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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       4 Horses, Kids, Forgotten Women: Are You Ready for Country Rock?

       ‘We wanted to turn away from all the intensityand social foment and just sort of go have a picnic.’

      BERNIE LEADON

       I: Hand Sown…Home Grown

      The night of 22 June 1966 found an unusual-looking group taking the stage of the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Four men in buckskin jackets and cowboy boots ambled into the spotlight and performed a short set of country and western songs. The response to the ensemble, led by departed Byrd Gene Clark, was one of brow-furrowing bafflement. Here was the Tambourine Man himself, the Prince Valiant of folk-rock, rigged out like some cornpoke Opry veteran and singing that music – the songs of Southern racists. Just how unhip could you get?

      For Clark, country songs were simply what you were reared on in Tipton, Missouri. It was no small coincidence that he returned there shortly after his Byrds meltdown. Connecting with his roots seemed to ground him in this dark passage of his fitful career. While the Byrds flew on into the Fifth Dimension, Clark lost interest in Roger McGuinn’s ‘jet sound’. His brief if heady trip as a mid-’60s pop star only confirmed his need to dig down into the original sources of the folk boom: bluegrass, Appalachian balladry, old-time string-band instrumentals.

      Not that the trappings of LA stardom were a total turnoff for the Missouri Kid. Brooding and introverted he may have been, but Clark was as wowed by women and cars as the most clichéd of rock idols. At a party at Cyrus Farrar’s Laurel Canyon house, he met Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and began an affair with folk-pop’s überbabe. ‘John [Phillips] and Denny [Doherty] were having parties every night and they were screwing everybody,’ Michelle remembered. ‘And then very innocently this thing started with Gene.’

      The romance scandalised the little village of Laurel Canyon, filling Gene with guilt and leading to Michelle’s departure from the Mamas and the Papas in early June. ‘He was an odd guy,’ says David Jackson, who played bass with Gene. ‘But he had his Ferrari and we went to Vegas one time. The guy was going at 150 mph. Now this is a guy who’s quiet, sensitive, a little weird, so it was incongruous to me. There was a discrepancy between the Ferrari and the art.’

      Clark wasn’t the only LA folk-rocker flirting with country music. Chris Hillman had sneaked Porter Wagoner’s ‘Satisfied Mind’ on to the second Byrds album, Turn! Turn! Turn!. As the group geared up to record Younger than Yesterday, Chris drew still deeper from the bluegrass well by penning two stone-country tunes, ‘Time Between’ and ‘The Girl with No Name’. He also brought in guitarist Clarence White and former Hillmen singer Vern Gosdin to play on them. ‘It all begins with the Byrds, and I will argue that point with anybody,’ Hillman told author John Einarson.

      Hillman would be the first to acknowledge that country music was already an integral strand in California’s musical fabric. The ‘western’ part of the country and western classification did not denote California per se but it certainly encompassed the Golden State: western swing and cowboy songs were as big west of the Rockies as they were down in Texas. The roots of country rock lay in the music of migrants uprooted by the Depression – Okies and other Southwesterners who’d drifted towards the Pacific from the drought-blighted dust bowls in the ’30s and ’40s. Many such migrants settled in the small city of Bakersfield, north of Los Angeles in the sun-baked San Joaquin Valley of California. By the early ’60s Bakersfield had unofficially become a ‘Nashville West’, spawning the gritty, unsentimental honky-tonk of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Los Angeles itself swarmed with displaced Southwesterners: its thousand and one suburbs boasted hundreds of dance halls, havens of drinking and fighting. And Capitol Records, the city’s biggest independent label, attracted the cream of country music talent, from Owens and Haggard to Wynn Stewart and Tommy Collins.

      ‘Most of us that came out of bluegrass didn’t like Nashville music,’ says Chris Darrow. ‘We liked country music, but we liked country music from California – from Bakersfield. We were really true to our school: we loved Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.’ For John Einarson, the sound of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos was ‘the first real electric country rock’. Owens, a conventional man next to brooding ex-jailbird Haggard, had a profound influence not only on a generation of country rockers but on such far-flung stars as the Beatles, who covered ‘Act Naturally’, and Ray Charles, who hit with ‘Together Again’.

      Like Gene Clark, brothers Rodney and Douglas Dillard hailed from Missouri. In late 1962 they packed themselves into a beat-up 1955 Cadillac and brought their fiery little bluegrass combo to Los Angeles. In no time they were the talk of the folk underground, thrilling fans at the Ash Grove and the Troubadour. Their first album bore the title Back Porch Bluegrass. ‘Everybody went, “Oh my God, this is astonishing,”’ says David Jackson. ‘Everybody else was kind of folkie and nice and genteel and white, and here come these guys just ploughing through.’ Of the brothers, Rodney stayed the truer to his rural Christian upbringing. Douglas, on the other hand, took to Sin City immediately. Tall and rake-thin with a weaselly Ozark Mountains face, Doug would play his relentless, bubbling banjo licks wearing an unearthly grin. The smile, more often than not, was the result of the substances he had ingested. ‘Doug became the focal point for anything anybody wanted to say or do,’ says David Jackson. ‘All the girls wanted to show him their tits and all the guys wanted to play him their new songs.’

      As galvanising and irreverent as the Dillards were, the bluegrass craze that swept through Southern California was rooted more in nostalgia than in eclecticism. ‘The wave hit LA, which was ripe for something like that,’ said Ry Cooder. ‘It…suggested that there might be a carefree, simple-minded world beyond all the stress and strain of Los Angeles, and that people could wear cowboy hats and boots and play banjos and be cowboys…’

      For all the success the Dillards enjoyed, brother Douglas was more interested in fun and frolics than in steady employment. He was also keen to move beyond traditional bluegrass. So were several other musicians. Clarence White, the hottest guitarist on the scene, was tiring of the acoustic, bluegrass-based music he played in the Kentucky Colonels. One of his chief accomplices was pedal steel player ‘Sneaky’ Pete Kleinow, a veteran of California western swing bands. ‘We were fooling around there with country rock but we didn’t know what to call it,’ Kleinow says. ‘Clarence was one of the ringleaders of all that, but there wasn’t a label for it at the time.’

      Troubadour hootmaster Larry Murray led Hearts and Flowers, a trio playing an uncategorisable mix of folk, pop and bluegrass that got them signed to Capitol Records subsidiary FolkWorld by A&R man Nik Venet. ‘[Hearts СКАЧАТЬ