John Kuehne

John Kuehne

          Sometime during the Autumn of 1969 John Ware showed up at my granny flat in the Wilshire District with the Stone Poney’s new bass player, a big (196 cm, or 6’-5”), fat guy with beginning-to-thin hair and a hick accent whom Ware introduced as John London. He had what Ware and I (plagiarising a Claremont potter named Bill Meeks) called Dunlop’s Disease: his gut done lopped over his belt. But the big guy was friendly enough, genial, even charming, with a rich baritone voice, and Ware gave me signals from behind his back to take him seriously.

          Over the years that he and I were to know each other I learned his story. His real surname was Kuehne — London was his Hollywood name. He’d been brought up in a military family in Texas and Germany. In high school in San Antonio he had fallen in with Mike Nesmith. He later told me about how he and Nesmith had worked after school in high school in the mid-1950s for Nesmith’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, who had invented Liquid Paper (Twink in NZ). They’d worked in her garage filling those little jalirs with funnels from the bigger vats she’d made the stuff in (She didn’t start to make a real living from the stuff until the mid-1960s — the big money came later).

          Anyway, they’d formed sort of a folk duo in high school, Kuehne on stand-up bass (“The bass was the natural instrument for big boys”) and Mike doing guitar and vocals. They called themselves Mikey-and-John. That, apparently, was how things went on in most things for them: Nesmith was the leader; Kuehne was the side-kick. They’d then gone on to San Antonio College (a two-year junior college I was later to get to know somewhat myself), where they won the school talent contest in 1963 (“hands down,” Kuehne told me) with ‘Fair Thee Well My Pretty Little Princess’. Having been judged #1 at SAC, they decided to go out to Hollywood to make the big time.

          The ‘London’ appellation had been Nesmith’s idea. As Kuehne put it, Nesmith had pointed out that from a show-biz point of view, ‘Kuehne’ just didn’t make it. Nobody could tell how to pronounce it (Keenie) when they saw it; nobody could spell it when they heard it. It was the mid-sixties: things British were happenin’. So ‘London’ it was. Over the years I’d take to calling him Jean Paree, Juan Madrid, Johann Berlin, Giovanni Roma, Jan Stockholm, Ivan Moscow, and so on.

          Anyway, off they went to Hollywood, and onto some small-dollar folk-club circuits, and “ate beans together,” as Kuehne always put it, for a couple of years before they answered the ad in the Daily Variety in the summer of ’65 for performers to audition for what was to become the Monkees.

          They went to the carpeted Hollywood office of whoever-it-was in order to fill out their formal job applications, which were — somewhat bizarrely — on standard, any-job-in-the-world application forms. Kuehne told me that he was busily filling out the form, trying to remember all the little penny-ante jobs he’d done to put down under ‘Experience.’ And he looked over at Nesmith to ask him about some gig they’d done at a folk club in Oklahoma, and Nesmith wasn’t writing anything at all. He was finished. And Kuehne asked him how he could be done so soon, and Nesmith showed him his app. He’d written the word ‘LIFE’ in large capital letters diagonally across the Experience section. Of course, it wasn’t Kuehne who got the job.

          But he did get to be the guy in the gorilla suit. Basically his job with the Monkees was as Nesmith’s stand-in. When the stars are off doing important things, like drinking coffee, the stand-ins move around for the production crews while they’re blocking shots. He also picked up pocket money as an extra, most notoriously as the guy in the gorilla suit when the script called for one. For a while he played bass with a group in fringed buckskin jackets called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. They were supposed to be another Monkees, but didn’t get either real backing from Colgems or a TV show, and disappeared.

          When the Monkees TV show was cancelled in 1969, obviously the people who had jobs as stand-ins and extras, as well as people who had jobs as actors being Monkees, were out of work. Nesmith had written ‘Different Drum”, Linda Ronstadt’s sole hit at the time, so he was able to call up Ronstadt and get Kuehne the gig with the Stone Poneys when the guy who had been playing bass for her quit.

          So I set up Kuehne’s amps for him when he played in LA for a couple of years, as one of the Stone Poneys, then the Corvettes, then the First National Band, and we got to know each other a little. He got so used to playing in a rhythm section with Ware that he said his job was to keep his right thumb in time with Ware’s left foot.

          Then, after the First National Band dissolved in acrimony, he went back to Texas. In August 1972, Ware phoned me with a roadie job Kuehne had told him about, wondering what I was doing. I was then doing little but wretching. Kuehne was working for a tour-booking company in San Antonio called Star Attractions. All I had to do was call him and the job was mine. I did and it was.

          I gave away everything that wouldn’t fit in my ’66 Ford Ranchwagon Six, drained my waterbed mattress and left it on the lawn for whoever would want it, gathered up my little dog Naomi, said good-bye to my friend Alfredo, and headed for the Lone Star State.

          Star Attractions put me up in a hotel called the El Tropicano on the San Antonio Riverwalk for two or three days until shooting me out on a tour. The day after I arrived I went out to Star Attractions’ office in a newish glass office building on a circumferential freeway called Loop 410.

          I’ve always liked the word circumferential.

          Star Attractions was basically in the business of buying acts — preferably acts people would recognise, however vaguely, from TV — at their monthly rate and booking them in as many different country clubs, dinner clubs, and military clubs as possible at their nightly rate, then providing transport and stage production. Another roadie and I were responsible for lights and sound on the tours.

          Kuehne was in the office when I checked in, all smiles and warm South Texas richness in his voice, sounding like Governor Connolly, selling some act over the phone to some club manager, smiling and winking at me as he did so. It looked like a piece of cake.

          I left my car (with cardboard boxes intact) and my dog Naomi with Kuehne and his wife Vicki at their newly-built house outside Loop 410 (which was the far suburbs in those days) and flew with my fellow-roadie from San Antonio to Panama City, Florida, where the tour equipment was being stored. When I came back a month later to get Naomi, my car, and my stuff to take to my new digs in Biloxi, Mississippi, I learned that Naomi had chewed a hole in a favoured bedspread of Vicki’s. Naomi was forgiven. I was somewhat less forgiven, but forgiven nonetheless.

          Star Attractions folded soon afterward, and Kuehne and I really weren’t in touch with each other again until the Spring of 1974. Things were going badly for me again, as usual. I was living in Wilmington, Delaware, my job situation was shit (as usual), and my first marriage was falling apart. When Ware had been through with a Linda Ronstadt tour a few months earlier he’d told me that another company was trying to pick up the ball that Star Attractions had dropped. Trying to give myself some hope, I phoned Kuehne in San Antonio. And Kuehne had said yes, there was a new outfit called On Stage, and he was positive, encouraging even, about my prospects with it.

          The night my first marriage folded I called Kuehne in San Antonio and he said Come on down. When the bus got me to San Antonio I based myself at first for a day at Kuehne’s house in an upmarket in-close neighbourhood called Monte Vista before finding myself a cheap place to flop, and at first my social life centred on the Kuehnes — watching sports on TV over a beer, and other normal stuff.

          He told me that after Star Attractions folded he’d got a job as a nightclub manager through the hustler who’d been Star Attractions’ CEO, but he hadn’t liked it. “Counting cocktail napkins and toothpicks!”, as he put it, his face filled with disgust. He considered himself lucky when somebody else had lined up a job for him at the newspaper.

          Sometimes he’d get out an acoustic guitar and play around with it. I remember at about this time him writing the start of a country song that went, “Two red downers and a yellowjacket / Make a man feel better when he just can’t hack it / In the cit-eee”. But by this time Kuehne wasn’t even smoking pot anymore. As he put it, “All I need is for my mother to be by visiting the grandchildren and then the cat walks in carrying a bag of weed.”

          What had really dismayed, however, was when his classic Porsche sports car had been stolen.

          Chez Kuehne did differ from other houses in Monte Vista, at least in part, by having a large number of large abstract expressionist paintings by John Ware on the walls and in the storage shed out back. He gave me the one I had watched Ware paint and that I still have.

          Kuehne had a job in the real estate advertising section of the classified display department at Rupert Murdoch’s first U.S. newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, and seemed to be making a grown-up’s living. Sometimes I’d see him stopping off for a moment with a camera on his way to take a photo of some house that was for sale, and he’d be smiling like he’d just won big in a poker game.

          After I’d been in San Antonio for a few weeks Kuehne drove me out to some place in the suburbs that’d advertised a cheap ’59 Karmann-Ghia for sale. I bought it for $200, and it sure was a $200 car. But when I sold it a few years later I got $215 for it.

          When I got married again in March, 1976 Kuehne provided a big vat of his special, secret-recipe chili for the reception. He had a big, roll-top desk then — one with seemingly dozens of little drawers and pigeon-holes and compartments. He kept the chili recipe in a locked drawer. The chili took all night and morning to slow-cook, as I remember, and it was wonderful. No beans.

          In early 1977 my job situation was once again in a perilous condition, and Kuehne came to my rescue one more time. He told me about a job that was open selling advertising at the newspaper, and said to use him as a reference. I got the job.

          I think it was later that year that Kuehne moved out to a house on the banks of Lake Medina. He had to commute about 45-minutes-plus, depending on traffic, each way to work and back every day, but he loved it. He and Vicki had been having some problems (I don’t think she liked living that far from town), but I think they were still together at this time. I went out to visit a few times — rode around in Kuehne’s boat; ate barbecue (Kuehne’s special recipe, of course) and drank less bourbon than he did. We talked about people at the newspaper and, I’m afraid to say, the Old Days back in Hollywood. Once, at about the time he was moving in there, we’d gone through an old cardboard carton of clippings and fan shit from his days with the Monkees and Lewis and Clarke.

          In 1978 a couple of the editors I knew at the Express-News got the idea of using me as a photographic model for the cover of the Weekender, their Friday entertainment tabloid insert, comedically illustrating the week’s lead story. This was just after I’d broken up with my second wife. Kuehne phoned me the evening after the first Weekender cover came out. He and Vicki were having drinks with their former next-door-neighbour, Cheryl, who had just broken up with their still next-door-neighbour, Randy, and she’d seen my picture on the Weekender cover, and she thought I looked cute, and was it okay for them to put her on the phone? Sure. And we made some kind of date, and I was launched into the first of a depressingly similar series of six-week affairs.

          I think it was fairly soon afterward that Kuehne and Vicki broke up. One of his former groupies in Hollywood had made contact with him and had flown out to San Antonio for old times’ sake. I made what I thought were the expected that-must’ve-been-a-hot-time noises, but he disagreed vehemently. “It was nothing! It was awful! It was that Hollywood shit! No love. No children. No point.” Then he hooked up with a well-upholstered Texas girl named Lana, and there were barbecues with bourbon out at the lake again.

          When Ware came to San Antonio for the filming of Honeysuckle Rose, and went with Kuehne and me to Mi Tierra, the big 24-hour Mexican restaurant in the downtown mercado, San Antonio’s touristy Mexican market, we ordered enchiladas and cabrito and beer. After the waitress brought us our Carta Blancas and we’d filled up our glasses, Kuehne lifted his glass and said, “Here’s to good friends,” right out of some tacky beer ad. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

          Kuehne had this picture of me as being somehow kinda show-bizzy and Hollywood. Maybe it was something he kept in his mind to activate nostalgia. Anyway, in the Fall of ’79, he left the Express-News and took a job as publisher of the program guide for a microwave-broadcast pay-TV movie channel, called Showbiz. He asked me if I wanted to leave the paper, too, to become his advertising manager.

          I went out to the featureless suburban office park where the operation had its headquarters to meet the guy who owned the channel. I’m afraid we made negative impressions on each other. I must have struck him as a small-timer. He struck me as a spoiled rich kid who didn’t know what he was doing and was full of shit. We were probably both right.

          But Kuehne was smooth, and the guy made me a formal job offer, and I felt as if I owed Kuehne enough to take it. The money was good but the job wasn’t real. Cable TV was about to come in, and the station had neither numbers nor cachet. The Express-News ran its program listings weekly. Sales did not come thick and fast, but the pressure did.

          It was easy for me to explain to Kuehne and his boss and the consultant his boss hired why the ads weren’t flowing in, when they challenged me on it, but they had no time for things like offering value for money. Kuehne kept telling me that I just had to be flashy and Showbiz (which was the publication’s name), and just put down the “soggy old newspaper on the front lawn” in favour of our slick magazine. They all coached me to avoid specifics, to concentrate on bullshit, and to sell blue sky, while wondering aloud what my problem was. Only advertisers weren’t buying blue sky. They wanted numbers. Then I found out that the circulation figures I’d been using, the ones that hadn’t been impressing anyone, were themselves gross fictions. The rag was a bigger loser than I’d thought. Anybody I did sell an ad to soon found out I’d been ripping them off.

          Things came to a head when Kuehne had me into his office one day. He seemed a bit uncomfortable. He started out going over how far back we went together, then said something like, “I know this doesn’t sound too good, and you’re probably going to take it the wrong way, but, well, aren’t you maybe being a little bit too honest for this job?” I reckoned that if he had to ask the question, I most certainly was. The next day I went to my old boss at the Express-News, who was glad to hire me back. I’d been with Showbiz Publications for two months.

          Kuehne and Lana got married in late 1981 or early 1982 — had a real do in one of those huge and flashy Baptist churches that dot the San Antonio suburbs. Alcohol-free reception. It didn’t seem at all like him, being the beer and bourbon-lover that I knew him to be. I wondered what he was up to, but he seemed smiley enough. I’m not sure, but I think he went to work for his father-in-law for a while.

          After I left the newspaper, I remember him getting me a job with his father-in-law moving some stuff out of a warehouse. I’d been more drunk the day and evening before than I was accustomed to being, and was so hung over that I just worked a half a day and split.

          And then he was divorced again, and he was staying at his parents’ house. And then he got back together again with his Baptist wife and moved to the Gulf Coast: an address on Padre Island, maybe ten or fifteen minutes down the beach road from Port Aransas. I went down there to visit in 1983.

          He was working on promoting a real-estate development, a high-rise beachfront condominium to be called The Dolphin. The colour scheme of the decor in the sales office, and on the glossy brochures and whatnot, was mauve and puce.

          It wasn’t funky Port Aransas, that’s for sure, and I’m sure that old Padre Island hands, lovers of funkiness and fishing, were pissed off as hell at the prospect of something that would look like Miami Beach going up just down the road.

          The money behind the project was Nesmith’s. Kuehne told me a story about finding an old coffee cup when he’d been moving out of his lake house. The cup had some sort of symbolic value from their days as a duo. Now, I don’t think Kuehne and Nesmith had talked to each other since the demise of the First National Band, lo those many years before. But Kuehne decided to send Nesmith the cup with a note with what he told me was “some sort of corny shit” about how the memories in the cup more than filled it, and he and Nesmith had achieved a rapprochement. Then Nesmith had suggested that they get together on a project, with him providing the capital and Kuehne the creativity. The result was The Dolphin.

          Kuehne and Lana were living in a tightly laid-out apartment high up another high-rise not too far down the beach from where The Dolphin was planned. Security at their building was tight, but the mosquitoes were horrible. We went out to dinner at a steak house in Corpus Christi. I was supposed to spend the night, but between the mosquitoes and Naomi having to stay out in the car (no dogs allowed in the building), I gave up on it about midnight and drove back to San Antonio.

          Some time later I heard that with a drop in oil prices and fluctuations in the Gulf Coast luxury real-estate market, the Dolphin project fell through. And Kuehne and I gradually lost touch with each other. I heard that he was back selling newspaper advertising.

          Then, in mid-2000 John Ware mentioned in an email, rather incidentally, something about “since John Kuehne died”. I wrote him back demanding more information. He told me that Kuehne had been having some health problems due to his weight, but seemed to be cruising along okay. Then, one night in February, 2000, he and Lana went out for some pizza and beer. When they got back home he sat down on the edge of the bed and complained of indigestion, and then it was all over. He was 58.

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.