The Wolf King of LA

The days are becoming shorter and the sunsets are starting to get good. I saw some incredible colors in the sky last night, but I start to feel uneasy this time of year as darkness comes a little earlier everyday. People are dead wrong when they say LA doesn't have seasons. We have winter, it's just a different kind of winter. The wet weather depresses me. I wish I could hibernate through it... The purples and pinks and oranges last night gave me a hankering to hear John, The Wolf King of LA for the first time in a few years. The album feels like an old friend. I don't play it that often anymore because it conjures up a lot of intense emotions and makes me very aware of the passage of time. From a second story window, caught a glimpse of someone's life, and it was mine, and my face was dark and dirty, and I'd been crying. Papa John sings with such casual warmth. There's sympathy in his voice, and generosity, too. There's not many singers who can pull that off. I might be tempted to call it plainspoken singing, except that this somehow detracts from the wisdom it conveys. The only other guy I can think off hand who sings in the same way is Jerry Garcia.

The ugly things I've read about Papa John over the years have never detracted from my love for the Mamas and the Papas. They only had a handful of good songs, but so much of the enjoyment I get from their music comes through the atmosphere it creates. My dad had If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. He was a lot groovier than I ever gave him credit for back then. He straddled the pre and Post WWII generation in a very interesting way. He loves him his Frank Sinatra and Glen Miller, but he also loves the Beatles, Donovan and the Mamas and the Papas. ...I practically wore the grooves out of the Mamas and the Papas record when I was a kid. The sleeve is crazy, with all of them piled in the bathtub, next to the toilet. I used to fixate on that toilet. No shocker there. California Dreamin' in particular always made me feel so good, with its perfect harmonies, Denny's angusihed singing, and the hep cat flute solo. I can picture my dad listening to that song, wearing a red turtleneck sweater and sporting some groovy sideburns. It's amazing to think that I've been listening to the Mamas and the Papas for 35 years, especially since they're such an LA phenomenon, even if they were transplanted from Greenwhich Village. They totally bought into the California Dream. They were outsiders, but they made this place their own and became the ultimate insiders...

Wolf King is about five years after the heyday of the Mamas and the Papas and it evokes its time and place perfectly. I tried to write a novel about the Wolf King world for about six or seven years but eventually I got knocked off course. Any self confidence I've ever had has been extremely fragile. One minute I'm flying high and feeling in control of my creative powers, the next I'm assuming the fetal position in the bathtub. And then when I emerge from the dark corridors of depression and anxiety, I just feel blank. The novel I was writing became so big, with so many characters and so many lurches forwards and backwards time. I didn't feel up to the task. I was - and I am - afraid of failure. But I fail all the time elsewhere, so what's the big deal if there's one more? Failure is an option. Maybe I'll begin to post some excerpts from the novel here as a way of attempting to get some confidence back. I enjoyed writing it until doubt started to creep in. But there's no pressure at all. It's not like I would expect the novel to ever be published, so it's something I should be able to do simply because I love writing...

Wolf King has a lovely sedated vibe, with weepy pedal steel that makes you feel like you're a character in Brewster McCloud, or some other blurry movie from the period. I love the impressionistic imagery of Papa John's observations. And the wine he spilled stained her pillow red. Robbie Robertson once said of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush that the words made him feel like he was in the songs and that they applied to his life, even though he didn't really know what Neil was singing about. That's pretty much the best thing that can be said about a song, that it transcends it's literal meaning takes on a universality. That's exactly how I feel about Wolf King. I used to listen to it a lot when I was first exploring LA and the city was opening up to me. I fell hard for Emma, a woman from New Zealand. Here in the city's heat I'm weeping, keeping a night watch again. That period of my life seems like it was 100 years ago. Where did all the time go?