Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns
Hodgson came John Haeny. ‘John was an extremely talented engineer,’ says Doheny. ‘He was also gay, and if we thought we were countercultural, that was beyond our thinking. He really had a great pair of ears, but he was very quirky and difficult to deal with.’ Later a group of foxy women showed up at the lodge: Janice Kenner, Connie Di Nardo, Annie the Junkie, Nurit Wilde and several others. For Jackson it was ‘kind of like bringing in the dance hall girls for the miners’.
‘In terms of girls, Ned and Jackson pretty well had it all under control there,’ remembers Friedman. ‘Ned wore a smoking jacket and was quite the gentleman at all times. He came from a long line of old money and he had that dignified demeanour about him.’ In the midst of all this, Friedman himself metamorphosed into ‘Frazier Mohawk’ shortly before the Christmas of 1967. Like some demented movie director, he orchestrated scenes of sexual and narcotic depravity that soon spun out of control. ‘It was certainly dysfunctional,’ he admits. ‘To call it bizarre might be to compliment it. It was a very strange place, and the people were a bit crazed. Plus there were a lot of very evil drugs around.’ The drugs included heroin, with which Friedman was flirting – and in which even Jackson Browne dabbled at Paxton.
When Jac Holzman finally came to see what fruit his $50,000 investment had borne, panic set in. The troupe went into overdrive, preparing a massive dinner of Cornish game hens. A wonderful and unrepeatable evening of music was staged in the lodge’s main living room but never captured on tape. Afterwards, as stoned as everybody else, Holzman was bathed in a tub by various lissom creatures, one of whom just may have been Friedman in drag.
Holzman flew out the next morning, thereby avoiding Paxton’s subsequent spiral into near-madness. David Anderle, who’d succeeded Billy James as Elektra’s head of A&R, wasn’t so fortunate. ‘By the time I got up there it was Wackoville,’ he recalls. The snow, which some of these Southern Californians had never seen before, didn’t help. Come December, cabin fever set in. Jackson Browne split for LA and then scuttled back to the lodge. Undercurrents of resentment began to be felt by everyone. Threatened by Ned Doheny’s refusal to accept his mind games, Friedman manipulated Jackson into giving his friend his marching orders. ‘I refused to be corrupted by Barry and so was asked to leave that group of people,’ Doheny says. ‘Jackson was chosen to deliver the note, but the beast was already dead by then.’ This crazed ’60s experiment was going nastily wrong.
Slowly, Friedman abnegated his paternal role in the proceedings. On New Year’s Eve he had a nervous breakdown, retreating to his upstairs bedroom and refusing to answer questions about the recording sessions going on below. John Haeny, struggling to mask his sexuality, freaked out and flew back to Los Angeles, where he collapsed, sobbing, into the arms of a waiting David Anderle. As spring neared, Holzman pulled the plug on Paxton. Mentally and emotionally bruised, as if they’d witnessed some unspeakable trauma, the company straggled back to Southern California.
‘They came back from Paxton ragged but never said why,’ says Judy James. ‘I never really did find out what happened there. I just knew they needed healing. I had the sense that our living room was where they could come back to and feel safe and secure.’
III: Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon
For Jackson Browne if not for everyone, Paxton proved a sobering experience. On a micro-level it suggested there were limits to how far you could really ‘let it all hang out’. ‘My stopping smoking dope had a lot to do with my becoming serious as a musician,’ Browne reflected later. ‘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…I had this huge self-conscious flash.’
For Judy James, Laurel Canyon became as much a sanctuary as a creative seedbed. It was as though California’s flower children had flown too close to the sun: victims of LSD were already being identified within the culture. ‘You cannot discount the incredible effect that drugs had,’ Judy says. ‘Holy moly! All these people who were so young they weren’t yet formed, who did or didn’t have talent, who did or didn’t believe they were geniuses, who were or were not conmen. And it was all wrapped up in one big thing.’ Early 1968 was about retrenching, putting down roots to counter the lysergic disorientation – not to mention the general political unrest in America. ‘Slowly but surely,’ says Judy, ‘people poured into the canyon. Bill Brogan at the Country Store supported us all in our hard times. He’d been there twenty years already when I moved to the canyon.’
Still holding court in the canyon were ‘Butchie’ Cho, Lotus Wein-stock and Tim Hardin, along with a new group called International Submarine Band, who lived on Ridpath Drive and revolved around a lanky trust-fund kid named Ingram ‘Gram’ Parsons. ‘Laurel Canyon just seemed to be the place,’ says former Bob Dylan sideman Bruce Langhorne, who moved into a house on Lookout Mountain Avenue in 1968. ‘The winters really drove people out of New York.’
Still in the canyon, too, were the Mamas and the Papas, whose John Phillips captured the essence of the place in his song ‘12.30 (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)’. ‘John began that song in New York,’ says fellow Papa Denny Doherty, ‘but he didn’t know what to do with it. When we moved out here, the canyon fit the bill perfectly. Everybody was up there, and all the young girls were looking for all the rock stars. They’d wander the hills calling out names. “We have a cake for you, Denny!!” You’d hide and peek out the windows hoping they didn’t see you.’ But it was Cass Elliott, now living in Natalie Wood’s old house on Woodrow Wilson Drive, who best defined the canyon’s spirit. ‘Cass was Elsa Maxwell meets Sophie Tucker,’ says Doherty. ‘She was a big broad who knew what she looked like to others, and there was no façade. It was “Hi there, come on in, let’s get right to real”.’
‘Cass was a major catalyst,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘You could drop in at her place any time. She wanted to feed everybody. She would always meet these English lads on a TV show and she’d bring them back to the house because they didn’t know anybody in town.’ Attracting what John Phillips later characterised as ‘a band of stoned hippie worshippers’, Cass kept permanent open house – even after giving birth to her daughter Owen. ‘I don’t have the psychology of the fat person,’ Elliott told Richard Goldstein, who described her as ‘Tinkerbelle, sprinkling magic dust over a grooving generation’. But deep down Cass was unhappy. In the company of David Crosby – footloose and fancy-free after his ejection from the Byrds – she pursued her love of opiates, including heroin. ‘There were a couple of good-looking guys that were schtupping Cass,’ says Denny Bruce. ‘They were basically there for her drugs. She got her little taste of cock and they got their dope.’
In any case, all was not well in the Mamas and Papas’ world. The group had closed out the Monterey Pop Festival but were now in disarray. Not for nothing did they release a greatest hits collection entitled Farewell to the First Golden Era. ‘They were under a tremendous amount of pressure,’ says John York, who played bass at the group’s final show in 1968. ‘They’d gone from being great friends to tolerating each other. There were moments where there was camaraderie, but they also maintained their own camps.’