John Ware 1971-1975

John Ware 1971-1975

          After the demise of the First National Band Ware returned to the house in Claremont and that arty way of life. He painted. He started playing the Hollywood Living-Room Circuit, which he described as, ‘this loose-knit group of about 20 or 25 guys who played backup for West Hollywood’s I-can’t-make-it-but-I’m-cool folk-rock guys. Hoyt Axton. John Stewart. People like that.’

          Early in 1971 a character in Herb Cohen’s office called Leon Danielle steered him into producing Nansi Nevins (as she spelt it then), the former lead singer with Sweetwater, the opening band at Woodstock. She’d been badly hurt in a nasty car smash, her voice was affected, and she was out of a contract. Ware got me some work doing strong-back-weak-mind stuff for Nansi, cleaning junk out of the back yard of the place where she was rehearsing. Ware thought she was really brilliant, a really good songwriter, but so far off into her own little world that after working with her for the better part of a year he didn’t think he got anywhere. He did eventually do some demos for Warner Brothers, who just dismissed them out of hand.

          Ware then spent almost a year as a sit-down drummer in a six-night-a-weeker playing country standards at a bar in Glendale. It was, he told me, ‘a hideous gig, but it put money in the bank.’ I went to see him once at this gig in 1972. The bar was a barn-like place in a truly dismal neighbourhood. It wasn’t an impressive experience.

          Then a guy he knew from just being around the scene for years approached him about playing drums for Johnnie Tillotson in Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t a fan of late-50s-early-60s white bubblegum pop, but he’d had it with the LA folk-rock-psychedelic music scene and the dive in Glendale, so he and his old high-school bass player from the Continentals, John Selk, started playing some gigs with Tillotson. He spent the summer of 1973 playing with him.

          “Playin’ Las Vegas. Playin’ the Flamingo. Playin’ the Tropicana. Playin’ the Sands. In the lounge. I’d go on stage at ten to ten-thirty, and then I’d go on stage again at about two. It was just awful. I can’t tell you how many times I played ‘Poetry in Motion’ to six people. Sometimes it was six people, one of whom was like Johnnie Carson, with two bimbos de soir, but essentially I was playing to fat, lower-middle-class, drunken gamblers.”

          Whilst engaged in this labour he ran into Kenny Edwards from the Stone Poneys in LA. Edwards had been back in contact with Linda Ronstadt, who was selling tons of records by that time, had a tour lined up with Jackson Browne, and, according Edwards, needed to get serious about a band. A few phone calls later Ware had an audition. He said it felt strange to audition for someone he’d already played with, but he got the gig.

          He loved working for Ronstadt again. He thought she was singing wonderfully, and the band she’d put together was fun to play in: Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Bobby Warford, Kenny Edwards, and Andrew Gold. Jackson Browne also had a band Ware thought was great. They toured for a year of hardly ever being home, both acts travelling on a Continental Trailways bus. It was hardly a rock & roll bus, until they started ripping seats out and getting blow-up rafts from army-navy surplus stores.

          In the autumn of 1973 I was living in Wilmington, Delaware, working for my step-father — just as in 1961 — and married to a woman who had mental-health problems with which I was having difficulty coping. I was wallowing in a sort of beaten-down-by-dead-end-job, terrorised-by-wife state when I heard that Linda Ronstadt was coming to Wilmington, and would be playing at my old high school’s gym. Ware and I were still in touch with each other fairly regularly, and he let me know when the entourage were likely to be arriving at the Hotel Dupont in downtown Wilmington.

          My wife appeared to be in a bit of a quandary over this one. Ware was, manifestly, not a woman about whom she could make a pretence of being jealous. She was, however, intensely jealous over anything and everything that had to do with my former life in Hollywood. She finally made it plain that she would tolerate — barely — me catching up with Ware, but any contact at all with Linda Ronstadt, including going to see the show for free, even if she and I went together, would almost certainly provoke a savage reaction.

          So, after some disruption when Ware — the West Point Hippie and, it seemed, always the unofficial roadie — moved the entourage from the Hotel Dupont to a suitable suburban motel and checked out the concert venue, he and I went out and about on a bit of what in rural New Zealand is called a tikitour. I took him by request to the Duponts’ Winterthur Museum. He seemed to sympathise with my bedraggled state, but he clearly had problems relating to it.

          He really tried to help by telling me a few obvious truths — such as, for instance,  happiness comes from staying at it — and then apologising for sounding smug. He said he was handling continuing life on the road by checking out museums and by practising his drumming constantly, often on a wood-block, to maintain and increase his level of professional competence. He came to the house for a bite to eat and to meet my wife, and then it was off to the concert for him, and a strong bourbon-and-soda and early to marital bed for me.

          The Ronstadt-and-Browne show played in Washington, DC in late 1973 or early 1974, not long after Gram Parsons died. Ware had heard about a girl named Emmylou Harris that Gram had been hanging out with, but he’d never heard any of her music. He met her in a backstage drink-up there.

          “Playing with women is different, backstage. The backstage people are mostly weird. It’s not groupies. Not even groupies for girls. There were, for instance, all those goddamned months that Jerry Brown was on the road with us. Yeeesh! Jerry Brown, governor of the fucken state of California, and his bodyguards, on the road with us. Sitting around in the back of the dressing room kind of wistfully, with moon-struck puppydog-eyes. I couldn’t figure that shit out.”

          At the end of 1973 the tour took a break and Ware took his wife on a three-week vacation to Ireland. When they returned he received a phone call from Peter Asher, who was then managing Linda, telling him that the Heart Like A Wheel album was done, and it was time to go on the road — first class this time. Ware wondered how the album could be done if he hadn’t played a note, himself.

          Asher told him that Gold, the rhythm guitar player, had played drums on the record, that he’d learned Ware’s drum parts by listening to live tapes, and that he’d played on Ware’s drum set, which he’d taken out of the storage hall because that’s the sound that everybody wanted. Asher was mystified that Ware was pissed off, but he was, and he quit.

          About a week later somebody called him and told him that Ian Matthews, who’d been with Fairport Convention, Matthews Southern Comfort, and Plainsong, was back in LA and was looking for a band. Ware knew him from when he’d been in London with Nesmith, made a couple of phone calls, and took the gig. He moved to New York to play with Matthews’s band, which Matthews was calling Plainsong again. They played in England and New York. Ware enjoyed it, but was still earning about $200 a week, plus per diem, and mailed it all, in cash, to Linda Ware in Claremont from a tobacconist on Third Avenue.

          In late 1974 Ware and Matthews were back in LA, looking to put together another band. They fell to networking the bars and recording studios. Ware ran into an old friend named Bobby Warford, who’d been playing some gigs backing up the Everly Brothers, along with Warren Zevon on piano. After tensions with the Everlies had come to a head (Phil Everly smashed his guitar and stormed off the stage midway through a concert), Coleman started looking for country-rock players to come in and play the San Fernando Valley. A scene grew out of this at the Sundance Saloon in rural Calabasas. It was a fairly small dive, but eventually there were six or so bands playing there each week. Each night had a different band, made up of people from major bands who, when they returned to LA from the road, gathered to play with their gang of Tuesday Nighters, or Wednesday Nighters, or Thursday or Friday Nighters, playing only for beer.

          Ware was in the Tuesday Night band at the Sundance for a few years, when he was off the road. Don Everly was the lead singer, and it included Skunk Baxter, Bobby Warford, John Selk, John Hartford, Sneaky Pete, and Albert Lee. If enough people were off the road there were a dozen people in the band, playing behind Don Everly.

          Meanwhile, Ware and Matthews ran into a songwriter named David Palmer in a bar in Pasadena. Palmer had just finished writing all of Carole King’s Jazzman album. Matthews and Palmer didn’t combine well, but Palmer hooked Ware up with Charlie Larkey, who was Carole King’s husband. Larkey was a bass player, playing with Bobby Keys, the legendary sax player.

          Ware started playing a few nights in bars with Larkey and Keys, and whatever their pick-up bands were — usually some of the loose guys from the LA part of the Rolling Stones’ touring band. Keys didn’t like Ware’s playing style (“too simplistic”), but Larkey liked it, and invited Ware up to his and Carole King’s house. Ware went. Then he dragged a set of drums up there. Then David Palmer started falling by.

          After they’d been up there for a few thousand cans of beer, Palmer started bringing songs up. Then King and Palmer were singing together, and they added a couple more people, and started having auditions for more people, and there was a band going, with a talented keyboard player-singer named Michael McDonald. They moved out of the house and into the Alley Rehearsal Halls in North Hollywood, where they worked hard for several months, calling the band Honor Bright. Ware thought it had more than promise, and that in the studio it was a killer. Lou Adler, King’s manager, was excited and chasing record companies.

          But Honor Bright either just was never meant to be, or didn’t happen fast enough. King seemed to Ware to be losing interest in the band and in Larkey. Then the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers OD’d, and in a panic the Doobies called Michael McDonald and asked him to come join them for the rest of that tour, and he left Honor Bright. After two days of what Ware called “acrimonious snivelling about Michael leaving us,” he ran into one of the roadies from the Linda Ronstadt-Jackson Browne tour at the rehearsal hall. The roadie asked what Ware was doing and he told him. The roadie then told Ware that he was just starting work with Emmylou Harris, and she’d been calling around trying to find out who the drummer was downstairs, because that was the sound she wanted.

          That night Ware got a call at home in Claremont from Eddie Tickner, Harris’s manager. He asked if Ware would like to come play drums for her. Ware mentioned Honor Bright and Tickner told him who else was playing with Harris, all of them people Ware thought were great players. He couldn’t say no. He called Palmer and signed off, and two days later they started rehearsing the Hot Band.

          The first gig the Hot Band played was April 15, 1975 in San Francisco, and Ware’s life changed forever on that night. He was staggered. The playing was hotter than anything he’d ever experienced. When Harris ran out of songs, Rodney Crowell jumped up and sang. They’d never rehearsed. There weren’t any rules. They just played.

          After finishing the first 115-minute show, with another show to go, Ware estimated that he’d probably already lost eight to ten pounds (3-4.5 kg) in sweat. It was all over the floor underneath his drum kit. He ran back behind the curtain and sank to the floor, almost passing out. He looked next to him and saw that Crowell was there doing the same thing. They looked at each other and both said, “Wow! What was that?” And they embraced. Out front, the crowd went insane. Close to three years of what for Ware was the most staggering music possible followed.

          I remember sitting in my dismal little “garage apartment” in San Antonio Texas, where I was eking out a miserable living as a waiter in an overpriced steak house, reading a letter from Ware in which he told me that he had just joined this new outfit called the Hot Band, which was more fun than anything he’d ever done before in his life. They were playing behind some singer named Emmylou Harris. I think I’d maybe heard of the name, but she really wasn’t in my frame of reference. I wasn’t plugged into that stream of popular music in the mid-to-late 70s.