‘It was kinda like a tadpole growing legs,’ says Jerry Yester, briefly a member of the Lovin’ Spoonful. ‘We just got closer and closer to being a rock band. Everybody else was doing the same thing – raiding the pawnshops for electric guitars. Inside of a year, the whole face of West LA changed.’ Secretly Chris Hillman was appalled by the electrification of folk. ‘Chris told me he’d joined this rock and roll band,’ says David Jackson. ‘He said it with this real sheepish look on his face, like he was betraying the cause.’
After one insipid single on Elektra as ‘The Beefeaters’, the group became the Byrds, complete with quaint Olde English spelling. Signed to Columbia, the band was adopted by Billy James. ‘In my opinion Billy was more responsible than anyone for the Byrds’ success,’ says Barry Friedman. ‘It was all down to his corporate manoeuvring at Columbia. The in-house stuff he did is what made that band happen.’ On 20 January 1965 the band cut Bob Dylan’s druggy ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ with dashing producer Terry Melcher and a bunch of sessionmen. Released in April, after the group had established themselves at gone-to-seed Sunset Strip club Ciro’s, the single went to No. 1 in June and instantly enshrined the new electric folk sound. ‘You mainly just went to parties and to hear people play,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘But then the Byrds happened, and you heard them on the radio and they had a huge pop hit.’
‘We all came over and went, “Ahhh! They got record contracts!”’ said Linda Ronstadt. ‘I mean, as far as we were concerned they had made it, just because they had a record contract. David Crosby had a new suede jacket; that was affluence beyond description.’ Pop life in LA would never be the same again.
Paying close attention to the Byrds’ ascent were local industry figures, many of them caught off guard. Lou Adler, the canny and highly focused LA entrepreneur who’d turned nightclub guitarist Johnny Rivers into a million-selling star, watched as ‘folk-rock’ caught fire in California.
‘The influx of the Greenwich Village folkies in 1964 and 1965 was very important,’ Adler reflects. ‘Music changed drastically. When Dylan plugged in his guitar he took a lot of people from the folk field to the rock and roll field. Folk-rock swept out the teen idols, and it gave pop a hip political edge.’ With his new Dunhill label, Adler homed in on folk-rock. Former surf-pop tunesmith P. F. Sloan was given a hat, a pair of Chelsea boots and a copy of Bringing It All Back Home and instructed to write some protest songs. He returned a few days later with ‘Eve of Destruction’, duly recorded by ex-New Christy Minstrel Barry McGuire. ‘Folk + Rock + Protest = Dollars,’ noted Billboard after the song topped the charts.
One afternoon, Barry McGuire brought a new folk group along to an Adler recording session at Hollywood’s Western Recorders studio. John Phillips, their leader, had tried his luck in LA some years before but his timing hadn’t been right. He’d even married Michelle Gilliam, a beautiful California blonde who sang with him alongside Denny Doherty and Cass Elliott, former members of Greenwich Village group the Mugwumps. Now here they were in LA, chancing everything on a move to the new promised land. The Mamas and the Papas’ moment eventually came. Breaking into the pealing harmonies of Phillips’s ‘Monday, Monday’, they followed up with ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, ‘Once Was a Time’ and ‘Go Where You Wanna Go’. Shrewdly, they left the best for last: the soaring anthem ‘California Dreamin’’. Adler was duly blown away. Released late in 1965, ‘Dreamin’’ summed up what the rest of the nation was already feeling about the Golden State. Except that this time it wasn’t the clichéd California of surfing and blondes and hot rods that was being hymned. It was the blossoming hippie milieu of the Sunset Strip and its bucolic annexe Laurel Canyon.
After ‘California Dreamin’, John and Michelle Phillips did what all self-respecting musicians were doing in Los Angeles: they moved from a decaying dump in the West Hollywood flatlands to a funky pad on Lookout Mountain Avenue, up in the canyon, high above it all. Cass Elliott, born Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, followed in their wake. A rotund Jewish earth mama, she began to hold court in the canyon in what was a kind of folk-pop salon. Among her close friends was David Crosby, with whom she’d bonded on a folk tour two years before.
Observing the success of both the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas were the savvy executives at Warner/Reprise Records in Burbank, north of Hollywood. It was a testament to their acumen that the conjoined labels were still in business at all. Warner Brothers Records, launched merely because the rancorous Jack Warner thought his movie studio should have a music division, had nearly gone under just three years earlier. Nor had Reprise, bought from Frank Sinatra in a deal that was laughably generous to the singer, launched promisingly. But Morris ‘Mo’ Ostin, who’d come into the Warners fold as Sinatra’s accountant, turned out to have instincts and ears. He was a bean-counter with soul. ‘The company had learned some good lessons coming out of the Dean Martin era,’ says Stan Cornyn, who became Head of Creative Services at the company. Warner/Reprise had missed the Byrds and the Mamas and Papas but were swift to sign the Kinks and Petula Clark to North America. ‘We got on the London express, because we weren’t getting fed artists here,’ says Joe Smith, who joined Warners in 1961. ‘We had to go dig out our own and sign them for North America.’
Mo and Joe were determined not to let the next Byrds pass them by. Helping them was a young A&R man named Lenny Waronker. ‘It’s amazing how little I paid attention to the Byrds,’ Lenny says today. ‘I’m embarrassed to even talk about it, but we were so focused in our own world.’ Waronker was the son of Si Waronker, founder of LA label Liberty Records. He’d got his grounding at Metric Music, Liberty’s publishing arm, overseeing a stable of songwriting talent that was the closest California came to New York’s Brill Building. Among Metric’s writers – Jackie DeShannon, David Gates, P. J. Proby, Glen Campbell – was Lenny’s boyhood friend Randy, nephew of movie composers Alfred and Lionel Newman. ‘We were a kind of poor man’s Carole King and Barry Mann and Neil Sedaka,’ Newman recalls of his Metric days. ‘I was trying to do the same things as Carole and I knew I wasn’t doing them as well.’
‘We used to crank out songs for singers like Dean Martin,’ says David Gates, who packed his wife and kids into a battered Cadillac in 1962 and drove from Oklahoma to California. ‘Seeing some nice songs go down the drain, you started to think, maybe I ought to do them myself.’
‘Dylan exploded the universe of folk songwriting,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘Suddenly there was a whole wealth of ideas out there, and you could discuss anything in a song. You also had Jackie DeShannon on pop TV shows talking about songs she’d written herself. Normally you wouldn’t