Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns
sauna.’
Twenty years later, Geffen will sell his second label – one he modestly names after himself – for a cool $550 million. At the same time the first Greatest Hits album by the Eagles – the group formed by Glenn Frey and Don Henley – will officially be pronounced the biggest-selling album of all time. ‘David took the crème de la crème from that scene,’ says Eve Babitz, ‘and signed them on the basis of their cuteness.’ Not bad work for an afternoon’s Nordic ogling.
Hotel California traces the incredible journey from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era in the mid-’60s to the peak of the Eagles’ success in the late ’70s. It is the story of an unparalleled time and place, the first in-depth account of the scene –‘the mythically tangled genealogy’, in the words of writer John Rockwell – that swirled around the denim navel-gazers and cheesecloth millionaires of the Los Angeles canyons.
At a time when the influences of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and the Eagles have never been more pervasive, the moment has come to reappraise this remarkable group of artists. To re-evaluate, too, the powerful movers and shakers who shaped their careers: men like Geffen, the agent-turned-mogul who established an unparalleled power base of LA talent; his partner Elliot Roberts, manager of Young and Mitchell; and Irving Azoff, who made multimillionaires of the Eagles.
This is an epic tale of songs and sunshine, drugs and denim, genius and greed. The setting is the longhair Olympus of Laurel and adjacent canyons. It’s about the flighty genius of Joni Mitchell, the Janus-like volte-faces of Neil Young, the drugged disintegration of David Crosby, Gram Parsons, Judee Sill and others. It’s about the myriad relationships, professional and personal, between these artists and the songs they wrote; about the love affairs between Joni and Graham Nash, Joni and James Taylor, Joni and Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills and Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt and J.D. Souther. More than anything it’s a narrative of Rise and Fall – from ‘Take It Easy’ to ‘Take It to the Limit’, from the hootenanny innocence of boys and girls with acoustic guitars to the coked-out stadium-rock superstardom of the mid-’70s.
Inevitably the recollections of the story’s characters are coloured by their sometimes selective memories, not to mention their own agendas. As Tom Waits, who began his career on Geffen’s Asylum label, puts it: ‘The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened aren’t talking and the people who don’t…well, you can’t shut ’em up.’
Whatever the ultimate truth, I have over the past decade elicited invaluable reminiscences from the following artists, managers, executives, producers, session musicians, writers, photographers and scenesters: Lou Adler, David Anderle, Peter Asher, Eve Babitz, Walter Becker, Joel Bernstein, Rodney Bingenheimer, Dan Bourgoise, Joe Boyd, Jackson Browne, Denny Bruce, Allison Caine, Gretchen Carpenter, Cher, Ry Cooder, Stan Cornyn, Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, John Delgatto, Pamela Des Barres, Henry Diltz, Dave DiMartino, Tony Dimitriades, Craig Doerge, Ned Doheny, Denny Doherty, Mickey Dolenz, Donald Fagen, Danny Fields, Bill Flanagan, Ben Fong-Torres, Kim Fowley, David Gates, David Geffen, Fred Goodman, Carl Gottlieb, Barry Hansen, Richie Hayward, Jan Henderson, Judy Henske, Chris Hillman, Suzi Jane Hokom, Jac Holzman, Bones Howe, Danny Hutton, Jonh Ingham, David Jackson, Billy James, Judy James, Rickie Lee Jones, Phil Kaufman, Nick Kent, Martin Kibbee, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Russ Kunkel, Bruce Langhorne, Bernie Leadon, Arthur Lee, Steve Lester, Mark Leviton, Nils Lofgren, Roger McGuinn, Robert Marchese, Ted Markland, Frank Mazzola, Bob Merlis, Joni Mitchell, Essra Mohawk, Frazier Mohawk, Graham Nash, Randy Newman, Tom Nolan, Michael Ochs, Anita Pallenberg, Van Dyke Parks, Billy Payne, Robert Plant, Mel Posner, Neal Preston, Domenic Priore, Nancy Retchin, Keith Richards, Perry Richardson, Elliot Roberts, Jill Robinson, Linda Ronstadt, Ed Sanders, Bud Scoppa, the late Greg Shaw, Joe Smith, J.D. Souther, Ron Stone, Bill Straw, Matthew Sweet, the late Derek Taylor, Ted Templeman, Russ Titelman, the late Nik Venet, Joe Vitale, Mark Volman, Waddy Wachtel, Kurt Wagner, Tom Waits, June Walters, Lenny Waronker, Jimmy Webb, Jerry Wexler, Ian Whitcomb, Nurit Wilde, Tom Wilkes, Jerry Yester and John York. My thanks to all for their time and their willingness to revisit the (sometimes painful) past.
A major debt is owed to two people in particular: my editor Matthew Hamilton, and Hannah Griffiths, briefly my agent before she switched horses to become an editor herself. They conceived the book in the first place and were a dual source of inspiration and encouragement. My gratitude also to Nicholas Pearson at Fourth Estate, and to Nick Davies, who shepherded the project through key later stages. Also to Merlin Cox for an exemplary copy edit. Tom Miller of Wiley & Sons had much to do with the shaping of the book. My thanks to Euan Thorneycroft at Curtis Brown, who seamlessly succeeded Hannah Griffiths, and to Sarah Lazin and Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books in New York.
For assistance and facilitation, often beyond any possible call of duty, thanks to the following: the indefatigable Harvey Kubernik; Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde for their timelessly evocative images; Debbie Kruger for trawling through Henry’s considerable archives and unearthing unseen treasures; to Eve Kakassy for getting those and other images to me; Jim McCrary; Dede at Redfern’s Picture Agency; Johnny Black, esteemed keeper of the Rocksource Archive; Billy James, who corrected factual errors and made many helpful comments; Roger Burrows, who generously burned CDs for me; Eddi Fiegel, Barry Miles, Matthew Greenwald, John Einarson, Richard Bosworth, Paul Scanlon, Kevin Kennedy, Richard Cromelin, Steven Rosen, Marc Weingarten, Susan Compo, Carrie Steers, Jonh Ingham, Neil Scaplehorn, Richard Wootton, Rob Partridge, Val Brown, Oscar Thompson, Annene Kaye, Diedre Duewel, Tony Keys, Mark Pringle, Martin Colyer, William Higham, Paul Lester, Allan Jones, Ted Alvy, Dale Carter, Rod Tootell, Mick Houghton, Davitt Sigerson, Brendan Mullen, Andy Schwartz, Mick Brown, Nic de Grunwald, Erik James, Michelle Kort, Jon Savage, Johnny Marr, Ian MacArthur, John Tobler, Pete Frame, Julian Humphries, Catherine Heaney and Silvia Crompton. A special thank you to Simon McGuire, the heppest cat in all of Glendale.
1 Expecting to Fly: Byrdsong and the California Dream
For decades Los Angeles was synonymous with Hollywood – the silver screen and its attendant deìties. LA meant palm trees and the Pacific Ocean, despotic directors and casting couches, a factory of illusion. LA was ‘The Coast’, cut off by hundreds of miles of desert and mountain ranges. In those years Los Angeles wasn’t acknowledged as a music town, despite producing some of the best jazz and rhythm and blues of the ’40s and ’50s. In 1960 the music business was still centred in New York, whose denizens regarded LA as kooky and provincial at best.
Between the years 1960 and 1965 a remarkable shift occurred. The sound and image of Southern California began to take over, replacing Manhattan as the hub of American pop music. Producer Phil Spector took the hit-factory ethos of New York’s Brill Building songwriting stable to LA and blew up the teen-pop sound to epic proportions. Entranced by Spector, local suburban misfit Brian Wilson wrote honeyed hymns to beach and car culture that reinvented the golden state as a teenage paradise. Other LA producers followed suit. In 1965 singles recorded in Los Angeles occupied the No. 1 spot for an impressive 20 weeks, compared to just one for New York.
‘California was so far removed from the mainstream of the recording industry,’ says Joe Smith, a Boston disc jockey who moved to LA in 1960 to work for a local record distributor. ‘Then all of a sudden the Beach Boys and Dick Dale and Jan & Dean were making music that nobody else was making, and that was the hallmark of the West Coast.’
Simultaneously a folk music movement swept across America and reached Los Angeles. Hootenannies – small gatherings of folk singers – had been staged in Los Angeles since the end of World War II, but the folk scene in LA was scattered, with few performing venues to focus it. In 1957 local promoter Herb Cohen responded to this lack by opening the Unicorn coffee house on Sunset Boulevard.
On and around Sunset, west of old Hollywood before one reached the manicured pomp of Beverly Hills, clubs and coffee houses began to proliferate. Although LA had