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

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СКАЧАТЬ – blues and country – and spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. The song ‘Sister Morphine’, which derived from a lyric by Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, was written at Nitzsche’s house. ‘That was quite a summer,’ Denny Bruce recalls. ‘Everyone was listening to Music from Big Pink, and Marianne and Anita Pallenberg were swimming nude in Jack’s pool.’

      When Jagger agreed to play Turner, the debauched rock star in Donald Cammell’s and Nic Roeg’s Performance, Nitzsche was asked to create the film’s soundtrack. That he did so with the help of Lenny Waronker’s Burbank ‘team’– Ry Cooder, Russ Titelman and Randy Newman – didn’t change the fact that the Performance soundtrack was sonically the antithesis of the cosy Laurel Canyon vibe of 1968. Indeed, one would have to say that, like Beggars Banquet, the Performance music was a lot closer to the Zeitgeist than the debut album by Joni Mitchell. Acoustic introspection was less a response to race riots, protest marches, and assassinations than a retreat from them.

      Composed in a witch’s cottage in the canyon, with Donald Cammell – godson of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley – plying Nitzsche with cocaine, Performance remains one of the scariest collections of music ever: a brilliantly creepy mix of malevolent Moogs, graveyard gospel vocals, and voodoo blues guitar that fit Cammell’s dark vision perfectly. ‘Death is always part of the music I make,’ Nitzsche once said. No wonder Warner Brothers shelved the film for two years after an executive’s wife freaked out during an advance screening.

      Neil Young, a Stones fan, loved the Performance music. The very things that alarmed others about Nitzsche were what fascinated Neil, who asked Jack to help him with his first solo album. In August 1968 he moved from Laurel to Topanga Canyon, putting more distance between him and the Hollywood scene in which Stephen Stills and David Crosby were so engrossed. Tellingly, the first vocal track on Neil Young was called ‘The Loner’. ‘Neil wasn’t as social as other people,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘He wasn’t as out-there, getting buzzed and drunk. He wasn’t partying. He was more serious about his life and music. Unlike Crosby he never had a big entourage of people partying around him.’

      Young’s flight to Topanga was in one sense a flight from the shock of the ’60s. Shy and still prone to epileptic fits, Neil was ill-equipped to deal with the sexual and narcotic adventures of the time. He was also the victim of a shaming, invasive mother who’d profoundly affected his ability to relate to women. Neil tended to become passive in the presence of girls. He felt marginally safer living off the beaten track in Topanga. Neil Young was the logical extension of songs that he had written in the Buffalo Springfield – songs such as ‘Mr Soul’, ‘On the Way Home’, and ‘Out of My Mind’, that spoke of his struggle and disorientation within the swirling Sunset Strip scene of 1966–67. ‘Here We Are in the Years’ was a statement about rejecting the smoggy city for ‘the slower things/That the country brings’.

      Assisting Young with the record was another Topanga outcast, producer David Briggs. Like Nitzsche, Briggs was a macho misfit – the kind of truculent outsider whom Young adored and fed off. Along with Elliot Roberts, a frontman masquerading as a manager, Nitzsche and Briggs formed a human shield that protected and insulated Young from the outside world. Behind this shield he began to write from a deeper, more intuitive place. ‘When I was very young and first came in contact with these musicians, I thought that the ones whose lyrics I loved must be really smart,’ says Nurit Wilde. ‘And I found out that some of them really weren’t smart, they just seemed to have some sort of instinctive feel for words. Neil was one of those.’

      Released in early 1969, Neil Young wasn’t quite the record Young had intended to make. When he listened back to it, it was overarranged and overproduced. But it was shot through with distinctive riffs and passages of spooked beauty that made it a minor landmark. ‘The beginnings of the singer-songwriter school were the first albums by Neil and Joni,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘After that you started to get songs that only the songwriter could have sung – that were part of the songwriter’s personality.’

       IV: The Elf on Roller Skates

      With everything heating up around him, Elliot Roberts felt overwhelmed. When Graham Nash quit the Hollies and moved to LA in December 1968, Roberts couldn’t see a way to free him or Crosby and Stills from their contractual obligations. He turned to the one man he knew who was sharp enough to find a solution: his old colleague from William Morris in New York.

      David Geffen had already provided free advice on how to negotiate Neil Young’s contract with Reprise; Roberts had got $15,000 out of Mo Ostin as a result. Now Elliot really needed David’s formidable brainpower. ‘I knew he could get this done,’ Roberts says. ‘By now he was in television at the Ashley Famous agency, but he was making a lot of side deals for everyone. You could hire David to make deals without having the involvement of David. He preferred it that way, because it gave him a broad spectrum of people from movie stars to rock stars to producers.’

      Geffen had grown up in blue-collar Brooklyn, a skinny kid with dreams of mogulism. He was 17 when his pattern-cutter father died and left him with an adoring mother who sold girdles and referred to her son as ‘King David’. He first visited Los Angeles in 1961, staying with his brother Mitchell, a student at UCLA. ‘From the day I arrived,’ he says, ‘California seemed like an enchanted land.’

      Back in New York in 1964, David landed a mailroom job at William Morris. After lying about UCLA references of his own, he steamed open a letter from the university denying that he’d ever studied there. He regularly embellished his CV to enhance his standing. Elliot Roberts was an agent who witnessed Geffen steaming open other letters in order to get jump-starts on what was happening in the company. The guy’s drive and ruthlessness, appalling to others, thrilled Roberts. It didn’t take David long to rise from the mailroom.

      As pop music became bigger business in the mid-’60s, William Morris opened its doors to longhaired musicians that it might have disdained two years before. Geffen was perfectly placed to deal with this emerging talent. ‘Stay with people your own age,’ senior agent Jerry Brandt counselled him. ‘Go into the music business.’ In truth, Geffen knew little about music. When television director Steve Binder turned him on to a remarkable singer named Laura Nyro, he’d never heard of her. Nyro was a Gothic Cass Elliott, a boho Barbra Streisand in black. Her swooping voice and street-operatic songs were starting to be covered by successful pop/MOR acts. Geffen eagerly seized the opportunity to offer his services. Nyro was quickly won over by his infectious enthusiasm, especially after she bombed at the Monterey Pop Festival and he rushed to her side to comfort her.

      ‘She was a very strange girl,’ Geffen told Joe Smith. ‘She had hair down to her thighs. She wore purple lipstick, Christmas balls for earrings, strange clothes. But very talented.’ David Crosby believed that Laura was ‘a window into something in [Geffen] that was not primarily about money’. The fact that Nyro and Geffen were both primarily gay helped: those who weren’t in the know even thought they’d become a couple. ‘People said, “You know he’s gay,”’ says Judy Henske. ‘And I thought, “Well, you don’t get a really gay hit from him, but whatever.” In any case he was great, and the reason that he was so great was that he was so smart. He was really, really fun СКАЧАТЬ