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Only a few years earlier, Geffen had been laboring in the mail room at the William Morris Agency, arriving early every morning to intercept a letter from UCLA informing his employers that he had not, in fact, graduated from the school, as he had told them.
“There was a tremendous feeling of anything [is possible],” musician Graham Nash remembered. “What do you want to think of? We can do anything. What do you want? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What do you want to play? What album do you want to make? There was no end to [it]. We were in this pool of, like, magic stuff, and it was rubbing off on everybody.”
“LA was a lens that American culture was focused through in those days,” she recalled, “like Berlin before World War Two.”
Popular culture became the bridge between the mass American audience and once-insurrectionary ideas that developed on the vanguard of the social and political movements of the 1960s. That bridge has proven unshakeable over the past half century.
In the struggle for control of popular culture, Los Angeles during the early 1970s was the right’s Gettysburg or Battle of the Bulge: the moment when it definitively lost the war.
Hollywood, at a low ebb financially and artistically, was dominated by bloated historical epics and musicals; television, operating under the theory of what one top executive labeled the “least objectionable program,” narcotized American households with a deadening array of rural comedies; and while rock music ruled the AM airwaves, the record labels had not yet accepted the idea of the album as a coherent artistic and social statement.
“It was like a big garden to me,” she remembered of LA in those years. “After those years in New York, it was like the land of milk and honey.”*
New York’s reflexive dismissal of Los Angeles as a vapid desert of silicone and sunburn always rankled some in Los Angeles. But LA in the early 1970s no longer sought validation from New York, which was spiraling into municipal bankruptcy and reeling under crime and urban decay.
Once the cultural balance tipped from optimism to resignation, around 1975, the LA renaissance flickered. When the last hopes that America might fundamentally transform after the 1960s faded, so, too, did LA’s moment as the center of popular culture.
One clear lesson from American history is that while the voices resistant to change may win delaying battles in politics, they cannot indefinitely hold back the future.
For a period in the early 1970s, flings with Nicholson and Beatty seemed almost as much a rite of passage for rising female celebrities as a profile in Rolling Stone or a Christmas vacation in Aspen.
friends considered Towne that rare hypochondriac who was often actually sick—when
Nicholson threw parties that floated on gallons of cheap Gallo red wine and ended, he recalled, with newly minted couples rattling the headboard in every room in his house.
For many in Nicholson’s generation, Corman became a critical source of work, if not a munificent one. The director didn’t pay much, but he did offer responsibility to young people who couldn’t wrangle a day pass at the major studios, including directors Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich.
the elephantine products that emerged from this assembly line (Doctor Doolittle; Mame; Hello, Dolly!; Camelot) could hardly have sounded more off-key in the world of Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Blonde on Blonde.
It didn’t help that in the mid-1960s, and for many years to come, decisions in both industries were made almost entirely by older white men who might interact with young people only when they propositioned a starlet.
In every possible way, Los Angeles entranced him. “It was free, it was warm, it was sunny, it was open, it was smiley,”
“When you are selling plastic, you can get away with murder,” Nash remembered. “We were selling millions of records, and so, what are you going to do with those people? Piss them off? I don’t think so. Let them do what they want.”
“We played dive-y folk clubs,” Ronstadt remembered. “The Insomniac, down in Hermosa Beach, now mercifully a parking lot; the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach. There was a club in Santa Barbara. We would load up the car and go up there. We played pizza parlors if that’s all we could get.”
In LA, Browne was becoming the musical equivalent of a playground basketball legend in New York City: an underground sensation that everyone was convinced would someday hit the big time. But the big time remained elusively out of reach.
Do not be seen standing around the Troubadour bar for three hours every Monday night. Don’t do that. Because that’s the opposite of getting your work done. You’re part of a social scene, but you’re not getting your work done.”
His friend, the transcendent guitarist Duane Allman, improbably gave him a Telecaster guitar, which was something like handing a flamethrower to a Boy Scout who has asked how to start a campfire.
The LA music of the early 1970s represented the ’60s generation folding in on itself, shifting its focus from trying to change society from the top down through politics to changing it from the bottom up through the way they lived their lives.
Jerry Brown was a party of one. He lived in Malibu and then Laurel Canyon and spent little time in Sacramento. He would fly in, strafe the legislators with contempt, and then retreat to glittery LA for dates with Liv Ullmann, Natalie Wood, or Ronstadt.
Brown didn’t mind the legislative leadership’s contempt: he welcomed it as a foil that would highlight his reform credentials and connect him to the same antiauthority impulses flowing through popular culture.
to Ronstadt, like others on the scene, LA always seemed more communal, more welcoming than New York City, where “there was a lot less forgiveness if you weren’t quite happening.”
Television was buffeted by the same gales of generational and demographic change that reshaped the music and movie businesses, but it responded more slowly than either.
“Even though I knew then that people looked down on television writers, Larry taught me that ‘More people are going to see one M*A*S*H episode, Linda, than are ever going to see Gone with the Wind.’
Lear began to ricochet between Los Angeles and New York, mastering the breakneck pace of television production—he survived the constant deadlines, he later recalled, on Dexedrine to stay awake for all-night writing sessions and Seconal to sleep when they were over.
the networks mostly offered viewers a gauzy, pastoral America unruffled by racial or generational conflict, unscarred by war, and untempted by new attitudes about sex and marriage. The biggest difference between the networks and the studios was that, unlike Hollywood, television made a great deal of money while doing so.
The prevailing aim at the networks and the advertising agencies was to produce what became known as “the least objectionable program” that could draw the most diverse viewership.39 In practice, this translated into shows that would be acceptable not only to urban sophisticates but also to small-town traditionalists.
As the Vietnam War escalated into an inferno, CBS responded with Gomer Pyle, an Andy Griffith spin-off with Jim Nabors as a guileless small-town marine, and Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy set in a Nazi POW camp. (With the toothless military comedies McHale’s Navy and The Wackiest Ship in the Army respectively, ABC and NBC came no closer to Vietnam than CBS did.) Each night, CBS chronicled the increasingly tumultuous strains tearing at America on Walter Cronkite’s newscast and then spent the next three and a half hours of prime time trying to erase them from their viewers’ minds.
Then they did what all aspiring rock stars in Los Angeles did in 1971: they went to see David Geffen.
won the job in part by falsely claiming he had graduated from UCLA and then arriving early every morning for weeks to intercept the letter from the university informing William Morris that this was not the case.)
Geffen’s own ambitions and avarice were never far from the surface, but he soon acquired the reputation as an agent who would fight for his clients to a contract’s last comma.
Geffen’s great professional cause in 1973 and 1974 was luring Bob Dylan to Elektra/Asylum, away from his longtime home at Columbia Records. “The legend was he could sign anybody,” remembered Jon Landau. “If he focused on somebody, he would go after them and communicate this tremendous intensity.”53 Dylan was to be the capstone of the Geffen legend. Geffen, as always, plotted his campaign methodically. He first targeted Jonathan Taplin, the former road manager for Dylan and the Band, as his conduit to meet Robbie Robertson, the Band’s leading figure. He courted Robertson to get closer to Dylan.
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For a gay man beginning his first serious romantic relationship with a woman, starting with Cher was like taking an interest in baseball by pinch-hitting for the Red Sox at Fenway Park.
Geffen courted Cher with his typical thoroughness: one of his assistants waited in line to fill up her Porsche during the gas crisis.
But compared to Browne, who felt little but gratitude, the Eagles were much more ambivalent and divided about Geffen. Frey was probably closer to Browne in his overall attitude toward him, but Henley was deeply suspicious of Geffen’s dual role as manager (even if he had retreated behind the scenes) and record label owner. The difference reflected the contrasting way Frey and Henley approached the world. Browne was one of many friends who likened them to Oscar and Felix on television’s The Odd Couple.69 Frey was messy; Henley, neat. Frey was gregarious, Henley most comfortable alone. Their
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Leadon and Meisner bridled at the heavy-handed leadership of Frey and Henley, who were so determined to control the band’s sound and direction that they rewrote songs from the other two that they believed did not meet their standards.
Frey and Henley were still locked in endemic conflict with their producer, Glyn Johns, who viewed the Eagles as a ballad band with country tinges and steered them in that direction with lots of banjos and creamy harmonies.
The relationship with Dylan that Geffen envisioned as a new peak in his professional career instead proved a prolonged headache. “I don’t know if David and Bob really clicked,” Taplin said. “This was more transactional.”81 The tour was a huge success, but Geffen felt slighted when Dylan didn’t recognize him from the stage at the last show in Los Angeles, and Dylan was disappointed that Planet Waves (though hardly one of his best) didn’t sell as much as Geffen had promised.
Joni Mitchell had moved out, considering Geffen too focused on Dylan. (When Geffen held a listening party at his house for Mitchell and Dylan to hear each other’s upcoming albums, Dylan boorishly snored through the playing of Court and Spark.)
Frey had concluded that none of the country-rock bands had reached the pinnacle of commercial success and that a harder sound would speak to a wider audience and carry them into that stratosphere.87 But their producer, Glyn Johns, continued to view the Eagles as a ballad band, not a rock band. “He said, ‘You’re a shitty rock band, and I’m not going to make a rock record with you,’”
“Why would you not go on tour with them? It was the greatest party any American white male could ever have.”
For a nation emerging fitfully from the previous decade’s turmoil, the Eagles were a fresh breeze from the coast, the easy-riding, hard-partying soundtrack to Los Angeles’ golden hour.
Hayden viewed the SLA as something like a high school friend who shows up a decade later to embarrass you with stories about the old days.
the group’s commitment to renouncing monogamy as a vestige of social repression turned out to be much more volatile than hoped.
wanted something more pungent than attending Brentwood and Beverly Hills cocktail parties that collected checks for radical causes while servants offered champagne and canapés around the pool.
One visiting interviewer found Hayden and Fonda living upstairs in a bedroom with a mattress on the floor.107 Fonda’s Oscar for Klute, flaking and worn, functioned as a bookend.
