B005S8O7YE EBOK (17 page)

I ran errands, gassed up the car, and got home in plenty of time to put away the groceries and unpack a few more boxes from New Jersey before I heard the school bus outside. As I ran out to greet my girls I couldn’t imagine how the bus had made it up the narrow winding streets of the canyon without scraping some of the cars parked in places they ought not to have been. I should have recognized the random car-parking as an early clue to my fellow canyon dwellers’ lack of respect for authority, but I was too engrossed in listening to my daughters’ stories about their first day at school. Then they dropped their books in the middle of the living room
floor, kicked off their shoes, and ran out the door to play Gilligan’s Island in the backyard of their new friends down the street. I was so caught up in their abandon that I had forgotten for a moment that I was a parent.

“Wait!” I called. “What about homew—?”

Gone.

It’s okay, I thought. Homework can wait.

Bad mom, said my conscience.

No, I thought defiantly.
Young
mom.

Amazingly, my girls did it all. They played at being Ginger, Lovey, and Mary Ann. Then they came home, washed up, changed their clothes, and finished their homework in time to leave for dinner.

The Sills lived south of Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, an attractive neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. In contrast to the grid of streets north of Ventura, their street, Valley Vista Boulevard, wound around the base of the foothills from Coldwater Canyon to Woodcliff Road just east of the 405. Valley Vista’s gentle curves gave the impression that it wasn’t really
in
the Valley. Each bend in the road revealed a new image of lush greenery and brightly colored exotic plants that fairly screamed, “Look! We’re even more vibrant than the plants you just saw!”

We pulled up to the Sills’ house, got out of the car, and were greeted by the entire family: Lester, his wife, Harriet, their four sons (their youngest, Lonnie, was close to the age of my daughters), their female collie, and six adorable, purebred tricolor collie puppies. The puppies were so irresistible that by the end of the evening we had agreed to adopt one of them. To keep our new puppy’s name consistent with the names of his litter-mates (all began with “Mac”) we decided to call him Macduff.

All the Sills except Harriet would attain success in Hollywood as part of the Sill/Kaye music publishing and music supervision
dynasty, now in its third generation. Harriet achieved her own success as the matriarch and fighting tigress of the Sill family. You did
not
want to mess with a Sill or with Chuck Kaye, Harriet’s son from a previous marriage.

Lester’s success as a music publisher was fueled by his friendships with various West Coast producers and artists. Like Lou, Lester had also earned the trust and respect of the Everly Brothers and other artists who recorded in L.A. but often flew back to Nashville to retain their original connection with their fans and their roots in country music. In addition to Lester’s ability to get covers, there was also his corporate connection with movie and television productions.

I had taken a great leap of faith across a continent. But it was clear to me that there was a wealth of opportunities available to an L.A.-based Screen Gems–Columbia songwriter, and I felt that I had landed in a safe place.

D
onnie had been prescient in selling Aldon in 1963 to an established company that produced both film and television projects. He had correctly intuited that the long-term prosperity of the music business lay in its connection to such projects. By 1968, though he still worked in New York City, Donnie’s business and personal relationships with L.A.-based luminaries had given him a significant jump on other East Coast publishers who were just beginning to open offices in Hollywood.

Had Donnie been willing to get on an airplane he would probably have become one of the V.I.P.s who lived west of the dividing line between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Driving west on Sunset Boulevard, the line was unmistakable. East of the line were stores, nightclubs, office buildings, and people clad in what unsophisticated observers might have described as costumes. Sophisticated observers called such people, not unsympathetically, “freaks.”

West of the line the ambiance changed abruptly. There were no stores, no office buildings, no clubs, and no freaks—only evenly spaced palm trees along Sunset Boulevard, grassy malls with carefully
tended flowers, and large, gated estates with rolling lawns and rambling homes barely visible through expensively landscaped trees and shrubbery. The sidewalks were virtually empty.

Laurel Canyon was conveniently located east of the divide in the hills just above Sunset Strip. Though the neighborhood included college professors, scientists, and journalists, most residents were artists, musicians, poets, photographers, actors, directors, dancers, models, producers, and writers who had yet to achieve a West Side level of success. Canyon furniture typically consisted of a single mattress covered with an Indian-print fabric that didn’t quite match the Indian-print curtains, a worn oriental rug, vinyl beanbags and cushions on the floor, and a stack of shelves made of wooden planks held up by concrete blocks or bricks on which there was a collection of books, including the
I Ching
and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and a massive, eclectic assortment of well-worn twelve-inch vinyl albums. A sandblasted nautical hatch cover or a large rectangle of wood on concrete blocks functioned as a combination coffee table, dining table, and repository for the bong—a water pipe consisting of a bottle or vertical tube partially filled with liquid, and a smaller tube ending in a bowl. The bong was used to smoke what law enforcement agencies called “controlled substances.” My neighbors called it hash. The décor was rounded out with guitars, incense, and candles. And no matter how impoverished the inhabitants of a crash pad were, they owned a stereo.

Shortly before the girls and I moved out west, I had flown to Los Angeles to look for a house to rent. Few things make me feel as ancient as remembering the two-year lease I signed in 1968 for a two-bedroom house in Laurel Canyon for $225 a month. The house was tucked into a hillside, with the garage at street level and the rest of the house above the garage. The stairs leading to the front door ascended between the wall of the garage and the
wall holding up the front yard. Inside and out, the house had a discernible California feel to it. The exterior walls were pale peach plaster with an adobe texture. Inside, the doorways were arched, and the windows commanded enough light to make the rooms feel bigger. The floors were hardwood or ceramic tile. There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room with a fireplace, a small dining area, a place for a washer and dryer, and a kitchen with a window over the sink that would reward a person washing dishes with a view of fuchsia-colored bougainvillea draped over a grape-stake fence. There were no large trees on the property, but branches from neighbors’ trees on both sides provided quite a bit of shade. Above the irises and calla lilies that grew in the lower part of the backyard was an unoccupied flat area with baked earth and prickly cactus that appeared to be a lovely desert ecosystem when I saw it in the rainy season but would prove inhospitable to humans the rest of the year.

I had chosen Laurel Canyon primarily because it was close to the Screen Gems–Columbia Music office, but with all the bands and songwriters living in the Canyon it had the added benefit of being a happening scene. It was the first time I had ever lived where the action was. Though I hadn’t considered that a necessary criterion, I didn’t mind. As if to validate the concept, one of my neighbors, Michael Schwartz, confided that he’d been one of the Action Kids on Dick Clark’s ABC television show
Where the Action Is
. His name on the show was Mike Williams.

In addition to the actors, musicians, and songwriters on our street there were families with children the same ages as my daughters. This made the Canyon a happening place for Louise and Sherry as well. With transients tripping along the winding streets dressed in outlandish outfits, the Canyon sometimes seemed more like the back lot of a carnival than a community. Still, enough families with children lived there to give the neighborhood a
semblance of normalcy. Our move had brought the Canyon yet another family with one mom, two kids, two dogs, and a cat. We weren’t the only family to lack a resident dad, but another super-important person was also missing.

Prior to leaving New Jersey I had asked Willa Mae several times if she would move out west with us. Each time, she had demurred. After a week in California I called to ask again. This time she said yes. Because there wasn’t room in our house for her to live with us, I helped her find an apartment in a neighborhood populated mostly with African American families. The three reasons she gave for choosing that neighborhood were social, church, and “I can drive to your house.”

Drive? Yes. Emboldened by her decision to move west, Willa Mae took just enough driving lessons to learn everything she needed to know to pass the examination in California. Inexplicably, immediately after passing the test she lost confidence in her ability to make a left turn in traffic. For the rest of her life Willa Mae would make multiple right turns to get where she needed to go rather than essay a left turn.

It was my extreme good fortune that Willa Mae was willing to leave her life and her friends in New Jersey and come to California to help me raise my daughters. Her consistent presence in all our lives made so many things possible. She provided a sense of stability and continuity for my family and helped mitigate my daughters’ sadness about their daddy no longer living with them. I’d like to believe Willa Mae’s affection for the girls was paramount in her change of mind, though I suspect that not having to wait for buses in severe winter weather may also have been a factor. Whatever moved her to leave her friends in New Jersey, once she got to California she never looked back.

Willa Mae liked her new neighborhood very much. She wasn’t so sure about mine.

If Sunset Strip was the commercial center of the pop music and club scene in 1968, Laurel Canyon was its residential center. Wanna-be rock stars and groupies waited on line at night to get into clubs on Sunset Boulevard, reveled in both the music and the scene, then crashed in the bedrooms of Laurel Canyon. You could drive along the winding roads of the Canyon any time of day or night and see people in varying degrees of substance-induced consciousness. The drugs of choice were mostly hallucinogens—marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD, or, as they were called in the parking lot of the Canyon Country Store, pot, shrooms, and acid.

As I drove up and down the Canyon in the Mustang with the top down, I could hear music from the side canyons competing with the tunes coming out of my car radio. I could never tell if the local music was live or recorded, but music was always in the air and on the air. Where there was music, there were musicians. Bands formed, broke up, and re-formed in different configurations. Rumor had it that some groups were being offered seven-figure advances. Musicians had high hopes that their band would receive one of those seven-figure checks. High hopes took on an additional meaning as the following scene repeated itself in the hillside houses during those heady times.

“Someone’s gettin’ those advances,” a musician said as he passed what was left of a wilted joint to the next person in the circle. “Why not
us
?”

This was followed by the sound of a deep inhalation, then silence as the second musician held his breath to ensure a maximum effect from the smoke.

“Yeahhhhh… ya know?” came the slow drawl amid a haze of smoke from the mouth of the second musician. “Why
not
us, maaaan? We’re the grooviest band around.”

Seeing that the joint was now too small for human fingers, the next man in the circle pulled a small alligator clip out of his
pocket to accommodate the roach headed his way and hoped that it would afford one last hit before it was consigned to the scarred wooden bowl that served as an ashtray.

High hopes indeed. But why
not
their band? Major record companies were ponying up millions of dollars for bands selected by their A&R man, and yes, as far as I knew, all A&R people at the time were men. Sometimes the A&R man came through big time. Paul Rothchild’s decision to sign the Doors on behalf of Elektra Records paid off handsomely for Rothchild, Elektra Records, and, oh yes, also the Doors.

One of the more colorful Canyon residents was Barry Friedman. Barry lived in a house on Ridpath Drive with a pool and deck populated day and night with nude and seminude people smoking pot. I had no firsthand knowledge of this until, after seeing Louise and Sherry off to school one day, I drove to Barry’s house to visit a friend, a musician from New York who was staying there. I arrived just in time to hear Barry, whom I had not previously met, announce that from that day forward he would be known as Frazier Mohawk. Just then my friend got up from his poolside chair to greet me. I observed with gratitude that he was wearing a bathing suit, and I also noted that no one among the group to whom Barry had just addressed his intention seemed to care enough to comment.

Barry’s wife, Sandy Hurvitz, was a singer who had opened for the Mothers of Invention. Audience members who had come to see the Mothers left as fans of Sandy as well as the Mothers. Soon after Barry became Frazier Mohawk, Sandy began calling herself Essra Mohawk. I remember Essra mostly as a wraithlike figure wafting from room to room, but she had enough substance to write songs for other artists and record a number of albums herself.

Some Laurel Canyon residents were already famous. Others were on their way to becoming famous. Graham Nash wrote “
Our House
” about
the little house off Lookout Mountain in which he and Joni Mitchell lived together. Frank Zappa occupied Tom Mix’s “Log Cabin” on the corner of Lookout and Laurel Canyon. Some of the Byrds lived on Horseshoe Canyon just below the Wonderland Avenue Elementary School. One Byrd provided the kids with a truly spectacular distraction from social studies. This particular Byrd liked to tear-ass around the Canyon on his motorcycle wearing a purple velvet cape. A quick-thinking teacher could have used this distraction as a
perfect
example of social studies, but that probably wouldn’t have gone over well with the L.A. Unified School District.