Chapter 17
Game hens and ganja ... Tales of a rascally remittance man ... A child of music is stillborn ... Life crisis of a teenage troubadour...
Welcome to Paxton. Jac (right), Jackson Browne (center) hiding in the trees
JAC: While all this deeply serious personal business was playing itself out in private, Paxton was heard from.
MARTY RICHMOND: The boys felt they were ready to record.
JANICE KENNER: The equipment was all in the dining room. Connie and I were the big cheerleaders, running up and down the dining room table. "Go, boys, go!" And they were all whang, whang, whang.
MARTY RICHMOND: Frazier decided to send Jac a telegram saying the time was ripe. We phoned the telegram in as a night letter to be delivered to New York the next morning. And the following afternoon, who should come strutting through the front door but Jac. It was his first visit to the lodge, and for that matter most of the Paxton people had not the vaguest idea of who this overdressed dandy was. Someone actually challenged his right to come walking into our house. He replied that it was his party. Frazier came to the rescue.
JAC: He handed me a brownie. I should have known better. It was tasty and loaded with grass.
JANICE KENNER: When Jac was coming—it's like, what do you do? Here the grownup is coming, you know. I only had one experience with him before this, coming back from a concert, and somehow it ended up that I had to be in this sports car with Jac. I was so uncomfortable, because he was—I had tons of respect for him, but it was impossible to know this man, he had this pale skin, this dark hair, these dark eyebrows, he had on this dark jacket, and he was just stiff. I was so intimidated. So now, do you try to impress him, or what do you do? I was really like beside myself. My role, being the Cancer that I am, I fell right into the mommy thing. "Oh, he's coming! We'd better serve something nice. Or should we serve bologna sandwiches so he doesn't think we're being extravagant? Nah—we're going to have Cornish game hens."
Cornish game hens—why this particular menu was chosen, I don't know. They just arrived. There were like a million of them, these little dead raw chickens, they were like frigging everywhere. All I knew was this better look good. It was kind of a groveling thing, almost, kowtowing. I've never been more intimidated or uptight in my whole life, than at that moment when I realized I had to serve a meal to this man who was paying for all this, and who I felt some compassion for, and guilt. I was probably one of the sanest ones there, I still had this little tiny sense of responsibility in my mind: "Somebody's footing the bill for all this, and I'm having too much fun. Something should be done. I should organize."
The kitchen was huge, hotel size, everything was Flintstone size. Three sinks like horse troughs. Every pan—if you fried eggs, you had to fry fifty eggs. The oven. So the Cornish game hens didn't take that long to cook. It was a timing thing. But I can't tell you the stress.
JAC: The cooking aroma that hit my nose was terrific. I looked into the industrial oven. Row upon row of Cornish game hens, like toy soldiers, browning away. A lot of them. More than should have been there, considering the fifteen or twenty people I thought were at the lodge. But by that time I was beginning to see doubles of everything, so I couldn't be sure.
JANICE KENNER: I think probably everyone, by the time dinner was served, was too uptight to eat. I have a vision of Jac sitting there alone with this Cornish game hen, and twenty-five of them on either side, with no one sitting there because everyone was too fucked up to sit down, or too embarrassed, or no one wanted to explain what we had gotten done or hadn't gotten done.
WILLIE MURPHY: Frazier went all out, whole hog, put on this huge dinner. The understanding I got was that it backfired because Jac was rather taken aback at the way Frazier was spending his money. Jac seemed very quiet, didn't say a lot. That night he had a long private meeting with Frazier, with people going around, mugging, "They're in the next room," wondering if it was a big heavy thing.
MARTY RICHMOND: I found Jac on the second floor, leaning up against the wall. I said, "Is everything OK?" And he said, "Well, I'm kind of afraid to move."
JAC: I thought a bath might help, the healing power of water. Marty had installed me in a corner room upstairs which had a tub, and ten minutes later a young lady came in, climbed into the tub with me and started to wash my back with serious soap and a stiff brush.
JANICE KENNER: Let me just think if I can really recount what happened that evening. OK, here we go. We decided to ply Jac with drug-filled Cornish hens. There were dancing girls, then there was a bath, and there were women with no clothes on, and Jac was like, "No, I can't, I can't, wait, please, no," and they cajoled him, I swear to God he fought, he was so resistant, but somehow they managed to get him in this tub. Now, little did anyone know that Ned Doheny had a hole in the roof and was watching the whole time, peering down into this tub where Jac, completely naked, stoned on Cornish game hen, was being bathed by naked nubile young girls.
JAC: I have absolutely no memory of this, Your Honor.
JANICE KENNER: I was told it happened. It doesn't surprise me. Barry would have done it. Barry would have dressed up like a girl and bathed him, I swear to God he would have, and I swear to God I think that probably happened.
JAC: A few hours into the evening, I regained my equilibrium and finally got down to my purpose for being there. I wanted to hear some music.
MARTY RICHMOND: The boys sat down to play for Jac. It was in effect an audition, because Jac carried with him the ultimate veto power from which there was no appeal. Already impressed by the speed with which he had answered their summons—in fact Jac never did get the telegram, he was coming anyway—they played their hearts out.
JAC: Paxton was an extension, on a very grand and loopy scale, of early Elektra—recording artists in their own environments, in homes that looked similar to the lodge, old houses with stuffed furniture and lamps with their orange-brown shades askew. That's how I made my first records. This was not a foreign scene to me.
I sat quietly and listened deep, the Big Listen, with all the concentration I could muster. It was the kind of bravura performance that comes when artists are eager to please, and know in their gut this is make or break. I had to sign off on the music or it was over, the good times would no longer roll. What I heard was extraordinary, and I was much relieved. Laurie Anderson once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but here are some words for what I was hearing: a solid variety of music, good melodies wrapped around real poetry, and the performances, especially Jackson's, had sweetness, spontaneity and energy. Just terrific.
That evening was one of those moments when I felt deep down that I would have liked to be a musician, able to be in that room and play something easy, perhaps a bass, where I wouldn't make a fool of myself. The best thing I could do was stay out of the way. I wasn't their age, or living that life, and I wasn't a musician. But I could give what they needed, permission and support.
MARTY RICHMOND: Jac loved it so much that he fell down, literally. Victory! The boys were all aflutter with plans of how they were going to spend the millions that their music would generate.
JAC: I had nibbled on another cookie while listening to the music. Suddenly I realized that I hadn't called Nina in the last few days. The Paxton phone was a rotary dial, and I remember working very hard to recall my New York number, 1 plus the area code, plus the number. Putting those three elements together demanded concentration. There were some 8s and 9s in the number, and the springloaded rotary dial would return very, very slowly, each click, sharp and distinctive, taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r. I had chartered a plane for the next day, and I had no idea if I would be in shape to crawl aboard and travel.
NED DOHENY: In the morning we got up and staggered down to breakfast, and Frazier decided he would eat fire for us, having been a fire eater in the circus. So he fashioned these batons out of coat hangers and wrapped them with twine and got white gas, which burns the coldest of any petroleum-based lighter fluid, and he put it out in his mouth. We were all hugely impressed. Then he walked out into the middle of the room, took an enormous mouthful, and blew a great ball of fire. Well, he had gotten too much in his mouth, and it came down the stream towards his face, and he was backing away with look of horror, and all of a sudden his face burst into flame. I was transfixed. When he came up from behind the couch, he looked like he had been out in the sun for an hour and a half, and his luxurious Pancho Villa mustache was singed down to a little triangle.
FRAZIER MOHAWK: Jac put me out. He threw something over me. It might have been a fat person.
NED DOHENY: Jac was so pale he looked bloodless. He was the color of powdered snow. He went out on the front porch for some time, while his composure returned.
Now I ask you, if you had just seen the producer of your recording project light his face on fire. . .
MARTY RICHMOND: I drove Jac out to catch his charter, to this tiny airstrip in the mountains. He was strutting around in a leather coat—he could strut great. It started to snow. There was a little office, locked. Jac got it open and went in and turned on the radio so he could talk to the pilot, who was wondering was anyone there. The mountains were socked in, and the pilot said he couldn't land unless he could see the runway. So Jac went out and stared at the clouds. And suddenly the clouds parted. The plane came down through the hole, Jac jumped in, they went back through the hole, the clouds smacked together and no one could land for another two weeks. I was impressed—this guy can part the clouds.
JACKSON BROWNE: I think Frazier was a flawed guy in that he resorted to manipulations and so forth that he didn't have to do. He was into being the guy that controlled the scene. It was all to do with some plan, but it didn't have anything to do with me. It was all about himself. He would give you a little bit of this, keep something back. Not good for anything that was organized around people's interactions. Music is a hard thing, and command in music is a hard thing to pull off, to put people together, but at the same time let it breathe.
FRAZIER MOHAWK: It wasn't very well organized. Everyone kind of decided where they wanted to go on their own, and the general consensus was everyone would just kind of go along with it. That was the concept. But everybody wanted to go to a different place at a different time. And there were a lot of people in different—a lot of creative people in a lot of different moods at different times. So it made it very difficult.
JANICE KENNER: There were all these little cliques. There was a Jackson team, each person had their team, either a musician who had bonded with them, or someone they brought up who was with them. There were moments when everyone would kind of go off in their own little groups, going, "I can't work with this person," or "This is not happening." But as far as everyone in the entire place sitting down and saying, "OK, what a joke, this isn't working, let's let him off the hook and get outta here and go home"—that never came up. Everyone wanted to stay. Because why wouldn't you stay? What young musician in their situation wouldn't have stayed in that place? And they were just blaming it on each other or on someone else.
DAVID ANDERLE: And it wasn't just about the music. There were certain hatreds, certain bitternesses, and people playing games with each others' heads. Multiple group situations where you put groups together, and there's multiple romances, and all those games start coming, and so much of the day is spent figuring out what you're going to do at night, and playing the games of position and possession and domination. It was just rampant. What was the blonde girl's name who was causing everybody the grief? Janice—oh, beautiful Janice. Everybody loved Janice. And Frazier Mohawk, who's like a master of the macabre, is in charge of this circus . . .
MARTY RICHMOND: Hanging on a thread of distant reality, life in the country began to take on its own shape and design, and more and more we all felt that we were caught up in events beyond our comprehension or ability to control. Time had flown away and we were in limbo. You had to hope that at any moment a little door in the hall would open and someone would jump out and yell, "Cut!"
FRAZIER MOHAWK: I don't know if it was any different than a health club is now. At that time it didn't seem like a bizarre idea, or a novel idea. To me, anyway. I mean, there were a lot of dentists taking acid then. It was a good place, maybe, to unwind and to puke out all of those things that you had been sort of saving up in the Fifties.
There were a lot of people who came up to kind of look at it. There was a guy, a psychologist who was a contributing editor to Psychology Today. We invited him up and he stayed for a weekend and just observed what was going on. We thought he might be interested in looking at it from the standpoint of—of whatever the creative hope of the place was. But we never heard back from the guy. He kind of fled in the night.
NED DOHENY: Winter was coming on. I was from LA. I had never seen snow. I watched the first snowflakes coming down and the snow banks piling up with my mouth wide open.
MARTY RICHMOND: We adopted a Christmas tree, a perfectly shaped fir, growing out of the hillside by the side of the road. We got icicles and some balls and decorated it, then got lights and hooked them to a car battery. We went back and forth into town, turning it on and off, till some trucker rammed it.
JANICE KENNER: When it snowed, the dogs would burrow in the snow. They were Alaskan, this is their instinctive thing, genetically. But these are LA dogs, what do they know? They're instinctively burrowing in the snow, but they're freezing their LA asses off, so we'd go find them, and they'd be like, "Brrr, we don't know why we're here, get us outta here."
MARTY RICHMOND: With the cold weather, more time was spent inside. Cabin fever made its appearance, and some had more severe cases than others. Then there was a biblical forty-day period when it rained or snowed every day. And a ten-day period when, had we wanted to, we couldn't leave. A slide took out the railroad track, and it filled in so much of the river with rubble and rock that the river took out the road. And the phone was along the railroad, so it was down. And the electricity.
So we entered the winter of our discontent. Outside, days of great beauty. Inside, nights of dark dreadfulness.
MARTY RICHMOND: One of the conclusions I came to about Frazier was that he had a great fear of success. As soon as it looked like a project was destined to succeed, he began to throw up hurdles in its way, either bringing it down around him or having it slip through his fingers. After Buffalo Springfield was put together, they grew tired of his antics and in effect fired him. Frazier probably provoked them into it because he knew how good they were. This happened so many times as not to be the fates acting upon him. The law of averages is often fickle, but rarely perverse.
JANICE KENNER: Barry was always trying to be a professional in the music business, and do what was right, but he didn't have the talent of music, he had the talent of manipulation and fancy, and there was this side to him that was so down and dirty, and he could kind of keep them separate, but so often they meshed.
JOHN HAENY: I was up there to record, to do the engineering, and Frazier was up there to produce. But Frazier at this point realized he had bitten off too much, he could not chew any more, and he retreated to his bedroom. He is the producer, and he is abandoning the whole recording project. I go up there. I tell him, "They're saying, What'll we do?" He says, "Record." Many sessions he doesn't come down, doesn't grace us with his presence.
JACKSON BROWNE: If I tell you that was irresponsible, I would really mean it.
JOHN HAENY: Frazier would issue edicts from his room and you would come up. This meeting he was taking his bath. He said, "John, I want you to produce Jackson." I said, "No. You shit in this bed, you're gonna sleep in it. I would love to produce Jackson, but I'm not going to walk into a mess that's this screwed up, this late in the game. I refuse. I will not do it."
JANICE KENNER: Everyone knew it wasn't working. No one wanted it to end, but yet everyone wanted—it was like, shoot the dog and put it out of its misery, but yet—
NED DOHENY: On New Year's Eve Frazier had a nervous breakdown. I remember driving with Marty in The Mouse, Marty's old grey 1948 Chevrolet, blankets across our legs, snow coming down, blinding, hitting the windshield, making it to the doctor's to get a bunch of downers so Frazier could keep it together.
It was a pretty devastating period of time. Remove people from all things familiar and put them at the mercy of what was both a peculiar error and the company of eccentric people in a galaxy far, far away—there isn't a lot of reality in that. It had no center.
We all imagined that we were the Beatles on some brave adventure. That part became tarnished, because if Frazier was the captain, the ship was in trouble from the start. I just couldn't participate in it any more. And I was bounced from The Good Ship Lollipop. Jackson was sent by Frazier to ask me to leave.
JOHN HAENY: Jackson was thrown for a loop, everybody was thrown for a loop. Jackson and I used to have conversations. One night late, we sat up on the railroad track. An amazing experience. There had been an accident and they were having to redo a big stretch of track, and they were burning railroad ties, every fifty yards a pile of burning railroad ties in the night, as far as the eye could see. We were a little loaded too. Jackson talked about his confusion in life and the mess he was in at Paxton, and what was my advice. It was a magical night.
JACKSON BROWNE: There was one time I sort of bolted. I split. I ran down this driveway, across the bridge over the river, down the highway. I got about three miles down the road and turned around, completely out of breath, and looked at this thing. Years later, I thought maybe I should have just kept on going to LA and told Jac, "I can't work like that. I'm part of the good people who had this smart idea, but this is not what anybody had in mind, and I don't want to do this." But I didn't keep going. I went back and toed the line.
JOHN HAENY: I couldn't see the album ever getting finished. It was pandemonium. I was through. I sat up for two days mixing down what was there, packed up the tapes and my dogs and went back to LA.
MARTY RICHMOND: Never to return.
JOHN HAENY: I was met at the airport by David Anderle. I fell into his arms in tears, went home, shut the doors, pulled the phones out, turned off the lights, and curled up in bed in the fetal position for about four days.
DAVID ANDERLE: I went up on a final fact-finding mission. It was a mess.
JAC: The music I had heard that night at Paxton was never going to make it onto a record, and if that was the case, it was time to put the wounded animal down. Most of the recording equipment and lights came back, but I'm sure there were items bought and paid for by Elektra, the ownership of which, shall we say, was deemed ambiguous by the Paxton participants.
MARTY RICHMOND: Somebody drove Frazier to Reno. There were commercial flights to LA all day long. But he chartered himself a private jet.
MARTY RICHMOND: We were told the album wouldn't be put out.
JACKSON BROWNE: It was badly played and badly realized. We named it "Baby Browning," after a stillborn child's tombstone that we saw while we were walking around the local cemetery.
CONNIE DI NARDO: Janice and I saw the gravestone and thought, "Boy, what a weird thing." But it was old, and maybe that's what they did back then. So we wanted to take the others and show them. And we couldn't find it anywhere. We looked everywhere, the place wasn't that big, and we asked the caretaker. He was like a hundred-twelve years old, and he said, "I've been taking care of this place fifty years and I've never seen a Baby Browning." One night at the lodge they were recording, and when they played the tape back there was what sounded like a baby cry. I thought, was it the cat? And they're saying, "No, no, the cat is in town"—there were two cats, and they were both getting shots. We'd play it back, and there was the baby cry, and that's when they were going to call it "Baby Browning."
JACKSON BROWNE: Each of us was let go and given our publishing back. We all went down together, and Jac was out a lot of money—the lease on the lodge, months of food and drink and gasoline, the cost of building the studio and renting the remote truck, on and on.
JAC: Suzanne Helms had kept a running ledger. Still, it took almost a month to fully calculate the cost. We had to pay for repatriating people and shuttering the place.
FRAZIER MOHAWK: There was a bill for ten thousand in damages. I thought we had painted some of the rooms in a quite unique and colorful manner. One of the colors was Hashish Green. Truly. Imagine finding that in a store in Quincy. But I suppose for a hotel, an old hotel, they didn't think that was appropriate. That was part of the bill. And we had sawed their big pink neon sign down. The guy was really upset about that.
JACKSON BROWNE: It was humbling to be back on the street and not have a record deal. I hung around my art school friends down at Pico and Vermont. I hit the Troubadour, the Monday night hoots. I'd show up and play, maybe sit around a bit, but I didn't want to hang out. I wanted to be taken seriously.
My stopping smoking dope had a lot to do with my becoming serious as a musician. For many others, and lots of my best friends, it is not a factor in their musicianship. But for me, I think I had a huge identity crisis. It was after Paxton, after two or three years of walking barefoot around Laurel Canyon and sleeping in people's living rooms and smoking the best dope on the planet at the time. I had this huge self-conscious flash. It was in Paul Rothchild's house. Who the fuck are you, really? What are you doing? All these incredibly accomplished people—here Paul is one of the absolute best producers in rock and roll, Haeny is like this miracle engineer. And what do you do? What are you, some kind of hanger-on or something? This is bullshit. I haven't done anything apart from sitting here getting loaded. What am I to these people? They're nice to me, they think well of me, and they'll get me high. And so what? Who am I? And what am I going to do in this life? A terrible paranoid flash. It made it really hard for me to continue getting high the way I had been, which was to stay blitzed. Smoking a lot of dope is a way to avoid coming to terms with work. So Paxton was actually a very instructive time.
JAC: Before the roof fell in at Paxton, two fine records did get produced there. One was Dave "Snaker" Ray's "Bamboo," with members of the house band and Will Donicht sharing vocals, guitar and tack piano. The other became a classic of the slightly spaced-out stomping school of roadhouse music. With Frazier producing, "Spider" John Koerner and Willie Murphy created "Running, Jumping, Standing Still," named after a British short film of great charm that was a favorite of Spider's. Allan Emig engineered, with Jack Wilce and Sandy Konikoff of the house band beautifully integrated. The credits read: Recorded at Elektra's Paxton Lodge on the Feather River, Keddie, California.
"Running, Jumping, Standing Still" EKS-74041
Barry/Frazier was like a rascally remittance man. You'd send him an ocean away, saying, "Never darken my door again," but there's a secret delight when he shows up unexpectedly at the old country estate, and you are forgiving, because he brings an excitement to life. What I admired about Frazier was his ability to set up a good game. That was my talent too: to provide the atmosphere, direction and support for people to play in a game of my devising, that worked for me and for them.
Paxton was a Potemkin village. Without honesty the music never could have worked. I was smitten with the idea and never saw the subterfuge. It was a form of arrogance from which I learned, and with time's passage the memory has softened. The Paxton tab came to seventy-five thousand dollars, the equivalent of perhaps a quarter million in late-Nineties dollars. Not a huge amount and not very big considering what could have been the reward had it worked. My long-standing friendship and affection for Marty Richmond and Jackson Browne are not to be calculated. And there was some terrific music, if only for one evening.
