As much as Columbia wanted new acts, James was frustrated in his attempts to sign such talent as Tim Hardin, Lenny Bruce, Frank Zappa, the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane. The one act he did get signed in the wake of the Byrds – the blues-rock band the Rising Sons – never got the backing they deserved. ‘Columbia never gave people like Billy and me the control we needed,’ says Michael Ochs, who worked under James in 1966 and was the brother of folk singer Phil. ‘I couldn’t stand the New York bureaucracy, which was why I was fired.’
‘At the time the industry was as risky and guess-filled as anything is,’ says Judy James, then Billy’s wife. ‘It was Billy’s job to say “Listen, listen, listen” and Columbia’s job to resist. He went nuts trying to sign Lenny Bruce.’ Judy saw how unhappy Billy was at Columbia and suggested they form a management company together. Working out of their home, the couple made 8504 Ridpath a de facto HQ for the coalescing canyon community. ‘I wasn’t the first to move into the canyon, but there weren’t too many here then,’ James told Rolling Stone in 1968. ‘Arthur Lee lived nearby, and that was about it. It’s all happened in the last year or so. If creative artists need to live apart from the community at large, they also have a desire to live among their own kind, and so an artistic community develops.’
‘Billy’s house was a gathering place for musicians, some of whom became his clients and some of whom were sort of budding clients,’ says LA writer Tom Nolan. ‘You could go up there for social conversation and a meal.’ In addition to her role as stepmom to Billy’s son Mark, Judy became den mother to a number of musical strays and protégés. Many hailed from the unlikely climes of suburban Orange County. ‘We would go to hoot nights at the Golden Bear down in Huntington Beach and Billy would roam around the back of that room watching these kids,’ Judy remembers. ‘They were sixteen and seventeen.’
For a year, 8504 Ridpath was home to the young Jackson Browne, who hailed from a middle-class Orange County background. Almost old enough to be his father, Billy was determined to get the teenage troubadour a deal. ‘Billy was sort of a hipster cat, something like a dancer,’ Browne remembered. ‘And he was very funny, very smart…somewhere in between a James Dean and a Mort Sahl.’ An artlessly handsome boy with a repertoire of pure and prescient songs, Browne slept in the Jameses’ laundry room. One of a precocious group of strumming youngsters that included Jimmy Spheeris, Pamela Polland and Greg Copeland, he had already received press attention as one of ‘the Orange County Three’, a label Tom Nolan bestowed on him, Steve Noonan and Tim Buckley in the pages of Cheetah. ‘Jackson was very talented and a class act,’ Judy James says. ‘He had this perspective and wisdom that were extraordinary for a boy of that age.’
As much as he enjoyed his new freedom, Billy James jumped when Jac Holzman asked him to head up Elektra’s West Coast office in the fall of 1966. ‘Billy was extremely bright,’ says Holzman. ‘He was sort of a pleasant Iago, always moving around in the root system of what was going on.’ It was no surprise that Jackson Browne was one of the first artists James brought to Holzman. Yet Jac was unsure of the boy’s voice. ‘Jackson was not a terribly good singer at that point,’ says Barry Friedman. ‘He came close to the notes, some of the time.’ Early in 1967, Browne demoed no less than thirty songs for Elektra, among them ‘Shadow Dream Song’, ‘These Days’, and ‘Colors of the Sun’. The demos weren’t enough to bag him a record deal with Elektra, but they did attract the attention of East Coast folkie Tom Rush, who cut ‘Shadow Dream Song’ on his 1968 album The Circle Game.
Frustrated at the lack of a recording deal, Browne decided to split for New York with his friend Greg Copeland. The pair drove across America in a station wagon in the vibrant spring of 1967. In New York they joined Steve Noonan, who was already ensconced on the Lower East Side. Although he was only there for six weeks, Manhattan was a crash course in harsh, cynical glamour for Browne. Fresh from the womb of Judy James’s laundry room, suddenly Jackson was deep in the world of Andy Warhol –‘not a place for somebody with a tender heart’, as he later remarked. Fixing the cute Californian boy in her steely sights was German-born model and part-time Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico. A brief affair with this valkyrie of pop left him stunned and slightly numb, but it also brought him the opportunity to accompany her in live performances and to contribute to her solo album Chelsea Girl. ‘For those who were listening,’ Richard Meltzer later wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘Jackson was where the action was. Here was the prototype singer-songwriter years before it had a context.’ To Browne’s displeasure Meltzer also recorded the evening that Nico abused her 17-year-old lover as he performed at the Dom, causing him to leave the stage virtually in tears. Nor did the writer omit the attraction that Jackson held for many of the gay men in Warhol’s circle.
Returning to Los Angeles older and slightly less innocent, Jackson idled away the late summer until he was adopted by Barry Friedman. Ironically, Friedman garnered fresh interest from Elektra, who advanced money for an album. But once again Jac Holzman was unconvinced. Friedman persevered. His new idea was to build a band around Browne, to which end he auditioned a number of young musicians at 8524 Ridpath. One was guitarist Ned Doheny, scion of a wealthy LA oil family whose history had been scarred by the 1929 murder of son and heir Edward L. Doheny, Jr. (Though married with a child, Doheny was killed by his male lover. For decades his homosexuality was covered up by his powerful family.) Browne and Doheny hit it off instantly. Talented and good-looking, they smoked pot, skinnydipped in Friedman’s pool, and took their pick of pulchritudinous females. ‘Jackson and I were sort of friendly adversaries,’ Ned says. ‘He was a much more deliberate songwriter than I was, and he’d made his choice about his path long before me. He was an old soul.’
A particular influence on Browne and Doheny were the songs from the ‘basement’ sessions Bob Dylan and the Hawks were recording at the Big Pink house near Woodstock, New York. Some of them –‘The Mighty Quinn’, ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ and others – were already making the rounds on tapes from Dylan’s publishing company, to be covered in due course by the Byrds, Manfred Mann and more. For Jackson and Ned, the fact that Dylan and his sidekicks were pulling back from rock’s psychedelic circus was significant. It was as though people needed to come down from 1967’s summer of love and evolve into something more rooted and rustic. Browne, whose acoustic, inward-looking songs had fallen on deafened ears in the age of Hendrix and the Who, felt a kinship with this back-to-the-roots trend.
On the Sunday morning of the Monterey Pop Festival, Barry Friedman took Jac Holzman aside and proposed that Elektra fund a kind of West Coast Big Pink – a ‘music ranch’ in the remote Plumas National Forest in Northern California. ‘In those days you could actually get people to bankroll fantasies and immense fictions,’ says Ned Doheny. ‘Barry was just crazy enough to be able to convince Jac to part with that kind of money.’ Friedman’s Big Pink was a place called Paxton Lodge.
‘We persuaded Jac Holzman to send us there to make a record, citing the fact that we didn’t want to work under constraints in a studio,’ Jackson Browne recalls. ‘It was an attempt to create a small musical community out of this circle of friends. Holzman was a real pioneer, an adventurous guy.’ Rather than taking a specific act to Paxton, Friedman assembled a motley crew of singer-songwriters and technicians, fuelled by drugs of every description. Holzman dubbed it Operation Brown Rice. ‘Paxton was a kind