A Light for the City
October 12, 2008

We were dressed in black and seated in the choir loft at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. More than a hundred of us had rehearsed with the Nashville Choir’s leader, John Coates. We had rehearsed with the conductor of the evening, David Hamilton. It was our job to provide background vocals for several artists who had gathered to honor the career of Michael W. Smith at a 25th anniversary gala performance. We opened the evening with a medley of Michael’s worship songs, beginning with one of my favorites, Shine On Us. (It appeared on a recording, My Utmost for His Highest, for which Michael wrote several songs.) That led us into Hosanna and then all the way back to How Majestic Is Your Name, one of Michael’s first and best known praise songs.

How powerfully music can return you in memory to a particular time and place! It was Belmont Church, in the early 1980s…I wasn’t a member there, so I must have been visiting for a special service or program. Michael came bounding down the aisle and gave me a hug and said, “I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry.” He was so excited. He and I had co-written a couple of songs together because we were both published by Randy Cox at Paragon Music, which later became Meadowgreen, a Sony subsidiary. These days those copyrights are administered by Universal.

My favorite of the two songs, Waiting, we recorded in the eight-track studio at Hummingbird Productions, where I worked. I had heard Kathy Troccoli sing at church (before her first album), so we hired her to sing this ballad of yearning which compares a woman’s waiting for her true love with our waiting for Jesus’ return. As far as I know, no one else has ever recorded it, but just this year I received royalties from Psalm 42, the other song he and I co-wrote. I don’t recall our recording a demo of it. I’m trying to contact Universal to find out who recently recorded it. It would be amazing to hear the song after so many years.

After the choir finished our opening songs and had been seated, the master of ceremonies for the evening took the stage. Bill Gaither is ubiquitous on TV these days with his Homecoming gospel music shows, but early on I knew of Bill and his wife Gloria as songwriters. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s we were singing their praise choruses, He Touched Me and There’s Just Something About That Name and Because He Lives.

I am grateful that many times I have been privileged to meet and thank songwriters who have moved me and changed my life. Bill is one of those. I was on a plane to L.A. when I recognized him across the aisle. I only said a few words of thanks to him, but it meant much to me to be able to express my gratitude to him personally. I’m thankful that he used his gifts to touch the lives of so many and help us sing out our gratitude for God’s love. Gloria is the primary lyricist, but I have yet to meet her.

Next, on stage came four men who were Michael’s original touring band. So much history with the first guy! Chris Harris and I were band members together in Fireworks in 1977-78. We later worked for six years together at Hummingbird Productions. Many years and a lot of living later, Chris and I were sitting in the lobby of the Vanderbilt hospital where his son Brandon was recovering from a terrible car wreck. As he introduced me to another friend, we discovered something we hadn’t known about our shared history. We both made the decision to quit the jingle business on the same night.

That jingle session in 1987 was yet another in a seemingly endless stream of late nights, impossible deadlines and frustrating circumstances. The product was Kotex and it was four in the morning when we finished the vocals. The music was FedExed off to Chicago or New York or wherever the client was. As he drove away from that session, Chris prayed, “God, You’ve got to get me out of this.” He said it was only weeks later when the call came from Smitty (This is how most friends refer to Michael Whittaker Smith, the honoree of the evening.) hiring Chris to be the bass player on his first big road trip. Instead of asking God to remove me from the situation, I just decided to leave it cold. I’ve wondered what might have happened had I exercised the same wisdom Chris did.

Next on stage came Chris’s brother-in-law Mark Heimermann. I remember the night I first met the Heimermann family in the late ‘70s, so many of them crowding into my then-favorite Nashville restaurant, the Laughing Man. (It no longer exists, and nothing has taken its place.) The whole family was in town for one of Belmont Church’s Come Together Thanksgiving weekends. Chris may not have imagined when he found his wife Jan that he was marrying into a musical dynasty. Elder brother Charlie is a composer as well as a singer in the Nashville Symphony Choir; a choral composition of his was performed for the Pope in recent years. Younger brother Mark and Chris later formed a group called Prism which produced four albums of hymns, reimagined with contemporary pop arrangements. Brother-in-law Don Wise is also a gifted musician, as are many of the family’s next generation.

Following Chris and Mark onstage was Wayne Kirkpatrick. When Wayne was still a student at Belmont University, he brought a demo tape to me at Hummingbird. At that time, it was one of my jobs to review all the demos submitted and evaluate them for quality of musicianship, writing, performance, etc. I would then give the evaluation sheets and tapes to the producers to recommend a small percentage of all the demo submissions. Wayne was one I had rated highly. Years later his evaluation form surfaced in some office housecleaning and the person who found it happened to know Wayne, so I think she gave it to him as a keepsake. I had never spoken to him about the story so I enjoyed sharing it with him in the hall before rehearsal earlier that day.

The fourth guy, Chris Rodriguez, played guitar in Michael’s touring band and went on to accomplish much in his own musical career. He and I happened to share a flight to L.A. once and had an excellent discussion about Israel, which has been a subtext of my life. So there they were, his original touring band, singing another medley of Michael’s memorable ‘80s songs, Secret Ambition and I Will Be Here for You, along with a black gospel version of Nothing But the Blood.

I’m not much of a TV watcher and especially not a fan of all the talent competitions which have become such a prominent part of our culture. I find that intense desire and yearning and disappointment very difficult to watch, having lived through it in my own life and in the lives of many around me. But Michael mentioned to me that his family regularly spends time watching American Idol together. The kids’ friends come over and everyone hunkers down with popcorn.

So of course it meant much to him to have Idol winners Melinda Doolittle and Jordin Sparks sing the song he wrote in memory of the Columbine High School tragedy, This is Your Time. Jordin was one of his backup vocalists when we in the Nashville Choir sang behind him in a Christmas concert a few years ago, and she did the same amazing job on that night as she did on this, powerfully interpreting Michael’s song All Is Well. I believe it’s one of the most moving melodies he’s written.

The Nashville Choir also sang backgrounds for his most recent Christmas album, the 2007 It’s a Wonderful Christmas. I’d never recorded in quite this way before. With so many voices, there was no way each one could have headphones, so we were asked to bring personal radios with headphones and tune to a particular radio frequency, and the recording feed was broadcast to it. Amazing.

I’m not sure why Ricky Skaggs was on the program because I don’t know what his and Michael’s association has been. Ricky’s been a leader in Bluegrass music, the protégé of Bill Monroe, and is well known for his Christian witness. I’ve never met him but I pitched a country song to his company (the only country song I’ve ever written, The Laundramat Waltz) and I stood nearby as he and his wife’s family, The Whites, sang in the lobby of the Green Hills movie theater for the premiere of O Brother, Where Art Thou? I know a lot of people who know him, including his recent production company manager, whose wife is in my book club. That’s Nashville for you.

Earlier in the afternoon before the MWS gala began, I was standing in the hallway telling Wayne Kirkpatrick my story about his Hummingbird “evaluation” when Mark Heimermann, Chris Harris and his son Brandon all gathered with us. As we stood chatting, down the hall came Amy Grant looking for the dressing rooms. Amy had her Harris-Teeter grocery bag, a couple of other bags or purses, and her guitar. She looked weary and a little befuddled. You wouldn’t have imagined that she could put on a black dress and sparkly earrings and come out on stage looking like a million bucks just a couple of hours later, but she did.

Amy is the fourth daughter of one of my grandmother’s doctors, Burton Grant. Her mom, Gloria, once went to get a prescription filled for my grandmother, because the weather was so cold. That’s the kind of gracious people they are. My grandmother was in a garden club with Amy’s grandmother, Zell Grant. I didn’t know these things until I was telling my mother about singing background vocals on a young girl’s album back in the fall of 1976 and she clued me into how many ways we knew the family. At the time we met, Amy was sixteen and a member of the Belmont Church’s youth group of which Brown Bannister was a leader. (More about Brown and me later on.)

Brown had moved to Nashville, with his friend Chris Christian, after graduating from Abilene Christian University. Chris (aka Lon Christian Smith) was an ambitious young Texas businessman who saw his future in music and made a lot of things happen very quickly. That year, 1976, he had worked a deal with Word Records to produce ten artists, many of his own choosing. He charged Brown with the task of becoming a recording engineer almost overnight. Brown’s early engineering sessions included lessons from the studio musicians as to which dial on the sound board did what.

With Brown’s help, Amy made a tape of some original songs she intended as a gift to her parents. She had written these songs in an attempt to communicate with her Harpeth Hall classmates about the love of Jesus which had become so real to her. Brown played the tape for Chris, and Chris played the tape over the phone for the Word people in Waco. “Sign her up!” they said. Thus Amy became one of the ten acts Chris had contracted to produce that year.

Since it was low budget and since Amy was in high school, many of the recording sessions were done outside normal studio hours. Sessions usually ran 10-1, 2-5 and 6-9. I was one of a handful of slightly older singers who were thrilled at the opportunity to record, to invent our own background vocals, to stay up late being creative and sometimes, occasionally, make a little money. (Not union scale, but we were so poor that we were still grateful.) We were in our twenties so to Amy we were “grownups” but we didn’t feel very grown up.

Marty McCall, Gary Pigg and I found that we worked well together. We were inventive, our voices blended (mine was the fuzzy bonding material between the two unique voices of the men), and we were quick. The three of us had the privilege of singing background vocals on most of the ten projects Chris produced that year, including B. J. Thomas’ first Christian album, Home Where I Belong. (His claim to fame was the Bacharach/David hit Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head from the movie Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and I loved his other hit from the ‘60s, Hooked on a Feelin’.)

Marty had recently moved to Nashville to become a solo artist, but when Word Records heard the three of us together, they offered us a two-record deal to become a group on their label. We named ourselves Fireworks and Chris Harris (introduced above) became our bass player and Lanny Avery our drummer. Now, sitting in the darkened auditorium listening to Amy sing Michael’s songs (Thy Word, which they co-wrote; Rocketown; Give It Away), I glanced up to the seats in the balcony to my right and there sat Gary Pigg with his son Landon, also a singer/songwriter with much success nationally in the past couple of years.

Marty now lives with his wife Vickie in Herndon, Virginia, and I have visited them twice, in 2007 and again this spring. But Gary and I see each other almost every week, as his wife Carol and I have been dear friends since 1975. I’ve watched their son Landon grow up, along with his sister and three brothers. It’s amazing to see the next generation taking off, doing what we aspired to do and doing it better. The youngest, Gabe, is a drummer.

And their daughter, Cari-Ann, married a drummer. A few years ago, their wedding was held at Michael and Debbie Smith’s country house, in a beautiful garden beside a lake. Of course her brother Landon sang, but a young lady I didn’t recognize sang too. It turned out she was Jenny Gill, Amy Grant’s step-daughter with Vince Gill.

Amy and I have never “hung out” but living in the same town has given me the opportunity to run into her at various times over the years. Once my mom and I were waiting in the airport at the same gate where Amy showed up, and I was able to introduce them and describe the family connections to Amy. Another time she and her sister Mimi were having lunch and we spoke. I was pleased to hear that they had been discussing our band, Fireworks, on her tour bus and wondering where everyone was now. When I quit the group I felt I had fallen off the face of the musical earth. Turned out I was wrong, but who could predict?

After singing backgrounds on her first album, I also had the privilege of singing backgrounds with Gary Pigg and another girl when Amy first performed with a live band. (Until then it had been just Amy and her guitar.) The concert was at Vanderbilt, where she was then in school, and it happens that I currently work in the building next door to the Langford Auditorium where we sang twenty-nine years ago. It was not much fun for me since rehearsal time was too brief, and we were singing with a girl who flew in from Texas for the event and missed rehearsal. Also the pay was minimal, and I was beginning to notice.

When it was time to record her third album, a friend and I co-wrote a song, Say Once More, which we handed on a cassette to her producer, Brown. (I still get tiny royalty checks for that song, even though it appeared on her second-least-selling album, Never Alone.) Those were the days, when you could simply walk up and hand a song to a producer! It wasn’t long until even the contemporary Christian music industry, the little brother of pop music, had become so complex and organized that all the songs came from known writers who had publishing deals. There were official song presentation meetings and the like. Of course, by that point we were talking about real money, so every Joe Schmoe and his sister were trying to get their songs cut, and there had to be some kind of filter.

I have always trusted Amy’s sincerity, but she made a huge impression on me years ago with the extra effort she took to bless a young friend of mine. She asked me for my friend’s name and actually remembered it, greeting her personally when I brought the girl to a teen fellowship/concert at Amy’s barn. I later told that story to Vince when I met him at a Belmont Church “family reunion” held in the ‘90s. He smiled and agreed, “She’s really good at the name thing.” That’s an ability some people have naturally, but Amy works at giving people this gift of recognition. She has grown up under constant public scrutiny and, despite untold harsh criticism, she has remained deeply genuine and consistently kind.

I’ve run into her at restaurants and in the grocery store parking lot, but the most significant moment for me came when I had the privilege of encouraging a creative impulse. She sang, along with our old group Fireworks and several other groups and singer/ songwriters, at a reunion concert in November, 2007. We were standing backstage and I asked her if the scripture song she had just performed was “written” or if it’s different every time she sings it. (I’ve known people with the gift of improvisation who compose new melodies on the spot, as they sing.)

She said she had many more like it and had been considering recording them. She had been discouraged that such a project could not be a commercial success. I exhorted her to do it anyway, saying, “We bought albums years ago that were musical dreck just because they were scripture. There is an audience. There are people who will buy this! Please do it.” Since she hasn’t recorded it yet, I’ve thought about writing to reinforce how moving I believe it would be to hear symphonic arrangements behind her very free, creative melodies.

Back at the Schermerhorn gala, the next artist to appear on stage carried a significant chapter of my history with her. Wynonna has had a solo career for decades now, but when she was a teenager she sang with her mother as a duo. They were known as The Judds. Neither woman is likely to remember my name, but I played a deep-background supporting role in getting their career off the ground.

In 1982 I was living alone in a four-bedroom house. One evening I went out to dinner with friends from church to meet a couple visiting briefly on their way from Florida to Rochester, New York. Their names were Don and Christine Potter. I felt an immediate, strong connection with both of them, and when I discovered they were considering moving back to Nashville (having lived here previously in pursuit of the music business), I offered without hesitation for them to stay with me while they looked for a place to live.

They loved visiting our church, but they could hardly believe it was real, so they made two or three trips down from Rochester just to go to church before they made the decision to move. When they arrived with their van full of stuff, I discovered they were in bad financial straits and would probably be staying with me longer than a few days or weeks. We couldn’t have imagined three years, but that’s what it turned out to be. Don, a fabulously talented guitarist, felt that God wanted him to lay down his guitar and work as a construction laborer for a time, and he was obedient. But one day, I believe it was Thanksgiving 1982, Don took his guitar on a visit to the home of an old music business friend, Brent Maher.

He played for Brent, and when he heard the jazz inflected brilliance of Don’s playing Brent was amazed. Just that week he had been conversing with Dan Raines, a contemporary Christian music business guy, who described his search for a new artist with precisely Don’s capabilities. Eventually, songs were written, and two albums were produced. But in the meantime, during the production process, Brent said to Don one day, “There are these two girls living out in Franklin, a mother and daughter. I think I’d like to pitch them to RCA. Why don’t you go out there and work with them to get a few songs ready for an audition?”

Wynonna and Naomi Judd had reinvented themselves as Kentucky country girls. Their real names were Christine and Diana and one of the mother’s previous jobs had been in L.A. as receptionist for the office of the Fifth Dimension (a pop group at the height of their fame in the ‘60s and ‘70s). Simple, unsophisticated country girls they were decidedly not. The mother was a nurse and had cared for Brent’s son when he was in the hospital following a car wreck. Naomi (Diane) slipped Brent a cassette of songs she and her daughter had sung into a cheap cassette recorder in their kitchen. That cassette went into the glove compartment of Brent’s car and months passed before he got the urge to pop it in and have a listen.

And so it was that Don Potter met Naomi and Wynonna and worked with them to get a few songs ready to perform. The executives at RCA agreed to audition the girls in person – unheard of since decades before – and offered them a deal the same day. Their first album was released in 1983. Don went on the road with them in the early months of their career, and then continued to coproduce the majority of their records with Brent. Don’s wife Christine and I visited the studio one night to hear what they were up to and met Wynonna for the first time there. Many nights we dropped Don off in the Kroger parking lot where the bus was waiting to take the girls on the road. I recall one evening when Wynonna came over and sat in our living room and discussed her boyfriend troubles.

One morning in 1985 I was home sick and got to witness a little of the life that went on in my house when I was on Music Row working at the jingle company. The folks at RCA, or her management company, someone with clout, had decided that Wynonna needed to lose weight. They hired an Asian guy to go everywhere with her and keep her moving. He was the first personal trainer I had ever met. Dressed all in black, he reminded me more than anything of Cato, the servant of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies.

Back at the gala, the Nashville Choir rose to our feet to sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness, one of my favorite hymns. It was an evening conceived to honor the ministry and career of Michael W. Smith, but I’m sure many people felt, like I did, that it was a night of looking back over our own lives as well. Indeed, God has been faithful: to teach and train, to correct and comfort, to empower and to protect through many challenges.

We ended the evening with a worship medley led by Brown Bannister. How appropriate that the last person to take the stage was the first person I met. Back in 1973, it was summer and we were gathered at the campus of Pepperdine University for a wedding. Our friend since seventh grade, Janice Hahn, was marrying a Texas boy, Gary Baucum. They had met at Abilene Christian University where Janice roomed with my best friend, Marilyn Young. Gathered to celebrate Janice and Gary’s wedding were all these precious Texas men.

We found that God’s Spirit was at work in Abilene like He was in California, wooing our hearts and drawing forth worship. We all sat in the Youngs’ living room and sang and prayed together. Brown Bannister was one of those young men. He and I, with my college boyfriend Danny, were asked by Janice to sing Noel Paul Stookey’s There Is Love in her wedding. So I met Brown in the context of worship and music three years prior to our first recording session, in the Nashville studio called the Gold Mine (the basement of Chris Christian’s home).

The Smitty concert ended with a song that has become a beloved anthem for many reunions and partings. Michael and Debbie wrote it on the spur of the moment one night for a friends’ going away party, and it became an instant classic. It was a fitting close for the concert and it also serves as an excellent blessing with which to end this stroll down memory lane.

“Friends are friends forever, if the Lord’s the Lord of them
And a friend will not say ‘Never’ for the welcome will not end.
Though it’s hard to let you go, in the Father’s hands we know
That a lifetime’s not too long to live as friends.”

Neil Young
August 18 & 19, 2005

The past two nights I have spent joyfully reliving many memories with friends. The Memory Fest was sparked by the arrival of Neil Young in Nashville to make a movie, directed by no less than Jonathan Demme. He’s most famous for his Silence of the Lambs but my favorite of his projects was Philadelphia. So now I know why Neil Young was chosen to write and sing the theme song of that movie – I wasn’t aware that Jonathan and he were friends. My friends (the reason I got in to the concert filming), Gary and Carol Pigg, didn’t know who the director was, they just knew he was “Jonathan”. He was so unassuming and humble and quiet, they would never guess he had such an impressive filmography, or status in the movie industry.

Pegi Young, Anthony Crawford, Jonathan Demme, Gary Pigg, Diana DeWitt

Gary Pigg and I met in 1976, when we were both called for a session at the Goldmine. That was the studio owned by Chris Christian, and we were working for his jingle company, Home Sweet Home Productions. It was my first paid session. My first time singing in the studio had happened the year before, when I did background vocals for free on the song “You Can’t Get to Heaven by Living Like Hell” for that wild man producer, Gary S. Paxton. (He sang on “The Monster Mash” and was the multi-tracked voice of the Hollywood Argyles, singing “Alley Oop”.)

Gary and I continued singing on more jingles and then backgrounds for several albums, along with Marty McCall. Finally, the three of us were invited by Word Records to become a group which was intended to fill the void left by the 2nd Chapter of Acts on their artist roster. 2nd Chapter had moved to Sparrow Records and they needed a “replacement group”. Kind of a silly idea, since no one could hope to replace the brother and sisters trio which revolutionized contemporary Christian music with their rock ‘n roll voices, unique harmonies and intimate lyrics.

Gary and I left the group, Fireworks, after not very long, but Marty continued it for several more years. Gary and I both did jingle and background vocal work for some years, but meanwhile he had married my dear friend Carol Ann Jackson Thomas and taken on her boys, David and Jason, to raise. He had a burden of responsibility I did not have, as well as greater drive and ambition, and he made quite a career for himself in the Nashville and Chicago recording industries. After about ten years singing, I became an administrative assistant for a number of musicians, companies and institutions over the years.

Earlier this year, Gary was recommended by our mutual acquaintance, Diana DeWitt, to accompany her and Pegi Young, Neil’s wife, on background vocals for Neil Young’s new album, Prairie Wind. He couldn’t have been happier about the job, since he had never aspired to be a jingle singer in the first place – his dream had always been to be a rock star. Neil had a longevity and legitimacy to his musical career that was more than a level above what often happens in Nashville sessions, and Gary took a lot of pleasure in working with someone at that level of creativity, not to mention historical significance.

Then the decision was made to record the new album as a movie concert, after the example of The Last Waltz by The Band and other such archival footage. Gary was hired! So he spent the previous two weeks in rehearsal, and Carol called and asked if I would like to attend the concert/filming. Would I!?! Certainly would. So I wandered down to the Ryman Auditorium Thursday night, August 18, 2005, to join a fascinating crowd waiting to get in to see one of our heroes, Neil Young.

It was an incredibly hot and muggy evening in Nashville, which made waiting outside for Carol to show up with the tickets a very drippy half hour. As I waited, I was able to observe such interesting people and relationships, some folks making contact after years of separation. I heard one lady who looked to be a suburban, Republican grandmother – the epitome of unhip – talking about working with Neil in L.A. in 1969. Ah, the foolishness of judging a book by its cover.

There was more long hair on the men than the women. Someone commented that they hadn’t seen that many VW buses in years. The crowd was mostly over forty, and everyone was glancing at everyone, trying to figure out who was who and whether any notables might be spotted. I recognized no one Thursday night, but then I don’t know the Nashville film community. I went back Friday night for the second concert and that night Meryl Streep showed up with a young man someone said was her son. We tried hard to politely glance and not stare.

I also got to spend some time with Gus Laux, who caught me waiting in line the second night. He used to road manage Don Gibson, got me in one night to Harlan Howard’s Birthday Bash, and has been around the Nashville music scene even since I left it. What a delight he is. He says he’s currently splitting his time between producing sessions and doing fine wood working on remodels for very patient friends, which sounds to me like a lovely creative balance. But I digress. Back to the man of the hour, Neil Young.

When I was just getting into music as a collector might, learning music history, making connections between various artists and groups, seeking out new writers and artists to love, there was a group calling the Buffalo Springfield. It was after the Watts Riots, it was during Viet Nam, I was in Southern California, it was the hippie generation, but it was pre-Woodstock. A song came on the radio called “For What It’s Worth.”

“There’s something happ’nin’ in here…what it is ain’t exactly clear.
There’s a man with a gun over there tellin’ me I got to beware.
I think it’s time we stopped, children — What’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.”

That song, written by Stephen Stills, became the anthem of an era. Matt Young was my best friends’ older brother and my musical guide. He had more money and more freedom than I did, being five years older, and he spent more time in record stores, although he did take me along occasionally. He played Buffalo Springfield albums (there were eventually three) and I fell in love with the articulate, searching, yearning, politically aware, romantic hearts of these guys.

Even then, Neil Young stood out. “I Am a Child” appeared on the third album, and there was also “On The Way Home,” the meaning of which to this day I don’t fully comprehend but nevertheless I’ve always loved. The version I love most, though, came four years later, when the album Four Way Street was released, and Neil did a much slower, more ethereal version of it. That was my theme song in Heidelberg in the summer of 1972.

But I’m jumping ahead. Back in L.A., I would sit in the Youngs’ bedroom where the big speakers were, or lie on the floor between them, and soak up the music. Musical groups and couplings in the ‘Sixties were relatively short lived, though very fruitful, and you always watched to see what the various artists who had split up would do next. What they did next was awesome. Woodstock happened, and one of the groups that played over those few days was Crosby, Stills & Nash. Neil Young joined them at Woodstock, though he was not on their first album. It was their second gig. (Their first appearance had been rather less dramatic, at a hall in Chicago.) Neil Young had not made any business commitments to these guys yet, but they were friends, so when they did their third gig, opening for Joni Mitchell at the Greek Theater in L.A., Neil sat in with them for the second half of the performance.

That summer night in 1968 started with David, Stephen and Graham standing together before one mike, with Stills the only guitar, and singing those incredible three-part harmonies which had originally brought them together. (Cass Elliott of the Mamas and Papas was responsible for introducing them.) Graham Nash was later to remark on the magic that seemed to happen the first time he and David sang together, and then when Stephen Stills joined in, the powerful musical connection couldn’t be denied. So there the three of them were, in front of a curtain on the stage of the Greek Theater, and making this gorgeous but very gentle acoustic music. Their fans were wondering whatever happened to the electricity. Graham had been part of the Hollies, and Stills, with Neil Young, was in the Buffalo Springfield. David Crosby had been a member of the Byrds. All the bands had made big noise, with electric guitars and amps and effects and etc.

After the first part of their set, the curtains opened to reveal banks of equipment…and Neil Young. And the rocking began. The crowd went wild. This was what they had been waiting for! This was what they came to hear. When the boys were finished thrilling us, they humbly thanked Joni Mitchell for allowing them to open for her. “This is our third gig, man,” David Crosby announced. What a night.

The funny thing about that concert was the audience. We were sitting in a steep natural outdoor amphitheater, surrounded by trees. This was the late ‘Sixties, and there were a lot of young people who loved this music but couldn’t or wouldn’t pay to hear it. They hiked up the Hollywood hills and climbed the trees. The only problem was, some of them were too loaded to hang onto the branches, and occasionally we would hear a crashing of bushes and ivy as someone fell out of a tree and rolled down the hill.

I was still in high school, living at home but spending as much time as possible with the Youngs, my second family. Matt kept me moving along the musical highway. Déjà Vu, the second album, after the introductory Crosby, Stills and Nash, had added “and Young” to the group. When the time came to record a third album, things got rocky. I didn’t hear this story until many years later, but it seems that at one of the sessions for that album, Neil became discontent with the way things were going, or the way he was feeling about it, and he simply left town. No warning, no “I’m not going to be there at the session tomorrow.” He just split. And thus ended Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

What was left for the record company but to put out an album featuring the individual strengths of each of the four players, all their diverse directions and leanings. It was clear, listening to Four Way Street, that theirs had been an explosive coming together, but not a lasting merging of talent. They were all solo artists…except Graham Nash, the one who preferred relationships to individual acclaim. The other three were the egos and he was the peacemaker, the oil that eased the scraping and banging of these Titans of rock music.

Out of Buffalo Springfield came another group, Poco, with Richie Furay, George Grantham, Rusty Young, and Jim Messina, which we also loved. (See the Endnote for more about Poco. Isn’t the internet wonderful?[i]) Their music reflected the happier side of the Springfield. It’s been said and written many times that the Southern California music scene was incestuous during those years. Cross-pollination was happening everywhere. People were hanging out together in Topanga Canyon, visiting each others’ homes and playing in a lot of the same venues, like Doug Weston’s Troubador.

When Woodstock happened, Crosby, Stills and Nash were able to make it to their second gig, but Joni Mitchell didn’t get in. Roads were jammed for miles around, and she wasn’t even able to get to a place where a helicopter could have lifted her in. So she was stuck in a New York hotel room, witnessing only what little could be seen by everyone else on TV. That didn’t stop her finding an incredibly moving way to comment on the event. She composed the song “Woodstock” and sang it with her own quiet melancholy, and then gave it to “the boys” to interpret, who of course rocked it in their muscular, more powerful way.

David Geffen and Elliott Roberts were managing many of these artists at the time. (Elliott has apparently continued with Neil until today, in 2005. He’s listed on all the albums as “Direction”. Gary also tells me that he learned Elliott managed Bob Dylan for twelve years.) The Eagles were in the same management stable with Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Still & Nash, and Don Henley and Glenn Frey have said that this represented quite a challenge to them in terms of sharpening their song writing.

James Taylor and Joni were involved for awhile – her Blue album was all about that. Graham Nash and Joni were in love for awhile, and her Ladies of the Canyon paints a few pictures on that theme. Joni even drew a sketch of David Geffen in “Free Man in Paris,” on Court and Spark, though she says this made him uncomfortable for awhile. James was singing the songs of Carole King, who was making the transition from being a bopper in New York’s Tin Pan Alley to becoming an earth mother in the mountains of Colorado.

Meanwhile, Neil Young was pretty rich at a mere twenty-four years old, and he bought himself a ranch. It’s in Northern California, but he doesn’t choose to say that. He tells the story that a man named Louie Avilla and his wife Clara lived on that ranch as caretakers, and Louie asked Neil how it came to be that such a young man was able to purchase such a lot of property. “Just lucky, man, very lucky,” Neil responded. Louie couldn’t get over it. Neil said he wrote “Old Man” for Louie.

“Old man, look at my life – twenty-four and there’s so much more
Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of two.
I’ve been first and last. Look at how the time goes past,
and I’m all alone at last, rolling home to you.

(and that incredible banjo makes its statement…and then the pedal steel…)

“Old man, take a look at my life – I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me the whole day through
By one look in my eyes, you can tell that’s true.”

(and then back to that ever so recognizable chord…)

When Neil did that song last night, the audience recognized it on the very first chord. I was sitting next to Carol Pigg and she was amazed by that. I whispered, “Nobody else ever started a song with that particular chord!” While all of us single hippies and wanna-be cowboys were listening to Neil and Joni and James and the Eagles and such, Carol Pigg had been Carol Ann Jackson Thomas, a married woman raising two little boys, and she hadn’t paid all that much attention to music. Funny that her life has been immersed in music ever since, yet left her relatively unaddicted. She never quite caught the bug. She worked for Jerry Reed, she managed Sound Stage recording studio, she worked for Chris Christian, she managed the office for Hummingbird Productions (where I worked with her and then took over for her) and then moved to Blanton & Harrell where Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith were changing the face of contemporary Christian music once again.

Then she married Gary, whose life has been music. Landon, their son and a mere twenty-one years of age, earlier this year was signed as an artist with RCA New York. Landon shared tales with me about private hours spent with Clive Davis. (Along with Ahmet Ertegun and Quincy Jones, Clive has been a primary mover and shaker in the music industry for most of my life, so this was quite something to me.) Yet for all this, Carol’s primary roles have been mother, wife and friend, throughout the decades.

Another friend from the ‘Seventies was also in attendance both nights for this 2005 Nashville concert event. Chris Harris was friends with Gary Pigg back in college at Abilene, Texas, and they both moved to Nashville in the mid ‘Seventies. Chris drove his baby blue Texas truck into town and almost immediately became the bass player for that group that Gary, Marty and I had started, Fireworks.

Lanny Avery, our drummer, lives in Florida, so I never get to see him, and Marty and his wife moved to the D.C. area a couple of years ago, but I’m grateful to still touch lives with Chris and Gary on occasion. With Chris, though, it’s been too seldom, he stays so busy as a record producer. Last night was a treasure, because he and I and Landon and his friend Costa went out after the concert and us two oldies reminisced for the boys at length. More about that later.

Finally, we got to escape the heat and get into the building. A ticket! That’s all we needed to gain entrance, and more than usual, those tickets were hard to come by. There we finally were, in the Ryman Auditorium, infiltrated by scurrying men in black, and cameras both fixed and roving. A large timing device mounted to the left above the stage was clicking away the hundredths of seconds as the evening progressed, flashing the red digital numbers as if to underline the speedy passage of time.

Neil commented on the incredible sound of the Ryman, like playing inside of a guitar. He was dressed in a light gray, loose fitting suit that could have belonged to a farmer or tradesman in the ‘Thirties, with a broad-brimmed light-colored hat that he regularly hid under, spending the majority of his time looking down, and only occasionally peeking upwards to make eye contact with an audience member.

The moves that reconfigured the stage between each song were as multiple and shifting as a kaleidoscope. Those moves had been rehearsed for two weeks, and with only a couple of exceptions appeared to go flawlessly the first night. I say the first night, because the second night felt looser. I suspect that once they had the first night in the can, the crew all felt a bit freer and not quite so rigidly tied to the marks they had rehearsed. Stage hands moved tables, chairs, mikes, instruments, between each song. Musicians and singers rearranged themselves. Neil paced the stage, in his lanky, loose limbed, laid back way. Guitar techs traded guitars with him for each new song.

A humorous moment for me was each time that this one stage hand came out to remove the little table that held a glass of water with Neil’s harmonica in it – as if that table’s presence would distract from the presentation of the next song. Someone was paying incredible attention to detail, and from what Gary reported, it was primarily Neil. Gary said Neil was amazingly aware of everything that was happening at all times, and would deal with anything he might find faulty or distracting on the spot.

The musicians were many of the same guys that had been with him ever since his first work in Nashville which produced the Harvest album in 1972. How did this rock ‘n roller from Canada end up finding musical expression in the South? It was an easier fit than I would have guessed. His roots were in the Canadian prairie, and the agrarian, rural background of Southern musicians may be the closest thing available to his familiar sounds and feel.

I didn’t know until last night that Neil was a chicken farmer as a boy. He told the story of the first instrument he ever owned, a plastic Arthur Godfrey ukelele that his daddy bought for him, probably at his request, though Neil doesn’t remember that for sure. He said he had never heard his daddy sing or play before, and also never seen the goofy smile on his father’s face which appeared as he sang and played “Bury Me on the Wide Prairie” for Neil that day. Neil said his dad and his uncle both ended up playing along with him and the whole family developed a tradition of making music together.

So when Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, had a TV show in the late ‘Sixties, and invited these young California whippersnappers to appear on it, Neil visited Nashville for the first time, along with James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt.[ii] Johnny was a visionary. Though he was deeply Southern, and solidly a country music star, he loved all kinds of music and used his success as an entrée for these younger musicians. Just one example of his musical sophistication? Witness his use of mariachi trumpets on his hit, “Ring of Fire”. Who else would have thought of that?

Last night, I told Carol, who grew up in Nashville in the middle of country music, “See, we had never heard a banjo or a pedal steel used like this before.” We (my friends and I in California) were prejudiced against country music, which we ignorantly associated with all those spangles and twangs we saw on TV, and dismissed as “plastic.” I hated the TV show “Hee Haw”, which my Nashville cousins found delightful. Why, I was so ignorant of country music that I didn’t know Buck Owens lived not far north of me in Bakersfield, California! So when Neil Young was singing and a banjo enhanced his hippie aesthetic, like in “Old Man”, or a pedal steel reflected back the melody on “Heart of Gold”, it was a revelation to my ears.

From top left: Clinton Gregory, Chad Cromwell (Memphis Horn player); Rick Rosas, Larry Cragg, Pegi Young, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Karl Himmel, Anthony Crawford, Grant Boatwright; (front) Gary Pigg

Neil continued to work in Nashville and remained faithful and loyal to these friends he had made here, so this week in 2005 there were men on the stage with him who had played on his 1972 album, Harvest. One friend, Grant Boatwright, had long white hair and wore a black cowboy coat to his knees, and postured a bit that first night. (He behaved more circumspectly the second night, and I wondered if he had been chastened by a correction from Neil.)

Grant was featured in one of Neil’s longer tales during the show, about the guitar he played on “This Old Guitar,” a duet with Emmylou Harris. Apparently Grant had found this guitar for him 35 years before, which Neil was able to buy from Tuck Taylor. He quietly and respectfully informed us, “It was Hank’s.” The audience duly drew in its breath when that hallowed name was mentioned, then clapped long and hard for the rightness of Hank Williams’ guitar being reunited with the Ryman stage, where it had been played back in 1951, the year Hank got fired from the Grand Old Opry.

Neil Young has always been slow, deliberate, close to tedious in making his dry-witted remarks. My favorite song introduction was enshrined on an album called Four Way Street, when he said, “This next tune’s guaranteed to bring you right down. It’s called ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” (I love the pause, where one guy in the audience “gets it” a bit late, and cackles all by himself at the irony of the remark, and the rest of the audience laughs at his enjoyment.) Neil goes on, “It sort of starts out real slow…and then it peters out altogether.”

Well, his delivery hasn’t changed a bit in 35 years. He told a quite involved tale of his favorite hound dog, Elvis, which he embellished each night with different details, and nearly every sentence was followed by a pause, pregnant with the audience’s anticipation of what on earth he would choose to say next. Elvis entered the story in a cardboard box under the Christmas tree, and he ends it reappearing after having been lost. The main humor in the story was how bad Elvis stunk after he got his natural and much-prized doggy smell covered up by some wretched perfume at the “Foo-Foo Parlor.”

The punch line was the fact that Elvis, who had run off and been left behind on a road trip, was recovered and delivered back to Neil by a guy in a yellow pick-up truck, at a concert about a hundred and fifty miles down the road in Eureka, California. The truck guy got free tickets to the concert as a reward for returning Elvis. Not too stirring a tale, although there was some dramatic tension in the fact that Neil thought for a few hours that his dog was gone, and came to realize how attached he was to the “blue tick” Tennessee hound. Just to confuse things Neil had intended to simplify, in the song Elvis is called “King”.

It’s that old country story-telling tradition that James Taylor honored in his concerts where he told the story of his pet pig, Baby. I declare, some years back in one of James’s concerts he spent a full thirty minutes on that story, and it had no dramatic tension and no punch line. There’s something so pleasant, though, about being told a story by one of these musicians with whom you’ve shared so many private hours. It’s a living room feeling, like he or she is talking just to you, and there’s something intimate about the fact that the story has no actual significance, except that it happened to them and they have chosen to take the time to share it with you.

Let me back up a bit and tell you about the stage setting. When the curtain opened, we were introduced to the title of the album (and the concert), Prairie Wind, which was written in a rope-style font on a backdrop which filled the back of the stage. A local artist was called three weeks prior to the show and commissioned to create three different backdrops, which he did all by himself, one week each. They were pretty great. The first one, along with the words, was a simple depiction of a brown prairie. A few songs into the concert, a second backdrop was drawn across the first, and this one, again all in browns, was the inside of a log cabin, with a river rock fireplace, an open door on the left, and a little kitten walking in. The final backdrop was saved for the one silly song, “The Last Time I Saw Elvis” (This time we’re talking about Mr. Presley, “Thank you very much,” not the hound.) and it was a fantasy of guitars and piano keyboards in pastels.

Neil used his musicians and singers judiciously, changing them up for every song. I never realized quite so clearly before how much like painting song arrangement can be. Each voice, each instrument, was like a color on Neil’s palette. He had my friends Gary and Diana DeWitt available to sing background vocals, and as I already mentioned, Emmylou Harris as well. Also singing along on many of the songs, and playing guitar on a couple, was his “lovely wife” Pegi. Carol had mentioned how much she and Pegi looked alike, but for the concert they had given Pegi blond hair extensions so she could have long hair like Emmylou and Diana.

Another background singer that Neil used occasionally was also a guitar player, Anthony Crawford, who looked so much like Gary and Carol’s sons, Landon and Gabe, that it freaked us out. Then there was Grant Boatwright (in the long black cowboy coat) on rhythm guitar, and Spooner Oldham looking frail, on the Hammond B-3 organ and piano. (Chris told me that Spooner Oldham was the composer of “I’m Your Puppet”!) Neil mentioned that Ben Keith, his dear friend and the steel player, had been his producer ever since Harvest. Ben was a white-haired guy who seemed even more laid back than Neil.

I know I recognized Rick (the bass player) Rosas, an Native American-looking picker, but he wasn’t in Crazy Horse (the band on Neil’s first solo album) and he wasn’t on the album Comes A Time (one of my favorites, from 1978), so I don’t know where I have seen him before. Larry Cragg, who did play on that album, stepped forward to do the banjo solo on “Old Man” (done by James Taylor on the recording of Harvest, James’ first and last attempt at playing banjo), providing an aural thrill to everybody gathered.

Then there were the strings, eleven of them. I didn’t recognize Kris Wilkinson, a lady I had worked for as a personal assistant, but my friend Chris insisted she was the viola in the middle of the front row, and Gary said another old boss of mine, David Davidson, was playing violin too. So even though the Nashville String Machine got the credit, the A-Strings were well represented too. The string players had the only stage direction I disagreed with. They came on during a song, because they were only playing in the bridge of it, and then walked off during that song, and I found all that movement too distracting. Then there were the horns, Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns and two of his buddies, all in Blues Brothers suits and black hats. Karl Himmel, who was on the 1978 record, was still the drummer for this concert, along with Chad Cromwell on percussion and drums.

Another “color in the palette” was the use of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers on several songs, a small chorale of about a dozen. I must say, had I been one of those singers, I would have felt terribly bored and underused, since their background parts were so simple and so sparse, but they trouped on like professionals and offered their best smiles and lots of energy.

Gary tells me that the famous country music couturier, Manuel Cuevas, was hired to dress the band and singers and Neil himself. The ladies looked great in shirtwaist dresses, pastels for the first half and a darker blue for the second half. Neil changed out of his pale suit into a burgundy suit for the second half. The band didn’t really look “dressed”, but I guess they may have been. I’ll give Manuel credit for amazing restraint. He’s normally known for flash, sparkle, sequins and beads, but this whole stage dressing was very subdued.

The first half of the concert was the new album, so I hadn’t heard any of that material before Thursday night. I liked a lot of it on first hearing, but by Friday night I had already become tentative friends with some of the songs. I especially loved the line, “If you follow all your dreams, you could get…lost.” Then after a brief intermission, the curtain opened again and Neil stood there by himself singing “I Am a Child,” a tune from his Buffalo Springfield days. It was so sweet to hear that same gentle choirboy voice, practically unchanged, singing those tender lyrics from another time and place.

Then the band and singers rejoined him for a stroll down Memory Lane. As each old favorite began, the audience paused for a heartbeat to be sure they recognized it, and then burst into applause. The second night, they were rowdier than the first, perhaps picking up on the slightly more relaxed mood of the folks onstage. But they were also more passionate, giving a standing ovation to “The Damage Done”, which Neil performed all alone in a spotlight.

Two of my personal-favorite songs got special treatment. Neil briefly noted the recent passing of Rufus Thibodeaux, who had played fiddle on Comes A Time, and just in the last week, Vassar Clements, and in their memory he called upon every free singer and band member to line up along the front of the stage with guitars and play first “Comes A Time” and then “Four Strong Winds,” a song I had loved ever since Ian Tyson had written it in the early ‘Sixties.

On “Four Strong Winds” he put Diana DeWitt on autoharp, which I hadn’t realized had been the special sound on that record. It wouldn’t have sounded right without it. (That way, Gary got to play the guitar and join the lineup across the stage. Apparently there weren’t enough guitars to go around until Diana moved to autoharp.) Neil told us that as a kid of sixteen in Canada, he had spent a lot of time at a local diner which had a jukebox, and spent all his money listening to Ian and Sylvia’s record of “Four Strong Winds” over and over again.

Neil mentioned Nicolette Larson, who was featured on Comes A Time, as if she was no longer with us, but never made that quite clear. He said he felt her there in spirit.[iii] I must admit that Pegi sounded nearly as good when doing that duet with him. Then he explained that he had been full of love songs for the young ladies in his past, but that recently he had written a new kind of love song. He supposed you could call it an “Empty Nester” tune, and he had written it for his daughter, twenty-one and in her senior year of college. “I guess you could say, I’m there for you,” was the final line.

Talk about there for you – I had heard that he and Pegi had founded a school for kids afflicted with cerebral palsy, called The Bridge, because Graham Nash had mentioned doing a fundraiser for it with Crosby and Stills. But I didn’t know it was because they had a son with cerebral palsy. He attended the concert both nights in his wheelchair. I was touched that they would go to the trouble not only to bring their son with them on this Nashville trip, but even transport him to the concert, not just one but both of the nights.

My friend Chris told me that Neil has the most enormous Lionel train set. It’s housed in a separate building on his property. He has invented special controls that his son can use to run the trains. Chris also reported that Neil then decided to just buy Lionel Trains, the manufacturer. Why not, if you love them that much?

The next song was “Harvest Moon” which I had heard a bit, from the Harvest Moon album Neil made in Nashville in 1992. For me, it’s not the kind of song you crave to hear, but it was so soothing and mesmerizing that you didn’t want it to stop. One mighty cute thing about that song was the percussion. Karl Himmel came on stage carrying a broom, and a roadie laid down a rubber floor mat in front of him. Throughout the song, the “brushes” sound that is usually associated with jazz was being produced by Karl sweeping that mat. A fun bit of knowledge, like my enjoyment in knowing that one of the percussion instruments on Delaney & Bonnie’s Motel Shot was someone banging on an empty briefcase.

The concert ended with “One of These Days,” promising that someday Neil planned to write everyone a letter, telling all the people he had loved how much they meant to him. It was a great goodbye song, and when they were finished with the show, they really meant it. None of that coy waiting in the wings until the audience proves they want you back. No amount of stomping, pounding the backs of the pews, hollering or clapping could convince them to do an encore, though we tried. They just did a final curtain call, all arms linked around waists and bowing together, and the merciless curtain closed again.

Then came the leaving. We didn’t really want to. Gary called Carol on her cell and asked her to keep everybody there till he could get down to us. Gabe and Landon were there, and Jason and Cari-Ann and her husband Curt Redding, along with Gary’s mother Lorene, his sister Brenda, her daughter and boyfriend. Chris and I waited with them until Gary finally made it out of the building, appearing to have showered and changed. I envied his freshness, drippy and hot as I was, waiting outside in the still oppressive night air.

Gabe, Gary, Carol Pigg; Chris Harris, Curt & Cari-Ann Redding, Gwen Moore, Landon Pigg, Jason Thomas

Gary was thrilled we all had shared the evening with him, but soon he was off to the afterparty at the Hermitage Hotel. He told Landon to wait awhile until he scoped out the mood of the party, and if it was loose enough, he would call Landon and he could show up and be further introduced around. Landon had already met Elliott Roberts earlier in the week and had a good conversation with him, and had made friends with one of the camera guys. So Landon needed to hang somewhere else for awhile, and he and a friend, Costa, and Chris Harris and I went to the Sunset Grill to decompress and debrief.

I honestly didn’t realize how much I had missed being in my music persona. It had been years, if not decades, since the last time I really talked with anyone about my personal history in music. Chris started the reminiscing by describing the Laughing Man, the health food restaurant we used to love that has long since closed. That’s where I first met the musical family he married into, the Heimermanns. Then Chris proceeded to quiz me about some of my family history and Pepperdine where I grew up, since his two boys, Taylor and Brandon, are living in L.A. at the moment, and hoping to discover their professional futures. (Both are musicians…of course.) Then we moved on to how we both came to Nashville and why…he for music, me for library school at Peabody. Then the two young guys started asking questions, and it turned into a humorous and fascinating music business history lesson.

What fun. I got to tell some of my favorite stories, including the Christmas Card debacle at Hummingbird. I talked about the ease of simply handing producer Brown Bannister the cassette of “Say Once More” and getting it on Amy’s third album with that little effort. I told about the fun of knowing most of the studio musicians in Nashville because I booked them for sessions. I told Chris about my favorite early vocal session, of getting to sing with Little Jimmy Gilmer, one of the first voices I could remember in my pop music listening career as a mere ten year old. Jimmy was the singer on “Sugar Shack.”

The way that session unfolded really astonished me. Alan Moore had produced it at the Goldmine, before he moved to Chicago, and I sang with Jimmy and Hank Martin. Alan simply talked for a couple of minutes about what he wanted the jingle to sound like, and the Nashville pickers just played it. There were no charts, no arrangements, no notes written down of any kind. It was what they called a “head session”. The producer simply communicated an idea, and the musicians grabbed it and ran with it, creating as they went.

I told them my favorite vindication story. I will omit the names for the sake of love, but it was so amazing to have Peter York (President of Sparrow Records) hand a famous producer my Healing Heart album, saying, “Make your next album sound like this.” I dearly loved that producer, but I had been hurt when I was not chosen to sing on an artist’s recording sessions after there had been some success. In my own mind at least, my status as a legitimate musician was more than restored in this moment with Peter. And God chose to make it happen more dramatically and to a greater degree than I would ever have wished for.

Peter York is a whole nother story. He used to play guitar for the 2nd Chapter of Acts, that group that our band Fireworks was supposed to “replace” at Word Records. After I quit the band, I sang in a wedding of mutual friends with Peter, so we’ve known each other since the ‘Seventies when we were both starving artists. Who would have predicted he would end up as president of Sparrow Records?

Chris got to tell about the first jingle account he won. His demo for Crisco beat everybody else’s and he got to produce the legendary Loretta Lynn singing it. He told about the time he showed Stevie Ray Vaughn how to play a demo he had written for some other jingle client. And how Stevie excitedly showed Chris the scriptures he had written into his AA 12-Step book, and how very well prepared Stevie was to go, when his plane crashed six months later.

We talked about Chris’s four months (Seemed a lot longer than that to me!) of parking cars for the Spence Manor, when it was the only locked, 24-hour service private hotel in Nashville and all the stars stayed there, and how he had met everybody who was anybody, including Cheech & Chong and Wayne Newton and lots of celebrities between those extremes. Chris said it was Carol Pigg’s idea that he apply for the job.

The boys asked us whether Mike Blanton was a genius, and was that was why Amy Grant had succeeded in such a massive way? Chris and I agreed, “No, we love Mike, but he’s no genius. He didn’t make anything happen. It was a God thing.” Chris told a story I was not aware of, that some Nashville guy had moved to New York, made contact with some wealthy Jewish backer, and had arranged for Amy to play a huge stadium there. When she sold out, with eighteen thousand people filling the stadium, that was when Blanton & Harrell could start booking her on that much grander scale. So Landon commented, “Mike’s genius was in not saying no, then.”

Landon Pigg, the question man, asked, “So what do you think made Neil Young so popular?” Chris said a few words, but he didn’t cover any of my reasons, so then I jumped in. “First,” I said, “Neil Young isn’t the greatest singer, and he isn’t the greatest guitar player, and he stands there so humble and unassuming and thankful and generous that the audience relates to him as a normal guy. Second, he’s used a lot of the same people in his band for years and years, some of them as far back as 1970. That’s loyalty, and that’s friendship. He makes relationships the center, instead of money or fame. He just loves the music.

“See,” I explained, “many producers are not all that confident about their own choices, so they are constantly looking to see who other people are using, and who played on this or that hit, and they use those pickers, thinking it will make the same magic for their project. They’re more superstitious than baseball players.” I asked for confirmation from Chris, and he agreed.

I didn’t say this to the guys, but for the reader’s benefit, I will add that those kinds of producers don’t realize something basic. The magic doesn’t come with the “hit-maker” picker like a package deal. The magic comes from the right players, with the right amount of direction, playing the right kind of music, in the right atmosphere. Casting is as important in a recording session as it is in a movie or a play, and so is the amount of direction offered from whoever’s in charge. If you pick the right player for the song, he or she will naturally know what to do to make it feel the best it can, so a wise producer will leave them alone to do their job unless they really need direction.

I had many experiences where a producer would hire me (the Queen of Mellow) and two other mellow singers, and then tell us to make the song “exciting”. When I finally got just too fed up with that kind of thing, I asked one producer right from the vocal booth, “Why did you hire Mr. and Misses Mellow, if you want excitement?” He did not appreciate that comment, and as you may imagine, I did not work for him again. I had other experiences where the producer would absolutely love my performance – in one case, saying he had never produced a perfect solo, but that this one came close – and then be talked out of using it later on by someone else’s opinion. I slowly, painfully learned that insecurity runs rampant in the producer world.

It was getting very late, and I didn’t get to offer my third reason. Neil Young has done the impossible, by constantly reinventing himself and trying all kinds of musical configurations, and yet always seeming to be a constant, someone you can depend on to always deliver his heart in everything he does. I didn’t get to say that, but I was definitely thinking it, or something like it. Then Gary called, saying that Landon should come on over to the party at the Hermitage, and the evening ended for us. Costa remarked, as we got up from the table, “I hope someday I have stories like these to tell.”

I’ll say, in closing, that Sunset Grill sure beats the Vanderbilt area International House of Pancakes, which used to be the only place you could go to eat and drink in Nashville after midnight. So Thursday and Friday, August 18 and 19, 2005, gave me a great forty-eight hours. I was as excited as a child to get to participate, and incredibly grateful for the rich experience I had with my friends and one of my earliest musical heroes.

Gwen Moore
August 20, 2005

Neil Young’s Greatest Hits reprised just for me on August 18 & 19, 2005:

Old Man; Heart of Gold; The Damage Done (1972, Harvest; “Heart of Gold” was his only #1 single)

I Am a Child (1968, Last Time Around, Buffalo Springfield)

Harvest Moon; Old King; One of These Days (1992, Harvest Moon)

Comes a Time; Four Strong Winds (1978, Comes a Time)

NOTES

[i] Poco was a country rock band started by Richie Furay (vocals and rhythm guitar) and Jim Messina (lead guitar and vocals) following the demise of Buffalo Springfield in 1968. Other initial members were Rusty Young (pedal steel and dobro), George Grantham (drums and vocals) and Randy Meisner (bass and vocals). The first album Pickin' Up the Pieces was significantly delayed - so that Meisner had joined Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band and later was a founding member of The Eagles. Timothy B. Schmit - bass and vocals - subsequently joined the band. Poco (1971) and Deliverin' (1972) followed. Messina then left the band - being replaced by Paul Cotton. Messina experienced considerable subsequent success with Kenny Loggins as Loggins & Messina. After two Poco more albums: A Good Feelin' to Know and Crazy Eyes, Furay also left the band - forming the Souther Hillman Furay Band.

[ii] As host of The Johnny Cash Show on ABC-TV (1969-1971), he served up 60 hours of prime-time TV, which featured performers like Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Neil Young, James Taylor, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Kenny Rogers, Roy Orbison, Hank Williams Jr., Dennis Hopper, Judy Collins, Charley Pride, the Oak Ridge Boys, Patti Page and Merle Haggard, most rarely seen on TV back then. Chris Harris comments: “I remember it was the Johnny Cash show that got em all here!!!! Wow...and John Darnall was the music director for that show.” John is a guy we’ve all worked for, and I’ve booked as a guitar player. His then-wife Beverly booked background vocals for the majority of sessions in Nashville for the past twenty-five years.

[iii] Thanks to the internet, I learned that Nicolette died in 1997, at the age of 45, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Thirtieth Anniversary CD Mix
Liner Notes for Sam and Sara Jackson
June 14, 2008

Sara and I were twelve years old in 1965, but somehow we discovered a singer whose fame had developed in dark lounges and New York City music clubs. Maybe we had seen her 1965 TV special, My Name is Barbra. Her brother Matt watched Dick Cavett more than Johnny Carson, so we probably missed her on the Tonight Show. Funny Girl didn’t arrive in the theater until 1968. We were young but our imaginations were exceedingly romantic and Barbra Streisand’s passionate voice expressed our yearnings. We used to lie on the floor in the study with our heads between the stereo speakers and sing our hearts out along with Barbra. I think her best album was The Third Album although the album from her second TV special, Color Me Barbra, was pretty wonderful too, and Sara loved all the high-fashion costume changes.

Matt and Danny Jackson were friends, so when Danny’s younger brother Sam showed up at Pepperdine as a college freshman, we got to know him too. These older guys strongly influenced our musical tastes, and I doubt I would know of Fred Neil if not for them. He’s best remembered for his songs “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me” (which gained huge popularity on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy as sung by Harry Nilsson). Fred went on to do more than sing about dolphins; he started a foundation for their protection. With his deep, raspy, masculine voice, he was the most grown-up sounding artist on the musical scene at that time. A younger but equally poignant voice was that of Tim Hardin, who never became as famous as his songs, especially “If I Were a Carpenter” which has been covered by dozens of other artists.

The Beatles had already established themselves as a phenomenon in 1964. The writing of Lennon and McCartney is represented here by Judy Collins (“In My Life”). Richie Havens interprets George Harrison's “Here Comes the Sun”. The Beatles were attracting screaming audiences across America, and our friend Janice Hahn made it into their Hollywood Bowl performance. If I recall correctly, she even went backstage. I remember her saying she couldn’t hear the music, the audience was so loud. I was jealous. In 1964 I stayed up really late one night with Beth Ross because the radio d.j. promised to play three Beatles songs back to back.

The California music scene was underestimated by some of us who lived there. The Beach Boys were too popular and happy for those who preferred looking in the shadows for more obscure musical gems. Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys has been referenced over the decades as a seminal work influencing many other musicians, including the Beatles themselves. They said their Sgt. Pepper album was an attempt at competition with Brian Wilson’s genius. So in retrospect I honor Brian’s work with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. The song reminds me of all the years of yearning that Sara and Sam experienced as they wondered if they would ever have the privilege of being married.

Bob Dylan was always lurking on the edge of my consciousness. I don’t think I ever bought an album of his, although I have memories of hearing a few of them in other settings. I remember one particular one night with John Scheifele and Dave Rice in Kaiserslautern, Germany when we heard the Concert for Bangladesh and Bob Dylan croaking out “It’s a Hard Rain Gonna Fall”. But that’s not a part of your history. I did always think of Sara, though, when I heard Richie Havens sing Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman”.

Why did we find woodsmen and railroad workers such compelling figures? Doubtless because of Gordon Lightfoot. His “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” painted such a romantic picture of the northern woods, the visionaries that connected the east coast to the west (pre-environmentalism), and the tender hearts hidden within those strong, rough laborers. I always think of Sam and Sara when I hear Gordon Lightfoot, not only because I know they loved his music, but also because they seemed to inhabit the images in my mind as I would listen. (It didn’t hurt that Sam actually went to work on the railroad for awhile during those years, and grew the requisite mountain man beard.) Particularly in “The Way I Feel”, Lightfoot describes the tides of closeness and separateness that Sara and Sam experienced through the years of their courtship.

1967 was a very good year for music. Peter Paul & Mary were often playing on the stereo in the family room at the Budlong house. Their Album 1700 contained a song which captures a feeling of those times for me like no other: “Bob Dylan’s Dream”. I wasn’t really old enough yet to have the kind of relationships the song describes, but I could certainly imagine and long for them. I’m not sure how I discovered Judy Collins’ album Wildflowers but I feel sure it was Matt, because he was my musical guide throughout this period. Judy and the other artists on that album created such a specific and elegant mood, an environment of sound. She was the first artist I was aware of who had the nerve to use classical instruments on a pop album. A funny memory connected with Wildflowers was our booth at the AWP Gift Fair, where I played this music and burnt candles we had made, as well as incense. I think we scared the AWP ladies a little with this reminder of the hippie craziness going on in the outside world. We raised $80 for the Pepperdine scholarship fund that day with our sales of cookies and candles.

Somewhere during these years Sara and Marilyn and I became involved with the Campus Evangelism movement. There was a fresh wind blowing through the spiritual lives of the college students we knew and some older men who were our teachers and guides. We attended prayer meetings, Bible studies and weekend seminars (including one all the way out in Dallas) where we were confronted with the claims of Jesus on our lives. “Is Jesus your Lord?” No one had asked us that before, and having the opportunity to invite Him to be not only Savior but Lord of every part of our lives was an incredibly significant turning point for us.

“Crystal Blue Persuasion” was on the radio one night as Stephen Bennett drove Sara, Marilyn and me to one of those Bible studies. The composer later acknowledged that he wrote this song after reading some of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation. I was amazed that the movement of the Holy Spirit in those days was extending to the radio airwaves. “Oh Happy Day” was a hit by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, a black church choir. Judy Collins had a radio hit with “Amazing Grace” and Norman Greenbaum put his trust in the “Spirit in the Sky”.

We close the first CD with a song that expresses the hope and determination of political commitment. Joan Baez had married an anti-war protestor named David Harris who was serving prison time for his convictions. As she raised their child and waited for his release, she wrote “A Song for David” to express her faith in their love and the importance of what he was doing. That kind of sacrifice of the whole person for ideals captured our hearts. We were challenged by books like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and William Stringfellow’s My People is the Enemy. In those days Sam decided to move to New Jersey to work with inner city children. He couldn’t have imagined then that he would be able to help children around the world later on through his commitment to World Vision. I thank God that not everyone who came through the ‘Sixties ended up disillusioned, cynical and self-centered.

Because of Matt’s research in record store aisles, we had already met Joni Mitchell before her first album was released. “Our House” represents a whole conglomeration of people and memories and sensibilities. Written and performed by Graham Nash, “Our House” describes the brief partnership of Joni and Graham during the glory days of Crosby, Stills and Nash. Matt took us to a concert at the Greek Theater where CSN and their friend Neil Young opened for Joni. It was their third gig, their second having been at Woodstock.

Joni also spent some time in the life of James Taylor, which partnership is captured musically in “Long Ago & Far Away” as well as in her album Blue. (Oh, you sweet baby James in your suspenders on the cover of Mud Slide Slim & the Blue Horizon.) In 1971 Cat Stevens appeared on the scene. That fall Sara and I were sophomores in college. She returned from Lipscomb for a visit and she and Sam and Danny Blair and I spent an evening in the Jackson apartment on Chester Place listening to “Wild World” and “Hardheaded Woman” (along with an album by Fevertree which I found again a few years ago through Napster and have now lost again). I always thought of Sara and Sam when I heard Cat singing about “one who will make me do my best…and when I find my hardheaded woman, I know the rest of my life will be blessed.” The Young family so emphasized “potential” and I knew Sam had it in him to rise to that challenge.

“Never Ending Song of Love” was one of my favorite radio hits that year and introduced me to Delaney and Bonnie and their album Motel Shot. I was fascinated by the fact that they recorded that album in motel rooms and public meeting spaces where there might be an old, ratty piano. One percussion instrument credited on the album was an empty briefcase. The songs are just as raw and real as at a late night jam. Oddly, I just this week came across a documentary from that era called Festival Express where Delaney is featured. It’s an uneven film with some tedious and great moments, chronicling a cross-country Canadian rock festival tour with amazing acts like Janis Joplin, the Band and the Grateful Dead.

What an amazing year was 1972, when I discovered Jackson Browne. He opened for Joni Mitchell at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in L.A. and, just months later, in the Jahrhundertshalle in Frankfurt, Germany. I was spending the summer and fall in Europe and Joni provided the perfect soundtrack with her album Blue. Representing that year is “All I Want” which features Joni on dulcimer. I also discovered Kenny Loggins, who had teamed up with Jim Messina from Poco, one of the groups that Matt was following because they morphed out of the Buffalo Springfield. “Danny’s Song” had more fame from Anne Murray’s Nashville-ized shortened version with strings and pedal steel, but Kenny’s cut with twice the verses reveals more of the Zeitgeist with his mention of getting high and astrological signs. I loved the Loggins & Messina album Full Sail which followed this, so 1973 is represented by “Watching the River Run”.

What a culture shock for me, to return from Heidelberg, Germany to Malibu, California! Sara was at Pepperdine now, her family was enjoying the Adamson house on the beach, and she and Sam and Danny and I spent occasional time together. We all drove up to Hayfork to visit Danny and Sally in northern California, and we attended another Joni Mitchell concert together. That was another culture shock. Joni had made a jump that was natural for her but jarring for me and much of her audience, from the hippie princess in leather and velvet to a rockin’ mama in heels and makeup with an entire band behind her, Tom Scott and the L.A. Express.

It took some doing for me to make that adjustment. “Help Me” from the album Court and Spark represents 1974. I remember buying that album and taking it to Sara’s, sitting on the floor in Marilyn’s bedroom where the stereo was and actually working at getting my mind around it. I really wanted to grow with this artist who had been such a creative inspiration and role model for me, but it was a challenge to make the leap from acoustic guitars to saxes and drums and Jaco Pastorius on a fretless bass.

I can’t explain the lack of a song from 1975 unless it’s because I was spending all my musical time in Nashville at the Koinonia Bookstore, sitting on the floor singing along to the music of a band called Dogwood every Saturday night. (I got to be “Dogwood for a Day” when Annie had just delivered their first baby and I filled in for her at a gig in Abilene.) They focused their ministry on families and became nationally known as Steve and Annie Chapman, enjoying a musical career with the Dobson ministry. In the meantime both of them have written many books, and both their children (Nathan Chapman and Heidi Chapman Beall) have become professional musicians in their own right.

I had moved to Nashville in the fall of 1974 with a sendoff from Sara and Marilyn that included an eight-track tape player for my yellow Camaro. I drove all the way listening to James Taylor’s album Walking Man – but that’s my memory, not the Jacksons’. I spent a year at Yale Divinity School but returned to Nashville in 1976 where the music business beckoned. Some of my musical colleagues opened by ears to new music, and one of those California artists I had missed, along with the Eagles, was Linda Ronstadt. “Hasten Down the Wind” from the album of the same title reminded me of Sara and Sam because their dance of separation and togetherness still continued. I also added “Give One Heart” because it’s such a happy affirmation of love amidst so much unfulfilled yearning.

We had all loved James Taylor since his first Apple-released album, Sweet Baby James. I remember a New Year’s Eve party at Sara and Marilyn’s Pasadena apartment where I had brought my friend Marty McCall. We drove straight from Nashville, 40 hours, for a few days’ post-Christmas vacation. We danced to JT’s In the Pocket and drank champagne that night supplied by Gary Baucum, the only one of us present that night with a paying job. (the rest of us were graduate sudents except for Marty the musician.) “Golden Moments” memorializes that visit. We got up the next morning and walked to the Rose Parade down the block, then came back to the apartment for omelettes.

The next time I was with you both was probably your wedding. The last three songs in this collection are a summary of the journey of your love, your coming together and parting so many times, the possibilities you had to face that you might never make a life together, and the final decision that you would. Although “The Water is Wide” could be heard as a bitter lament, I hear the determination and commitment of a partnership that God has blessed with longevity. Yes, we have all experienced the truth that feelings come and go. “Oh love is gentle and love is kind, the sweetest flower when first it’s new, but love grows old and waxes cold and fades away like morning dew.” But the final declaration is one of hope and confidence. “Give me a ship that can carry two, and both shall row, my love and I.”

Thank you, Sara and Sam, for sharing your lives with each other in our presence. Thank you for all the battles you have fought to stay together and create a family and a home. Thank you for being our friends, and for making our lives so much richer. And thank you for celebrating with us these thirty years of covenant relationship, and nearly a lifetime of memories.

Celebrity City

For the sake of those who, like my cousin Bonnie Kay, have never gotten over the excitement of celebrity sightings, I’ll list a few more. When I was still little, I found out how truly glamorous living in California could be, because you could run into famous people almost anyplace. My first sighting occurred on the way to the Hollywood Bowl, when our car happened to come alongside another on the freeway and I spotted the actor who played the bumbling fat Mexican officer on the TV show Zorro. How exciting!

Someone decided to throw the Pepperdine faculty and staff children a big Christmas show, and for the emcee they got the actor who played Robbie from My Three Sons. That was almost more thrill than my little heart could bear. I was still new to the California culture and not jaded about star spotting.

There was the night we were at the airport and we saw John Wayne picking up his son there. I was touched by the warmth of the hug they gave each other, and it helped me bring balance to my image of Mr. Wayne as a WWII hero and a tough-guy Green Beret.

When we started living in Malibu in 1972, of course the sightings dramatically increased. The Malibu Beach Colony was across the lagoon from the beach house that the Youngs were living in, and “stars of stage and screen” along with music people and other artists had been living in the Malibu for decades. Their nearest neighbor across the lagoon was Tab Hunter, a movie star heartthrob for millions of screaming girls in the early ‘Sixties.

One morning we were eating breakfast in the Malibu Inn (which is no longer there) and Rod Steiger sat with a small entourage in the next booth. (He starred with Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night.) Another morning I went with Marilyn to the Malibu Coffee Shop, which she loved to patronize, to have one of her favorite cheese omelets. Around the curve of the counter sat Art Garfunkle, appearing very depressed and eating alone. Marilyn said he was in there a lot. Bonnie Kay told me that Mr. Garfunkle had an unhappy marriage with the daughter of our Nashville grandmother’s oncologist, Dr. Grossman.

Another night we were having dinner in my favorite Malibu restaurant, Moonshadows, when Andy Williams and his then wife, Claudine Longet, walked in and sat a couple of tables down from us. It must have been a special occasion, because he presented her with a gift during dinner. Sara was fascinated, since this was a glamorous couple, and she reported (I couldn’t turn around and look discretely) that the gift was a gorgeous silver and turquoise belt. “Oh, Andeeee!” Claudine cried in her adorable, breathy French-accented voice, and got up to go to him across the table and give him a thank you hug. (This was prior to the over-publicized occasion on which Claudine supposedly murdered her ski instructor lover in a bathtub.)

At Pepperdine Malibu, we were often introduced to famous people. Momma had a book signing for Will and Ariel Durant, whose series on Western Civilization had finally been completed. Adela Rodgers St. John was a speaker at a luncheon, and I served her coffee. Helen explained that I should be very impressed to meet her, because she had been the first woman reporter to work for William Randolph Hearst on his newspapers. Later when her wrinkled brown face showed up as a “witness” in Reds (one of my favorite movies, produced, directed and starred in by Warren Beatty), I was duly impressed.

Bob Hope was the speaker for the first Malibu graduation, and Loretta Young attended that one. I met her in a back room. Mr. Hope said something in his speech that I recall for its irony. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, and he remarked, “I appreciate your sincerity, but I question your judgment.” In actual fact, I knew that most institutions bestow an Honorary Doctorate upon guest speakers so they’ll give them a large donation, so the truth was the opposite, as Mr. Hope well knew. Art Linkletter and Ronald Reagan both spoke at Pepperdine a lot, because they were on the conservative Republican speakers circuit.

In 1976, Marty McCall and I drove forty hours straight from Nashville for a three-day Christmas visit. His only star sighting on that trip happened in the shops down by the Malibu movie theater. “Radar” O’Reilly from M.A.S.H. (Gary Burghoff in real life) was buying a pair of tennis shorts. Once I was on a visit home and ran to the grocery store to get some things for my mother. I nearly crashed into someone else’s grocery cart, not paying attention, and looked up to see that it was a severely tanned George Hamilton (the actor, not the country singer). And there was the time I was driving down Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Monica and to my right, driving an SUV, was Robbie Robertson of The Band. I tried to keep up with him as long as I could, but he never looked over so I could tell him, in sign language, what a giant fan of his I was.

Years later in 1993, when Marilyn got married, I wondered why on earth Ralph Edwards (This Is Your Life’s emcee) would attend the ceremony, but he did. There was just no telling who Norvel was going to make friends with next. Everyone loved him and Helen for their comparative innocence, their generous natures and their endless affability and kindness.

And the Music Just Keeps On Coming

My senior year in high school, our choir was invited to participate in the “Myron Floren Extravaganza” at the Forum. (I think they may call the Forum the Staples Center these days.) (Note to reader: Myron Floren died this week, at the age of 85. It was announced on Sunday Morning, July 24, 2005.) It was a shame that Daddy had died the summer before we performed with Mr. Floren, because Daddy always loved Lawrence Welk’s TV show, on which Myron Floren played the accordion. He would have been thrilled by this concert.

Nothing could have been much further from the kind of music I now wanted to make. It was the late ‘Sixties, yet there we were, forced to sing background vocals for the music of the ‘Fifties, Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Music Makers. We had to rehearse more than thirty arrangements. My mom brought a friend to the performance, but I don’t recall their particularly loving it. I certainly felt I was being musically tortured as I endured it.

When I became a freshman and moved into the Pepperdine dorm, a wonderful opportunity availed itself. Here were people who played the guitar! With my love of music and the explosion of singer/songwriters, it was sort of unbelievable that I was seventeen and had never learned a chord on the guitar. So a young red-headed lady whose name I don’t recall showed me how to play “April, Come She Will,” a song I knew from the second Simon & Garfunkle album. I seemed to have a feel for finger-picking right away, and could feel the simpler chord changes. This was a whole different experience from trying to play the piano by reading music. I was able to move from my left brain to my right brain, and I loved it!

A terrible couple of classic embarrassing – no, nightmare quality – moments happened to me while at Pepperdine, in addition to all the good times. We did Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance the summer after my freshman year, and at the dress rehearsal, we were singing along and suddenly there was dead silence. Everything came to a complete stop, and we were all waiting. The conductor, Hansel Rayner, called MY name. I had one line in the whole production, and didn’t even recall it being assigned to me. Everyone was waiting on ME. That was a heart-stopping, nervous system-frying moment.

I also took voice lessons from a woman named Violet McMahon, who threatened to fail me if I didn’t sing out more. As part of the course requirement, we were supposed to sing two or three pieces in a vocal recital before the faculty. I did okay with the first one, but when the next piece came I completely, entirely went blank. I was forced to simply sit down in shame. Another flood of neuronic distress cascaded through my body.

In my sophomore year of college, I finally knew the joy of “making” a musical group that was excellent, special, better than average. I became a part of the Madrigal group, a few voices selected from the larger choir. The glory of that success was greatly diminished by the fact that Norman Hatch allowed everyone who tried out to be in the group that year, so we had sixteen members.

The following year, when our Madrigal group gave its concert, Mrs. McMahon came to me afterward and commented on the solo I had done, “I’m going to feed my father’s flock, his young and tender lambs that over hill and over dale lie waiting for their dams.” She cried, “What happened to you? I could really hear you! Why didn’t you ever sing for me like that?”

I had always pleased Mrs. McMahon with my pitch accuracy, but I couldn’t release my body to sing the way I wanted to. Mrs. McMahon gave me articles to read about Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, the opera singers, and they described singing properly as feeling like throwing up. I thought, “That’s why I can’t do it, I hate to throw up!” but it was much more than that. I was afraid of all strong emotions, afraid of loudness, afraid to express myself…afraid to be seen, and judged, and rejected. Seated in the midst of the Madrigals doing my solo, I had felt much less exposed, so I could sing with more confidence.

The Madrigals not only gave concert performances, we were also called upon to add our musical sparkle to Republican fund raising events. This included one dinner where, as we processed down to our seats after singing our (icky) “Red, White & Blue” medley, Frank Sinatra winked directly at me and mouthed the words, “Good job, kid.” Unbelievable.

Nothing glamorous sweetened the worst night of all, when we sang the same hideous patriotic medley to a gathering half the size of our singing group, seated in the Youngs’ living room. It was unseemly; it was embarrassing. The dinner party included Mrs. Blanche Seaver, who later donated the majority of the money for the Malibu undergraduate campus, Seaver College. I felt morally compromised. I felt like a musical prostitute.

As a political statement of conscience, I had sat through the Pledge of Allegiance in my high school pep rallies. I saw myself as a citizen of the world, but most of all I identified as a citizen of heaven, and didn’t feel that I owed a special allegiance to the U.S. of A. Although I enjoyed my life of comforts and freedom, and appreciated how much easier life was here than almost anywhere else, I no more felt I owed “allegiance” to it (whatever allegiance was supposed to mean) than I felt that it was my birthright to have all those privileges. I didn’t hold to either of those American tenets.

I knew that God loved and blessed people in all kinds of cultures with all different measures of freedom, and I didn’t believe that He loved or blessed America in a unique way. This is how I interpreted Hebrews 11:13b,14,16: “And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own…Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

I was raised to be a pacifist. My dad and uncles were Conscientious Objectors during World War II, when it was incredibly unpopular to be so, and my brother was a C.O. while we were still in Viet Nam. I couldn’t conceive that I was standing there singing songs I didn’t believe in for people who were probably donors to the John Birch Society. My heart couldn’t have been less in it. So my long-awaited joy in performing in an elite musical group really ended up costing me too much.

Performers I Have Loved

I didn’t get to see the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, although Janice Hahn did. (For years, Chip thought I had been there for that historic moment. He has been telling that story wrong for years, and I finally found out about it and set him straight.) My first live concert was indeed at the Hollywood Bowl, though, with our neighbors the Kinney boys as escorts. Opening for Simon & Garfunkle was The Lovin’ Spoonful, with John Sebastian playing his autoharp. So it was an autoharp! I was thrilled to finally find out how they were making that wonderful fresh sound I’d been hearing on the radio. Hal Freshley (my last college-boy crush before I actually got to college myself) had turned me on to Simon & Garfunkle, and I had loved them from their first album on, so this concert was special for me.

The next live music event was when Stephen Bennett took Sara, Marilyn and me to see the Supremes at the Forum. We prepared for the evening by buying the Supremes’ Greatest Hits and I of course memorized almost the entire two albums of Motown hits. When we arrived at the Forum we realized we were practically the only white people in the audience, but we loved it. Everyone was dressed like I’d never witnessed before, in their finest finery. The stage went black, a spotlight shone and the most amazing harmonica rendition of “Danny Boy” came pouring out of “Little” Stevie Wonder. After his set, the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band did “Grazing in the Grass” (Hugh Masakela’s hit) and a bunch of other unfamiliar but exciting street music. But we were now chomping at the bit for the ladies we had come to see. When Mary, Flo and Diana finally crossed the stage in their electric blue spangled sheaths, the crowd went wild. We were on our feet singing for the rest of the concert.

Later on around 1974, my Nashville cousin Bonnie Kay was visiting us in Malibu, and she was thrilled (She’s still thrilled, to this day!) to spot Diana Ross in the checkout line ahead of us at the grocery store out in Point Dume. Of course we scoped out what she was buying, and were stunned at the massive number of pink foam hair rollers she had in her shopping cart. For her many wigs, of course.

I was a senior in high school when I attended a concert featuring Dionne Warwick, again at the Forum. I went that night with Evelyn Ono, a friend from school, and at one point we went to the restroom during part of the boring opening act. There, all alone loitering in the lobby, stood Burt Bacharach and his then wife, Angie Dickenson. What else could we do but walk up to them and ask for their autographs? It was the only time I’ve ever done that. It was that night that I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to become a Burt Bacharach background singer.

Oddly enough, that’s sort of what I did. Though I never did get to sing for Mr. Bacharach himself, I did spend ten years doing background vocals in the studios of Nashville. I would never in a million years have guessed that my dream could ever come true. And in actual fact, I was only one degree of separation away from Burt himself, since I sang backgrounds on two albums by B. J. Thomas, the artist who performed Burt’s hit, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” for the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And I got to meet Mac David, the brother of Burt’s collaborator Hal, and also a successful songwriter.

Matt Young was my musical guide through high school. He was, in the words of Bob Dylan, a “musical expeditionary.” Though not a musician himself, he was a researcher. He would take us record shopping, and we would troll the aisles together looking for new material to fall in love with. We would go driving and he would tune in the new FM stations that played whole albums, long cuts and the more obscure music that the AM station programmers weren’t allowed to play. The most memorable of the DJs was B. Mitchell Reid, who worked at KMET-FM. He would actually play a new release in its entirety, which was incredibly exciting.

Matt brought my attention to one writer in particular. There was a standout song on an album by Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, entitled “Clouds”. We loved it, and Matt started watching the music scene for the appearance of its composer, Joni Mitchell. Her first album arrived just a little bit later, and soon we went to the Hollywood Bowl to see her. That happened to be a night when people around us got a little rowdy and uncooperative, and Matt got angry at them, and I thought, “Wait a minute. We’re all singing, ‘Come on people now, smile on your brother, Everybody get together, try and love one another right now’ and you guys are arguing and about to start a fight! Cognitive dissonance!”

The second time we saw Joni, she was at the Greek Theater, and there was an odd opening act. Three guys came out on stage with two guitars, stood around a mike and sang amazing three-part harmonies. After several songs, the curtains opened, and the crowd cheered and yelped because the rock ‘n roll background of these “new” artists was being revealed.

There were banks of electric guitars, amplifiers, two drum kits, etc., and Neil Young joined them on stage. It was the third live gig of Crosby, Stills and Nash. I later found out their second gig had been at Woodstock. I had lucked into an historic moment. I was familiar with David Crosby from the Byrds, and Graham Nash from the Hollies, and Stills and Young had been in the Buffalo Springfield (“For What It’s Worth”) which Matt had already turned me on to. Later we also loved Poco together, another offshoot of Buffalo Springfield. As the critics wrote, the Southern California music scene was downright incestuous. CSN’s first self-titled album was released in June, 1969.

The funny thing about that concert was the audience. We were sitting in a steep natural outdoor amphitheater, surrounded by trees. This was the late ‘Sixties, and there were a lot of young people who loved this music but couldn’t or wouldn’t pay to hear it. They hiked up the Hollywood hills and climbed the trees. The only problem was, some of them were too loaded to remain in those trees, and occasionally we would hear a crashing of bushes and ivy as someone fell out of a tree and rolled down the hill.

o ~ o ~ o ~ o ~ o

In the summer of 1970, between high school and college for me, Daddy had been dead for a year, and Momma felt ready to take a major vacation. She thought it would be a good idea to go on a tour of New England, and see her daughter-in-law Sharyn’s parents, the Harmons, in New York while we were at it. Well, my friend Sam was spending a year in New York working with Camp Shiloh. Shiloh had a summer camp in Mendham, New Jersey, where kids from inner city New York were able to come to the country, hear about Jesus, and get a different view of the world.

Sam Jackson had met Sara in 1966, when we were thirteen and he was eighteen. He and Stephen, Sara and Marilyn and I had formed that “prayer group” which was really an opportunity for Stephen and Marilyn to spend more time together and for Sara and Sam to get to know each other. Sam was a freshman in college when they met, and though Sara was five years younger, she was at least eighteen in her own mind. They dated, on and off, even though he was so much older. The Youngs trusted him – somewhat – because he was the younger brother of Matt’s best friend, Danny Jackson.

Now it was four years later, and I was going to be in New York, if ever so briefly. Why not try to hook up with Sam? He told me to meet him at the Port Authority bus station, and we would have an evening together. Then he would put me on the train to White Plains, and Mom and the Harmons could meet me there. How many parents would go for that when their daughter was just sixteen? But somehow, Mom was willing to accommodate me. Our family had always been loose on issues of child safety.

What a wonderful feeling of freedom, to be on the town in New York with Sam and his friend, a sweet, tall Texan named Joe B. Williams. My relationship with my mom had never been easy, and it was a relief to get a break from her and feel like myself again. And what an incredible night to show up in New York. Lazarus, that group I had first heard in Dallas with Campus Evangelism, was playing that very night in Greenwich Village at the Gaslight.

So we three walked along the hot city streets. At one point I was singing Joni Mitchell’s bluesy song, “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire”. I didn’t know it wasn’t okay to look people in the eye on the streets of New York, and one black guy going the other way made eye contact with me. He heard what I was singing, and called out, “Lighten up!” I loved that.

So we arrived at the Gaslight, a music club I had read about as part of the folk scene. There were the same guys I had heard in Dallas, and later met at a Bible study in L.A., on the little stage of a famous, genuine Greenwich Village coffee house. They were terrific. And I was with Sam and Joe B. The romance of it made me almost breathless with happiness. After the show, it was later than it was supposed to be, but we hurried on the subway to the train station, and they put me on the train to White Plains, where the Harmons lived outside IBM headquarters in Armonk. And George Harmon was there to meet me at the station.

Lazarus never really hit it big, but they hoped to because of a connection with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. One night in Texas, they were able to get a demo tape to Peter after a concert, and instead of just taking it with him to listen to later, he got a wild notion to go with them to their apartment and listen to them play live. He was so impressed with their talent and their passion that he made a personal commitment to try and help them.

A couple of years after the Gaslight performance, Sam told me that Lazarus was coming to L.A. Peter was traveling with them, and they were all playing at the Troubadour. It was meant to be their “last try” tour, to promote their second album. If nothing happened this time, they would come off the road and quit trying as a band. Of course we had to be there at the Troubadour. It was April 19, 1972 – I wrote it in a journal. Of course they were great, playing some music from their second album, which Sam assured them afterwards was their best work yet.

As we waited in line to get in, Sam and Sara and I were standing around passing time when Sam turned to me and seriously asked, “So when are you going professional?” At first it struck me as a joke, but he was so earnest. The awareness washed over me that someone was actually acknowledging my talent, encouraging me to dream, and believing that it wasn’t a totally ridiculous notion. His comment didn’t have enough power to set me really dreaming, but it did make a solid impact on my heart.

One postscript about Lazarus. In later years I worked in music for advertising, and I learned that Bill Hughes, the lead singer and writer for Lazarus, was the composer of that lovely little ditty, “Lifesavers…a part of living” which was their campaign theme for several years. I was pleased to learn that he had made some income off the music business, but also sad that he probably felt like a commercial sell-out.

When the internet became widespread, and a kajillion people were on AOL, I decided to write to all the men named “Bill Hughes” with AOL email addresses (there were six or seven) and ask them if they were he. I had a desire to reconnect with him and tell him that I was still listening to their albums and still loving their work. I never did connect with him, though I did hear back from some nice men named Bill Hughes. Then one day I happened to thumb through an issue of ASCAP’s publication Playback, and there in small print in the back of that issue was his death notice. So strange that he had been on my heart. Maybe there was some manner of spiritual encouragement flowing between us because I carried him there for awhile.

o ~ o ~ o ~ o ~ o

We were always looking for God in the music, and James Taylor came through for us with “Fire and Rain”: “Won’t you look down upon me, Jesus, you’ve got to help me make a stand. You’ve just got to see me through another day.” (He claimed later that it was just a useful metaphor, that he didn’t mean it literally.) There was “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum on the radio, and Judy Collins’ rendition of “Amazing Grace”. A huge black church choir, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, had a hit with “O Happy Day.” Cat Stevens did not disappoint, with his “Morning Has Broken” and “Peace Train”.

So it didn’t surprise me much when Arlo Guthrie had a spiritual experience while writing a song for his album, Washington Country. He was performing at the Hollywood Bowl, and he told the story before he sang that song. He said, “I was writing a song in Woodstock, man, and it was snowing outside. Every time I came to this line, ‘Jesus gonna make you well,’ man, the snow would stop and the sun would come through the window and hit the paper where I was writing. It was weird, man.

“And then when I started performing it, one time it was raining and the rain stopped whenever I got to those words. So I’m just warning you, man. I never know what’s gonna happen when I sing this song.” Well, it’s a cynical crowd in Hollywood, and I was wondering what kind of supernatural touch the Lord would bring to his Jesus song for us. Whenever Arlo got to that line, a dog in the crowd starting yelping and howling. The crowd kind of chuckled when they realized it was becoming a pattern.

o ~ o ~ o ~ o ~ o

I now had established a personal tradition of going to every Joni Mitchell concert that came to town, so when it was 1972 and she was performing at the Music Center, I called for tickets. On the first day that they were available, they were all sold out in the first few hours. What was I to do? I wasn’t giving up. I found another intrepid fan, Barbara Henderson, and we decided to show up about 4:00 pm and stand in the cancellation line.

The hours passed, the line moved slowly, and it was almost curtain time. We were the very last ones to get tickets before the line closed, and we hurried to our seats as the opening act began to sing. It was a guy we had never heard of, but we loved him, and found out his name was Jackson Browne. He was a new discovery, an addition to my list of heart-broken singer/songwriter poets who provided the soundtrack for my life.

Just a few months later, that same summer, I was in Heidelberg, Germany as a student (in the same Year in Europe program my parents had initiated in 1963). I was now eighteen and a sophomore in college. Somebody in our small group of American students found out that Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne were coming to Frankfurt, and a bunch of us decided to go. We hopped a train, found something to eat, found the auditorium (“Wo ist Jahrhundertshalle, bitte?”) bought the tickets for 20 DM, and had a magical evening with Joni and Jackson.

Joni had just composed her homage to Beethoven after she arrived in Germany, and she performed it for the very first time for us, on an awesome black grand piano. She had a vase of roses and a Persian carpet on stage with her, and I thought, “This is who I want to be when I grow up.” Later on, I would choose to stop following her lead. Her path got too rocky and dangerous for me. (Historical note: Joni Mitchell turned 62 yesterday, November 7. She says she quit writing when she was reunited with the child she gave up so long ago for adoption. She wrote the song "Little Green" about her. She says she was trying to help make the world a better place for the child she had been separated from, and now they're finally a family, she doesn't feel that compulsion any more.)

I had a postcard with a picture of the Heidelberg castle, and I wrote on the back, “So much said in listening.” (a line from her first album) and laid it on the stage at her feet. I wrote Pepperdine’s address and invited her and Jackson to stop by Heidelberg and see us, if they had time. Apparently, Jackson was an Army brat and his family had actually been stationed in Mannheim, right next to Heidelberg, so Joni mentioned that they were coming there the next day. The idea wasn’t all that far-fetched, I thought, and I waited around the Moore Haus all that next day in hopes that they would show up.

On our way home on the train, everyone was talking about the performance, and it was my first experience getting to critique a show with other aesthetes. I was moved to hear Russ DiNapoli declare, “She’s so generous with her audience.” Being an actor, he thought in those terms, and I was grateful he could put words to what I had been feeling.

Another chapter in my personal Joni Mitchell saga happened in Malibu. Sara and I always watched for when a new album would come out, and this time it was Court and Spark. Joni had really branched out. No longer was she “Acoustic Hippie Girl,” the queen of Topanga Canyon. Now she was dressed up and made up, and backed up by an entire band, Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, with jazz influences and woodwinds. We sat in Marilyn’s bedroom where the stereo was, and listened hard, trying to absorb the new sound and seeing whether we could get our ears around it. We both succeeded and decided to embrace the change.

So when she played a hall near enough to drive to, Sara and Sam and Danny and I went to the concert. It was so strange, seeing her transformed from Topanga princess into sexy city woman. I wasn’t ready to make that emotional shift, and yet I loved the lyrics of the album and related to them all, especially “Didn’t it feel good? We were sittin’ there talkin’, or lying there not talkin’ – didn’t it feel good?” and “Trouble child, breaking like the waves at Malibu.”