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.

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.