Wild Tales (20 page)

“Hey, man, we don’t want to wait any longer,” Croz told me during a phone call at the end of October. They wanted to gauge my seriousness about putting something together with them. “Stephen and I are gonna come over to England as soon as we raise some cash.” Almost as soon as those words were out of his mouth, Stills walked into the room, pulled out his wallet, and fanned fifty one-hundred-dollar bills in front of Crosby’s eyes. “There should be enough for some airfare here,” he said, chucking the bills into the air like confetti. Ahmet had come across with a little seed money. David and Stephen decided to strike while the iron was hot. The next day, November 1, 1968, they were on a plane to London.

They came prepared and with plenty of artillery. They had guitars and enough money to rent a flat on Moscow Road with a little upstairs studio in it. I moved right in with them for three weeks. We went to local stores and stocked our refrigerator, we had ladies come by, plenty of dope. And we sang our asses off. It was a musical riot.
Each of us came loaded with songs. David had
“Guinevere,”
“Long Time Gone,”
“Almost Cut My Hair,” and “Wooden Ships.” Stephen brought
“You Don’t Have to Cry,” “As I Come of Age,” “Helplessly Hoping,” “49 Reasons,” “My Love Is a Gentle Thing,” and fragments of a song he was working on about his relationship with
Judy Collins. And I had
“Marrakesh Express,”
“Lady of the Island,”
“King Midas in Reverse,”
“Right Between the Eyes,” and some of “Teach Your Children.” Not a bad lot to start with—the songs, I mean, although I could say the same about the guys.

The three of us fell in love all over again. Our voices blended gorgeously on every song. It was as if they knew exactly where to go without having to be told. We didn’t have to break things down, work out harmonies or individual parts. We found the groove the moment we opened our mouths and those songs evolved organically, just like that.

We established a democracy early on that featured a reality rule: If I play you a song and you don’t react to it, you’ll never hear that song again; if you go, “Fuckin’ cool!” then I’ve got you. Simple as that. That meant we’d only do songs that the three of us really loved, and that was a good basis to start from. There were other rules, too, silly ones and send-ups. Of course, we were so high on hash half the time that I barely remember the specifics. It was a wild three or four weeks. We just didn’t want to stop singing, hearing that incredible sound. At some point,
Rolling Stone
asked Crosby to describe it for them. His answer paraphrased Jackson Pollock but was typical Croz: “There’s a whole bunch of it that just don’t make it with words—it’s like trying to describe fucking.”

We knew what we wanted: a record deal with a company that left us completely alone so there was no outside bullshit, no one who tried to mess with our sound. Sure Ahmet put up dough to get us moving, but that didn’t buy him a free pass. In fact, we really had our hearts set on
Apple Records. It was a happening label. They had
James Taylor, Jackie Lomax, Delaney & Bonnie, Billy Preston, the Iveys (who later became Badfinger), and Mary
Hopkins. And, oh yeah, I almost forgot—they were the
Beatles, no small fact. In the midst of our rehearsing, they’d put out
The
White Album
, and when we heard “Blackbird” we jumped all over it with three-part harmony. It’s one of those tunes we’ve sung steadily over the years.

One day in early December,
George Harrison and Peter Asher (then the head of A&R for the label) came by Moscow Road to hear what we were up to. By that time, we had nearly an album’s worth of material and ran down everything we knew on a couple of acoustic guitars. We really nailed it, we were on our game that afternoon. The music, sung in its entirety, sounded glorious. To say nothing of which, we had created a new sound. I could see on their faces the effect that we had. Or so I thought. A few days later we got a formal reply: “Not for us.” Turns out they just didn’t hear it at all. As a matter of fact, the same thing happened sometime later, when we played it for Simon and Garfunkel at Paul’s apartment in New York. We thought, “They understand this kind of sound. They’re going to
love
it.” But they didn’t love it, which was shocking at the time.

Hey, have it your way.

No matter, I knew we had something incredibly special and I was more than ready to make it official: The Hollies and I were parting company. Unfortunately, I handled it badly. I didn’t have the balls to tell Allan or the other guys. They were my mates; I’d grown up with them. I’d been joined at the hip with Allan for most of my life. We’d been best friends since we were six and we relied on that friendship. Both of us assumed we’d be involved with each other for the rest of our lives. So I knew how he’d take it. He’d be hurt, completely pissed, especially since I was moving on and, in effect, leaving him behind. So instead of settling things man-to-man with Clarkie, I turned chickenshit and just told
Ron Richards. The Hollies got the news from him and the music press.

Obviously, things were a little, shall we say, awkward, but I agreed to finish my obligations with the Hollies, which amounted to a final charity gig, the Save Rave for the Invalid Children’s Aid Association
at the London Palladium on December 8, 1968. The band still didn’t believe I was splitting from them. It didn’t seem real—that is, until Crosby showed up in our dressing room backstage. His presence made for a pretty tense scene. He was in his fuck-you dark green leather cape, Borsalino hat, twirling a cane like Bat Masterson, joints in his pocket. And there was that loaded Crosby swagger you couldn’t avoid. I can only imagine the effect it had on the other guys.
Tony Hicks says he knew at that moment it was over between us. Allan … I’m not so sure. He took it really hard.

I didn’t stick around to soothe frayed nerves. Two days later, I was on a plane to Los Angeles. I was twenty-six years old and came with basically nothing, just my guitar, a small suitcase, and a few of my favorite things: an albino turtle shell and a mirror in the shape of a jester that I’d found on the King’s Road. I had no money to speak of. My financial people didn’t want me to be taxed by two governments, so for a few months I couldn’t touch my bank account. Crosby told me not to worry about a thing. “What do you need?” he asked me when I arrived at his house. I didn’t know. I had no idea what it cost to live in the States. He said, “Let me lend you a little dough just to tide you over,” and he wrote me a check for $80,000.

Ostensibly, I was going to crash with Croz. He’d moved into a house on Crater Lane in Beverly Glen. When I arrived there just off the plane, a party was in full swing: Who knows, maybe it was an ongoing affair. Beautiful young women all over the place, some clothed, some not so clothed. Plenty of weed. Music pulsing through the place. I was in hippie heaven. After ten years of playing with a stick-straight band, I wind up in the middle of this blissed-out mayhem. It was
insane
, and I loved every minute of it. Too bad I couldn’t relax and enjoy it. I wasn’t feeling that well. I had jet lag and a nagging cold. Suddenly, like in an acid flash, Joni Mitchell appeared. Taking me by the arm, she said, “Come to my house and I’ll take care of you.”

America! What a country this was!

I
MOVED INTO
Joni’s and somehow never made my way back to David’s. Do I have to explain this? No, I didn’t think so.

She had a great little place, a quaint one-bedroom wooden cottage nearly as small as my Salford home but so incredibly charming. It was built in the 1930s by a black jazz musician, lots of knotty pine, creaky wooden floors, warped window sashes, mismatched carpentry. Crosby had brought Joan to Los Angeles to record a year and a half earlier, and she found the house, which cost about $40,000. She was not a rich girl at that point, so Joan used her artistic sensibility to dress that place in her inimitable style. She could transform a shack and make it look chic and gracious. The living room felt like a safe, snug refuge, welcoming, toasty, warmed by sunlight. There was some great furniture mixed with Craftsman pieces, a couple of cabinets full of beautifully colored glass objects, a stunning Tiffany lamp, Joan’s artwork leaning discreetly here and there. Against a wall beneath the ripple-paned windows were bookshelves with little vases and knickknacks, a wooden pig from a carousel. And, of course, a piano. Around the corner, a useless, simple kitchen. Joan wasn’t much of a cook. Soup and salad and that was it.

The house was well situated for peace and quiet. Standing on the porch, we could barely see the neighbors—a cabin on the corner that used to belong to Tom Mix and where Frank Zappa and his family now lived, and just beyond that, up the hill, a house rented to Joan’s manager,
Elliot Roberts.

So Joan and I lived together in this lovely place, with its garden out back, one of the dreamiest sanctuaries in Laurel Canyon. What a gift to land here, even with all its twists and complications. Once again, the instigator was Crosby. He knew Joan and I would hit it off, even though his place in Joan’s bed was still fairly warm. Didn’t matter to Croz. He didn’t get hung up on shit like that. He wasn’t territorial or the jealous type. He wasn’t possessive. The way he saw
it, women were made to be loved every which way, and without any strings attached. Long-term relationships were fine, as long as you played by his rules, which meant monogamy was out of the question. He was going to make love to whomever he pleased, whenever he pleased, wherever he pleased, however he pleased. And he was up-front about it, just so you knew. There was no doubt David had been in love with Joan, but they were already breaking up during the recording of her first album. Their relationship had turned turbulent, according to Crosby. Anyway, he knew I would be better for her than he was. And what happened was probably one of the most civilized she’s-not-my-girlfriend-anymore-and-now-she’s-yours swaps that had ever taken place.

In the meantime, David had fallen in love with a beautiful young woman named
Christine Hinton. An army brat with a freethinking worldview, she’d started a David Crosby fan club with her friend,
Debbie Donovan, when she was fourteen, and variously—and often together—they’d been David’s lovers. David, of course, wanted both of them. He even wanted me to enjoy, so one night when I’d crashed at David’s house, he asked Christine to go downstairs to be with me. What a wonderful woman. Rock ’n’ roll, huh? Christine accepted his ground rules for an anything-goes relationship; to a large extent she felt the same way he did. And in a curious way, they were devoted to each other. So these tangled issues had a way of resolving themselves.

Ten days after I’d moved in with Joan, David, Stephen, and I took the red-eye to New York to try to put something more concrete together. We were three guys who sang harmonies incredibly well, but we needed to get the machinery rolling, with a band, a record deal, and other incidentals that go with the gig. It was time to find out exactly where we were headed. We didn’t want to rehearse in LA because Laurel Canyon was too damn social and we wanted to get out of the scene. Leaving was the only way we’d get any work done. Our good friend
John Sebastian came up with an alternative. He proposed that we relocate to Sag Harbor on Long Island.
“Nobody’ll bother you there, man,” he said. “I’ll rent you a house. You’ll be totally fine.”

Sag Harbor, a funky little hamlet on the lip of the Hamptons. Dead of winter, no one was there. Perfect. Sebastian rented us one of those wooden chalets, just outside of town on a lake. We invoked the “no women” rule:
NO WOMEN ON THE BUS
. That meant Joni and Christine remained behind in LA.
Judy Collins, who lived in New York, did manage to infiltrate our strategic defense shield, but she came and went before it became an issue.

Before we moved out there, however, we stopped off at the Record Plant in the city, where Sebastian was in the process of recording his first solo album. It was December 21, 1968.
Paul Rothchild was producing the session—nice guy, the house producer at Elektra Records, with an impressive track record: the Doors, the Butterfield Blues Band, Tim Buckley, Love, and later Janis Joplin’s
Pearl.
David knew him socially in LA, they used to hang together, and Croz had made a demo a year earlier with Paul at the board. Seemed like he might be a good producer for us. He had some time left in the studio after one of John’s sessions, so we went in and put down two tracks, “Helplessly Hoping” and “You Don’t Have to Cry.”

Paul doubled our voices to give it a rich, resonant sound. Stephen played guitar, bass, and piano. Instead of drums, we substituted tambourine.

Nothing like a test drive to realize the vehicle wasn’t up to speed. We knew right away that Rothchild wasn’t right for us. He was too precise, too rigid. We were so much looser than Paul. If one of us moved away from the mike, even an inch, he went apeshit, and that started to piss us off. We’d do what we thought was a great take, and he’d cut us off midstream: “No! You moved!” So what? We cared more about how it felt. There was a lot of testosterone flying around that session. Paul wanted control, and that was the last thing we needed from a producer. Meanwhile, he was chemically on the same trip we were on, so he couldn’t counterbalance the adrenaline in the studio. He couldn’t say, “You guys are too coked
up and are singing too fast.” Crosby recognized that right away. The demos we made are frantically fast and high-strung, not the way we wanted to hear ourselves.