Eagles, p.12
Eagles, page 12
[1355] McLane, B. (January 1, 1997). The One Eyed Jacks, Retrieved from https://www.benmclane.com/OneEyed.htm
[1356] Peterson, D. (September 17, 2012). The School of Rock, Retrieved from https://illinoisalumni.org/2012/09/17/the-school-of-rock/
[1406] Segal, D. (April 24, 2010). Calling Almost Everyone's Tune, New York Times
Randy Meisner and his new band, the Soul Survivors, didn’t have much money in their pockets when they made their trek from Denver to Los Angeles, and their plan was not well thought out. The idea was, simply, to find a place to live and sign a recording deal.
The group found a place to store their bags when another Denver band, the Back Porch Majority, let them stay in their Encino home. They found their own run-down house in East Hollywood and began rehearsing with a goal of landing a recording contract. Both of Meisner’s previous bands—the Soul Survivors and The Drivin’ Dynamics—had already succeeded in landing recording deals for singles. The Survivors’ single had already received strong airplay in Denver, but they hoped that with Meisner in tow, they’d parlay that small regional success into a bigger album deal.
But L.A. was already teeming with starry-eyed bands and they all wanted the same thing. It proved a daunting task for the band, and they didn’t have much success. Eventually, the group found managers in the fast-buck team of Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, who originally managed Buffalo Springfield and were managing Sonny & Cher. Greene and Stone set the band up with regular, albeit low-paying, gigs in L.A. clubs like the Whisky a Go Go opening for Springfield and other better-known bands. But by that stage, the Survivors weren’t creating any buzz and weren’t finding any meaningful work. They began to realize their prospects were poor.
Meisner told John Einarson in his book Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock that the band ended up the way they arrived: with nothing. “We lost all our money and the house, then briefly struggled under the name of The North Serrano Blues Band,” Meisner said. “I had to sell my car, because I was basically down to nothing.” Now the de facto band leader, Meisner changed the name of the band to The Poor, since that’s what they were. Greene and Stone helped the newly dubbed band get the band a contract with Loma Records, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers Records. After a year of obscurity, Meisner and his bandmates would finally head into the studio again. 1
1 [6] Eliot, M. (2005). To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press
[1107] Nebraska Music Hall of Fame Foundation. (January 1, 2001). Biography: The Drivin' Dynamics, Nebraska Music Hall of Fame Foundation.
[1185] Cashbox. (February 11, 1967). Green Stone Inks 5.
[1186] Einarson, J. (2001). Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock, New York, NY: Cooper Square Press
Playing in folk festivals and coffeehouses around her native Tucson, Arizona, was a bit deflating for the 20-year-old musically precocious Linda Ronstadt. While folk music was flourishing in California in 1967, small-town Arizona had not yet caught the fever.
Ronstadt performed at the venues with her siblings, Peter and Suzy, but the usually sparse crowds were dispiriting. She also had a decided disinterest in her studies at Arizona State University, and the allure of an exploding folk music movement in California had her considering a change. So, when her friend Bobby Kimmel decided to move to Los Angeles to find the folk music wellspring, she decided to go along. Once they arrived in L.A., they, along with friend Malcom Terrence, who was a young reporter for the Los Angeles Times, set up housekeeping in a clapboard bungalow on Hart Street in Ocean Park, a neighborhood situated between Santa Monica and Venice Piers.
Ronstadt, Kimmel, and his friend, Los Angeles native Kenny Edwards, practiced in the bungalow and began performing at local clubs and coffeehouses. They got their big break performing on an open-mic Monday night “hoot” at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, about 20 minutes from their house in Santa Monica.
Hoot nights were regularly attended by record executives, managers, and agents looking for talent. Ronstadt and her troupe, calling themselves the Stone Poneys (after the Charlie Patton blues song), played and soon after found themselves opening for folk music legend Odetta Holmes. The group was approached by their soon-to-be-manager Herb Cohen, a one-time drug and gun runner from Cuba, who got them a recording deal with Capitol Records. They would be produced by Nik Venet, who had also produced records for Capitol’s flagship American surf band The Beach Boys.
By February 1967, Capitol had released the Stone Poneys’ first album, a collection of non-commercial folk songs that did not get airplay. The band would briefly break up, then get back together, and with Venet’s encouragement, they tried again a year later—this time with a more folk-rock theme and with Ronstadt and her silky vocals clearly leading.
Their second album, Evergreen, Vol. 2, was released in June 1967, but wasn’t earth-shaking either, though it did contain a hit single, “Different Drum,” that would crack the national Top 20. Despite the success, cracks were already forming in the band, largely because Capitol saw a future that only involved Ronstadt. It would force changes, strain friendships, and give the group a view of just how brutal the music business could be. 1
1 [531] Pavillard, D. (November 25, 1966). 2 Tusconians leave home and become Stone Poneys, Tuscon Daily Citizen
[532] Los Angeles Times. (February 12, 1967). Latest group to emerge in the lucrative folk field.
[533] Boston Globe. (May 7, 1967). Revere Raiders Rock.
[534] Ronstadt, L. (2013). Linda Ronstadt: Simple Dreams, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster
[1189] Cashbox. (February 4, 1967). Capitol Markets New Album, Tape Product.
The Mushrooms, with Glenn Frey: “Such a Lovely Child” (single)
The New Breed, with Timothy B. Schmit: The Pullice; Oxford Circle, The Animals, Universal Joint, The Acme Jugs Band
Don Felder had moved away from his family home by the spring of 1967, and he had gained considerable experience as a musician. Along with future Eagles co-founder Bernie Leadon, Felder and the rest of the Maundy Quintet were now working club dates up and down the East Coast and earning upwards of $1,000 per gig, which was beyond respectable for a late-1960s Florida cover band. The Young Rascals came to play at the University of Florida in their hometown of Gainesville and the Quintet opened for them. That show led to a gig at a New York club that summer, which proved an eye-opening experience.
“Before we came to New York we were doing covers, we were on the circuit, playing the fraternities in town, and [our manager] would get us gigs down in Miami at The World, a club with four stages. We’d play with The Byrds, The Turtles, pretty good bands. We were getting some good bucks,” said Tom Laughlon, the band’s lead singer.
But when the band got to New York, they learned that those bands played their own material or their own interpretations of hits of the day. That’s when bass player Barry Scurran, Leadon, and Felder decided they needed to begin writing original material or resign themselves to simply being a cover band.
“Bernie and Don said, ‘We need to record a single,’” Laughlon said, and Leadon quickly wrote two singles: “2’s Better Than 3” and “I’m Not Alone,” with some riff help from Felder.
“We went down to H&H Productions [Gil Cabot Enterprises] in Tampa and recorded them,” Laughlon said. “They came out on a vanity label called Paris Tower, so there was no label promotion of the record. It was four-track, it was a little studio, the studio’s whole mission in life was to get bands like ours to come and pay for a session, they made you feel like they could help promote your record, but they had no connections, so it was just ordering your minimum amount of records, and good luck and Godspeed.”
Leadon and Felder worked with the engineer to polish the mix. Fortunately one member of the band was moonlighting as a DJ at local radio station WGGG, so the single received more airplay attention than it might have otherwise; for a short time, “2’s Better Than 3” was the most requested single at the station.
Roughly a year later, Leadon decided that the musical fortunes of Florida were not good and quit the Quintet. He tried in vain to convince Felder to join him on the trip to California, but Felder wasn’t ready to leave yet. The two musicians’ paths would cross again years later with the Eagles, but with one going through the “in” door and one going through the “out.” 1
1 [218] Felder, D. (2008). Heaven and Hell : My Life in the Eagles, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons
[229] Laughton, T. (August 1, 2016). Tom Laughton - The Maudy Quintet, Retrieved from http://www.gainesvillerockhistory.com/MaundyQuintet.htm
After watching his new band collapse, Randy Meisner got a new start by stitching together the remaining players from the Soul Survivors and mixed them with a few new additions that had connections to Buffalo Springfield. Led by Springfield managers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone the new band, The Poor, quickly got a recording deal and recorded their first single.
“She’s Got the Time (She’s Got the Changes)” was a classic late 1960s thumper played in the spirit of Eric Burden and The Animals. It was written by Tom Shipley, who would later go on to become half of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley. The song was released under the York Records label and gained significant airplay in Pittsburgh, Miami, Hartford, and New Orleans, and, despite the band’s new name, it still reached #2 in the Soul Survivors’ hometown of Denver. It never reached higher than #133 on the Billboard singles chart.
Though the song didn’t chart well, it had some bad luck associated with timing of the single’s release. Greene and Stone initially pushed “She’s Got the Time” hard in the music trade magazines. “There was a big ad in Billboard for the song and it goes shooting up the charts and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, now it’s my turn, I’ve made it’“ said Shipley. “And about that time just when it looked like it was going to peak, the DJs go on strike. It just went right down. Right there I learned everything I ever needed to know about Hollywood and show business.”
As dejecting as it was for Shipley, then a songwriter for A&M Records, it was more profoundly so for The Poor, who’s money-starved, hand-to-mouth lifestyle continued. “We lived in a dive in East Hollywood,” said Pat Shanahan, the band’s drummer who joined Meisner on the trek from Denver. “We had no food. The clothes we had brought from Colorado wouldn’t even fit us. We were living on rice. There was no money.”
The hard scrabble lifestyle wore thin for Meisner, who started looking for other opportunities. Shanahan and guitarist Allen Kemp, the last remaining members of the band, started taking on studio session work to get by. The band would get one last single included on a soundtrack for a new Jack Nicholson movie, Hells Angels on Wheels, in the summer of 1967, but it didn’t help.
Meisner finally got a big break in the summer of 1968 when his friend Miles Thomas relayed the news that Buffalo Springfield co-founder Richie Furay was auditioning for a bass player for his new band. Thomas, who came with the band from Denver, had grown close to members of the Springfield. It would be a move that helped him start one of the seminal bands in country-rock history, Poco. 1
1 [1183] Record World. (March 18, 1967). R&B Beat: The Poor: She's Got the Time.
[1184] Record World. (March 11, 1967). The Poor: She's Got the Time (She's Got the Changes).
[1186] Einarson, J. (2001). Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock, New York, NY: Cooper Square Press
[1187] Cashbox. (August 5, 1967). 'Intimate' Disko in NY; Called 'Salvation'.
[1188] Cashbox. (August 12, 1967). Smash Rushes Track of "Hells Angels on Wheels".
[1200] Warburton, N. (October 1, 2009). Down In LA – The Brewer and Shipley interview, The Strange Brew Blog
The Poor, with Randy Meisner: “My Mind Goes High” (single)
Bernie Leadon plays guitar for the track “Different Drum” on the Stone Poneys album “Evergreen Vol. 2” (with Linda Ronstadt). It hits #12 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in winter 1968.
The New Breed, with Timothy B. Schmit: The Yardbirds
James Gang, with Joe Walsh: The Association
Hearts and Flowers, with Bernie Leadon: Bob Lind, The Humane Society, Buffalo Springfield, Chad & Jeremy
David Geffen and Elliot Roberts were an inseparable pair at the William Morris Agency in the summer of 1967. They both came up through the WMA mailroom eventually and both took jobs as secretaries at roughly the same time.
The next step in the evolutionary chain for a secretary—business parlance for an agent’s go-fer—was to become an actual agent. Geffen had unabashed ambitions and rose to agent first, and once there he would help his friend. Roberts was offered a job at the personal management firm of Manhattan-based Chartoff-Winkler on Geffen’s recommendation, and one of his clients, Native American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, dragged him to see a 24-year-old Canadian coffeehouse folk singer named Joni Mitchell in October 1967.
The two hit it off so well that he joined her the very next day on a Michigan tour and became her manager before the tour ended. Roberts was soon working on deals to get her recorded in New York. Pitches to Columbia and RCA failed, largely because the euphoria over folk music had withered in the Big Apple by then. Reprise Records, however, was listening. On the strength of Mitchell’s then-boyfriend David Crosby’s pledge to produce an album for her, she believed she was ready. But she needed to come to California to record.
Roberts left Chartoff-Winkler and he and his solitary client headed for Los Angeles. Roberts’ run of luck continued in L.A., as Buffalo Springfield was in the studio across the hall from Mitchell’s. Mitchell introduced Roberts to her friend Neil Young, and Roberts rented a room in his house in Laurel Canyon, which was essentially an artist’s village in the Hollywood Hills. In short order, he became manager for Young, Buffalo Springfield, and for Mitchell’s boyfriend, Crosby. It all happened incredibly fast. Excitedly, he told Geffen about the energy and opportunities in the city. Geffen started making trips to the West Coast more frequently. The connections that Roberts was making would soon give rise to he and Geffen’s ascension as managers in the nascent country-rock arena, and, before long, the music industry altogether. 1
1 [1] King, T. (2000). The Operator, New York, NY: Broadway Books
[1283] Allen, J. (March 29, 1981). With new label bearing his name, record biz wiz has done it again, New York Daily News
[1284] Hoskyns, B. (October 16, 2005). Lady of the Canyon, The Guardian
Fresh off hiring Buffalo Springfield managers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, Randy Meisner and The Poor had quickly cut a single and were looking to tour, so the managers sent the band on a road trip to New York to to earn some gig money and gain some exposure.
Some New York developers had recently opened a new venue in Greenwich Village called The Salvation Club, and they had booked The Jimi Hendrix Experience for the inaugural show. They needed a house band for two weeks and The Poor fit the bill. It was a disaster from the start. Meisner told Rock Cellar Magazine in 2016 that when the band arrived, the club renovations were not even finished. Greene and Stone had gotten them some nice outfits for the gig, complete with bell-bottom pants, but they also put them up in the run-down, poorly maintained Earl Hotel, where the entire band stayed in one bug-infested room with no air conditioning and sweltering 100-degree heat.
“We all had cots and there were cockroaches all over and we couldn’t breathe,” Meisner said. On opening night, the club chose to start the night off with Hendrix, who didn’t show until 1:30 a.m. When he finished playing, he did his well-known pyrotechnics routine, Meisner said, and burned his guitar on stage. The stunt also flamed out the public address system, he said, meaning that The Poor would not perform that night.
“The [club] guy comes back, ‘You lucked out, you don’t even have to play,’“ Meisner said. For a band looking to get noticed, it was hardly a relief. And the troubled New York visit continued for another two weeks. To cap it all, at the end of their two-week run, the band couldn’t find anyone to pay them for the gig. They found out where the manager lived and, quite literally, threatened his life. That got them airline tickets back to Los Angeles, but not back to solvency. The Poor was just about out of patience, and Meisner was again staring at failure. But while things seemed quite dark for him, a close friend in L.A. had just received news that would offer an opportunity to turn the corner. 1
1 [6] Eliot, M. (2005). To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press
[231] Einarson, J. (2001). Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock, New York, NY: Cooper Square Press
[463] Sharp, K. (November 10, 2016). Catching Up with Eagles and Poco Co-Founder Randy Meisner (Interview), Rock Cellar Magazine
[1200] Warburton, N. (October 1, 2009). Down In LA – The Brewer and Shipley interview, The Strange Brew Blog
[1201] (April 19, 2012). The Poor (1966-1968), Retrieved from http://musicofsixties.blogspot.com/2012/04/the-poor-poor-1966-1968.html
When Bernie Leadon left Gainesville, Florida, late in the summer of 1967, he had grown frustrated with his musical prospects in the Sunshine State. In California, his ex-Scottsville Squirrel Barker friend Chris Hillman had hit it big with The Byrds, and his attempts to gain musical recognition in Florida were going nowhere.
He had made lifelong friends in San Diego, the previous stop on his parents’ cross-country travels in support of his father’s aerospace career. While he enjoyed playing alongside another future Eagle, Don Felder, in The Maundy Quintet, his frustrations were palpable. After he completed a short active duty stint in the U.S. Army Reserves, he decided to head back to California. He had been getting recruited by two California bands, and he opted to join his friend Larry Murray’s band, Hearts and Flowers, because the group had a recording deal with Capitol Records and “that was the label of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and the Kingston Trio,” he told Marty Jourard in his book about Gainesville, Florida’s rock history, Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town.
