Chapter 4
Prematurely laid-back in LA ... Lenny Bruce on Cosmo Alley ... A unicorn, a banjo in the rain, and a Louise Brooks wig
JAC: By 1962 the New York scene was looking very tired. Everyone was picking over the same turf. The major labels had wised up and were now sending people down to the Village. But looking for what? Nothing that I could see. It was all very gray. There had to be a lighter vision somewhere.
When the territory feels picked over I tend to pull up stakes. I started thinking about California.
There was a psychological as well as a continental divide between East and West. The West Coast was a world afar where life was defined differently. In New York nobody took California seriously, except perhaps San Francisco. Other than the four majors, no East Coast record companies staffed offices there. Records that were successful in the East tended to travel West but not the reverse. Television drama in the early Sixties was still New York-based, with most of the stories set in eastern locales. "77 Sunset Strip" was the beginning of a shift in TV consciousness from east to west. I had a hunch something was going to happen in California, and when it did I wanted to be there first.
JIM DICKSON: LA was a lot of fun then. There were only about a third as many people. In the winter time you could stand on the Sunset Strip, look down the end, and watch the moon, the full moon, come over the snowcapped mountains.
HERB COHEN: You could drive to Santa Monica and there was empty space. Westwood was a little village.
JIM DICKSON: It seemed more personal. Everybody knew everybody.
JAC: I was now managing Theo Bikel, who was very busy in television and films, many of which were shot in LA, and that brought me to the Coast often. Every few months I would jet out for a week.
LA worked its sundrenched charm on me. My routine did not vary much. In the morning I would head to Schwab's, have a relaxed breakfast with friends, drink an enormous tumbler of their freshly squeezed orange juice, and read the trades. It was a surreal Hollywood scene: all those wannabes with some tenuous connection to show business scanning the trades before they opened their newspapers—if they read newspapers at all. Movies were all anyone talked or cared about. Records weren't taken very seriously.
Elektra was growing and so were the West Coast distributors, and that relationship was important to nurture since we lived a continent apart. I was curious about what was selling, who were the best dealers, and since local radio was pretty much handled by the regional distributor, I came to meet the movers and shakers of the wig air waves. New York radio was by-the-numbers and predictably dull except for early morning comedy talent like Bob & Ray. The fresh, progressive style of LA radio alerted me to the major changes about to take place. It was smart, loud, full of itself and had a pulsing vitality. In three years they would be calling it Boss Radio.
Most of the independent record labels in New York got on well with each other and I wanted to extend that feeling to the companies based in California. Les Koenig owned and ran one of the sharpest jazz labels, Contemporary, doing most everything himself, including cutting his own masters on the same lathe that had cut the master discs for "The Jazz Singer." Fantasy, operated by Saul Zaentz, was based in Oakland and also specialized in jazz, and the "sick humor" of Lenny Bruce. Later they would be the home of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Zaentz would become a major force in literate motion pictures, winning Best Picture Oscars for "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," "Amadeus," and "The English Patient."
My days were mostly spent working on Theo's career, calling on stores, visiting distributors and looking up talent managers. These connections might make it easier to find artists, which was my primary goal. Friends showed me around the clubs.
Having a hungry East Coast record company soliciting material in California was a novelty. Slowly the submissions began to flow. Jim Dickson turned me on to the Dillards.
JIM DICKSON: The Dillards were a bluegrass band. They were the real thing. Most of the people in folk music sort of learned a few chords on the street. But the Dillards were from Missouri. They'd actually grown up with the music and were much better players than anyone in folk music.
JAC: Len Grant brought me the Travelers 3, sort of a Kingston Trio knockoff, who were great fun. The banjo player was Japanese-American, the guitar player was Hawaiian, and the only regulation white American issue was the standup bass. They loved to challenge the $2.95 all-you-can-eat restaurants and wipe the buffet table clean.
My trips to California were becoming so frequent that Theo and I decided to share an apartment. Our place was moderately upscale, a two-bedroom duplex, a block south of Sunset, on De Longpre Avenue, in what is now West Hollywood.
I no longer had problems with flying and the jets would take you across the country in under six hours. I was shuttling back and forth, trying to give Elektra a West Coast presence without losing effectiveness in New York.
Underneath everything, and coming to the surface, I was tired of New York and wanted to experiment with a move to Los Angeles. In 1962 I decided to do it.
I flew my B-33 Beechcraft Debonair, hauling fragile recording and test equipment I did not want to leave to the untender mercies of transcontinental movers. Mark Abramson, always up for adventure, flew with me.
The first day out we came uncomfortably close to hammerheads—large, anvilshaped clouds intimately associated with thunderstorms; so we put down at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, short of our first night's planned destination. Taking off the next morning at sunup, we scudded south under low-hanging grey clouds, following the gentle curve of the Mississippi Delta. From the air, the delta was exactly as I had imagined it and I started humming snatches of Robert Johnson. About a hundred-fifty miles north of New Orleans we hung a right and headed toward the broad expanse of Texas. We flew until our buns ached . . . and we were still over Texas. At El Paso we gave in, landed, and out of curiosity took a cab across the border to Ciudad Juarez. The third day we headed for California and touched down at Santa Monica as the sun was dipping into the Pacific.
We opened a small office, just east of where Santa Monica Boulevard meets Melrose Avenue, right across from the Troubadour. It was intended to be a West Coast A&R and marketing outpost with the main "get it done" responsibilities handled out of New York under the supervision of Bill Harvey and Mel Posner.
Nina and I and the kids took a one-year lease on a California ranch-style house on Edelweiss Drive, above Beverly Hills, about as high up as one could get, at around fourteen hundred feet. It was open to the sky and perpetually sunny. Driving down the hill to work in the morning I would hit a bank of low lying clouds that Angelenos referred to as the marine layer. It was gloomy weather for a summer day and hung over the city till mid-afternoon. Welcome to LA.
JAC: Theo Bikel collected a wide variety of interesting people to keep him amused when his film and TV shooting shut down. One was a former Castro "freedom fighter" named Herbie Cohen.
THEODORE BIKEL: Herbie was a kid from the Bronx, with those sleepy eyes. He was looking to do something, to open something that had to do with folk music and that would satisfy our own societal needs as well as the craving for the music. He said San Francisco had all those coffee houses, and it was all nice and structured, but LA had nothing of the kind.
HERB COHEN: I opened Cosmo Alley, by the Ivar Theater, jazz, with some folk on the side. Folk music was new, rock and roll was new, political comedy was new. Mort Sahl was very big. Lenny Bruce was just starting. He played three weeks at Cosmo Alley before he went to San Francisco and became very popular. Then Theo and I did the Unicorn.
THEODORE BIKEL: My name was quite well known, so I was sort of the shill, the come-on. Herbie was more of the entrepreneur.
HERB COHEN: We had Lenny Bruce at the Unicorn, and he got arrested. It was all about saying "fuck." You could say it offstage, you just couldn't say it onstage. The Unicorn stage was near the Sunset Boulevard side of the building. So Lenny used to open up the back door and walk out with a microphone with a thirty-foot cord and stand in the street and tell the audience inside, "If I say fuck onstage, the police who are standing there are going to arrest me. If I say fuck out here in the street they can't do anything." They arrested him anyhow. Then I took over the old USO canteen. We had Lenny there for a week, and the first night the cops arrested him and closed the place for health hazards, and then tore the building down.
JAC: I was a major Lenny Bruce fan and loved to hang out at the club. Through Theo I met Herbie, who managed a singer named Judy Henske . . .
Judy Henske
JUDY HENSKE: I wanted to be a college graduate. Unfortunately, I flunked out of Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois, when I was a senior. Then they said, "Because we feel so sorry for you, we'll give you a chance to make up this theology credit." They said, "You could take a couple of courses at the University of Wisconsin summer school and then come back and graduate." But I got expelled from the University of Wisconsin. I had this boy friend and he was a lifeguard, this great big strong dare-devil kind of guy, and I lived on the third floor, and he used to climb up and in my window, smoking a big cigar.
Anyway, I got expelled, but I met a guy who played the banjo, so I followed him to Oberlin College in Ohio and we became engaged. Then he left for India and he left me his banjo, and that's how I became a folk singer.
So I came to Los Angeles, and I was just a total beatnik, and I wore these real weird clothes because I was a beatnik, a rubber duck-hunting jacket, and I had really long hair that hung down way below my waist.
I was living with this gay Flamenco dancer friend and we didn't have any money, so I went down to this place and they said, "Oh, there's this little club called Cosmo Alley and it has jazz and folk music sometimes and you should go and audition there.
"So I went down in my horrible clothes and my long stringy hair, and I was sitting outside on a rock in the rain with my banjo, and Herbie Cohen came walking up, and he stopped and looked at me and he said, "Can you play that thing?" Because there weren't any chick banjo players. And I said, "Sure." So after the jazz act came off, I got up on stage and sang, and Herbie said, "You're hired."
I had some songs that really used to make jazz people pissed off because they only had, like, two chords. It was the opposite of jazz, honka-chonka kind of music, and I hit my foot and played in my hideous clothes and my horrible hair. And the waitresses would come by—they were jazz chicks with big long fingernails and real beautiful eye makeup and little form-fitting outfits, and I was just this terrible beatnik, so they wouldn't talk to me. They would drop trays on purpose during my show. But I never took it personally. I thought, "Well, they have their lives and I must live mine."
Herbie said, "I have another club up on Sunset Boulevard, called the Unicorn." He took me up there, 8907 Sunset. It was a very funky coffee house. Everything was black and they had female nude paintings hung upside down.
HERB COHEN: I have a painting in my office now of Deadly Diane, barebreasted, with very big dark eyes and shadows under the eyes and flowers. The waitresses all wore black. The freak scene hadn't started yet. Sylvia, Angie, Joanne, Sally Kellerman—an odd collection.
JUDY HENSKE: Herbie said, "I'll give you ninety bucks a week—fifteen a night, six nights." I performed in my duck jacket sitting on a closed-up player piano. I sat on the top of it and my feet were down where the keyboard was. I only had to do twenty-minute sets, but I only knew like maybe eight songs, so I would talk in between. "Well," I'd say, "how are all you jazz fans out there?" And needle them a little bit. Oh, yeah. I appeared with Lenny Bruce there. I opened the show. The Lenny Bruce audience were the hard-bitten Hollywood habitués. They were so hip, so mean—come on, the meanest audience on earth! And my parents came to hear me, from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, when I was opening for Lenny Bruce. Not good.
Ah, Unicorn nights. There were these horrible fights, where like drunken sailors would come in and start throwing chairs against the wall.
HERB COHEN: We had this Mexican waitress, tiny, four-foot-six, with her own deadly tray, steel, not plastic—if she hit you with the edge of it she could take your head off.
JUDY HENSKE: If you wanted class, you went up the street to the Golden Violin, same side, maybe three doors up. Or if you really had to have a drink, they would agreeably sell you like a giant malted milk in a plastic cup, with gin in it, and you could take it to the Unicorn. The Golden Violin had these big grayish plastic booths with pink and artificial gold accents. But when you went in it smelled. But it looked OK when you saw it at night. Like so many of us do . . .
Here's what happened. I did good at the Unicorn, the crowds liked me, and Herbie said, "Well, I'm going to be your manager now."
HERB COHEN: I decided to manage her because she was incredible. She was so weird that I knew it was going to be a lot of fun.
NINA HOLZMAN: She was Bette Midler before Bette Midler. Bette Midler says that.
JAC: Mama Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas modeled her persona on Judy.
NINA HOLZMAN: Judy was one of my favorites. She was very smart, with this wild sense of humor.
JAC: The great one-liner about there being three kinds of singers—male, female, and chick—that was Judy's.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: An absorbing entertainer. A very powerful personality. And the tallest woman I ever stood next to.
JAC: Taller than ninety-nine percent of record executives.
JUDY HENSKE: Herbie said, "You better go on the road." OK. So I took my banjo and I went on Trailways buses, playing all these little coffee houses in my duck-hunting jacket. I always had the money I made in my pocket, the rubberized pocket, it was perfect for money carrying.
I think it was, in a way, the most fun that I ever had. In those days they used to have places where the folk singers lived, going from town to town, like a theatrical boarding house. It was really fun because of the people that you met and the artists that you met. It wasn't like the music business is now, which is big bucks. It wasn't big bucks then. It was totally mom-and-pop.
I did great in Tulsa, I did great in Oklahoma City, I did great in Boulder, I did great in Chicago. Here's where I didn't do well. Indianapolis. I didn't do so well in Canada. I played once in Biloxi, Mississippi, and they were practically spitting at me as I left the stage. But I did great in Cleveland.
MICHAEL OCHS: I remember seeing her in New York at the Village Gate, opening for Woody Allen, who was relatively unknown. She was an incredible show person. One of the smartest women I've ever met. Some of her raps were as good as the singing, and her singing was unbelievable. She was trying to learn how to play the guitar, and she is like fiddling with it, and she would go, "Damn, I wish they'd make these things bra cup size."
JUDY HENSKE: After I had been out on the road for a while I came back to LA. I was singing at the Unicorn. Jerry Yester was playing guitar for me. That was a step up from just my banjo playing.
JAC: That's where I first saw her. That raunchy humor, that outsized voice—forget about breaking genteel crystal wine goblets, Judy could shatter tempered windshields in the parking lot. She banged her foot so hard, keeping time, she punched a hole in the stage. I wanted her for Elektra.
JUDY HENSKE: Jac came in and said, "Oh, we'd really like to sign you up." He was very white-skinned, dark hair, a good haircut, horn-rimmed glasses. And he seemed like a natural aristocrat. He wasn't your regular beatnik, let's put it that way, he wasn't a funky guy. Everything seemed to matter to him and he was very focused. He had on a nicely pressed pair of Levi's. And a T-shirt with a collar that was nicely pressed, maybe like a Lacoste shirt. As a matter of fact, I think he had his T-shirt tucked in. He came in the next night and he had this contract and he said, "We will give you an advance of $2,000," and $2,000 was written in. I don't know that I've ever had more than that in the bank since then. I've always lived on the brink of extinction. Certainly of monetary extinction.
Nina was just so well-behaved. They were both extremely well-behaved people, in a group of people who were not well-behaved. A lot of the artists they had were people who were not well-behaved, they were misbehaving all the time. But that's part of being a well-behaved person—you don't have to do it, but you can produce records from it.
Jac said, "Well, you can't have that long stringy black hair," because he thought, "Hey, she's too much of a beatnik, let's make her into more of a cocktail singer." So Nina said, "Come here, we're going to make you look just fabulous."
NINA HOLZMAN: I had a designer friend, and I kind of got Judy together, clotheswise.
"Judy Henske" EKS-7231
JUDY HENSKE: But I was a troubled beatnik, remember. I wasn't going around in dresses. Most of the time I had a broken collarbone from motorcycle accidents and stuff. I mean, I was on the other side.
My parents were very clothes-conscious and I had beautiful clothes at college. They bought me the best of everything. I had beautiful shoes, I even had hats and stuff. But then I got tired of always—it's like being in a monkey suit, and I was a monkey anyway, so why be in a monkey suit? So I got out of it, then Nina got me back into it again.
She was just wonderful. She would say, "Well, when I look at you I see a diamond in the rough." Of course, not knowing that's what I will always be, and that's my charm. She said, "Oh, well, we'll make her into a Julie London." She said, "We're going to make you look really beautiful," and they did. They spent all this money giving me this image. All these dresses from really fine stores.
Now I had the clothes but I still had the long stringy hair. The black wig was the final thing. Nina got it at Saks. This gay guy doing styling of all the models says, "I know how you'd look good," and he goes cut, cut, cut—"Tada!" Complete transformation. I looked like a cocktail singer.
Jac spent tons of money on my first album. It was one of his most expensive albums. And Jac himself was unfailingly wonderful to me. He was very encouraging and said, "Oh, I know you're just going to be our greatest act." He knew what he wanted and what he thought I should do. His idea for my first album, he found this African-American disgruntled jazz guy and got him to arrange a whole bunch of cuts, all my funky songs, 'Low Down Alligator' and 'Good Old Wagon,' but with a big band. A really big studio, with a big audience invited. We had one night live with this big orchestra, and then they went back and worked on the tracks. It was, like, sixty thousand dollars, really a lot of money, honey. Or no, I think one of my tracks was sixty thousand takes. Jerry Yester was leading the orchestra, and he was so jealous of my getting this record deal that during 'The Salvation Army Song'—my big song, regardless of how icky it is—he was conducting and he pretended to faint. He was lying on the floor in this gigantic studio, they had to stop all the recording, and I bent over him and I said, "Jerry, this isn't fair." And it wasn't.
On the first album cover they had me all dressed up, pearls, beautiful white dress with drapery around the bosom and beautiful stockings and shoes. And the wig. And it said on the cover, Judy Henske looks like this . . . But she sings like THIS, and there I am, still with the Louise Brooks wig but screaming, hollering. Which was the way I really was. Under all those clothes I was a very funky human, I was still the person in the duck-hunting jacket with the big rubber pockets so the blood wouldn't soak through from the killed birds.
I didn't care about the wig. I would wear it performing, but I never put it on its styrofoam form head. I would put it on a box instead. So that when I got on stage, instead of looking like, "Now we can make some money with her," there was something wrong. There was real mean sniping at me by critics. They would say, "Her hair looked like a mortar board on top of . . ." But the album was very well reviewed.
MICHAEL OCHS: Judy was probably the first superstar in the whole movement. She was the first to make Newsweek, this big article about this six-foot-one singer, and she'd stomp her feet so heavy on the floor that she'd go through the floorboards. She was this real Bessie Smith type gutsy singer, but white. And at this point everyone is going, "Is it ethnic or is it real?"
JUDY HENSKE: "Hootenanny" was happening, which was a TV show, and I was on that a whole lot.
MICHAEL OCHS: Herbie Cohen puts her in this movie—
JUDY HENSKE:—"Hootenanny Hoot"—
MICHAEL OCHS:—And they have her singing 'Wade in the Water,' in a Beverly Hills swimming pool.
JUDY HENSKE: Please don't search for it, and you must promise now to never ever watch it if it comes on television. Thank you. I try to exact a certain loyalty.
I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't want to be involved in anything. When I had to get dressed up in a little thing with a leopard collar and go in and audition for a television game show, I didn't feel right. Once they said in this nasty TV guide thing, "Judy Henske just acts like a befuddled housewife."
What I was interested in was the life of being on the road. It was really fun. And I loved being in the studio, because I got to sing all the time. Just singing, that was all I was interested in. I just wanted to come in, sing, and then go back to my life. I liked drifting. Other than that I was at a complete loss, didn't have a clue. I lived with different men at different times. I was one of those women, willy-nilly, blown through the world. The thing is, that although some people are aggressive enough to be an artist on the stage, they also have a deep bovine passivity. I would say I have. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. It's like I wanted to be dependent all this time, and all of these men, Jac included, and Herbie, were very much men who would take over. I mean, they would take over people who didn't want to get taken over, and I wanted to get taken over, so I was like a big plum. They'd say, "You're gonna do this and you're gonna do that." So I just said, "Oh, OK."
You have to be very smart, very canny, as a girl singer to get anywhere. You have to be very seductive to the right people, seductive on stage and also in a way backstage, to make it work. Everybody says, "You've got to take control of your life and you've got to take risks." Well, I always took risks and I never took control. My assemblage, the Elektra people that accompanied me, I let it go completely out of my hands, and it was wrong, completely, utterly wrong. You can't be there by yourself with one musical sensibility and then everybody else is going off on their own. Regardless of how good their musical intentions are, it's not gonna work. They meant well, and they wanted to make a beautiful presentation. But it's like presenting a chocolate cake on a mirrored catapult drawn by fox terriers. I mean, do you really want that cake? It's dessert, for Christ's sake, let's just put it on the table.
They had brought me out one way, and then they went, "Whoa, we better cut back." So "High Flying Bird" was a better album. It was a smaller band, more banjo and guitar stuff. It sounded more like a human being than, you know, a chanteuse. We got really great reviews. Because I was unusual, I guess. Except for Crawdaddy. It said, "Judy Henske continues to wallow in her own bizarre brand of musical jelly." And I read it and I thought, "Sounds like me, alright." And I was very pleased that at least someone understood me, and there's an insult that was great. All of the stuff that was written that was good I didn't really agree with. But I liked "her own bizarre brand of musical jelly."
NINA HOLZMAN: It's a shame it never did quite work with Judy.
JUDY HENSKE: It wasn't anyone's fault. Certainly not Nina's. Nina was wonderful. And Jac was unfailingly good to me. You had a sense that he was really excited about what he was doing and that it was really fun. And that's it—if it isn't fun you shouldn't do it. Instead of like now. What's happening now is, if it tastes good, spit it out. It was just that Herbie and Jac didn't know what to do with me. But then nobody did. They wanted Al Grossman to manage me, Dylan's manager. I had dinner with Albert, but that was all.
I have no idea why I left Elektra. That's business. I don't know anything about that.
JAC: LA was great for lifestyle. I wasn't much of a sun lover, but I was becoming more relaxed, dressing for comfort in jeans, tees and velour shirts. Nothing much was happening musically, and people still talked endlessly of movies and restaurants.
In retrospect I was a much duller person in Los Angeles. I wasn't challenged. Elektra was still without a clear sense of direction. I was paying bills and salaries, four people in LA, seven back in New York, but I didn't have my arms around anything solid on the West Coast to get excited about. What I hoped would happen in LA wasn't happening and I obsessed that my competitors in New York, the Solomon brothers at Vanguard and John Hammond at Columbia, were getting ahead of me.
Vanguard had Joan Baez, and she had been on the cover of Time. Soon after, the label fell into a hit single with 'Walk Right In' by the Rooftop Singers, absolutely perfect for the moment—an American skiffle tune with pre-jug band overtones. And was I ever right about John Hammond. While I was lifestyling in LA, he was signing Bob Dylan.
I didn't hear Dylan until I bought his first album, prematurely in the cutout bins at Wallach's Music City, the major Los Angeles record retailer. Music City stayed open through the wee hours and you would meet all kinds of offbeat people strolling through their fluorescent-lit aisles. They stocked everything: Latin, jazz, big band, classics, pop, and folk. And now Dylan in the cutout bin. Whatever my New York office had been doing about A&R, they hadn't picked up on Dylan. We missed him totally. It made no difference that his debut album had stalled; he was astonishing, and that was obvious from the first track.
This was the summer of 1963. After a year of waiting to surf the perfect music wave in LA, I realized that it wasn't happening, and I had better return east. Sometimes I dither about making changes, putting off decisions that need to be made until I suddenly switch gears and do them. I called Bill Harvey and told him I was coming back; then shut everything down and moved, all within a few weeks.
