John Ware 1967-1971

John Ware 1967-1971

71

          So there we were, in Southern California in the seasons following the Summer of Love, in the arid and smoggy atmosphere, me pretending to study government in a PhD program and Ware being an artist and a househusband and a rocky-roller. We drank cheap red wine (often cut with club soda to make it less nasty) and played cards and watched TV and agreed about entirely too much. Ware has a way with a viewpoint that was for me utterly convincing. I was inclined to agree with his artistic and general opinions anyway, but his total and easy self-confidence — his self-assuredness — would have been impossible for me to challenge even if I’d wanted to.

          I used to feel genuinely apprehensive about cruising across the driveway as often as I did in order to see if Johnnie wanted to play, but he always seemed genuinely gracious and friendly about it all. I think Linda may have resented it a bit, though, even though we constructed the living metaphor that they were the George and Gracie and I was the Harry Von Zell. Sometimes she’d call us the “two sots.”

          Ware was really into being dapper, and his clothes just about always looked good on him. Except once when he suckered and bought a couple of Nehru jackets. Hell, Nehru jackets never even looked good on Nehru. He particularly liked to dress up for holidays. He’d put on a tie before sitting down to watch TV football on Xmas. His hair, however bushy, always seemed to be magically in order.

          Ware admired Andy Warhol and it showed in their house’s interior decor. The large front room was dominated by his piano, but also featured a row of four fold-up theatre seats John had reupholstered in big white polka dots on a dark blue background. One or two of his large, brightly-coloured abstract impressionist paintings graced the walls. There was, as I recall, a little bronze plaque by the front door that said. “The Warehouse”. He also clearly had some mana in the art world thereabouts, judging student art shows, setting up a Frank Stella exhibition on La Cienega in Trendsville, West Hollywood, and stuff like that.

          Two days before New Year’s Eve 1967-68, their dog Henry had puppies. I got one, the black female, whom I named Naomi and who stayed with me, with a couple of intervals, for 17 years.

          Meanwhile, Ware painted away on large, colourful acrylic-on-stretched-canvas pictures based on cutaways of perspective studies of rectangles. I have one — one that I watched Johnnie paint — on one of my walls today, and I have another, somewhat three-dimensional one (that was my 22nd birthday card) on the wall of my office.

          He had some sort of an involvement with a large-scale art happening at the Cucamonga winery, where an old Jaguar became The Jaggernaut and was induced somehow to self-destruct whilst rolling down a ramp into those assembled, to much cheering and popping of firecrackers. As part of that happening he played with a couple of different pick-up bands. One of them was a sort of post-bebop cool jazz ensemble. Later he told me how much he hated playing jazz. It wasn’t him. He was a rocky-roller.

          Somewhere in there I started taking Ware’s drum kit in the back of my VW bus to some of the Pop Art Band gigs. I was a help in carrying stuff, being kind of burly and all, but I turned out to be hopeless when it came to learning to set the drum kit up properly. What I remember of the Pop Art Band was lots of feedback, the bass player basically hiding back among the amps, the lead singer jumping around a lot but not making a big impression on me, and Ware tossing his hair from side to side a few times — during fills, I believe. I couldn’t keep from laughing when he did, because it seemed out of character, but, after all, he was an entertainer, and a little showmanship doesn’t hurt.

          The Pop Art Band began to look unlikely as a means for Ware to retire by the age of 25, which was his stated ambition. One day his friend Chris Darrow came to tell him that there was a girl in LA who had some kind of folk band that was about to break up, but they’d just had a hit record, and she needed to find a drummer for a touring band to go out and support it. Ware followed up the lead and ended up knocking at the door of a little house in Santa Monica. The person who greeted him was the little girl at the rehearsal place back when he’d been with Junior Markham and Eddie Davis and Levon Helm. She stared, then said, “I know you!” It was Linda Ronstadt. Ware auditioned, but the audition was probably over when he walked in the door, and he became the first drummer for the new Stone Poneys.

          I remember him coming back from LA that day in what was for him a somewhat agitated condition. He told me he was going to be the new drummer for the Stone Poneys. I’d heard the name. They’d had a big enough hit for me to have heard about it some months before, called ‘Different Drum’, but if I’d ever heard it, it hadn’t made enough of an impression for me to remember it.

          Anyway, Ware got the brushes out of his drum kit and started fucking around with them. He told me they were going to do a country-rock sound, and for that he’d have to use the brushes a lot. I was dubious. I had the East Coast urban Jewboy’s reflexive aversion to redneck music. But Ware was confident. He was always confident.

          The new Stone Poneys played gigs around LA Ware helped to get me paying gigs shlepping equipment for Linda and the Poneys in my microbus. I remember once they played for a few days at a place called Musicland, which was near Disneyland. The other acts on the bill were Bobby Hatfield and some guy he’d hired to replace Bill Medley — performing as the Righteous Brothers — and Jose Feliciano. I was surprised at how square Hatfield presented himself, and about how clearly bitter Feliciano was. When we returned the equipment after this gig to the rehearsal studio, which was upstairs in a building on Wilshire otherwise occupied by some opera company, nobody had a key. It took us about 20 minutes, and a whole lot of noise, to break into the place — ineptly — and leave our stuff there, and the cops never showed up to see what was happening.

          That edition of the Stone Poneys travelled without a roadie, and Ware took on most of the roadie’s usual administration jobs. They’d fly into New York, for example, and there’d be nobody waiting for them. So Ware would go to the car-rental counter and rent a car with his American Express Card, which was on his father’s company account. Then, after the bill came the next month, a sort of steamy letter would show up from his dad and he’d go in to Herb Cohen’s office and give him the bill, and he’d give Ware a check.

          Ware and I wrote some songs together — me 60s-ish words and him country-ish music — that we were unable to sell to Linda Ronstadt or to anybody. By mid-1968 I’d moved into Echo Park in LA, and we weren’t next-door neighbours anymore, but we did get a chance to joke around a bit at Stone Poneys gigs, and I made the drive out to Claremont for social or songwriting purposes from time to time.

          Through a mutual friend I introduced him to a Danish blues-harp player named Lee Oskar, who didn’t have a place to stay at the time. He ended up sleeping on the floor of Ware’s front room for a while. Ware enjoyed him being there, as he really did live and breathe music. If Ware sat down and played a boogie-woogie left hand on his piano, Lee Oskar would immediately pick up his harp. That’s all the guy wanted to do — that and eat large amounts of food. Soon after that he joined a band called War with Eric Burdon and Papa Dee Allen.

          Ware and I kept in touch when I went back East for the first half of 1969. The Stone Poneys changed, as such bands do. John Kuehne, a friend of Mike Nesmith’s (Nesmith had written “Different Drum”), took, over at bass. Chris Darrow left the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and joined them, as did Jeff Hanna. Bernie Leadon, who went on to fame later with the Eagles, also came on board. I returned to LA in June, 1969 and stayed at the Ware house while I looked for a place to live.

          Ware met Mike Nesmith through Kuehne, and they became friends. They toyed with the idea of Ronstadt’s backup group becoming a band, with Nesmith wanting to produce whatever it was. They got into the studio and made some tracks. Ware told me that Nesmith had some kind of a deal with one of the ABC companies, and he got them a deal there, too. They called themselves the Corvettes because they thought it was about as stupid a name as they could come up with. They put records out that never did anything.

          On one of the many coast-to-coast drives I undertook for one reason or another I stopped off for my mid-continental nap at the Ware family home in Okie City. I remember John’s mother showing me a painting he’d done as a teen of the family’s African American cleaning person. She clearly thought the painting was marvellous. She also said that the painting deeply embarrassed Johnnie and she couldn’t see why.

          Ware and Kuehne were playing with Ronstadt, and hanging out at Nesmith’s house almost every day when they weren’t on the road. Nearly a year after the Monkees had ended, Nesmith still had a mansion overlooking Bel Air and every toy he’d ever dreamed of having. He had a Lamborghini Estrada and a Cadillac limousine. He had a manservant. His wife had maids. Then the industry went through Monkee backlash and the money was gone.

          Thugs jimmied his estate’s electric gate and start repossessing things as Ware, Kuehne, and Nesmith drank beer in the afternoon. The repo men took cars, furniture, and musical instruments. Ware insists there was gunfire at least once, and described it to me as “a cheap movie.”

          One day Ware went to see Nesmith early, instead of in the afternoon, so they’d be alone. He had an idea. He sat Nesmith down and told him that they needed to do a band with Kuehne and Red Rhodes, the pedal steel guitar player at the Palomino Club, who’d given Nesmith pedal steel lessons. They called Rhodes at his house, and he said yes, and they became the First National Band. They all signed contracts — initialled every paragraph — with RCA.

          They had me up to the mansion to see about the roadie job, which they ended up giving to, I think, Kuehne’s brother-in-law. It was a strange place and a strange visit. Nesmith had his gold records on the wall in the loo. Nobody talked to me while I was there, and I played on one of his pinball machines.

          Ware told me they did a whole album, including mixing, in something like eleven or twelve days. The band’s first single, ‘Joanne’, was released just before Nesmith moved out of his mansion. They were sitting on Nesmith’s living room floor, because the sofas were gone, when he got a phone call from somebody at RCA to tell him that the Drake Stations, the most powerful Top-40 stations in the country, had picked up ‘Joanne’ as a single. Ware was surprised that Nesmith got extremely sullen about that. It had happened too fast. It was Monkee stuff. The song was clearly going to be a hit, and this clearly freaked Nesmith out badly.

          Then Nesmith arranged for them to move to London in late 1970, without their wives. RCA leased a townhouse for them. They had chauffeurs and Jaguars and Rolls Royces, and played some gigs. But the Monkees TV show hadn’t happened in London, so hardly anybody noticed, as far as Ware could tell. They played some workingman’s bars. And while they lived there ‘Joanne’ went to number one in the U.S.

          Ware told me that Nesmith didn’t really know all the people — John Lennon and Ringo and so forth — they were hanging out with. Ware thought it was heady, but a horrible thing to do to their wives, not to mention being a horrible thing to not be out supporting that single in the US, because of fear of Monkee backlash.

          A few months later, just about the time that ‘Joanne’ faded from view, they flew back to the US and tried to pick up their lives and finish a second album. Ware thought it was time for a payday. He’d taken nothing in the way of an advance but a weekly allowance from RCA in London, and they’d sold a lot of records. But there was nothing, and the RCA accountants informed him that he’d be wasting his time to try to get anything, because the band didn’t have a contract. Only Nesmith had a contract. Ware said he did have a copy of a contract with his name at the bottom and two RCA executives’ names at the bottom and initials on every paragraph. They told him that those were all favours that Nesmith had done to make the band feel good, and that the contract was between RCA and Mike Nesmith, and Screen Gems and Mike Nesmith, and that was it. Merry Christmas, 1970.

          The First National Band, in ill humour, made its second album. Ware conceded that it “was actually a pretty good piece of work” (I liked it), and credited Nesmith with “spawning creativity in the studio.” They did some touring, once again without me, but Ware felt it was pointless, and he quit.