Aaron Abramson and Sitting Bull were seated at the soundboard console when Zolie and Jefferson entered the control booth for Studio 3A at Sunset Sound. A large cloud of skunky pot smoke hung in the air, the booth’s poor ventilation offering it no escape. Jefferson smiled and made a show of inhaling heavily through his nose. “Ready to make some beautiful harmonies?” he asked, addressing the question to no one in particular.
“Ready for Canyon Fodder, baby,” Abramson said.
Abramson was the most in-demand session guitarist in L.A. His style and sound weren’t especially distinctive, but he clearly had some sort of magic touch for a three-year period during which he seemed to play on every top selling record that came out of L.A., including all three Jefferson White albums. Bald on top, and yet wearing what was left of his blonde hair at an ill-advised shoulder length, he sported a silky black kimono decorated with a yellow and orange Kung Fu dragon on the back, and a sizable gold medallion around his neck. His eyes were shut to the point of being two red slits.
“I dig the concept,” he said. “Canyon Fodder. I bet it’ll be the biggest thing to hit this town since Pet Sounds.”
“Pet Sounds didn’t sell very well,” Zolie said matter-of-factly.
Zolie had come up with the idea for Canyon Fodder three years earlier, at a time when he felt particularly bitter about the apparent decline of his prospects in the music business. Ally Schneider, a redhead from New York and one of Zolie’s three girlfriends at the time, tried to get him to see the bright side of things.
“I wish you wouldn’t be so negative all the time,” she said one evening in response to Zolie’s typical fit of post-coital moroseness. “You’ve got an incredible track record.”
“An incredible losing track record,” Zolie said, running his hands absent mindedly through the sensual waves in Ally’s hair. “It’s a record of incredible disappointment.”
“Disappointment? You’ve written songs for the Turtles and Paul Revere. How many people can say that? And how about Richard Harris and the Fifth Dimension?”
“That’s already 5 or 6 years ago,” Zolie said. “Only things I get hired for these days are commercial jingles and boring session work.”
“You’re only 28, Zolie. Give yourself a chance.”
“I’m 27, baby, and 27 is over the hill in this town.”
Zolie paused thoughtfully as he lit a cigarette.
“Know what this place does to you?” he finally said.
“’This place?’”
“Yeah, ya know, Hollywood, show business, whatever. It lures you with its promises of easy money, easy pussy and easy fame. You see the schmucks who make it here, with their shiny new Porsches and their tables waitin’ for ‘em at Dan Tana’s, even when the line’s out the fuckin’ door. You figure, ‘if that pinheaded motherfucker can make it here, so can I.’”
“Is that why you got into it? To be rich and materialistic?”
Zolie took a drag on his cigarette. “Come to think of it, yeah, that is why I got into it.”
“Those things won’t make you happy.”
“Nobody’s happy these days, baby. And if I’m gonna be miserable either way, I’ll take being rich and famous over being some obscure loser without a pot to piss in.”
“You’re giving me very bad vibes all of a sudden, Zolie.”
Zolie ignored her. “I chased the dream,” he said. “I got sucked in with a tiny little taste of success, just enough to convince me I had what it takes. And then the distractions came. So many of them. The partying and whoring every night ‘til the sun came up.” He took a long drag on his smoke. “Problem is, every cunt I eat tastes different, and any man worth calling a man wants to taste as many flavors as he can.”
Ally gave Zolie a toxic look.
“I tried to build on the small success I had,” he continued, “but I lost something along the way. I dunno. I lost focus. I can feel myself becoming one of those people.”
“Those people,” Ally said, deadpan.
“Yeah, those people. The hangers-on. The guys who don’t have it anymore, so they start to feed off the crumbs under the table. There’s a lot of us here, Ally. We do it out of desperation. We become parasites. Slugs. We gravitate to the bright lights and the fancy haciendas in the canyons. But we’re nothing but fodder. Canyon fodder, if you will. Victims of the mirage.”
That night, Zolie sat in his apartment at the piano his father had bought him some 15 years earlier, and he began writing the music for what would become his first album, Canyon Fodder, a conceptual song cycle loosely based on Day of the Locust and Sunset Boulevard.
“Where’s Charlie?” Jefferson asked.
“He excused himself for a few,” Sitting Bull replied as he began to roll another joint.
“Yeah, and we all know what that means,” Abramson said.
“I saw Charlie when I got here,” Zolie said. “Looked like he was gettin’ himself a bump.”
Abramson smiled. “And let me guess: He was all by himself, right?”
Sitting Bull lit his joint and took a hit. “Charlie don’t like to share,” he said.
“Selfish motherfucker,” Abramson added.
Jefferson pointed towards the control booth window. “Hank’s here!”
Sitting Bull exhaled a large cloud of smoke and passed the joint to Zolie. “Hank don’t share either,” he said.
“What is it with these rock stars nowadays?” Abramson asked. “Remember the 60s, when everybody shared?
“We loved one another and shined on our brother,” Zolie said.
Sitting Bull laughed. “You got that ass backwards, man.”
On the other side of the control booth window, Hank Daly, founding member of the Coyotes, sat down on a stool in the wood paneled confines of Studio 3A, near a grouping of microphones and a brown Fender Stratocaster leaned up against a Peavey amp. Daly wore a beefy moustache on his deeply tanned face and had an unruly mane of dirty blond hair. He hadn’t shaved his beard for a few days and could have been mistaken for Jesus Christ Superstar, in snakeskin boots, faded blue jeans, and a denim shirt worn with 3 or 4 buttons open.
Jefferson spoke to Daly through the intercom from the control booth. “You ready to make some beautiful harmonies today?”
Daly eyed Jefferson through the glass and grudgingly gave a slight gesture of acknowledgement with his head, nothing more.
Jefferson’s timing in securing Daly’s participation in Zolie’s album coincided with the Coyotes earning a Platinum Record for their Cahuenga Passages. Over the previous several months, the album’s title track had blasted continually from the heart of the FM dial, filling millions of cars, homes and supermarkets with its lurid images of Rock Star L.A.
Inhale a white line
Cruise down the pass
To Sunset and Vine
To a piece of groupie ass
For a taste of the life
She’ll hum like a bee
But it cuts like a knife
‘Cause she’s just fourteen
Daly kept to himself in the studio. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small cylindrical film canister, and grabbed the latest issue of Rolling Stone off the top of an amplifier. He took great care in forming three lines of cocaine on the magazine’s cover photo of Jimmy Carter.
“Take it easy Hank,” Jefferson said through the intercom. “I can’t have you bouncing off the walls.”
“I bet that cocksucker’d fuck his own mother in the ass before he gave any one of us a goddamn bump,” Abramson said.
Sitting Bull stared into the middle distance, abstracted. “What’s it gonna take to get the suits to promote this album when it’s done?” he asked.
“If they think it has a chance to be a hit, they’ll promote the shit out of it,” Abramson said. “Otherwise it just ends up rotting away in the cutout bins.” He took a hit off the joint. “We need a single, something with a catchy chorus, a great melody, and a hook that’ll grab the girlies by their little titties and get ‘em all ready to go. Know what I mean?”
Zolie laughed. “You’re givin’ me a boner just thinkin’ about it,” he said.
Zolie thought about all the pop songs he’d written years ago. He was just trying to write hits back then. He wanted to write hits now, too, but he also wanted to make a ‘statement.’ At the same time, though, he worried that making statements might be anathema to making hit singles. He worried that he had to choose one or the other, a hit or a statement. And as much as he wanted to do something with artistic integrity, he wanted to make lots of money even more.
“You played on the basic tracks for the album,” Jefferson said to Abramson. “There’s a hit single or two in there, don’tcha think?”
Abramson pondered the question for a few moments as he sunk further into stoned-out bliss. “I’m not sure yet,” he finally said.
“Lemme take the tapes home tonight and play ‘em for my girlfriend. “I’ll let’cha know tomorrow.”
“If she fucks you like a rodeo rider all night long,” Zolie said, “we’ll know we got a Gold Record on our hands.”
Daly glared through the window, into the control booth, and pointed to the gold Rolex on his wrist. “Can we get this thing going?” he asked petulantly. “My time is money.”
“What’s your rush?” Sitting Bull asked into the intercom.
“I’ll tell you what my rush is, asshole. My Platinum-Record-selling-band is doing Kirshner this weekend. We have a rehearsal today at ABC.”
“But that’s just lip synching on Kirshner,” Jefferson said through the intercom. “What’s to rehearse?”
“Fuck you, man! There’s an art to lip synching the right way. We like to do it with feeling. Maybe you just go through the fuckin’ motions when you’re lip synching, but I like to lip synch like I mean it.”
“Tell that motherfucker to cool down,” Zolie said into Jefferson’s ear. “He’s all wound up on coke.”
Daly wasn’t finished spewing. “It’s just lip synching to you, sure. But lemme tell you somethin’. We got a vampire yid of a manager, takes 20 percent of what we earn. 20 fuckin’ percent! So we need to move merchandise. Lip synching on TV helps us do it. Gettin’ paid fuckin’ scale to sing backing vocals on a Zolie Wachs album doesn’t help us do it. I’m only helping out here ‘cause I owe you a favor or two, Jefferson. Got it? Now let’s get this goddamn thing started already.”
Back towards the end of ‘71, before either one of them were rich and famous, Jefferson lived upstairs from Daly in a decrepit duplex overlooking the Echo Park duck pond. Daly had migrated from Tulsa, Okalahoma and now played in the Sylmar Shakers, a country rock band also featuring Russ Bertrand on bass and Skip Daulton on pedal steel. The Shakers had released one tepidly reviewed album for MCA, One Thousand Oaks, and they never managed to garner much of a following beyond the local crowds that showed up for their gigs at the Troub and the Palamino.
Several days after Jefferson moved into the apartment upstairs from Daly, the sound of orgasmic squealing came wafting up through the floorboards and woke him up in the middle of the night. The noise eventually reached a loud crescendo, followed moments later by Daly’s twangy singing voice and an accompanying guitar.The following morning, Jefferson met Daly and his nubile15-year-old companion at the base of the duplex stairway. The dark foyer leading to the front door of the building smelled of pot.
“You my new neighbor?” Daly asked. He had a goatee at the time and wore a leather cowboy hat with sunglasses and a blousy white shirt.
“I heard ya singin’ last night,” Jefferson said. “Sounded real good. I almost came downstairs with my guitar to join ya.”
“You should have, man! I love a good midnight jam session.”
“Next time,” Jefferson said. “I got a bunch of new songs I wanna try out on someone new.”
Jefferson noticed the young girl smiling at him flirtatiously. She had on a tight, yellow tank top that matched the color of her hair and accentuated her pointy breasts. He wondered whether she might be Daly’s kid sister, or maybe even his daughter, but then he remembered the noise that had disturbed his sleep.
Jefferson and Daly struck up a friendship and began jamming together regularly. They walked to Hector’s Diner at Sunset and Alvarado every morning. The place was known for its rocket fuel coffee and killer Huevos Rancheros. Jefferson bussed tables there several evenings a week in exchange for food whenever he wanted it and a small share of the tips during his shift.
Daly usually dominated his conversations with Jefferson, but one morning while the two of them sat in a back booth at the diner, Daly remained uncharacteristically mum and pensive.
“What’s wrong?” Jefferson asked.
Daly lit a cigarette. “The record company’s dropping us,” he said.
“I’m sorry. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. That’s the problem. We sold about 900 records. That’s not good enough these days. Nobody gives a shit about the Sylmar Shakers.”
“Seemed like you were getting’ big crowds at the Palamino.”
“Nah. That place is a little matchbox. Small potatoes.”
“So what’cha gonna do?”
“I’ll Probably start my drinkin’ early today. Want in?”
Jefferson smiled sympathetically. Daly took a long pull on his cigarette.
“Russ ‘n me talked about starting something new,” Daly said. “Something more commercial.”
“Commercial?”
“Yeah, ‘ya know, selling out, man. It’s the thing to do these days. Same kinds of songs, but more for the radio.”
“You got any songs ready?” Jefferson asked, “’cause I got one you might wanna try. I think you could have a hit with it.”
The song, “Go Slow,” earned Jefferson his first big payday and made him a marketable commodity after Daly, Bertrand and Daulton dissolved the Sylmar Shakers and reformed as the Coyotes, adding Dave Heller on drums and Chuck Banham on guitar and vocals.
Go slow
You’re ridin’ way too fast
Go slow
Gotta learn from your past
Go slow
As you turn the page
Go slow
Through this fallen age
The Coyotes recorded “Go Slow” for Lesley Geldenbaum’s fledgling Hideaway Records, and by the summer of 1972 the band had a number 1 hit single with the song, as well as a Gold Record with their self-titled debut album. With the success of the single, Jefferson began work on Long Shadows, which was to be his first album for Hideaway.
“Has he always been such an ornery bastard?” Abramson asked, motioning with his head towards Daly, who was pacing back and forth distractedly on the other side of the glass separating the studio from the control booth.
“Hank?” Jefferson said, “Hank’s not ornery once you get to know him. He’s just wound a little tight.”
“Tight as a virgin’s pussy,” Zolie said.
“That’s pretty tight,” Sitting Bull added.
“Only reason Hank’s cool with you is ‘cause you made the guy’s career,” Abramson said to Jefferson.
Jefferson protested gently as he twiddled knobs on the soundboard. “I didn’t make Hank’s career.”
“The fuck you didn’t,” Abramson said. “There’d be no Coyotes today if you hadn’t written ‘Go Slow.’”
“And we wouldn’t be here having to listen to Daly’s shit all day long,” Sitting Bull said.
“I’ve always hated ‘Go Slow,” Zolie said, somewhat randomly.
The door behind the Soundboard opened. Charlie Watson stumbled into the control booth. He wore a sky-blue t-shirt with faded blue jeans and a pair of red clogs. His wavy blond hair grew past his shoulders and a grizzled beard covered his face. A cigarette hung from his mouth, and in his left hand he held a fifth of Jim Beam in a brown paper bag, which gave him the look of an unwashed transient. But no amount of ratty facial hair or inebriated dishevelment could completely camouflage the essential handsomeness projecting outward from his dark-blue eyes. Charlie was a rare genetic accident. The uglier he made himself, the more beautiful he became.
“Where ya been, Charlie?” Jefferson asked. “You ready to make some beautiful harmonies?”
Charlie stood in place, practically asleep on his feet, teetering on his wobbly legs.
“Toni kicked me,” he mumbled. “Told me don’t never come back.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” Abramson asked. “Anyone know what he just said?”
“Sounds like Toni threw him out of the house,” Jefferson said. “Is that right Charlie?”
Charlie nodded drunkenly. “Told me don’t come back,” he said.
“Who’s Toni?” Zolie asked. “His girlfriend. Why’d she kick you out, Charlie?”
“Says I’m too messed up. She don’t like the drinkin’ ‘n stuff, ya know? Told me don’t never come back.”
“Sorry about that, Charlie. You got a place to go?”
Pop music is an exhausted medium today insofar as inventiveness is concerned. This is probably true of art more generally. Everything refers to something else. I can only speak for myself, but I can’t really hear something new without thinking that it sounds like something I’ve already heard, can’t see a movie without thinking the director is borrowing his style from another director, can’t read a book without thinking it’s an attempt to parrot another author’s style. Jean Baudrillard talked about how in a media saturated society all culture would increasingly become a simulation, and then a simulation of a simulation, and then... And it's come to pass. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that new music is bad or tired, though it does suggest that it’s not realistic to expect much in the way of innovation anymore… Which brings me to my main point about music making in the 60s, at a time when it was still possible to do new and fresh things. What fascinates me is not just how sounds and styles changed so quickly from one year to the next, and even from one month to the next, but also the uneven way change occurred. Some artists transitioned from naïve teenybopper pop to headier drug influenced music as early as 1965, while others didn’t really catch up until 1969 or 1970, by which time the first few rounds of psychedelia were already being surpassed by pioneers who moved into harder FM radio rock with longer, more ‘serious’ songs.
Tommy James and the Shondells were among those who were late to the psychedelic party, and in retrospect that’s not a bad thing. During parts of 1968 and 1969 - when the Beatles were doing the white album and Abbey Road, and the Who were doing A Quick One and Tommy, and pieces of the Hollies, Buffalo Springfield, and the Byrds were breaking off and forming Crosby Stills and Nash - Tommy James was only just starting to move from bubble gum music to psychedelic pop. This resulted in some of his best singles, songs like Crimson and Clover, Sweet Cherry Wine, Ball of Fire, and tonight’s song, Sugar on Sunday. The brilliant thing about all these songs, though, is that Tommy James never abandoned pop for rock, never tried to get too heavy in any sense of the word. With the Shondells’ psychedelic pop singles, you hear harpsichord, and flanged guitars and vocals, and peace and love, but the songs remain light ‘n airy and have a naivety and enthusiasm about them that you rarely get from heavier rock with its more jaded and self-important approach to music. Even though James supposedly took umbrage with the bubble gum label, you can tell that the guy has always been in love with pop, and he held onto that side of himself even as his sound evolved. His music gives me a warm romantic feeling inside, perfect for the onset of spring. The days are getting a little longer, flowers are blooming, and the air is pregnant with possibility...
