Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc.

by Howard Kaylan

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  In Glasgow, for the first but not the last time, we drank our breakfast with Alice and got a glimpse into his slightly addled world. In Munich, after the concert, Shep rented out a sex club called the Tiffany, where bouncers with German shepherds straining at their leashes stood watching us while we watched the show onstage. It was a live sex show and our drugs and liquor gave us the lack of inhibition needed to interact, whether inappropriately or not. When a pretty blond stripper tried to persuade Alice to join her onstage, he reflexively punched her in the face. This didn’t sit well with the club owners or the growling dogs, so Shep paid some cash, made some excuses, and quickly escorted us out of the club and into waiting cars before somebody called the cops.

  Alice was doing amazing stunts onstage: the decapitation, the hanging, blood squibs, and violent effects. These were all under the supervision of one James Randi, aka the Amazing Randi, a world-renowned magician and debunker of all fakes and flimflam artists. Randi deals in illusions, not lies. He traveled with us throughout both the European and U.S. segments of the tour and now works closely with my friends Penn and Teller in Las Vegas. The tricks were spectacular onstage, and Randi’s card tricks and close-up sleights of hand kept us amused during the long rides and the backstage waiting.

  I was calling home twice a day, more for my sake than for Dianne’s, and in the decades before cell phones, this was a very expensive proposition. I kept telling myself that it was all worth it. This, after all, was the fragile woman I loved.

  The shows were going great and the cities whizzed by. We weren’t playing the classic, golden-age theaters that we had visited with Frank. These were modern auditoriums and only in world capitals. Europe was beginning to lose its charm for me the longer I was away from home. I spent Thanksgiving in Dusseldorf and Lixie flew in to supplement our hash supply. Perfect timing, as we had to fly into Berlin the following morning. In 1972, that meant flying into East Berlin and then driving into the Western Sector through Checkpoint Charlie. We bought souvenirs. Lixie joined me in Frankfurt, too. We sat up and rapped through the night. I spoke a lot about Dianne instead of doing what we usually did, and she sort of left me alone and confused at about two in the morning. I’m not sure which one of us was more fucked-up. She did stay the night, but she cried in the morning. I realized that she was Lixie no more. She was, once more, Elizabeth to me.

  In Zurich, Gary Rowles, our guitar player, learned that he had become a new dad. We celebrated with champagne and went on to London again. Alice and the band had returned home for the moment, and the Flo and Eddie band had one more booking at Imperial College, where I scored two encores and a journalism major who was adorable and spent the night.

  Getting home wasn’t easy either. TWA canceled our flight and booked me on a 2:30 Pan Am that left at 4:30 and then ran out of fuel in San Francisco, prompting a stop en route to L.A., where Dianne had been waiting for hours. She’d gotten a job at the May Company department store, just so she could feel like she was contributing, so I would wake with her at 8:30 to drop her off on Wilshire Boulevard an hour later. Then, later, I would pick her up and we’d head out to the Forum to see the Kings play, do our drugs, have a great dinner, and head back to Laurel Canyon. As I write this, it all sounds wonderful to me. I suppose, at the time, it was. Earlier days are always happier days.

  Nine days later, we were on the road again. I had barely enough time to see Emily, discuss the band’s future with Larry Heller, do laundry, and try to convince Aynsley to return from England in time to do these recently added shows. Our roadie Michael Moss waited for Dunbar at the airport, while the rest of us held a band meeting to discuss phase two. It was a lot like Spinal Tap.

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  Under pressure, Dianne and I somehow decided on an actual marriage date: January 27, 1973. Dianne’s folks were happy to be a part of the planning for the big day. But for now, I was still on tour. On December 13, I flew to Detroit to do a sold-out show at Ford Auditorium, where we had seen the Dead perform. This time, the hip crowd was there for us. Well, for us and Mott the Hoople, but it felt like the show was ours. Next, it was into New York and One Fifth Avenue—Alice brought the incredible Orson Bean with him the next day when we played at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey. I was thrilled.

  Home yet again, and this time I was meeting with my lawyer, Paul Almond, on prenuptial agreements. Dianne and I spent Christmas with Emily and Ona, unwrapping gifts beneath our communal tree.

  Mark and I were busy assembling cassettes of possible songs to record with Bob Ezrin when Don Preston unexpectedly quit the band. We kind of expected it. Musically, we had nothing challenging to offer to Donnie. We didn’t even know what we were doing next.

  As the year changed over, I was spinning in some hippie delirium. Professionally, we had been fortunate enough to drag ourselves out of the urine-smelling dives for a minute, but we harbored no illusions. Ezrin or not, we were hanging by a thread. The competition was fierce out there, and we had no real management—it was just us, as always, looking after ourselves. We did have Warner Bros. though, and that was great.

  Besides, I had always romanticized the notion of the starving singer-songwriter as the hero of the new American dream. My adult life had been too easy, with success handed to me on a silver platter, if you will. Now, like John Sebastian or Seals and Crofts, I was the lonely troubadour making my way through the countryside with naught but a crust of bread in my pocket and a song in my heart. But I had Mark and he had me, and there was no way in hell that this was going to fail.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Officially Bipolar

  During the second week of January 1973, Mark and I flew first class, Air Canada, to Toronto to meet with Bob Ezrin about the new Reprise album. Warner Bros. figured that they could actually save money by supporting the entire Alice tour, including us, rather than trying to figure out where the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie actually stood in their contemporary lineup. Bob listened briefly to our first, self-produced effort before lifting the needle off of the album.

  “You know what I’m hearing here?” he asked.

  “Um … songs?”

  “Exactly. Nobody wants to hear songs and chords and harmonies. I’ve never made an album yet that wasn’t driven by power licks. You’ve got to have a guitar lead going through each and every song. That’s how I do Alice. Every cut has to be an anthem.”

  Honestly, coming from the Jackson Browne school of songwriting, we didn’t know what he was talking about. And we really didn’t have that many power-driven songs. We played Bob our demo of “Afterglow,” which he loved. And Ray Davies’ amazing “Days,” which we hoped we could bring our own flavor to. Nice. But when we got to “Another Pop Star’s Life,” he stood up and cheered. This, plus Mark’s magnificent “Just Another Town,” would make a mini opera. At the last minute, I poorly sang and miserably played my long, acoustic and autobiographical opus, “Marmendy Mill.” I expected laughter, but what I got was approval.

  “A full symphony!” Bob exclaimed. “And we’ll do it live, like a Broadway show!” This was going to be great.

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  Now, home again to wild lovemaking and even wilder arguments, both fueled by copious quantities of drugs. The pendulum was swinging far too wildly to control now. Dianne and I were officially bipolar. When we were good, we were very, very good, but when we were bad, we were beyond horrid. It was very Hollywood.

  We recorded at the Record Plant studios in both L.A. and New York. Ezrin loved this old album Mark and I had committed to memory in the tenth grade about the death of the bullfighter Manolete, and we turned the dialogue from it into “Carlos and the Bull.” Which made us laugh. Which is what we needed after a shaky start. Now we were up and running—the recording went great.

  The album wasn’t even done yet, but Bob had mixed “Afterglow” as a single—he worked through the nights with little but chemical assistance as the two of us bounced in and out.

 
We were really working around Alice’s schedule now. The American leg of the Billion Dollar Babies tour kicked off in early March and we played many sold-out shows: At the Philadelphia Spectrum, with more than 20,000 in attendance, the kids broke the barriers down. Cops were moved in to protect us. Us! Now, this was more like it. Our road manager, John’s brother, Jim Seiter, who had worked for Spanky, the Byrds, and others, provided the needed link to our past as the tour rolled on for months.

  We were traveling now in Alice’s rented jet, a full-blown 727, complete with stewardesses. Coop had appropriated the back of the jet, not for his own private bedroom—he never slept anyway—but for use as a poker lounge. I can’t recall what I was paid on that tour, but I’ll bet that I lost most of it back to Alice in the rear of that damned plane. Still, it was wonderful waking daily, whenever, and taking a limo to the plane and another car to the hotel and still another to and from the shows. Better than two station wagons.

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  On March 24, my world shifted again. Big-time. There was a Warner Bros. executive flying with us on the Cooper jet. Her name was Diana Balocca. She was a vice president. She was amazingly hot. Her body was to die for. She wore see-through blouses and not much else. I was determined and I was vocal about it. I told Mark, “I will have her!” He laughed. Much like he had when I had lusted over Nita Garfield. But I showed him, boy.

  The plane was a nonstop orgy of one kind or another. On April 1, our stewardesses were both fired for partying too hearty and we were assigned new Amish attendants. Dianne came to visit in Detroit a few days later. We spent time with her friends, drinking and dancing at her local stop, the Roostertail, with John Sinclair, the radical who’d recently been freed from prison after John Lennon did a benefit concert for him. Dianne passed out. On to Chicago and St. Louis. She passed out. There were so many fights. There was so much cocaine. Alice’s road manager was in charge of Alice’s stash; the rest of us were on our own.

  Meanwhile, the shows were breaking records. James Randi hyped us on The Tonight Show and Alice quoted us in Rolling Stone. Ms. Balocca and I were talking a lot and sitting together on the plane, having eschewed the poker lounge in search of a more attainable quest.

  On April 26, while in New Orleans, I received an uncharacteristically angry call from Marc and June Bolan. Seems they heard “Another Pop Star’s Life” and instantly realized that it had been written about them. Despite all my claims to the contrary—that the protagonist of the tune had been an amalgam of every Brit rock star that we had ever met—Bolan wasn’t buying it. He was pissed. He was betrayed. He was gone. I had lost one of my closest friends in the world for the sake of a song to throw on a disposable album. What an asshole. And I wasn’t done yet.

  On May 11, we played the Forum in Los Angeles to a monster sell-out crowd, followed by one of those parties that you only read about. It took place at the Rainbow on Sunset and continued in Alice’s suite at the Beverly Hilton. Diana Balocca was on my arm and whispers could be heard. The following Tuesday, there was a meeting at Don Schmitzerle’s office at Reprise, where Larry Heller and I shared celebratory champagne with the two execs. Larry eventually split and Diana started feeling a bit woozy, so Prince Charming volunteered to take her home. And that was it. The inevitable happened. I knew where I was. I knew what was going to take place. I owned my deeds, but that didn’t make me any better. And I had to leave in two days. There wasn’t even any time to discuss things. I went to Denver and hung out with Pons in a strip club.

  Needless to say, it’s not easy to repair a relationship over the phone. Especially one that is far past the fix-it stage. Dianne and I had known each other exactly two years. I should have had more alone time.

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  The A.C. 1, as we called the plane, landed in New York on June 1, 1973. All of us were sick. Pons, Volman, and I left the One Fifth to walk the Village and lucked into a performance of the National Lampoon’s new play, Lemmings, directed by Tony Hendra, a Brit who we’d met years ago when he and his partner, Nick Ullett, performed with us on The Ed Sullivan Show. The play was astounding. It starred unknowns Chevy Chase, Christopher Guest, and a portly genius we could totally relate to, named John Belushi. John was the funniest, most honest human I had ever met. He also had drugs. He followed us over to the One Fifth and stayed all night.

  I went back with Diana to see Lemmings on the next night and solo the night after that, following our concert at Madison Square Garden. Belushi and his wife, Judy, spent the next night with me. Tuesday was Nassau Coliseum, and John was waiting when I got back to my room. We stayed up all night, obviously. There was a party at Mary Jennifer Mitchell’s loft in the village—she of the sexy hippie parts in the play—and I stayed the night with her. Not for love, you understand, just companionship. And great sex.

  The tour ended on June 7, and there was plenty of welcome-home lovemaking there as well. But I wasn’t keeping score. Things were just moving far too quickly. We met with Chuck Swenson, the 200 Motels animator who had written the script for his new X-rated film, Cheap, with Mark and me in mind. Dianne decided to do some camping, she said, and took the bus up to Lake Tahoe. I loaned Ona my car and was stranded until John and Catherine Sebastian picked me up and took me to Diana’s. Poor Ona—the kid had loyalties to both of us, wanted to be nice to everybody, and found herself stuck right in the middle of my domestic troubles, just trying to cover all the bases. Ona and I drove through the hills, higher than kites, talking things through. I should have been talking to Dianne, but it was already too late. My dick had already done all my talking for me. She was gone. I helped her load her boxes into her VW bus. There was nothing left to say.

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  We were recording the music for Cheap at Cherokee Studios with our good friends, the Robbs, so we were indeed productive, but we hadn’t sold records for Reprise, and with Diana privy to all the poop coming from Warner’s, we knew that our days there were numbered. Damn! We had our major label shot and blew it. And even schtupping the vice president wasn’t going to help.

  I have to say that if it hadn’t been for my great friend Allan MacDougal at A&M, who gave us support, as well as background work on Hoyt Axton’s album, I might not have made it. Between him and my ever-present buddy songwriter Steve Duboff, I got to talk through my shortcomings and avoided a rather dark fate. Larry Heller and Tim and Barbara DeWitt were my other saviors. I was still living at the house in Laurel Canyon along with Ona, though I wasn’t spending a lot of time there. I was at Diana’s every night. I was starting to wonder where my next meal was coming from. Then one night I went to a record release party at the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, where the rock bands stay, and who should I run into but Clive Davis’s new head of A&R at Columbia Records: Ladies and gentlemen, meet Ted Feigin—the very same Ted Feigin from my White Whale days.

  Diana met my parents and brother, but none of us knew that just eighteen days later, the two of us would marry at the Abbey Wedding Palor near the L.A. County Courthouse. The next night, Mark and I left for another tour. We fished for mud sharks at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, but for the first time, I didn’t call Lin. We weren’t stars anymore. We were just Flo and Eddie. I called my parents to tell them that I had gotten married. They seemed elated. I think they had given up on me by then.

  Lots of drugs in Seattle. Tim Buckley was there. Jeff Simmons was there. Lee Michaels was there. We played Vancouver for the first time and did shows in Denver at a club called Ebbets Field with Sopwith Camel. We were getting to be a pretty decent club band with Gary Rowles on guitar and Andy Cahan now on keyboards. We had no illusions of grandeur. Impossible when you’re playing places called Humpin’ Hannah’s and the Smiling Dog Saloon.

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  Back in Manhattan, we were, at least, in our element. A taxi to the One Fifth, calls to Mary Jennifer and Belushi, and all of us out to eat, drink, and make … Mary. The new Lemmings road company was now doing that show in the Village. I walked dow
n to see them, but it just wasn’t the same. In September we opened in Providence for King Crimson and in Amherst with Ike and Tina. We did a week in Atlanta at a club called Richards, where I burned my eyebrows off investigating a misfiring flash pot and thought, for a few hours, that I had gone blind. At the end of that month, with the tour finished and Diana having moved her stuff over in my absence, I carried the second Mrs. Kaylan over the threshold of our house on Hollywood Hills Road. I could barely afford it, but we were living high on the hog … again.

  As for my new wife, she had made a significant move: She had abandoned her cushy gig at Warner’s to take a job as the new head of A&R at Capricorn, the Atlanta-based Warner’s subsidiary run by Phil Walden, a Southern legend. It was the era of Southern rock and the Allman Brothers, Wet Willie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few others were burning up the airwaves. Plus, Capricorn had Martin Mull on their roster and lots and lots of money. Also, famously, lots and lots of drugs.

  I had to borrow a thousand bucks from Shep Gordon just to get through the month. Where was the money really coming from? Well, we had started writing articles for Creem magazine out of Detroit for our friends, Barry and Connie Kramer. They sent a photographer to take naked photos of us that they published as a foldout Creem Dream. Sure. Phonograph Record Magazine hired us to do a Blind Date column with the music journalist Ken Barnes, who still remains a great friend. Ken would play records for us and not tell us who we were listening to, and we would give our two cents, sometimes rudely.