The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  Apparently the only redeeming qualities possessed by Three Dog Night are such nebulosities as a) everything they record becomes enormously popular (but hell, what do the record buyers know? they can be stampeded into buying any sorta crap, right? look at how successful Terry Knight’s Faith was, right? how many hundreds of thousands did United Artists lose on that superhyped fizzle?), b) other estimable musicians—such as B. B. King and Elton John—consider them sensational musicians (see the quotes on the next page), and c) they are one of the three or four top American rock groups of all time.

  Three Dog Night serves the not inconsiderable commonweal of allowing fresh writing talent to ride their coattails to public attention. By serving as scintillant figureheads whose every recording gets massive attention, they keep the lifeblood of the rock idiom red and rich and flowing. They aren’t alone. Carole King might not be such a hot number today had it not been for James Taylor. Burt Bacharach might today be only a legman for his father’s gossip column if it hadn’t been for Dionne Warwick. Leon Russell’s top hat would likely be a tam today if Joe Cocker had never existed. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and why the effete snob critics cannot perceive that is one of the great unsolved conundrums of the Modern World.

  The painstakingly evolved popular appeal of Three Dog Night is used to lend clout to the careers of other young talents. Anyone doubting the foregoing need only consider how much notoriety and money has been garnered for talents like Laura Nyro, Randy Newman, Hoyt Axton, Harry Nilsson, Paul Williams, Danny Moore, David Arkin, David Loggins, Alex Harvey, and a pressboxload of others via the express route of a Three Dog Night interpretation. Consider the common good, if you will: while a McCartney writes and sings his own work and draws down the adoration of the critical gurus on crystal mountainpeaks, Three Dog Night juice the careers of twelve different creators per album. Nothing at all wrong with an artist self-serving, but who the hell has the chutzpah to put down a group that carries so many others with them as they rake in the goodies?

  ALEX HARVEY: “I’ve long admired Three Dog Night as an outstanding and entertaining musical group. But it was not till they cut my Tulsa Turnaround that I realized how much they could add to a song with their unique interpretations. In fact, I liked their version so much I copped it for my own act.”

  RANDY NEWMAN: “What can I say about them that their music doesn’t say better? They have great taste, they work hard, they’re at core musicians. Anyone who questions that should stop to consider how big they’ve been, and for how long…

  “Mama Told Me would not have been a hit if they hadn’t recorded it; it’s that simple. When I heard it was going to be a single, I thought they’d bomb with it. I’m glad I left them alone; what they did for that song is going to put my son through college.”

  BRIAN WILSON: “Why don’t you ask who I think is better, Danny Hutton or Frank Sinatra? I’d tell you Danny Hutton. Wow! Wow! Three Dog Night! Wow!”

  DANNY MOORE: “Three Dog Night is really a workhorse group…music is a serious business with them. They’ve helped my career enormously. I was ecstatic when they recorded Shambala: to date it’s sold over one million two hundred thousand copies. They can do that for a song because they keep going for perfection in their performances, and so they appeal to such a broad range of audiences. There just aren’t many groups that can do something as difficult as that.”

  And if you think this largesse is extended only to the favored few composers whose names are now common currency, consider that Gary Itri, who wrote “Midnight Runaway” (on the Seven Separate Fools album), was the cleanup janitor in the recording studio where they were cutting that album. He took his time sweeping up the rancid coffee cups and dropped chunks of cheese danish the night of the session, and when Chuck Negron stumbled off wearily into a corner to get a breath of untainted air, Itri braced him to listen to a song he’d written. Negron, head sunk into his neck like a Galápagos tortoise, from the endless hours of sifting tunes and rehearsing, might just as easily have pleaded exhaustion or boredom, or simply told the eager young guy to take a push-broom walk for himself. But he didn’t. Itri got an acoustical guitar, played the song and fah-joomp, instant success. If Itri had been Mickey Rooney, MGM could have gotten Judy Garland to play the lead girl singer and made it into one of those loverly implausible musicals.

  Ask Gary Itri how worthless is Three Dog’s stock as merely entertainers.

  Look: this writer has been paid to put this article together. I’m hardly an altruist. But I don’t write flack. What you find in these pages is what I came away with from a week on tour with Three Dog Night. I started out cynical and very Missouri “show me.” What they showed me is contained herein. As flack for the group, it may not satisfy. Hell, it doesn’t even satisfy the group itself; I’ve related personal data they never even knew I’d glommed eavesdropping, I haven’t devoted appropriate lineage to the other members of the group—Jimmy Greenspoon, Floyd Sneed, Mike Allsup, Jack Ryland and the new keyboard guy, Skip Konte—and I haven’t even said what a wonderful human being and credit to his race is Jay Lasker, the President of ABC/Dunhill, the label on which the group performs. I’m not a rock critic and I can’t abide about 98% of what I hear on records these days. But I buy—not get freebie for review, I buy—every Three Dog Night album, and I take an almost pathological delight in what they do on records.

  And I was approached to do this piece probably for those reasons. And because I won’t buy the bullshit that artists who don’t write what they record are dismissable.

  For me, Three Dog Night appears to be an entity suffering the perils of a double-edged sword. They cut clean in promoting other people’s music in a way few other groups could…or would. But the backswing leaves bloody marks on them because they aren’t The Rolling Stones.

  APPENDIX C | 1988

  DARKNESS FALLS IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS

  Phone rang about five-thirty in the morning. I was already up, making my coffee. I said the effword and made a grab for the receiver before it screamed again and woke my wife. Said the effword because I knew the call was from some imbecile on the East Coast who, like most of those shell-shocked New Yorkers, hadn’t yet assimilated the fact that two-thirds of the continent ain’t on Manhattan time.

  Ethnocentrism at an ungodly hour. It may be eight-thirty where you are, dork, but it’s still dark out here in the civilized world! Have an effword, dork!

  It was a buddy of mine I’d left behind when I fled New York in 1961. A buddy who takes great pride in having four deadbolts and a Fox police-bar lock on his apartment door. A buddy who’s been burgled six times in the past nine years, been mugged three times in the past five years, and can survive only by living in a high-rise as fortified as Hitler’s bunker. Two ex-cop doormen, two rent-a-cop security wardens, full-range tv monitors, coded entry, and laser-scan security check at the front desk.

  For the privilege of thus living in a battle-zone with “peace of mind,” my buddy exists in his two-and-a-half-room cave high up in that co-op mountain paying out each month an amount only slightly less than the combined budgets of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  He’d called to gloat.

  “Heard the news this morning,” he said, with a nasty chuckle. “Heard a couple of Crips with AK-47s took out a whole restaurant full of nutburger vegetarians. Just wanted to check you out, make sure nobody’d stapled you to a wall.”

  “In your ear,” I said.

  Then followed a charming chat about how he figured I might be considering moving back to New York, where life was safer. I used the effword a lot, told him at least we weren’t as dopey as Gothamites who went for the Tawana Brawley scam, and assured him Los Angeles was still Paradise.

  Then I hung up and turned on KNX-AM for the news.

  In Venice, a drive-by shooter unloaded from a van at a bunch of people standing around talking, and killed a nine-year-old boy playing in his front yard.

  A family in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, broke up a gang dope de
al going down on the sidewalk at 1:00 a.m. outside their house, shoo’ed off the creeps, who returned later and pumped some shots through the windows. The father of the household fired back, wounding one of them. Their car was, thereafter, vandalized and stolen, the house broken into, ransacked, trashed and, finally, set afire with Molotov Cocktails. House and the one next door burned to the ground. But the Fuentes family didn’t find out till this morning, because they’d already fled in terror.

  The last thing my buddy had said to me, before I’d hung up on him, was a little street-rap currently fashionable in New York, as admonition to California-bound travelers:

  In L.A. town, a warning true.

  Don’t wear red, and don’t wear blue.

  Some vato loco will shoot at you.

  I turned off the radio. It was too early in the day to be reminded that Paradise has been paved over and the Uzi is the calling card of choice. It was too early in the day to be scared. I waited for the darkness to lift, and drank my coffee, and thought about what’s happened to my town.

  You don’t need me to tell you what this place was like when I got here just after New Year’s Day 1962. If you’re under thirty it’d be like trying to describe Atlantis to a Visigoth: most of you think concrete is a natural state, that the peak of Western Civilization is gelato, that you’re supposed to pay fifty cents when you call information for a phone number, and the more Caucasoid Bill Cosby gets, the cuddlier he is to you. If you’re under twenty, then for most of you nostalgia is breakfast. If you’re over forty, only an idiot would insist that the condition of life in Los Angeles is better now than it was even twenty-five years ago.

  So telling you that this was the best goddam town in the world, that smart and witty and educated people chose to live here rather than London or Paris or New York, that one felt every day like Ali Baba in magical Baghdad…is a pointless exercise.

  And stating flat-out that darkness has fallen in our beloved town is something we all know, from the most frightened homeless bag lady camping under a freeway overpass to the best-protected estate owner in San Marino Mesa. We’re scared. We’re scared in so many different ways that even trying to put it in coherent form, simply attempting to codify it, makes the reason reel and the words get hysterical. We’re so goddam scared we don’t even know where to begin…

  Scared. You used to be able to drive anywhere in the Los Angeles area and not worry about it. You could take off on a Sunday afternoon with out-of-town visitors or your kids or just a bunch of friends, and go over to South Central to admire the Watts Towers. You had to use a Thomas Guide to worm your way between the railroad tracks down around Willowbrook Avenue, to find that little dead-end street where Rodia’s magnificent gift to us stands, and you’d always get lost, but you had no fear of pulling in to the curb anywhere in that neighborhood to ask a resident how to thread a way through the labyrinth. Now you’re too scared even to go to Watts to see those Gaudi-like wonders. Scared.

  Scared. To drive down La Cienega to a Creole restaurant was as easy as going to a neighborhood grocery to pick up a pint of whipping cream. Now there are damned few neighborhood groceries left, having been squeezed out of existence by the chain supermarkets as methodically as Crown Books has squeezed out of existence so many independent bookstores…and you don’t drive anywhere without looking constantly at every car moving alongside, to see if some roadway shooter has a 9mm Parabellum aimed at your head because you inadvertently cut him off. Scared.

  Scared. If you’re a man, you don’t understand why women are frightened of elevators. Think about it. You’re a woman, and you enter an elevator, and you’re all alone, and a man gets in with you. And you’re in an enclosed space where no one can hear your moans if that particular man is one of the thousand loose-cannon crazies in Los Angeles, who gets his jollies raping and robbing. Paranoia? If you’re a man, ask the nearest woman. Scared.

  Scared. Because we can’t leave our doors open or unlocked on those days when the Santa Anas blow in hot and humid off the inland deserts. Because if you’re old and slow-moving, there are street specialists in mugging senior citizens for the welfare check or the food stamps. Because if you’re a kid, you know someone will be bracing you for your lunch money in exchange for not beating the crap out of you. Because you can’t park your new car on a city street and not be worried all through dinner and the movie that when you return it’ll be there; or if it’s still there, if your tape deck and spiffy aluminum wheels will be there. Scared because your neighborhood is changing so fast you go to sleep at night with the tremor that you’re living on the edge of the slide area. Scared because you’ve got to have a security system and bars on the windows, and if they firebomb your house you’ll probably fry inside before you can get through those bars. Scared because everybody’s got a gun, and only half your worries are about the stereotypical nine-foot-tall black man who wants to rob you; the other half of your worry is that your own kid will get pissed at you and shoot you, or your neighbor will run amuck because your friends are making too much noise at your party, and he’ll shoot you. Scared because no place is safe, no place is quiet, no place is free of the developers, no place has the peace and ease it had when you first came to live in that area.

  You’ve been scared for quite a while now. But it didn’t affect you as much, because you had a safe haven away from them. And that’s the way you thought of all those people in the Projects, in the ghetto, in Watts, in the barrio. Them. But now the gangs are everywhere. Your fears are no longer ephemeral, vague, omnipresent and disquieting. The gangs rule.

  And not all of the pronunciamentos of Chief Daryl Gates, not one example of Action News posturing on his part, can cover the fact that no matter how much money we give him for more cops on the street, no matter how many sweeps and special task forces he deploys, no matter how many tiger tank battering rams he unleashes, nothing he does can contain the atrocities and depredations of the 70,000 kids currently estimated to be gang members.

  We’re enjoying a death a day, on the average, from gang warfare. And for the fat, happy, self-deluding yups safe in their Beverly Hills or Malibu or Pacific Palisades enclaves, it has even passed the point at which they could dismiss the darkness, on the theory that, “Well, let them kill each other, what has that to do with us?” That cheerily racist point was passed when a gang kid smoked a member of Our Kind in warm, cheery, well-lit Westwood one collegiate weekend recently.

  We have long been reaping what was sown in Los Angeles; even farther back than 1966 when Reagan was elected Governor, and proceeded to dismantle the best educational system in the nation. All the way back to the days of the theft of the Owens Valley water and the greening of the San Fernando Valley and the making of illicit millions by the forefathers of some of the richest movers and shakers in our community today. All the way back to the conspiracy that tore up the streetcar tracks of one of the best urban transportation systems in America, killed off the Big Red Cars, and made us smog-slaves of the automobile, for the greater enrichment of the road-building lobby, the auto manufacturers, the tire and gas companies. A long way back before 1966 and Reagan those seeds were sown…but something happened to us a little more than twenty years ago that accelerated the decay. Something that began to show its evil fruition in the flaming blossoms of the Watts Riots in ’65. And we learned nothing from that terrible warning.

  Something happened to us at that nexus point.

  Something that told the rest of the world that Los Angeles was getting fat and complacent under the vanilla sun, that it was Xanadu for the high-rollers and the blue-sky merchants and all the corporate entities with floating ethics. That we were a city so intent on building swimming pools and having a good time that we turned a blind eye to what we were creating—the Underclasses. Cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and even New York, took note of the days and nights of bloody civil rioting, and they moved to rectify their awful situations. But L.A. went back to sleep in front of the tv set, learning nothing fro
m the message of the Watts Riots. Went back to feeding its face, feeding its ego, feeding its coffers as if we’d never come to the equivalent of New York’s sickness.

  Something happened in Watts that should have scared us sufficiently in 1965 to avert the darkness under which we now tremble.

  Something that foreshadowed eight years of Reagan’s America and the Me Decade that spawned the yuppies, and the slaughter of our ethics.

  More than twenty years of “benign neglect” and of unrestricted “progress” that has left us with our hillsides ravaged by million-dollar-a-unit crackerbox builders and the Underclasses condemned to the Projects. Twenty years of Reagan/Deukmejian law’n’order horse puckey and no urban revitalization worth a spit in the wind. Twenty years of slapdash, if any, coordination among federal, state, county and city agencies to address what was going on among the people, to mitigate Nixon’s 1973 cutoff of federal funds for gang rehabilitation.

  The streets are filled with litter; there’s hardly a vertical surface that hasn’t been “tagged” by illiterate thugs puffing up their withered egos with spray cans; six hundred different gangs have turned the schools into gulags where the dropout rate for blacks and latinos is pushing sixty percent; and the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four isn’t cancer or heart attack or even dope overdose. It’s murder.