Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (14 page)

David Lindley was traveling with us, playing with Jackson. David is a multi-instrumentalist who collects and plays a variety of instruments that I can’t even pronounce, let alone spell. Still a young man, he had vigorously explored a number of disparate music styles, including Middle Eastern and Central European. David has an elastic face that settles into a puckish expression during the rare times that it is at rest. He is one of the great characters of the music world, with an ability to change accents and personas as readily as he can change instruments and music styles. During one of our conversations, with David Rolodexing through voices and personalities, we discovered that our families are related through my grandmother’s grandfather, making him my cousin. I didn’t know whether to be delighted or dismayed.

Lacking patience for the two-to-a-berth, leaking-air-mattress
arrangement, David had figured out how to sleep in the bus’s overhead luggage rack. This space was so tight that it would make a bunk on a submarine seem deluxe. He would emerge from his beauty sleep at odd hours and blast the zydeco music of Louisiana accordionist Clifton Chenier at thundering volume all the way to the back of the bus. No one seemed to mind. David was cherished like a beloved uncle in the late stages of dementia.

Lowell George had a falling out with his bandmates and joined up with us somewhere. He and Jackson sat in the front of the bus night after night while Jackson was writing “Your Bright Baby Blues.” Lowell accompanied him on electric slide guitar, which he plugged into a tiny battery-driven Pignose amplifier. Lowell also was writing good songs on that trip. I remember watching him write in a blank book with a Rapidograph pen, carefully printing, in block letters, the lyrics to “Long Distance Love” and “Roll On Through the Night.”

We worked our way east to New York City and then turned back south. Meanwhile, the flu epidemic of 1974 was working its way through the passengers on our tour bus. It was a particularly savage virus that year. Some of our band members had been so sick that they had to be left behind, much too weak to travel. By the time we arrived in Washington, D.C., I was coughing, feverish, and could hardly walk. We had a show that night at Georgetown University. Emmy and John Starling came to the show. John took my temperature. It was 103 degrees. I sang anyway but sounded just awful and felt sorry for the audience having to listen to it. John had recently nursed his wife through the same flu. Being a doctor, he knew how dangerous the virus could be and warned me that it could turn into pneumonia. Lowell and I went to stay with John and Fayssoux, and
the tour went on without me. I missed the last two shows. That meant no washing machine.

I went to bed and didn’t get up for four or five days. When I finally got up, I had only enough strength to go downstairs and lie in the big orange leather beanbag chair in their living room.

In the morning, John put on his white coat and left to see patients and perform surgeries. In the evening, he took off the coat, strapped on his guitar, and played music with Emmylou and members of the Seldom Scene. The first week, I could only lie in the beanbag chair and listen, still too sick to sing. The second week, I began to join in.

Paul Craft, a songwriter friend of John’s, came up from Nashville, slept in the Starlings’ basement, and taught me to sing his newly written “Keep Me from Blowing Away.” I decided to record it there in Maryland and have Paul and John play on it.

John told me about a good sound engineer who had built a great recording studio in nearby Silver Spring. John brought him over to meet me. His name was George Massenburg, and he would eventually become my most important musical partner, working together on at least sixteen albums.

Emmy turned up with her young friend Ricky Skaggs. He was just beginning to develop a name for himself as a formidable bluegrass tenor and superb harmony singer. John Starling had introduced him to Emmy, recommending him for her backup band. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard how well he sang. I sat down with him and started to learn. Over the next ten days, he taught me everything I know about bluegrass harmonies.

Emmy brought a second friend to stay in the Starlings’ basement. Jet Thomas had been the dean of freshmen at Harvard, and also a proctor in Gram Parsons’s dormitory when Gram studied there in the mid-1960s. Modest and quiet, Jet had piercing blue eyes and a brilliant mind. He and Gram had continued
a friendship beyond Harvard, and Jet would appear occasionally at recording sessions and concerts to boost Gram’s morale. Emmylou and Jet forged a deep bond of friendship after Gram’s death. Jet listened more than he talked, but when he talked, he had a great ability to clarify thinking and change attitudes for the better. In the gravity-defying M. C. Escher landscape of the music business, he was a good man to have around.

With such a great bunch of musicians assembled under one roof, we played all the good songs we knew, and we played all night. Outside it was snowing hard. By midnight, the snow was so deep that no one could leave. Great! We carried on for several more days. Emmy and I have often remarked that we have been recording the songs from our snow marathon for thirty years and counting. They have turned up on my records, Emmy’s records, and the Trio records that Emmy and I made with Dolly Parton—usually with George Massenburg presiding in the studio control room.

When the snow was cleared away, we drove to Silver Spring and recorded “Keep Me from Blowing Away.” Lowell went along to help and was so impressed with George Massenburg that he patched up his quarrel with Little Feat and talked them into coming to Maryland, where they recorded
Feats Don’t Fail Me Now
. Lowell also produced a beautiful album,
Long Time Gone
, for John Starling, with Massenburg engineering on several cuts.

Lowell convinced Massenburg to move to Los Angeles, where he continued to record Little Feat, plus a series of successful albums with Earth, Wind & Fire. He built another studio, the Complex, in West Los Angeles, where Peter Asher and I recorded with him for years.

10

Heart Like a Wheel

P
ETER AND
I
BEGAN
work on the record I owed Capitol at the Sound Factory in Hollywood in the spring of 1974. The fact that Capitol got to claim that record turned out to be one of the luckiest breaks of my career. Al Coury, one of the best promotion men in the business, was head of A&R and promotion for Capitol. He wanted to show off to upstart David Geffen that he could run a superior sales campaign. It was also in Geffen’s interest to have the record sell, because the following record would revert back to him, and it would sell more if the Capitol record were successful. I wound up with both record companies throwing everything they had at my project. I felt like a girl with two suitors competing for my hand.

I was excited about finally getting to record Anna McGarrigle’s “Heart Like a Wheel.” I spent a lot of thought and energy planning the arrangement, masterfully written by violist David Campbell, and making sure that it included a cello solo. I particularly wanted the spare sound of a chamber group, rather than the more lush, orchestral approach that I thought had clogged up some of my previous releases. I had also figured out my guitar arrangement for “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” during my floor-waxing frenzy in the Beachwood apartment. Emmylou and I had worked up some harmonies to “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You),” and she agreed to fly out and record it with me.

As I am primarily a ballad singer, I find it necessary to include uptempo songs on my records and in my performances so
that the audience doesn’t go to sleep listening to one slow song after another. As an afterthought, I decided to include on the record a song I’d been using to close our show. At the suggestion of Stone Poneys bandmate Kenny Edwards, I had learned it from the singing of soul singer Betty Everett, best known for her hit “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss).” It was called “You’re No Good.” We were tired of the arrangement we had been using onstage and decided to try something new. Ed Black, who played six-string guitar and pedal steel, started to play a rhythm riff on his Les Paul. Kenny Edwards had recently joined the band as the bass player, and he echoed the riff in octaves. Andrew Gold added a sparse drum part, giving me a basic track to sing over.

We did a few takes, picked one we liked, and then Andrew, who also played guitars and keyboards, went to work with Peter and began to build up layers of guitar, piano, and percussion tracks. After several hours of adding to the basic track, they started to compose and piece together Andrew’s guitar solo. This was done by recording multiple tracks of Andrew playing the solo different ways and then editing together the bits they particularly liked. After that, they added more layers of Andrew playing guitars with different electronic effects until they had the solo completed. It took several more hours. When they had the solo assembled, we all sat down to listen to what had taken so long to put together, to see if it was as good as we thought it was. While they had been working, I had nicked out for an hour to eat dinner and brought a friend back with me. He made a comment about the solo, wondering why it suddenly sounded like the Beatles. Peter, who had worked so hard and was excited about how it had turned out, did not look happy. I asked to hear it again. Val Garay, our engineer, had been sitting at the console all day and into what was then the morning. He was
tired. During the playback, he reached to turn on the track that contained the composite guitar solo, but he hit the wrong button and erased the entire thing. When he realized what he had done, his face turned as gray as putty. Peter was deadly calm. I could see the wheels turning in his head, frantically figuring out how to recapture what had been lost. Andrew opened his case, pulled out the guitar he had just packed up, and they started again. I went home and went to bed. I returned to the studio the next morning and heard the reconstructed solo. Peter, Val, and Andrew were exhausted. It sounded fabulous.

“You’re No Good” was released as the single. We had included “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You),” the duet I sang with Emmylou Harris, on the flip side. In February 1975 “You’re No Good” went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In addition, “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)” went to number two on the country chart.

Photo by Annie Leibovitz.

Number 38 Malibu Colony.

11

Malibu

H
EART
L
IKE A
W
HEEL
spawned two more hit singles, “When Will I Be Loved” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” Now I had enough money to buy a washing machine. I began to look for a house to go with it.

I had become an exercise fanatic and wanted to run in clean air and soft sand. I bought a small Cape Cod–style house at the beach in Malibu, about twenty minutes north of where I had lived in the Stone Poneys days in Santa Monica.