Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (39 page)

Read Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Online

Authors: Pamela Des Barres

But Rick didn’t quit. In 1969, heartily inspired by Dylan’s country-flavored “Nashville Skyline,” he rounded up a batch of excellent musicians, formed the Stone Canyon Band, and started playing live again. Despite vigorous protests, his fellow players convinced Rick to add a few of his oldies to the set, along with the new material, which included three Dylan tunes. Released in 1970,
Rick Nelson in Concert
met with respectful raves and the single, Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me,” reached number thirty-three on the charts, Rick’s highest-ranking single in over five years.
Rick looked different: He had let his hair grow long, he wore boots and bell-bottoms. Some of the audiences he faced wanted the Ricky Nelson black-and-white version. They wanted him to take them back to their tight, bright, unlined bobby-sox days. But he wanted to move on. Rick’s next album,
Rick Sings Nelson,
was languishing at the bottom of the charts, so he grudgingly agreed to take part in an “oldies” package show at Madison Square Garden. After going through the “Mary Lou” oldie motions, he launched into a raucous version of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.” The crowd’s enthusiasm turned hostile and the audience of twenty thousand started booing. At least it seemed that way to Rick. Accounts vary—some say only a few people booed—but Rick got the point and it must have stung him like a hive of angry bees.
Rick went home and channeled his account of that hellish evening in one sitting on a single piece of paper, and the insightful result was “Garden Party,” in which he realizes “You can’t please everyone / So you got to please yourself.” After he penned the final killer lyric, “If memories are all I sang / I’d rather drive a truck,” Rick called his cousin / manager, Willy Nelson: “Willy, I wrote one! I think I just wrote a hit!”
Fifteen years after “I’m Walkin’” hit the
Billboard
Top Ten, Rick Nelson struck gold again with “Garden Party,” giving his waning career another jump start. He went on to write deeply heartfelt songs about his burgeoning belief in reincarnation and the sorrows of lost love, and took them on the road.
After life on “Adventures,” Kris found that she didn’t have a career and
deeply resented Rick for spending so much time touring. They were close to separating when Kris found she was pregnant with twin boys—Matthew and Gunnar. Though they stayed together, the couple grew steadily apart and any real communication ceased, despite the birth of their fourth child, Sam, in 1974. Kris was so jealous of Rick’s music that she didn’t even allow his guitar in the house.
When Ozzie died in June 1975, Rick slowly fell apart. The spark created by “Garden Party” flickered and went out, the songwriting fizzled. He turned up late to sessions and rehearsals, keeping band members waiting around for hours. He rarely got dressed, preferring to stay in his robe all day long. The thirty-five-year-old star had never written a check, never used a credit card. He had entrusted all the financial decisions to Ozzie and then to Kris, and her outlandish spending had just about broken him. To escape his deeply troubled marriage and to pay for the endless heaps of bills, Rick went back on the road and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Rick believed that entertaining was his life’s calling. He felt comfortable on the road—the great escape from reality. He had to be at a certain place at a certain time and someone woke him up and took him there. When he was hungry, he called room service. When he wanted sex, there was always a pretty lady close by who knew all the words to “Travelin’ Man” by heart. He always stopped to sign autographs and had a ready smile for his fans. Sometimes the venues were less than desirable. Said a member of the Stone Canyon Band, “Rick played as hard for sixty people as he did for twelve thousand.”
Rick was in Monroe, Louisiana, where director Taylor Hackford was filming a TV documentary on the singer, when Kris made her perfectly timed call to announce that she had filed for divorce. He was devastated. When she picked him up at the airport, she drove him to his new house. “You live here now,” she informed him. Rick hadn’t been at his new pad for a month when Kris arrived to find her estranged husband cavorting in the Jacuzzi with two Rams cheerleaders. Kris promptly smacked the naked girls, screaming at them to leave while Rick hid in a closet. Rick has told friends that he bedded thousands of women. I’m sure it’s true. Against the advice of his business manager, in 1978 Rick bought salacious actor Errol Flynn’s former estate, complete with several unusual naughty features, one of which was a two-way mirror in the master bedroom.
Rick and Kris briefly reunited, but due to her flagrant buying sprees and their constant arguing, Rick was on the road 250 days a year, which Kris found intolerable. Kris started drinking heavily, insisting that Rick quit music and go back to acting, which he, of course, refused to do. They broke up for good in 1980, and although the relief must have been blessed, Rick couldn’t help but compare his embittered, messy marriage to his parents’ seemingly perfect forty-year union. As he mourned, Kris went on a hell-bent rampage to remove from Rick every cent he ever made. And then some.
To add to his grief, in 1981 Rick was slapped with a paternity suit. A blood test proved that a one-night stand in New Jersey had favored Rick with another son, Eric Crewe. Kris was wearing him down with depositions and money demands, and since Rick refused to be a fossil on the “oldies” circuit, he turned into a recluse, hanging around the house in his robe, playing the piano along with Carl Perkins’ forty-fives.
I talked with a petite brunette named Linda who visited Rick several times during this period, and got a pretty miserable story: “The first time I went up there, these fellows were sitting around, but he wasn’t there. He was watching us from a telescope in his closet. He was in the closet getting high on freebase and he finally asked me to come in. I think he had just gotten into it. I could tell by the way he handled it, he was really still enjoying it. It gets to the point where you hate it, but you do it. It’s instantly addicting. It took me to my knees. It’s like a cancer in this world that we’ve never seen the likes of. He was a total gentleman, sweet, kind, just precious. He had his new wardrobe all lined up in there and was looking at some new pictures through a loupe. He said, ‘Help me pick out the best of my head shots,’ but it seemed like something that would never get done. He was torn because he knew he had to work, but when you have that pipe in your hand, there’s nothing more important.”
Linda went to visit Rick again and found him in the closet watching pornographic movies. “He took me on a tour of the house,” she recalled. “He was real proud of the house but very angry because Kris had gone to Sears and bought all of these cheap aluminum fixtures and replaced all the original brass fixtures in the bathrooms. He was so embarrassed. ‘She spent eighty to a hundred thousand dollars on junk, she has no taste,’ he said. He was very resentful. He took me into his room and he had just gotten his father’s chair delivered from his mother. He said, ‘Sit in this chair. It’s the only thing left I have of that man: He started telling me about his father-he was a real overbearing, real tough guy. He said all he ever wanted to do was play professional tennis, he was extremely shy and never wanted to act, that he was forced to work, that his father was a tyrant. But he was so happy to have his father’s chair in the bedroom. He admired David because he went out and became a lawyer. He talked about how proud he was of his sons that they played tennis. Once I was up there and he apologized that he couldn’t cook me anything. He had these two guys up there taking care of him. He picked the lid up off a frying pan and said, ‘This is all I get anymore, this chicken-fried steak. I’m sick of eating like this.’ He was lost. A lost soul. Rick was crippled.”
Rick signed his divorce papers in December 1982, but the legal warfare with his former wife was far from over. Plagued with debts, Rick finally made the decision to join his peers and hit the road with his classics. Friends laughingly nicknamed him “Ledge,” short for “legend,” and Rick Nelson finally seemed to accept that he really wouldn’t rather drive a truck. Just like another
rock maestro, Pete Townshend, who really didn’t want to die before he got old.
When a fellow musician had one girl too many in his room at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, he offered pretty, blond Helen Blair to Rick, and he accepted. Rick was very lonely and twenty-one-year-old Helen soon became his constant companion, happily bending to his topsy-turvy lifestyle, eventually moving into the Errol Flynn house with her two long-haired cats and Afghan hound. Rick seemed content, but his friends were concerned about Helen’s heavy drug abuse, in particular her addition to cocaine. She also had a penchant for shoplifting. When Harriet discovered that Rick and Helen were engaged, she threatened to write him out of her will, but Rick always explained away his fiancée’s troubles by saying she had had a horrible childhood.
Rick finally met his idol, Carl Perkins, after thirty years of emulating his style, and Perkins was taken by Rick’s sincerity: “One of the last things Ricky said to me was, ‘I would really like to open some shows for you next year, Carl.’ I said you’ve got the cart before the horse—/‘
//
open for
you,
but Ricky said, ‘No way.’ That was very special, and when I heard about the accident, it really tore me up.”
The day Rick’s twin sons, musicians Matthew and Gunnar, turned eighteen, they moved in with their father. Daughter Tracy remembered her father saying, “I feel like I have a home again.”
Rick was feeling pretty good. Having done a couple of pilots, he was hopeful about renewing his television career; his all-age crowds were more enthusiastic than ever, and he had just completed a soulful new country-tinged album for Curb Records that featured a tender, moving version of Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways.” He had even spent a comfortable Christmas Eve with all four of his children and Harriet, David, and Helen.
Because Kris had her attorney send Rick a letter saying he was behind in his payments and owed her money, Rick and his band booked a short tour that started the day after Christmas 1988. As usual, Helen joined Rick on the trip. It was a grumpy group that boarded Rick’s 1944 Douglas DC-3 that night. More than a plane, the “traveling house” DC-3 had recently been plagued with problems. In September Rick and the band had missed the first Farm Aid concert due to a malfunctioning spark plug. Drummer Ricky Intveld’s brother James told me that the band was afraid to fly on the DC-3. “Rick liked it because he thought it was a cool old plane. My brother used to call from the road and say, ‘The plane’s cheesing out. I don’t want to get on it. What do I do?’”
Rick with Al Kooper. His T-shirt speaks for him. (GARY NICHAMIN)
On Monday, December 30, Rick closed his show in Guntersville, Alabama, with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” shouting joyously to the crowd, “Rave on for me!” before patiently signing autographs for a long line of fans. Tuesday morning upon arriving at the airport, the sleepy travelers learned that there would be a delay due to a clogged primer line that prevented the left engine from starting. Finally, at a little after one o’clock, the DC-3 took to the gray skies. At 5:08, 120 miles from their destination, copilot Ken Ferguson radioed the Fort Worth Air Route Traffic Control Center: “I think I’d like to turn around, uh, head for Texarkana here. I’ve got a little problem.” At 5:11 another radio transmission: “Smoke in the cockpit. Have smoke in the cockpit …”
At 5:14 Rick Nelson’s DC-3 disappeared from the Fort Worth air-traffic controller’s radar screen.
The plane severed two power lines as it went down, snapped a utility pole, crashed into a tree that tore off its left wing, and plowed into a heavily wooded area. From two hundred yards away, eyewitnesses could feel the heat from roaring flames seventy-five feet high. Both pilots struggled from the wreckage and watched the inferno in horror. Firefighters wouldn’t let anyone near the blaze, and the flaming sepulchre, holding seven bodies, was left to smolder all night long.
Harriet Nelson learned about her younger son’s death on a TV newscast. Rick’s son Matthew was enjoying “Garden Party” on the radio when the deejay announced sadly, “A tribute to Rick Nelson, killed in a plane crash earlier today.”
When he heard the tragic news, an old friend of Rick’s, newscaster Charley Britt, remembered Rick telling him the two ways he didn’t want to die: in a plane crash or a fire.
Even before the funeral, Kris threatened to sue for part of Rick’s life-insurance money, and to avoid a court battle, David let her have the money from one of Rick’s two policies. Kris also attempted to get control of the estate from David, who was the appointed administrator of Rick’s last will and testament. Two weeks later a judge rejected her request.

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