Table of Contents
For Natalie
I warn ya,
Im coming back to California.
Lend me a shack
And Ill perform ya
All kinds of happy songs to ease your pain.
Think of all we will gain.
David Ackles, Oh, California!
Preface
There is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here
The Eagles
On a baking day in August 1971, five naked young men sit in a sauna in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. Four are musicians, three of them on the cusp of unimaginable success. Two are out-of-towners come to sunny Southern California to find fame, glory, girls. All are lean, rangy, good-looking like Jesus Christ after a month in Palm Springs, in the words of their friend Eve Babitz.
The fifth naked man in the sauna is the one who owns it: a short, skinny agent whos moved to L.A. from New York and established himself as a talent broker of fearsome repute. Among his clients are Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. As the sweat pours off their suntanned limbs, David Geffen tells the four musiciansGlenn Frey, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, and Ned Dohenyabout his plans for his record label. I want to keep Asylum very small, he avers. Ill never have more artists than I can fit in this sauna.
Twenty years later, Geffen will sell his second labelone he named after himselffor a cool $550 million. At the same time, the first Greatest Hits album by the Eaglesthe group formed by Glenn Frey and Don Henleywill officially be pronounced the biggest-selling album of all time. David took the crme de la crme from that scene, says Eve Babitz, and signed them on the basis of their cuteness. Not bad work for an afternoons Nordic ogling.
Hotel California traces the amazing journey from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era in the mid-1960s to the peak of the Eagles success in the late 70s. It is the story of an unparalleled time and place, the first in-depth account of the scenethe mythically tangled genealogy, in the words of writer John Rockwellthat swirled around the denim navel-gazers and cheesecloth millionaires of the Los Angeles canyons.
At a time when the influences of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles have never been more pervasive, the moment has come to reappraise this remarkable group of artists. It is also time to reevaluate the powerful movers and shakers who shaped their careers: men such as Geffen, the agent-turned-mogul who established an unparalleled power base of L.A. talent; his partner Elliot Roberts, manager of Young and Mitchell; and Irving Azoff, who made multimillionaires of the Eagles.
This is an epic tale of songs and sunshine, drugs and denim, genius and greed. The setting is the longhair Olympus of Laurel and adjacent canyons. Its about the flighty genius of Joni Mitchell, the about-faces of Neil Young, the drugged disintegration of David Crosby, Gram Parsons, Judee Sill, and others. Its about the myriad relationships, professional and personal, between these artists and the songs they wrote; about the love affairs between Joni and Graham Nash, Joni and James Taylor, Joni and Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills and Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt and J. D. Souther. More than anything, its a narrative of rise and fallfrom Take It Easy to Take It to the Limit, from the hootenanny innocence of boys and girls with acoustic guitars to the coked-out stadium-rock superstardom of the mid-1970s.
Inevitably the recollections of the storys characters are colored by their sometimes selective memories, not to mention their own agendas. As Tom Waits, who began his career on Geffens Asylum label, puts it: The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened arent talking and the people who dont... well, you cant shut em up.
Whatever the ultimate truth, I have over the past decade elicited invaluable reminiscences from the following artists, managers, executives, producers, session musicians, writers, photographers, and scenesters: Lou Adler, David Anderle, Peter Asher, Eve Babitz, Walter Becker, Joel Bernstein, Rodney Bingenheimer, Dan Bourgoise, Joe Boyd, Jackson Browne, Denny Bruce, Allison Caine, Gretchen Carpenter, Cher, Ry Cooder, Stan Cornyn, Chester Crill, Chris Darrow, John Delgatto, Pamela Des Barres, Henry Diltz, Dave DiMartino, Tony Dimitriades, Craig Doerge, Ned Doheny, Denny Doherty, Mickey Dolenz, Donald Fagen, Danny Fields, Bill Flanagan, Ben Fong-Torres, Kim Fowley, David Gates, David Geffen, Fred Goodman, Carl Gottlieb, Barry Hansen, Richie Hayward, Jan Henderson, Judy Henske, Chris Hillman, Suzi Jane Hokom, Jac Holzman, Bones Howe, Danny Hutton, Jonh Ingham, David Jackson, Billy James, Judy James, Rickie Lee Jones, Phil Kaufman, Nick Kent, Martin Kibbee, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Russ Kunkel, Bruce Langhorne, Bernie Leadon, Arthur Lee, Steve Lester, Mark Leviton, Nils Lofgren, Roger McGuinn, Robert Marchese, Ted Markland, Frank Mazzola, Bob Merlis, Joni Mitchell, Essra Mohawk, Frazier Mohawk, Graham Nash, Randy Newman, Tom Nolan, Michael Ochs, Anita Pallenberg, Van Dyke Parks, Billy Payne, Robert Plant, Mel Posner, Neal Preston, Domenic Priore, Nancy Retchin, Keith Richards, Perry Richardson, Elliot Roberts, Jill Robinson, Linda Ronstadt, Ed Sanders, Bud Scoppa, the late Greg Shaw, Joe Smith, J. D. Souther, Ron Stone, Bill Straw, Matthew Sweet, the late Derek Taylor, Ted Templeman, Russ Titelman, the late Nik Venet, Joe Vitale, Mark Volman, Waddy Wachtel, Kurt Wagner, Tom Waits, June Walters, Lenny Waronker, Jimmy Webb, Jerry Wexler, Ian Whitcomb, Nurit Wilde, Tom Wilkes, Jerry Yester, and John York. My thanks to all for their time and their willingness to revisit the (sometimes painful) past.
A major debt is owed to two people in particular: my U.K. editor Matthew Hamilton, and Hannah Griffiths, briefly my agent before she switched horses to become an editor herself. They conceived the book in the first place and were dual sources of inspiration and encouragement. My gratitude also to Nicholas Pearson at Fourth Estate, and to Nick Davies, who shepherded the project through key later stages. Also to Merlin Cox for an exemplary U.K. copy edit. Tom Miller of John Wiley & Sons in the United States had much to do with the shaping of this edition of the book. My thanks to Euan Thorneycroft at Curtis Brown, who seamlessly succeeded Hannah Griffiths, and to Sarah Lazin and Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books in New York.
For assistance and facilitation, often beyond any possible call of duty, thanks to the following: the indefatigable Harvey Kubernik; Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde for their timelessly evocative images; Debbie Kruger for trawling through Henrys considerable archives and unearthing unseen treasures; to Eve Kakassy for getting those and other images to me; Jim McCrary; Dede at Redferns Picture Agency; Johnny Black, esteemed keeper of the Rocksource Archive; Billy James, who corrected factual errors and made many helpful comments; Roger Burrows, who generously burned CDs for me; Eddi Fiegel, Barry Miles, Matthew Greenwald, John Einarson, Richard Bosworth, Paul Scanlon, Kevin Kennedy, Richard Cromelin, Steven Rosen, Marc Weingarten, Susan Compo, Carrie Steers, Jonh Ingham, Neil Scaplehorn, Richard Wootton, Rob Partridge, Val Brown, Oscar Thompson, Annene Kaye, Diedre Duewel, Tony Keys, Mark Pringle, Martin Colyer, William Higham, Paul Lester, Allan Jones, Ted Alvy, Dale Carter, Rod Tootell, Mick Houghton, Davitt Sigerson, Brendan Mullen, Andy Schwartz, Mick Brown, Nic de Grunwald, Erik James, Catherine Heaney, Silvia Crompton, Julian Humphries, Michelle Kort, Jon Savage, Johnny Marr, Ian MacArthur, John Tobler, and Pete Frame. And a special thank you to Simon McGuire, the heppest cat in all of Glendale.
