John Ware 1975-1982

John Ware 1975-1982

          Emmylou and the Hot Band didn’t just go on tour at first because two of the guys in the band were still playing for Elvis and one was playing for Neil Diamond. They played weekends, and gigs near Elvis gigs. They started recording in April 1975 at what was essentially a derelict house in Coldwater Canyon with a mobile unit in back of it.

          At the outset they were bigger in Europe than in the US. Three weeks after the band had formed they were playing major concerts in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, and Birmingham. Then they went on a tour with James Taylor. They toured. They recorded. They got big. And by some time in 1976 Ware got into cocaine.

          Before this he hadn’t been into controlled substances. Marijuana only put him to sleep, he hadn’t tried cocaine more than once or twice, and he’d never done acid. He abused beer and cheap wine, which can be nasty, but legal. Then, even though his nose was a mess, and packing alkaline powder into it just had to be unwise, he said to himself one afternoon on the way into the studio, “I’m gonna start doin’ this stuff. I want this rock and roll lifestyle. I want whatever it means, whether it means early death or somethin’, I want that. I want it to lead me to somethin’ else.”

          He caught on to the cocaine lifestyle quickly. The band would shlep their own bags and apply their out-of-pocket band expenses for valets — for carrying baggage in and out of airports, and from vans into hotels, and so forth — into blow. Ware, enthusiastically addicted, was the keeper of the vials. By the Spring of 1976 they had drug dealers on the road with them. They had FedEx packages of cocaine coming in almost every day on tour. They all knew that was stupid, but did it anyhow.

          In the summer of 1977 the Hot Band was touring with Willie Nelson. One night in August they had to ride their bus through the night to get to Memphis for a show, arriving at two-thirty or three in the morning. Their road manager was concentrating on crew work and Ware had started doing his familiar West Point Hippie jobs. He checked them into the motel and rolled everybody out of the back of the bus and into their rooms.

          After a few hours sleep he hauled himself up at about six or so, called room service for coffee and turned on the TV news. A story about a rumour that Elvis had some kind of a medical problem kept coming up and then going away. Then, shortly before seven o’clock, a TV reporter announced that Elvis was indeed dead. Then other reports confirmed the news.

          They were in Memphis, with Graceland just down the road, and three of the guys in the band worked for Elvis.

          Ware started with Glen D Hardin, the piano player. He tapped on his door and said, “Glen! Wake up!”

          Hardin responded with an early-in-the-morning mumble. Ware kept at it until Hardin sounded halfway lucid.

          Then Ware said, “Elvis is dead.” He said the ensuing silence was like a piece of rock: the sound of evaporating paychecks.

          Harris got pregnant soon afterward and they stayed in LA for a while, doing coke and recording albums. Then she miscarried and the band was unemployed for a while. Life on the road with cocaine had been taking its toll, and the Hot Band started going through personnel changes. When she’d recovered they hit the road with Version Two of the Hot Band in mid-1978. Not all the replacement players got on as well, at least with Ware, as the originals, but he stayed on.

          Although I was mostly unaware of it, the Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band phenomenon soared on. She won Grammy awards. They played with musical legends. They filled stadiums in the US and Europe, and Ware acquired a repertoire of anecdotes involving music, sex, cocaine, and big money.

          He came through San Antonio, where I was working as an advertising jerk, once in 1978. We got together and drove out to Medina Lake where John Kuehne lived, but Kuehne wasn’t home. I remember Ware taking pictures of Rancho Kuehne with a funky little instamatic and explaining that he didn’t have a nifty 35mm camera because, “Hell, I’m not Ansel Adams.”

          I thought that was a bit extreme. I reckoned a person doesn’t have to be the best at something to want to do it for fun. I guess that’s a difference derived from our divergent environments. Or else he was being Warholian on me and I wasn’t there with him on that then. Otherwise we yakked and yakked and it was okay.

          By 1979 he was doing most of Harris’s tour financial stuff, and one day he saw some paperwork sitting on a desk in the accounting office showing that Ricky Skaggs was on a regular salary, unlike everyone else in the Hot Band, and had been for a year or so. The rest got paid well when they worked, but not when they were off.

          He and the only remaining guy from the original band, Hank DeVito, were both enormously pissed off, and DeVito started making plans to move out of LA and back to New York to start doing other things. In order to try to keep them, Harris’s manager offered Ware and DeVito half his management share of the act. He told Ware that since he was already doing most of the work on the road he’d just give it to them. DeVito didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Ware decided to stay, and from that point on was Harris’s manager for live performances.

          He’d chosen the bucks: “And what bucks! It was a serious money change. I mean, the next time I saw Eddie [the manager], he said, ‘Oh, by the way, I got some money for you.’

          I said, ‘Oh. cool,’ because Hank and I had instantly gone on a salary.

          He said, ‘I’ve got a check. It’s in my briefcase. I’ll give it to you after the gig,’ and backstage after we played he handed me a check for like $35,000! Oh-yeah! I can get used to this!”

          So in 1979-81 Ware was running the Hot Band show. He contracted. He played. He did the paperwork. He ran the crews. He controlled merchandising. He started getting t-shirts made. He got out back to Claremont when he could.

          One time in 1979, Ware blew through San Antonio on some family business with some friends of his parents. Harris had just won a Grammy — he was calling her Grammylou — and he was on a roll. We met at his hotel and made a strategic retreat to a nearby bar. He was coming down and he wanted me to bring some speed to keep him going. I was devastated to acknowledge that I didn’t have any. We sat and drank and agreed about stuff and he told me about The Big Time.

          He told me about doing Harris’s business negotiations, about holding up concert promoters for huge sums of money and getting it, and he wondered if he was losing his soul to greed, but he said he didn’t think so. His clothes, as always, looked great; his hair was right-on. He carried himself with his usual easy confidence. The cocktail waitresses, I could see, were impressed.

          He told me that he’d begun to recognise that all the personnel changes in the Hot Band were killing him musically. As they started adding people who copied the people who played the original stuff, they became for him a technically proficient, highly-paid bar band. By 1979 he felt they’d become very professional and very slick, with everybody on stage, except for Harris and himself, playing somebody else’s parts, copying the patterns and riffs of the band’s original players. Then Ware started having to learn the parts again after time off — listening to the records to remember what it was that he’d played. He told me that he thought that copying himself was an unhealthy thing to do.

          In late 1979 I got a call from Ware that he was coming into San Antonio with the Emmylou Harris entourage to film a scene in a Willie Nelson movie at the Hemisfair Arena. I went with Kuehne, who was selling advertising for the same newspaper I worked for, down to the Hemisfair Plaza with my little dog Naomi, and Ware got us into the area where all the trailers were. He was only there in San Antonio for the movie with Harris because he was managing. He had nothing to do with the movie itself.

          He was pleased as punch to see Naomi, family that she was, and picked her up and took her into Harris’s trailer to show around. Harris went ballistic about a dog being in there with wee baby Meghann, whom she was at that time nursing in the back. Ware told me that for months after Meghann had been born everyone had had to wear surgical masks when inside Harris’s house, even if only for a few seconds. Not to be in her room — just to be in the house. The little dog in a confined space put Harris way over the top. She shouted lots of “Get that dog out of here with the baby” things, and we tried to be reassuring with dignity without great success. Later the two Johns and I went to Mi Tierra, the big 24-hour Mexican restaurant in the city’s downtown mercado.

          By 1979-1981, Ware felt that Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band had sunk “into the oblivion of playing the same stuff over and over again, and spending all the money that we could possibly get on drugs.” They also had come to the point where they didn’t even like each other. It seems to me now that Ware at least was begging the question of life: he played on with the Hot Band because of the money, which he spent on cocaine so that he could get himself up to play on with the Hot Band.

          In 1980 the Emmylou Harris entourage made a tour stop in Austin, an hour’s drive up Interstate 35 from San Antonio. It was Big Time, more or less: a concert at the Superdrum and taping an Austin City Limits TV show.

          Ware was definitely managing the operation. When he had more or less done the things he needed to do we met at the bar of the hotel, some in-the-process-of-being-renovated Victorian structure, and had drinks. His nephew, who was a student at SW Texas State in San Marcos (about midway between San Antonio and Austin), was there. He was a nice kid.

          Vanessa, Emmylou’s wardrobe mistress, was there, too, a tallish woman with lots of frizzy reddish hair. She and Ware seemed to be hanging together some. I wondered if it had something to do with him managing things. Well, not directly. Vanessa had been his mistress since about the time he’d started managing the show, as I was to find out later.

          The shows went by slickly and professionally. The people in the audience all seemed to know the repertoire, but I didn’t. I’d never been an Emmylou fan.

          Backstage after the show at Austin City Limits Ware laid out some lines of coke on a make-up table, and since he’d given me a snort earlier, I queued up with the band for a reinforcement toot. Coke is like that; it doesn’t last long. But one or two of the guys in the band took umbrage at my presence in the line. They’d put down money for their dose of the Andean alkaloid. I wasn’t in the financial frame. But Ware told everyone that he’d paid for mine, and I went ahead.

          The high energy, the whisky, and the cocaine — to which I was unaccustomed — turned things blurry for me. I remember us wandering around the darkened hotel for a long time long after midnight, looking at the renovation work and talking trash.

          Then, in March 1981 I had a bit of money and some credit still on my MasterCard, so I made a sentimental journey out to L.A. It’d been more than eight-and-a-half years since I’d left. My second day there I drove my rental car out to Ware’s new house. He had at last more or less broken up with Linda Ware and was living, I believe, with Vanessa. The house was in some far northern fringe suburb of the Southern California megalopolis called La Cañada. It was bare and white and clean and concrete and modern and had a view — a real cocaine-ish house and a long way in many ways from Mills Avenue in Claremont.

          We went out for a drink at a local suburban franchise saloon. Ware was in that age-old pickle: he wanted his wife and he wanted his mistress, too. I couldn’t help him. He drove us into town to the Emmylou rehearsal hall compound and scored a bit of coke from a dealer who lived across the street and apparently made his daily bread more or less entirely from those working in or visiting the compound. Ware was feeling put upon by coke at this time. I remember him complaining that he was spending as much on coke a month as he was spending per semester on Vanessa’s son’s exclusive private school, apparently the same one Frank Zappa’s kids went to. ‘Good thing you got that much to send down the drain and still live well, Johnnie,’ I thought.

          Soon afterward he decided that if the Hot Band was to survive, it was going to have to be without cocaine. He quit coke himself in the Spring of ’81, which he told me was surprisingly easy, much easier than quitting tobacco, then put it off-limits for the rest of the band, telling them, “If you’re wired, you’re fired.”

          Ware had developed carpal tunnel syndrome to the point where his hands hurt so badly it was hard to finish the shows. The physical pain wasn’t all that was unpleasant. He couldn’t even stay in the same hotels with the band anymore. He booked them in. He went in the mornings and paid everybody’s bills. But he stayed elsewhere because although he’d made that rule about no drugs, he didn’t want to be there to enforce it. He didn’t want to be a cop.

          They finished the tour with the second of two shows at the Greek Theatre, did two or three encores, and then Ware ran up to the front of the stage, waved at the crowd, did a couple of bows, held Emmy’s hand, gave her a big hug, said “See yuh!”, and he was gone.