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Overview
But there was a dark flip side to the fun fun fun of the music, a nexus between naive young musicians and the hangers-on who exploited the decade's peace, love, and flowers ethos, all fueled by sex, drugs, and overnight success. One surf music superstar unwittingly subsidized the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. The transplanted Texas singer Bobby Fuller might have been murdered by the Mob in what is still an unsolved case. And after hearing Charlie Manson sing, Neil Young recommended him to the president of Warner Bros. Records. Manson's ultimate rejection by the music industry likely led to the infamous murders that shocked a nation.
Everybody Had an Ocean chronicles the migration of the rock 'n' roll business to Southern California and how the artists flourished there. The cast of characters is astonishing—Brian and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, eccentric producer Phil Spector, Cass Elliot, Sam Cooke, Ike and Tina Turner, Joni Mitchell, and scores of others—and their stories form a modern epic of the battles between innocence and cynicism, joy and terror. You'll never hear that beautiful music in quite the same way.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613734940 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Everybody Had An Ocean
Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles
By William McKeen
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 William McKeenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61373-494-0
CHAPTER 1
DREAMERS OF THE GOLDEN DREAM
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
— Joan Didion
Like the rest of the country it bookended, California was a place of contradiction: site of spectacular sunsets and lonely dead ends; land of dreams, home of nightmares; and happy endings alongside withering tragedies.
As the twentieth century dawned, the East Coast attained its adulthood. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were civilized, intellectual, and economic centers, and the nineteenth century disappeared into vapor. Not so in Los Angeles. Even as starched Arrow Collar men strode around New York City, Los Angeles was still the Wild West.
The film industry preceded the music business in California by several decades, but parallel experiences prove the maxim that those who do not remember history get stuck on repeat.
The motion picture industry began in New York, where early filmmakers saw themselves as adjuncts of the theater business. Films were three-minute novelty pictures — a kiss, a scandalous dance exposing a woman's ankle, waves on the beach. Soon, films grew in length. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter made the ten-minute Great Train Robbery at Edison Studios in New York, with location work in New Jersey, Wild West enough at the time. Audiences recoiled when a bandit fired at the screen in the film's last moments.
Enter boosters from the infant city of Los Angeles. They went after the nascent movie business, hoping to turn it into a dominant California industry. They had some good arguments: the weather was perfect year-round and the terrain was varied and could pass for most other parts of the world. There were forests, deserts, oceans, flatlands, and jagged peaks. Jersey couldn't compete with the San Gabriel Mountains.
The westward migration began around 1910. Pioneer filmmaker D. W. Griffith tired of the unpredictable and often insufferable winters back east. Moving to California, he found all the landscapes he'd need to film his Civil War epic (and racist diatribe) The Birth of a Nation in 1915. It was the first modern narrative film, with a running time of two hours and thirty-five minutes. Griffith was sold on Los Angeles as his new base. Soon the majority of film companies made the move to Southern California, and those stubbornly remaining back east, such as the Edison Studios, went bankrupt.
Most film companies settled in the just-annexed section of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. The village was incorporated in 1887, and when filmmakers arrived it was still a town of orange groves and a single trolley.
The entertainment business and scandal went hand in glove. The film industry established a pattern of crime and shame soon to be replicated by music moguls, record producers, and naive artists and performers.
Hollywood's hundred years of scandal included murdered movie stars, anti-Semitic tirades, and drug overdoses. A century after it happened, the story of silent-film star Roscoe Arbuckle still made most lists of show business infamy. Arbuckle, a portly fellow known as Fatty to his fans, costarred with Charles Chaplin in one- and two-reelers. His real life and habits would have been the grist of a horror film to audiences. He was a junkie, his drug of choice being morphine, which he injected into the track-filmed arm he carefully covered on filming days.
Arbuckle had finished a harrowing withdrawal when he decided to stage a colossal party. He had signed a lucrative new Warner Bros. contract and booked a floor of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for a bacchanal with a few score friends. A near orgy ensued. Witnesses said on September 6, 1921, actress Virginia Rappe ran from Arbuckle's room in the middle of the night. Other guests assumed she was drunk or sick, but when she died three days later, Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter. Word was that Arbuckle raped the young woman with a champagne bottle, rupturing her bladder. She died of peritonitis.
Arbuckle's first two trials ended in hung juries, and the third acquitted him. But the damage was done, and his career never recovered. He died destitute at forty-six.
Scandals kept on coming. Film director Thomas Ince died aboard a yacht owned by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. His death was attributed to heart failure, but his corpse was cremated before the coroner could perform an autopsy. The story on the down low was that Hearst had shot Ince while aiming for Chaplin. Hearst suspected Chaplin was shtupping actress Marion Davies, Hearst's girlfriend. (If true, behold Chaplin's cojones for carrying on with Hearst's woman while on the man's yacht.) Though the Hearst-shooting story was oft repeated, no additional inquiry was launched into Ince's death.
By many accounts, Chaplin was a penis with a small man attached. Chaplin proudly referred to his organ as "the eighth wonder of the world," and the two of them kept Hollywood gossip fires stoked. His first divorce yielded assertions from his spurned wife that he had "abnormal, unnatural, and perverted sexual desires." Through paternity suits, multiple marriages, political persecution, and his eventual deportation in 1952, he was a one-man scandal machine.
* * *
Los Angeles was fecund with corruption. As it became the American capital of crazy, it also became a reliable source of ghastly crimes, often found on the fringes of the entertainment business. One of the most horrific was the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, a Boston girl who went west to make it big in the movies. She was found sawed in half, body washed and neatly bleached, in the Leimert Park neighborhood. The press dubbed her the Black Dahlia, after the noir film from a few years before, The Blue Dahlia.
California had sunshine and the Pacific, but it also had a dank underbelly of stunningly bizarre murders. As Woody Allen said of California in Annie Hall, "There's no economic crime, but there's ritual, religious cult murders, you know there's wheat-germ killers out here." Reporters loved to name the spectacular murders — hence the Black Dahlia — and a body of literature grew from the tales of Southern California's horrific violence and the historically corrupt Los Angeles Police Department.
Novelists James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler explored the milieu of dirty cops and double-crossing broads in such remarkable books as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (Cain) and The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye (Chandler). Chandler was one of the great and under appreciated literary figures laboring in the movie studio vineyards. His only original screenplay produced was The Blue Dahlia, and he adapted Cain's Double Indemnity. Cain wrote as if being charged by the word. He could teach an egg to be hard-boiled.
Los Angeles was the promised land and a pathetic and brutal place. Nathanael West wrote screenplays for low-rent Hollywood potboilers, but he also wrote the best novel about corruption and tragedy in Tinseltown. He picked up the rock and studied its underside in The Day of the Locust, offering a grim vision of the dreamers of the golden dream:
They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
* * *
Charles Chaplin built his film studios at the corner of LaBrea and Sunset in 1917, and, long after his deportation from America during the McCarthy era, those studios became home to the hugely successful A&M Records. The film industry bequeathed its property and its propensity for scandal to the music business.
The American music industry had been centered in New York as long as it had existed. In the days before recording, music publishers supplied performers and families gathered round the family upright with the sheet music needed in order to play.
In the late nineteenth century, several music publishers located to a row on Twenty-Eighth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. This became Tin Pan Alley, and those music publishers dominated the industry. Recording was introduced in 1877, but it took thirty years for music to be readily available to the general public on disc.
The recording industry evolved from the New York music publishers. Columbia was founded in the 1880s, and the Victor Talking Machine Company (later known as RCA Victor) began in 1901. Those two giants duked it out for well over a century, along with other majors — Decca, a British company whose American division opened in New York in 1934, and Mercury, which started in Chicago in 1946.
The first West Coast label to become a major player was Capitol Records, founded in Los Angeles in 1942. Songwriter Johnny Mercer ("Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses," "Summer Wind," and scores of other standards) decided he wanted to start a record company and mused about the prospects to Glenn Wallichs, owner of the massive retailer Music City on Sunset Boulevard. They looked for investors and approached Buddy DeSylva, a sometime–song writing partner of Mercer's and film producer for Paramount. When Mercer asked if Paramount might want to invest, DeSylva said no but that he did. He handed over a personal check for $15,000.
Within just a few years, Capitol was competing with Columbia, RCA, and Decca, giving the world such recording stars as Nat "King" Cole, the first African American superstar to cross over to the mass market. The company's diverse catalog of pop, jazz, and country featured Tennessee Ernie Ford, Miles Davis, and Jackie Gleason. Crooner Frank Sinatra's career came back from the dead when he signed to Capitol in 1953, re-creating himself as a mature saloon singer providing the soundtrack for a million conceptions. The revenue from Sinatra and other Capitol artists helped the company build its distinctive headquarters, the Capitol Tower, across the street from Wallichs Music City. The building resembled a thirteen-story stack of records and was soon a major Los Angeles landmark.
Though Capitol was the only major label in Los Angeles, the city had given birth to a number of significant independent labels.
* * *
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" suggested that because America was a young nation with challenges, it constantly required innovation.
Adapt that concept to rock 'n' roll. The major labels aimed for the middle ground, which is why they were slow to respond to the music embraced by teenagers, who began to assume prominence as consumers in the fifties. On the frontier of the music industry, small, independent record companies — often run by lunatics — ended up reaching these new, adolescent consumers with disposable income.
The principal lunatic was Sam Phillips in Memphis. Though a poor white sharecropper's son from Florence, Alabama, his greatest love was the blues music he heard from African American musicians in Memphis. He and business partner Marion Keisker opened the Memphis Recording Service in 1950. The slogan on the business cards said, We Record Anything — anywhere — anytime. Among the first artists Phillips recorded were B. B. King, Rufus Thomas, and a group of convicts known as the Prisonaires. It was an exclusively black group.
Phillips had a great ear for talent, but he had no record label. He sold his master recordings to Jules and Saul Bihari, two Hungarian Jews who'd set up Modern Records with a Beverly Hills address in 1945. Phillips got a flat fee for recordings he sent to Los Angeles, and he grumbled about doing all the heavy lifting while the Bihari brothers built their label with King and other artists.
Phillips also got credit for discovering Howlin' Wolf, a massive, growling blues singer born as Chester Arthur Burnett in 1910. After recording Wolf, he sold the master tapes to another set of brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess in Chicago, whose Chess Records made significant contributions to the birthing of rock 'n' roll.
In March 1951, nineteen-year-old bandleader Ike Turner from Clarksdale, Mississippi, set a recording date with Phillips for his band, the Kings of Rhythm. Band and equipment were shoehorned into a car for the hour-long drive from Clarksdale, up Highway 61. As Turner and his sardines neared Phillips's studio on Union Avenue, the car hit a pothole and guitarist Willie Kizart's amplifier came loose from the trunk and smacked down on the asphalt. That's that. We won't be recording today. The dejected band drove on to the studio to tell Phillips the bad news.
Sam Phillips wasn't worried. Well hell. Let's plug it in and hear what it sounds like.
Only a lunatic would record with a broken amplifier, but Sam Phillips did, and critics will still wrestle nude in creamed corn to argue that the result was the first rock 'n' roll record. Phillips sold the recording — "Rocket 88," credited to Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats; Brenston was Turner's sax player and singer — to the Chess brothers, and they reaped the benefits of Sam Phillips's madness.
Investing every farthing he could find, Sam Phillips founded Sun Records in 1953, continuing to record the black artists he admired and musing about what would happen if he found a white singer with the naked emotion of the black artists he loved. In the segregated world of 1953, it was unlikely any black artists would ever cross over to the mass market, unless they were nonthreatening crooners such as Nat King Cole or the Mills Brothers.
That summer, Sam Phillips's savior walked through the door. New high school graduate Elvis Presley was a truck driver for Crown Electric Company when he came by the studio to make a vanity recording for his mother. Marion Keisker ran the shop that day, and when Presley started singing, she heard something she liked and turned on the tape recorder — the vanity recordings were cut direct to disc, not taped — so she could later share Presley's voice with Phillips.
Phillips released five Presley singles on Sun, music that provided much of the DNA of rock 'n' roll: "That's All Right, Mama," "Good Rockin' Tonight," "Milkcow Blues Boogie," "Baby, Let's Play House," and "Mystery Train." After a year and a half, Phillips sold Presley's contract to a major label (RCA) and used that money to continue his discoveries of new and singularly American talent, including Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich.
By the time Phillips sold Presley's contract, the young singer had already defined his style. Some argue that he never made a great record again after leaving Phillips. RCA called in Phillips as a consultant, but the label insisted on recording at its studios in Nashville, and there was no way to re-create the magic of the cracker box in Memphis.
RCA would have no interest in Presley — or any other young and untrained singer — if Phillips had not found genius lurking inside the pimpled truck driver. That's why it took independent labels, such as Sun in Memphis and Chess in Chicago, to mine and refine the talent. Chess gave the world blues greats such as Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon, as well as early rock 'n' roll stars Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Modern (and its subsidiary, RPM) was not the only independent label in Los Angeles. There were small labels operating from offices behind a Laundromat or out of a camper truck. The craziness of the label owners made them willing to try just about anything, and some of those L.A. based labels ended up producing significant recordings, even if they didn't make much money.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Everybody Had An Ocean by William McKeen. Copyright © 2017 William McKeen. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note,Introduction: Brothers,
1 - Dreamers of the Golden Dream,
2 - Magic Transistor Radio,
3 - They Put the Bomp,
4 - The Second Jesus,
5 - Everybody Had an Ocean,
6 - Sacred and Profane,
7 - The Beautiful Future,
8 - The Ransom of Junior Sinatra,
9 - From All Over the World,
10 - The Door Flies Open,
11 - The Loners,
12 - The Teenage Symphony to God,
13 - Captive on a Carousel,
14 - Peace, Love, and Flowers,
15 - The Dread,
The Tag: Summer's Gone,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Selected Discography,
Index,