Cameron’s looks back at Led Zeppelin just months after the death of drummer John Bonham.  This was the original piece that inspired Stephen Davis to call his infamous Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods.

This L.A. Times story from January 4, 1981 is brand new to the site (and our 232nd item in the Journalism section). In addition to a history of the band, Cameron looks at some of the bad luck that seemed to plague the band.

Led Zeppelin – The Hammer of the Gods

During a tour several years back, Led Zeppelin guitarist and founder Jimmy Page sat in his hotel room selecting official photos of his band. Time and again, he passed over the clear, precise shots in favor of dark and fuzzy near-rejects.

“What are you looking for?” asked the photographer.

Replied Page, “Power. Mystery. And the hammer of the gods.”

Melodramatic words, perhaps, but ones that summarize the mystique of Led Zeppelin. When the British quartet cryptically announced its passing in November – an end they attributed to the death in September of 31-year-old drummer John Bonham – they were still one of the most popular acts in the world. Zeppelin was a rock institution for 12 years, yet few knew any more about them at the end than they did when the group formed in 1968.

They were a close band. Page, 36, bassist-keyboard player John Paul Jones, 35, singer Robert Plan, 32, and Bonham were perhaps the most insulated group in the music business. They carried an uneasy view of outsiders. Writers and critics never really accepted them, they felt. They clung to their own longtime friendship and to the incredible fan support that began with their first album (recorded in 30 hours) in 1969. Since then, they’ve sold about 30 million albums and 2 million concert tickets.

“I have no idea why our band is so popular,” said Page in 1973. Covering the group for The Times, I had been led past two security levels, several road managers, through several double-locked doors to a large room where page sat alone, quietly staring out the window onto Sunset Boulevard.

“We’ve never done a television program,” he said. “We don’t see our interviews. We don’t record AM singles – in England, in fact, there’s never been a Led Zeppelin single. All I can say is that Led Zeppelin is street music. Rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe people feel an affinity toward it because the media never hammered it down anybody’s throat. Quite honestly, the popularity surprises us.”

It was a strange hold that Led Zeppelin seemed to have on the adolescent mind. For millions of kids, teen-age depression was easily aided by a good pari of headphones and a copy of “Physical Graffiti.” Perhaps no one knew this as much as Robert Plant, by far the most accessible member of Zeppelin on the road. Plant was known to walk into such places as a suburban McDonald’s, strike a classic rock-god pose for a shocked counter girl, smile and order a Big Mac and fries. Then he would sit and talk about the band with fans, happily gossiping about the group’s inner workings.

Throughout the ‘70s, as the band’s popularity increased, there was a certain hugeness to everything Led Zeppelin did. They stayed in the best hotels, played the biggest halls and stadiums. The sheer size of Zeppelin’s sound often clouded the fact that they were, simply, a trio with a singer. While Page was the architect of the band’s studio sound, all four members carried an equal musical load. “Stairway to Heaven” was mostly Page, “All of My Love” was largely John Paul Jones. Songs like “Rock and Roll,” “Trampled Underfoot” and “The Song Remains the Same” grew out of studio improvisations started by John Bonham. Fundamentally, Zeppelin was brute strength and musical power.

There have never been many interviews, and only one press conference, 10 years ago. With Zeppelin, the mystery always led to speculation, and that was just fine with Page. For the first four years they toured extensively with only one ruthless objective – obliterate the competition. They played louder and harder than any of the headliners. They always know how well they had done, Plant once observed, by how many people came back to the hotel after a show.

The reputation spread. In ’72, Elvis Presley wanted to meet the members of Led Zeppelin. Their mutual promoter at the time, Jerry Weintraub, took Jimmy Page and Robert Plan up to Presley’s Las Vegas hotel suite. For the first few minutes, Elvis ignored them. Page – who had first picked up a guitar after hearing “Baby Let’s Play House” on overseas radio – began to fidget. What was going on? Did he really want to meet them? Should they say something?’

Elvis finally turned to them. “Is it true,” he said. “These stories about you boys on the road?. . . “

Plant answered, “Of course not. We’re family men. I get the most pleasure out of walking the hotel corridors, singing your songs,” Plant offered his best Elvis impersonation. “Treeat me like a fooooool, treat me meeean and cruuuuel, but looooooove me.”

For a moment, Elvis eyed them both very carefully. Then he burst out laughing. Then his bodyguards burst out laughing. For two hours he entertained them in his suite. He had never heard their records, he said, except when a cousin played him “Stairway to Heaven.” “I liked it,” said Presley.

Later, walking down the hallway from the hotel room, Page and Plant congratulated themselves on a two-hour meeting with The King.

“Hey,” came a voice behind them. Presley had poked his head out the door. “Treeeeeat me like a fooooooool . . . “

“I sang it with him,” Plant recalled later. “It was a high point of my life. I could have packed it in right there, a happy man.”

The band only grew more popular. The fourth Led Zeppelin album became one of the biggest records of all time. “Stairway to Heaven,” a track never released as a single, became the most requested songs of the ‘70s.

The group thought quite a bit of “Stairway to Heaven” and the respectability it brought them. “The song proved a lot of things to us and to other people as well,” said John Paul Jones. “No one ever compared us to Black Sabbath again after that song. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something that will hold up for a long time. We did that with ‘Stairway.’”

But starting in ’73 came a persistent stretch of bad luck and timing that would dog the group for years to come. On tour in California, Page broke a finger gripping a fence in San Diego. Dates were shuffled around. Zeppelin returned after a month-long break to ticket riots in almost every city. The bad press racked up.

Just before a summer tour in ’75, Robert Plant’s car plunged off a cliff in Sicily. Page’s child was in the car and emerged unharmed. Plant’s wife, Maureen suffered a fractured skull, a broken leg and pelvis. Plant fractured his elbow and broke his ankle. It kept the band off the road for two years.

They returned the next year for a tour that, again, broke attendance records at almost every stop. There were fewer riots over the sold-out shows. Then, in Oakland for one of the tour’s last shows, there was an incident that would again darken the band’s reputation. John Bonham’s child was denied a souvenir placard from a dressing room door. Bonham, along with manager Peter Grant and a road manager, beat the security guard to a pulp.

There were lawsuits and vows from promoter Bill Graham to “never in good conscience book this band again.”

Led Zeppelin prepared to leave the country, shamed by the press, when Robert Plant received news that his young son Karac had died of a virus infection. Plant’s father met his plan. “All this success and fame,” he said. “What is it worth?”

In ’78, a year in which they still won most music polls, Zeppelin did not exist. Much was written about the band’s dark side, the karma of their early years coming back to haunt them.

Perhaps too little has been written about the other sides of Led Zeppelin. When the plane carrying the Lynyrd Skynyrd band went down several years ago, killing singer Ronnie Van Zant and two other musicians, the funeral hall was literally filled with flower arrangements of all kinds, sent by a band they’d never met – Led Zeppelin.

Zeppelin released their last studio LP, “In Through the Out Door,” in the midst of an industry recession that had already caused the commercial death of many other “dinosaurs.” The album sold a phenomenal 4 million.

Zeppelin had struggled back to life. They headlined a show at the Knebworth Festival in London, and quietly put together a three-legged American tour to have begun last October. A warm-up series of concerts around Europe produced reports that Page was leaping the stage, Plant was in fine form, Jones and Bonham were laying with a vengeance. They began their three-hour show with the first song they had ever played together 12 years earlier in Page’s London loft, “Train Kept a Rolling.”

Then, last September, the same day the first mail-order tickets were available in Chicago, the same day of the first ticket mob, came the news that Zeppelin fans could hardly believe. John Bonham, the groups celebrated drummer, had died from “unspecified causes.” (It was later found that he had died from inhaling his own vomit, after ingesting about 40 shots of vodka.)

It was much more than just another member leaving another band. Even the fans knew: It seemed ludicrous, almost sacrilegious that a band like Zeppelin would hold auditions for a Bonham replacement. Still, the American tour was canceled with no comment, and rumors persisted that they might carry on with either journeyman drummer Aynsley Dunbar or Bad Company member Simon Kirke. There was even word the band had rehearsed with Jason Bonham, the 16-year-old son who studied and idolized his late father’s style.

Then, came the official statement. “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”

The ambiguous statement surprised even American representatives of the group’s Swansong Records, who first read it on the UPI wire. Their transatlantic calls confirmed the word. There were no future plans. The name Led Zeppelin had been retired. They had done what few groups were ever able to do – ignore the commercial opportunities and never look back.

Certainly they will play together again in some form. The many Led Zeppelin fans will demand nothing less. Perhaps Page will now take the opportunity to complete his long-promised project, the first official Zeppelin live album, something he’s been recording and editing tapes for since ’69.

I thought back to the afternoon I’d first interviewed Page seven years earlier. I asked him – would there be a Led Zeppelin as long as there was a Jimmy Page?

“There will be a Led Zeppelin as long as there’s a Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant,” he answered. “This isn’t a nostalgia band, playing the ‘hits’ forever. If anything ever happened and somebody left – which I really can’t ever see happening – I don’t think we’d bother to carry on. That would just be it. The magic for me is as it is now.”

Courtesy of the L.A. Times - Cameron Crowe – January 4, 1981

It’s all you Annie Hall!

The always great Paste magazine shares their 50 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time and we thought you’d enjoy a little discussion around it.

Cameron is represented by Jerry Maguire (#33) and Say Anything… (#7). Here’s the Top 20, but please visit Paste and check out the entire list.

• 20. Chasing Amy
• 19. Bridget Jones’s Diary
• 18. Knocked Up
• 17. The Shop Around the Corner
• 16. Love Actually
• 15. Pretty Woman
• 14. Sixteen Candles
• 13. Harold and Maude
• 12. Moonrise Kingdom
• 11. The Apartment
• 10. Four Weddings and a Funeral
• 9. High Fidelity
• 8. The Philadelphia Story
• 7. Say Anything…
• 6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• 5. Manhattan
• 4. The Princess Bride
• 3. Amelie
• 2. When Harry Met Sally
• 1. Annie Hall

I personally love the inspired choices of WALL-E (#31), Waitress (#29) and Knocked Up (#18), but what are your favorites? What’s missing from their list?

With the recent release of History of the Eagles on Blu-ray and DVD, it made sense to revisit Cameron’s Rolling Stone cover story from September, 1975.

Cameron delves into the band’s formation, their tumultuous recording history with Glyn Johns, their label woes, Irving Azoff and much more. It’s an interesting snapshot of the band in their mid to late 20′s up to their release of One of These Nights.

The Eagles: Chips off the old Buffalo

Perched on the million-dollar border between boredom and laidbackness, the Eagles perceive a hardening of the artistry and the industry.

Hiya! This is superjock Larry Lujack! Sitting with me right now in the Super CFL Studios-straight from California-are everybody’s favorite hitmakers…those darn Eagles! In town for two concerts at the Arie Crown Theatre, the band is visiting one of Chicago’s top jocks to play, for the first time, the title track and single from One of These Nights.

“How ya doin’, guys?” Lujack winks. It is guitarist/vocalist Glenn Frey, a long-time Johnny Carson aficionado whose streetwise L.A. drawl stands out from the groggy “okays” and “alrights” of the other four Eagles. “Doin’ real fine, Larry,” he says from behind reflector shades. “It’s nice to be here at WCFL this morning.”

Lujack, a world-weary Jack Nicholson look-alike, doesn’t miss a beat: “Let’s talk a little bit, guys, about how you got together.”

“Glenn and I used to play for Linda Ronstadt and…”

Lujack cuts drummer Don Henley short. “Linda Ronstadt.” The name rolls off his lips with lecherous abandon. “She’s probably my favorite chick singer, heh-heh. Say, I remember reading somewhere that the Eagles do the best ‘ooo’s in the business. What do you say to that?”

” ‘ooo’s for bucks, Larry, that’s our motto.” Frey flashes a sly grin. “The only difference between boring and laid back is a million dollars.”

Lujack chortles mirthlessly. “You rock & rollers are all alike, aren’t you? Hey, is it true you guys want to sound like Al Green? What’s the matter, you tired of being cowboys?”

“That’s actually very true,” Henley deadpans. “We almost called this record Black in the Saddle….”

Lujack throws a hand signal to his engineer. Okay. For the first time ever, let’s listen to that new Eagles record – ‘One of These Nights!’ Alllriiiiiight!!!” Safely off mike, “Superjock” heaves a booming sigh. “That was a fuckin’ great interview,” he snickers. “Now who’s got the drugs?” A few courtesy chuckles later-heh-heh and all that-the Eagles have eased out of the building.

It had been an anticlimax, to be sure, but this was still a prize moment for Frey, Henley, bassist Randy Meisner and guitarists Bernie Leadon and Don Felder. After six months of work and anguish, their fourth album, One of These Nights, was finally public.

If only for perfectly capturing the feel of L.A., the Eagles are the one band that’s carried on the spirit of the Buffalo Springfield.
– Neil Young ’75

The view from the Los Angeles hills offers a romantic and soul-searching look at Hollywood’s neon glow. It’s not surprising that much of One of These Nights was written under its influence. The picture is hypnotic. In the few months that Don Henley and Glenn Frey have lived here – strictly for proximity’s sake, they say – the two have spent many nights staring out at the “million dollar view” from their living room table and jotting down bursts of songs. Now, just one week before the band will reenter Criteria Sound Studios to record vocals and finish the album, the entire house is littered with yellow legal tablets – all of them scribbled black with abandoned or half-finished verses. “It’s finals week,” says Frey. “We’re cramming.”

The Eagles have always approached their albums cautiously. Every word and melody is considered and reconsidered before a song is deemed recordable. In the studio, the process repeats itself. “Sometimes I wonder if we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Henley muses after hearing the Beatles’ nonsense song “You Know My Name (Look Up My Number)” on his car radio. “Who knows, maybe Art is just a dog on Neil Young’s porch. Every time I start writing one of those wonderfully sensitive songs that we write, I start wondering, ‘Who really gives a shit? Do I really give a shit? I want to do something semihumorous on one of these records someday. Something that doesn’t demand so much fuckin’ time and energy. We’ve never had an easy time making Eagles albums.” This one, the follow-up to On the Border (which included “Best of My Love”), has been no reprieve. Bernie Leadon complains, “It seems to take more time and effort every year to forget the whole trip of touring and recording and get loose enough so that the creative juices flow naturally.” Frey and Henley, in fact, already have a suggestion for a story on the Eagles: “The Hardening of the Artistry.”

Don Henley sits alone at the table tonight. He looks like he could be a better-looking younger brother of Mac Davis. Headphones clamped over his curls, he’s sworn himself to finish the lyric to a basic track titled “After the Thrill is Gone,” or as he’d named it earlier, “Here’s Another Hidden Commentary on the Music Business Disguised as a Love Song.” On a cluttered oak slab before him lie all the accumulated vestiges of life as an Eagle: cassettes of outtakes, guitar picks, songbooks, gold record receipts, an Elektra/Asylum yo-yo, a copy of Timemagazine’s Cher cover with a SO WHAT sticker pasted over the banner and, of course, stacks of legal tablets.

In the next room, Frey is absorbed in a basketball game on TV. Chain-smoking and drinking Dos Equis, he rumbles the house with beery cries of “Willya stop the son-of-a-bitch” and “Turg-o-vitch!!” After a while, Henley rips off the headphones and heads for the TV room in disgust, adding a new tablet to the heap. This one is blank except for two lines.

What can you do when your dreams come true
and it’s not quite what you planned

“Naw, naw, naw….” The game’s about over and, faced with another night at the legal pads, Frey and Henley are warming to the idea of a conversation. “There’s no way it’s stopped being fun, it’s just…harder,” says Frey. “The main reason it’s taking us longer to do every album is you just don’t have the kind of time to collect ideas. You usually have about 20 years to work on your first album, then the media turns back around in six months and wants more. And if you’ve mastered a little bit of the language, your success formula tempts you every time you use it again.”

“Plus,” Henley continues, “it’s not just a high-school game anymore. It’s a fucking business. An occupation. It’s a profession. And it’s fuckin’ hard. I’m sure nine-to-five is just as trying, but their one advantage is that they can leave it at the office. This is a 24-hour-a-day trip. It’s like cramming 60 years into 28. Or, as Joe Walsh says so brilliantly, ‘You burn the candle at two ends/Twice the light in half the time.’ I don’t know, at least we’re doing what we want to be doing.”

Frey: “But that gets boring and unfulfilling too. There are days when I drive to the office, drink a cup of coffee for an hour, check the mail, watch Irving [manager Irving Azoff] kill on the phone, get existential anxiety, go to the Cock ‘n Bull to eat, drive to the dry cleaners, drive back up to the house, roll a joint, look out at the view and wonder what’s gonna get me up to do what I want to do. That’s the whole premise of ‘After the Thrill Is Gone.’ Where is the next stimulation?”

Henley: “Where is the next dream now that you’ve got this one? We were talking about this with Clive Davis the other night and he said something that’s really stuck with me. Once you get comfortable, once you get most of the things you’ve always wanted, your universe becomes defined into a little square. Eventually you get to where you don’t know what the fuck’s going on outside your own little rectangle. It’s like, I got up the other day and took my slide projector in to get worked on, got my camera repaired, had the car washed, got my cassette player fixed.” He shrugs. “Took up the whole day.”

“Servants is the answer! Frey shouts, as if suddenly enlightened. “We should call up Abbey Rents and find someone to live for us.” He pauses a moment, then turns serious. “You know that adage, ‘For every dream come true, there’s a curse’? One of those curses is just a lifestyle…it’s going on all the time. When I take a look at the last year, between On the Borderand this album, what have I done? Worked my ass off. You know, we went on the road, got crazy, got drunk, got high, had girls, played music and made money. If you don’t watch it, that can become your whole life.”

Glenn Frey, 26, and Don Henley, 28, through their crisp, quotable lyrics and interviews, are chiefly responsible for creating what one band member calls “our punky James Dean image.” As a result, most journalists rarely bother to explore the band’s remaining three-fifths. They would learn that for Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner and Don Felder – all comfortably settled into secluded home and road lives – the Eagles are not quite a “24-hour-a-day trip.”

Says Felder, 27, who’s planning to move out of Topanga Canyon and up the coast, “I’m glad that Don and Glenn project a lot of the band’s L.A./Hollywood charisma. Every group needs one and in this band we’ve got two people doing that. Even though Glenn’s from Detroit and Don’s from Texas, they really know and live the L.A. scene. It’s real. It suits their personalities. Personally, I don’t feel comfortable living there. I don’t relate to it at all. I’d rather be alone with Susan [his wife] and Jessie [their year-and-a-half-old son].”

Nebraskan Randy Meisner, 29, is by far the most subdued of the Eagles. On his time away from the band he is with his wife Jennifer and three children, Eric, Heather and Dana, in Mitchell, Nebraska.

Meisner, too, is content to leave the posturing to Frey and Henley – but not without reservation. “No, I don’t go along with everything they say or do. For example, I’m probably the only one in the band who loves funky rock & roll, trashy music and R&B. And I don’t agree with some of our images either. But Don and Glenn have it covered. I guess I’m just very shy and nervous about putting myself on the line. They’re used to doing that.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Bernie Leadon, the only true Southern Californian in the band, cherishes the easy anonymity of his Topanga lifestyle. He strikes one as a commercially successful musician with a purist’s guilty conscience. He admits to twice leaving and rejoining the Eagles. His previous bands were Flying Burrito Brothers and Dillard and Clark, both critically raved and financially starved.

“My attitude toward the band is pretty good these days. We’ve all grown a lot. Everybody realizes this is a good opportunity to get some bucks ahead and also, man, I think the music is worth something. There’s so much bullshit in the pop world. So much of it is just lower-chakra music. No finesse. It’s just sexually oriented. That’s a form of escape. I like to think our band is more than that. That there’s some thought, some living behind it. In the meantime, I just don’t want to succumb to the comforts of an affluent society and say, ‘Okay, this is swell, I give in.’”

Leadon, given to T-shirts and jeans, thinks concerts have been reduced to “business transactions.” And he despises limousines: “It feels like you’re thumbing your nose at your audience.” He succumbs and rides the limos but escapes to the beach whenever he can. “To me, sun and salt water is where it’s at. That, a little wine, a little music and my old lady…that’s it. That’s all that matters.”

Glenn Frey glibly writes off these crosscurrents of personalities, lifestyles and directions as the Eagles’ vital force-creation tension. “We’re the Oakland A’s of rock & roll,” he says. “On the field, we can’t be beat. But in the clubhouse, well, that’s another story. Sure, Don and I are a lot more into it than the others. We’re completely different people. We rarely even hang out together.

“Sometimes I wonder if the other guys in the band know how much I like them. How much of a foundation they are. We never even talk about it. We each have our own spaces. We play sometimes and we fight sometimes. I get so caught up in all this-the pressures of being Glenn Frey of the Eagles, the guy who talks a lot-that if Randy or Bernie needed some confidence building, I might be too self-involved to realize it. I worry about that. But even though there’s a keg of dynamite that’s always sitting there, this band is fairly together.”

Frey is on the edge of his seat now, eager to make his point. “I just figure we can’t lose. The longer the Eagles stay together, the better it’s gonna be. No matter what. We never expected to get this far, anyway. I thought we’d break up after our first album.”

Still, there is a predestined aura about their success, a feeling that maybe even the tension was plotted. On stage they wear their recently obtained superstar status with the nonchalance of a band always geared to go all the way.

The story begins in Detroit, where a sunken-eyed, girl-crazy guitar player named Glenn Frey began popping up in various local bands like the Mushrooms, the Subterraneans and the Four of Us. “He knew he was cool. He was really into this whole role of being a teen king,” one girl remembers him. “He took my sister out once and tried to feel her up. She didn’t let him, so he brought her home early and never called her again.” At the time, his mother had another theory. “Glenn,” she remembers telling him, “your life revolves around groups of people. You can’t relate that well to individuals. If your guitar had tits and an ass, you’d never date another girl.” Frey smiles. “That was really true,” he says. “I’ve had long talks about that with her since.”

These days, Glenn is anxious to play down his jack-rabbit adolescence. “I read something that really made me think. It was an interview Jules Feiffer did for – oddly enough – Playboy. He said, ‘Remember when you were 11 years old and girls were a drag. The only thing that was cool was playing Army and recess and dodge ball. The big mistake that men make is that when they turn 13 or 14, and all of a sudden they’ve reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you’re just horny. It doesn’t mean that you like women any more at 21 than you did at ten.’ That’s strong shit. I read that and though of all the guys I’ve heard say, ‘I fucked the shit out of her.’ It made me realize that the real test for a man is learning to respect and like women.” Frey’s on-the-road womanizing days are over, he believes. “I want to settle down,” he says. “A whole lot.”

After a brief apprenticeship with Bob Seger (Frey sang backup on “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”), Glenn left college and made his big move to L.A. Why not New York, which was closer? “Well, the truth was that I was gonna buy drugs in Mexico and see a girlfriend who’d moved out here with her sister. My parents told me that if I was going to California, they weren’t gonna give me a goddamn dime. They would send me five bucks/ten bucks in every letter. ‘Buy yourself a nice breakfast and a pack of cigarettes.’ I send them money now. That’s the big get-off about money. Doing things for other people. I’m paying for my brother’s college education.

“But anyway, the whole vibe of L.A. hit me right off. The first day I got to L.A., I saw David Crosby sitting on the steps of the Country Store in Laurel Canyon, wearing the same hat and green leather bat cape he had on for Turn! Turn! Turn! To me, that was an omen. I immediately met J.D. Souther, who was going with my girlfriend’s sister, and we really hit it off. It was definitely me and him against whatever else was going on.”

Souther and Frey formed a duo, Longbranch Pennywhistle, and recorded an album on Amos Records. Eventually they split up with their girlfriends and, on the advice of Jackson Browne, moved into his $60-a-month upstairs apartment in Echo Park. “So the three of us were all living there, listening to records or to Jackson. I’d just lay in bed and hear him practice downstairs. The piano was right below my bed. Those were great times.

“Then one day J.D. and I got in a fight with our record company and suddenly we couldn’t make any more records. Every day we’d go to the office, ask if we could get released from our contracts and they’d say no, so we’d go down to the Troubadour bar and get drunk. The Troubadour, man, was and always will be full of tragic fucking characters. Has-beens and hopefuls. Sure, it’s brought a lot of music to people, but it’s also infested with spiritual parasites who will rob you of your precious artistic energy. I was always worried about going down there because I thought people would think I had nothing better to do. Which was true.”

Don Henley, lead drummer and lead singer in a band named Shiloh (also on Amos Records), never spoke to Frey when they saw each other in the bar. “I just thought Glenn was another fucked up little punk.” Henley had also just made his move out to L.A. Behind hem were four years of college and Lindon, a Texas town (population 2000) where he was the weird hippie. “In a town that size,” he says, “all you can do is dream. I had this one English teacher who really turned my head around. He was way out of place in this little college. The bohemian, the first one I’d ever seen. He’d come to class in these outrageous clothes and lecture cross-legged on top of his desk. One day he told me, ‘Your parents are asking what your future career plans are. I know there’s a lot of pressure on you to decide.’ Then he said something I never forgot. ‘Frankly, if it takes you your whole fucking life to find out what it is you want to do, you should take it. It’s the journey that counts, not the end of it. That’s when it’s all over.’” And Don was off. His mother and dying father not only wished him well but supported him in his first year of scuffling.

Frey was first to break into one of Hollywood’s royal rock circles: “I had just played a couple of songs for David Geffen, the guy who managed Joni and CSNY-the people I wanted to be with,” he recalls. “Geffen told me point blank that I shouldn’t make a record by myself and that maybe I should join a band. Then Linda Ronstadt hired me. It was two days before rehearsal was supposed to start and they still hadn’t found a drummer. And here was Henley, just standing right up in the Troubadour. So I struck up a conversation with him. I told him my whole trip was just stalled. I had all these songs and couldn’t make a record and I wanted to put together a band, but I was going on the road with Linda. Henley said that he was fucked up too. Al Perkins had left Shiloh to join the Burritos and…we were both at impasses. So he joined Linda’s group too. The first night of our tour, we decided to start a band.”

But not just another L.A. band. “We had it all planned. We’d watched bands like Poco and the Burrito Brothers lose their initial momentum. We were determined not to make the same mistakes. This was gonna be our best shot. Everybody had to look good, sing good, play good and write good. We wanted it all. Peer respect. AM and FM success. Number One singles and albums, great music and a lot of money.

“Money,” Henley reasons, “was a much saner goal than adoration. They’ll both drive you crazy but if I’m gonna blow my brains out for five years, I want something to show for it.”

John Boylan, Linda Ronstadt’s manager/producer, was the first to come up with the combination of Frey, Henley, Meisner and Leadon. His idea was to form a five-piece supergroup to back Linda. “We all thought, ‘Yeah, great, but why don’t we just put together a supergroup to back each other up,’” says Don. “John and Linda gave us our blessing. I really respect Linda Ronstadt. She’s got a good heart. She’s never been selfish enough to hold anybody back.”

Frey, now with the Eagles, made his triumphant return to David Geffen’s office without even a demo tape. As the group’s father figure/leader in its first year, Bernie did all the talking. “Geffen had no idea what we sounded like,” Henley recounts. “And here comes Bernie walking in saying, ‘Okay, here we are. Do you want us or not.’ It was a great moment. Geffen kinda said, ‘Well…yeah.’ A lot of credit has to go to Jackson, who convinced David we were good. Geffen himself couldn’t carry a tune in an armored car. Still, he kept us alive while we got some songs together and rehearsed by playing four sets a night in a club in Aspen.” The music was rocking blues and their show included Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Pontiac Blues” and an R&B-tinged version of “Take it Easy,” Jackson Browne’s song from the Echo Park days. Geffen eased Frey out of his contract and fronted the band $125,000 and they went to London to record their first album for Asylum Records, produced by Glyn Johns.

It was Johns who reshaped this bar band into “the country-rock band with those high-flyin’ harmonies,” as their bios kept saying. “He was the key to our success in a lot of ways,” Glenn admits. “He’d been working with all these classic English rock & roll bands…the Who, the Stones…he didn’t want to hear us squashing out Chuck Berry licks. I didn’t mind him pointing us in a certain direction. We just didn’t want to make another limp-wristed L.A. country-rock record. They were all too smooth and glassy. We wanted a tougher sound.”

By all accounts, Johns, known as a kind of a school-marm in the studios, led the Eagles by the nose through their first album, camp-counselor style.

“Glyn made us very aware of all the little personal trips within the band,” says Henley. “He’d just stare at you with his big, strong, burning blue eyes and confront you with the man-to-man talk. You couldn’t help but get emotional. We even cried a couple times….”

Frey: “He’d say, ‘You’re a fine singer, a fine guitar player, a great asset to this band….’”

Henley: “‘But you’re being an asshole.’”

One of Johns’s strictest studio rules-no drugs-held fast. “It really irritated him,” says Frey, “that Randy and I would sneak off and smoke weed. He’d tell me, ‘You smoke grass and then you don’t say what’s on your mind when it comes to mind. Now it’s a week later and you’re talking about something that you should have ironed out seven days ago. And that’s juvenile…’ What can you say? You’re busted. It’s true. He pointed out a lot of bad habits in everybody. It’s hard to be friends with someone who does that to you. It’s like a basic premise for friendship is that you accept the threat that everybody else poses to you.”

If Eagles was the perfect attention getter (it produced three hit singles, “Take it Easy,” “Witchy Woman” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling”), Desperadoestablished the Eagles’ credibility. The album’s low-key concept, that the rock & roll life is not unlike an outlaw’s, was an idea Henley, Frey, Browne, Souther and Ned Doheny had kicked around for years. Even today, they pipe dream about a screen adaptation.

Though the Eagles agree that it’s probably their finest effort, Desperado was the scene of the battle that the group still fights every time they enter the studio. “The only two people in this group who tend to think alike are Glenn and me,” explains Henley, “and we’ve always wanted every song to be the best that it could be. We didn’t want any filler. No stinkers. So there’s been plenty of fights even with Glyn Johns over ‘Aww, you guys just want to rewrite all the lyrics.’ That’s not true. We don’t disagree with anything anybody in the band has to say, it’s just how they say it. When somebody hears a bad song, they’re not gonna say, ‘So-and-so wrote a weak song.’ They’re gonna say, ‘There’s a shitty song on the Eagles album.’ It reflects on everybody. Still, I suppose it’s a matter of taste.”

Frey cuts in, “I asked Graham Nash once, ‘In CSNY did you guys ever change any of the other guys’ lyrics?’ He said, ‘No, never. Why, do you do that?’ I said ‘yeah’ and he kinda looked shocked. I just think it’s part of the band trip. All these legal pads don’t make me feel heavy. It just makes me feel like I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“Glenn is not a great guitar player and I’m not a great drummer,” says Henley. “On the other hand, Randy, Bernie and Felder are incredible on their instruments. We’ve just taken it upon ourselves that this is our department. Maybe we’re full of shit but I think we’ve proven ourselves. We recognize the fact that those guys have got a need to say something and if we can help them say it better, then I think everybody’s better off. It’s not a matter of credit or money or any of that stuff. We’ve been splitting the publishing evenly from the beginning.

“All the fighting reached a culmination point on On the Border. That’s when we didn’t finish the album in London with Glyn Johns. We came back with two songs, “You Never Cry like a Lover” and “Best of My Love,” and finished in L.A. with Bill [Szymczyk]. Glenn and I assumed this bulldozer attitude before we went into the studio of, ‘We ain’t gonna put up with any weaknesses. Every song’s gonna be great.’ There was a lot of fighting. Don Felder, who we just added to the band in the middle of the album, was so scared he’d joined a band that was breaking up.”

Frey and Henley, it would be safe to say, are the band’s primary students of the music business. They devour all the trade magazines, reading sales figures and interview features like most businessmen read Wall Street Journal. “You can’t be sensitive artiste all the time,” says Henley. “You have to be able to fend for yourself. I don’t want to be like the Fifties superstars, walking around now completely broke and trying to make a comeback.” Henley and Frey were also the main engineers behind the band’s leaving Geffen-Roberts management in favor of Irving Azoff, himself a former employee of Geffen and Elliott Roberts.

“It’s the old sauna story,” says Henley. “Jackson, J.D., Ned and Glenn were at David Geffen’s house just down the street one day and he said, ‘I want to keep Asylum Records really small. I’ll never have more artists than I can fit in this sauna.’ Then, all of a sudden, he was just signing people right and left.

“Then Geffen just split the management scene entirely and became a record company president, turning the whole thing over to Elliott Roberts and John Hartmann. It wasn’t the same after that. Elliott’s insights were great, but he’s been through all that stuff with Joni and Neil and Crosby and all those guys. Finding the right manager is kinda like finding the right girl. When you finally get the perfect one, you want the one that’s your own age and has been through the same trip you have. We were always the young guys down there. Nobody paid much attention to us. We found out our management company had signed Poco and America by reading Melody Maker.”

Azoff, 26, formed his own management firm, Frontline, at the insistence of the Eagles and two other artists he had developed a close relationship with, Joe Walsh and Dan Fogelberg. Azoff, referred to by the Eagles as “your shortness” (he’s 5’3″), has acquired a reputation of sorts because of his showboat business methods. “I think it’s great to have someone pounding on record company desks saying, ‘Fuck you, you’re not getting another Eagles album,’” says Frey. “When we first met Irving, we had two gold records and $2500 in the bank. Now we each make a half-million dollars every year and see every penny.

“Getting Irving was like catching Geffen on the upswing six years ago.” Sure enough, Azoff, along with Fogelberg and Walsh, has already put together his own label, Full Moon, on Epic. An affiliation with Jerry Weintraub, the concert promoter/manager of John Denver, Moody Blues and Frank Sinatra, is in the works. But, he says, “managing the Eagles will always be my top priority. Always.”

Asked about the present Eagles game plan, Don Henley plucks up an acoustic guitar and strums absentmindedly. “We definitely believe in maintaining the underdog status,” he decides.

Frey is slowly, deliberately nodding his head. “Mass appeal is definitely suspect. Just look at our Grammy winners, Stevie Wonder excluded. Sometimes all that mass appeal means is that you simplified your equation down to the lowest common denominator. It’s a great temptation to think, ‘Well, fuck it, they’ll buy this. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the mass public.’ Bless H.L. Mencken’s heart. He’s absolutely right but, see, I don’t want that kind of karma. That must be weird shit, to sell a bunch of records and make a bunch of money off something that didn’t mean a fuckin’ thing. I don’t ever want to face that.”

Henley: “It’s not a sin to be in the top 40. Look at Paul Simon and Joni. They sell millions of records.”

Frey: “I’m looking to Joni and Paul Simon and Randy Newman as living proof to us that you can still be doing it in your 30s. I get my confidence by watching them. I realize I can still do it when I’m 32, if I keep my perspective. If I don’t overamp and die from success poisoning. This business is like walking through a mine field. That’s why people who envy me look foolish. They don’t see me at the Record Plant, trying all night to get one vocal. As far as they know, I’m just a guy who’s drunk down in Tana’s one night a week.

“I’m beginning to feel kind of proud that we’ve gone through three albums,” says Henley. “I’m beginning to feel like a trooper, like we’ve finally got a place in the big rock pile, as it were. The important question now, though, is will we make a better album than the last one. Knowing full well that, whatever we do, it’ll be gold in three or four weeks.”

There is a reflective silence around the table, as if Henley has struck the quick of the matter. Frey finishes the last of his beer and set the bottle down with a loud clunk. “Well, you can clock me in at 5 a.m.” He squints at his watch. “Good night.”

The Eagles return from a record crowd at the Chicago Stadium to find their Holiday Inn’s front desk covered with phone messages, telegrams and flowers. With One of These Nights in its fifth week at the top of Billboard‘s LP chart, the group has just won in Best Song (“Best of My Love”) and Best Group (over Led Zeppelin, Elton John and the Rolling Stones) categories of the nationally televised Rock Awards. On the phone upstairs with Glenn Frey is Joe Walsh, who accepted the awards for them, and, in the process, kissed presenter Raquel Welch.

“You really kissed her,” Glenn is demanding, eyes wide. “Did you ask her about the silicone?” He spots the writer going for his notebook. “Naw, naw, naw. Don’t use that. That’s a cruel remark. Besides, we can’t be roguish underdogs anymore.” Frey grins and flips a cigarette into his mouth. “We have to be gracious winners.”

Courtesy of Rolling Stone #196 – Cameron Crowe – September 25, 1975

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Bob Marley’s death. His impact has continued to grow since May 11, 1981 and hopefully you saw the recent Marley documentary.

Today we’d like to share Cameron’s introduction to Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae. The book written by Roger Steffens and Jeff Walker focuses on the years 1975-1976 and includes some great photographs by Kim Gottlieb-Walker.

Foreword by Cameron Crowe

In my journeys as a fledging rock journalist, just out of high school, I one day found myself on the phone with a cool-sounding dude from LA.

Jeff Walker was a fellow journalist and a publicist too. He easily negotiated both sides of the media coin. He was a music writer with a day-job in publicity — a job that sometimes had him acting as a conduit in setting up interviews for a firm called Rogers and Cowan. Jeff had arranged for me to interview Jim Croce on the artist’s tour stop in San Diego. The interview had gone well. Croce had snuck me past security, and we”d talked for a local underground paper, The San Diego Door, with me hidden in the dressing room of a 21-and-over club (I was 15). I promptly skipped high school the next day to hang with Croce and his guitarist, Marty, by their hotel pool. This was certainly the life. I couldn’t wait to tell Jeff. In Jeff Walker, I had a compadre on the path of documenting our musical heroes. He was like a slightly older brother, one grade ahead of me, but with the same influences and references. Jeff liked authenticity in his favorite music, especially great songwriting, and we both savored interviews with the artists who specialized in these areas. Later, when Jeff was appointed music editor of a magazine called Music World, our friendship expanded professionally too. Walker was the most excited and knowledgeable editor I”d ever worked with. He always took my post-interview phone calls in a flash, with a “How did it go?!!!?”

Our conversations about the questions, the interviews, and the nuances of both could stretch for hours. He pushed me to dig deeper, and dig deeper I did. Jeff was often first to point me in important new directions. He was the first guy to tell me about Nick Drake, or an obscure English folk band, or to delightfully load me with writing assignments that would send me in some amazing directions.

One day I mentioned to him that I’d gotten the assignment to do a “bio” on Gram Parsons, a then little-known new solo artist and former member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers. (A “bio” was a two-page summary of an artist”s career, commissioned by the record company and sent out to the press with no by-line. It was an anonymous and easy way for a freelancer to pick up a hundred dollars and stay afloat.) Jeff nearly jumped out of his skin. He spoke excitedly about the value of this upcoming interview, the importance of Gram Parsons, and Parsons’ seminal instinct to combine a love of (then slightly uncool) country stars like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens with a powerful knowledge of rock pop. Parsons’ passionate experiment had quietly fueled the Rolling Stones “Wild Horses” and also helped inspire a wave of country-rock bands like Poco and of course, The Eagles. (To their credit, The Eagles are still passionate about singling out Parsons as the prime pathfinder to their gargantuan success. Their early song “My Man” is dedicated to Gram and his influence.)

Jeff loaded me up with an extra assignment on Parsons for Music World, and also arranged for his wife, the extraordinary artist and photographer Kim Gottlieb, to accompany me on the interview with Gram. I remember Jeff showing me some photos Kim had taken of Jimi Hendrix. I was floored. Kim’s talent in slipping past the trappings of an artist”s stardom were instantly obvious. It was all there in her series on Hendrix. Her camera reflected her own spirit, warm and loving and the results were striking. For once, Hendrix didn”t look vaguely suspicious of the camera or the photographer. Suddenly he was no longer the most exotic animal at the zoo, photographed through the bars of a pop culture cage. Here was a shot of the artist himself, at ease, with a full and open heart.

Our interview at Gram Parsons’ tour-manager’s house in Encino turned out to be historic. Parsons was a soft-voiced Southern charmer. He was starting a rehearsal for his first solo tour and band equipment was set up in the ramshackle living room. Kim, artfully adjusting her hair around the straps of the camera bags and equipment she was carrying, set about photographing Parsons with ease and familiarity. It was one of the few in-depth interviews the artist had ever given, and at one point in the proceedings, the singer-songwriter-guitarist, adorned in a floppy hat, took me aside and shared some information. He was expecting one more musician, he said with a sparkle. He’d seen her in a club. She was a young girl from DC he wanted to try out as a singer in his solo band. He clearly had a crush on her. “She’s got the greatest name,” he confided. He paused importantly. “Emmylou Harris.”

Harris showed up a few hours later, straight from the airport, radiating a beautiful combination of nerves and anticipation, and holding her guitar-case like a schoolgirl holding a copy of Franny and Zooey. And then she began to sing. Her voice gave us all shivers. As Parsons guided her through a version of an old Byrds song, “I’d Probably Feel A Whole Lot Better,” the two sang facing each other and we all shared a look or two or ten. The whole room tilted their way. I secretly pressed the “on” button of my tape recorder now hidden in my orange canvas bag. (The tape is a bit muffled, the microphone was hidden in the orange bag too.) It was an afternoon of quiet lightning, and we all felt it.

It was also a remarkable glimpse of Kim’s style. Life unfolded and she quietly caught the highlights. Gram and Emmylou’s budding love affair, the looks between them, and Parsons shy crush… it’s all there in Kim’s photos. Kim’s supportive and soulful sensibility always led her to know exactly where to be with her camera. I watched her quietly work alongside the heartbeat of the music and the emotions in the room. Always a fan, always an assistant to the groove, Kim is a joyful audience as well as a documentarian. Her style is simple. Listen…snap… snap… listen… snap…. listen. It’s no surprise that her work never interrupts, only inspires and celebrates the creative flow she’s there to capture. Though it’s said elsewhere in the wonderful collection of her work that you are now holding, it bears repeating — her proofsheets are surprisingly economical. She is not a blitzclicker, she is a collector of fine moments. And when Parsons died less than three months after our afternoon session, Kim’s photos from that day became one of the few surviving documents of Parsons and his short, now-legendary life and career. And Emmylou Harris is still singing about that musical love affair that changed their lives.

My friendship with Jeff and Kim flourished in the years to come. Along with our endless pow-wows about music, the sharing of craft and anecdotes, facts and records and songs and photos, I also had the benefit of watching how a truly dedicated relationship worked. Their son, Orion, was a perfect romantic collaboration. I watched these young parents, Jeff and Kim, raise their son with the same passion and artistry they brought to their love of music. Their instincts were something to behold. Ry grew up with all the music we loved. And it was right about this time that Jeff and Kim began talking about a new kind of music, a wave of songs and culture coming from Jamaica. It was the future, Jeff said, and it was as important as Dylan to the generation just before us. He was talking about ska, and reggae and dub… and a group he called “The Beatles of Jamaica” — Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Jeff was now working as a publicist with Island Records, and he’d visited Jamaica, walked the mean and soulful streets, and hung out with Marley. Kim had been there too. It was Kim who was the first “outsider” to photograph Marley and the young Jamaican masters around him, wildly creative artists who had previously seen a camera only as the wicked tools of tourists. Her photos would soon fill the walls of record stores and clubs around the island.

There was something special in Jeff and Kim’s early conversations about this growing musical movement. They were positively giddy, but also reverent. The music was more than a commercial enterprise for these reggae artists, the Walkers stressed, it was a lifestyle and a faith. It was about culture, and the rhythm and roots of the rastafari movement. Marley’s charismatic power was rooted in something more than a pursuit of simple success. It was a mission and a passion, and though Marley, with his rock star looks and universal melodies, was the reigning star of the island… the key to the movement was also in the often mysterious and mystical group of players who surrounded, played and competed with him.

As part of Jeff and Kim’s attempts to spread the word about reggae, and to prepare for the release of the Wailers’ Rastaman Vibration album, Jeff had taken a few journalists over to Kingston to meet and interview Marley. The great Lester Bangs was one of the first writers to visit, and Lester’s trademark piece about the experience is also discussed elsewhere in this collection. I was in the next group. This was a smaller touring party — just us — Jeff and Kim and Ry and me. It was a family adventure, with a mission attached. Together we would further explore Jamaican culture, and the intricacies of the relationships Jeff and Kim had forged in their previous visits. With Jeff and Kim as tour guides, we worked our way through the Kingston music scene. Our trip would center around an interview with Bob Marley, of course, but there were many other musicians to track down. I had prepared especially well for Marley, who was often verbally elusive (as Bangs captures brilliantly in his piece), and discussed his work in a thick Jamaican patois filled with passion but little concrete information about his craft and methods. But this much was clear before we even began our journey, the island was bubbling with scores of characters as deep and colorful as the music itself. And with Jeff and Kim’s help, I would interview as many of them as I could.

It has often been noted that only Motown Records in the 1960s could rival the plethora of street anthems and the sheer volume of local hits that came out of this small island in the late 1960s and early 70s. That explosion was in full evidence in the heady days of our 1976 trip. Thanks to Jeff and Kim’s encouragement and my early assignments for Music World, I”d also found my way into Rolling Stone magazine. They too were ready for my reports from Jamaica. So. Armed with a bunch of assignments, and a spanking new professional Uher stereo-cassette recorder in a leather case, off we traveled to the land of dub.

Courtesy of Titan Books – Cameron Crowe – November, 2010

Cameron sits down for a lengthy discussion with the Who’s Pete Townshend from this 1974 issue of Penthouse magazine.

“Progression is always great,” says Peter Townshend, “but unless you take your audience with you, it’s useless.” True to his word, the innovative English guitarist-composer and mastermind of the Who has remained in the-forefront of rock ‘n’ roll for more than ten years. With a score of teen-trauma hits like “I Can’t Explain,” “My Generation”, “The Kids Are Alright,” and “Magic Bus ” as well as the more rock-opera masterworks Tommyand Quadrophenia, behind him, Townshend now watches Who albums turn gold on the day of their release and Who concerts cause riots at the ticket window. Lately, he has even entered the celluloid sweepstakes with Ken Russell’s spectacular film of Tommy. At twenty-nine, Townshend may very well be rock’s most valuable player.

Teenage frustration, from masturbation (“Pictures of Lily”) to the Quest for the Answer (“The Seeker”), has been a major theme of the of the Who throughout most of its existence. And for good reason: Townshend’s fascination with the subject is bred out of experience. “High school was very painful for me,” Pete says as puts a finger to his mammoth nose. “I was very embarrassed and self-conscious about my nose for quite a while. I got obsessed with it. Music was my escape. My mother was no help, she seemed to think that anybody who wasn’t beautiful couldn’t be any good. She was gorgeous, of course. My father was very good-looking, too. How they spawned me I’ll never know. Dad was kind to me about the nose, but in an unintentionally devastating manner. He used to say things like, ‘Don’t worry. Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe, didn’t he?’ I didn’t want to look like fucking Arthur Miller, I wanted to look like James Dean.

“But I knew down inside that the only way I was really gonna become confident was to become something everybody could respect. So I labored at the guitar, trying my best to be incredible within a few weeks. And when it didn’t happen, it destroyed me. It was only later on that I realized I actually did have a talent. As soon as I started to write, I really came together in one piece for the first time. Even in the early years of the Who, I suffered that frustration of searching for my niche. That’s why my first songs were so screwed-up and indecisive.”

Originally called the High Numbers, the Who was formed in 1964 when singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle auditioned and accepted their beak-nosed schoolmate into the group the two were putting together. A year later, after playing in small, English bars with pick-up drummers, they added a permanent fourth member, Keith Moon. Drummer Moon, rock ‘n’ roll’s most lovable basket case, entered the band in classic style. He had been watching the High Numbers play at the Oldfield Hotel, thinking — not unlike any self-respecting musician — that he could do a far better job on drums than the particular fellow they had on stage that night. Entwistle remembers the evening well. “Keith staggered up onstage, drunk out of his mind, and started to play the drums. He destroyed the drummer’s bass-drum pedal, something the guy had had for twenty years. Keith was dressed all in ginger, with ginger-dyed hair, and he was just as mad and loud as the rest of us.”

The Who, as they soon began to call themselves, gained quite a reputation as a live act. Townshend, known as “the Birdman” because of the way he spun his arms in the air and across the guitar strings, began demolishing guitars onstage. Daltrey smashed his microphone into the floor, filling the room with a loud metallic thud, Moon destroyed his drum kit for the encore, and Entwistle all the while stood a discreet distance apart, dressed entirely in black. “All four of us were unbelievably aggressive,” says Daltrey, “we were very violent. We would literally have bloody fistfights onstage, as well as destroy all the instruments. But in the end, it became a sort of monkey on our back. After two years, people were just coming to see us smash up all our gear. The music meant nothing. All our pre-Tommy stuff had that stigma about it.”

“We’ve always spent a lot of money and created a lot of damage,” adds Townshend. “And we weren’t really making any money during that time. Tommy came just at the point when the Who would have had to split because of financial burdens. Like most performers, we didn’t pay any tax in the first few years of our career. So, when the bill came in, Tommy gave us enough money to pay it. And it was a frightening sum, too. If we hadn’t been able to pay it, it would have been a public scandal. We’d all be in jail right now.”

Thanks to a dynamic performance at Woodstock in 1969, the Who found a mass audience for the newly released Tommy. The story is essentially a parable incorporating the band’s familiar themes of frustration and violence. It tells of a boy who becomes deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing his father killing his mother’s lover. Tommy then staggers through a series of nightmares which include torments from his cousin and a sexual assault by his uncle. He eventually becomes a pinball champion, is worshipped, and ultimately regains his senses. Tommy forms a kind of pinball religion, only to be flung aside by his oppressed disciples.

In 1971, after years of drug-taking and [a] brief flurry of experimentation in psychedelics, Townshend publicly denounced the drug culture and proclaimed devotion for Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. One of the most important ground rules for Baba worshippers, it seemed, was a complete disregard for drugs.

(Baba’s life story is little known outside of the hard-core cult of his devotees. Born in 1894, Baba grew up in the Indian town of Poona. While in college, he built up an affection for an old woman named Hazrat Babajan, who was In reality a Perfect Master. One day she kissed him on the forehead and from that moment on, Meher Baba was a changed man. He neither ate nor slept for months, and spent the next seven years in study with the five Perfect Masters of the time. One of these Masters threw a stone at Baba, hitting him at the spot where Babajan had kissed him, between the eyes. It was at this moment, so the story goes, that Baba became aware of his role. Meher Baba did not speak at all from July 10, 1925 until he died in 1969. His silence was intended to be symbolic. “You have had enough of my words,” said Baba, “now it is time to live by them.”)

The Tommy film isn’t Townshend’s first attempt at writing for the screen. In early 1971, he attempted an intriguing, but ultimately overwhelming rock fantasy called Life House. In the end, all that remained were the handful of songs he wrote for the aborted project, some of which appeared on Who’s Next, the group’s seventh album, and Who Came First, Pete’s only solo album. More Life House material will appear later in an upcoming album of forgotten material dating back from the earliest days to the present, called Odds and Sods. For now, though, Quadrophenia stands as Townshend’s last major recorded work. The story deals with the despondent and disillusioned Jimmy, a teenager growing up in the Mods vs Rockers era of English street life. Jimmy suffers from double schizophrenia, hence the title. Townshend insists that Quadrophenia will be his last work to be preoccupied by teen turbulence, but don’t bet on it. Pete Townshend, after all, is everybody’s favorite rock’n’roll adolescent, even if he is pushing thirty.

This exclusive interview was conducted by Cameron Crowe.

Penthouse: Many people think that Jimmy, the hero of Quadrophenia, is a thinly disguised Pete Townshend. Is this true?

Townshend: No. I identify very strongly with Jimmy in several ways, but certainly not all. He’s a workshop figure. An invention. And while he may seem a lot more real than Tommy, he isn’t. Tommy was set in fantasy, but there was something very real about its structure. Jimmy, on the surface, looks like a simple kid with straightforward hang-ups, but he’s far more surrealistic. I don’t fully identify with Jimmy’s early experiences. . . his romanticism, his neurosis, his craziness. I never went through a tormented childhood. When I was a kid, it was just me and the guitar and the belief that if I ever learned the secret of rock’n’roll I would own the world. I feel closest to Jimmy when he’s reached the stage, late in the album, of being stuck on the Rock. He’s surrendered himself to the inevitable, whatever that is, and has put all his problems behind him. Jimmy’s not become any kind of saint or sage, he hasn’t even found anything, much less himself. Basically, he isn’t gonna be any different. He’s just reached the point in his life where he’s seriously contemplated suicide — as we all have — and the fact that he chose not to kill himself has left him with a fantastic emptiness. A need to be filled. A lot of kids today try to fill that void by waving the rock ‘n’ roll flag, but they just don’t understand it or feel it or live it. In a way, they should be totally immersed in rock ‘n’ roll the way I do which is practically in a religious sense.

Penthouse: Don’t you think that viewing rock ‘n’ roll in a religious sense is a contradiction in terms?

Townshend: Just to sit and talk about rock ‘n’ roll is a contradiction in terms. So there you go. All I’m saying is that rock ‘n’ roll usually isn’t anybody’s sole salvation. Too any rock musicians don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Penthouse: What effect has discovering Meher Baba had on you? Are you still “on the Rock”?

Townshend: Of course. A lot of people equate finding a spiritual master with discovering the escape clause in life. Actually it’s just the opposite, All that happens is that, for the first time in your life, you acknowledge the fact that you’ve got problems instead of futilely trying to solve them. The problems become more acute, yet somehow less painful. Still, they don’t get solved automatically. The only way in this lifetime that you can move something from A to B is to get up and fucking move it. There’s no magic. All Baba has done is to get me to start looking outside myself and tempering all my results in his terms rather than my own. I was keyed-up, at the time Quadrophenia was ready to be released, for total failure. I kind of figured that was what I needed. I thought that was the only thing left that was gonna teach me any kind of lesson. That sounds nihilistic. And yet the failure wasn’t what I really wanted. I wanted continued success and everything, but somehow I was expecting it rather than working for it.

Penthouse: Don’t you think that when a group becomes rich and successful, their basic motivation is gone?

Townshend: That’s assuming something really quite incredible. That’s assuming that every rock band picks up their instruments because they want to be rich and successful. I don’t think any band worth its oats ever picked up a guitar because it wanted wealth and fame. That’s always part of it, but it’s never the sole purpose. It wasn’t why we wanted to play. We wanted to play because we were into the music and into the fact that the only reality that existed was in losing yourself in people’s reaction to you. Money’s got nothing to do with it. What prompts musicians that have gone through that painful trying-to-attract-the-attention-of-a-drunken-pub-audience, and worked their way up to the top, to go back to their fucking roots in cabaret and start trying to win over a drunken audience again? It’s got nothing to do with money. Or success. It’s got to do with some kind of need to be looked at, to be respected and — this has been made more evident in rock than in any other aspect of show business — the need to find yourself through your audience’s reaction. You’ve got to discover what makes that audience tick to discover what makes you tick. A musician has to be affirmed; and if someone else won’t do it, he has to do it himself.

Penthouse: Looking around at your contemporaries, do you think too much fame, too much money coming in while one is very young — say eighteen to twenty-five — is a good thing?

Townshend: I don’t know. I think perhaps too much money can be harmful, but too much fame I don’t think is necessarily bad. Teenagers, while they’re in school, do get to learn that it’s quite important to work out your own way of being special and, in a sense, famous on a small scale. You have to be famous for being yourself. Either you’re famous for being long, thin, and acting queer, or you’re famous for being the girl with the big tits, or you’re famous for being the guy who always gets his Levi’s just right … whatever it is, you become famous in a sense. I don’t think that really hurts anybody. It makes them confident. It also teaches you what people need from life. People need heroes and you’re doing a job in being a hero. You’re performing a service.

Penthouse: Did you have any heroes when you were a kid?

Townshend: Well, there was Bob Dylan.- When I was a kid … well, not a kid, but younger and listening to Dylan, I couldn’t wait for the day when somebody would get to him and do that in-depth interview where everybody would find out what really was in the back of his head. And when I discovered that there was nothing there at all … nothing … I must say I was incredibly disappointed. From that day onward, he ceased to be my hero. He remained somebody who wrote music that I loved. I still love the earlier stuff for the pure nostalgia of remembering how stimulating he was; but he wasn’t quite the gladiator I had expected. You can’t deny, though, that Dylan’s music marked a new dimension in rock ‘n’ roll. He opened the door for rock to say bigger and better things.

Penthouse: Like what?

Townshend: Well, I think rock became more idealistic. It became the music of the adolescent and a vehicle for the denunciation of whatever we didn’t believe in. If there was something a bit dodgy, we knew that pretty soon there’d be a song about it and through that music we’d know what we felt to be right and what we felt to be wrong. It was like an affirmation.

Penthouse: Much of your early writing displays an intolerance of age. You wrote in “My Generation” that you hoped you’d die before you got old. You’re twenty-nine now, and to a lot of kids that’s perilously close to being antiquated.

Townshend: I wasn’t ready for how quickly I was going to get old. Rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t just age you in time, it ages you quicker than time. I’m still a young man in a normal sense, but I’m constantly thinking about age, always watching the audience change over the years. The audiences come in waves, you know. There’s the people that grew with the Who, then there’s the second wave, and then there’s the third wave. In Los Angeles, that third wave stretched from maybe fifteen years old back to thirteen. In the whole of our career, that’s the youngest our audience has ever been. I kind of automatically assume that thirteen- to fifteen-year-old kids are gonna be really thick … maybe “secure” is a better word. I assume that all they really want is some kind of mild sexual stimulation like the Osmonds or some other silly flirtation act. It surprises me when their appetite includes the Who. I don’t think those kids come to see us because they can identify with what we said in “My Generation”; I think they go for the sound. That rams age down your throat as well. I’m constantly aware of how old I am and how fast I’m aging. Rock ‘n’ roll also ages you because it’s extreme. Its spikes are so much more lethal than in any other business. It’s not just the artistic pressure, it’s a creative pressure that the recording industry throws down on you. There have always been a lot of people asking me about what I said in “My Generation.” I suppose when I wrote that song I was thinking more about genuine old age, being in your late fifties or sixties and adjusting to being an old person: worrying less, doing less, and feeling less. That was what I meant by old age. But then somebody comes up to you and says, “You said you were gonna die before you got old.” All you can do is nervously laugh it off by saying, “Oh, I was just a young kid when I said that, what did I know . . . ?” I think back now to the way I was when I wrote those songs and I must admit that I don’t really like myself in retrospect. I just don’t like the person I remember. I like what I wrote and I like the success I came up with, so presumably I must hate myself in retrospect because — I keep saying this — I had sharper edges. Those edges aren’t quite so sharp now. So I wonder whether ten years from now I’ll like what I’ve done today as much as I like what I did ten years ago now. I really like my first few songs because they were an incredible surprise. Through writing I discovered how to free my subconscious, in a way. I wrote out of necessity, in fact. The Who couldn’t get its initial recording contract without somebody in the band writing. So I wrote “I Can’t Explain,” and I thought it was about a boy who can’t explain to a girl that he’s falling in love with her. But two weeks later I looked at the lyrics, and they meant something completely different. I began to see just what an outpouring the song really was. At that point I became the greatest rock critic in the world. I was two people — someone who sat down and wrote a song for some particular purpose, and then somebody who looked at it and saw something totally different. Then I realized, “Of course, that’s why Bob Dylan doesn’t know what to say when people ask him about one of his songs-because he doesn’t fucking knowwhat it’s all about. I know … because I’m on the outside, reacting to it and whatever it means to me is it. But he doesn’t. How could he? All he did was write it.” Trying to project into the future, what I think will hurt me about Quadrophenia when I’m old is its deliberate self-consciousness. But I felt it was time for the Who to be self-conscious. It’s incredible how well it works on record and how badly it works on stage. I found it so embarrassing to have to explain the album in between numbers. It’s a bloody admission of growing old, to stand up an talk about “When I was nineteen…” Nineteen isn’t too fucking young and that was years ago. When I walk onstage I feel time less. I feel abundantly athletic, free, and liberated and unfettered and complete unselfconscious. I don’t feel like I’m Pete Townshend, I feel like one of the Who — a group with tremendous collective impact on that audience. I get lost in the rush and then all of a sudden, there you are trying to explain yourself. Well, it won’t happen again because another conscious aspect of Quadrophenia is that it’s a rejection of that sort work ever again. Or at least the adolescent obsession, the teenage frustration thing. I’ve got some lyrical growing up to do.

Penthouse: Is there anything that moves you, that makes you want to act, besides music or Meher Baba?

Townshend: Obviously Baba moves me. I don’t know, I think music is the main thing. It’s the root cause of everything. I’ve got ideas now about making a musical film of a type that’s never been made before, but music is even at the root of that, I imagine. I think music is probably the only single thing. Like everybody else, I’m moved by traditional things like love, a sunny day, or a mighty sea. But most of all, music. Really good films can make me cry or make me happy, but music can do more than that to me. I think that’s true, funnily enough, for most people who have been brought up on rock ‘n’ roll. They regard music as the most fully saturated medium. It’s words and pictures to them; whereas in the Thirties and Forties, music was much less important. Movies were where it was at. I don’t think that’s true anymore. And it’s certainly hard to be moved by anything on television just because of its very nature.

Penthouse: You visited India several years ago –

Townshend: India was an absolutely, totally mind-blowing experience. Nothing that I was ready for at all. It all started with a visit on our last tour, three years ago, to Myrtle Beach, in South Carolina, on the Atlantic Ocean. It’s made up of lots of lakes, kind of an inland Hawaii-type situation with lakes and fairly easy jungles leading down to the Atlantic coast. There are three or four thousand acres there that were a gift for an American Baba center. There are lots of little cottages and places where you can go and stay. Baba loved the place. I went there one day, in the middle of the tour, and spent the night in this cabin, a place where Baba had lived. All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I felt that I was in his presence. I’d never ever met him when he was alive. I put my head on the bed and fucking thought the most incredibly … unthinkable, unrepeatable, and unspeakable thoughts I’ve ever had. It was so awful, it was like being in hell. I completely broke up. I finally went out with fucking tears streaming down my face. Tears of self-pity. And I thought that I’d blown it. There I was, in the presence of the Master for the first time, and all that bullshit, all that filth.

Penthouse: What kind of thoughts?

Townshend: Listen, I don’t even want to relive them by discussing them in any kind of detail. Suffice it to say, they were fantastically disgusting and terrifying. I tried to convince myself that it was just a kind of cleansing process, but that wasn’t what it was about at all. It was me fighting like mad not to surrender and using the most subtle, most subconscious way that I knew how. It was very, very spooky… Anyway, that prompted a trip to India. I suddenly realized that I was gonna have to go to India and at least meet all the people that were around Baba. I went over there and the first thing that hit me was that India was a fantastically beautiful country. It’s the only place where poverty is almost pure. I mean I felt like the fucking peasant with my twenty suitcases and my first-class ticket and my charcoal-gray suit. I felt like a pig, I really did. So to cut a long story short, I ended up in the tomb where Baba was buried. There’s a ritual that goes on there in which you walk in, put your head down to the ground, and walk out again. It’s a kind of sacred procedure. Awful in a sense. It’s just what Baba would never, ever have wanted a ritualistic thing. The first time I went in there, I put my head down and tried to really feel like I was in Baba’s presence. And I had the same thoughts that I had when I was in the bedroom at Myrtle Beach. And the same thing happened once again, when I went around the second time. By this time I’m really starting to know what I’m going to think as soon as I get in there. So the third time I go inside, I’m standing there thinking, “Well, I’m washed up. I’m never, ever going to be in the presence of God, so I might as well fucking enjoy being with all these people and have a good time during my unhappy years on earth.” And suddenly this young guy walks in and he’s obviously got dysentery bad. He’s small and fragile, his face is white, and he’s shaking like a leaf. Somebody kind of ushers him forward and he looks like well, he brought out all my maternal instincts, if that’s possible for a man. I just felt so much compassion for him … so much sorrow for him, and that sort of identifying self-pity thing that always happens in those situations. And I see him get in, put his head to the ground, and tears begin to stream down my face. I’m so wrapped up in this kid that by the time I get my head down, I’ve forgotten about what it was that was in my head. I forgot that whole trip. So I get up after realizing that this guy was just a device to get me out of the way, you know what I mean? It was Baba’s compassion that had arranged it. It was nothing else. I felt so insignificant that I might as well have been a speck of dust. It was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever felt in my entire life. And I went out afterwards and collapsed in thanks. That’s what happened in India. I came back, and since then really very little has happened. I’m kind of nervous about going back again. I mean I’ve had my little zap. I don’t know how much more I could handle. It’s like a door was opened for an instant, just so you could quickly glance inside. Then it slammed shut again. And you think, “Christ, is that where we’re all going?” Because if it is, we’re all right. I’ll tell you that right now.

Penthouse: Do you think Meher Baba rescued you from the self-destruction of the music business?

Townshend: Yeah, possibly. I don’t now, you see. The thing was that I found Baba after the Who had already found success. We had already gone through the most trying period of our careers, the long downs and short ups of trying to break through to the American audiences –which was very hard on our egos because of the instant success we had in England. All these expectations led to — although we still act like kids all the time anyway — a kind of spiritual maturity. And spiritual maturity has got absolutely nothing to do with the normal maturity suffered by the majority of the world’s adults. That kind of maturity is an adopted, assumed frame of mind. It’s a shackle. I did expect, if you like, that when I got into something as big as a surrender to somebody like Baba — not knowing years before whether it would be Baba or LSD or flying saucers or whatever — I was sure it would change me. And it didn’t. The only part of me that’s changed is the way I review my results. You do the same things, you just have a better perspective on the outcome. But I think that change in me is due more to the Who than Meher Baba. Because of the Who and the lessons I’ve learned with them, I instantly accepted something meaningful and obviously right for me. Some people go all the way through life without even batting an eyelid at anything bigger than your average adulthood maturity. Most politicians are that way. They think that maturity and courtesy are the only things anybody needs. They’ve mutilated the words “peace” and “freedom.” Politicians are the last people to know the real meaning of those words.

Penthouse: Do you have many political convictions?

Townshend: Well, it it’s possible for someone who’s reputedly a millionaire — I’m not, incidentally — I’m morally very left-wing. I suppose as a member of the Who I’ve earned quite a lot of money. I’ve also spent that money. I’m a capitalist, yet I feel that the most spiritually correct of all political states would be a Communist one. But I think all politics are useless unless the component parts — the people, the leaders, the organizers, and the workers — are spiritually together. Communism at its purest can be corrupt, hurt people, and not do its job. Capitalism at its finest and most effective — even in a period where it was really working, like Fifties’ America — stands and falls on the quality of the people involved in it. It’s really great when you’ve got a good bunch of leaders leading you, but when they turn sour, you realize how little control you actually have to change them.

Penthouse: Life House was about politics, wasn’t it?

Townshend: Well, first of all, Life House was an aborted film script. The essence of its story line was a kind of futuristic scene, a fantasy set at a time when rock ‘n’ roll didn’t exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. They lived TV programs, in a way, everything was programmed. Under those circumstances, a very, very, very old guru figure emerges suddenly and says, “I remember rock music, it was absolutely amazing; it really did something to people.” And he talked about a kind of Nirvana people reached through listening to this type of music. The old man decides that he’s going to try to set it up so that the effect can be experienced eternally. Everybody would be snapped out of their programmed environment through this rock ‘n’ roll-induced liberated selflessness… Then I began to feel, “Well, why just simulate it? Why not try and make it happen? If it doesn’t, well okay, we’ll spoof it.” And so I became obsessed with really making it happen, and LifeHouse would be the film of the event. I was talking wildly about a six-month rock concert, hiring a theater for it, and having a set audience with a closed house of maybe 2,000 people. I was going to write a theme for each individual, based on a chart that told everything from their astrological details to alpha waves to the way they danced to the clothes they liked, the way they looked, everything. All these themes would be fed into a computer at the same moment, and it was all going to lead to one note. All these people’s themes put together would equal one note, a kind of celestial cacophony. I did a lot of experiments, and it was practical; it wasn’t just a dream. I was working at it.

Penthouse: And this one note was the note that would produce a mass Nirvana?

Townshend: Right! The song “Pure and Easy” is about that. The music I was writing for Life House was more interlude music than individual themes. The nearest thing I got to the type of music I thought I would come up with was “Baba O’Reilly.” It was a theme that I put together in reaction to Meher Baba himself. That was his theme. That was the sound I thought represented the power and, at the same time, the ease of his personality. LifeHouse was an incredibly ambitious project, but it got entirely out of hand.

Penthouse: Were you fighting the group all along on it?

Townshend: No, not at all. Everybody was behind it; they just didn’t understand it. The fatal flaw, though, was getting obsessed with trying to make a fantasy a reality, rather than letting the film speak for itself. And it hurt when I realized it was all a crazy idea. We needed people, for example. So we opened up the theater we rehearsed in and played a few unannounced concerts to try and get some flow of people coming through. All we got were freaks and thirteen-year-old skinhead kids. If we had advertised the thing as a Who concert, we could have packed the fucking place for a year. But we were just opening the door and playing, waiting to see who came in. It was a disaster. It made me the most cautious I’ve ever been. The self-control required to prevent my total nervous disintegration was absolutely unbelievable. I flew to New York and did some therapeutic recording work, pieced myself back together, and went back to England to finish off Who’s Next.

Penthouse: Which was… ?

Townshend: The remains of Life House.

Penthouse: There’s a song called “Naked Eye” that the Who have never released on record, But when you play it, it seems to have quite an effect on the audience.

Townshend: Yeah, I wrote a couple of songs in a period where people were writing extensive analysis of my character and stuff like this. And I thought, “Well, fuck it. You don’t know me. I don’t know myself, how can you know me?” And the other thing was that people were attributing so much to dope at the time and I felt that was very stupid. People just didn’t seem to be looking any further than they were seeing. “Naked Eye” is a song saying, “Wake up … it’s not really happening the way you see it.” It’s a sincere request for people to look a little deeper into things. Like they say, when you’re running an engine in, run it in at varying speeds, don’t just run it in at a fixed thirty-miles-an hour. Don’t always expect a band to be the same. Don’t always expect a stoned musician to automatically be a good musician You know, junk sometimes makes a musician good, and it sometimes destroys a good musician. The same goes for people in the audience.

Penthouse: Do you feel strongly about dope?

Townshend: Well, I don’t feel as strongly now about it as I did a couple of years ago. The kids now have put it in perspective of their own. I should have known they would. Four years ago, man, nobody ever came up to me on the street and said, “Are you Pete Townshend of the Who?” without offering me a joint or a snort or something like that. It seems like those days are gone. We’re back to the point again when people can turn down a joint without feeling that they are some sort of schmuck. Just as long as that’s happening, just so long as kids who don’t want to get stoned aren’t considered crazy, then it’s okay. But I used to feel very explosive about the fact that if I played something good, someone would inevitably come up to me and say, “Wow, man! What are on?” I should have told them I was high on life. There’s no bigger drug. I spent too much of my adolescence attributing everything I was capable of to drugs, and not to myself, to stand for people crediting dope with everything that they can get out of rock music.

Penthouse: Do you have any particular fears?

Townshend: Yeah. My main fear at the moment… I mean this is a very bad thing to say, but I’m very worried that I’m fucking around with the most serious thing a man can ever wake up to. And that’s the fact that I very sincerely believe I know the route to perfection. That route, in my case, is through living my life in a way that would please Baba. I get very scared when I see that I’m fucking around with my life. I’m my own witness, I know when I’m doing it right according to my own set of rules. I get scared when I don’t live up to those rules, that’s all. I get scared when I see I’m not my own master. I feel there’s a power within me that’s getting more and more impatient with me, like a schizophrenic situation. A case in point is what happened last night onstage. I got disgusted with myself because I wasn’t able to have a good time. It was an incredible thing where I was angry because I couldn’t enjoy myself. “Come on, you cunt, enjoy yourself! Have a good time! They don’t fucking care if your guitar’s out of tune or your leg aches. All they care about is you having a good time watching them have a good time! So have a good time!” That’s the kind of conversation I’ve been having. I feel sometimes that, impulsively, I don’t take life seriously enough. I get afraid of how long I’m going to have to go on and on playing this game. I get very scared of the fact that I might have a long, long time to live.

Penthouse: You seem to love getting a passionate reaction from your audiences, whether that reaction is extremely negative or extremely positive.

Townshend: I’m afraid I’ll have to go along with that.

Penthouse: There was one show in England where you got so upset with an indifferent audience that you said from the stage you’d never play again.

Townshend: Yeah, that was in Newcastle. Quite weird. I’d really decided that that was the end, that it had all become a complete waste of time. Any business where one night you can be playing before a completely ecstatic audience, and the next night you’re playing to an audience of complete dummies, must be a farce. How can a human being stand such extremes? It’s like getting adulation one day and the next day complete detachment. It’s very hard to live with it. It’s like recooking a cold meat pie. You do it enough times and fucking salmonella grow up in it and you get food poisoning. I just couldn’t understand it. It seemed like the only people who really knew what was happening were the group. Then I suddenly realized, “Well, obviously, we can’t go on working like this because the audience, the roadmen, the lighting crew… nobody knows what is happening in this room. Nobody knows the low vibration that’s occurring. It’s far below normal.” Anyway, I completely exploded and smashed up a load of very valuable gear, including a lot of pre-recorded tapes, imagining that I would never, ever walk on the stage again. Twenty-five minutes later, there I was for the encore.

Penthouse: You’re very nice to your fans offstage. Very personable.

Townshend: I’m after all their asses. No, I suppose it’s got a lot to do with the fact that I remember when I had heroes. I just wanted to be able to spend an hour with them, that kind of thing. That hero worship was one of the main motivations for playing. I idolized the Shadows and jazz bands like Acker Bilk. One day, actually, John Entwistle and I went to see Acker Bilk, and as we were coming out of the concert, the band went past. We waved and we were just dumbfounded because they all waved out at us, stopped, and gave us a bottle of beer. They were all saints from that day on. I don’t know, I suppose that one little thing has always stayed with me. But I have to admit it. I almost feel guilty about my position. If you think about it, I’m really using the kids. About five years ago there was a big thing going on in rock about the bands financially exploiting the audience by high ticket prices. I had big rows with people over that. I’ll admit that I’m exploiting, but not by high ticket prices. I’m taking their thoughts, their moods, their feelings, and I’m giving them back to them. For that they call me a genius. All I’m doing is telling them how they are. That is the exploitation part that worries me. But I suppose if they’re nuts enough to pay me for it, then it must be cool. Still, I feel so guilty that when I meet up with my admirers I really try to relate it to them. I feel that exploitation factor is the biggest problem in rock. Not everybody wants to take to me, though. When we play a concert, most people are happy to see it and then go home. Maybe five or six want to talk or touch you and there’s only about three or four women who want to fuck you. It’s not like hundreds of thousands. And after a while you get to know those few people by their first names. They come again and again and again. But I’ve been very rude to people almost as often as I’ve been very nice to them. I’m often very rude to women because I find that if you’re in a rock band and you smile or are courteous to a girl, she seems to think that’s a come-on. So I get a terrible reputation with a lot of women who must think I’m queer. The operator who screens my calls at this hotel must think I’m queer. If somebody comes on the phone who says their first name is John, I think, “All right, I’ll take a chance that it’s John Entwistle and talk to him.” But if somebody comes on the phone and says her name is Kim, I know there’s trouble on the end of that line. So I tell the operator that I don’t want to talk to her. She either thinks I’m queer or have a million girl friends.

Penthouse: What do you do to have fun?

Townshend: The best fun I have is definitely in stag situations. I like getting drunk with the guys, smashing up hotel rooms, riding on boats, falling off, drowning … that’s th kind of thing I like doing. I also have a lot fun recording on a loose level with the guys in the group. The heavy level of making an album I don’t necessarily enjoy, but just fooling around in my home studio is great. I enjoy being at home because it’s a place where I can live and also work and play. I don’t know why I like bawdy situations, but I do dearly love them. The bawdier the better.

Penthouse: You speak almost wistfully of the past. Are you afraid of the future?

Townshend: Well, the future is going to bring some changes. I don’t think we should have to assume any more attitudes or roles and play along with a game plan that we can’t sincerely and honestly deal with. Even if one can get away with it, hypocrisy is not tolerable in something as intrinsically honest as rock ‘n’ roll. It’s very hypocritical for a band like the Who to stand onstage and pretend that they’re adolescents, when all they’re really doing is reliving their adolescence. So the future, if nothing else, at least holds a challenge for the group to really see themselves as they are. I’m not squeamish about the future. I have some album ideas and general plans for the music we might end up playing. It’s all well and good, the band is still together; but do they really, really, deep down inside, want to be together? I think that everybody in the band, if they were asked that question, would say yes. You occasionally get flashes of frustration — John makes albums on his own, Roger felt the need to do a solo album, Keith wants a film career. So you could worry, if you like, about an earthquake hitting the Who. But if an earthquake is going to hit us, I want it to be a fucking big earthquake, not a slow and boring crack.

Courtesy of Penthouse – Cameron Crowe – December, 1974

Here’s an exclusive treat. This is the extended version of the story that ran back in the January, 2013 issue of Vanity Fair. It’s nearly 1000 words longer and digs a bit deeper into the subject. We hope you like it.

When Musicians Act – And It’s Not Terrible

So many musicians have been drawn in by the allure of the silver screen only to get burned. But when the moonlighting succeeds—think Whitney Houston, Art Garfunkel, Courtney Love, Eminem—the result can be riveting.

There is a wonderful moment in Judd Apatow’s Funny People that is as surprising as it is funny.  Seth Rogen portrays a struggling young writer-comic invited along on a corporate gig to assist his idol, a legendary stand-up comedian played by Adam Sandler.   James Taylor is also on the bill, and in a casual moment after Taylor’s performance, Rogen asks him “Do you ever get tired of singing the same songs over and over?’”  Taylor, playing off a long career based on graceful elegance, sharply replies, “Do you ever get tired of talking about your dick?”

For anybody paying attention to the long and tumultuous history of musicians crossing over into the dark and mysterious world of acting for film, this was a watershed moment.   Taylor was operating far out of his comfort zone, throwing in with Apatow’s famously unruly gang of screen-comedians.  He nailed his moment with aplomb.   This doesn’t happen often.  The cinematic battlefield is littered with the bodies of musicians who have not fared as well.  Though musicians and actors often long for each other’s careers, crossing over is the Holy Grail.  The results are often calamitous, and rarely less than riveting.

To discuss this thorny issue of acting musicians, I went to James Taylor himself.  Taylor has had a front-row seat to this time-honored challenge.    In the early months after Taylor’s momentous 1970 success with Sweet Baby James, he was one of the first approached to portray Harold in Harold and Maude.  (He declined, as did Elton John, before director Hal Ashby settled on the quintessential Harold, non-musician Bud Cort.)    Taylor did say yes, however, to an even more unorthodox project, written by Rudy Wurlitzer, and directed by Monte Hellman.  The road movie was called Two-Lane Blacktop, and though it enjoys success to this day as a serious time-capsule piece of 70’s auteurism, the filming was torturous for Taylor.  (The movie also starred Laurie Bird, Warren Oates, and another musician new to acting, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.)

“We only got a page of the script at a time,” recalls Taylor from his Connecticut home.  The frustration still sounds fresh.  For months, he watched the valuable time of his post-Sweet Baby James success tick away while attempting to maneuver the movie’s stringent existentialism.   Was he given acting advice?  “Quite the opposite.   We were told to drain our faces of emotions, and not to ‘act’ at all.”   Taylor happily returned to music.   When he was approached the next year to star in the remake of A Star Is Born, in a part written specifically for him, he passed.  (The project then went to none other than Elvis Presley, who nearly agreed, before the part ultimately landed with Kris Kristofferson).

It’s no surprise to Taylor that many actors dream of a side-line career in music.   But, he warns, “there’s much more control in music.  Music, as an art form, is almost like a human language… but where languages are made up of symbols representative of other things, music is the thing itself.  It’s a physical reality.   It cuts across all cultures and all creatures.  A dominant chord with a 7^th in it, for example, wants to resolve to the one chord and the tension of wanting to go someplace, and then going there, or not going there… it produces an emotional effect.  It’s straight to the heart.   There’s no argument to it.   It’s a matter of physics.   (A musician who acts) finds himself dealing with many more intangibles.”

Or, in the words of Graham Parker, who plays himself in a sharp and funny appearance in This is 40:  “Pop musicians are too full of themselves to act properly.  It’s all preening and posing for us.  We mug, we mime, we throw shapes, we pose, we do weird things with our eyeballs, but we can’t act.  I think deep down many musicians, myself included, consider acting and film making a much higher art form and we wish we were actors.  We spent too many time in music trying to manipulate people’s emotions in under ten seconds.  It’s excessively phony.  I don’t know why there aren’t more actors whose music is any good, though.  But let’s leave Jeff Bridges out of this.  He’s allowed to do anything and it’s always good.”

Indeed, acting for film requires a different discipline, working generously with fellow actors, a script-supervisor, a cameraman, specific lighting, and ultimately surrendering the quality-control to a director and editor….in other words, none of the rebellious independence that makes for an epic rock star.   Still, there are wonderful bravura moments where musicians have conquered the silver-screen.   Courtney Love in The People Vs. Larry Flynt.  David Bowie in Basquiat, The Prestige, The Hunger… or anything.  Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard was surprisingly free, infused with humor and emotion and attitude. Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová were so authentic as a budding duo in Once, they fell in love.

ALREADY FAMOUS Jack Nicholson and singer Art Garfunkel in 1971’s Carnal Knowledge.

There are some obscure favorites as well.   The Guess Who’s Burton Cummings took a lead role in the 70’s feature Melanie.  His bravura piano-serenade in the nude makes the entire movie an instant classic. (“I’m in the nude, for loooove.”)  Art Garfunkel was achingly good in Carnal Knowledge.  Marvin Gaye and John Lennon both showed promise in early attempts at acting.  Madonna made it look easy in Desperately Seeking Susan.   Steven Van Zandt crushed in The Sopranos.  Bob Dylan is always surprising on screen, particularly in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.  Ironically, he’s far more relaxed at capturing his famously elliptical rhythms on screen then the host of A-list actors employed to portray him in I’m Not There.  Mick Jagger started out powerfully in Performance, moonlit infrequently after that, and then surfaced recently as a remarkable comic actor in his 2012 hosting-and-performing turn on SNL.

Producer Lorne Michaels certainly knew the stakes involved.   A long-time personal friend of Jagger’s,  he’d known for some time that the singer had the humor and the fearlessness to do it.    Still, reinventing the world’s most famous lead-vocalist as an SNL host was no small endeavor.

“The key,” says Michaels, “is rhythm and timing.”  He adds, “You have to know how they can be funny, because it has to be an extension of who they are.”  His track record is solid – he’s helped guide Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars into the same winner’s circle.   Michaels’ love of tailoring the comedy to the musician began with the second show of SNL, when he paired Paul Simon with basketball great Connie Hawkins. The height difference was instantly funny.  Later he dressed the often-solemn Simon in a large turkey costume.   It worked.  But Jagger was the trickiest of all.   He explains:  “Mick is a pure performer.   He can’t be buffoonish.  He can be silly, but he has to find a way in, so that he can still be Mick and do a character.”

There was also the audience to consider.  “It wasn’t like a Rolling Stones show, where you know he’s going to do three songs, kill, and then he’s going to talk.  They’ve already won by the time they open their mouths.  In comedy, you’re coming out (to a monologue), there’s applause, then you have to win.   We needed an opening line, you know that line that settles everyone?   I think it was John Mulaney or Seth (Myers) who found it just before dress (rehearsal).  And it was Mick’s line – ‘I’m here because I get to do what I do best, standing still and talking.’”  Michaels laughs appreciatively.  “The audience just went, ‘right, we’re with you.’  It’s that first moment when you make contact, it’s everything.”   The wrap party was euphoric, with Jagger joyously knocking out versions of “Miss You” and “Bitch” with Foo Fighters on the Rockefeller Center skating rink, playing long into the night for shocked passersby.  “It only took 37 years to pull off,” notes Michaels.

To quote another Rolling Stones song, it’s not easy.

One major problem in musicians learning to drop all the pretense of their usual job is the thundering voices of their potentially-caustic peers.  I had fun directing Pearl Jam as struggling rockers in Singles, though Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Keidis apparently chastised at least one member for an entire Lollapalooza tour.  (Turnabout would happen quickly.  Keidis’ cameo in Point Break evened the playing field.)    Jerry Cantrell, from Alice in Chains appeared in Jerry Maguire, playing an all-night Copymat clerk, and possibly a Messiah, who helps Maguire design his Mission Statement.  Cantrell was fearless.  He nailed the performance in two takes, earning a blitz of high-fives from co-star Tom Cruise.   Sometimes the reckless naturalism of a relaxed musician is just what the scene needs, like Mark Kozelek in Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky.  He is a lucky charm, and my go-to guy for dark rejoinders like “Dude – fix your fucking face!”  (Mark fares well in Shopgirl too, along with the actor-drummer Jason Schwartzman.)

Another fear for the wannabe musician-actor is the chance of losing rock mystique.  “I have no image,” Graham Parker happily notes, “therefore I don’t give a shit.”  Others do.  When Bruce Springsteen first arrived as a major force in the mid-seventies, his charisma was so large, so cinematic, it was widely assumed he was built for the big-screen.  Springsteen knew better.  After fielding a blitz of offers, he decided “The Character” lived most vividly on records and on stage.  Springsteen has held himself almost entirely off-screen, outside of a few videos and a brief appearance as himself in High Fidelity.  And James Taylor, after Two-Lane Blacktop, long kept his own acting jobs to a memorable appearance on The Simpsons, and a nice turn with Barbara Hershey in the 1997 video for his song “Enough To Be On Your Way.”  (Until, of course, Apatow called with Funny People, and a game-changing dick joke.)

“I consider acting something I like to do,” says Taylor.   “But mostly my career is a matter of touring and recording, and sometimes you participate in the other stuff to keep yourself in the public eye.   Some artists, like Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, are already such vivid personalities, such trail-blazers, I can’t even imagine them acting.  It would take time away from the importance of who they are.”   He pauses.  “Speaking of Joni Mitchell, there is a wonderful cover of her song “River,” by Robert Downey, Jr.   So there’s an example of an actor with a musical soul.  Being a musician is actually not that far from being a music fan.”

He brings up a good point.  Sometimes an actor’s own love of music infuses them with the ability to play a musician credibly.  Gary Oldman’s Sid Vicious is an example.  Tom Cruise scores in Rock of Ages, in no small part because he’s a Guns ‘n Roses fan and took the time to study Axl Rose… and his posture.  Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix led with their musical hearts in Walk The Line.  Same with Bill Nighy, who is allegedly the world’s biggest Rolling Stones fan, complete with a home stocked with every bootleg.  He waltzed into one of the best portrayals of a burned-out sixties pop icon ever in Love Actually.

For Almost Famous, as well as David Chase’s beautifully poetic 60’s music piece, Not Fade Away, the actors had a rock boot camp before filming.   Chase’s movie band, The Twylyght Zones, and our band, Stillwater, both benefited from late-night rehearsal sessions where we gorged on the greats and near-greats, read up, watched everything, and conducted long-hours of music lessons.  Under the training of Peter Frampton, himself a sometime actor, Jason Lee was able to stand and deliver his lead-vocals with authenticity, and Billy Crudup learned lead-guitar in a scant six weeks.   Every once in a while, he still calls me up and leaves a damn good version of  “Smoke on the Water” on my voice-mail.

But the King of the Rock Fan Actor is indisputably one man – Jack Nicholson.  While Nicholson has only rarely played a musician (Stoney Jackson in Psych-Out ), he understands music as few do.  I once sat one seat away from Nicholson at a Neil Young and Crazy Horse show.  He wore his trademark dark-sunglasses and nodded his head deeply, as if it were ‘66 and this was Coltrane at the Village Vanguard.  I snuck a look over at him, and grabbed a glimpse of his eyes through the sides of his glasses.  They were shut, lost in reverie.  Yes, I too wondered if he was asleep, but those fears were quickly banished when he leapt to his feet as the last chord of “Cortez The Killer” was played.  This man loves his music.

And then there’s Elvis Presley, who is worthy of any rainy-day trip through his catalog of 31 movies (and two documentaries).  The King began his career with dreams of crossing over as a kind of Marlon Brando/James Dean.   He was well on his way early on, before getting derailed into a long string of vehicles like Roustabout and Girls, Girls, Girls.  But Elvis is never less than fascinating, even when he was banging out three movies a year and barely keeping track of which girl, animal, car, co-star or guitar he was performing with.   A performer either has built-in screen presence or he doesn’t.  Most don’t.   Elvis did, every time he stepped in front of that big glowing camera.

Which brings us back to James Taylor and his epic turn in Funny People.  Taylor arrived on the set and was surprised to find that Apatow’s film was a long way from Two-Lane Blacktop.  Taylor was now in the company of Rogen, Sandler and a host of other collaborative comedians.  Suddenly there were lines being shouted from behind the camera, and no one paid much attention to the words “action” or “cut.”  There was only one line he questioned – “Fuck Facebook.”   But after trying the line as “Screw Facebook” a few times… the lure of the set overcame him, and Taylor whipped out a “Fuck Facebook.”  The crew and actors erupted in laughter and applause.   Touchdown.  It’s the take in the movie.  “They were right,” Taylor agrees, ever the student of the form.  “’Fuck Facebook’ is an alliteration, which makes it funnier.   That’s acting.  You surrender your self-consciousness for the greater good…“

That Judd Apatow has enjoyed directing success with James Taylor, as well as other musicians like Eminem (Funny People, 8 Mile), Loudon Wainwright III (Knocked Up, Elizabethtown), and a poignant Graham Parker (This is 40) is no accident.  He enjoys bantering with the artists, relaxing them with new jokes and new approaches, and generally gives them the greatest busman’s holiday ever from the business of music.  But alas, it is a lonely job.   After Eminem nailed his own watershed moment in Funny People – sexually taunting Ray Romano from across a crowded restaurant – there was a similar roar of approval from the crew.  Eminem then promptly left to celebrate, grabbing only Adam Sandler and retiring to his car to listen to his own newly finished album.   Apatow watched the thumping car, uninvited, and was left to bask in yet another rare acting-musician victory…. alone.

“I enjoy working with musicians, love the energy and the creativity.”   Apatow sighs happily.   “I get to be their best friend… for an hour.”

Courtesy of Vanity Fair - Cameron Crowe – January, 2013

Indiewire shares their list of the 15 Fictional Bands That Rocked Your World. It’s nice to see Stillwater on there. Check out the entire list below:

• Autobahn - The Big Lebowski
• The Big Band – Brothers of the Head
• Banjo & Sullivan – The Devil’s Rejects
• The Blues Brothers – The Blues Brothers
• DJay – Hustle & Flow
• The Folksmen – A Mighty Wind
• Hong Kong Cavaliers – The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
• Marvin Berry & The Starlighters – Back to the Future
• The Wonders – That Thing You Do!
• The Rutles – All You Need is Cash
• School of Rock – School of Rock
• Sex Bob-omb – Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
• Spinal Tap – This is Spinal Tap
• Stillwater – Almost Famous
• The Venus In Furs/Wylde Ratttz – Velvet Goldmine

What do you think? Anyone missing from the list? Share your thoughts!

I always get a kick out of the wide variety of Blu-ray covers from around the world…

The variety of pictures (some great, some awful) and the different titles always brings a smile to my face. Above is En NY Start, the Swedish Blu-ray for We Bought A Zoo. Below you’ll also find Zoo covers from Finland and France, along with some Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and Fast Times pics.

Cameron shares his thoughts about actor/writer/producer/director Ernst Lubitsch for the Trouble in Paradise Criterion DVD.

The Lubitsch Touch

The LUBITSCH Touch is…
The ELEGANT JOKE, full of character, that becomes…
ANOTHER surprising joke, which becomes…
AN EVEN FUNNIER joke, which becomes…
THE ULTIMATE joke you never expected, which becomes…
THE MOVIE you can’t wait to see again.
VIVA LUBITSCH! Cameron Crowe

DVD Menu Screen

Courtesy of the Trouble in Paradise: Criterion Collection DVD – Cameron Crowe -  January, 2003