Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (7 page)

The allure of a record deal and some guidance from a manager finally outweighed Herb’s exotic reputation, and we signed a management contract with him. I grew to like him very much. He had settled down with a pretty wife and a little daughter that he clearly adored.

By this time, he was handling Tim Buckley plus Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He and Zappa would later start a couple of record labels, Straight and Bizarre. He also booked what were called “Freak Out” dance performances for the GTOs, a quartet of girl groupies Zappa had assembled that included the legendary Miss Pamela (now Pamela Des Barres).

Miss Pamela, undoubtedly the model for the character Penny Lane in the Cameron Crowe film
Almost Famous
, was as beautiful as a fawn. She seemed guileless, with an underlying kindness and a keen sensitivity. Never cloying, her preternatural sweetness produced a head-spinning effect.

Zappa was also something of a patron to the infamous Cynthia Plaster Caster, renowned for having captured the plaster impressions of erect penises belonging to the various rock stars she admired. She also kept detailed accounts of the experiences in a journal.

The plaster penises were housed in a filing cabinet in the Bizarre Records offices. When someone wanted to see them, Pauline,
the leggy, miniskirted British secretary, would pull out the file drawer. They would glide into view, trembling and shivering from the motion of the drawer, resplendent in their plastery tumescence. They gave the impression of a tiny forest, with Jimi Hendrix’s unmistakably distinguished as the mightiest oak in the wood.

Unlike his reputation, Herb’s household and office furnishings were tasteful and refined. In his travels, he had amassed a beautiful collection of antiques and Middle Eastern rugs. Everything he owned seemed to have an adventure behind it. Herb wasn’t very tall, but he was powerfully built and had an aura of willful determination that few would think wise to oppose.

One night we were watching Tim Buckley at the Troubadour. Herb was standing at the door with a clicker that counted all the customers who came in. That way the club owner couldn’t hold back on the artist’s share of the gate. Someone started to heckle Tim. Herb pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and shoved it into the guy’s ribs, told him it was a gun, and pushed him out into the street. He came back inside laughing his cynical, infectious laugh. His strength lay in the fact that if he fooled other people, he never fooled himself.

He took us to the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood, the famous “round” building that resembles a stack of 45 records on a record player spindle. We rode the elevator up to Nik Venet’s office. Nik had agreed to produce us, and we were given a boilerplate recording contract to sign. Nik was a staff producer for Capitol and had made some records with the Beach Boys. He was fast talking and charming, more Las Vegas in his sensibility than the Ash Grove folkie world I thought I had left home to find.

Musically, our band was very green and hadn’t gained much strength in the short time that we had been together. It showed
in the recordings we made. After the release of our debut album in January of 1967, Capitol sent us on a promotional tour of the folk club circuit that existed in the United States in those days. The clubs were really important to the development of the music because they provided an entry-level atmosphere where the artists could learn and get experience with audiences across the country. They also gave us a chance to hear artists in other places and see how we compared. That was humbling. We played Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. It was the first time I had ever been to the East Coast. We opened for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Cafe Au Go-Go in New York’s Greenwich Village. The air-conditioning was louder than we were.

In Boston, Bobby renewed his friendship with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and we spent some time getting to know them. An acoustic band, they reigned supreme at the Club 47 in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. People would jam the place to hear them play. Tall, skinny, ginger-haired Fritz Richmond played the bass lines either by blowing on a jug or by slapping a washtub rigged with one string and what looked like a broom handle. Using the handle for a lever, he could change the tension on the string to raise or lower the pitch. They also played fiddles, guitars, kazoos, and washboards with impressive musicianship. Men in the audience were simply drooling over Maria, who had the curves and nonplussed sexuality of Betty Boop. Her intelligent phrasing and sincere charm guaranteed that she would not be dismissed on any level.

I remember having a conversation in the Troubadour bar with Janis Joplin, who also loved Maria’s singing. She had been telling me with touching excitement about how the new dress she was wearing made her feel pretty, and she had come to the Troubadour to show it off. We got into a discussion about what we liked to wear onstage and immediately agreed that Maria was
the gold standard of glamour for the hippie/earthy segment of our society. Because of the phenomenal success of artists like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, earthy funk was God, and the female performers in the folk pop genre were genuinely confused about how to present themselves. Did we want to be nurturing, stay-at-home earth mothers who cooked and nursed babies, or did we want to be funky mamas in the Troubadour bar, our boot heels to be wandering an independent course just like our male counterparts? We didn’t know. Later, I did my own exasperated send-up of our confusion by posing for an album cover in a pen with pigs in the style of the character Moonbeam McSwine from the comic strip
Li’l Abner
that I had read in the
Tucson Daily Citizen.

Our first record didn’t sell, and we began to discuss material for a second attempt. I felt that the songs Bobby was writing for us weren’t good vehicles for my voice. Ken and Bobby had a conflicting vision of the band’s musical direction. I began to look around for outside material. I found a song called “Different Drum” on a bluegrass record sung by John Herald of the Greenbriar Boys and written by Mike Nesmith before he joined the Monkees. I told Venet I thought it was a hit. We went into the studio and recorded an arrangement for acoustic instruments, with Kenny playing mandolin. Venet wasn’t happy with it and said he wanted to hire an outside arranger, Jimmy Bond, and recut it. A few days later, I walked into the studio and was surprised to see it filled with musicians I had never met. They were all good players: Don Randi on harpsichord, Jimmy Gordon on the drums, and Bond playing bass. There was also an acoustic guitar and some strings. The arrangement was completely different from the way I had rehearsed it. I tried as hard as I could to sing it, but we went through it only twice, and I hadn’t had time to learn the new arrangement. I told Venet I didn’t think we could use it because it was so different from the
way I had imagined it. Also, it didn’t include Bobby or Ken. He ignored me. It was a hit.

The first time we heard the recording of “Different Drum” on the radio, we were on our way to Hollywood for a meeting with Nik Venet and Jimmy Bond to discuss material and arrangements for a third album. We were out of money. Our meager advances had already been used to pay rent and bills and repair Bobby’s car, the only one we had among the three of us. It still wasn’t running well. Somewhere in West L.A., something froze in the engine, and the car began its death cry—a hideous sound of metal straining against metal. We rode our screaming vehicle several blocks, turning heads in the street. When it finally refused to budge, we got out and pushed it into a gas station. The mechanic, who had heard us from blocks away, explained to us that the car, which was loaded with our guitars, Bobby’s huge acoustic bass, and, recently, us, would never run again and could only be sold for scrap.

The jingle for KRLA, an L.A. Top Forty AM station, sounded weakly from the back of the station’s garage. It was followed by the four measures of acoustic guitar–harpsichord introduction to “Different Drum,” and then me singing. We strained to hear it. We knew that it was getting airplay in San Francisco but didn’t know if it would make the national play-lists. Hearing it on KRLA meant it had.

Someone eventually showed up to rescue us, and when we got to Nik’s office and began to discuss our new recording, we realized being carless in L.A. wasn’t our only problem. Capitol was adamant that the new record be titled
Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III.
They wanted me to step out firmly in front so that I could be identified as the lead singer. No boost to band morale, it was the beginning of the end for the Stone Poneys.

We had been performing as a harmony band featuring Kimmel’s compositions and me as an occasional soloist. Now we had to assemble a repertoire that made me sound like a lead singer with material and a style we didn’t have, and we had to do it fast. “Different Drum” was a national Top Forty hit. To expose us to larger audiences, Herb Cohen had gotten us some dates opening for the Doors, who had just had a huge hit with “Light My Fire.”

In March 1968 we started the tour in Utica, a college town in upstate New York. As the opening act, we were well tolerated by the audience and the Doors members were nice to us. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger were all excellent players who seemed to be solid guys. Their singer, Jim Morrison, was moody and distant, and I noticed that he liked to drink. I watched their show with a great deal of curiosity. The dynamic between the audience and the performers was different from what I had observed in the folkier musical environment that had been my previous experience. Some individuals in the audience seemed to be projecting themselves onto Morrison. This was followed by a kind of needy, narcissistic frenzy that seemed dangerous and unhealthy. Morrison would pick up the microphone stand like it was a javelin and posture with it, as though he needed to protect himself from the identity-bending onslaught of the crowd’s adoration. I found it troubling.

Backstage after the show, some girls invited us to their apartment. Kenny went with us and some of the Doors, including Morrison. The girls were college students, earnest, young, and excited to have Morrison in their tidy little apartment. He had brought along a bottle that he emptied steadily, and after a while, he began knocking things over. The girls looked embarrassed, as if they weren’t sure whether or not it was an accident. Kenny and I were sure it wasn’t and hightailed it out of there
immediately. In the morning, we heard that he had trashed their little place, and a hefty bill was presented for the damages.

The following day in nearby Rochester, Bob Neuwirth joined the tour. I believe the Doors’ management sent him to be an auxiliary road manager to try to keep Morrison out of trouble. I had met Neuwirth through mutual friends in the Kweskin Jug Band, and he had also made an appearance in the Bob Dylan documentary
Don’t Look Back
as Dylan’s sidekick. Himself a capable musician and songwriter, he was smart, funny, and socially adept.

The next day we had a show in Boston. We went to the airport early in the morning to find that a massive snowstorm had grounded all the planes. Herb didn’t want to lose money from a canceled show, so we waited several hours while he chartered a DC-3 passenger aircraft. But we still didn’t have a pilot. After more time waiting around, Herb found someone who flew in his spare time—he worked for a used tire company—and was willing to take us there in spite of the weather. The turbulence was extreme. We were all green faced with motion sickness, and in a propeller plane, it took us two and a half hours to get to Boston. I had to dress in the tiny airplane lavatory. Mohawk Airlines had lost one of my suitcases on the way to Utica, and all I had was my wrinkled Betsey Johnson striped singing dress that I had stuffed into my purse. No shoes or tights. I ran across the snowy tarmac in bare feet and a lightweight coat, hopped into a waiting station wagon, and was driven directly to the 3,200-seat Back Bay Theater. When we walked onstage, we were greeted by the audience chanting “We want the Doors!” They were furious that they had been kept waiting, and their patience was exhausted. I sang “Different Drum” and beat it off the stage.