Chapter 54 - You Bette Your Life

AT THIS POINT in 1978, Chas and I, being neighbors and all, used to hang out a lot together. I remember one time we took a walk out past his house on Walnut into the more underdeveloped regions of Laurel Canyon. It was a beautiful sunny day in LA (aren't they all like that?) and we stopped at a clearing where I could finally try to explain astrology to him using a walking stick. I drew an astrological chart in the dirt and divided the circle into twelve equal parts. I was so engrossed in my explanation, I hadn’t noticed a small black cloud forming directly over our heads, but Chas did and said, “Maybe this is not such a good idea, James.” I told him not to worry so much about it and that I was almost through. He was not convinced, especially after a giant of a man, who looked like an overstuffed version of Grizzly Adams, appeared on the horizon walking toward us at a rapid pace.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Chas pleaded, but I needed to finish. As the beast of a man came closer, I began to feel we had overstayed our welcome. The behemoth was casting a giant shadow over us as the cloud grew darker in tandem.

“What are you boys doing here? This is private property,” he said in a deep gravelly voice. We left before I could finish my explanation of Chas’ chart and I don’t think he ever had any intention of finding out about it in the future.

Chas was on a roll. His band, Romanse, was hired to perform in the Robert Altman film, A Perfect Couple, with Ted Neely (from Jesus Christ Superstar) and Paul Dooley, a wonderful character actor. I went down to visit him on the set of the film, and I sat in the audience of the Greek Theater where they were shooting a scene with the band playing a rocking, soulful number. There were a few other people in the audience but it hardly, if it were filmed without effects, would seem like a full house. A little while later, Chas was watching the rushes of that scene, and he was amazed to see a full shot of me that lasted for more than ten seconds. My face on the silver screen drinking a coke was all you could see. I have to rent that film and see if I made it to the final cut.

After seeing the film, Bette Midler had auditioned the band and they passed with flying colors. They performed to a sold-out crowd for over a week at the Greek Theater. One night, after a performance, I was backstage with him, but we had stayed a little too long. When we went back to his Rover in the parking lot, we found it was locked in behind a chain. Chas called a few people for a ride, I guess he wasn't a member of triple A. After exhausting most of his resources, he finally called Bette. She and her not entirely virtuous friend, Tanya Tucker, rescued us in a silver Rolls Royce limo, where the white powdery substance was passed around. Bette did not partake of the powder but did crack open a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne and we all drank as we headed off to the Rainbow. Where else? At this time Chas was on top of the world and was very generous in picking up tabs at the aforementioned nightclub. I was happy to tag along and have him spend his money thinking when my ship came in, I would return the favor in spades. So far, I haven’t been able to reciprocate, and if I did find success, I wouldn't be buying drinks for the crowd since I eliminated alcohol from my diet over twenty-five years ago. I would maybe buy everyone a round of golf—or a set of golf clubs instead.

For my twenty-fifth birthday he bought me a CD player and a complete Beatles set of CD’s. This was one of the first CD players ever released to the public. He always had to have the newest, best and most expensive thing on the market. I had a nickname for him—Mr. Accessory.

Bette was really a wonderful person and so approachable. A few evenings later Chas, Bette and I were sitting in the kitchen of her Bel-Air home. She handed me a nylon string acoustic guitar and we all sang Beatle songs together. She reminded me of a girl I went to high school with, so relaxed and without any airs of superiority. She’s down home—I guess her being raised in Hawaii had something to do with that—or maybe it was just the way she naturally was. I could tell there was something more than friendship going on with her and Chas and I was right. They continued on tour and stayed together in one of the fancier hotels in Manhattan for a few months while her show, The Divine Ms. M had an extended stay on Broadway. He was connected in a big way now and I thought it would be beneficial to my career to hang on his coattails. Maybe we could write some songs together or he may ask me to play in his band. He didn't. I think he felt, since the demise of Silverspoon, I was too controlling, and way too stuck in my own way of thinking to be a side man, or even a co-writer. Maybe it all came down to his being fired from the aforementioned band by Mal Evans and was thinking that I had something to do with it. I wasn't even there that day, but I guess I could have gone to bat for him—thinking it may rock the boat and jeopardize our chances for success with an actual Beatle associate at the helm, I didn’t.

He might have had other reasons. When he got a gig in 1979 with Steppenwolf and then The Association, neither of which had any of the original members, he went on the road and asked me to keep an eye on some of his things. He had a set of Auratone speakers, and I had kept them on top of my piano. One day my cat, Gretel, or maybe it was Bosco, jumped up on the piano and knocked one of the speakers off. It had a two-inch scratch on the side, nothing that affected the sound, but it was scarred for life. He never forgave me for that. During a gig with The Association, the band was somewhere in Texas or Oklahoma and had just wound up the last set in the club. For some reason or other, Steve Green, the agent, had not paid the club owners and they consequently had confiscated all the band’s instruments and locked them in a storage closet in the back of the nightclub. Early the next morning, Chas and the rest of the band broke in, stole back their instruments and headed out of town. They didn't get far before the cops caught up with them and threw their sorry asses into a holding cell. He called his mom, and she wired the police station the money by Western Union. It wouldn't be the last time she would bail him out of trouble. Hey, beside love and nurturing their children, that’s what moms are for. Right?

Another time he had lent me his Guild acoustic guitar for a showcase I had at the Troubadour. There was a special cable that attached itself to a miniature microphone in the body of that guitar. I was trying to be as conscientious and careful with the guitar as I could, but me being caught up in exhilaration in the aftermath of the gig, I forgot about the cable and left it there. I went back the next morning to see if anyone had turned it in, but nobody had. It wasn't just any cable, mind you, it was specifically designed to fit that guitar and a replacement would cost a few hundred bucks, which I didn't have. I think he eventually sold the guitar but never forgave me for that either.

 Although we remain good friends to this day, I can’t help but feel there are some hidden resentments on both of our parts. It took more than thirty years, but I did finally confront him about an amplifier of mine I left in his mother’s garage back in 1974 that disappeared. He said it wasn’t him who had taken it, it was his brother, Richard (also fired him from Silverspoon) who sadly had died on December 8, 1985, from a drug and alcohol overdose which was deemed to be a mistake. He was trying to get sober and had slipped in big way with Vodka and Codeine. It’s a shame that Richard couldn’t be here to defend himself. It was five years to the day after John Lennon was brutally murdered.

I tried my best to console my friend. He was so depressed he was going to blow off his ski trip to Aspen. I told him I would help him drive his Chevy Blazer to Colorado and try to lift his spirits. He agreed. On the way we stopped in Las Vegas, got a room at the MGM Grand, and we did a little gambling. I won a few hundred bucks at the craps tables. We procured the company of some local female talent and after they left, Chas and I wrote a song called, It Ain’t Love, But it Ain’t Bad. You can imagine the details.

We were driving through Grand Junction, Colorado the next day when Chas had an uncontrollable urge for a burger from Burge King. MacDonald’s or Wendy’s wouldn't do, it had to be a Burger King Whopper. I thought it extremely odd since he was basically a vegetarian. We had no idea where in Grand Junction a Burger King was located and told him we should pull over and ask someone. This was 1985 and there were no GPS’s. He was a man on a mission and was determined to find one come hell or high water. Just when I was losing hope, a Burger King materialized like an oasis in a desert of fast-food restaurants. While standing in line, Chas noticed a girl behind him wearing a button on her coat. As he looked closer, he could see it was a Great Buildings (the band his brother Richard played drums in) button. Great Buildings was a wonderful group, but they were not very well known outside of Los Angeles and for this girl to be wearing it on her coat seemed like more than a coincidence, it was fate. It served to remind Chas, and me, that there are more things out there than meet the naked eye or as old Billy Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. He was so right.

I must confess, with all of Chas’s evasiveness and self-oriented lifestyle, he still calls me his best friend, well at least I’m his oldest friend. Later, we were living across the street from each other for the second time, he on Milner Road and I on Camrose drive. One evening, I had a very lucid dream. I saw a magnificent sky of blues, bluer that I had ever seen in my red-green colorblindness of waking reality. It was fairy-tale-like in feeling, and I woke up with a melody in my head reminiscent of ’til Tuesday’s— Voices Carry. At eight AM, I called Chas, played him the melody and, even though he hadn't had his morning cup of coffee, he told me to come right over. We recorded the demo in his 16-track studio through the Trident board, and it sounded pretty darn killer. About a month or two later, it appeared on Maria Vidal’s 1987 self-titled record and was released as a single by the familiar name, Make Believe—check it out on you tube— I still like it, you might too.

Chas and I would live in the relative same vicinity two more times after that. In the nineties, my wife Donna and I bought our first home in Woodland Hills when she was expecting the first of our three sons. Chas had moved about three miles away a few months prior. Before the Northridge quake, Chas had the presence of mind to move to the Nashville area in the more residential and slower paced Williamson County just outside of Franklin. Donna, our twenty-month-old son, Jonathan and I were not so forward thinking. At 4:28 in the morning, right after I had coaxed Jonathan back to sleep and I was just about to rest my weary head, the house starting rocking—not the good kind of rocking. I shielded my wife, who was sleeping on my left; she woke up to the convulsing room and screamed, “Jonathan.” I got up and my feet swayed like I was walking on the deck of a ship caught in a tidal wave. I crawled my way into Jonathan’s room and somehow lifted him out of his crib just before the substantially sized framed picture of a teddy bear painted by his Nana fell on his newly formed head. We all staggered to the dining room and in the midst of the crashing glass figures on the shelves, televisions flying off the stands to the wooden floors below, we hunkered down under the dining room table. Of course, I didn't have any batteries in my flashlight or for the portable radio, so I got my keys off the kitchen counter, went to the driveway and turned on the Jeep’s radio. I heard that there was a 7.1 earthquake in Los Angeles (tell me something I don’t know) and it was not the big one California had been expecting for some time now. “NOT THE BIG ONE! I am so out of here.”

Two months after that, in March of 1994, we went on a vacation to Nashville for three basic reasons. One, to scout out a place to move to where I could still have the opportunity to pursue my musical endeavors, two, to visit Chas and see what he is up to now, and three, I had registered to attend a writer’s seminar at the Loew’s Vanderbilt Hotel near Music Row. We stayed in Chas’s rented, historic, antebellum house where Hank Williams Sr. used to let the cattle roam freely, in March of ’94. By July, after our earthquake damaged house sold in six weeks, bought an old farmhouse with three acres in Thompson Station, about thirty miles south of Nashville in the prestigious Williamson County. The only person we knew there was Chas. We were in culture shock. I used to tell my L.A. friends that it was more redneck than the Beverly Hillbillies.

Chas had a plethora of parties there on Bailey Road between Leiper’s Fork and Franklin. I’ll never forget the Halloween party he threw on November 2. It was a little late for Halloween, but it fell on a Saturday, and it also happened to be my birthday. Inside this palatial mansion was a large formal entry hall leading to a spiral staircase. You could imagine Scarlett O’Hara walking down to greet her ruefully beloved, Rhett Butler. At the rear of the foyer there was a baby grand piano. I sat down to play a tune. Little did I know that in the dining room, one room adjacent, were Stevie Nicks, Billy Burnette and host of other local renown musicians. As they gathered around the piano to join in, somebody mentioned it was my birthday and they all wanted to sing Happy Birthday to me. Not knowing the best key, I played a G chord thinking that would be a good place to begin. It was the worst rendition of Happy Birthday I have ever heard in my life. It was awful—nobody, and mind you these are professional in their trade, could find the key. One would start with the opening words in one key then, another virtuoso entered in another key, than a third in another, before too long it was utter cacophony. Maybe they were a little wasted, but hey it was near midnight, and we were approaching the new millennium.

Although in Silverspoon Chas had a minor but significant role, our friendship didn't expand until after the band’s demise. He still lives in Franklin, has barely survived two marriages and two divorces, the second much worse than the first which provided him with four children all under the age of thirteen, three boys and a girl. He now has been married nine years to a wonderful and talented woman, Melanie, and they have a little genius seven-year-old son, Bowie. Right now, he is producing my fifth solo album called Still Moving which should be released sometime in January of 2024. I think he still calls me his best friend.