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

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СКАЧАТЬ pedigree, reciprocated. Nitzsche’s approval wasn’t enough, however, to land the Buffalo Springfield in Burbank. Greene and Stone turned to Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun in New York. Upping Warners’ offer of $10,000 to $22,000, Ertegun was only too delighted to whisk the group from under Mo Ostin’s nose, assigning them to Atlantic’s affiliated Atco label.

      By the time Greene and Stone were in the studio with the Springfield, having imposed themselves as producers of the band’s Atlantic debut, it was too late. The group’s career was obviously in the hands of charlatans. For the naive Neil Young especially, the sense of scales falling from the eyes was almost too much to take. ‘There were a lot of problems with the Springfield,’ he later said. ‘Groupies, drugs, shit. I’d never seen people like that before. I remember being haunted suddenly by this whole obsession with “How do I fit in here? Do I like this?”’ Compounding Neil’s unease was the growing competitiveness between him and Stills. The band wasn’t big enough for the both of them. Neil acknowledged and respected Stephen’s drive and versatility, but the guy’s ego – the presumption that Buffalo Springfield was his group – was beginning to grate. Although Buffalo Springfield’s first Atco single was Young’s fey and slightly pretentious ‘Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing’, Stills was soon coming down hard on Young’s material. To the consternation of the hippie chicks who nursed Neil’s emotional wounds, Stephen undermined Neil at every turn.

      Robin Lane, briefly Neil’s girlfriend, recalled Stills storming into the small apartment his bandmate had rented. Irate because Neil had missed a rehearsal, Stephen picked up Lane’s guitar and only just restrained himself from smashing it over Neil’s head. ‘You’re ruining my career!’ Stills screamed at the cowering Canadian. Dickie Davis thought it no coincidence that Young had the first of several epileptic fits just a month after the Springfield formed. During the band’s residency at the Whisky in the groovy summer of 1966, the sight of Young thrashing around onstage in a grand mal seizure was not uncommon. The real truth was that Stills and Young were both driven and egomaniacal – Stills’s pig-headedness was merely more overt. Neil, a classic passive-aggressive, stifled his resentments and licked his wounds in private. ‘We know each other,’ Stills would later say of his relationship with Young. ‘There was always a kind of alienation to the people around us. They are old things that no amount of analysing and psychotherapy and all of that stuff can wash away.’

      For all the conflicts, Buffalo Springfield represented a new chapter in the unfolding narrative of LA pop. They were hip and genre-splicing, angry young men with talent and attitude. Last of the folk-pop groups, they were also one of the new electric rock bands. Now they even had a hit record. After Stills watched the LAPD come down hard on a demonstration march on the Sunset Strip on 12 November 1966, he wrote ‘For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)’. With its lines about paranoia striking deep and ‘the man’ taking you away, it was protest pop à la Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’. But unlike Neil’s singles it cracked the Top 10.

      Like the Springfield, the Byrds were riven by internal feuds and resentments. The enmity between David Crosby and Jim (now Roger) McGuinn was plain to see. McGuinn, lean and aloof in his pebble sunglasses, was the antithesis of the chubby, hedonistic Crosby in his hat and cape. McGuinn’s cerebral voice and glinting guitar runs had defined the Byrds sound, but Crosby was determined to insert his more rambling and flowery ballads into the mix. ‘David was a bit of a brat,’ says Billy James. ‘There was this contentiousness about him. His hackles got up very quickly.’ The Byrds’ best writer, meanwhile, was sandwiched between Crosby and McGuinn. The group’s tambourine-rustling frontman, Gene Clark was paradoxically its most introspective member. He had supplied the B-side of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and written the most songs on the first album. As a result – to the envious indignation of his bandmates – publishing royalty cheques were pouring into his mailbox. Soon he was haring around town in a maroon Ferrari.

      Alcoholic from an early age, Clark was a troubled soul. In contrast to McGuinn’s and Crosby’s songs his folk-throwback ballads sounded grave and timeless, closer to the soulful grandeur of a Roy Orbison than to the amphetamine poetics of a Bob Dylan. The bittersweet ‘Set You Free This Time’, a failed single from Turn! Turn! Turn!, was the template for several folk-country masterpieces Clark would record. Crosby recognised that Gene was ‘an emotional projector on a huge and powerful level’, but it didn’t stop him and McGuinn preying on his insecurities. ‘In the beginning, David was very musically intimidated, so he tried to intimidate others,’ said Jim Dickson. ‘He shook [Gene’s] sense of time by telling him he was off.’ Early in 1966, Clark decided he’d had enough – enough of the sudden fame, enough of the tensions.

      ‘After “Eight Miles High” I felt we had a direction to go in that might have been absolutely incredible,’ Clark said in 1977. ‘We could have taken it from there, but I felt because of the confusion and egos – the young, successful egos – we were headed in a direction that wouldn’t have that importance or impact.’ One afternoon in March 1966, Barry Friedman and drummer friend Denny Bruce went to score some pot from a friend named Jeannie ‘Butchie’ Cho. Sitting in her Laurel Canyon living room was none other than Clark. He had black bags under his eyes and looked ravaged.

      Clark was in crisis, pouring out his heart to Butchie. He said he was due to go on tour with the Byrds the next day. ‘I can’t do it,’ he kept repeating. ‘I can’t see myself on that airplane tomorrow.’ Butchie said that nobody left a successful group. ‘I don’t give a shit,’ Gene insisted. ‘I don’t like what it’s doing to my head.’ Clark did make it to LAX but started screaming as the plane taxied to the runway. The Byrds flew to New York as a quartet. The official announcement of Clark’s exit came in July.

      The departure only increased the tension between McGuinn and Crosby, even as the Byrds propelled folk-rock into a new psychedelic realm with Fifth Dimension. By the summer of 1967, relations between the two were severely strained. McGuinn approached the Byrds’ music with what Derek Taylor described as ‘a fussy school-marm attitude’. Crosby, enamoured of the wild new scene up in San Francisco, felt the Byrds had become square. He wanted to be in a dynamic band like the Buffalo Springfield or the Jefferson Airplane. He was seeing an increasing amount of Stephen Stills, whose sheer appetite for playing and jamming thrilled him. ‘I remember hearing all these horror stories about what an arrogant asshole David was,’ said Stills, often accused of the same trait. ‘But when I met him I found he was basically just as shy as I was and making up for it with a lot of aggressive behaviour.’

      Crosby had interests besides music. One was hanging out with scenesters like Cass Elliott. The other, despite the shame he felt about his roly-poly physique, was sleeping with any fetching nymphette who offered herself to him. ‘David was charming around chicks,’ says Nurit Wilde, who lived around the corner from Crosby in Laurel Canyon. ‘But there was a revolving door with him – one girl in, one girl out. And if a girl got pregnant, he was mean to her and dumped her.’ By the summer of 1967 Crosby had become so obnoxious that McGuinn and Hillman could take no more of him. After he used the Byrds’ appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival to launch into a tirade about the Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination – and then compounded that by appearing onstage with the Buffalo Springfield – the decision was made to axe him.

      In October, McGuinn and Hillman drove in their Porsches to Crosby’s new place on Lisbon Lane in Beverly Glen. ‘They drove up,’ Crosby said in a 1971 radio interview, ‘and said that I was terrible and crazy and unsociable СКАЧАТЬ