Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns
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Название: Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976
Автор: Barney Hoskyns
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Музыка, балет
isbn: 9780007389216
isbn:
Songbird Jackie DeShannon, who’d started out at Metric Music, straddled the two worlds of writing and performing. She was also alert enough, in the fall of 1968, to release an album called Laurel Canyon, complete with a golden-throated paean to the Edenic place she now called home. ‘It was the right time and the right place,’ she stated. ‘All the elements I envisioned fell together.’
Nowhere were the changes felt more keenly than at Warner/Reprise. ‘We just felt we were out on some limb,’ says Stan Cornyn. ‘There was Capitol sitting there having trouble with the Beatles, not to mention Liberty, Dot, ABC and those other floundering labels that didn’t quite get it. We seemed to get it and we were having fun with it.’ Arguably the most catalytic figure at the company, however, was not Lenny Waronker but the svelte, sardonic and very British Andy Wickham. Following the model of Billy James, Reprise head Mo Ostin wanted his own ‘house hippie’ at Reprise and Wickham fit the bill perfectly. ‘Mo had had the very astute realisation that he needed an ambassador to the counterculture,’ says producer Joe Boyd, who first met Ostin and Wickham in late 1967. ‘Mo would hang with people and listen to people and take their cues,’ says Stan Cornyn. ‘Andy was worth listening to. He had real intelligence. What he came up with was generally unknowns.’
Wickham had been a commercial artist in London before working at Immediate Records for Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. A fascination with American culture had brought him out to California – and to a publicity job with Adler’s Dunhill label – in 1965. ‘In those days he already looked like a hippie,’ says singer Ian Whitcomb, a fellow Brit in Hollywood. ‘He was wearing beads and chains and long hair. He loved it in Los Angeles.’ Ostin put Wickham on a generous salary of $200 a week, though Andy’s principal duty was to hang out with musicians in Laurel Canyon and keep his finger firmly on the pulse of the times. As a result, the canyon – in Stan Cornyn’s words – became ‘a Reprise lode of gold’.
‘In my head, Andy took over Laurel Canyon for us,’ Cornyn says. ‘I can’t think of who else really repped us in those narrow-laned hills. He hung there and he had long hair and he did not keep office hours.’ For Mo Ostin and Warner Brothers Records head Joe Smith, Wickham wasn’t the easiest sell to their colleagues. But the Englishman’s track record began to speak for itself. ‘Andy knew about things,’ says Smith. ‘He was our longhaired kid. We guided him through the hostile waters of the rest of the staff, which was a much more establishment group of people.’
It was one of Wickham’s hunches, a young Canadian folk singer, whose arrival in LA in early 1968 would mark the true onset of the Laurel Canyon era. Joni Mitchell’s time had come.
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Joni Mitchell was a stranger in a strange land – twice removed from her native Canada, new to California from America’s East Coast. She was strange-looking, too, willowy but hip, a Scandinavian squaw with flaxen hair and big teeth and cubist cheekbones. Men instinctively knew Joni as a peer. They also sensed a prickliness and a perfectionism. ‘She’s about as modest as Mussolini,’ remarked David Crosby.
In tow with Mitchell was Elliot Roberts, né Rabinowitz, a rock ’n’ roll Woody Allen with a hooked Fagin nose and an endearing devotion to his single cause – Joni Mitchell. ‘Elliot pitched being my manager,’ she recalled of him. ‘I said, “I don’t need a manager, I’m doing quite nicely.” But he was a funny man. I enjoyed his humour.’ This odd couple had come out to Los Angeles from New York, where the Greenwich Village folk scene was petering out before their very eyes. Roberts, a Chartoff-Winkler agent, was a graduate of the legendary William Morris mailroom. He’d worked there with an even more ambitious agent named David Geffen. Elliot decided to jack in the world of agenting after Buffy Sainte-Marie, a client, dragged him to see Joni perform in late October 1967.
Joni had already crammed a lot into her short life. She’d been married to a fellow Canadian singer, Chuck Mitchell, and given up a daughter for adoption – an abandonment that ate at her like a wound. Songwriting served as therapy for her pain. ‘It was almost like she wanted to erase herself and just let the songs speak for her,’ reflected her friend the novelist Malka Marom. Joni’s unusual open guitar tunings also set her songs apart from the folk balladry of the day. ‘I was really a folk singer up until 1965, but once I crossed the border I began to write,’ Mitchell says. ‘My songs began to be, like, playlets or soliloquies. My voice even changed – I no longer was imitative of the folk style, really. I was just a girl with a guitar that made it look that way.’
‘Elliot became wildly excited about Joni, and he introduced me to her and I became her agent,’ recalled David Geffen. ‘And it was the beginning of her career – it was the beginning of our careers. Everything was very small-time.’ Established stars were lining up to cover songs from the Mitchell catalogue. ‘When she first came out,’ said Roberts, ‘she had a backlog of twenty, twenty-five songs that most people would dream that they would do in their entire career…it was stunning.’ One artist to pay close attention was Judy Collins, folk’s ethereal blue-eyed queen. For her 1967 album Wildflowers Collins chose ‘Both Sides, Now’ and ‘Michael from the Mountains’. Tom Rush and Buffy Sainte-Marie both sang ‘The Circle Game’.
Joe Boyd, who produced the English folk group Fairport Convention, met Mitchell at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival and brought her to London that summer to open for the Incredible String Band. Both in America and in England, people sat up and noticed the blonde with the piercing prairie soprano, the idiosyncratic guitar tunings, and the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics. When Roberts and Mitchell went to Florida to play the folk circuit there, David Crosby came to see her at a club called the Gaslight South. ‘Right away I thought I’d been hit by a hand grenade,’ he reported later. There was something about the way Mitchell combined naked purity with artful sophistication that shocked Crosby – the sense of a young woman who’d seen too much too soon. He set Joni in his sights, bedding her that week. The affair was never likely to last. ‘We went back to LA and tried to live together,’ Crosby said. ‘It doesn’t work. She shouldn’t have an old man.’
‘These were two very wilful people,’ says Joel Bernstein. ‘Neither was going to cave in. I remember being at Joni’s old apartment in Chelsea in New York and I heard this commotion on the street. And it was Crosby and Joni screaming at each other on the corner. It gave me a real sense of the volatility of their relationship.’ The volatility СКАЧАТЬ