Somebody to Love? (17 page)
The main floor of the Big House had the typical baroque excesses of cut-velvet wall covering and pink carpets, carved wood paneling, and painted cherubs on the ceiling. The dining room accommodated our pool table, and the furniture ranged from cheap Louis XIV couches to a handmade wooden torture rack/dining table and an unplugged electric chair. I had the macabre items specially made, because the juxtaposition of happy dining and instruments of death tickled my dark fancy. We actually put David Crosby on the rack one time, strapped him in by his hands and feet, then turned the wheel that pulls on all four limbs at the same time. We realized how well designed it was when David's laughter turned to anguished screams.
Peace and love.
We used the second floor for offices, and I lived in the master bedroom (also on the second floor) for about four months. I was still seeing Spencer, although our love affair was cooling off, but on the road as well as at home, I've always maintained separate rooms from my partner. That way, each individual can sleep, play music, eat, be quiet, watch television, or party without disturbing the other.
I've always gotten up at about 4:30 every morning; it's my own peculiar ritual. Lying there in the dark for hours until the guy woke up would drive me nuts. Besides, it's sexier to make love in someone else's room; things get much more interesting when I can visit the man's territory for a while. Private quarters also help to avoid the old “Did you leave the cap off the toothpaste?” routine or “When are you gonna turn off the damn TV?” They lighten up the situation, leaving me free to argue over more important issues than who left the wet towels on the floor. Without that setup, each of my relationships would have ended in about a week.
The top floor of the Big House looked like a salon from a fancy turn-of-the-century house of ill repute. Lots of small rooms (for getting a quickie?) around a central area (which one of these girls would you like?) and one large bedroom (for the Madam?), where Paul took up residence. From Home of Tramps to Enrico Caruso's residing there on the night of the big earthquake of 1906, the Big House had seen it all.
Originally white, we painted it black—not as a tribute to The Stones song “Paint It Black,” but just to bring dark flavor to the neighborhood. With four big stained-dark columns in front, it looked like the Addams Family mansion.
I spent some strange days at the Big House; I actually met my friend Sally there one night when she was waiting for Spencer in one of the small upstairs bedrooms. Sally, a groupie (the groupies weren't necessarily mindless idiots), is now a lawyer, living in Texas with—surprise!—another musician husband. She and I talked for a couple of hours when we first met, and I liked her sense of humor and her sharp mind.
I felt that Spencer and I, as an item, were pretty much over, but it was another night at the Big House when my suspicions were confirmed. I walked in the front door to find Spencer and Sally in the living room, watching a video (which Spencer had taken earlier that evening) of Sally dancing around naked. I had a twinge of one-more-blonde-with-big-tits-grabs-the-spotlight envy. But considering my new interest in Paul, and my ongoing friendship with both Sally and Spencer, plus the fact that I was still married to Jerry, the viewing of the homemade peep show was more humorous than devastating.
Sally and Spencer tied the knot at the Big House. Our manager, Bill Thompson, got a mail-order preacher's license and married my ex-boyfriend and my new girlfriend there, followed by a lavish party attended by rock-and-roll types and San Francisco freaks of all descriptions. I was living off premises at that point, so I decided to leave on the early side. When I got home to Sausalito, though, I received a concerned phone call. “You've got to come back to the wedding party,” a friend said. “Paul's losing it on LSD.”
Paul losing it? Oh, Jesus, I didn't know what to think, or what I could do, but I went back to see if I could help. When I got to Paul's top-floor bedroom, he was sitting on his bed, legs crossed, in his usual ramrod-straight position, rolling a joint. This was freaking out?
“How's it going?” I asked. “Someone said you weren't doing so well.”
“Everything is so confusing,” he replied.
That was the extent of any “bad acid trip” I ever saw. Just momentary confusion. Of course, I'd
read
about people
really
losing it, like Art Linkletter's daughter, who committed suicide by jumping out a window while she was high on LSD. When Mr. Link-letter was interviewed on a TV program some years later, he accused Timothy Leary and me of killing her. Tim and I had never even met her, but our reputation as unpaid cheerleaders for LSD led Mr. Linkletter to arrive at his conclusion. When I heard Linkletter accuse me, I tried to call the TV station. I wondered how many celebrities who'd been
paid
to pitch alcohol had been accused of the millions of traffic deaths attributable to alcohol over the years. Probably none. I wanted to talk to the man, to remind him of the more serious alcohol situation and the hypocrisy associated with it, but the lines were jammed with other people who had their own opinions. I suppose Linkletter's grief would have prevented him from really
listening
to me anyway.
Later, Leary released this statement:
I've talked in the past about the weirdo oxygen-snorting fish who advanced evolution. But let's be honest. Some fish aren't ready to sniff oxygen. Most of them know who they are. It's been said, for instance, that LSD causes panic among people who have never tried it. Still, if I have prematurely coaxed some fish ashore who were really not prepared for the experience, I now express regret for not refining our invitations with more care.
—T
IMOTHY
L
EARY
(and G
RACE
S
LICK
by association)
On another occasion, at the Big House, I almost
did
kill somebody. I came in late one night, opened the front door, and the furniture had been tossed around the room like discarded toys. It looked like some kid had thrown a tantrum, but it was very quiet. No crazy party had gone on here—I would have known about it—so I figured it must have been a crazy person.
Fear.
I remembered that Paul kept a gun in his nightstand, but that was three floors up. Where was the person who'd caused the chaos? Was he or she still here and armed? As quietly as possible, I made it all the way up to Paul's room. Then I heard footsteps behind me. I grabbed the gun with mindless resolution and aimed at the door, fully intending to fire on sight.
“Good girl,” a familiar voice said, complimenting me on my ability to protect myself. David Crosby strolled into the room.
“Good girl, my ass,” I retorted. “I almost blew your head off.”
David had obviously come into the house
before
me, and
after
the screwball had trashed the place. Since neither of us knew at the time whether or not the nut was still in the house, we couldn't do anything but sneak out, wondering who'd done all the redecorating and why. We later found out that the mess had been created by a crazy “fan” who had some gripe about us not responding to his desire to join the band.
Since I didn't fire the gun, Crosby is still around. And happily for me, my ears didn't suffer the same kind of trauma that took place after an afternoon of shooting in the woods with The Dead, Airplane, and assorted Bay Area musicians and artists. We weren't aiming at animals; we were just bouncing bullets off planks of wood that we'd nailed to the trees. I should have worn target practice headgear, because my ears were ringing for days.
Of course, it never occurred to us semiconscious musicians that self-inflicted ear assaults could wreak havoc with a key requirement for our “profession”: hearing.
And the Winner Is …
I
n 1968, when we were recording
Crown of Creation,
we were still new enough at the business of delegating authority that each member of the band wanted to control his own knob or fader on the board.
For those of you who don't know the ins and outs of a recording studio, “the board” is a slanted desk with an enormous number of knobs, faders, dials, wires, VU meters, and electric gizmos that both record and mix the music. “Mixing” happens after the song is completed, when the volume of each instrument gets placed at precisely the desired level in relation to the overall sound of the piece.
Usually, the producer is the master of the board, but of course, each of us wanted to be louder than everybody else. That meant six egos were busy sending the meters into the red, indicating OVERLOAD. Add to that consistent snorts of cocaine, and you have a formula for major cost overruns if not chaos. Apart from its expense and its tendency to cause people to babble, cocaine also has a tendency to make musicians want to try at least seventy-five different ways of mixing a song before they'll surrender to a popular opinion that the fifth take was just fine. That can be great fun if you have $250 an hour to throw away on studio time, or if you have a couple thousand dollars to get everyone else in the room as fucked up as you are.
I know I've fried my share of engineers by replaying a particular song in every possible permutation of sound until the janitors imposed their vacuum cleaners on me at dawn. God love the patience of all recording engineers. Producers and stars will argue or walk when they get miffed, but the engineer stays right there until the end. It was during one of these six-man mixing sessions that Paul's and my hands were constantly touching due to his fader being located right next to mine on the board. After about forty-five minutes, I still had my hand on the fader, making adjustments that had nothing to do with the song. I just wanted to see how long it would take before the skin-touching registered as a proposition. It
did
make Paul friendly, not to the point of making lewd remarks, but I noticed that he'd begun moving to the left a bit more, talking in my direction, keeping his hand on the knob even when the tape was rewinding—that sort of thing. Slow buildup. But not yet.
What
was
building was the popularity of the group, and we were suddenly being approached by various film people who were interested to see if we could join forces and make some money together. The director Otto Preminger was one of those people. He apparently thought he was a certified hippie because he'd been doing some psychedelics at radical chic parties with Leonard Bernstein. Burning to direct a comedy about the counterculture, he talked up my being in a movie called
Skidoo
, about an old guy (ultimately played by Jackie Gleason) who takes acid. Unfortunately—or perhaps
fortunately
for those moviegoers who would have had to sit through my performance—there was something so absurd about Preminger's cocky presentation, I said no thanks to his offer of a role.
I also turned down what was eventually Lauren Hutton's role in
Little Fauss and Big Halsy
. Hollywood was still making mass-appeal color trivia infused with Doris Day cleanliness—not exactly my area. But in 1969, Airplane said yes to a collaboration between the group and Jean Luc Godard, thereby bringing together two bizarre artistic elements.
Here's something to do if you have a band and you want free publicity: play 150-decibel rock music from a rooftop in midtown Manhattan. We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist for the same “volume” of public exposure. Speaking of exposure, do it nude. That last part we didn't think of, so Jean Luc Godard, shooting from across the street through the window of the office of Leacock-Pennebaker studios, filmed us, fully clothed, as we perched on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel.
When we were ready to begin, Marty took his microphone and shouted, “Wake up, New York. Wake up!” The actor Rip Torn, in a bright red scarf, and Paula Matter, dressed in a bedsheet, arrived to join us. Unfortunately, they weren't the only ones who showed up. After two songs, “Somebody to Love” and “We Can Be Together,” a cop appeared and told us to stop the music because we were disturbing the peace. We figured it would make a better film if we kept on playing, so we did, while cars screeched to a halt, pedestrians froze in their tracks, and office workers leaned out the windows waving. Five more cops showed up and started shoving Rip and Paula around. When they resisted, they were arrested and taken to the Eighteenth Precinct.
And the band played on.
The film, called
One American Movie
, opened at an art house in Berkeley on December 17, 1969, to this review by film critic Ralph Gleason:
It is a fascinating sequence—the film, itself, actually only a work print of a series of interviews plus some footage of Rip Torn which hints at what the flick might have ultimately been, does something which I find quite important—in a way, it is an exact mirror of the political scene today. …
It is a collection of open-end raps which eventually becomes boring. If it were not for the presence of the rock band and the fact that its footage is not only interesting visually, but also listenable, the whole thing would have been hard to take.
But, Ralph, you've heard the old line “You had to have been there.” Some jokes exist for their own sake, and most of us thought that the film was meant to be a comedy of errors. Maybe tighter editing would have helped, or the addition of at least one cop with a lamp shade on his head. But the incongruity of it combined with the illegality were enough to make the entire production a worthwhile farce—as far as I was concerned. And there was another plus: Siskel and Ebert would have hated it.
By the way, decades later the rock group U2 did the same thing in L.A. in the process of shooting a video. There were no arrests.
One more Hollywood turndown for me: Milos Forman's
Ragtime
. This time I was offered the part of a radical Communist rabble-rouser, which wouldn't have been a big stretch for me. Unfortunately, it cut into our touring time and I declined. My movie career was short, uneventful, and over in one poorly reviewed underground flop.