I WAS WATCHING Monday Night Football alone in my apartment
on Radford on December 8, 1980, settling in for the night with Peppermint
Schnapps on crushed ice. There was an interruption on the telecast, and, of all
people, Howard Cosell made an announcement that John Lennon had just been shot
outside his suite at the Dakota in New York City. Oh MY GOD! I flashed back to
when I was eleven years old, and they announced over the loudspeaker in the
schoolyard that JFK had been shot. My first thought then, as was on that chilly
night in December, that he was probably shot in the arm and would be
recovering. JFK didn't recover and neither did John Winston Lennon
and later John Ono Lennon. My musical mentor and hero was dead, brutally and
premeditatedly murdered by some insane twerp who was trying to emulate the
pop/rock icon. He lived in Hawaii and had a Japanese girlfriend, and he wore
the same round glasses as John. He tried everything possible to emulate his
idol but there was one thing he could never do—he could never be John Lennon
the man, the icon was still alive—so he shot him.
Mark David Chapman had
gotten an autograph a few hours earlier (Lennon signed a copy of the Double
Fantasy album) and was waiting in the courtyard of The Dakota on 72nd and
Central Park West for him to come back from a recording session. At around
10:50 pm on that fateful day, as Lennon and Ono returned to their New York
apartment, Chapman shot John in the back four times at the entrance to the
building on 72nd Street. He was taken to the emergency room of
nearby Roosevelt Hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:07 pm.
Yoko issued a statement the next day, saying “There is no funeral for John”,
ending it with the words, “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please
pray the same for him.”
I was more than devastated, I was in shock. Even though Howard Cosell is long gone, I don’t think I can ever watch Monday Night Football again without being reminded of that horrible evening— the evening the music really died. I stayed in my bed on Radford for a week only getting up to stagger down to the liquor store to buy more Kessler’s whiskey, being the only booze, I could afford. Even though Marly and I had broken up, she felt so sorry for me, and knew how much I had adored and looked up to John Lennon, she decided to take care of me. We actually got back together for three months, and I spent time at both my place on Radford and her place on Shadyglade, about two miles to the west down Moorpark. We finally broke up for good after realizing that we were better at being friends than lovers, still was a kind thing for her to do, knowing how I felt about John Lennon and what a complete mess I was after his death.
I had to write a song
about Lennon’s murder. Not a gruesome detail of the crime, but more of a
tribute to his life. I had one verse and part of a chorus when I called
Stephen. He was living on Lloyd Street with his mother, Mary. With the receiver
wedged between my left shoulder and my chin and a guitar balanced on my lap, we
had finished the chorus, and the song was really starting to take shape. After
we hung up the phone, I worked on it some more, but I knew it needed a bridge,
so I called Blair. He wrote the musical portion of the bridge and later,
Stephen and I wrote the lyrics to his musical passage. The song was finished in
three days. Was this going to be a Silverspoon reunion all brought about by the
death of Jon Lennon? It looked possible, but I was going to take it one step at
a time and not try and project anything other than we were going to record this
song the best we could and then see what happened. We called the song, Last
Autograph. Here are the words:
He was a lost and lonely child.
Growing up like a
hurricane running wild.
And then a meeting with a
boy named Paul.
Began the dream that would
soon be heard by all.
He had the love of the world,
but he felt alone.
Until his wife and boy
became his only home
Another meeting that was
set by fate.
Ended the dream point
bland with a 38.
It was his last autograph.
Hey mister, won’t you sign
your name?
It was his last, last autograph.
Cut down, in the prime of
his life.
Now the singer’s gone but
the song remains.
With words of love and
peaceful change
He was a man the whole
world cried for
Can’t you see it was the
world he lived and died for.
It was his last autograph.
Hey mister, won’t you sign
your name?
It was his last, last autograph.
He became a victim of his
fame.
We may have lost our
innocence that cold December night.
It’s got to be a lie I
heard a young girl cry.
We’re wounded in the
battle, but we haven’t lost the fight.
(Double chorus and fade)
In early January of 1981, after the song was completed, we booked a studio in
Hollywood and hired some of the best musicians we worked with in the past. Beau
Segal on drums, Chuck Fiore on bass, Blair on keys, Stephen on guitar and
myself, who played electric guitar and sang the lead vocal in my best Lennon
snarl. Joey was slated to sing the high harmony, but he had to wait around
until I had finished my vocal, and then overdub his part on top of that. It was
beginning to get late, but we wanted to finish the song, even if we had to go
all the way until dawn. We had enough of the white powdery substance to sustain
us, and I was doling it out to everyone there, especially the recording
engineer, who had invested some of his own money in the stimulant. Joey was
frantic and bored—not a good combination. He knew soon it would be time for him
to sing, so he asked me for my “stuff”, and then went into the bathroom to
prepare himself for his vocal. While this was happening, I was in the control
room with Blair, Stephen and the rest of the crew putting the final tweaks on
the track, you know, adding echo delay to the vocal to make it sound more like
John. With that being done, it was time for Joey to do his thing.
All he had to do was a
harmony a third above mine, some oohs and ah’s etc. We called out his name—no
answer. We looked down the hallway—no Joey. He was gone and had taken every
grain of the white powdery substance with him. We were pissed, but no one more
so than the engineer who was part owner of the drug. The session was over. We
did finish it with Brent Nelson singing the high harmony at some other studio
in the San Fernando Valley since nobody heard a thing from Joey after that.
I did see Joey one last
time in the middle or tail end of the eighties. He had married a woman named
Faith who had a young daughter, Nina, and he was an instant family man. I was
hoping the stability of married life would straighten him out, and it did for a
while, but it didn't take. He left Faith and Nina, or he was
released, and once again he was a wild single man on the loose and left to his
own destructive devices. He was trying and failing miserably at getting sober.
I myself was having a rough time and was at an AA meeting in Hollywood when I
recognized that chipmunk smile and machine gun laugh of Joey’s. We thought it
would be great to catch up on some old times, so we decided to go to the Café
Figaro to talk and just hang out. He said he had been in and out of
rehabilitation centers so often they had his name permanently attached to the
door—the Joseph Hamilton wing. He was having a really rough time and I felt bad
for him. Even though he had almost single-handedly ruined the session for Last
Autograph, I forgave him. What else could I do? He was a poor lost soul who
was too caught up in his own self-destructive patterns
he couldn't escape from. I was bad enough, and Stephen and Blair had
their problems, but Joey’s problems were more than all of ours put together. He
went in and out of rehab center for the next few years and sadly passed away in
1993 from complications of hepatitis—he had all three kinds, A, B and C. His
brother Jeffrey died at the same age in 1995 from the same disease—both at the
tender age of 41. I was greatly saddened by Joey’s death (and Jeffrey’s too),
but more so by the fact that I never really got to know him. He was a bit of a
loner and ran around with a select crowd of people that I never wanted to
associate with—nobody in the band did. Joey was stoic and, as I said before, he
was harder to read than Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. Joey was a great singer
and a great athlete, but as a person he never did reach his potential and was a
disappointment to not only his friends and family, but to himself. I guess it
was hard for him to live up to the expectations of his father, Joe, and his stepmother,
Carol Burnett. I wish that he had tried a little harder to push through his
pain and deal with his demons, which were more than plentiful. I still think
about him from time to time with an air of sadness and regret.
Back to Last Autograph.
The song turned out better than expected, and in late January or early
February, Blair and I drove up to San Francisco in Jeff Hamilton’s VW bug to
mix the record with Richie Moore at the helm. He was teaching recording
techniques in a studio on Hayes Street at the north end of the city. After we
were done mixing, we headed out of town but there was an unusual amount of
traffic and we couldn't understand why at that time in the evening,
especially on a Sunday. We figured there must have been an accident up ahead
because cars were at a standstill. We turned on the radio to get a traffic
update and we caught the tail end of the sports report announcing the Super
Bowl had just concluded in Oakland and we were driving right through its
immediate aftermath.
Everyone thought the song
was great; maybe the best thing Silverspoon had done since You Hurt Me
So at the Record Plant back in 1974. We pitched it to a few record companies,
but everyone thought that it sounded too much like John Lennon and it was so
near the time of his death nobody wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Not
long after that, Blair went back to his house on Mammoth with Jeffrey and
decided he had had enough. He knew, as well as everyone else, that Last
Autograph would be the swan song, the last hurrah for Silverspoon.
With Joey’s antics and the rejection of the song by the music industry, I also
knew it was over. Stephen was the only one who still kept the candle burning in
his heart for the band. It was so much a part of his DNA that he found it next
to impossible to let go. Sometimes I think he still holds out hope against hope
the band will reunite, even though over one third of the members are no longer
on this planet.
In September of 1981, after seeing Bruce Springsteen at the Forum, Blair and I
decided to form a duo called Two Guys from Van Nuys. We had a gig
at the Sidewalk Café in Venice the next night. Stephen, as I said before, had
just come back from Carmel with a guitar and amp with designs on joining the
Two Guys, but Blair and I wanted to keep it as a duo. Stephen was dejected and
it was a year or two before I saw him again. He was, like the rest of us having
a tough time with alcohol and it was becoming a real problem for him—not to
mention his strict diet of coffee, donuts and cigarettes. One day in 1982 an
event of which most likely saved his life occurred while smoking his usual
Marlboro light and drinking his coffee hot, blonde and sweet, Stephen looked
out the window and noticed a yard sale in the alley behind Jon Marr’s apartment
on Fourth Street in Santa Monica. He wandered down to see if there was anything
interesting to buy at a meager price, because, at the time, meagre was all he
could afford. He saw a Smith Corona manual typewriter and had a notion that he
would write the next great American novel. Standing next to the typewriter
there was an attractive brunette who happened to catch his bespectacled eye. He
began talking to her and before they knew it they fell in love. Her name was
Portia, and it still is, and she has been there by his side ever since and they
still live together in Venice. God bless them. God bless Silverspoon!
No comments:
Post a Comment