Waging Heavy Peace (31 page)

Chapter Fifty-Five

B
ruce Palmer and I had been in LA for only six weeks when Buffalo Springfield played at the Whisky a Go Go for the first time. Buffalo Springfield had already done a hootenanny at the Troubadour, a club down on Santa Monica Boulevard that showcased new talent all the time and had folk-oriented headliners playing weekly. That showcase had been set up by Dickie Davis, our original road manager who worked the lights at the Troubadour, and Barry Friedman, our manager who had put us up and guided us through the first weeks of our existence. That gig got the record companies interested in us and also got the attention of some other managers.

All kinds of people got their start there. Sometimes ten acts would be seen in one night, all of them looking for a break. It was LA, and a lot of these acts made it. Just
getting
to LA was a big thing, a launching spot to the big time. We had a one-night showcase along with a few other bands. It was an event because a lot of people thought we were going to be the next big thing. We were good that night, and though we were really nervous, it was obvious to everyone that we had something. Stephen and Richie sang incredibly well, and because of the diversity of musical roots, the band had a blend of music that was largely unknown at the time. It was kind of folk rock, but kind of country blues with a rock and roll edge. Richie’s great voice and Bruce’s unique Motown bass style brought depth. Dewey’s smiling face behind the drums was both incongruous and appealing. It was Stephen’s soulful vocals and phrasing that set us into another class.

Our guitar interplay was also something no one had ever heard. Stephen and I would play these intricate parts off of each other all the time that were largely improvised, and people could hear that it was spontaneous. It was exciting, and we were young and very alive. Everything started moving really fast.

Record companies, managers, everyone wanted to talk to us. Dickie Davis tried to handle the whole thing. He did the best he could and, as I mentioned earlier, we eventually ended up with Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, two guys from New York who had handled Sonny & Cher, as our managers. These guys were real hustlers. Before we met them, when they first came to LA from New York, they had actually set up an office on the Universal lot and were doing business there for six months before anyone at Universal realized they were there. Imagine that. They just walked in, set up an office, started using services, and lasted six months before they were caught. It was not long after that we first met them and we decided we liked them the best. They told us their story. They were also record producers, they said. They had a big Lincoln limousine and Joseph, their own driver. We were way too impressed by that limo.

They bought out Barry Friedman, who regrets it to this day, and so do I. He was a musical guy with some knowledge of who we were. Losing him was a very big mistake. It was too late to back out of our agreement when we found out that Greene and Stone had never really produced a record. Still, with their connections, we were getting some major dates. We got a gig right away opening for the Byrds and played about a week of local California shows. We were playing with the Byrds! They were our heroes. It was so fast. I remember a show we played where the Byrds were pretty messed up. They were one of the biggest acts going, and that night we blew them away. It was obvious to us all that the Springfield was a force to be reckoned with.

Shortly after that, by chance Greene and Stone booked us into the Whisky to cover another band’s night off—we ended up staying for six straight weeks without a break. We were building a following. We started opening for Hugh Masekela and then Johnny Rivers. Headliners came and went, but we stayed. We built our own fan base that kept returning every night. Mario Maglieri and Elmer Valentine ran the place and treated us like their own. Elmer was the boss. Mario was the doorman and floor manager. They were like fathers to all of us in the scene: the groupies, the bands, all of us. Mario still called me Skinny years later when I would drop in and say hello.

We were also recording our first album during that time. Greene and Stone had signed us to Atlantic, because they had connections there with Ahmet Ertegun through their success with Sonny & Cher. When we got the album down and mixed, we felt great. We had been there guiding the mixing process and everything. One day we were leaving to go on the road for a weekend, and we heard Greene and Stone had to go in and do a stereo mix. We had only done a mono. We were so unaware, so green! Stereo was the new big thing.

In one day they remixed the whole thing into stereo without us, and we only heard it when we got back to LA from our weekend tour.

We hated it.

The mixes sucked and didn’t have the energy we felt in the studio or on the stage when we were playing live. That was what was missing. The sound was very thin, and the mix itself was terrible. Stephen and I were so disappointed. They released “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” as the first single, and that was a big mistake. It was way too weird to be a single. We had “Go and Say Goodbye” and “Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It,” either of which would have been a much better choice. But we went along with it. While I thought it was cool to have “Clancy” out there, I doubted whether it was commercial enough. But what did we know?

It bombed.

Riots were happening on the Strip. Hippies against the war, cops against the hippies. Stephen wrote “For What It’s Worth” about the riots. It was a great message song of the times, with his signature vocal phrasing. We recorded it at Columbia with the help of Stan Ross, owner of Gold Star, because Gold Star was booked. Tom May was our Columbia engineer. Stan and Tom got us a decent sound. They got the drums right. Thankfully, Greene and Stone were not there producing. We had our first hit and rereleased the LP with that song on it. If you listen to that record now, you can hear the difference in tonal quality and production between “For What It’s Worth” and the rest of the
Buffalo Springfield
album. We missed a good chance to remix the whole album right there and never even realized it.

Soon we were back at the Whisky, headlining on a Sunday night. We were recording artists now, and our fan base was exploding. We started to feel different and act different, but we were still just a bunch of green kids. That was our beginning, and we went on for a year and a half until we broke up. Bruce got busted a couple of times and was eventually deported. That was the beginning of the end for us.

Chemistry is the big thing in any group, and Bruce was the element that made us unique. His roots in R&B (that he got in Toronto playing in his first band, where he was the only white guy) were so important. Stephen and I loved Bruce. He was a complete original. He played like Motown, but he had an added flair that was totally Bruce. Everyone knew he was completely off the charts. A genius player. Musicians would just stand there slack-jawed, watching and listening to him play. After we lost him, we were never the same. It was the beginning of the end, right there. We had Jim Fielder on bass for a while, and he ended up with Blood, Sweat & Tears. Then we had Jim Messina, who we had met at Sunset Sound. But we could never find anyone like Bruce, and it was killing us slowly. Stephen became frustrated with the rhythm section problems and started cutting his songs with other guys, Buddy Miles on drums and Bobby West on bass among them.

When we used to play at the Whisky, Bruce and I would be back there with Dewey holding down a groove with our backs to the audience, lost in the music. That was magic. That is why Richie and Stephen sounded so great. They were singing on a rock-solid foundation that breathed and pulsed. We were so into the music back there that the girls in the audience could feel that pulse, and it drove them crazy. We didn’t even realize what we were doing. The way Stephen and Richie sang their asses off, if we hadn’t lost Bruce, the sky would have been the limit for Buffalo Springfield. But we did lose him. When he got busted for grass in a hotel in New York while we were playing a club there, he was instantly deported. Bruce was gone.

That was why the Springfield broke up. All the fighting was because we lost Bruce. If he had stayed in, we would probably still be together today (if we had all lived). Sure, I would have done some solo records, but with that sound there, I always would have come back to it. It is as simple as that. We broke up because we were broken. We were missing the essential ingredient, and all the momentum in the world could not replace it. People say we were great and ask why we ever broke up. That is why.

If you want to see the Springfield, the best representation of it is a Dick Clark production,
Where the Action Is
. On that show, you can see the real group. We were lip-synching, but that was what we looked like. Those were the finest times of Buffalo Springfield, and it never, ever got better. Without Bruce, that was all gone.

Our last gig was at the Long Beach Arena. We walked out and the place went nuts. Our fans knew this was the last time. We started playing and the crowd left their seats and rushed to the front of the stage. Some authority figure turned on the lights and walked out onstage, admonishing the crowd to sit down. He repeatedly said, “Buffalo Springfield will NOT play until you return to your seats.”

Eventually we started to play again. It was a bittersweet moment. I was wearing my finest Buffalo Springfield fringe regalia, Stephen had on his great cowboy hat and suit. We all wore our finest. Without Bruce! It was like a funeral. We were just a little more than eighteen months old as a band. It was nobody’s fault. We were just too young and we had made a lot of bad and inexperienced decisions, starting with losing Barry Friedman. But losing Bruce broke our heart.

Thank you, Buffalo Springfield. There will never be another. It’s about chemistry. Love and chemistry.

Chapter Fifty-Six

I
n Feelgood’s there is a 1957 Jensen. It is a 541, one of just thirty-five ever made. In 1975, while I was down in Florida working on restoring the
WN Ragland
with Roger Katz and a bunch of shipbuilders and sailors, I found the Jensen in Fort Lauderdale in a little used-car place on Sunrise Boulevard. It was $2,750. I had never seen one before, and it was very beautiful. I needed a car. It was in original condition, faded red, well-worn, but nice. This was and is still my favorite combination; beautiful, original, and worn.

Its worst flaw was that the back window had been cracked from a falling coconut somewhere. It was a right-hand drive and had a unique little lever in the dash; if you pushed up, the horn honked, and if you pushed down, the brights would come on. Toggling it back and forth resulted in a classic European blasting-horn-and-flashing-lights combination effect. It also had been equipped with glasspacks. That meant it was loud as hell! I loved it and bought it the next day.

I drove it everywhere in Florida. Once I took it to West Palm Beach. I was feeling lonely and went lookin’ around, found a little bar, and met a girl there who was playing pool. She had a white dress on. Playing pool with a white dress on blew my mind! She took me to the West Palm Beach Country Club the next day for breakfast, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I felt like a trophy. The Jensen got me back in a couple of hours of peaceful motoring along A1A, the Florida coast route. It is a beautiful highway along the Atlantic with motels that reminded me of going down there with my parents every winter from Omemee when I was a kid in the fifties. We went down to New Smyrna Beach every year for a few years. Daddy was working on books, and while he would write, Bob and I would go in the ocean. I went to school there for a couple of months for a few years in a row when I was about ten, because that was where my family was. No wonder I like to move. No wonder I love the South, especially Florida.

When I got back to the boat in Fort Lauderdale, I was always happy to see the progress and check in with Roger and the crew. On a Friday, after the traditional payday tequila, we headed out to the bars. Later that night I was driving the Jensen and got pulled over by the police. We were completely shit-faced! The car was full to capacity with drunken shipworkers. I explained that we were all good citizens who had been working hard all week and we were simply going to go and get some coffee. He let us off. Everyone in the car was amazed. So was I.

Later, after the
Ragland
was launched, Roger shipped the car back to California, and it was damaged along the way. I had to get it fixed. Afterward, they repainted the hood area that had been repaired. It was the European type of hood that lifted completely up, revealing the whole front end, wheels and everything. Now it was suddenly shiny red in the front. I was disappointed and missed the old faded look. We had to repaint the whole thing—John McKeig was great at mixing paint and finishing, and gave the whole car a faded look.

Today, it sits in Feelgood’s in need of a big tune-up (at the very least). The horn/lights controller was broken when I left the car at a dealership to get something done. Some turkey got in the car and broke it with his knee. It has never been quite the same. I want to get it fixed, and that’s what’s happening now. I love that car. So does Pegi, because it’s very sexy. Just seeing it in Feelgood’s fills my heart with all good thoughts of an innocent time with really good friends.

—

A
few meditations about success.

Somewhere along the line it always comes up. Are you happy with what you have done? Have you been successful? I know I am thankful for the things I have been able to try. Success is hard to measure. If you have lots of cash, that doesn’t make you successful—it makes you rich. (Even if you’re like me and have lots of stuff and not much cash relatively, that doesn’t make you a success; it only makes you materially rich.)

Success is a tough one for me to define. I have my failings to be sure, and I’m working on them all the time, except for when I forget or am so preoccupied that I’m not aware. These are my personal successes and failures, and they have nothing to do with money or possessions. My children are perhaps my biggest success, and I share that with Pegi, because without her, it would not be like that.

You may have noticed that a lot of my time is spent tying up loose ends, getting closure, and completing things. One early measure of success I set for myself was very material. Remember that red 1959 Cadillac convertible I sat in that was in my twin friends’ garage in the early sixties while I was going to Kelvin High School? The one that was driven back and forth to a TV station in the States by their dad? Remember when I was in the YMCA in Fort William calculating how many months I would have to work at the Flamingo Club to earn enough money to buy that kind of car? Well, as fate turns out, I had it and I lost it and I still have it. The situation wears on me. It’s not a big deal, but it isn’t a success, nor is it a failure. You see, that car is the famous Nanu the Lovesick Moose! But there is much more to it than that.

One day in 1975, I was leaving my ranch. The long road out is very narrow; there is a very steep hill with twists and turns through redwood trees on either side of the road. As I was driving along, climbing slowly up the hill in Nanu, a Volkswagen came flying down the road between the trees and, seeing me, slammed on the brakes and slid directly into Nanu, scraping down the whole side of the car and destroying its side panels and the rare stainless molding that identified this Eldorado as a Biarritz. The driver of the Volkswagen, a teenage girl, was terrified. She was nearly hysterical, crying about the trouble she would be in with her parents for getting in another accident. She had been going way too fast and should not have slammed on her brakes. (That was the worst thing she could have done; she had plenty of room to stop or pass, but she panicked, hitting the brakes and locking them up, and slid downhill straight into poor old Nanu, the Innocent Convertible.)

I let the girl off the hook. I told her right there not to worry, I would take care of it and she should just go home, which she did. There was a place called Coachcraft in Scotts Valley, California, near Highway 17 between Santa Cruz and Walnut Creek. Nanu was taken there to be fixed around the third quarter of 1975. I asked the man in charge to do a perfect restoration of the car. “Make it museum quality,” I said.

He took it down to bare metal in his shop and started to paint the chassis. At some point he decided he would like to work for me and complete the car while he was taking care of my whole collection. I liked John McKeig immediately; we were kindred spirits, so I hired him. He moved to the ranch and began taking care of my cars, maintaining and cleaning the building and the old autos, which had grown in number. He redid the entire building, which took a couple of years and was a beautiful work of art.

John’s standards were very high, but so were his mechanics. (You don’t have to read between the lines here.) Years went by. Anyway, to make a long story short, Nanu sat on the ranch for thirty odd years in the same condition, always next in line to be worked on, until one day John had to retire. It was just not feasible for me to have that many cars anymore, so I started selling them; I even sold the part of the ranch where the beautiful car barn John had built was. That was heartbreaking for John. We then constructed Feelgood’s, where the cream of the crop of my old cars would stay. Today, there is also a warehouse in San Carlos, where Nanu sits in pieces, patiently waiting to be reassembled. I have been told that Nanu is worth a fortune. I have also been told by Brizio Street Rods, the shop building Lincvolt, that to put Nanu back together again would probably cost around as much as she’s worth. So when Lincvolt is finally done, I plan on starting one more job. If there is any money left in the Lincvolt fire insurance fund, I will use that cash to start reassembling Nanu the Lovesick Moose, completing my seventeen-year-old self’s dream in one more giant step toward success.

—

W
alking has always been good for me. I love to walk. Long walks on the ranch or over the lava in Hawaii are therapeutic and result in a clear head. Ben Keith and I used to walk the ranch together on a ridge every day for a couple of years. It is usually my preference to walk alone, but with Ben it was fine. One day Ben told me that he got winded starting where I start, so we began starting at the top of the first rise, rather than at the bottom. He was having a problem getting enough air. We adapted, and everything was fine. I miss him now on that walk.

For a year or more, I stopped the walking because my feet were hurting. At a doctor’s advice, I tried wearing special inserts in my shoes, but they threw off my balance. Eventually I learned from various body workers on the Big Island, most notably a Feldenkrais practitioner there, that correct posture is very important and my bad posture was putting a lot of strain on the bottoms of my feet. It’s amazing what you can learn when you step outside the realm of people who are selling you something and into the realm of people who treat the body, not the symptom.

Where the doctor had not helped me and the inserts were not working, the body workers’ advice was the key to success. I took it to heart and solved the problem by working on my posture, which is a lot better now than it was. I was well on my way to being a stooped-over old guy. That did happen to my dad. That was my problem, and I solved it by changing my posture. After that, things were pretty good.

But I had another thing causing the problem, too. When I find something I like, I stick with it, sometimes for way too long. I had been wearing the same brand of hiking shoes for a long time. At first I loved them, but eventually I found that I had to get new ones more and more often. One day I went to a different store and got some real good leather boots instead of those hiking high-tops I had been getting for years. These new leather boots kick ass. No more problems. Now I have really good boots and can walk a long way again! Fantastic. Maybe I should call this book
The Shoe Chronicles
.

There
is
a reason why I am telling you so much about my shoes and my feet. Walking and all kinds of movement from one place to another are very important to me. It has always been my way to think about things while I walk. I am always going over ideas, songs, album running orders, all kinds of creative stuff, while I am walking. I love to walk. It soothes my soul. My mother always told me that my Grandpa Ragland would walk every day and he loved his walks. He lived a long time.

My favorite walk is still up on the ridge overlooking the ranch. I walk about a mile and a half to two miles every time I go up there, and always feel better afterward, rain or shine. Nina goes with me now when I go. On the ridge, there is a place I walk to where two eucalyptus trees have grown together. One tree has a branch that reaches over to the other and grows right through its trunk. These two trees are permanently connected. I call them the Trees in Love. I walk to the Trees in Love and back home every time I get a chance.

Now, in Hawaii I like to paddleboard too. It does the same thing for me, I open up and start thinking about all kinds of ideas about music, life, my family, all matters personal. I take all of this to heart in my personal time of reflection.