As galvanising and irreverent as the Dillards were, the bluegrass craze that swept through Southern California was rooted more in nostalgia than in eclecticism. ‘The wave hit LA, which was ripe for something like that,’ said Ry Cooder. ‘It…suggested that there might be a carefree, simple-minded world beyond all the stress and strain of Los Angeles, and that people could wear cowboy hats and boots and play banjos and be cowboys…’
For all the success the Dillards enjoyed, brother Douglas was more interested in fun and frolics than in steady employment. He was also keen to move beyond traditional bluegrass. So were several other musicians. Clarence White, the hottest guitarist on the scene, was tiring of the acoustic, bluegrass-based music he played in the Kentucky Colonels. One of his chief accomplices was pedal steel player ‘Sneaky’ Pete Kleinow, a veteran of California western swing bands. ‘We were fooling around there with country rock but we didn’t know what to call it,’ Kleinow says. ‘Clarence was one of the ringleaders of all that, but there wasn’t a label for it at the time.’
Troubadour hootmaster Larry Murray led Hearts and Flowers, a trio playing an uncategorisable mix of folk, pop and bluegrass that got them signed to Capitol Records subsidiary FolkWorld by A&R man Nik Venet. ‘[Hearts and Flowers] were probably the closest thing to what we were all flowing into,’ said Jimmy Messina, a new guitarist recruited by Richie Furay to help patch up the Buffalo Springfield. ‘They were the cutting edge of where the rest of us were going.’ Venet, who had been instrumental in the career of the Beach Boys, wasn’t exactly hip to the new direction; he even fought Hearts and Flowers on their cover of Merle Haggard’s ‘I’m a Lonesome Fugitive’. Yet inadvertently FolkWorld became a creative Petri dish for country rock, especially after Venet signed ex-Kingston Trio singer John Stewart and the Linda Ronstadt-fronted Stone Poneys to the label.
Venet figured he could sell the Stone Poneys as a kind of Sunset Strip version of Peter, Paul & Mary. The young Ronstadt, puppyishly eager and grateful, was happy to go along with the plan. But when Venet added sweeping strings to ‘Different Drum’, a song by her boyfriend Mike Nesmith, the barefoot chanteuse was appalled – especially when, in late 1967, the track became a hit. ‘I hated it,’ Ronstadt says. ‘I never set out to make it. If I was playing some pizza place in Westwood or the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach, I was happy.’
With her dark skin and doe eyes, Ronstadt was already turning heads and breaking hearts. ‘Linda was young and she was very cute,’ says Nurit Wilde. ‘She was adorable. You could tell right away that she was the Stone Poneys.’ Flirtatious and precocious, Ronstadt seemed only semi-aware of her sexual power. When Judy Henske took the unhappy Phil Ochs to visit her in Topanga Canyon, he asked her out. ‘Linda says to me, in front of Phil, “Phil just asked me out,”’ Henske remembers. ‘She says, “I told him no. I decided I didn’t dig him.” And she started giggling.’
Ronstadt, who recorded her debut solo album Hand Sown…Home Grown in the fall of 1968, was just one of the artists on the post-folk LA scene who sensed the move towards a new kind of country music. ‘Everybody’s going to the country,’ she said in October 1970. ‘Everybody’s trying to get some air. Obviously we screwed it up here pretty badly for human beings. They’re trying to seek shelter in any way they can.’
‘I think it was unconsciously a reaction to the volatility of the times,’ agrees Bernie Leadon, a bluegrass-schooled picker who’d gigged with Chris Hillman back in the early folk days. ‘By 1967 we all already knew people we’d been to school with who’d been killed in Vietnam. And then in 1968, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King got killed. So you had all this intense political stuff going on but at the same time you were struggling with questions like “Am I going to have a family? Is that a wise thing to do?”’
When Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding appeared early in 1968, its sparse Nashville sound and biblical imagery confirmed his apparent retreat from the exploding plastic counterculture. His former backing group the Hawks – or The Band, as they became known when their 1968 debut Music from Big Pink was released – had if anything more impact in LA than their mentor. While country music was only one of several rootsy ingredients in their Americana brew, the use of such old-timey instruments as fiddles and mandolins made them a key part of this retrogressive trend. When Time magazine put the group on the cover in 1970, the headline read ‘The New Sound of Country Rock’. And when The Band came to record their second album in 1969, they chose to cut most of it in California in a pool house overlooking the Sunset Strip.
Nashville Skyline, released in the same year, took Dylan’s retreat one step further. Sung in a strangely plummy voice at several removes from the caustic timbre of Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, Skyline was another rebuff to the politicos who’d looked to Dylan for militant leadership. It also changed the image of Nashville for ever. ‘It broke the city open,’ says Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, who grew up in Nashville. ‘After that, things started to get interesting as far as other people coming to town to record on a fairly regular basis.’ In Nashville at the same time was John Stewart, working on an album called California Bloodlines. Employing the same Music Row session players that Dylan used, producer Nik Venet wanted to cross the Nashville Sound with LA country rock. The resulting record – an Americana classic flecked with the influences of John Steinbeck and Andrew Wyeth – sounded like some missing link between Johnny Cash and Gene Clark. ‘I wanted to do a sort of modern folk thing, not LA country,’ Venet said. ‘By making this cross, John made it possible for Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers to happen. I wanted to define a new folk movement with Stewart and Ronstadt.’ The ‘new folk movement’ was on its way, but it had little to do with folk as Nik Venet had known it.
In California itself, country music was now setting the pace for late ’60s rock. Even as the Buffalo Springfield unravelled in the sessions for farewell album Last Time Around, country was clearly audible in the clipped rimshots of Neil Young’s ‘I Am a Child’– and even more markedly in Richie Furay’s song ‘Kind Woman’, featuring a pedal steel guitar. ‘I think Neil Young and I were playing country rock before [The Band] ever got out of what they were playing with Ronnie Hawkins,’ Stephen Stills told Circus in 1970. ‘I mean, we were playing Chet Atkins guitar and stuff like that, which may sound like an ego trip.’
If Stills and Young were barely speaking during the recording of Last Time Around, the sessions at Sunset Sound cemented the bond between Richie Furay and guitarist Jim Messina. As the two men worked on the Springfield’s swan song, the seeds of their own country rock band Poco were planted.
The Byrds themselves underwent the most radical of all stylistic changes when they made the bold decision to replace David Crosby with Southern-born Gram Parsons, late of the International Submarine Band. Skinny and cute with a warm boyish smile, what set Parsons apart from his country rock contemporaries was the $30,000 he received each year from a trust fund set up by his wealthy family. He suffered from rich kids’ dilettantism, dropping out of bands and other projects when he tired of hard graft. He’d also had an upbringing as dysfunctional as anything in