Herb Cohen

Herb Cohen

          In 1968 Linda Ronstadt’s manager was Herb Cohen. Herbie was something of an underground show-biz legend at the time. He’d started out as co-owner of a folk club on Sunset Boulevard in the mid 1950s, serving up a beatnik’s brew of espresso, live music, poetry readings, and comedy. Then he’d disappeared from the scene for a while. People said that he’d been a mercenary soldier and a gun-runner in the Caribbean. I don’t know if either of those things were true, but they didn’t hurt his image. He’d met Lenny Bruce when Lenny had performed at his club, and became his manager, or so I heard. There were stories of him duking it out with a deadbeat club manager out on the sidewalk on the Sunset Strip in order to obtain payment for one of his acts.

          He was short and burly, wore guayabera shirts, had a narrowly-trimmed beard, and always seemed to have a pained expression on his extraordinarily round face, even when he was smiling.

          Anyway, my VW microbus work for the Stone Poneys got my name and phone number on the Rolodex in Herbie’s office, high on about the 15th floor of a building on Wilshire Boulevard: I was a big fellow with a van. I started getting calls to do jobs here and there around L.A. for some of Herbie’s other acts. You may have to google what a Rolodex was.

          Herbie was fun to work for, if your taste appreciates cynicism, as does mine.

          Herbie seemed to like me, and by November he signed me on as assistant producer, or, sometimes, assistant to the producer (titles were always vague in Herbie’s organisations), for a big concert that Frank Zappa, another of Herbie’s clients, was having with the Mothers of Invention and a bunch of freak acts he’d signed for his new record label, Bizarre. It was set for just before Xmas in the Shrine Auditorium in downtown LA.

          The producer was an individual named Joe Gannon, who was from Philly and had prematurely grey hair, and who told me any number of times over the next few years that being afraid “to make waves” is the worst thing there is. A show-biz dude all the way. He looked and talked show-biz and had a reputation for sailing close to the wind, in the grey areas, as it were.

          Joe and Herbie had me running all over the LA basin — chasing down the materials for building and decorating the stage, meeting out-of-town acts at the airport, making sure the various acts’ equipment was in the right places, taking care of details. Then Herbie decided that I was just the one to mother-hen people like Captain Beefheart and Wild Man Fisher, who nobody else in the office wanted to mess with.

          On the night of the concert it was my job to pick up the unpredictable Wild Man at his flea-bag rented room, calm him down a bit, and drive him to the auditorium. Then I saw to a bunch of details and when the doors opened helped watch the entrance. People were trying to get in with phoney tickets, and so on. I remember this one young woman trying to just breeze past without a ticket. When I more or less challenged her she told me that she didn’t need a ticket, she was Suzy Creamcheese.

          It flooded back to me, lying on my back on the floor of Jerry Kleiner’s roach-hotel apartment in Foggy Bottom, stoned to the gills, my then-girlfriend by my side, freaking out pleasantly to the Suzy Creamcheese pieces (‘Return of the Son of the Monster Magnet’ and ‘Help, I’m A Rock’) on Freak Out!, the Mothers’ first album (with the endorsement letter from Suzy Creamcheese on the back cover). I looked at her. Delusions were In that season, after all. It was December, 1968.

          I said, “Yeah. Right.”

          She said, “Go check with Herbie.”

          I went and found Herbie, who was covering another part of the entrance and told him there was this chick who wanted to get in free because she was Suzy Creamcheese. He looked over at her, then at me. “That,” he said, “is Suzy Creamcheese.” His pained half-smile. “Let ’er through.” And in she breezed.

          While the bands were playing I had the chance to stand next to Herbie and watch and listen. Herbie kept asking me what I thought. Alice Cooper at that time sounded awful. It was the name of the band as well as its star. They performed wearing frocks over jeans and T-shirts. It was all feedback and — to my perceptions — patternless and irritating noise: the lead guitarist running his metal bracelet up and down the strings, and so on. I told Herbie I thought they were crap.

          “Yeah,” he said, “but I think I can sell ’em.”

          A band from Seattle called Ethiopia sounded good to me. Good, basic rock & roll with close harmonies, á la Buffalo Springfield. I told Herbie I thought they were a good find.

          “I can maybe use the bass player,” Herbie said.

          Anyway, the concert ended and a day or two later we’d taken everything down and returned it or otherwise disposed of it. The Stone Poneys were on the road, and in those days they travelled without a roadie or a crew. I went to see Herbie, and he told me that he couldn’t think of any work coming up for me to do until at least February or March, if then.

          I ended up leaving LA to go back to Delaware to work for my step-father. Not long after I arrived in Delaware I got a phone call from Herbie. He hired me over the phone to help out Dick Barber, Zappa’s road manager, with some stuff at a gig the Mothers were set to play at some hippie dive in Philadelphia. When the show went on to the next city, I went back to my job on the survey party, feeling empty.

          Late in the Spring of 1969 I wrote a letter to Herbie, lamenting my being trapped amongst “the cossack rube hordes,” and asking him to let me know if anything came up that I could do. I got back a letter saying that if I could find my way back through the cossack rube hordes, he was sure he could find something for me to do. Surprised the shit out of me. He must have liked that phrase. So I drove back to LA around the first of July and went back to work for Herbie.

          Technically I was working for — being paid by — something called Bizarre, Inc. I don’t know exactly who owned stock in it other than Frank Zappa. From the way they behaved I assumed it was Herbie, his lawyer brother, Mutt, and a guy in New York named Neil Reshen. Zappa was the president; Herbie was the executive vice president.

          Herbie ran the show. I’m sure he couldn’t have overruled Zappa on anything, but Zappa didn’t want to run the show. He wanted to make music and play with tape and film. When it came to the business, Zappa made the decisions he needed to make, but Herbie ran it. In other words, Herbie was my boss, but if Zappa wanted something done, that came first.

          Bizarre sometimes billed itself as an “underground conglomerate.” Well, I don’t know about underground, being 15 stories up, but Kimberly Allen — née Eloise Peacock — our genial secretary, must have had the stationery of a dozen or two different companies in her right-hand desk drawers. There was Bizarre, Inc., of course, and Bizarre Records, and Straight Records, and NT&B Advertising & Youth-Market Consultants (NT&B stood for Nifty, Tough, and Bitchin), and Third Story Music, and Fourth Floor Music, and a couple other music-publishing companies, Herb Cohen Management, United Mutations (a fan-relations and marketing company), and others. Cohen and Boyle, Mutt’s law firm, was one flight up. On the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard called the (yawn) ‘Miracle Mile’, the offices that had views looked north, away from Wilshire and the street, up across the gentle, smoggy slope of the LA basin to Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills.

          Along with the various acts that we had one thing or another to do with — living ones such as Captain Beefheart, Linda Ronstadt, Tim Buckley, and others less successful — Herbie had the rights to some previously unreleased tapes by Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley, two great icons of beatnik-hipster comedy cool, both dead. I’d only been back from Delaware for a couple of days when Herbie handed me a bunch of Lord Buckley tapes and some old publicity stuff and said, “You’re a writer, right?”

          And I mumble-shuffled some kind of answer like, “Well, I try to be.”

          And he told me to write the liner notes for this Lord Buckley album that was in there with the tapes. I’d never heard of Lord Buckley. He was before my time and not a topic for discussion in any circle I’d ever been in. So I said, “Sure. When do you want it?”

          And Herbie said, “Yesterday.”

          I got the job done in about two days, working around my lift-and-carry duties and commuting back and forth to Claremont, where I was staying with the Wares while I looked for a place to live. Herbie liked it. Used one of my phrases (“an immaculately hip aristocrat”) for the album’s title. Kimberly hated it. Said it sounded pompous; she’d liked the letter I’d sent about the cossack rube hordes better. But, shit, that was Lord Buckley, I told myself, and I was too amazed that Herbie didn’t think it was shit to care. I’ve always been amazed when people seem to like stuff I do. Always.

          I saw something on the net about Lord Buckley when I went online that referred to those liner notes, and to me as somebody “who appears to be an expert” on the subject.

          Also during my first week or two of full-time employment at Bizarre, Herbie sent me on a few errands to the house Zappa had just moved out of — this giant log cabin in Laurel Canyon that had been built by Tom Mix, the old-time cowboy star. Some of Zappa’s friends and associates and groupies and hangers-on were still living there, although I believe they were at that time under some pressure to move out.

          There was a blow-up when Herbie instructed me to pack up Cal Schenkel’s art studio from the log cabin and move the stuff to some place in the San Fernando Valley. It was, first of all, an impossible job. The art studio contained, in addition to lots of the more common art supplies, thousands of bizarre little bits and pieces of this and that, which Cal and his assistant used for the assemblages that appeared for years on various Mothers album covers and other promotional photos. Cal, of course, went ballistic, but Zappa interceded on my behalf, me having been an ignorant innocent caught in the middle of other people’s conflicts.

          A few times I had occasion to go to Herbie’s house, usually to do some kind of work for him. He had a beautiful, youngish wife who became pregnant. Herbie said that he was going to name his kid either Ice Cream Cohen or Genghis Cohen, but I’m sure he didn’t. He and his wife were both keen collectors of oriental rugs and knew a ridiculous amount about them.

          Herbie rented a building on LaBrea to use as a rehearsal hall and storeroom, and gave me the keys. I remember he hired Lowell George to do the carpentry work involved with burglar-proofing the windows and whatnot. I ended up being on call pretty much around the clock to let people in and out, or to move equipment in or out of the storeroom.

One time I had to do keys for this biggish band called Sweetwater, who had been the first band to play at Woodstock, after Richie Havens’s opening solo act. I was particularly impressed by the tall girl who was their lead singer. We got to know each other a bit more later.

          I didn’t travel with the acts, but when they returned from touring their road managers turned their shit over to me at the rehearsal hall, and I handled most of their LA-area gigs. I remember once Herbie telling Neil Reshen, in for a quick visit from New York, that my title was “West Coast Schlep.”

          After I’d been working for Herbie for several months a rash on my arm started to be a real drag. The long hours, the miles and miles of driving around in LA traffic every day, sexual frustration, the drink and the pills, all were having unsurprising effects. My left arm was itching and oozing and staining the upper left sleeve of all my shirts. I wasn’t sleeping worth shit.

          Kim, the secretary, recommended a shrink that she’d gone to. Oscar Janiger. She said he was Allen Ginsberg’s cousin. Office in Beverly Hills. Not somebody I could afford on $100 a week, but I talked my mother into covering the cost. After a few sessions he told me that I wasn’t particularly crazy and that he wasn’t particularly interested in shrinking me, but suggested that maybe I should quit my job and concentrate on writing. He’d certify me for government disability payments. So I went to Herbie and told him about it. I figured a substantial raise would relieve my stress and reflect the amount of work I was doing, but he said he couldn’t afford it, and maybe I would be happier writing away on disability.

          Over the next few years I did a few jobs for Herbie. Bizarre moved out of the high-rise on the Miracle Mile and into a high-rise up in Hollywood. I wrote bios for acts such as Lobo and Dion and schlepped equipment for Little Feat before they got going and for various acts that never made it that Herbie or Frank or somebody else in the office was nurturing.

There was, however, one job that was not out of the usual cookie-cutter. I was, oh-so-briefly, a private dick for Frank Zappa. Someone had been selling bootleg Mothers albums. A customer with a conscience (or trying to curry favour with the star) had given Zappa the PO box number the bootleggers were using. I spent a day and a half hanging around at a suburban post office waiting to observe someone using the box in question. Someone finally did. I followed him to his car and jotted down the license plate number and the make-and-model. When I got into my bus to follow him, I noticed that he’d spotted me paying too much attention to him. My ’66 VW bus not being James Bond’s Aston-Martin, I drove off with my jottings, gave them to Herbie, and later learned that they’d been sufficient to locate the bootlegger.

          I’d been away from LA for almost nine and a half years when I made a sentimental journey back to Hollywood in March, 1981. While I was there I went to see Herbie. He and Zappa had broken up and he was in a comfy garden office in mid-Hollywood. He was in a friendly mood. He was in the mood to chat.

          He shared some of his views about people in his business environment: “Y’know, some of these people — they think because they can carry a tune, or play an instrument fast, or string a few words together in a rhyme, they think they’re better than other people. And they’re not.”

          And he shared some of his views about the larger picture, which was something like: “The way I see it, I got maybe ten or maybe 15 more years of doing what I’m doing, and then I start getting old, and then sick, and then I die. And that’s it.”

          I lost touch with him after that. From the internet it appears that he went on to manage Tom Waits for some time, then George Duke, then a Russian rock band called Autograph. He died in 2010, fairly close to the target he’d told me about on my last visit.