Around Town

It was in Dr. Cole’s office that Eric met the  ”King,” Elvis Presley.   Dr. Cole was one of the best Beverly Hills doctors and he had a famous clientele.  Elvis needed to have cortisone shots administered to his hip area as he had gyrated his hips so often.  Also he had been an avid Karate enthusiast and that didn’t help his overused body either.  Dr. Cole could help.  Elvis had him flown to Las Vegas to help him after performances.  First Dr. Cole died and then Elvis died.  Eric always thought that Elvis would still be alive if Dr. Cole had still been his doctor.

The group was making good money and in the world of real estate it was a good time to find reasonable property value for your money.  The interest rates were still reasonable.  John had reunited with Michelle and they bought a castle in Bel-Aire.  It had belonged to Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald.  It was right around the corner from Lou Adler’s house and Brain Wilson’s house.  Cass moved to Woodrow Wilson Drive.  Dennis bought a home on Apian Way in Laurel Canyon that had belonged to Mary Astor.  It was next to Carol King’s house.  Eric moved around the corner from Dennis.

Dennis’ house had the most beautiful view, yet inside it looked like dark shadows from the Nordic middle ages.  The house had been offered at a good price as well as having priceless furniture inside.  It had Chinese jade screen room dividers that were worth a lot of money.  He had bought the house lock, stock and barrel.  What started as a real good real estate investment turned into Hollywood Babylon.

You would walk into a foyer and off to the left was a monstrous living room with a monstrous fireplace.  There was a fire burning in it day and night, all times of the year.  On the ceiling was a huge parachute.  Dennis would serve Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Wheaties for breakfast.

Dennis had a large assortment of friends and a lot of people dropped in.  He “held court” as much as Cass “held court” over at her Woodrow Wilson estate.  Included in Dennis’ court were Barry McGuire, Owen Orr (Greg Benedict), Bobby Simon, Peter and Mary Jacobs, Anita Kemm, Lance Wakely, and Linda Hyite.

After a while the parties became something else.  People were staying for days on end and you would have to kick them out and tell them to go away.

Eric’s place was off of Lookout Mountain Drive in Laurel Canyon.  It belonged to Thea Van Runkle.  She was a costume designer in competition with Edith Head.  Bonnie and Clyde was her biggest picture. “It was good to be able to afford a nice place and have good drugs and food.”

Eric would constantly play the guitar.  People would drop over and pick with him.  Jam.  The corner was so sharp turning to get to his house that one night Dennis, in a large red Cadillac convertible, rolled into the twenty mailboxes clustered there.

They’d jam on acid or mushrooms quite often.  Mark Volmin (from the Turtles) reacted to something by saying “Man, this is really good stuff” and then barfed.  Then they would make it down the hill to the Whiskey.

If the Buffalo Springfield were playing at the Whiskey it would be good to go to see them because you knew that some gigantic party would take place.  It would be at someone’s house in the hills or out in Topanga Canyon or Bel Aire.

During this time Eric would take daily trips down to the guitar store always trying to pick-up on new techniques . . . to be up on the new electronic procedures going around.  In the studio you had to have a particular sound.  There were echoplex, reverb, and chamber techniques.

Other people who lived in the hills were Tad (Henry) Diltz, the photographer and Van Dyke Parks.  Van Dyke was collaborating with Brian Wilson on songs:  “God Only Knows,” “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains,” Eric called Van Dyke a genius.  There was also Michael Green who lived on Grandview Avenue.  And Ry Cooder, Phil Fried, David Crosby and John Judnich lived in the hills.

Fast Eddie lived over by the Hollywood Bowl and Cyrus’ place was over on Barham Boulevard.  Cyrus was the leader of the Modern Folk Quartet.  Then Peter (the Count) and Rusty took over Cyrus’ place.  It was a fun half-way point there.  You could run into Nick Woods, Barry McGuire, or Paul Potash there.  Steve Mann lived at Hollywood and Argyle.

“A person could tulle around in their Alpha with their Brioni sports jacket, hat, shirt and smile, Gucci boots, $40 bottle of coke, some good weed, and guitar and visit a variety of people.”

Eventually Eric moved to Topanga Canyon.  He was a canyon person but now he was a Toganga Canyon person.  There was the Corral and the Canyon Store.  If you were into hallucinogenics, then you wanted to get out to the country somewhere.  Eric had enough money to move to a more natural place.

Topanga was forty minutes from Hollywood.  You could take care of your business at home and then drive into town around 11 a.m. when the traffic was not too bad.  In Los Angeles you always had to think about when you would be on the road and what the traffic would be like before you drove anywhere.  He would visit people in and around Laurel Canyon and pick-up his check from Carol Samuels at the Roberts and Landers Agency.

Topanga Canyon was a retreat.  It’s not the city.  By the time you turn off of Pacific Coast Highway, which is rimmed with cliffs on one side and ocean on the other, you are ready to appreciate the chaparral.  Eric felt good driving the canyon curves in his Alpha.

Topanga Canyon had it’s own little scene.  Victor Maymudes, who was Bob Dylan’s road manager at one time, lived there as did Hoyt Axton and Gilligan’s Island, Bob Denver.  There was Chris Hillman, Tim Hardin, Russ Tamblyn, Bobby Buchanan, Graham Parson, and Paul Potash.  Scott and Gerri Elam (actor Jack Elam’s children) lived in Topanga.

Barry McGuire held court out at his Powder Horn Ranch.  Actually Barry had the charisma and his wife Patti held court.  Patti was nut brown from the sun and swollen pregnant.  Her belly looked translucent and it seemed as though you could almost see soon-to-be Ever inside.  Barry had been in the Christy Minstrels and in the stage production of Hair and any member of either might visit the ranch.  He was in a James Coburn film called “The President’s Analyst.”  There is an excellent scene depicting Topanga Canyon life with Barry singing in a field of flowers and Coburn with a lady.  It was filmed there in the canyon.

Barry was a natural person.  He really believed in acid for nature’s sake.  He got busted at the big be-in at Tapia Park in the Malibu Mountains.  The police thought that someone who took acid was an animal and treated them like it.  They had it completely opposite.  The police were supposed to be there for your protection, not to be beaten up.  Barry came to the aid of a young person being beaten and was arrested himself.  His picture made the newspapers.

Barry was busted once again down by the river where lots of nude kids went swimming and tripped out.  John Phillips wrote “Young girls Are Coming to the Canyon.”  It was acid that brought all thoses girls there.  Hanging out with flowers in their hair and nothing on.  No wonder the parents were upset.

Once at Powder Horn Eric was doing his circus act on this large rope swing that was tied to a tall tree.  Out over the rocks he swung and fell.  He was on acid so it was O.K.  They also didn’t mind falling into the poison ivy or getting mosquito bites.

The scam of the year was the four friends; Victor, Barry, Crazy Patrick and Eric) walking into the Vox Instrument plant in the San Fernando Valley and proclaiming themselves as the next big rock group.  Vox is to Europe what Fender, Gibson, or Martin is to the U.S.  The Stones and the Beatles used  Vox instruments.  V ox sponsored major tours.  So they walked in looking half-crazed and convinced them . . . stoked them into lending them an electric organ, a couple of large amplifiers, a bass guitar and a couple of electric guitars.  Just sign here please.

The first Topanga fiddle contest was held in a creek bed in Topanga.  It was a nice stage setting for a battle of the bands.  It was Eric’s idea to hold the contest there and it is still a major event.

Eric’s neighbor next to where he lived on Rock Trail kept a lion in a cage in their back yard.  One morning he got up and rolled a fat bomberoso joint and walked outside bombed and blitzed.  He walked around the corner and saw a roaring lion.  Gray hair.

Another day Eric had parked his car to close to the corner.  Victor and he were in his living room.  They were breaking up a tightly packed brick of weed onto newspaper on the floor.  There were candles and incense burning.  When they answered the door a policeman looked inside and said “Would you please move your car.” And then he walked away.  That was a close call. 

Now Eric was beginning to be interested in a church.  The acid was slowly starting to sink into the ministry of it.  Why couldn’t they have a Sunday thing out here for all these kids?  Guitars and stars.  They had a mini be-in in Topanga with thirty to forty people.  “Come on over to Doc’s place for a little guitar music and spiritual gathering.”  He also played his sitar while Indian Doug danced and the purple Owsley acid was passed out.  It was a cosmic paradise one again.

Their Sunday be-in was on his large back lot with plants and sunflowers, crickets, birds, and a little stream going by.  They had an altar with a big cross.  There was also an old-fashioned western wagon wheel and a few old saddles draped over the fence posts.  Barry would be nearby  looking at a bug on a tree, making bug or bird sounds with his mouth.  He would look at the leaves.  He was always being fascinated with life and the eternal now.

A typical Topanga day might go like this:  first you would go to the post office around 11 a.m. or noon and check your P.O. box to see if you got any mail.  Then you would go over to the Topanga Café and just hang out and find out if anything was happening somewhere.  You might see some girls come by on horses, country girls with straw hats on.  Other ladies wore knee high moccasins.  Some wore leather jackets with beaded fringes and hats with feathers in the headband.  Barry McGuire wore lace shirts.  In general it was fashionable for men to wear flowered shirts.  Mod was the style then also.  In Topanga it was mod, hippie and country styles mixed together.

Maybe a group would decide to go to the Renaissance Faire out in Calabasas.  They would don Elizabethan costumes and wear wreaths of flowers in their hair.

For dinner you could go to Moon Fire.  It was a vegetarian restaurant that served good food and had nice windows for looking at the full moon.

For evening entertainment you could see different groups the Corral.  The “canyon band” was Spirit comprised of Randy California and Neal Cassidy.  There was Canned Heat, Buffal0 Springfield, Taj Mahal. Gene Clark, the Dillards, Chris Hillman, and the Yellow Submarine Band.

Sometimes a group of them would go to the Whiskey in town.  They’d dress up in their finest hippy finery and dance up a storm at the club.  Their fringe and feathers would swing and sway.  Eric was looking sharp in his Brioni sports clothes.

While they were in town they might go visit “the castle” over near the Griffith Park Observatory.  John Phillip Law along with Tom and Lisa Law (the co-originators of the hog farm along with Wavy Gravy) lived there.  You might find Wavy Gravy, “hog” people, Severn Darden, Vito or Crazy Patrick there.

The Mamas and Papas were on top of the world but because of inner conflicts they just weren’t the same group of people that Eric remembered from the East Coast, from all the times in the islands or going to the World’s Fair on acid.  Something was starting to dissolve.

The problem with John and Dennis rested with Michelle.  The problem with John, Dennis and Michelle rested with Cass.

John was a task master and the leader of the group.  He worked with Lou and set up the rehearsals.  Let’s make a couple of demo’s here . . . let’s make a showing there.  He was the business man.  Cass didn’t want to work that hard.  With all the luxury you might not want to rehearse and work as hard.  “I don’t want to come into the studio tonight.  I want to hang out with Jimmie Hendrix or Buddy Miles who are in town.”

During the actual recording of a song in the studio there is a lot of condensed pressure.  A part of a song will be done over and over again until it is done right if need be.  This can become irritating and usually leads to a spat here and there at any recording session.  “ Do it again, do it again, do it again.”  The constant repetition and criticism of vocal phrases made for a high strung situation.

On stage John and Cass were best at having a good rapport with the crowd.  John was a natural born talker and always had a good response to give a heckler.  Cass was loveable.  It was easy to laugh with her.  Especially when she would say “Howdy, howdy, howdy kids, it’s Froggy the Gremlin.”  Dennis was the Errol Flynn of the set.  He had a nice Irish personality.  Not too rough.  The chicks liked him.  He had a good voice.   Michelle was good to look at.  She was the Rose of Spanish Harlem, the young wild nymphet.

One night they played the last set at a jai-alai arena called the Fronton Palacio in Orlando, Florida.  Paul Revere and the Raiders had played the first set.  

The group went back to their rooms at the Orlando Inn and Cass looked in the yellow pages and called an Italian restaurant to order food for everyone.  She ordered up about $150 worth of food;  five orders of escargot, spaghetti, lasagna, and salad.  She started to cry because she was so “loose” she couldn’t even keep track of her purse and someone had stolen her money.  She gathered the money from everyone and paid the delivery person.  Then they all sat down to eat.

Somehow between the hash,  Eskatrols, weed, and booze things got a little rowdy.  Dennis and Cass started throwing spaghetti at each other.  Soon everyone and everything joined in.  The whole room was covered with food and the T.V. and beds were overturned.  Lou stopped by to visit and shouted out “You’re all animals” and left.  There was a lot of laughing . . . a temporary break of the tension.

John was receiving the lion’s share of what the group was pulling in as he had written the songs they sung.  Cass wanted to try for a better career as a solo artist.  The others didn’t seem to mind.  John said it was time to call it quits.  “O.K. , time to quit.”

Before the group broke up Eric was becoming more and more discontent himself.  He was back to being a side man, like he had been with Ian and Sylvia.  He was this mysterious person that had disappeared to do his time in jail, which he never mentioned to anyone.  It was nobody’s trip but his.  He had to take his medicine as it came and wait for his time to take a shot at the spotlight.

In the original recording of “California Dreaming,” Bud Shank took and instrumental break.  It was a flute solo.  On the road, Eric played it as a guitar solo, note for note.  At the Monterey Pops Festival he played it as a guitar solo.  At the Hollywood Bowl concert, Bud Shank got the solo.  Eric was extremely pissed and never did get over it.  He knew his place after that.  It was just salt in an open would when Bobby Roberts asked him to tell the band not to order Chateaubriand at the restaurants anymore.

One night the group was bickering so badly during a recording session that Eric wrote a note saying that when they got it back together he’d come in and put on some good guitar.  He was also mad because his dog had eaten out the interior of his Alpha.  Eric drove out to the Santa Monica pier.  Construction was going on and they had a small chain blocking the end of the pier.  Eric accelerated and drove off at about 40 miles per hour.  He was sure the car is still sitting down there.  It was a convertible so Eric floated up to the top of the water and swam back to shore.