Another Little Piece of My Heart (14 page)

I walked over to the limo where Brian’s wife, Marilyn, said he’d be waiting. The windows were tinted brown. Down it rolled, and there was Brian, eyeing me with suspicion. I flashed him my biggest grin. “Meet you in the tent,” he said warily.

The structure in question stood in his spacious living room. It had a very
Arabian Nights
vibe. I remember rugs, an oil lamp, and a hookah, or maybe it was just a joint. We got stoned; I’m certain of that. I pressed him to agree that his music resembled Fauré’s—I wanted to prove my point to the
Times.
He looked like I had pulled a knife on him. “I never heard of that guy,” he muttered. I switched gears, asking about those dazzling harmonies. Where did they come from? “Barbershop,” he replied. Yes, of course, the traditional heartland style, but hadn’t barbershop originally been a black form? And what about Chuck Berry? Wasn’t Brian actually producing a grand synthesis of American pop styles? I was tempted to point this out, but then I remembered that another reporter had been careless enough to ask about the black roots of his music. Brian’s response, as the reporter related it to me, was: “We’re white and we sing white.”

The Beach Boys were mostly a family affair, and the Wilson boys were sons of the great migration west from Oklahoma to escape the Dust Bowl. So the author of “Fun, Fun, Fun” was a spawn of
The Grapes of Wrath
, the first generation in his clan to take security for granted. It struck me as moving, even poignant, that Brian had crafted the icon of the blithe surfer, since he was a chubby introvert who never went near a board, preferring the safety of his room. But I understood his fixation. Surfers were the Apollos of SoCal. When I saw them on the beach, perfectly tanned, or when I watched them twirling in the waves, I grasped the transcendental element in surf music. It was all about freedom from the rules of life, the whole of your being concentrated in the act of shooting the tube. For several years after that trip to L.A. I subscribed to
Surfer
magazine, and I practiced the Atlantic Ocean version of the sport, though only with my body and on rather tame waves. With my voice muffled by the water I would shout a line from “Surf City.” To me, this
was the ultimate fantasy of plenty: “two girls for every boy,” except I sang it as “Two girls for every
goy
.”

Fortunately, Brian has survived the schizoid tendencies that seemed close to the surface when I met him. He’s still performing and writing songs. But it was his emotional battle and the intersection of that struggle with the acid-dosed aesthetic of the sixties that produced his most astonishing music. He was hardly the only rocker torn between the warring gods of art and popularity—merely the most erratic. He needed critical validation even as he rejected it. I suspect that was why, at the end of our rather inconclusive chat, he invited me to join the band for a photo shoot in Palm Springs. Judith and Marilyn came along for the ride, and quite a ride it was.

When I think of that weekend I flash on Brian running around the desert with his wife trying to corral him, shouting, “Pick up your pants.” He was high; so was I. (We’d stopped along the way to pick up some weed from one of the Byrds.) We ate lunch at a coffee shop that was playing Muzak versions of Beach Boys songs. Then we hopped on a funicular that took us from the desert to a mountaintop, where the baked sand changed to snow. Everyone rolled around in it, including Dennis Wilson, who, not a half hour earlier, had been frolicking among the cacti. At some point during that excursion, Dennis hit on Judith. He was too stoned to succeed—she claims. I wouldn’t have objected. It was the sixties; possessiveness was a cardinal sin. And winning the admiration of a Beach Boy was a dream come true for her. She’d grown up in a household where playing Hindemith on the stereo was prime-time entertainment, but she was a secret Beach Boys fan, just like me.

By the end of the day I’d forgotten why we were in Palm Springs. But I can still picture Dennis’s face as I saw it at night, in the green neon glow that suffused the porch of our motel. It made me feel like I was trapped inside a lime Life Saver. Southern California lighting in those days was a bad trip in itself, and the tikis that graced many courtyards put me in mind of umbrella drinks. But for Dennis this emerald excess was just another jewel in the pleasure dome. With his well-shaped jaw and sandy hair, he was the all-American member of the group, the only Wilson brother who wasn’t chubby and, as far as I know, the only Beach Boy who had actually ridden a wave.

Dennis had a soulful side, but it was hidden behind a well-developed set of sybaritic impulses. He never made it past the age of thirty-nine. In
1983, after a day of heavy drinking, he drowned while swimming in a marina. It wasn’t exactly a shock. I still hadn’t forgotten the trip from Palm Springs back to L.A., with Dennis at the wheel. “Whoa!” he said, clearly still high. “The road is doing these weird things.” I thought, If I survive this I promise never to do drugs again.

The piece I produced for the
Times
was decorous enough to suit my editors. I had learned to leave the viscera out of my copy after they censored my description of Diana Ross farting during our interview. (“Ooh,” she said, “my tummy is upset.” I thought this was a wonderful moment of self-revelation, but it didn’t suit the paper’s definition of news “fit to print.”) Once I filed the Beach Boys story, I had several days to kill before my flight home. I dreaded spending them alone. Judith had already left, and L.A. is a place where isolation can feel like death. At least in New York the odor of car exhaust is masked by garbage, but out here it mixed with tropical blossoms, giving me the impression that I was entering a room-deodorized gas chamber. But one of L.A.’s distinctive charms for a pro like me was the chance to party at homes of the media elite. Though I preferred the ambience of a crash pad in San Francisco, I couldn’t resist the invitation to cocktails chez Hugh Hefner.

I remember more about the driveway, which seemed miles long, than I do about the house, except that it looked unlived-in, like a movie set. I don’t know which wife Hef was on, but I recall catching sight of him surrounded by women so slick in their beauty that I could have varnished a car with it. He was the only VIP in the room; everyone else wore the expression of serenity masking envy that I associate with Hollywood. I suppose he had set up the guest list so that no one outranked him, certainly not me. I considered schmoozing up a
Playboy
editor for an assignment. They paid better than any magazine I wrote for, but I didn’t think anyone actually read the articles, and I wasn’t interested in competing with a centerfold. (It wasn’t the sexism but the processed quality of these images that appalled me.) So I retreated to the grounds, which included a menagerie with all sorts of animals. The wildlife followed me as I strolled along, monkeys in the bushes and even fish in the stream that ran through an artificial grotto. They were hoping for a handout. I’d never been stalked like that, and it was an eerie feeling. But it struck me as a metaphor for my role in the music industry. There was no escaping
the procession waiting to eat from my hand, and I was addicted to the feeding frenzy.

It was a troubling thought, and I buried it in a Mexican dinner, one of my main consolations in L.A. I felt incapable of grasping whatever made this city the metropole it was. The money was here, and so were studios of all sorts, but most of what the city produced didn’t seem homegrown. The local bands I’d heard were as artificially psychedelic as the flaming Polynesian fakes that were everywhere. There was no funk. Black styles were barely relevant to the scene, and without that scaffold everything just … flowed. If I’d been able to stretch myself I might have understood that L.A. offered a harmonic blend of folk rock and mellow jazz, which would blend with the more rough-edged San Francisco sound to dominate pop in the late sixties. The city also hosted a music milieu that I knew nothing about, until I got to meet some of the local singer-songwriters. They were bohemians without the New York defensiveness and the encrustations of chic. Thanks to them I discovered an alternative sensibility, different from the one in San Francisco but no less distinctive. The mood I’d mistaken for terminal mellowness was actually acuity.

I owe my initiation into the real rock culture of L.A. to a transplanted New Yorker who worked as a publicist and talent scout. When he called, inviting me to drop by his house, I assumed he was just another company freak, but I had learned by then that those people were often excellent judges of quality. And I was intrigued by the name of his street, which I remember as Blue Jay Way. I may be confusing that with the title of a Beatles song, though to me every byway in Laurel Canyon should have been called Blue Jay Way. I took a cab up the slopes, which seemed to my urban eye like a fragrant jungle. Music wafted from every door, along with the smell of weed. This was the lane where Billy James lived.

Billy was an amateur in the original sense—he worked the rock scene with a loving touch. He shared his house with a teenage son—I recall a sign on the kid’s room that read,
WARNING! A SENSITIVE SOUL LIVES WITHIN.
Many of Billy’s discoveries used his place as a mail drop and crash pad. They were not quite ready for prime time, but very talented. I remember a lovely woman who’d grown up in perhaps the ugliest stretch of California, the stagnant Salton Sea. She wrote ballads about empty landscape and hardscrabble dreams, so poignant that I
doubted she would get very far, even with a name like Penny Nichols, which she’d been born with. Thanks to the Internet I know that she now directs a retreat for singers and songwriters, and she looks like a vagabond troubadour who made a life—no small accomplishment. In 1967, there were many music strays in L.A, as gentle as the hippies of the Haight but more knowing. Most of them never hit the big time, and this is a city that has never honored obscurity.

I had much more faith in another of Billy’s clients, who would become the essential singer-songwriter of L.A. mellowness, Jackson Browne. Under his studied casualness he was a savvy dude, but as an Angeleno of the Aquarian Age he knew how to hide his ambition behind a sublime vibe. To a New Yorker like me, it was like watching the suave alien in
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Jackson was lean and chiseled without being done up, and he radiated worldliness. I remember hearing him talk to a woman on the phone, clearly someone much older. He called her by her first name and acted like a trusted advisor, giving romantic advice about dealing with her new boyfriend. Billy told me later that she was Jackson’s mother. I’d never heard someone address a parent with such blithe intimacy. He was an incarnation of the laid-back polish I could never achieve—I was all edge, and still am. I will always associate his song “Take It Easy” with my California fantasies of no-stress sexuality.

We may lose and we may win

Though we will never be here again

So open up, I’m climbing in

My most vivid memory of Jackson is the offhanded way he greeted his friends. “Taj Mahal, on the ball,” I heard him say to one of the few black musicians in the local rock scene, another of Billy’s clients. “Jackson Browne, back in town!” Taj replied. I don’t know why this exchange still stays with me, except that it’s the essence of L.A. style in the sixties, a wry imperfection, like the imprecise notes that make a solo personal. On subsequent visits I would notice the same quality in the L.A. comedy scene. I had a brief affair with a wealthy woman who’d given up her class privileges to become a social worker (though she hadn’t given up her BMW). She’d bought a house in Venice, which was still blessedly shabby, and she opened it to a group of young creative types, one of whom was Harry Shearer. Even then he had a gift for irony without the hostile edge
that New York stand-up specialized in. The same was true of Richard Pryor; for all his subversiveness, he never lost his affection for the absurdity of human beings. Nor did Lily Tomlin, or Cheech and Chong. Randy Newman has this same sly humanism. By now it’s been upgraded into a whole meta sensibility, like the city itself, but back in the sixties L.A. demanded
not
to be taken seriously, which was the most serious thing about it.

I’m sure Billy James hoped I’d write about his roster, and that was fortuitous, since he tipped me off to a local band he had recently brought to Elektra Records. Their name was an homage to Aldous Huxley’s book about his experiences with LSD,
The Doors of Perception.
This was all I knew at the time about the Doors.

Billy took me to the Whisky A Go Go, the premier rock club on the Strip. I feared that, with a name like that, the floor show would feature girls in high boots and miniskirts dancing in cages. There was a romantic mystique around these babes—check out the ballad by Gordon Lightfoot: “Only a go-go girl in love/With someone who didn’t care …” The girls were there, twirling behind bars on a platform above the stage. It was not a very big room, and that stage was tiny, as I recall. We were so close to the musicians that I could see the bulge in the singer’s leather pants. Jim Morrison gripped the mike, black hair curling around his angelic face. I knew right away that he would be a major rock star.

Morrison had a feral intensity, riveting to behold. But his persona was shaped by a shrewd sense of theater, and he sang with the measured ranting of a beat poet. The musicians backing him up—I was most struck by keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who looked like a groovy schoolteacher in his round glasses and neatly long hair—had devised a sound that was both tight and trancey. The slash-and-burn of rock might have fought Morrison’s wildness, but this style seemed to incite it. “We may look cool,” Manzarek would tell me when I interviewed him, “but we are really evil, insidious cats behind Jim. We instigate the violence in him. A lot of times he doesn’t feel particularly angry, but the music just drives him to it.”

The set I saw at the Whisky was stunning, and the first thing I did when I got back to my hotel was to pound out a piece about the
Doors for the
Voice
. When I returned to New York an advance copy of their debut album was waiting. I’ve already mentioned my blooper about “Light My Fire,” but I praised the record as a whole, and as a result I had easy access to the band. Within a year of watching them perform at the Whisky I was back in L.A., on assignment from
New York
to interview Morrison. I got to watch him slither down the Strip in a snakeskin jacket, oblivious to the teenyboppers fluttering around him. I also spent an afternoon riding around with him in a little red sports car, with his girlfriend at the wheel. I noticed that she did the driving. It was further evidence that fragile male rockers needed the support of strong women. That was an emotional necessity for these guys, who courted collapse. I don’t think I was introduced to Jim’s “old lady” by her name, or maybe I’ve forgotten it, but I do remember that she was an ad exec, not an easy career for a woman circa
Mad Men
. She had invented a very successful concept for Alka-Seltzer. The product was a remedy for “the blahs,” a condition that fell short of illness but merited medication. The term, she told me, had come to her while tripping.