The Wrecking Crew (18 page)

By the time he turned seventeen, Schlein (now known professionally as P. F. Sloan) had developed enough of a reputation as a songwriter for various local recording acts to also catch the attention of Lou Adler at Screen Gems. Always looking for new talent, Adler hired Sloan and immediately paired him with Steve Barri, thinking that the two might work well together.

Adler, who wore many simultaneous hats, also acted as the manager and producer for Jan and Dean. And he liked what he heard from the newly formed duo of Barri and Sloan, enough so that they began writing surf songs for Jan and Dean on a regular basis. By the time Adler broke away from Colpix/Screen Gems and formed Dunhill Records and Trousdale Music Publishing with partners Jay Lasker, Bobby Roberts, and Pierre Cossette in 1964, the tandem of Barri and Sloan were natural additions. And it wouldn't take them long to make their mark.

Working late one night at his parents' dining room table, nineteen-year-old P. F. Sloan (known as Phil to most) found himself tapping into an inspiration for a song that seemed to flow directly from some kind of inner voice. It was a plea of desperation to God about a number of social issues that Sloan found simply unbearable, including the general hypocrisy of hatred, the continuing racial disharmony between blacks and whites, and the utter injustice of sending young American males off to war in Vietnam when they weren't even allowed to vote. Calling the tune “Eve of Destruction,” Sloan subsequently joined forces with Steve Barri to put a few finishing touches on the melody and structure.

Ultimately hiring a gravelly voiced former singer with the New Christy Minstrels named Barry McGuire to record it—along with Wrecking Crewers Hal Blaine (drums, tympani), Larry Knechtel (bass), and Don Randi (piano), plus Sloan on acoustic guitar—Barri still had his doubts, however.

“It's kind of a depressing song, Phil. I don't know if it's right for Barry,” he said.

With the song's apocalyptic lyrics and equally ominous sonic quality, it was not exactly the ideal choice for pop radio in late 1965. Folk rock, of course, had already hit the airwaves earlier in the year with the arrival of the Byrds, among others. Message songs were not new. But “Eve of Destruction” was something else altogether. It was flat-out
dark
. No one at Dunhill, especially Adler, figured it for anything more than an album cut, maybe the flip side of a 45, at best. There were other, more promising songs to work on anyway.

*   *   *

Following Barry McGuire's recording session, Steve Barri took a tape copy of “Eve of Destruction” home from the studio overnight so that he could play it the next morning when he got to the office. Arriving around 9:00
A.M.
, Barri immediately spooled up the unusual-sounding song on his reel-to-reel deck and let it rip. He wanted to assess its possibilities one more time.

From the office next door, Barri then heard a loud voice say over the top of the music during mid-play, “What is that?” The question had come from Jay Lasker, the president of Dunhill.

“It's gonna be the B-side of Barry McGuire's next single,” the young producer and songwriter replied.

“Let me have the tape, Steve. I want to take it into my office and listen to it.”

Thinking nothing of it, Barri handed the tape to Lasker and went about his business. Around three hours later, just before heading out for another recording session, Barri suddenly noticed a bunch of yelling coming from one of the offices down the hall. He then heard his name being called. As Barri entered the room, he saw a red-faced Lou Adler ready to wring someone's neck, possibly his.

“Steve, what did you do with the ‘Eve of Destruction' tape?” Adler bellowed.

“I gave it to Jay.”

“Well, there has to be another one, then.”

“Why?”

“Because I just heard it on KFWB in my car.”

Unbeknownst to either of them, Lasker had given the tape to one of the promotions men to run down to the station. He wanted to know firsthand whether radio would even
consider
playing such a controversial record. Instead of rejecting it, however, as Lasker had feared, the program director, William J. Wheatley, loved it. He immediately made a copy of the tape and put it on the air within minutes. Which normally would have been good news. Except that Adler did not feel that the song was finished. In his opinion, McGuire very much needed to rerecord his lead vocal. Unfamiliar with the lyrics, he had sung them in an oddly halting fashion, even letting out an audible, anguished-sounding “ahhh” at one point while trying to buy time as he attempted to decipher the tiny handwriting on the paper in front of him. That was not the kind of thing Lou Adler wanted on the air. It was patently unprofessional.

But KFWB wouldn't budge. “We don't want to pull it,” Wheatley said. “It's now our most-requested song since ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.' You can finish it up and get us a new one. But we're gonna keep playing this version in the meantime.”

Realizing that they were staring at a smash, the Dunhill execs backed off. They never did ask McGuire to go back in the studio. His rough vocal attempt turned out to give the production the perfect air of authenticity. P. F. Sloan's heartfelt protest composition subsequently went all the way to the top of the national charts, giving Dunhill its first number-one hit. But there would be one more unexpected gift soon to come from the unusual song. The Wrecking Crew were unknowingly on the cusp of beginning work with four of McGuire's best friends, who would also be recording for Dunhill. An unknown, sweet-singing, bohemian quartet called the Mamas & the Papas.

*   *   *

When Barry McGuire first heard his old friends Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot, John Phillips, and Michelle Phillips sing their latest material, he knew they had something special. Having moved to Los Angeles after performing in a variety of small clubs in New York City and the Virgin Islands, the down-on-their-luck quartet were desperately looking for a record deal. They were inches from becoming destitute. And with a huge current hit on the charts in “Eve of Destruction,” the affable McGuire was their main music biz contact.

Stopping by the foursome's tiny shared apartment one day for a listen, the rising Dunhill star told them just what they were hoping to hear.

“You guys sound really good,” McGuire enthused as they all passed around a joint. “Why don't you come down and sing for my producer, Lou Adler?”

A few days later, when McGuire and his four pals all trooped into Western Recorders, the first to hear them sing were the staff producers Barri and Sloan. And they were bowled over. Barri immediately got on the phone to Adler at the nearby Dunhill offices on South Beverly Drive.

“Lou, you have
got
to come down here to Western Three and see these people,” he said.

After Adler arrived, he, along with the engineer Bones Howe, then took the group down the hall into an empty studio tracking room and asked them to sing what they had. After they turned in a soaring, goose bump–inducing four-part harmony vocal on one of Phillips's compositions called “California Dreamin',” Adler dryly said over the talk-back, “You got any more?”

More?
Hell, yes, we have more, the quartet's lead tenor, Doherty, thought. They might be poor and they might look kind of funky, but they
knew
one thing for sure: they could sing like nobody's business. The four then launched into “Straight Shooter,” “Go Where You Want to Go,” and a newer tune called “Monday, Monday.”

Secretly delighted but playing his cards close to the vest, Adler casually told them afterward, “I think maybe we can do business.” He then slipped them a hundred bucks and told them to come back the next day. The Mamas & the Papas had their record deal.

After signing them to contracts, Adler then assigned the four to the duties of singing backup for McGuire on his second album. As the recording progressed, however, it became clear who the real singing stars were. Taking John and Michelle Phillips out into the hall during one recording session where McGuire was recording his own version of “California Dreamin',” Adler said, ”We're not giving this song to Barry. I know we told him we would, but we're not. I want this to be
your
single.”

John Phillips then asked his friend McGuire if the Mamas & the Papas could release it as their first single, rather than putting McGuire's name on it. “Sure, John,” he said generously, if a bit disappointed. “It's your tune, man; you wrote it.”

Soon wiping McGuire's lead vocal off the instrumental track already created by the Wrecking Crew—specifically the work of Hal Blaine on drums, Joe Osborn on bass (the same guy who several years earlier had fished “Travelin' Man” out of the trash), and Larry Knechtel on keyboards, with Phil Sloan sitting in on acoustic guitar—Adler had the four singers come in to lay down their vocals. Bones Howe set up everything to mimic the way the group naturally stood when singing together, with the men and women facing each other, close in. A pair of RCA DX-77 mics were then strategically hung overhead. On cue, the well-practiced foursome once again put forth a bravura performance on the tune, with the beautiful arcing blend of their voices magically achieving what sounded almost like a fifth level of harmony, something they privately referred to as “harpy.” With Howe having the additional inspiration to craftily insert a flute solo in the middle during the bridge (played by his friend the noted jazz man Bud Shank), the song was complete. Now the only challenge would be finding some way to get airplay.

*   *   *

At exactly 3:00
P.M.
on April 27, 1965, from inside a drab, nondescript, bunker-like building at 5155 Melrose Avenue—directly across the street from the legendary Lucy's El Adobe Café and less than a block from Paramount Pictures—the following words were spoken into a microphone, forever changing the landscape of Top 40 radio in Los Angeles:

“Ladies and gentlemen, presenting
The Real Don Steele Show …
with a sneak preview of the all-new Boss Radio on … KHJ, Los Angeles.”

With an all-star disc jockey lineup, more music per hour, a faster pace, and the inviolate mantra of “no dead air,” a new kind of radio had materialized in a rush of masterful publicity. The brainchild of three industry veterans, Gene Chenault, Bill Drake, and Ron Jacobs, within six months of its launch 93 KHJ's electric, larger-than-life format had earned the third-highest overall ratings in town.

Suddenly the game had changed for the record labels, too. By early 1966, with KFWB and KRLA lagging behind, KHJ had become the new power broker in terms of getting all-important airplay. For a pop song to become a hit, it needed to somehow make its way onto their tightly scripted playlist, zealously guarded by both Jacobs and his next-in-command, the station's music director, Betty Breneman.

Needing to find some way to break “California Dreamin'” in the second-largest radio market in the country in terms of metro population—and arguably
the
most important in terms of trend setting—Lou Adler knew that all roads led through KHJ. The question was how to get them to go for a folkie-style song performed by two women and two men about missing California. There were plenty of male and female solo singers on the radio, and girl groups, too. But there were few, if any, music acts that had two of each gender. That was something new.

By this time, having produced artists like Sam Cooke, Jan and Dean, and Johnny Rivers, Adler had developed a reputation as a real player in the business. And he traveled in the most exclusive rock-and-roll circles, counting among his good friends people like the Rolling Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. The two were first introduced backstage at the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in October 1964, where Mick, Keith, and the rest of the Stones appeared as the headline act along with an astounding star-studded underbill featuring the Beach Boys, the Supremes, James Brown & the Famous Flames, Marvin Gaye, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, Leslie Gore, the Miracles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Chuck Berry, plus the Adler-managed Jan and Dean as hosts. The two-day T.A.M.I. Show (short for Teenage Awards Music International, a totally made-up name) had been designed from the start as a vehicle to become rock and roll's first live concert film, something that teenagers could see in a local movie house in Anytown, USA, and actually
feel
like they were there in person.

With so much riding on the line budget-wise, the event's director, Steve Binder, made sure that he left nothing to chance in terms of the quality of the music production. Binder went right to the source, bringing in Phil Spector's arranger, Jack Nitzsche, to handle all the conducting duties, who then promptly turned around and hired a bunch of Spector's Wrecking Crew favorites like Hal Blaine, Jimmy Bond, Glen Campbell, Plas Johnson, Lyle Ritz, Leon Russell, and Tommy Tedesco to play all the incidental music and to become the house band behind the acts (other than for the Stones, Pacemakers, Dakotas, and Fabulous Flames, who played their own instruments). Though it ultimately achieved only so-so box office returns upon its release a couple of months later, the T.A.M.I. Show did serve to set the creative and technical template for live concert films to come. It also allowed some of the Wrecking Crew guys, though uncredited as always, to have a little fun showcasing their skills onstage for a change during a rare couple of days away from the studios.

A little over a year after the big concert, in January of 1966, Adler, with his pal Oldham in tow during a subsequent Stones visit to Los Angeles, decided that it was finally time to make his first pilgrimage to the hallowed halls of KHJ. They were now the Southland's undisputed Top 40 radio gatekeepers and the Mamas & the Papas sorely needed some airtime.

As Ron Jacobs worked in his office just past the front reception area of the radio station, Betty Breneman poked her head inside his doorway. “Lou Adler from Dunhill Records just stopped by,” she said. “He wants a few minutes with you.” Adler, by then, had gone next door to wait with Oldham at Nickodell Restaurant, a small, dimly lit diner/bar with red vinyl booths and a perpetual smell of Scotch and Lysol.