Chapter 16
Creatures of the canyon, circa 1968 ... The summer of incense ... Turtle steak and brown rice in Lahaina ... The Mexican rubber stamp dance
JOHN HAENY: Elektra on the West Coast was a record company where, when you got up, you decided if you were going to wear the denim shirt or the denim shirt or the denim shirt, and would the denim trousers be the bell bottoms with the roses embroidered on them or the ones with the gardenias? Those were the choices in life. All of us were living on rock and roll time. We partied till the wee small hours, then slept until ten or noon or three. But of course Jac was in New York, on New York time. I think we suspected he would get up early, take a few uppers—
JAC:—I never needed uppers—
JOHN HAENY:—Have his chauffeur pick him up, and head to Elektra with his thousands of things to do. Jac has never been short on motivation. He always kept economic and office management on the East Coast, but we were the real creative people, the real hippies. So the phone used to ring an hour after we went to bed, and it would be Holzman from New York. He had to get those babies on the phone in California, with a thousand thoughts on his mind and yabadabadaba. He used to do it to all of us, and we all used to scream and holler and hang up on him. We were bratty children and he was the daddy, even though he was only in his mid-thirties.
JAC: The West Coast people thought of themselves as the elite, above the fray, while New York did the heavy lifting. The East Coast was a place to "do," and the West Coast was a place to "be." The West Coasters walked a fine line between doing business, being in the business, and looking cool. It was good to let them know from time to time that the world outside of hip LA still existed and was moving forward.
JOHN HAENY: Jac would make his royal visits and bestow his presence upon us. He was a big man, imposing, serious. If we had a tape to play for him he would give it The Big Listen—that's what we called it—face in hands, eyes closed, deeply concentrating on every nuance. At the conclusion of which everybody would wait for what was known as The Big Opinion. Jac would be listening as intently as possible, so that when it was finished he could say something that was as profound as possible—Jac, don't hate me for this, but I know the Virgo mind—some meticulous eloquent summation. We would sit there in rapt expectation, because he was the boss, he paid the bills, he held the keys, he had the power of life and death. El Supremo.
JAC: Those moments between the music's end and the expected words from my mouth were torture. If I loved it there was no problem. If not, I tried to find something I could single out for praise before sending them back to do it again.
JOHN HAENY: Record executives, especially from New York—they were suits, and that was that. Sometimes those people started wearing denims, but they still had business suits for minds. It could take a long time for the change to happen. But it wasn't fair to call Jac a suit, I mean just a suit. He was out on the streets of New York at nineteen, recording blues artists, ten, fifteen years before any of us were involved in the music business. There must have been a Jack Kerouac in him somewhere, to go out and experience it. And Jac was probably one of the first record company executives to show up in the office wearing jeans. So we all gave him denim points.
DAVID ANDERLE: The East Coast and the West Coast were totally different cultures. And there was the East Coast Jac and the West Coast Jac—it's almost like the classic case of the guy who's married to two women in two different ports.
JAC: California was seductive, and I was willing to be seduced. You didn't bring your briefcase to the West Coast, you left it in New York, where you had the administrative people to handle those things. In California, there was two to three times as much hang time. Hanging was a big part of getting things done in LA. And when in Rome . . .
DAVID ANDERLE: Jac would hit LA looking New York. He kept an apartment here, he'd go there, put on his jeans and his Indian shirts.
JOHN HAENY: He would always grace me with an evening, come to my little house in Laurel Canyon, which was very relaxed, laid-back—hippiedom. And being El Supremo, he would ensconce himself in the most auspicious place in the room, a double mattress in the middle of the floor, and it was like, "OK, make me feel good."
Jac always had a strong desire to be part of what we were, one of us. In 1968 it was important for everybody to love everybody. And Jac wanted to be loved.
DAVID ANDERLE: There were enormous preparations in my house to get ready for his arrival—there were enormous preparations for everything that's got to do with Jac. Paul Rothchild and I used to have contests about who could roll the greatest joints and give to Jac to blow his mind.
JAC: Rothchild rolled meticulous joints. If the Japanese were to manufacture joints, they would look like Rothchild's, not within spec but to spec, no slop tolerance. It defined Paul's hipness, rolling joints in front of artists, two-thirds the diameter of a cigarette and perfectly tubular. Works of folk art.
PAT FARALLA: And Jac loved maryjanes, hash or grass cookies. I remember making him some and wondering, "Too much? Or too little? Oh, what the hell . . . "
JOHN HAENY: My Laurel Canyon house was on Ridpath. In the living room was my stereo system, with big electrostatic speakers, extraordinarily exotic for then, and a five-foot hookah that I was keeping for my drug dealer whose mother wouldn't let him have it at home. I extended visiting privileges to him provided he brought the grass. He would show up from time to time with his friends, and I would invite my friends. We would lock all the doors and windows so the smoke would stay in the room. We were all into popsicles. I had the world's largest collection of popsicle sticks. We would fill the bowl of this huge hookah, a cup, cup and a half, and keep it lit by throwing popsicle sticks in, and pass the rope around till everybody passed out.
I woke up one morning to some chaos, and there was Judy Collins nude in my front yard. The yard had a high wooden fence and succulents, and there was Judy with her clothes off and a photographer. They were shooting the album cover for "Wildflowers." They ultimately came into the house. She was sitting on the floor, with some clothes on now, by a curtained wall with light coming through the window and one of my exotic brass vases with some dried flowers in it, and that became the back cover. The nude pictures were scotched.
Also at the Ridpath house I introduced Judy to Stephen Stills, and that resulted in their romance, and their romance resulted in Stephen writing 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.' Carole King was in and out of Ridpath—it was a dog owned by Carole and Gerry Goffin that sired my dog Niki's first litter of puppies. Neil Young was around. I was at some friend's house with David Crosby—we were all in a pack, you know, all buddies then—and somebody had brought a tape in of a young girl that nobody knew much about, except Judy had discovered her as a songwriter, and it was Joni Mitchell.
Joni was living on the next road up from Kirkwood. David Crosby was producing her first album. The people who recorded it were basically incompetent, and the tapes were a mess. David was having serious problems with the mix. I was exclusive to Elektra, but David came to me and asked would I sneak out and remix. We did it in the dead of night in a little studio at Sunset Sound. I didn't have a written contract with Jac, but it was a violation. Years later Jac told me he had always known I did it. There wasn't much going on that Jac didn't know about; he was a fox. He let it go because he knew Joni was important. David gave me a Swiss army knife. I still have it in a box out in the garage.
JACKSON BROWNE: I met John on Ridpath. A great guy, an interesting guy, very funny. He had these two white dogs, huskies, that he loved like they were his family. He was a genius engineer. Intensely talented. He made everybody sound great. Through his mind and his mike placements, he could shape things. And his demos sounded like completed records. He was sort of odd, a little goofy-looking, very sincere, not much of a hipster, probably a kid who had grown up taking apart Wurlitzer theater organs. Very anal retentive. In the studio he was fastidious beyond belief about how he wanted to do things, and he talked about it all the way: "I want to do this, I want to do that." Most people reserve a lot for the mix: "It'll really sound great when we mix it," and then you play this game, Beat The Demo. But John right there in the session could make it sound fantastic. He could hear it all at once.
BOB ZACHARY: He used to say, "Watch my hands, when you see them starting to sweat, we are only a take or two away from the best take."
JACKSON BROWNE: John was neurotic as hell, with little tics. "I've got a bladder the size of a walnut," he would say, and go to the bathroom. One time he nearly cut my thumb off in the middle of recording. He was doing an edit, he had the razor in his hand, I was reaching for a book of matches, and he thought I was going to step on the loops of tape cascaded onto the floor waiting for him to take up onto another reel. He screamed, "LOOK OUT!"—and he did like an umpire's safe motion with his hand and cut me right across the thumb, and the blood poured out, blub-blub-blub.
NED DOHENY: I met John on Ridpath too. We were all crashing on that street, in every sense of the word. The Incredible String Band was there. Gentle Soul. And Nico, talking about Dr. Hoffman on his bicycle.
JUDY JAMES: Around Ridpath was always an alternative area, with dirt roads, fire roads.
JAC: I remember someone saying the streets looked like they had been laid out by earthworms.
JUDY JAMES: It had gotten rundown and cheap before us, a lot of garages turned into one-room thises and thats, so there were always actors and musicians. There was a sense of hanging-outness, of finding out what was going on in the music business if you walked up and down Ridpath.
JACKSON BROWNE: There was amazing tribal life. There were houses supported by record companies, groups living with an account at the health food store.
JAC: Billy James' mailbox had listings for twenty groups, plus companies and artists.
JACKSON BROWNE: Billy was my manager, and he ran the Elektra office for a while. Sort of a hipster cat, something like a dancer. And he was very funny, very smart. Like somewhere in between a James Dean and a Mort Sahl. He was older than us, must have been in his thirties, but he was still one of us, he was a freak.
JUDY JAMES: No one owned furniture. People would be living on the floor, many of them on our floor. Runaways. Kids who were parentless. Groupies. This tremendous influx of kids from Orange County.
BILLY JAMES: Penny Nichols stayed in the laundry room downstairs for a while. Jackson slept over. Pamela Polland. Tim Buckley. Jimmy Spheeris, Greg Copeland, Steve Noonan, wonderful writers. All coming out of Sunny Hills High, Orange County. We were never alone. We had a dining room table made of three-quarter-inch ply with two-by-four legs. Seated a lot of people. Ray Manzarek came to dinner and told me it was the first time he had ever seen an artichoke.
'The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders' EKS-74026
Cass Elliott was living up the hill with Butchy. Tim Hardin was a couple of doors up. Leonard Cohen came calling. Frank Zappa was on Kirkwood, which is the street you take to get to Ridpath, and then he moved to a log cabin at the corner of Laurel Canyon, with a bowling alley downstairs. Lots of people lived in that house with Frank.
JOHN HAENY: Then there were Deering and Billy Howell, rich kids who liked to have stars around. They had a big house. We would head up there at midnight. David Crosby and Paul Rothchild and I ended up in the shower there with lots of Vitabath, which was very big in those days.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: And Jack the castle man, this guy who owned a bunch of castles. Different stars would rent them and move in with their entourage. They could make wonderful entrances down the stone staircases and they were good for practicing in and careening about on the parapets in various states of undress. I remember Nico with Jackson in tow coming down the stairs one day. That was quite a sight.
JACKSON BROWNE: Paul Rothchild lived on Ridpath too. Paul was like a superman. He knew about all sorts of things. He sat me down and had me listen to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, long before the Doors recorded 'Alabama Song.' He drove a Porsche and wore a velour hat, a Borsalino. These were things that denoted one's station, these were the people who had made a fortune or were on the way to making a fortune.
FRITZ RICHMOND: Paul's main room was one of the nicest music listening rooms that anyone knew of in Hollywood, and because of that people would come by with their tapes. I had my juke box there, and people would come over to check out what things sounded like on the juke box. The Doors would come up for playbacks. And Janis Joplin. I would wake up in the morning and hear her cackling away downstairs. She had a unique laugh, that woman.
DAN ROTHCHILD: My father had a story about a couch that Fritz eventually donated to a rummage sale in Portland in 1989. Among those who sat on the couch were Janis Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, Paul Butterfield, Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and another dozen butts of distinction. That couch should have great vibes.
JACKSON BROWNE: So there were interesting houses we could walk to. Or we would catch a ride to Peter Tork's house on Willow Glen. Peter had been a dishwasher at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and now he was a TV star, a Monkee. My friend Ned Doheny and I would say, "Let's go up to Peter's house, see what's going on." Sometimes you would walk in and there would be twelve girls in the pool, naked. And they were beautiful women, people of substance, not bimbos—not that we would have minded if they were bimbos. One time Jimi Hendrix was up there jamming with Buddy Miles in the pool house, and Peter's girlfriend was playing the drums, naked. She was gorgeous like a Varga girl is gorgeous, this physically flawless creature. She looked like the drawings of Indian maidens that they airbrush on motorcycle tanks. I don't think she was as good a drummer as she was an object of desire, but she was something.
Barry Friedman was on Ridpath too, about a block from Billy James, two blocks from Paul Rothchild.
JOHN HAENY: Barry was one of Jac's little West Coast club of fanciful folk.
PAT FARALLA: Elektra on the West Coast was a real safe house for creativity and for eccentric people.
JACKSON BROWNE: Barry had this wonderful carny mentality. He had been in the circus, a clown and a fire eater.
NED DOHENY: Diablo the fire eater.
MARTY RICHMOND: He also had the amazing ability to get out of any ropes you could tie him up in. He wouldn't let us watch him doing it, but he could be loose in fifteen seconds or less.
NED DOHENY: He used to drive around town in a sports car dressed in a gorilla suit.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: It was a King Kong suit. It came to me by way of this Las Vegas hooker. Her husband Scotty was one of the original King Kongs, he did all the stuff on the Empire State Building. A great suit.
JUDY JAMES: Once, Barry phoned everyone and got us all to drop the needle on the new Stones album at exactly the same moment, so that the canyon would echo with music.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: One night it was full moon, we're all sitting around in various states of decomposure, and a voice is heard echoing over the canyon, "This is God speaking. I have a message for you." And He gave His message. Well, thousands of people throughout the canyon were somewhat freaked by this experience and talked about it for days. It turned out it was Barry McGuire, the 'Eve Of Destruction' guy, who had set up this huge sound system, I think at the Mamas and Papas' house up at the top of Lookout, and blasted this diatribe to the stoned minions below.
JUDY JAMES: Many times I sat on the steps of Paul Rothchild's house with Barry, talking. On a Saturday afternoon, before the night, before the music, before the drugs, if Barry was straight and into talking, it might as well be to me—I had a degree in theater and philosophy, and I didn't do drugs. Barry was a pretty interesting guy, a thinking, reading person, a watcher. And into sound, into how good the music could be.
JACKSON BROWNE: Barry produced Kaleidoscope's first album. Brilliant. Another very great record Barry did, on Elektra, was "The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders." The Holy Modal Rounders did extremely drug-oriented folk music. A lot of beautiful songs about being up for days and coming down—"Rockin' around in that belladonna cloud, euphoria." They were real freaks.
JUDY JAMES: I had an impression of Barry as a true hippie. In the way that Cass Elliott was a true hippie. They believed in what was going on. They believed in what Timothy Leary was finding out, and didn't yet know the danger of it, that it was only true for five minutes and then you could be lost to the acid experience. Barry was at the center of a lot of stuff, drugs, recording, money spent on a loose, deliberate creation of that which the press was codifying as the Sixties, creating permission with money to go into the deeper darker side of the drug music culture. Bigger parties, more drugs, more permissions given, more permissions taken.
JOHN HAENY: Barry was in his late twenties. Most of the rest of us were younger, me for one, twenty-three. Some were much younger—Jackson Browne and Ned Doheny were still in their teens. Barry was sort of the leader of the pack.
MARTY RICHMOND: Undisputed leader of the band.
JOHN HAENY: There were social experiments at his house, where he pushed all the beds together in the living room, and all the people who were living at his house were going to start sleeping together.
JACKSON BROWNE: Orgies. Lots of bodies. The mechanics of that kind of arrangement are always problematic.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: One time Nico came in with a gun and grabbed some woman that one of the boys was in bed with by the hair and drug her out and made her run down the road, and we finally got the gun away from Nico and said, "Nico, why did you do that?" And she said, "Oh, some men like that."
JACKSON BROWNE: You'd meet all sorts of great people at Barry's house. That's where I met Warren Zevon. I met David Crosby there. He and Stephen Stills and Graham Nash would come over and play their demo. I played Barry some of my songs.
JUDY JAMES: This really was a moment when musicians had an enormous determination to communicate what they were feeling, whether in music or in lyrics. You could hear that at the hootenannies at the Troubadour, in living rooms all over town. On Ridpath, too. People were forming various groups and allegiances and alliances, and they all wanted to make a record.
JACKSON BROWNE: The Band came out with "Music from Big Pink." We had never heard anything like it. It was ragged, loose, but it was plugged into something so real. They recorded it where they were living, in this big pink painted house at Woodstock—more than a year before what we know as Woodstock—and we all went, "Wow, they made their record in a house!"
My friends had made some slick records that didn't mean a thing to anybody. Producers were using the same musicians in the studio with very different artists, not finding what was unique about an artist and shaping the production around that. The session hack syndrome was looming, and it was the enemy. We were thinking, "How do you get in the studio and make something that sounds like itself?"
We were taking "Big Pink" as a road sign. Being with all those guys in the canyon, around Ridpath, gave birth to the idea. So we were saying, "We want to make a record, in a house, in the country."
MARTY RICHMOND: One of Barry Friedman's many talents was the ability to assemble bands. He could take a bunch of untried kids, and after a little weeding put together a going band. He had done it before, with Buffalo Springfield. Then, while he was working for Jac and Elektra, he was wearing the cloak of a real exciting record label. He was able to attract many aspiring musicians. He was interested if they were competent; but if they were also young, and especially if they were pretty, his interests became more intense. His living room was one giant bed, where all of those crashing at his house could mingle. In some ways Barry's ideas had merit. He was convinced that any successful band contained a bond of love among all the players, which although not necessarily sexual was equally as strong. He was hoping to take a short cut, by introducing the sex and hoping that the love would follow.
NED DOHENY: Out of this snakepit of manic self-indulgence and general searching was born the Los Angeles Fantasy Orchestra.
JAC: Actually, it goes back to the Sunday morning of the Monterey Pop Festival. Nina, Barry Friedman and I were sitting in a coffee shop, infused with the heady good vibes of the festival, where flowers had been placed in the helmets of smiling motorcycle cops, and the lady mayor was making sure that everything remained peaceful and pleasant, because there was worldwide attention focused on her community.
I had been disappointed that the Doors had not been invited to Monterey, because wherever you went radios were playing 'Light My Fire.' Paul Simon, who was on the festival board, said to me that he was truly sorry they hadn't been asked. I know I cared, but 'Light My Fire' was Number 1, and that certainly softened the hurt.
With all of this euphoria and those incredible performances from The Who, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, there was this pervasive feeling, fueled by the haze of dope that hung over the festival, that the world was slowly shifting our way. Barry had an idea, and he chose the final morning of the festival to lay it on me. He proposed a music ranch. Take talented kids out of the struggles of trying to make it in the city, give them fresh air, good food and the freedom to create whatever music came to them.
It just struck me as a worthy notion, and out of that enthusiasm came a "Yes." With the Doors and Nonesuch, Elektra was throwing off enormous amounts of cash, so money was not the issue. And I was much more inclined to be experimental if it made any kind of crazy sense whatever.
Barry had produced one of my all-time favorite albums, the first Kaleidoscope for Epic. He had been there early, trying to help me sign Buffalo Springfield. He had taste, and I knew that I would just have to give him his head and pray it would work. I also felt my presence during the project should be kept to the minimum. Elektra was too big for me to be everywhere at once.
Jackson Browne in his early Elektra/Asylum days
JACKSON BROWNE: Jac went for the idea that we would have a repertory recording company, a loose aggregation of musicians that all responded to each other—the band, or the rock community, however large a circle you want to draw. We were all interested in making our own albums, and we were all going to play on each others' records.
MARTY RICHMOND: Jackson played guitar and piano and wrote songs. Rolf Kempf played piano, organ, guitar, and—oddly—accordion. He had had polio as a child, and he walked with a brace on his leg and a cane. Jack Wilce played banjo, mandolin and guitar. He had also written one song. Peter Hodgson signed on as the bass player. Ned Doheny, an heir to the Doheny oil fortune, was to play electric lead guitar.
NED DOHENY: It was a major adventure for a credential-less kid. I had originally auditioned for Barry before Ridpath, in some hotel room on Sunset Boulevard. I hooked up a little amplifier, played some Eric Clapton stuff, and was hired. At that time Barry was looking for somebody to play with someone named Jackson Browne, who I thought must be a huge black man. Imagine my surprise when I met him in Laurel Canyon and he was a small white person in his teens.
MARTY RICHMOND: All of the above had been spending a lot of time at Barry's house.
JACKSON BROWNE: The coolest thing we could imagine was being off where we could work on ideas and not have problems and we could get unlimited experience in recording and trying things. Cool. Pat Faralla, a very funny and astute woman who worked for Elektra, said to us: "Why should the world give you a house in the mountains? You have a problem with the clock? Are you, like, refugees from the rigors of studio life? Have you guys ever been in a studio?" Nobody appreciated her saying that. But it was true.
MARTY RICHMOND: Jackson had cut demos at Elektra. He knew the minimum basics of recording. The rest of them were going into it blind.
JACKSON BROWNE: We were all such whelps.
MARTY RICHMOND: The times were ripe for the plucking. The project was budgeted at around fifty thousand dollars and Jac approved it. Barry began scouting for a place.
NED DOHENY: Originally Barry told me he wanted to record Jackson's first album in a cave outside LA. So he was off to a flying start with bizarre methodology.
MARTY RICHMOND: Then he started looking in the San Fernando Valley. After several weeks he had nothing, and the search began to lead north.
JACKSON BROWNE: We drove up to Bolinas and looked around and didn't find anything.
MARTY RICHMOND: Finally, in some desperation, an ad was placed in the Los Angeles Examiner. A man answered, with a place for rent up in northern California on the Feather River, called Paxton Lodge.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: He was a bill collector, a guy about seven feet tall and a good three hundred-twenty pounds, and his son was just a little bigger.
JAC: Paxton was in beautiful mountain country—gold country—and, incidentally, on the stretch of Western Pacific railroad track where I had my adventure with the nun in 1955, so I already had an emotional connection with the place, a soft sweet memory.
MARTY RICHMOND: The only drawback was that it was five hundred miles from downtown Hollywood. Did they all want to stay in the Disneyland that is the Hollywood record world, or did they want to relocate to the woods and live in sylvan splendor? Barry took the plunge, and with Jac's OK the lease was signed for six months, with an option for six more.
JAC: The lodge was built by Western Pacific early in the century, as an overnight resort stop. When the railroad gave up on the place, it fell on hard times.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: It became a resort hotel for like little old school teachers, who would go to collect this rare kind of butterfly that was only found there. Then it became a brothel and a gambling place, with secret drops in the walls where they could hide the money when the sheriff came.
JACKSON BROWNE: Then a speakeasy. Then an alky dry-out farm. Then nothing. Just this old empty hotel in the mountains. Small. Nothing as big as "The Shining."
JACKSON BROWNE: About this time Barry changed his name to Frazier Mohawk.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: I think I owed American Express a lot of money and they kept coming around, and they sent someone to the door and asked if I was Barry Friedman, and I was very stoned at the time, and luckily Danny Kootch was there and he said, "No, no, he's Frazier Mohawk."
JACKSON BROWNE: God knows, in rock and roll we all have the right to call ourselves what we will.
JAC: I left Paxton to follow its fancy while I dealt with the growing enormity of Elektra and Nonesuch. I had an unbelievable number of things that needed attention.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Visiting Jac in his offices in New York, that was so fucking serious. You could see the sweat on his brow. Really a business environment. Not a stale, pathetic corporate environment like the Columbia office, the Black Rock, but you were very aware that business was being done here, on an extremely intense level.
JAC: And not just in New York. I had so much going on both coasts and with our A&R and distribution outpost in London that I was constantly in motion, yo-yoing back and forth. My marriage couldn't help but suffer.
NINA HOLZMAN: Jac had started traveling what I considered excessively, and I was constantly alone. I had the children, thank God. But I started living two lives, one life when Jac was home in New York, the other when he was traveling.
Jac had difficulties socially. He liked having people over to our house. But that was his turf. Otherwise, we would be going to a party, and it would be people he knew and liked, and I swear, as we were standing ringing the bell he would say to me, "What time can we leave?" I had other friends who didn't like Jac particularly, and I would see those people when he was out of town.
So things had started to fall apart. The business was fine, but his personal thing—I think there were major issues left over from his childhood that had never gotten resolved. And money doesn't resolve those things. It's only the beginning. In fact, it presented more problems. What's the next big deal? How am I going to live? It goes on and on.
I said to myself, "What do I have here that I won't have if I'm not here?" And I thought to myself, "I know that I'll get an OK settlement, so financially that's not an issue. I will still have my children, so that's not an issue. I'll still have my friends. So what is it that I won't have?" I wouldn't have Elektra, and Elektra was very important to me. But then again I knew I would move out to California, and there was an office out there, so I wouldn't be completely detached from it. And I wouldn't have Jac. But there wasn't enough joy at that point. I decided that I would keep trying for another year. But there came a point—
JAC: To do more you need more people, and they bring people with them, and more artists, and the company just began to balloon. Though it put on more muscle, it also put on fat. And sometimes the fat and the muscle were on the same person. The problems were multiplied along with the opportunities and it was a strain to always be the good shepherd.
If your batting average in any field of endeavor is better than .500, everyone thinks you're a genius and wants to clip off a little piece of the hem of your garment as a talisman. To everyone at Elektra I was something different, because each one had needs that were different. In the sense of giving—or trying to give—everyone what they needed in the way of support, I lost my own center.
I felt reintegrated only when I heard music that justified the turmoil I was living through. It was a lonely existence. This was far too buried for me to fully understand myself. Nina was the only person I could talk to, but by early 1967 we had begun to lead separate lives, hanging in there out of love for the company and a sense of responsibility to the children.
By the spring of 1968 I felt disillusioned, unable to articulate the problem, but knowing in my gut that I was at a profound dis-ease with myself and the company I had created. There comes a point when you are no longer in control. Instead of riding the tiger, the tiger rides you. Elektra was getting away from me, and my reaction was to get away from it, to escape an organization in which I found my influence waning. So I said to Nina, "I don't want to do this any more. Why don't you try it for a while?"
NINA HOLZMAN: His intention was to go away for a year, go around the world or something, and he wanted me to run the company. That freaked me out. I didn't feel I was up to doing it. And I didn't want the responsibility. After all, I had two kids. I said, "What are you talking about? No way."
Looking back, I think Jac was probably having a nervous breakdown. He had worked so hard and in such a concentrated way for so many years, and he didn't know how to relax. That was not in his repertoire at all. So he just drove himself unmercifully, and took on all this responsibility, and he just broke. He was totally and completely emotionally burned out.
But right then I didn't understand his emotional state. To me it was a bit cavalier, to think that he could pull up, leave a company he had spent eighteen tough years building, and that he was in effect abandoning our family.
JAC: I don't think I meant a year literally, it was just something I blurted out, hyperbole to make my point, but it frightened Nina. She had never seen me come so unglued. I was acting wacko, and it scared her right down to her sandals.
Nina called our family friend and counselor Irwin Russell. By the time Irwin arrived I was calmer, but still feeling trapped in a zoo of my own making. I had to get away, find some perspective, clean my head.
We worked it out that I would take off for eight to ten weeks, traveling by sea as much of the time as possible. The vastness of the ocean has always had a quieting effect on me, so I decided to sail on the President Roosevelt from San Francisco to Yokohama, then to Hong Kong, then fly to my fantasy islands of Tahiti and the South Pacific, to walk the beach in quiet contemplation, and eventually return to New York.
JANICE KENNER: How did I get to Paxton? I'm in Laguna Beach with Connie Di Nardo, and Jackson calls.
CONNIE DI NARDO: We were in this commune that had something to do with Timothy Leary—
JANICE KENNER:—The Brotherhood of something. They had the first head shop in California, called Mystic Arts, incense and paraphernalia and clothes and beads. I didn't know I was on the cutting edge, all I knew is that I just happened to be there. I worked in the bead store. I took so many psychedelics—I mean I was just hallucinating. We had these little trays of beads, beautiful, they were constantly flying through the air.
So Jackson calls: "Come to Paxton." I said, "How am I going to get there?" Jackson says, "It's all arranged, your tickets. Just go to Elektra and pick them up." I said, "Well, I'm not coming unless I can bring Connie." He says, "Bring her, the more the merrier." So I say to Connie, "What do we have to lose? Let's go up there. This'll be fun." And I was so in love with Jackson.
I had fallen in love with him when I was just at the end of high school. I was obsessed with him. That's all I wanted to do, was be with him. I was living with my parents in Seal Beach and he would come down. He had nothing, just a Volkswagen bus. He had big holes in his shoes. He slept on our couch one night, and my mom was like, "Oh, the long hair; oh, my God, what has she brought home now?"
We were just two people who fell in love very young. When we lived together he weighed about ninety pounds, wet, and he had his guitar, and he got his first piano and taught himself to play, and he stayed at home writing songs, from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to sleep. He was a musician, and I kind of feel that was his destiny, there was nothing else he could have done.
CONNIE DI NARDO: We would go see him sing in these little guitar shops, and there would be like twenty people, mostly women of course. Just Jackson and his guitar, and we would all be in tears, because he would be singing these sad songs that he wrote that would be just beautiful.
JAC: We had signed Jackson as a songwriter when he was seventeen.
JANICE KENNER: I always knew in my heart that Jackson was incredibly talented. To me that was such a special gift, magic, and I have to admit I was like a moth to a flame, before Paxton and again after Paxton. While he was writing I would draw all these pictures, and I wore these beautiful vintage Eighteen Nineties clothes, I got them at thrift stores, I had a real collection, and I would walk around like Greta Garbo, Jackson saying, "Take them off and throw them on the floor and draw nude," and he'd be there playing the guitar. It was so amazingly romantic.
We were on and off, off and on, but always passionately drawn to each other. When he called to say, "Come to Paxton," we were apart, but it took me about three seconds to decide.
JACKSON BROWNE: It was kind of like bringing in the dance hall girls for the miners.
CONNIE DI NARDO: They did their music, and we did our little housekeeping thing. They ate and we cooked.
MARTY RICHMOND: The first thing, when the girls got here they baked enormous batches of cookies which, when we went to town, we would hand out to the merchants, all prettily wrapped, and the sheriff wouldn't touch them, he was sure they had marijuana or acid in them.
JACKSON BROWNE: The girls liked to scandalize the people in Quincy by going into town wearing leopard-skin tights.
CONNIE DI NARDO: Leopard Capris, and aviator sun glasses and high heels. We didn't wear underwear, at least not all the time.
JACKSON BROWNE: They would go there in all their glory. Janice—really beautiful, incredibly kinky blonde hair like a lion's mane—looked like Jean Harlow just got out of the car and is now shopping in your mini-mart. Gorgeous open-faced beauty. A wildly exquisite girl. She imparted such goodness, like a Marilyn thing, this goodness-and-badness sexiness, but cleverly. She dazzled you. There was like a trail of open jaws as she left the market and got back in the car.
JANICE KENNER: They would cross the street not to pass us, because we were not the norm up there at all, we were an aberration.
JACKSON BROWNE: There was sort of a legend in Quincy about the goings on up at the old hotel.
CONNIE DI NARDO: A lot of us wanted to sleep with Ned. One time we told Ned his room was on fire so we could get up to his bedroom. I think he knew his room wasn't on fire.
NED DOHENY: After I moved out of a cabin and into the house, I selected one of the rooms in the attic because it had gables. We labored and dragged in a tub. We discovered that by moving several of the boards in my bathroom you could look down into the bathroom below. So not only did I have my own tub, I had a commanding view of the other tub. And I saw things that were real showstoppers.
WILLIE MURPHY: There were all these hippie girls and stuff that would wanna give guys baths.
CONNIE DI NARDO: Lottie Olcott was there when Janice and I came. Pale skin, blue eyes, turned-up nose, straight blonde hair. Small-boned, like a bird—she had the tiniest wrists in the world, you could put your finger round it. Real long legs, all legs, real ballerina-looking. She had always been a dancer. Her room was on the top floor, and they had fixed up a barre and a mirror for her. She was really just light and airy, sweet and gentle. Real hippie.
DAVID ANDERLE: I have a picture from Paxton, of a couple of the girls that were real friends, and they were, like, nude, posed and happy, and, you know, this is it.
WILLIE MURPHY: There were a lot of people's friends there, people I'd call hangers-on.
MARTY RICHMOND: Friends of Frazier's who came up from LA mainly on the lure of a free party.
FRAZIER MOHAWK: There were a couple of motel maids. There was one girl who wrote some of the strangest songs, who was a librarian.
JACKSON BROWNE: Annie the Junkie came up. She lived in Laurel Canyon. She was married to a jazz musician. He basically lived in New York and sent her money. She had these beautiful mulatto children. She was responsible, she always had someone looking after the kids. The kids didn't know she was a junkie. She was smart, so smart and good, a soulful woman, but strung out, a casualty of having been exposed to jazz and drugs, beautiful, soulful, with pancake makeup on the back of her hands. She was going to kick at Paxton.
NED DOHENY: It was the first time I had really been away from home. My parents probably pictured some sort of organized summer camp situation, people in cowboy hats and horses. It was definitely a lot more than that. It was a strange time for a human being to try and figure himself out. Most of us had the discipline of children. Our attention was grabbed by all sorts of strange things as we were seduced first in one direction and then another. Traditionally the late teens and early twenties are spent in college. We were in a very strange college. A big fireplace filled with roaring logs, nymphets dancing around, ferocious marijuana.
WILLIE MURPHY: In the middle of the living room table there was a great big wooden box that was always full of hashish and pot and stuff. It was a lot of fun hanging out, staying up to seven or eight or nine in the morning, talking to people, getting high.
MARTY RICHMOND: Roger Di Fiore was the champion joint roller as well as being the official chief cook. Roger was a friend and confidant of Barry Friedman throughout many of his early Hollywood exploits; at one point they had a direct phone line between their houses to eliminate the effort of dialing.
The Paxton "inmates." (back, left to right) Lottie Olcott, Sandy Konikoff, Jack Wilce, Marty Richmond, Jac. (front, left to right) Steven Solberg, Jackson Browne, Ned Doheny, Rolf Kempf, Peter Hodgson. Frazier Mohawk on right holding rifle
Roger was one of the great road managers for rock and roll bands. He could keep the group on the road, in the right city, at the right time on the right day—difficult—while keeping them out of jail after the destruction of a motel room—more difficult. The last tour had turned his hair prematurely grey. He was in early retirement. He came along to Paxton for the rest and relaxation he sorely needed, spending many a long hard day lying on his bed listening to his large collection of audio tapes of WC Fields movies over and over, laughing in the same places over and over. And he could and frequently did spend hours rolling joints, turning out as many as fifty at a sitting, each a perfect clone of the last.
He introduced us to the morning joint syndrome by each night placing two freshly rolled joints by each of our beds, one for before bed, one for upon waking. Often this meant trying to get up several times, each time smoking a little more and drifting off again. It's amazing that neither the lodge nor any of us were burned to the ground. Awaking in this way certainly does put a different light on the day. Following the morning joint, the after-breakfast joint, then the mid-morning joint, then the lunch joint . . . The day is in effect over before it begins. We went through a kilo and a half of grass a week.
JACKSON BROWNE: To tell you the truth, I don't remember making much music. I suppose we must have, but I don't remember. It wasn't wild drugs all the time, mostly just a daily haze, but I don't remember making much music.
JAC: For my getaway cruise, I had flown to San Francisco and boarded the President Roosevelt, one of the last passenger ships of the American President Lines, with stops in Honolulu, Yokohama and Hong Kong. Waiting for me in my cabin was a cable from Nina, wishing me a wonderful trip, with her hopes that I would find what I was looking for. To have her blessing, even though I knew she was in such pain, was the start of healing.
I had booked the largest cabin, the Lanai Suite, which, for all its trying for something approaching opulence, had a bunk too short for my frame and a lot of bad art. But it did have the loftiest cabin, opening to a tiny veranda—a lanai—where I would spend hours, quietly watching the ocean pass beneath our keel.
We were not long out to sea when I heard a knock at the cabin door. A young purser, Kim von Tempski, was standing there in his starched white uniform. He handed me a thick envelope that gave off a sensual crunch. "The crew and I thought that, of all the passengers, you might especially enjoy this." Inside was some of the most beautiful dope I had ever seen or smelled, Thai Stick, the Courvoisier of smoke, neatly laid out in spindles of massive potency.
Later, when I asked Kim why I had been chosen as President Roosevelt cannabis honoree, he mentioned a recent issue of Life magazine, with a story about Elektra, photographed by Alfred Eisenstadt, following the fortunes of Paul Rothchild's latest discovery, a group called Ars Nova, made up of classical musicians, playing rock with medieval overtones. Viewed from mid-Pacific, all that seemed so far away, not of my world at that moment. Nothing was easier or more pleasurable than to let it drift away in a cocoon of Thai Stick. Ars Nova was not a success, but that article brought me the Thai Stick and, more importantly, a long friendship with Kim von Tempski that was to lead in several life-changing directions.
One evening, as Kim and I were lounging on the forward deck under a canopy of shimmering stars, he told me of growing up on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Kim was so enthusiastic for me to see Maui that I decided to leave the ship at Honolulu, fly to the island, and catch up with the President Roosevelt when it docked in Yokohama.
The Maui magic sunset of 1968
The morning of our Hawaii landfall I was up on the bridge deck very early. With the sun just beginning its climb on the eastern horizon, the sky was cloudless, except for the far distance, where cottony tufts of white floated over a small mountainous area. As the ship closed the distance, the mountain defined itself as Diamond Head. I felt the same sense of wonder that every explorer who encountered these islands for the first time must have felt: beauty and peace and splendid isolation from my troubles.
When I jumped ship at Honolulu I took only the minimum of clothing. I caught a plane to Maui, less than half an hour by air but two generations earlier in time. Renting a small Toyota at Kahului airport, I began my drive across the isthmus of the island to Lahaina, through sugar cane fields bordered by clapboard houses, painted a weather-worn hint of what was once a leaf green, capped with rusted tin roofing. With only the sound of the trade winds, my head continued to quiet.
Kim's hotel suggestion was the Sheraton Kaanapali, northwest of Lahaina town, on the beach, built from the top down, the reception area two hundred feet above the sand and all rooms facing the ocean. In 1968 it was the only hotel in the area and the location and initial impact on a mainlander couldn't have been more dramatic. Everything seemed new and fresh, existing in a world quite different from my own. I lounged on my lanai, sniffed the lush vegetation, watched the sun dance over the repetitive roll of the ocean, and began to pull myself together.
Hungry, I drove into town for dinner, and found a charming restaurant, the Lahaina Broiler, half on land, half over the water, with a glorious and unobstructed view out to sea. The setting sun was turning a deep, memorable red. I looked out at the serenity of the ocean, the waves gently lapping against the boats in the harbor and the pilings under the restaurant and could never recall such a sense of equilibrium in myself or openness to nature. I took the first of many deep, cleansing breaths. Clearly, what was happening in the natural world was far more important and interesting than my self-absorption in business. There was real peace here, and I could effortlessly learn to love it. Waiting for my turtle steak and brown rice, I made myself a promise, "In five years, somehow, I'll be done, and I will move here to Maui and start over. This is my dream, my commitment, and my secret." I took a photo of the sun in its final pause before being swallowed by the horizon, as a memento and a reminder.
NED DOHENY: If Frazier Mohawk had been smart, he would have broken the Paxton day up into a boot camp—nice, but a boot camp. He would have infused it with a sense of discipline. But Frazier was a campaigning loony who wanted to draw people into his orbit.
MARTY RICHMOND: We felt we were actors in a movie with a slightly deranged director.
JANICE KENNER: It was always kind of an amazing phenomenon to me. What is going on here, really? Occasionally you'd lapse into consciousness and you'd go, "Wow!"
NED DOHENY: Like the time Sandy recorded a percussion track with a microphone up his ass.
JACKSON BROWNE: Sandy Konikoff was a great drummer. He had toured with Dylan, he had played with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, he hung around with the Band. This older, wiser, crazy, great guy. Probably the craziest and sanest of us all. Kind of like the Neal Casady hipster drummer—Sal Mineo as Gene Krupa. Always talking about a tailor he knew in Montreal or something Ronnie Hawkins had done. Those guys were famous revelers. We needed a drummer, and Sandy didn't have a gig, he was cooking hot dogs at a stand in Orange County. He was a handsome guy. Had a beard. His hair was thinning. He wore this great Nigerian police officer's helmet, almost like a Shriners thing. Around the lodge at midnight you would hear a knocking sound outside, and it would be Sandy naked except for his Ray-Bans, baying at one of the girl's windows.
JOHN HAENY: We used a very narrow microphone in a plastic bag. I put the Cornhusker's lotion on, and found the masking tape, and got Sandy to take his clothes off and go out in the middle of the studio and play hand jive while we recorded him with the microphone up his rear end. 'Los Stimulantos,' we called it.
JACKSON BROWNE: I had been to the movies in Quincy, I came back, and in the dining room they're doing an overdub on somebody's tune, they're motioning us to be quiet, and there's Sandy with a cord coming out of his ass, and he's hamboning—
NED DOHENY:—Slapping his leg and chest alternately. It's a rural American rhythm. Glen Campbell does it real good, Mac Davis does it real good. A most unusual sound, coming out of Sandy. He looked like an electric rat.
JANICE KENNER: Tape and hair and balls, and I'm thinking, "This is Dylan's drummer?"
JACKSON BROWNE: The playback sounded pretty good, actually. When Sandy went with the Joe Cocker tour, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, they put it on the poster, where they had a bit about each person: SANDY KONIKOFF—PURVEYOR OF THE SPHINCTERPHONE.
JOHN HAENY: I have the stereo mix. The track is called '?.' You can hear when the mike fell out and we put it back in.
JACKSON BROWNE: Of course it was Haeny's idea. Haeny was having the time of his life.
JOHN HAENY: Actually I believe it was Frazier's brilliant idea. Typically Frazier came up with the idea and then went into his bedroom and locked the door.
JAC: After Maui I flew on to Japan, did a little business, and spent time in Hong Kong. I passed up Tahiti in favor of going back to Maui and began looking at raw land—when the time came I wanted a place waiting for me. I also realized that I could no longer avoid the real world. Part of that world was my family. I wanted to call Nina, to ask her to bring the kids over for a short holiday.
But after eight weeks away, I couldn't remember my home phone number. I would have to call Pearl. But then I couldn't conjure up my office number either. Elektra would be listed—that much I did remember. I called Manhattan information, then phoned Pearl and said, "I know this is going to sound funny, but"—
NINA HOLZMAN: I was in California with the kids for the summer, and Jac called, anxious for us to join him on Maui for a few weeks. We went, but it wasn't a very happy time.
JAC: I knew Nina wasn't happy, and neither was I. She was such a special person, and she loved me, despite my inability to return the emotional support she deserved.
To begin a new life meant I had to complete the old one. Yet I couldn't bring myself to tell the truth about what was going on inside me. I just let it go unsaid, until one night when Nina and I were back in California, dining by candlelight at an outdoor restaurant. My birthday was just a few days off, and Nina asked me what I wanted. If ever there was an opening to tell the deep-down, painful truth, this was it. For what seemed like minutes but was probably only thirty seconds, I said nothing, and then with all the strength of will I could muster, I blurted, "I think I want a divorce."
It was finally out. I waited for her reaction. It was quite calm, which told me that she had come to the same place but by her own road.
NINA HOLZMAN: A California lawyer we knew told us about Mexican divorces, in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso.
JAC: Within three days, we flew there from Los Angeles.
NINA HOLZMAN: As we were walking across the field to the plane, Jac said, "I don't think we should be doing this." And I said, "Well, I think we should." So we went, and we had this wonderful couple of days, the best in a long time. Jac bought me a beautiful ring, turquoise and pearl, which I called my divorce ring. I still have it.
JAC: In 1968 Mexican divorces were a growth industry. It took just a few minutes. A lawyer, a judge, some minimal questions, and much rubber-stamping—Mexico was all carbon paper and rubber stamps, purple as I recall.
NINA HOLZMAN: Jac thought it would be a wonderful idea not to tell anybody we were divorced. He felt that if nobody knew, we could continue working on the relationship and maybe he could make it work. I really think it had a lot to do with my reputation in the business. I was very well liked, and Jac thought that if I told everyone we were divorced, it might cast a bad light on him, that he was in some way inadequate, not able to hold on to the marriage. So I said, "OK." We continued to live together. I told nobody, he told nobody. Nobody knew—not my sisters, not the children, nobody.
