Geffen–Roberts was a fearsome double act, like Charlie Greene and Brian Stone with credibility and Levi’s. Elliot was the people person, emotional caretaker to the sensitive stars; Geffen was the financial wizard behind the scenes, outsmarting the industry’s cleverest titans. ‘We were both very involved with the artists, but in different ways,’ Geffen says. ‘Elliot would go on the road with them but I would not. I did most of the business for the artists and Elliot did most of the hanging-out with them.’
‘Elliot in some strange way was the vehicle for David to be so successful, because in some regard it was his musical taste that defined all of this,’ says Ron Stone, hired to help manage the Geffen–Roberts acts. ‘Elliot had this amazing sensitivity to this kind of music and made some incredibly insightful choices. I forgive him all his other foibles, because there was a touch of genius there.’
‘In the Laurel Canyon and Topanga areas, Elliot was the rare manager who actually lived there rather than Beverly Hills,’ says Joel Bernstein. ‘The whole vibe of Elliot’s office, with a roll-top desk, told you they’d got into the whole canyon vibe – this whole updated Western fantasy.’ Geffen–Roberts clients were under no illusions about the duo’s master plan, however. ‘Elliot Roberts is a good dude,’ David Crosby told Ben Fong-Torres. ‘However, he is, in his managerial capacity, capable of lying straight-faced to anyone, any time, ever.’ And if Roberts didn’t rob you blind, the grinning Crosby continued, ‘we’ll send Dave Geffen over: he’ll take your whole company. And sell it while you’re out to lunch, you know.’
But it wasn’t all about money for Geffen. There was a part of David that fed off the egos and insecurities of his stars, compulsively trying to make everything perfect for them. Staying sober and focused while the talent indulged, David was driven not just by his own insecurity but by his own ravening co-dependency.
‘David may have wanted to have a successful business,’ said Jackson Browne, ‘but he also wanted to be part of a community of friends. He became our champion, and years later – after a lot of therapy – he finally got over his need to caretake people to the detriment of his own life.’ In the meantime there were plenty of fragile egos to caretake – and much remarkable talent to exploit.
4 Horses, Kids, Forgotten Women: Are You Ready for Country Rock?
‘We wanted to turn away from all the intensityand social foment and just sort of go have a picnic.’
BERNIE LEADON
The night of 22 June 1966 found an unusual-looking group taking the stage of the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Four men in buckskin jackets and cowboy boots ambled into the spotlight and performed a short set of country and western songs. The response to the ensemble, led by departed Byrd Gene Clark, was one of brow-furrowing bafflement. Here was the Tambourine Man himself, the Prince Valiant of folk-rock, rigged out like some cornpoke Opry veteran and singing that music – the songs of Southern racists. Just how unhip could you get?
For Clark, country songs were simply what you were reared on in Tipton, Missouri. It was no small coincidence that he returned there shortly after his Byrds meltdown. Connecting with his roots seemed to ground him in this dark passage of his fitful career. While the Byrds flew on into the Fifth Dimension, Clark lost interest in Roger McGuinn’s ‘jet sound’. His brief if heady trip as a mid-’60s pop star only confirmed his need to dig down into the original sources of the folk boom: bluegrass, Appalachian balladry, old-time string-band instrumentals.
Not that the trappings of LA stardom were a total turnoff for the Missouri Kid. Brooding and introverted he may have been, but Clark was as wowed by women and cars as the most clichéd of rock idols. At a party at Cyrus Farrar’s Laurel Canyon house, he met Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and began an affair with folk-pop’s überbabe. ‘John [Phillips] and Denny [Doherty] were having parties every night and they were screwing everybody,’ Michelle remembered. ‘And then very innocently this thing started with Gene.’
The romance scandalised the little village of Laurel Canyon, filling Gene with guilt and leading to Michelle’s departure from the Mamas and the Papas in early June. ‘He was an odd guy,’ says David Jackson, who played bass with Gene. ‘But he had his Ferrari and we went to Vegas one time. The guy was going at 150 mph. Now this is a guy who’s quiet, sensitive, a little weird, so it was incongruous to me. There was a discrepancy between the Ferrari and the art.’
Clark wasn’t the only LA folk-rocker flirting with country music. Chris Hillman had sneaked Porter Wagoner’s ‘Satisfied Mind’ on to the second Byrds album, Turn! Turn! Turn!. As the group geared up to record Younger than Yesterday, Chris drew still deeper from the bluegrass well by penning two stone-country tunes, ‘Time Between’ and ‘The Girl with No Name’. He also brought in guitarist Clarence White and former Hillmen singer Vern Gosdin to play on them. ‘It all begins with the Byrds, and I will argue that point with anybody,’ Hillman told author John Einarson.
Hillman would be the first to acknowledge that country music was already an integral strand in California’s musical fabric. The ‘western’ part of the country and western classification did not denote California per se but it certainly encompassed the Golden State: western swing and cowboy songs were as big west of the Rockies as they were down in Texas. The roots of country rock lay in the music of migrants uprooted by the Depression – Okies and other Southwesterners who’d drifted towards the Pacific from the drought-blighted dust bowls in the ’30s and ’40s. Many such migrants settled in the small city of Bakersfield, north of Los Angeles in the sun-baked San Joaquin Valley of California. By the early ’60s Bakersfield had unofficially become a ‘Nashville West’, spawning the gritty, unsentimental honky-tonk of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Los Angeles itself swarmed with displaced Southwesterners: its thousand and one suburbs boasted hundreds of dance halls, havens of drinking and fighting. And Capitol Records, the city’s biggest independent label, attracted the cream of country music talent, from Owens and Haggard to Wynn Stewart and Tommy Collins.
‘Most of us that came out of bluegrass didn’t like Nashville music,’ says Chris Darrow. ‘We liked country music, but we liked country music from California – from Bakersfield. We were really true to our school: we loved Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.’ For John Einarson, the sound of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos was ‘the first real electric country rock’. Owens, a conventional man next to brooding ex-jailbird Haggard, had a profound influence not only on a generation of country rockers but on such far-flung stars as the Beatles, who covered ‘Act Naturally’, and Ray Charles, who hit with ‘Together Again’.
Like Gene Clark, brothers Rodney and Douglas Dillard hailed from Missouri. In late 1962 they packed themselves into a beat-up 1955 Cadillac and brought their fiery little bluegrass combo to Los Angeles. In no time they were the talk of the folk underground, thrilling fans at the Ash Grove and the Troubadour. Their first album bore the title Back Porch Bluegrass. ‘Everybody went, “Oh my God, this is astonishing,”’ says David Jackson. ‘Everybody else was kind of folkie and nice and genteel and white, and here come these guys just ploughing through.’ Of the brothers, Rodney stayed the truer to his rural Christian upbringing.