BONNIE YARDUM WAS beautiful, like a rose, but there were
thorns attached and you had to be careful not to get pricked. She was the
receptionist at ASCAP when Stephen and I strolled in off the street wanting to
set up a meeting. There was a girl with a beauty mark on her left cheek on the
back cover of Leon Russell's Carney songbook eating some cotton candy.
That was Bonnie. She also appeared in a film in 1975 with Dean Stockwell and
Russ Tamblyn, Win, Place or Steal which also featured a small part by
Johnny Haymer, my dad. Bonnie had two loves in her life, one was her standard
poodle, Buffy, and the other was heroin.
There were so many people
we knew that were abusing drugs in those days and many of them are not around
to tell about it; hey, it was the seventies. Even though Silverspoon had a
reputation of being a druggie band, the nucleus, Stephen, Blair, and I
were what one would call “normies”. Sure, there was pot around all the time and
Stephen, and I had our fair share of joints or maybe some choice mushrooms once
in a great while, and Blair, who never smoked, would dabble in this or
that but it never ruled our day. We would never go out of our way to get high
and escape, if anything we would do things to enhance our experience, which was
usually music. Unfortunately, that wasn't what it was like for Joey. He took to
the much harder stuff. He was one of these guys who could keep a straight face
through any degree of intoxication. You would just never know if he was
tripping his brains out or completely sober. He was a perfect match for Bonnie,
although the thought of them together made my blood boil. They would hide out
in her apartment on Westbourne, and I was jealous. I knew Bonnie had some
terrible habits and I would be out of my mind to want that kind of thing in my
life, but I cared for her deeply.
I think it was at a
Halloween party at the end of 1975 Bonnie was hosting a nightclub on Rodeo
drive called The Daisy. This was the party where Blair would meet his
future squeeze, Christa Helm. Christa was an enterprising actress and wanted to
get into the music biz. She started working on her record with Frankie Crocker,
the former New York and Miami DJ, the man credited with coining the radio term
“urban contemporary”. It would be later in '76 when Blair and Stephen
would move into the “red house” on Fountain near Kings Road in West Hollywood.
That place gave me the creeps. I stayed away from it not only because it felt
dark and evil, but also because of the banal and nauseating music that was
coming out of it. Bad vibes.
It was right after the
party at the Daisy when I met Tommy. He used to hang out at a Chinese
restaurant across the street from the Rainbow called Jimmy Wu's. Tommy looked
exactly like Lee Marvin with a deviated septum from doing more than his fair
share of cocaine. One night I was having dinner there with Bonnie when Tommy
pulled up a chair. He said he recognized me as one of the guys hanging
around Blair and Stephen at the Rainbow. I always thought I kept a low
profile but apparently not. He was going on in a hyper rant about how he knew
this guy and that guy and was a good friend of Billy Preston's, the keyboardist
extraordinaire who played with the Beatles and had a couple of hit singles in
the mid-70s. Tommy said Billy was going to appear at a party of a well-to-do friend’s
house and we were all invited.
The huge party in a
mansion in Beverly Hills materialized because fortunately or unfortunately one
of Silverspoons’s parents was out of town. So, we invaded the place and took
control, or so we thought. There were all sorts of people invited, not your
typical Rainbow crowd, no, these folks were the druggie types, the mafia
dons with their diamond laced girlfriends. Big boobs, round assess co-mingling
with greasy-haired pimped-out dudes. Then entered Billy with Tommy and the rest
of his entourage. There he was, the so-called fifth Beatle, (although there
were at least five or six other people who claimed this honor). Billy sat down
at that Steinway grand in the living room. It was hard not to notice that monstrous
wig on his head looking like it could have housed all sorts of unmentionable
critters or vermin. I'd never seen so much cocaine in my life on the coffee
table. It was spread out over a large silver platter that had to be at least
fifteen inches in diameter. The coke peaked up in a mountain that crested like
a miniature ski slope covering nearly half the platter.
While tuning up my J-200
in the corner, I had convinced Blair (who was sitting with some
gorgeous honey) to sit down at the piano and play. He was a little intimidated
but held it together and played the keys with one of his idols, watching. He
started into Flight of the Bumble Bee written by Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov. He was playing it faster than I had ever heard, then Billy jumped up
off the leather couch and began to play the high part. It was mind boggling. Blair was
in piano heaven.
Joey got up from his perch
at the bar and said, “Let's do some Spoon tunes”. I was shocked that he took
the initiative to sing in front of all these people, but he was feeling good,
real good. Stephen picked up his Martin D-28 and with Blair still at
the keys we went into She Is The Woman. I saw Billy watching Blair’s fingers
and he was smiling that little boy smile of his (the same smile so prevalent in
the Let it Be, and later Get Back movies) I glanced at Bonnie who
was now sitting with Tommy attempting to level off that mound of coke on the
table. I knew I could never be with a girl like that, even though she was
gorgeous and sweet and had great intentions, her habit would prove to be too
overwhelming for me. It just didn't seem that we were a good fit, although she
did appeal to my more rebellious nature, but good sense would win out in the
end, at least in our case, which really wasn't the case at all. Infatuation, I believe,
was what I would have called it.
Joey was on his game that
night. He was hitting high notes in a full voice that were hard to sing in a
falsetto and his pitch seemed perfect. The harmonies were tight, and the place
was rocking especially when Billy sat back down at the keys and jammed with us.
We were so caught up in the magic of the moment nobody realized that people
were starting to wander. There were people milling about the rooms upstairs
which a definite no-no, and it was starting to seem like another party was
going to get out of control. At least I knew the walls were well insulated and
the music was basically acoustic, so the police weren't going to show.
The next week we were
invited up to Billy's horse ranch in Topanga Canyon where there was always
something going on. That night Billy was playing the piano and there was this
guy underneath playing with the pedals and drinking Old Grand Dad out of the bottle. Blair asked
me if I knew who that drunk was and I said, “Yeah, it's Joe Cocker.” He somehow
managed to crawl out from underneath his hiding place then he sat down on the
piano bench next to Billy and sang a tipsy but heart-felt version of You Are
So Beautiful. Then the parents of the Spoon where the party had been the
week before came back from vacation.
To this date nobody knows,
or at least I don't think anybody knows who had stolen almost a
hundred-thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and other fine things from that
mansion at the party the week before. Was it set up by Tommy? I know Bonnie was
a part-time junkie but in my heart I knew it wasn't her. It couldn't have been
Billy because he was in plain sight the whole night. I can't say the same thing
for his entourage though I dread in my darkest of thoughts to think that any
member of the band or any people we knew from the scene were part of it. I
don't remember if the police were ever called in because neither Stephen, Blair
nor I were ever questioned about anything. I think the owners of the house were
trying to keep their names out of the paper for political reasons because
nothing was ever mentioned about it again, and after a few weeks it was forgotten.
We still had stars in our eyes, but now people were creeping into our inner
circles that were not the most savory of characters and it was going to be a
showdown. Things were coming to an unsightly head and the bubble felt like it
was about to burst.
Soon after that, Bonnie moved
into Mediterranean Village and was hanging around some red-headed dude that
sold smack. I did my best to try and talk her out of seeing this guy because I
knew he was bad news. It was March 31, 1976. I remember walking by her
apartment and blowing her a kiss as a wish to have a happy twenty-seventh
birthday the next day. She never celebrated that day, overdosing on heroin
probably around the time I blew her that kiss. What a shame and a terrible
waste of a life. I still think about her often.
Things were changing in a
negative way, and I had a suspicion it was that movie Helter Skelter that
had jinxed things. I hoped to God I was wrong. I know now it wouldn't have
prevented Bonnie from her fate, but there were too many variables tearing at
the seams and getting in the way of where we wanted to go, at least where I
wanted to go.
It was a few weeks
later when Stephen and I had our blow up by the pool table and I would take out
all my frustrations on a steel reinforced guitar case and then make my escape
into the desert. In between the two events I would go back to the friendly
confines of Oakhurst Drive at a time which would prove to be essential in my
development as a human being. Life was happening all around me and it was all
about me. Soon I would have to look it straight in the eye and deal with it on
its own terms. It was time, as Stephen Stills so aptly put, “to do for the
others”.
No comments:
Post a Comment