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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       III: Both Sides, Then

      With Joni Mitchell established at Reprise, Elliot Roberts now capitalised on his relationship with Andy Wickham and Mo Ostin to bring them Neil Young. ‘It’s hard to define that period,’ Roberts says. ‘It wasn’t a money market yet – everyone was just shooting craps. Warners got more of the folk/writer-oriented end of it: the James Taylors and Van Morrisons and Van Dyke Parks. All these people reflected Andy Wickham’s taste in particular.’ But it was really Jack Nitzsche, one of Mo’s most trusted ears, who got Young in the door at Reprise. Young, for his part, felt immediate trust in Ostin. ‘Warner Brothers,’ he later told his biographer Jimmy McDonough, ‘was making music for adults rather than children.’

      ‘Warners was a big standard-bearer for the hip Hollywood fraternity,’ said Bob Merlis, later the company’s head of publicity. ‘It said that you didn’t have to be in the Village to be hip, and I think that was one of the reasons a person like Joni Mitchell was prepared to risk leaving New York for Hollywood Babylon.’ For Lenny Waronker, the fact that sensitive, introspective artists like Mitchell and Young were signing to Warner/Reprise was vindication of the label’s artist-friendly approach to the music business. ‘Neil and Joni were coming at it from a less trained place than Randy Newman or Van Dyke Parks,’ Waronker says, ‘but it was basically the same. There was a line that connected everybody.’

      Newman claims, affectionately, that Waronker exploited their boyhood friendship to get him cut-price. Lenny’s father and Randy’s uncle had worked together in the 20th Century-Fox orchestra, and the two boys – Lenny was two years older than Randy – played together constantly. ‘I told Lenny that A&M were offering me $10,000,’ Randy says. ‘He said, “How can you do this to me? Don’t you understand that money isn’t important now?” But Warners matched A&M’s offer and I went with them.’

      Artists such as Newman and Parks posed problems for Reprise. Scholarly, almost nerdish writers, they weren’t part of the counterculture in the way that Young, Mitchell or the Grateful Dead were. But then neither were they Top 40 hacks. ‘Randy and some others weren’t joiners,’ says Waronker. ‘Their goals were a little different. It was almost self-consciously trying not to join the game. But everybody wanted to be the best. That was a big deal – “Who’s the best?”’ Newman did not aspire to rock credibility. One glance at his hopelessly square, polo-necked appearance on the cover of his 1968 debut album makes that clear. Nor did Randy hang out with the Laurel Canyon crowd: by now he was married with a son. ‘There was marijuana but I never liked it that much,’ he says. ‘I’d see Harry Nilsson sometimes. But I wasn’t part of anything. If they had a club I wasn’t in it.’

      ‘Randy was sadder than I was,’ says Van Dyke Parks. ‘He’d seen the dark side of the moon, for some reason that I couldn’t figure out. He got more nervous and upset about it all.’ 1968’s Randy Newman, co-produced by Parks and Waronker, was an astounding debut. The jump from the candyfloss Randy had written at Metric to the wry satire of ‘Laughing Boy’ and the bleak self-pity of ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ was clear to anyone paying attention. Sadly, just as Joni’s debut had done, the album struggled to find an audience. More recherché still was Parks’ sown Song Cycle, a highbrow concept album about Southern California that included the track ‘Laurel Canyon Boulevard’ (‘the seat of the beat’). ‘I was trying to ask questions like, “What was this place? What does it mean to be here?”’ Parks claimed. ‘I wanted to capture the sense of California as a Garden of Eden, a land of opportunity.’

      ‘Warners was comfortable,’ says Russ Titelman, a guitarist/producer whom Waronker brought into the Burbank fold. ‘It was people who knew about music and had a lot of fun making it. The signings were incredibly hip. Lenny turned Arlo Guthrie into a pop act, which wasn’t easy, and he made hit records with Gordon Lightfoot. It created a certain vibe and a certain perception. In a way – a good way – it was all things to all people.’ One Warner/Reprise insider who could not have been described as comfortable was Jack Nitzsche. If his unhappy adolescence had been alleviated by a worship of James Dean, his mind now wandered to darker places of comfort: alcohol, cocaine, the occult. ‘Jack’s mother was a medium and Jack believed in all that stuff,’ says Judy Henske, who often visited him in George Raft’s old house in Mandeville Canyon. ‘If you went around with Jack for long enough, you believed in it too. One time, Jack and I were playing with a ouija board and his mother came in and snatched it away, saying, “That’s a pipeline to the Devil!”’

      It was no coincidence that Nitzsche was so infatuated with the Rolling Stones, on many of whose mid-’60s albums he had played. In the summer of 1968 the English band was flirting heavily with Satanism СКАЧАТЬ