|
Peter's Infamous house in the Hollywood Hills
I spent the summer and autumn of 1971 in Peter Tork's Shady Oak house. When I moved in, the house was being rented by sci-fi screenwriter Rick Strauss and his wife Simone, who was a fashion designer with Patty Woodard, California. One thing I remember is that there was a huge hole in the bar, like someone had kicked it in. I've always been curious about who did that. Jim Morrison? Hell, it could have been any one of the "Rock gods" who'd partied there! I thought it was a shame that no one bothered to fix it -- it's an incredible house. I stayed in a maids wing over the garage, known as the Carriage House. It had its own bath and a view of the drive below, with Austrian crystals hanging on invisible fishing line in the windows, casting rainbow prisms onto the purple wall that the head of the bed sat against. Later, I discovered a door behind a mass of clothes in an upstairs closet that opened into an attic room that no one but Rick and Simone knew about. I immediately moved in and had a private loft that looked out over the entire pool area. I hung the walls with Indian bedspreads and wrote music to my heart's content. No one could find me; I could work uninterrupted. No one ever wore clothes when we were outside by the pool. I was a little shy about that, but I got used to it. Because it was less than two years after the Manson murders, the L.A. area was still paranoid about anything that looked like a hippie commune. Suddenly, hippies weren't just harmless, peace-loving sideshow freaks, and in the canyons of Hollywood, little signs began sprouting up on lawns proclaiming that the properties were protected by a security system. Rick had dubbed our group, which was actually an event production collective, "The Shady Oak Family". Understandably, the word "family" in this context made some people in the area apprehensive. The police were frequent guests, but not in the way you might think. They respected Rick because our events were well-known for always being incident-free. The police chief shared bagels and lox with us on more than one occasion, laughing with us at the kitchen table and, amazingly, treating us with a curious camaraderie. He paid no attention to the pot, and Rick never allowed anything harder. The L.A. Times published a huge spread on us one Sunday, and when I get back to California, I intend to hunt it up in the library archives. Invited there by a folksinger named Jessie, I hitched down from Ventura County and called him from a phone booth at the Laurel Canyon exit. He showed up in a red '68 Ford Mustang convertible and I, my backpack and 12-string guitar climbed in. Driving up the canyon and even higher up on the curvy driveway to the house, I felt like I was about to see all my dreams of fame come true. When I actually saw the house I about flipped. Jessie took me around to meet everyone; there were 9 people living there: Jeff Levin (who was Rick's right-hand man, taking care of the business of managing a millionaire commune -- he soon became my manager) Jessie, Diane Christy (a leggy brunette dancer and singer, and protege of actress Stella Stevens and who seemed oh, so glamorous to me), Bill Kaminski (a good-looking blonde who was a chef at the Olde Worlde Restaurant on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood), and Cathy Williams and her boyfriend whose name I can't remember. There were a couple of other people whom I remember only faintly. I finally met Rick and Simone at dinner, which we ate seated on the red-carpeted living room floor around a large round coffee table with a jug of Almaden. After dinner, I was asked to sing for everyone and I happily obliged. Later that evening, Jeff came to where I sat with Jesse in the music room, and said that Rick wanted to see me. He led me through the large, curved living room into the foyer, and up the circular stairway to a den on the second floor. I knocked on the door and Rick told me to come in. He sat behind an antique desk with a deck of Tarot cards before him and invited me to sit down. As he shuffled and dealt the cards he casually asked me, "What do you want?" I misunderstood, thinking that Jesse hadn't been cleared to invite me up to "the house on the hill".
Looking at the cards he'd laid out, he nodded in thought and said, "I can do that. See this card? This is the Fool. That's you. You're the star I've been looking for. All these other people are just court jesters, but you're the real thing." He went on to tell me that he wanted to make me the new generation's Mary Pickford, but I had no idea what he meant by that. He asked if I could stay and be groomed for my stardom. What else did I have to do? I said yes and the work began. He gave me a hippie stage name, which I hated, and instructed me to come to him with every new song I wrote. His wife began designing a "look" for me, sort of a white-face mime look without the makeup. Soon, I was performing at the Venice Beach and Griffith Park Love-In concerts, on TV and radio, at showcases, and warming up for acts like Leon Russell and the Doobie Brothers. Whenever I had an gig he made sure that a limo came up the hill to get me and bring me back. I was considered for the female host on The New Zoo Review, but Emily Penden, one of the show's creators and wife of the male host, got it. It happens. Between you and me, I'm glad that gig's not on my resume. I recall being taken to a house in Laurel Canyon where a designer had made me a couple of airbrushed shirts to wear at gigs. We had a big party one night that was catered by the Olde Worlde, and a lot of the Laurel Canyon bunch was there, but nothing crazy happened. I guess those days were over. I remember well the big bath upstairs and the sauna, and I remember sitting in a papa san chair late at night listening to music through headphones as I watched the lights of the valley below, and the planesz taking off from Burbank Airport. I heard Joni Mitchell's "Blue" for the first time there and wondered how I stood a chance at "making it" in her wake. Unfortunately, the Strauss's went bankrupt and when they moved to a smaller house in Studio City that was also owned by Peter Tork, they took only Jeff and me with them. Everyone else had to move on. Disillusioned within the month, I left too, although I still took gigs that Jeff got me for a while. Rick Strauss was not your typical commune patriarch. Sure, he taught us lessons about life (he was 60 years old and knew more than we did), and he used the popular spiritual texts at the time, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, the Teachings of Buddha, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, etc., but he saw himself mostly as a mentor, taking in talented young people and preparing them for fame, and life. "You live up here on Mount Olympus. You eat what you want, drink what you want, ingest what you want, dress how you want, make love to whom you want. You are gods and goddesses and you will treat each other as such. But if you want to be treated the same way when you descend down into the "real" world, you must continue to act like gods and goddesses. You are ambassadors for a new age. Conduct yourselves accordingly." I've never forgotten that.
I performed a few times on "Head Shop", a hip talk show on channel 52. During those performances I was interviwed by Dave Diamond and Elliot Minz, and appeared with Eric Burden and a group called "13th Our", who also played at Gazzarri's. We spent their breaks between sets riding up and down the boulevard in their limo, honking and waving at Sly Stone in his limo.
|