Dana Cooper, ca. 1974

I would rather bathe a cat than write this last chapter of the Elektra saga. I’ve procrastinated for weeks, weeding my yard, talking to the IRS, poking myself in the eye, anything to avoid writing about the demise of my record deal. Funny, it still bothers me.

Once the tour was over I retreated to sleepy Santa Barbara California where I shared an apartment in the hills with my girlfriend Mary Ann. While she worked on her Occupational Therapy internship at a local hospital I fidgeted around our little apartment and tried to figure out what had happened over the last year. Off the road I felt directionless. I wasn’t writing much. I had no gigs. Elektra was lukewarm about the prospects for my follow up album. Weeks slogged by before they issued a request that I demo some songs for their consideration. What could I do but comply?

Marlin Greene offered to produce. He scheduled a day for a demo session and I drove the two hours from Santa Barbara biting my nails all the way. It felt odd pulling into the parking lot for the first time. I never owned a car when I lived in Los Angeles. I always walked to the recording sessions. The four secretaries and one receptionist who sat at their desks surrounding the Spanish courtyard lobby always looked up from their work and gave me a friendly hello. Not today. Everyone’s eyes remained downcast as I passed through to Marlin’s office. Before I got there my presence was requested by the west coast treasurer. She proceeded to further question me about the long distance phone call confusion. Even though I assured her I had already made arrangements to settle the bill with the phone company she lambasted me for being a troublemaker.
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Continued from Part 2:

Are we having fun yet?

The day after the accusatory dinner with the Atlanta radio program director, Roger (the promoter who maybe wasn’t doing his job…) took us for a drive up Lookout Mountain to another radio station that was spinning my record in heavy rotation. The Program Director there, a fellow named Frank, invited us to tour the station and meet some of the DJs and staff. Frank was a cross between Fog Horn Leg Horn and Colonel Sanders. He was a tall, barrel-chested man with boot black pomaded hair and a pencil thin mustache to match. He wore a seer-sucker suit with a white belt and white shoes. He spoke in a slow, booming Georgia drawl. I liked Frank even though I thought he was full of bull right from the get go. Frank gathered a couple of DJs, technicians, Al, Roger and me into his office. We all sat in a circle while he opened a big bottle of Cuervo. The bottle went round several times and tongues loosened up. Somebody mentioned their latest office party and they all sniggered in a secretive, knowing way.

Frank told a tech to break out the party photos so we could have a gander at what they all found so humorous. Frank, being the big boss man, took the first look, peeling off each glossy in the stack and sending it around our way. Everyone studied the pics for a few seconds, laughed out loud and passed them on. Roger did likewise and handed the first one to me. It was an 8×10 of a man in a suit apparently passed out on the floor surrounded by four other men in suits standing with their dicks in their hands pretending to urinate on their unconscious friend. I blinked and handed the thing to Al.
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Phil Ochs, ca. 1973

Phil Ochs was a ravaged man by the time I met him in Washington, D.C. at the legendary venue The Cellar Door. Once a vibrant activist singer/songwriter, he appeared to be bitter and frail now. He was still robust enough to out-drink Al and myself though (and we drank quite a bit). This truly was the beginning of the end for him. In less than three years Phil Ochs took his own life. I don’t recall having any pleasant conversation with him and, in fact, I remember avoiding him. I was young and, sadly, had no idea how to relate to him.

Ochs received several encores after every show. He would stagger through the backstage door and relieve himself in the toilet which had no door while the crowd downstairs stomped and shouted for more. He would stagger back down, the crowd went crazier, he would play one more, stagger back upstairs for a quick drink, stagger back down and play another. He did this every set, every night.

A cadre of homeless men milled around on the sidewalk in front of  The Cellar Door. One of these fellows reminded me of Popeye after too long a sea voyage. To get to the dressing room one had to exit the front door of the club, walk around to the uphill side of the building, turn the corner and climb the stairs to the second floor. Every time we finished our set and popped out to climb the stairs this one guy would hone in on me. He tried to engage me in conversation but I never understood a word he rattled off. He was short, muscular, anywhere from fifty to sixty years old and his one unsquinting eye shone wild blue.

Al and I had just played our first set of the last night. We stood in front of The Cellar Door in the warm spring evening talking with Ron Stone, head of A&R for Elektra in Los Angeles. Popeye loped up and began slurring something at me. I smiled, keeping it friendly, straining to decipher what he wanted. He hooked my right hand in his and we stood there in a prolonged handshake while he kept baffling me with gibberish. I kept asking him to repeat himself. He became more and more agitated, his eye glinting hotter, his hand gripping tighter. Maybe he was Popeye’s evil twin after all.

Then he reeled back still clutching my hand, swinging his left fist, slamming it into the center of my chest. As I tried to pull my hand free I saw him haul back to take another swing. He fidgeted with something in his left hand and I saw it was a switch blade knife. He was drunkenly trying to get the damned thing open. Seems his first attempt at stabbing me had failed but he was a determined guy. The two of us lurched around for a while. No one else knew what to do but watch us in our grotesque waltz. Finally I managed to fling him to the ground and break his grip on me. The police were called while somebody detained Popeye. I left in shock and went for a walk around Georgetown to clear my head of what had almost happened. Someone I did not know had just tried to stab me in the chest. Fate is a funny thing. Once I stopped shaking I walked back to the Cellar Door where we played our last set of the weekend.
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Yes, we were all young once...

Not too long after my Elektra LP was released, my hometown newspaper, the Independence Examiner, ran this feature story about my burgeoning career.

Reading this article from the perspective of several decades later, I have determined that my brain was not yet fully developed.

The connective tissue between my mouth and my still callow brain had a tendency to unsnap and reknit awkwardly in those days. Occasionally, it still unravels. Especially during interviews where — in the final reading — I don’t recognize having said anything of the like. Kind of Gingrichian.

So much for the disclaimer. Once I get over the initial humiliation this tickles me. I hope it tickles you. Take a big dose of salt before reading. Check out the movies that were playing in Kansas City and Independence at the time. “Grizzly Adams” and “Stepford Wives!” Several really good ones too. Also gotta love the moustache. That’s the one I got caught between my teeth while biting into a Chunky bar. Maybe that’s how the connective tissue came undone!

The LP is out! Just click the album cover to visit "The Parallel Universe" and listen to it.

I felt poleaxed standing in the middle of Tower Records Store on Sunset Boulevard. A thigh high block of stacked LPs, over 1,000 of them, sat fat together in prominent display, all with the same cover staring back at me and the face on the cover was mine. I wondered how many more thousands of copies were crammed into a warehouse somewhere and who outside my immediate family and friends was going to buy all those albums.

In the weeks to come, Elektra Records would  release a single to radio, distribute to record stores and I would tour the country, following the record around from town to town. I’d be opening concerts for Townes Van Zandt, Leo Kottke, the Persuasions and Phil Ochs, scheduling radio and press interviews from New York City back to Los Angeles.  There was basic tour support offered from the label but not enough for a band. I could afford to take one accompanist. I called on creative guitarist and friend Al Billings to join me on my four month tour.

Al didn’t own a worthy instrument at the time so I went to Elektra seeking an advance to buy him a guitar. This meeting led to a bit of a yelling session between the Vice President of the New York office and myself. I could have benefited from having a manager who would take on these sorts of negotiations but I was on my own. After Elektra spent tens of thousands of dollars on production of the record and were so modest in tour support a few hundred dollars for an instrument didn’t seem all that unreasonable for me to expect. Apparently I was mistaken. I paid for the guitar out of my own pocket.
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(If you missed the first installment of this saga, you can find it here.)

(Listen to “Lover Baby Friend,” the first single from Dana Cooper’s 1973 debut LP, while reading the post that follows:

01 Lover, Baby, Friend by Dana Cooper

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

I sit listening to my first album from 1973 and I am overwhelmed with emotions. They run all over the place. Always do. Looking back is not what  I want to spend my life doing. Yet, I do it everyday. Aren’t all our lives spent balancing amongst what we’ve done, what we are doing and what we hope to do? I am no different than you. Only our experiences vary.

The Entrance to the Elektra Records Studios in Hollywood, ca. 1973

The seventh decade of my own particular balancing act has already begun.  On the night of my 60th birthday (April 2)  I was fortunate enough to perform at Ebeltoft Kulturhus in Ebeltoft, Denmark with my talented young friends, The Sentimentals.  Fact is, I’ve always been fortunate even if I didn’t realize it at the time. I’ve been on the road since I was 19. That’s 41 years and counting. There I go again; then, now and someday.
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Marlin Greene, ca. 1970-something

By Marlin Greene

Los Angeles in the 70′s – Elektra Records – the house that Jac built. I occupied a small room in that house for a couple of years. My job description was assistant to Russ Miller, A & R person for the West Coast. What that meant was that I was a nerve ending for Russ and Jac Holzman in terms of ferreting out promising candidates for an Elektra recording contract from the slush of bric-a-brac that arrived every day.

Not all of the tapes and disks came in the mail; a lot were delivered through the door by agents, cousins, lawyers, girl/boy friends and sometimes by the wanna-be’s themselves. My long-suffering secretary was my screening mechanism – if they convinced her they got to see me. If they convinced me, they might get to see Russ, etc.

Into this unfair and haphazard mechanism for gaining celebrity and becoming fodder for radio-land’s insatiable void, one spring day came Dana Cooper towed by his producer, Stan Farber. They had made it past my Brenda because Dana let Stan do the talking. Stan was a Hollywood veteran of the record biz – Dana was from Kansas.

Dana opened his guitar case to “audition” and sang two or three of his songs. They were all impressive, but the one that got my attention was “Oklahoma Rodeo Queen.” As far as I was concerned, this put Dana on the songwriter shelf next to Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. Dana also put up a nice appearance and played a mean acoustic Gibson, adding up to a pretty good candidate to impress Russ and Jac. I signed on.

After hearing Dana, Russ and Jac signed on too. Without realizing it, Dana had insured that I would not be evicted from my little room any time soon and that Elektra would make an album. However, Elektra was by this time was mostly selling units, not poety set to music. Dana had one hindrance that he would never overcome: finely burnished poetry set to music is not for everyone and doesn’t move a lot of units.

I had a dream somewhere around this time. I saw Dana clear as daylight performing in a very prestigious venue – maybe Carnegie Hall. The house lights were dim. Dana was playing solo in a spotlit center stage. Of course he was singing “Oklahoma Rodeo Queen.” I never told Dana about this. Maybe it will still happen. Maybe it already has and I got the venue wrong.

Dana, thanks for hanging in there. I always knew you were a magician who sets words to music and now I learn you are a conjurer as well.

–Marlin

By Stan Farber

I met Dana Cooper  in Los Angeles in 1972. He was visiting an advertising  exec  friend of mine, who had met him in Kansas City and advised him to come to LA and  meet record industry people.

He played and sang a few songs and impressed me immediately on his song writing ability and voice.  I took him around to various record companies in the next few weeks to play live instead of making a taped demo.  Many companies were interested, but we chose Elektra as the best fit for his artistry.

The music was produced at various studios in LA that had been used by many famous artists. The studio musicians were some of the best in the recording industry, among them two from James Taylor’s band, Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar. Many of the tracks were recorded live with the musicians and Dana recording together, i.e. “Jesse James” (magic happened)  Dana had not had a lot of recording experience at that time, but took to it like a pro.

“Oklahoma Rodeo Queen” and “Lover Baby Friend” remain two of my all-time favorite songs, now 38 years later.  Unfortunately, just after the album was released, the record label changed executives, namely David Geffen. He immediately trimmed over 30 acts from the label and brought in his own favorites.

Such were the vagaries of the record industry, their mistake, Dana’s misfortune. And yet, he is still thriving, on his own, continuing to write great songs, and touring the land, ever the quintessential troubadour.

Stan Farber
Austin, TX ,March 2011

The winter of 1971 I sold my album collection and a chocolate brown Gretsch Tennessean, packed a duffle bag and my Gibson Heritage and bought a one way ticket to Los Angeles. One year earlier I had met a gentleman named Bill Barnett at a coming out party I was performing for in Kansas City. Bill was taken with my music and offered help in introducing me to people in the music business in LA. After one foiled attempt to move out there and a grueling winter long tour of the Midwest college coffeehouse circuit, I finally managed to make that California trip.

Hollywood in the 1970s

The plan was for me to crash on Bill’s couch until I got on my feet. In less than one week I found a job petitioning door to door for a solar energy company. A few days later I snagged a $49 a month apartment across from Paramount Studios. The four story ocher colored building had survived several fires over the decades but it looked like it could go up in flames again at any moment.

I lived in one small room with a bathroom. For cooking there was a hot plate which sat atop a tiny knee high refrigerator. Both looked as old as the apartment building which was built in the 1930′s. There was a Murphy bed, the kind that folds up into the closet to make more room for entertaining. The bathroom was so cramped that the toilet stool lid hit the under side of the sink when lifted.

A trip to St. Vincent DePaul’s for a dented skillet, an equally abused pot, one chipped plate, one cracked bowl, one set of dinner ware, a dull knife, a rusted serving spoon and a flimsy spatula and I was ready for culinary experimentation. I cooked a lot of beans and rice that first month. Rationing was the key to survival on my meager budget so I made a loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese and a dozen eggs last one week. Sometimes I’d splurge on a quart of cherry tomatoes. Each morning I would consume one slice of cheese, one slice of French bread, two or three cherry tomatoes and an egg. That would be my meal for the entire day.

Just before moving in to my pad Bill Barnett arranged a meeting for me with Stan Farber. Stan was a renowned studio singer who was part of the most in demand group of  singers in the business. He also produced several albums for  Andy Williams. Stan knew Bill from working on one of his projects at Screen Gems Films. Since he knew just about everyone in the business Bill thought Stan might be interested in shopping me around to some record labels. Stan dropped by Bill’s one afternoon and I sang some of my songs for him. We hit it off immediately and he proceeded to make appointments with all the major labels in town.
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