Cindy Smith was a blond, strong-willed twenty-year-old who had gotten it into her head, from some unfathomable source, that life in Los Angeles was glamorous. She offered to come live with us in Topanga Canyon when she left Phoenix, but we denied her the privilege. Undaunted, she took her own apartment in LA and found a job as a seamstress.
One morning she was stitching away at her machine when she heard two guys with New York accents tell the salesman they were rock managers. Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg were nothing of the sort. They were gamblers by nature, two New Yorkers in LA with a good head for poker and chips. They met each other five years before in the Port Authority Bus Terminal and spent their college years roaming up and down the hotel circuits of one-night poker games.
With a sociology degree from Buffalo, Shep went through a quick succession of unlikely jobs: cabana boy, parole officer for a day, and as delivery boy for Devine garments, a shroud factory. After a year he hooked up with a Joey Greenberg, and they were soon in the chips again. I’m not sure how. By September of 1967 they had amassed a considerable amount of cash and moved to LA in search of action. A few months later they turned up in Cindy Smith’s hippie boutique. When the salesman asked him what he did, Shep lied. As soon as Cindy heard Shep tell the salesman he was a rock manager, she glommed on to his sleeve and told him all about her brother who was in a rock and roll band. Shep couldn’t have cared less. He said, “I’ll take another shirt.” Cindy said, “They’re in desperate need of a manager to sign a contract with Frank Zappa,” but Shep didn’t know who Frank Zappa was.
Cindy said, “They’re getting a six-thousand-dollar cash advance.”
Shep and Joey lit up like Christmas trees. A quick six grand with nobody to take it off their hands. Well, of course, they were rock managers! Two nights later we met them at the Landmark Hotel.
I don’t know if Shep and Joey were shocked when they saw us, all glitter and streaked blond hair, but if they were they didn’t show it. They took it for granted we were weird like we took it for granted they were rock managers. They lived in a two-room aqua plastic hotel-apartment with dirty dishes in the sink that let off such a stink it smelled like the Toledo garbage dump. We didn’t discuss business or the $6,000 once. He was a smooth operator and besides he liked us. Instead we got very drunk. Shep was low-keyed about rock and roll, since he didn’t know the slightest thing about it, and avoided the subject. He said the next time we had a job he wanted to come and see us.
Zappa in the interim was chomping at the bit for us to sign contracts and record an album so he could meet the terms of his distribution deal with Warner Brothers. He also had a new bug in his head: he wanted us to change our name to Alice Cookies. He decided that the only way we had a shot at making it was if we played it as a comedy act. I was insulted. To top it off, he was insisting that his partner in Straight-Bizarre Records, Herbie Cohen, become our manager — making us completely Frank Zappa controlled.
We stalled for two weeks until Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg could hear us play at the Lenny Bruce Birthday Celebration held at the Cheetah. Lenny himself was six feet under, but the celebration still attracted every hipster in Los Angeles. The Cheetah was wall to wall with high-energy speed freaks tripping out on the dance floor. Outside on the pier, five big-name bands, including Jim and the Doors, were playing to another crowd of 10,000 people who were stretched along the beach on blankets.
We were halfway through our first number that night when the heckling started. When the audience realized the boos and yelling didn’t phase us they started throwing plastic cups, some full of booze and soda. I booed back. When the screamed, “Get off!” I screamed back, “Get out! What do you expect? Idiots! I’m a star. Don’t boo a star!” I spit at them. I shoved my hand down the front of my pants and yelled, “Eat me, you cowards!”
After fifteen minutes Merry Cornwall stopped the show and called for the houselights. WE had nearly emptied the club. The people who were left stood along the back wall as far from the amplifiers as they could get. About twenty-five feet away from the stage, Shep Gordon stood there clapping like a seal.
“You cleared the auditorium in fifteen minutes!” he said. I kept asking, “Did you like us? What do you think?” Shep just went on, “What power! To run three thousand people out of this place in one stroke!”
“What did you think about us?”
“Do you know how hard it is to get three thousand people to do anything in fifteen minutes?”
“We do it all the time,” I confessed. “Do you think we have a chance to make it with an album? I mean, what do you think of the music?”
Shep was in reverie: “Three thousand people in fifteen minutes! I don’t care if they fucking hated you. It’s mass movement. There’s power and money in that. Jesus, three thousand people!”
I didn’t honestly get the point. But I understood that Shep was honestly sparked by something that had happened in the auditorium that night. Six thousand dollars in the hand was a sickly goose compared to what he saw waiting in the bushes.
We met with him and Joey the next day to discuss management. He finally admitted he knew very little about rock music (although he continued to claim he was a business manager for several groups including the Left Banke), but you didn’t have to be a critic to know our music was putrid. When he got down to it he told us it was the worst show he had ever seen. But the sight of those three thousand people running for cover still gave him orgasms.
“I’ll get into this for one thing,” Shep said. “I want to make a million dollars. Then we’ll get out. I don’t care what you sound like or what you look like, I think you can do it. If you want to make a million bucks you’ll have to stick with it for as long as it takes and as hard as it gets. Okay?” It was okay with me.
Frank Zappa and Herbie Cohen were furious when we told them. Who the fuck was Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg? Where did we pick up these two shyster New Yorkers? Why them? Why not Herbie Cohen?
Shep and Joey ruled Zappa and Cohen off limits until we signed the contracts. No phone calls. No socializing. Not even with the GTOs. Either we signed correctly, with a third part protecting us, or not at all — a heady attitude for a rock group who just a month before were desperate enough for a contract to sell themselves into bandage. Most important was we learned that Zappa and Cohen were not friends, but business associates, and had to be dealt with that way. It was the first commandment of the music business: Nobody is your friend.
In early October of 1968, a week before we were supposed to sign the Zappa contract, Shep moved us into an enormous glass and stucco Spanish style house on Quebec Street in the Hollywood Hills that was owned by John Phillip Law. Five bedrooms, gleaming kitchen, dining room, study and heated swimming pools. Shep said nobody wanted to connect with a bunch of losers, and if we were going to be pop stars we had to appear to live like pop stars — at least from outside. The rent, a big $350 a month, was going to be paid out of our $6,000 advance.
Law owned several houses in the hills, all of them rented and tended by his caretaker, Jack Crow. Crow, Shep warned us, treated the houses like they were his children, and one broken window or scratch and we’d get heel. Crow was waiting for us the moment we got there. He was a tall, hefty man in his late forties with tweezed eyebrows. It looked like he was wearing his mother’s nightclothes.