Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns

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СКАЧАТЬ Song’ on his 1968 album The Circle Game.

      Frustrated at the lack of a recording deal, Browne decided to split for New York with his friend Greg Copeland. The pair drove across America in a station wagon in the vibrant spring of 1967. In New York they joined Steve Noonan, who was already ensconced on the Lower East Side. Although he was only there for six weeks, Manhattan was a crash course in harsh, cynical glamour for Browne. Fresh from the womb of Judy James’s laundry room, suddenly Jackson was deep in the world of Andy Warhol –‘not a place for somebody with a tender heart’, as he later remarked. Fixing the cute Californian boy in her steely sights was German-born model and part-time Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico. A brief affair with this valkyrie of pop left him stunned and slightly numb, but it also brought him the opportunity to accompany her in live performances and to contribute to her solo album Chelsea Girl. ‘For those who were listening,’ Richard Meltzer later wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘Jackson was where the action was. Here was the prototype singer-songwriter years before it had a context.’ To Browne’s displeasure Meltzer also recorded the evening that Nico abused her 17-year-old lover as he performed at the Dom, causing him to leave the stage virtually in tears. Nor did the writer omit the attraction that Jackson held for many of the gay men in Warhol’s circle.

      Returning to Los Angeles older and slightly less innocent, Jackson idled away the late summer until he was adopted by Barry Friedman. Ironically, Friedman garnered fresh interest from Elektra, who advanced money for an album. But once again Jac Holzman was unconvinced. Friedman persevered. His new idea was to build a band around Browne, to which end he auditioned a number of young musicians at 8524 Ridpath. One was guitarist Ned Doheny, scion of a wealthy LA oil family whose history had been scarred by the 1929 murder of son and heir Edward L. Doheny, Jr. (Though married with a child, Doheny was killed by his male lover. For decades his homosexuality was covered up by his powerful family.) Browne and Doheny hit it off instantly. Talented and good-looking, they smoked pot, skinnydipped in Friedman’s pool, and took their pick of pulchritudinous females. ‘Jackson and I were sort of friendly adversaries,’ Ned says. ‘He was a much more deliberate songwriter than I was, and he’d made his choice about his path long before me. He was an old soul.’

      A particular influence on Browne and Doheny were the songs from the ‘basement’ sessions Bob Dylan and the Hawks were recording at the Big Pink house near Woodstock, New York. Some of them –‘The Mighty Quinn’, ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ and others – were already making the rounds on tapes from Dylan’s publishing company, to be covered in due course by the Byrds, Manfred Mann and more. For Jackson and Ned, the fact that Dylan and his sidekicks were pulling back from rock’s psychedelic circus was significant. It was as though people needed to come down from 1967’s summer of love and evolve into something more rooted and rustic. Browne, whose acoustic, inward-looking songs had fallen on deafened ears in the age of Hendrix and the Who, felt a kinship with this back-to-the-roots trend.

      On the Sunday morning of the Monterey Pop Festival, Barry Friedman took Jac Holzman aside and proposed that Elektra fund a kind of West Coast Big Pink – a ‘music ranch’ in the remote Plumas National Forest in Northern California. ‘In those days you could actually get people to bankroll fantasies and immense fictions,’ says Ned Doheny. ‘Barry was just crazy enough to be able to convince Jac to part with that kind of money.’ Friedman’s Big Pink was a place called Paxton Lodge.

      ‘We persuaded Jac Holzman to send us there to make a record, citing the fact that we didn’t want to work under constraints in a studio,’ Jackson Browne recalls. ‘It was an attempt to create a small musical community out of this circle of friends. Holzman was a real pioneer, an adventurous guy.’ Rather than taking a specific act to Paxton, Friedman assembled a motley crew of singer-songwriters and technicians, fuelled by drugs of every description. Holzman dubbed it Operation Brown Rice. ‘Paxton was a kind of Star Search for emerging folkie singer-songwriters,’ says Chris Darrow. ‘It was an extension of the canyon thing.’ Along with drummer Sandy Konikoff and guitar-toting warblers Browne, Doheny, Rolf Kempf, Jack Wilce and Peter 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 СКАЧАТЬ