♦ ♦ ♦
On September 4, 1979, we drove into New York and met Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, and Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, at the Power Station to put backing vocals on a new song called “Hungry Heart.” Jon sent the four of us into the studio to sing four-part harmonies, but when we listened back, something sounded terribly wrong.
“Somebody is really singing flat,” came Landau’s voice from the control room. So we listened back and heard it ourselves. He was right. It was wrong. Back out there to try it again.
“Nope. Still flat.”
Shit. I prayed that it wasn’t me. These guys were paying us to deliver a killer track for the Boss and somebody was letting him down.
“Um, Bruce, you wanna come in here for a second?”
Springsteen trotted to the booth. We couldn’t hear the conversation, but Bruce was listening and nodding his head in agreement.
“Why don’t you guys try this on your own?”
So the three of us did and it sounded great. It had been him. The Boss was singing flat. Then Landau had an idea. He asked Bruce to strap on his guitar.
“Try it now,” he insisted.
And it was perfect. It was all about stance and attitude. With that axe slung over his shoulder, Bruce’s Bossiness returned and he was in his element again. And the record tells the story. Mark and I overdubbed the harmonies a few times and listened to the all-important playback.
“I think we got it!” Landau said. It still didn’t sound like a Springsteen hit to me, but I have never been so happy to be wrong.
Still, no one was sure if it would make the album or not—they were considering something like forty songs. It sure didn’t sound like a Bruce record. There were no motorcycles, no Wendy in the night. It was more like a Top 40 single than an FM anthem. We left the studio without much hope for the song despite having had a great time, as always, just hanging around those guys.
The following year “Hungry Heart” became Springsteen’s first Top Ten single.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back to L.A. to host the Billboard Awards (before they became such a big deal) at the Century Plaza hotel. The Strawberry Shortcake TV show was finished and all that remained was to come up with her theme. No problem. Who sleeps all night in a cake made of strawberries? Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t you know.
The very next day, we met with Laugh In’s Chris Bearde about becoming head writers on his new pilot for Murray Langston, The Unknown Comic. We were hired. And hey, we’d be working with a guy we already knew from high school, our pal Phil Hartman. Phil’s brother John was Poco’s manager and Phil had designed their logo. Chris’s office was on the Santa Monica Promenade, just down from the King’s Head pub. I was about to spend a lot of time and many lunches at the old King’s Head.
We shot the pilot at KCOP studios on Sunset and on the streets of L.A. It was corny, but funny in a vaudevillian way. We were satisfied and pretty well compensated. The day after the shoot, we flew, first class, to Chicago and drove to the Playboy Resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to produce a great midwestern band, Roadmaster, for Mercury Records. Together with our L.A. engineer extraordinaire, John Stronach, we had formed a company called I’m a Legend, You’re a Legend specifically for this project. These guys were brilliant and never got their chance to go national. We hoped that with Fortress, they would have that shot. We realized that we were in trouble when Mercury refused the cover art, which showed a model being chased down by a semi. It was gorgeous. They said it was sexist. They put out the album in a yellow cover with an obelisk on the cover. What?
When I called my dad from Lake Geneva to wish him a happy birthday on November 15, my mother was in the hospital for tests. The ’70s came to an end with a lot of doubt, too many spinning plates, and not enough income to justify the work and the angst.
THIRTY-ONE
Hey Ma, Look—I’m a Performance Artist!
They say it never rains in Southern California. Well, on February 16, 1980, it poured—man, it poured! The mountainside behind my little house at the top of Hollywood Hills Road came down and into my famous black-bottomed pool. The water overflowed, causing a torrent of mud to come cascading into my neighbor’s yard and taking out his living room. The fire department came. There were sandbags. The community helped me shore up our little stucco box and I helped keep the storm drains open all night. The TreePeople laid out tarps and filled sandbags. The entire Canyon broke out from the poison oak that was ubiquitous. The kids were staying with friends when they could, but we were all contagious and at each other’s throats. The fighting began.
In March, Suzanne Somers called—really—and we dressed like bunnies to sing “Elenore” and “Happy Together” on her big Easter Seals Telethon. The producers had passed on our initial offer to perform “Keep It Warm.” Yeah, good call. And, during that very week, Rhino Records decided to release our bizarre Rhythm Butchers series of EPs—mostly fun hotel-room stuff recorded on cassette while winding down after gigs and during all-night drives or on the way to concerts—and our first Strawberry Shortcake TV special aired in L.A. We were broke, but you wouldn’t know it. That, my friends, is the key to a successful show-business career.
Necessity being what it is, inspiration was now guiding us. It certainly wasn’t an invisible bearded guy. We had an epiphany. We had always sung about being cheap little guys and now it was time to put that claim to the test. It was Howard and Mark and Andy Cahan, the keyboard guy and all-around verbal punching bag. Andy had graduated from driving down to Santa Anita with our bet money every day and was back playing keyboards. It wasn’t exactly a three-man operation. We named it Flo and Eddie’s 2½-Man Show. We’re talking a lot of years before Charlie Sheen.
We flew down a road manager, an Englishman who was working for a sound company in Sacramento, named Mick Coles. We gathered our old tour slides together. We rented Don Preston’s old drum machine. We bought a portable screen, projector, and professional reel-to-reel tape deck. We took the vocals off our hit records so that we could sing live over the tracks and we created new bits. Pink Floyd was huge with “The Wall,” so we sped up their hit, unrolled a bamboo rug, and threw stuffed animals over the thing from behind as it transformed into Flo and Eddie’s “The Fence.” We opened the show in yellow plastic hazmat suits, coming out of a fog of incense being coughed out of two bee smokers charged with smoldering charcoal, to the strains of an original German-style tech recording. We did our bits. We sang our hits.
Our first test show was on April 8 at the Ice House in Pasadena. It was a sellout. It was over two hours long and it got us a standing ovation. This might actually work. We had created something brand-new. Hey Ma, look—I’m a performance artist!
♦ ♦ ♦
By the time we finished our first little tour of America and Canada and returned home to count our losses, Rebekah was hanging out on Hollywood Boulevard. Nancy blamed me and we weren’t speaking. My White House photos had been taken off the walls and placed down in the flooded basement to be ruined: Nancy never liked American politics much, anyway. Melita, meanwhile, had given me a court order to sell and surrender her half of the house. Good times. The house sold instantly and I knew already that I’d be making my next move, as always, alone. On July 26, the family moved out. On the 27th, the SOLD sign went up in Laurel Canyon and I bought a tiny little shack with an enormous garden in Studio City. I’d just sit there. The only company I had was my accountant’s secretary, Maggie Lawrence, who supplied the occasional flirtation. Empathy, at least.
Flo and Eddie made a deal with our pals at WLIR, a radio station on Long Island, to do a weekly specialty show for their Sunday night lineup. We would record the shows out in Fullerton in Orange County, and then send the shows, on tape, to New York and pretend to take phone calls, do local ads, and give the overall appearance that we were doing a local show. It was silly and it paid hardly anything, but it helped and we needed it badly. Every once in a while we’d actually have a gig on the Eas
t Coast and do a show live on the air. That helped the illusion.
We did the Bottom Line with the 2½-Man Show in early September and I went back to my hotel with Susan, the receptionist from My Father’s Place. I still couldn’t see the trouble clouds gathering offshore.
We were playing bars now: the Fast Lane, the Long Run, Toad’s Place; Bill’s Meadowbrook for our friends in the New York Jets organization.
I guess I fucked up again. I thought my marriage was over. One night, after we did a show at the Roxy, I took Maggie home, crashed into a center divider, and taxied to my new house. I was very confused. It was my first brush with therapy. My doctor told me that I was a fool to try to save my marriage. Her analogy was of returning a second time to a bottle of spoiled milk expecting the milk to be better. $250.
One night, Maggie made spaghetti as sort of a housewarming dinner. That same night, Nancy decided to see how I was doing, saw a voluptuous brunette serving me food, and threw a brick at us, smashing in the entire glass front of the house, and leaving us picking shards out of the carpet for weeks. Maggie held down the fort, so to speak (in fact, it was a little fort with walls facing the street and only my garden paths and gazebo visible from my living room), and I would fly off to Jamaica.
♦ ♦ ♦
Mark’s and my obsession with reggae had gone so far that our national reputation as fans of the genre preceded us everywhere, and Michael “Eppy” Epstein of My Father’s Place, also an aficionado, actually put up the cash and enlisted his buddy Warren Smith, of Epiphany Records, a niche label in San Francisco, to get us to make an authentic reggae record using the real players and the actual location. We flew into Kingston with Warren and his wife, stopped off in Trelawny Beach to score some native greenery and eventually found the tiny Indies hotel. There were no windows here. Just shutters.
The real pot was to be had at the studio itself. We were to record at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Studio, which was pretty much his house. Earl “Chinna” Smith, the Jamaican guitarist who was coproducing the album with Errol Brown, Mark, and me, picked us up the first day just to sit around and play songs—we really didn’t have an agenda at all; we were just dumbstruck being in this fantasy world. Before we even walked into the studio, Chinna made sure we stopped at Juicy’s Hut. Juicy sold fruits and other sustainables to the island locals, about twenty feet away from the main house. And we bought tons of it, figuring that happy players guaranteed a happy album.
Things got a bit too happy, although the quality of musicians—Jamaican legends including Augustus Pablo, Carlton “Santa” Davis, Leslie “Professor” Butler, Aston “Family Man” Barrett, and the rest—was beyond world class. We all got wasted—again, what would you have done?—and we all had a great time. We recorded “Happy Together,” roots style, which made the players smile. That song has become sort of an island standard now, I’m proud to say. We also cut my parents’ favorite song, “Prisoner of Love,” in a romantic island style. I was singing it for them. They hated what I was doing to my life and couldn’t understand where they’d gone wrong.
♦ ♦ ♦
We got home to pick up checks from Maggie at Marty’s office for the second Strawberry Shortcake special. The Boss came to town around Halloween and, hot on the heels of The River’s success, enlisted Mark and me to sing on as many live shows as we could to get a version of “Hungry Heart” that would sound good enough to use on his new live record. Limos took us to the L.A. Sports Arena and the event was star-studded, as one would imagine. And there he was—after all these years—backstage, just milling around, Bob fucking Dylan. I had to approach him.
“Mr. Dylan,” I sputtered. “Hi. I’m Howard Kaylan from the Turtles. Thanks for writing our first hit.”
“Was it any good?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“So we both made money then?”
“Yessir.”
And he shook my hand. “Well then, I thank you. Let’s do her again sometime.”
And that was it. Four sentences in fifteen years.
Ronald Reagan was elected president the day after Bruce’s final L.A. gig. Born in the USA, indeed.
Maggie quit her job at Marty Fox’s office to become Jeff Conaway’s personal assistant on the set of Taxi—see the trouble coming, kids?—and I finished up the reggae vocals at the Indigo Ranch in Malibu. Monday night, John Lennon was murdered and I cried all night for all of us.
Christmas wasn’t about the kids, although I still saw Emily, of course, as well as Justin. Rebekah had been seen around town, but that was all.
Bruce flew us to New York for more live show recordings at Nassau Coliseum and we flew home on New Year’s Eve. We ushered in 1981 onstage at the Roxy and I’ve never been more befuddled about my life than I was right then.
THIRTY-TWO
Who the Hell Are These Fat Guys, and Why Are They Here?
I said goodbye to Maggie, flew to New York, played two nights at the Ritz with the 2½-Man Show to raves and great crowds and Susan Olsen from My Father’s Place. Then Mark, Andy, Mick, and I flew the six and a half hours to London, completely bypassed customs, and were driven to the Virgin Records townhouse in Shepherd’s Bush, where Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin empire, made us eggs and gave us the toots and the scotch whiskey that sent us off to bed. He always liked us and helped out whenever he could. Some incredibly successful people deserve to be where they are and never forget their friends.
Jann, our tour promoter, lived in Denmark, so it was there that we went to see how this scaled-down attempt at performance art would fly. Shows in and around Copenhagen went well. The crowd was mostly college age and usually Zappa freaks and curiosity seekers. The show was relevant, artsy, and incredibly cheap, and to the European audience at large, that meant that you were making a social statement, whether you were or not. The phone calls home were costing as much as I was making, but sanity has no price. We returned to London, where they totally got it. In Amsterdam, Andy and I walked the red-light district and laughed our asses off. They got it there too. All over Germany, it worked. In Stockholm, we got to do a fifteen-minute segment of our live show in front of a national audience from the Studio Club. Our set there went really well too and that night, a new Irish band visited our dressing room for autographs and advice upon the release of their first album. We shook their hands. Adam, Larry, Bono, and the Edge. Good luck, kids.
♦ ♦ ♦
I got home to find Jeff Conaway in the hospital for advanced syphilis and gonorrhea. Maggie got a shot—just for protection. Andy Kaufman called. We traded VD jokes. He said I was a genius. I laughed my ass off.
In April, our second Strawberry Shortcake TV special aired while we were in New York meeting with the Strawberry team about doing the third one—at a reduced rate, of course—and we went back to Europe again. We should have stayed home. After a week of shows, our German booking agent had proven to be a flake, the tour got canceled, and all of our money was stolen from a hotel safe in Bonn. The next day, we joined Springsteen onstage in Amsterdam, but despite the after-show partying, we had nothing left to say to one another. Mark and I rode back to our hotel in uncomfortable silence.
In July, after being treated for any number of sexually retransmitted diseases, Maggie gave up making excuses and quietly left the little house on Landale Street. I saw my doctor. He said I was fine. I got vaccinated anyway. Always a great judge of human nature.
Our final WLIR radio show ran on July 5, 1981, and we were out of that business. Again, we did interviews with Rolling Stone, NME, and the New York Times, but basically, we were unemployed and unemployable. We did have some more live shows to record with Bruce in L.A., and our buddy Richard Lewis demanded to be introduced to his idol, the Boss. We were only too happy to oblige.
Mutt Cohen had a check for us from K-tel, the conglomerate that released anthology albums. He had made a deal to lease them “Happy Together” for use on a compilation. We didn’t technically own the master—yet—but our attorn
ey was taking a calculated risk here and not only did it pay off, but the cash was absolutely needed.
Then we got a life-altering call. It was Joe Stefko, the drummer who had helped us out a while back by putting a band together for us. He had seen Flo and Eddie’s 2½-Man Show, but it really wasn’t music, was it? Why not, he suggested, let him come to the rescue again by putting together a band of the best players in New York and we could just fly in and do the shows? Why not, indeed. And that’s how Joe wound up being the Turtles’ drummer for the past thirty-two years and counting.
Our world tour consisted of shows at My Father’s Place and the Bottom Line, but the band was fantastic and it felt amazing to front a group again instead of a tape machine or—no offense, Ange—a half-man. I spent those days with Susan. What the fuck!
♦ ♦ ♦
Herb moved out of the Zappa offices and pretty much hung up his manager’s shoes, so Mark and I, fully aware of how important maintaining an office had become, moved in with our graphic design friends at Pacific Eye & Ear on La Cienega. We found things to do during the day, afternoons were often spent with Harry Nilsson at V.J.’s bar on Sunset, and my nights were reserved for the now-familiar two-hour coast-to-coast phone shenanigans.
Mark and I flew to Manhattan during the first week in October to sing with Jan and Dean onstage and with Steve Forbert in the studio. I spent my nights with Susan and ignored the incoming calls from the front desk all morning. Finally, my brother, Al, got through. My mother had suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. Here I was, 3,000 miles away, fornicating like a crazed weasel, and life was begging me to pay attention.
Marriage? What marriage? Ring? What ring? Oh, the one that you and your mother already picked out! See the funny little clown. We took a taxi to the Garden City Exchange and, at my most vulnerable, I bought Susan the lock to my future.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 25
