Papa Dee Allen & Linda Ronstadt

Papa Dee Allen

          One day when John Ware and I were sitting at a table in one of the rooms of his house, playing cards and drinking wine, I looked out the window and saw a big, fat black guy knocking on the door to my place across the driveway. I signed off from the card game and went to investigate. The guy looked at me when I asked him what he wanted, and then acted glad to see me. He told me that he’d just arrived on the Coast from Delaware himself, found himself in Claremont, seen the Delaware license plates on my VW bus in the carport, and thought he’d check out who I was.

          Then he said, “Shit, baby, I was afraid you coulda been some old folks or somethin’. Got any shit?”

          So we went into my place and I got out my stash and we smoked some. His name was Dee. It took me a pause or two to figure out what he meant when he said it, that it wasn’t just an initial or something. He was a musician. Played the congas. Had just quit, after many years, something called Manny Klein’s Society Orchestra. And I remembered them playing at my high school Senior Ball, and seeing a big black guy up front stage left playing hand drums.

          I put some head music on my new component stereo set-up, and he just went wild. He’d been into jazz and mainstream so thoroughly that he’d never even heard of the Mothers of Invention, let alone heard them. I don’t think he’d even heard Sgt Pepper, just soft-jazz covers of one or two of the tunes. And it just knocked him out.

          I took Dee over to meet John Ware. He seemed to Ware like an old guy. Ware told me he thought, “Okay, here’s a black guy who says he plays hand drums, but he doesn’t have a gig.” Ware just wasn’t overly impressed. He liked Dee. Dee was a pleasant guy. But he really wasn’t ready to accept Dee’s talk about getting a band.

          A couple years later, after he’d made it big playing in hit after hit with War, Dee was always glad to see me if I’d come to see one of their gigs, and always thanked me for steering him toward rock music. He and Ware got to be fairly friendly, too, I think because of Ware’s friendship with Lee Oskar. Ware told me Papa Dee had always asked him how “that crazy Jew” was getting along when he ran into him.

          Dee died in 1988, on stage, playing hand drums. John Ware told me about it, saying, “I should be so lucky.”

Linda Ronstadt

          When John Ware told me that he was going to be the new drummer for the Stone Poneys, all I knew about them was that during the summer before they’d had a big enough hit for me to have heard about it. “Stone Poneys” had been printed under ‘Different Drum’ on all the jukeboxes, but if I’d ever heard the recording itself it hadn’t made enough of an impression for me to remember it. I’d stopped listening to top-40 radio.

          As before with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Ware helped to get me paying gigs shlepping equipment for his new band, which seemed to spend most of its time rehearsing. There had actually once been a band that was the Stone Poneys, a sort of more-folk-than-rock outfit, but by the time Ware plugged in it was in reality a case of Linda Ronstadt and hired musicians.

          The first time I met Linda Ronstadt I went up to a rehearsal hall they were using to move some equipment. The room was upstairs from something to do with the LA Opera, on Beverly Boulevard. Ware told her who I was and she smiled and said hi. Polite but not that interested in yet another burly amp-shlepper.

          Over the next few months I got to be friendly with some of the guys in the band, and a bit more friendly with Linda. When they went on the road  they travelled without a roadie, which meant no paydays for me when they were out of town.

          Ware tried running the songs he and I were writing by Linda. I had high hopes, as by this time I was, like everyone, in love with her. She was nice about it, but didn’t think the songs were for her.

          When I returned to LA after living in Delaware during the first half of 1969 I worked full-time for Herb Cohen, who was then Linda’s manager. As well as shlepping and setting up amplifiers and instruments, I did a lot of personal work for her, chauffeuring her to and from the airport and taking her car to the garage to get worked on and other miscellaneous jobs, and we got to be fairly friendly.

          I remember in particular working this gig that the Stone Poneys played in Orange County at a place called Musicland, across the road from Disneyland. Everything out there was something-land. They’re clever in Orange County. It was for something like three or four nights. They were on the bill with Jose Feliciano and, headlining, the Righteous Brothers, who at that time were composed of Bobby Hatfield (the high voice) and a low-voice guy he’d hired, Bill Medley having moved on.

          I remember Linda complaining of not knowing what to say to the audiences between songs, and me giving her a second-hand piece of patter that she used: introducing ‘Different Drum’ as “a medley of our hit.”

          One afternoon a few months later Linda, under the influence of some alcohol, came up to me at a gig and said, “Richard, I know you like to play the fool and make a joke out of everything, but I think you always have a point and there’s something serious in just about every silly thing you say.” It was one of the nicest things anybody has ever said to me.

          One day I got a call to open up a rehearsal hall on La Brea that I was managing for Herb Cohen. It was for Linda and the Poneys, Linda having just returned from somewhere back East with a new song that had some promise that she wanted to rehearse. And I knew as soon as she’d run through it just once with John Forsha on acoustic guitar, that the joke about the medley of her hit was over. ‘Long, Long Time’ just had “hit” written all over it. I knew right away it was going to be pretty big, and within a few months it was.

          Shortly after ‘Long, Long Time’ hit the charts she did a three-night gig at a club in Long Beach, as Linda Ronstadt, not the Stone Poneys. On the last night of the gig Linda got a bit drunk, which was no big deal. Only she came up to me and sort of leaned her shoulder against me while the opening act, some forgettable local band, was doing its second set. She asked me which one I thought she should ball after the show: their guitar player or their bass player?

          Now, I, of course, had had a massive crush on Linda from the time I’d met her, I guess almost two years before. Not unusual. Linda made lots of guys horny. Only I’d done a bunch of work for her and she’d always been nice to me. We’d always got on real fine. So I said something like, “Why one of them? How about me, instead?”

          And Linda said, “Oh, Richard, be serious! You’re my friend! Come on, tell me: which one do you think?”

          After I stopped working full-time for Herb Cohen I saw her less and less, especially in the interludes when Ware wasn’t drumming with her. I’d maybe run into her at Cafe Figaro and exchange a crude joke or two in passing. Old pals on different orbits. Then I drifted out of LA and she started becoming a big star.

          By 1975 I was living in San Antonio, keeping myself alive with a minority interest in a headshop – a dope-accessories store. I went to see a concert featuring Linda opening for Willie Nelson in the auditorium at Trinity University.

          It was strange, seeing Linda sing without John Ware behind her with the drums. It was also strange to hear her sing, instead of a medley of her hit, one hit after another for an entire show without once doing ‘Different Drum’. During the break between shows I was walking by one of the doors to backstage and ran into Kenny Edwards from Linda’s band. He remembered me from before.

          Kenny took me backstage for a beer. Linda was nice to me, of course, but the warmth of friendship that had been there six or seven years before was just absent.