in the sand for hours and talk and watch the sunset.
ELLEN VOGT: I adored Tim. I had a big crush on him. I used to look out the window to see if he was coming. I was shy, I didn't know what to say to him. He would sit quietly, looking straight ahead, waiting for David. I think he was high every time he came in.
PAT FARALLA: A slightly slouching and shy young man, beautiful, hair like a halo, befitting yet another angel. I was in love with this young voice, those words, that torment, that frustration, that poet.
DANNY FIELDS: Brilliant, playful, prodding, alert, just wanted to swallow the world. He had no concept of age, race, sexuality, he was just free.
FRITZ RICHMOND: Tim had some very pretty groupies. He would pack the studio with groupies. He seemed to like to have them around as an audience, and they sometimes didn't even know each other. They'd be in there sitting around looking gorgeous and listening politely all day, and at the end of the day some would stay even after he left. They wanted to watch me clean up. Buckley's band were the worst slobs. They would leave the studio and there would be wet garbage on the carpet. They'd order ribs and I'd have to pick bones off the carpeting. I thought that was inexcusably impolite. There were plenty of trash cans.
DAVID ANDERLE: There was a real push to get Tim popular. From our side, we just wanted everybody to know about Tim Buckley—
JAC:—To have the world hear him.
DAVID ANDERLE: But I had the feeling that if Tim didn't have to perform for an audience, it would be fine with him.
JACKSON BROWNE: Tim was in the Village, at this place Andy Warhol had put up, the Dom. A lot of uptown patrons, business people, stockbrokers, artsy, coming to the Village to get a glimpse of Warhol. He had a film loop of a sky diver falling endlessly, floating, and another one of someone eating a candy bar with this kind of intent look. Nico was on the bill. There were twenty-foot-high posters of her all over town, beautiful. She was always compared to Marlene Dietrich, with this deep voice and German accent, but less arctic than Dietrich. I was transfixed by her. She had this bunch of songs—songwriting was the event—a Tim Hardin song, an unrecorded Dylan song, a Donovan song, a James Taylor song, a Leonard Cohen song; Leonard Cohen used to come in and listen to her. Tim asked me did I want the job accompanying her, and I said, "Absolutely." Tim would back up Nico and play a set of his own and not take it very seriously. He didn't like this place or any of the people in it. He would sing a lot of Johnny Cash songs or whatever he felt like doing, and after a week he said, "Hah," and he was out of there.
Tim Buckley
STEVE HARRIS: At his high point, Tim did a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. It was sold out. When he looked out he said something to me that was unintelligible, but it was almost like, "Oh, shit." He didn't want it. He didn't seem nervous, he just seemed pissed off, almost, you know, "OK, I've done this, now what do I have to do?" The concert was wonderful, it was fabulous. He had it all at his fingertips. And he had nowhere to go. After that, his whole musical outlook and his perception of what he was about and doing, changed. Almost the next day, changed.
HERB COHEN: Whatever success he had, he would try to avoid it.
JAC: On the Tonight Show he would insult the host, or he would refuse to lip-sync and walk out. At the Improv he would be onstage, snoring, and I heard about him once barking at an audience.
DAVID ANDERLE: He was poised all the time to become a major pop artist. Because he was so attractive and his voice was so beautiful, it was a natural tendency to say, "Come on, man, you could do this in your sleep and have everything you want." He had pressure from Herbie to do it more commercially. He had pressure from the label to try and make singles. He had pressure from everybody to do it a certain way. And he rejected it. He wanted so badly to do his own music. I went to every one of his gigs at the Troubadour. A lot of times he would have a good audience for the opening show, but at the midnight show there might be only three or four people. It never bothered him. He would get into his experimental mode. Sometimes he would do one number for the whole set. He didn't give a shit, as long as he got to play what he wanted to play.
PAT FARALLA: The time I remember best with Tim was going down to Venice one night, and we cruised the bars, jazz bars, whatever, having the night I always wanted to spend with Tim. Just reaching into his mind. A lot of talk about jazz.
DAVID ANDERLE: I think he had the jazz demon. Certain guys—Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk—they go after this unattainable thing. The music Tim was hearing was really different. And he had demons he could not control.
STEVE HARRIS: Tim was self-destructive, changing what he did, going into drugs. The last time I saw him was at a club in San Francisco. He was playing jazz and it was interesting. But all that went through my mind was how important an artist he could have been. He was so eager to talk about old times at Elektra. Elektra was Camelot, and people never realized it better than when, like Tim, they went elsewhere. I could see it in his eyes, talking about how well he was treated and respected.
CLIVE SELWOOD: The first time Tim came to England he was at our new house, and he went out in the back yard, which was still uncultivated, and played with our little daughter for an hour and came back in all covered with mud. The hippie child. The last time I saw him was at the Troubadour, and he was carrying a gun. I asked him why. He said, "The police, they see long hair, and they're going to arrest you or kill you, so I'm going to kill them first."
MICHAEL JAMES JACKSON: I saw him at the Chelsea Hotel, fucked up on heroin. A small, sweet, fragile guy, with wild hair. Why such a disastrous habit? It was trouble beyond my perception.
STEVE HARRIS: The day Tim died, I was at Madison Square Garden and Herbie was in town. He called me up and he could hardly talk. I said, "Herbie, what's the matter?" And he said, "Come right over. Tim died."
HERB COHEN: He OD'd. Twenty-seven.
