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

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       Introduction

      On a baking day in August 1971, five naked young men sit in a sauna in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. Four are musicians, three on the cusp of unimaginable success. Two are out-of-towners, come to sunny Southern California to find fame, glory, girls. All are lean, rangy, good-looking –‘like Jesus Christ after a month in Palm Springs’, in the words of their friend Eve Babitz.

      The fifth naked man in the sauna is the one who owns it: a short, skinny agent who’s moved to LA from New York and established himself as a talent-broker of fearsome repute. Among his clients are Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. As the sweat pours off their suntanned limbs, David Geffen tells the four musicians – Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Ned Doheny – about his plans for his record label. ‘I want to keep Asylum very small,’ he avers. ‘I’ll never have more artists than I can fit in this sauna.’

      Twenty years later, Geffen will sell his second label – one he modestly names after himself – for a cool $550 million. At the same time the first Greatest Hits album by the Eagles – the group formed by Glenn Frey and Don Henley – will officially be pronounced the biggest-selling album of all time. ‘David took the crème de la crème from that scene,’ says Eve Babitz, ‘and signed them on the basis of their cuteness.’ Not bad work for an afternoon’s Nordic ogling.

      Hotel California traces the incredible journey from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era in the mid-’60s to the peak of the Eagles’ success in the late ’70s. It is the story of an unparalleled time and place, the first in-depth account of the scene –‘the mythically tangled genealogy’, in the words of writer John Rockwell – that swirled around the denim navel-gazers and cheesecloth millionaires of the Los Angeles canyons.

      At a time when the influences of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and the Eagles have never been more pervasive, the moment has come to reappraise this remarkable group of artists. To re-evaluate, too, the powerful movers and shakers who shaped their careers: men like Geffen, the agent-turned-mogul who established an unparalleled power base of LA talent; his partner Elliot Roberts, manager of Young and Mitchell; and Irving Azoff, who made multimillionaires of the Eagles.

      This is an epic tale of songs and sunshine, drugs and denim, genius and greed. The setting is the longhair Olympus of Laurel and adjacent canyons. It’s about the flighty genius of Joni Mitchell, the Janus-like volte-faces of Neil Young, the drugged disintegration of David Crosby, Gram Parsons, Judee Sill and others. It’s about the myriad relationships, professional and personal, between these artists and the songs they wrote; about the love affairs between Joni and Graham Nash, Joni and James Taylor, Joni and Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills and Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt and J.D. Souther. More than anything it’s a narrative of Rise and Fall – from ‘Take It Easy’ to ‘Take It to the Limit’, from the hootenanny innocence of boys and girls with acoustic guitars to the coked-out stadium-rock superstardom of the mid-’70s.

      Inevitably the recollections of the story’s characters are coloured by their sometimes selective memories, not to mention their own agendas. As Tom Waits, who began his career on Geffen’s Asylum label, puts it: ‘The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened aren’t talking and the people who don’t…well, you can’t shut ’em up.’

      Whatever the ultimate truth, I have over the past decade elicited invaluable reminiscences from the following artists, managers, executives, producers, session musicians, writers, photographers and scenesters: Lou Adler, David Anderle, Peter Asher, Eve Babitz, Walter Becker, Joel Bernstein, Rodney Bingenheimer, Dan Bourgoise, Joe Boyd, Jackson Browne, Denny Bruce, Allison Caine, Gretchen Carpenter, Cher, Ry Cooder, Stan Cornyn, Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, John Delgatto, Pamela Des Barres, Henry Diltz, Dave DiMartino, Tony Dimitriades, Craig Doerge, Ned Doheny, Denny Doherty, Mickey Dolenz, Donald Fagen, Danny Fields, Bill Flanagan, Ben Fong-Torres, Kim Fowley, David Gates, David Geffen, Fred Goodman, Carl Gottlieb, Barry Hansen, Richie Hayward, Jan Henderson, Judy Henske, Chris Hillman, Suzi Jane Hokom, Jac Holzman, Bones Howe, Danny Hutton, Jonh Ingham, David Jackson, Billy James, Judy James, Rickie Lee Jones, Phil Kaufman, Nick Kent, Martin Kibbee, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Russ Kunkel, Bruce Langhorne, Bernie Leadon, Arthur Lee, Steve Lester, Mark Leviton, Nils Lofgren, Roger McGuinn, Robert Marchese, Ted Markland, Frank Mazzola, Bob Merlis, Joni Mitchell, Essra Mohawk, Frazier Mohawk, Graham Nash, Randy Newman, Tom Nolan, Michael Ochs, Anita Pallenberg, Van Dyke Parks, Billy Payne, Robert Plant, Mel Posner, Neal Preston, Domenic Priore, Nancy Retchin, Keith Richards, Perry Richardson, Elliot Roberts, Jill Robinson, Linda Ronstadt, Ed Sanders, Bud Scoppa, the late Greg Shaw, Joe Smith, J.D. Souther, Ron Stone, Bill Straw, Matthew Sweet, the late Derek Taylor, Ted Templeman, Russ Titelman, the late Nik Venet, Joe Vitale, Mark Volman, Waddy Wachtel, Kurt Wagner, Tom Waits, June Walters, Lenny Waronker, Jimmy Webb, Jerry Wexler, Ian Whitcomb, Nurit Wilde, Tom Wilkes, Jerry Yester and John York. My thanks to all for their time and their willingness to revisit the (sometimes painful) past.

      A major debt is owed to two people in particular: my editor Matthew Hamilton, and Hannah Griffiths, briefly my agent before she switched horses to become an editor herself. They conceived the book in the first place and were a dual source of inspiration and encouragement. My gratitude also to Nicholas Pearson at Fourth Estate, and to Nick Davies, who shepherded the project through key later stages. Also to Merlin Cox for an exemplary copy edit. Tom Miller of Wiley & Sons had much to do with the shaping of the book. My thanks to Euan Thorneycroft at Curtis Brown, who seamlessly succeeded Hannah Griffiths, and to Sarah Lazin and Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books in New York.

      For assistance and facilitation, often beyond any possible call of duty, thanks to the following: the indefatigable Harvey Kubernik; Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde for their timelessly evocative images; Debbie Kruger for trawling through Henry’s considerable archives and unearthing unseen treasures; to Eve Kakassy for getting those and other images to me; Jim McCrary; Dede at Redfern’s Picture Agency; Johnny Black, esteemed keeper of the Rocksource Archive; Billy James, who corrected factual errors and made many helpful comments; Roger Burrows, who generously burned CDs for me; Eddi Fiegel, Barry Miles, Matthew Greenwald, John Einarson, Richard Bosworth, Paul Scanlon, Kevin Kennedy, Richard Cromelin, Steven Rosen, Marc Weingarten, Susan Compo, Carrie Steers, Jonh Ingham, Neil Scaplehorn, Richard Wootton, Rob Partridge, Val Brown, Oscar Thompson, Annene Kaye, Diedre Duewel, Tony Keys, Mark Pringle, Martin Colyer, William Higham, Paul Lester, Allan Jones, Ted Alvy, Dale Carter, Rod Tootell, Mick Houghton, Davitt Sigerson, Brendan Mullen, Andy Schwartz, Mick Brown, Nic de Grunwald, Erik James, Michelle Kort, Jon Savage, Johnny Marr, Ian MacArthur, John Tobler, Pete Frame, Julian Humphries, Catherine Heaney and Silvia Crompton. A special thank you to Simon McGuire, the heppest cat in all of Glendale.