Herbie Cohen, with the help of his lawyer brother Mutt, ruled the acoustic demimonde in Hollywood. His avuncular exterior concealed a streak of pure ruthlessness. ‘Herbie was a lot scarier than people would think,’ says folk singer Jerry Yester. ‘They’d think he was a kinda pudgy Jewish guy, but he was absolutely terrifying in conflict.’ In his way, Doug Weston was no less ruthless than Cohen. At six foot six he towered over everybody. ‘Tallest queer I ever knew,’ says actor Ted Markland. Weston’s sexual preferences were an industry secret. What wasn’t secret was his canny practice of tying artists to contracts that obliged them to return to the cramped Troubadour long after they were big enough to sell out amphitheatres.
For all the lip service it paid to folk protest, the Troubadour always had one beady eye on success. The clubhouse for the more commercial folk music epitomised by the Kingston Trio, it rapidly became a hootenanny hotbed of vaunting ambition. Pointedly different was Ed Pearl’s club the Ash Grove, which had opened at 8162 Melrose Avenue in July 1958. LA’s self-appointed bastion of tradition, the Ash Grove held fast to notions of not selling out. It was where you went to hear Doc Watson and Sleepy John Estes – blues and bluegrass veterans rescued from oblivion by earnest revivalists. ‘The Ash Grove was where you heard the roots, traditional stuff,’ says Jackson Browne, then an Orange County teenager. ‘Lots of people went to both clubs, but you didn’t stand much of a chance of getting hired at the Ash Grove.’
Another Ash Grove regular was the gorgeous Linda Ronstadt. She had deep soulful eyes and a big gutsy voice and she’d grown up in Arizona dreaming of freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. During the Easter break of 1964 Linda followed Tucson beatnik Bob Kimmel out to ‘The Coast’, moving into a small Victorian house on the beach at Santa Monica. ‘The whole scene was still very sweet and innocent at this point,’ Ronstadt recalls. ‘It was all about sitting around in little embroidered dresses and listening to Elizabethan folk ballads, and that’s how I thought it was always going to be.’ Among Ronstadt’s contemporaries were obsessive young folk-blues apprentices: kids like Ryland Cooder, John Fahey, Al Wilson. Some of them got so good that they were even allowed to play at the club. Cooder, 16 years old in 1963, backed folk-pop singers Pamela Polland and Jackie DeShannon. The nascent Canned Heat – a blues band formed by Wilson after Fahey had introduced him to man-mountain singer Bob Hite – played at the club.
‘The scene was just tiny,’ Ry Cooder reflects. ‘It was by and for people who were players, not for the general public. Ed Pearl was some sort of socialist, whereas Doug Weston was just an opportunist clubowner. We’d go down in the evening, mostly on the weekends. At that point Ed must have had a supply line, because he had Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and he had Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt and then Skip James. Sleepy John Estes was the one I was waiting to see. He seemed the most remote and peculiar – and I’d assumed dead.’
Ash Grove regulars looked down their noses at the Troubadour coterie. But it was at the Troubadour that the times were truly achanging. ‘The Ash Grove was supposed to be the more authentic place, but it was at the Troub that you really heard authentic regional music,’ says Ronstadt. For Henry ‘Tad’ Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, ‘it all came out of the scene at the Troubadour’. Yet the MFQ had trouble breaking out of the region to the rest of America. None of the local record companies was truly alert to what was going on under their noses. ‘The business for the kind of music we were playing then was all on the East Coast,’ says Chris Darrow, a folk-bluegrass multi-instrumentalist whose Dry City Scat Band was a fixture of the scene. ‘We all wanted to be on New York labels like Vanguard or Elektra, and the only thing that came out of here was the commercial stuff like the Kingston Trio.’
Yet something was starting to change. When the Modern Folk Quartet travelled to New York in 1964, they ran into young acoustic dreamers who longed to learn about the LA scene. A blond Southern boy named Stephen Stills came to the Village Gate to soak up the rich four-part harmonies the Quartet had honed. Accompanying him was an amiable kid from Ohio called Richie Furay. When Henry Diltz told Stephen and Richie what was happening in California, they were all ears. Ambitious beyond his years, Stills was disillusioned with the Village folk scene. Income for him and Richie was whatever found its way into the baskets that passed round after their sets at coffee houses such as the Four Winds on West 3rd Street. Manhattan felt cold and unfriendly. You might be broke in LA, Stills thought, but at least you’d have a suntan. John Phillips, a member of a group called the New Journeymen, had the same hankerings as he shivered through another New York winter with his lissom Californian wife Michelle. A song entitled ‘California Dreamin’’ started to take shape in his mind.
It was no coincidence, perhaps, that record companies in New York were waking up to what snobs called the ‘Left Coast’. Paul Rothchild, a hip A&R man with Jac Holzman’s classy and eclectic Elektra label, flew out to LA to scout the 1964 Folk Festival at UCLA. Smitten with what he found, Rothchild began to commute regularly between the East and West Coasts. ‘LA was less the promised land than the untilled field,’ says Holzman, himself entranced by Southern California. ‘We’d picked over the East Coast pretty well.’
Columbia Records, a far bigger entity than Elektra, was also casting a wider net from its Manhattan headquarters. If its meat-and-potatoes income came from such pop and MOR acts as Patti Page and Andy Williams, the label was also home to Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. On New Year’s Day 1964, Columbia publicist Billy James flew to Los Angeles to begin work as the company’s Manager of Information Services on the West Coast. Already in his late twenties, Billy was pure beat-generation, his sensibility shaped by Kerouac and Ginsberg. Thrilled at the way pop music was becoming a vibrant force in American culture, he plunged into the scene at the Troubadour and the Ash Grove. ‘Billy was a wonderful guy,’ says record producer Barry Friedman. ‘He was a charming, well-read, interesting fellow. In some ways I think he played the corporate game very well.’
James also felt the seismic impact of the Beatles’ first visit to America. The Liverpool group had done something no Americans were able to do: legitimise pop stardom for hipsters who despised identikit idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon. All of a sudden young folkies like David Crosby saw that you could write your own songs, draw on rock and roll, rhythm and blues and country music and still be stampeded by young girls. ‘The Beatles validated rock and roll,’ says Lou Adler, then an LA producer and label-owner. ‘People could listen to them knowing that these guys were really writing their songs.’
‘What started happening was that these young talented kids would band together,’ says Henry Diltz. ‘It was like double or triple the excitement.’ At the Troubadour and the Unicorn, David Crosby hung around the MFQ, envious of their gang-like camaraderie. Soon he was fraternising with other folkies who’d gravitated to California in search of something they couldn’t find elsewhere. Jim McGuinn, a slim and cerebral graduate of Chad Mitchell’s Trio – and of a stint in the employ of Bobby Darin – was slipping Beatles songs into his hoot sets at the Troubadour. Gene Clark, a handsome, haunted-looking balladeer from Missouri, finished up his apprenticeship in the LA-based New Christy Minstrels. Shy and slightly bewildered, Clark approached McGuinn after one of his Beatle-friendly sets and told him he dug what he was trying to do. ‘You wanna start