Free Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt Page B

management company and assembled an impressive stable of thoroughbreds. It included Laura Nyro; Joni Mitchell; Neil Young; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and, eventually, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and John David Souther. David went on to form a hugely successful label called Asylum Records.
    The other person was John Boylan. John was introduced to me as the man who had produced the latest single for Rick Nelson, “She Belongs to Me.” In addition to being a big seller, the record was tasteful and thoughtfully produced. John had helped put together a band to back Nelson called the Stone Canyon Band. It featured steel guitar legend Buddy Emmons, plus a number of L.A. country rock stalwarts. It sounded like my dream band. I asked him if he would consider putting together a band for me, and he agreed.
    John stood with the best of the grownups among the Troubadour regulars. As a young man in his twenties, he had a head of thick, gray hair, and faded blue eyes to confirm his Irish surname. He was smart, well behaved, and well educated, with a degree in theater arts from Bard College. He knew his way around a stage, and he knew his way around the music business. He was a healthy specimen, slender and fit. We called him Fat John. He produced some recordings for me, and we started to build a touring band.
    I was living with John David Souther on Camrose Place, which was a little court of bungalows on the hill below the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater. He had the flint-eyed, dusty-wind squint of the Texas Panhandle, where he had been raised. WhenI met John David he was playing drums for Bo Diddley, but it was his songwriting that impressed me.
    Jackson Browne lived in the bungalow adjacent to us. Jackson was younger than most of us by a couple of years, but he always ran in front of the pack. In the Troubadour community of blistering raw talent, he was a little smarter, a little further evolved in his thinking, a little more refined in his writing practice. He could use his relatively small voice to great advantage. Jackson has a Doppler effect way of starting a musical phrase that seems to be coming from far away at great speed. It builds in intensity till it disappears in the distance, leaving the listener sprawling. He was sixteen when I met him on Hart Street, shortly after I had arrived in Los Angeles, and he had already written “These Days,” a beautifully crafted song that stands with his best.
    Later, we toured together, often alternating as headliner, depending on who had the bigger regional hit. In our little circle, Jackson was touched earliest by tragedy. His beautiful young wife, Phyllis, who was a troubled girl long before they met, committed suicide, leaving him a small child to raise. Jackson, devastated, did his best to step up to the task. I remember him and his little son running up and down the aisle of our tour bus. Jackson had a beach towel tied around his neck to resemble Superman’s cape, trying to make touring life seem like it was something normal—trying to ransom his boy’s childhood from the fate he’d been dealt by the death of his mother.
    John David Souther and Glenn Frey had been a duo called Longbranch Pennywhistle, and they spent a lot of time with Jackson, swapping ideas and writing songs together. Warren Zevon, with his literate, quirky sensibility, was also included. I never got to know Warren well. I remember him as someone who mostly stayed quiet, his complicated gaze directed at the floor.He was the only person I ever knew with a subscription to Jane’s Defence Weekly . There was a lot of competition among those individuals, with no lack of silverback posturing, yet I always had the sense that they admired and respected one another’s work, and weren’t stingy about giving support and encouragement.
    I recently came across an old cassette tape recorded in my living room in Malibu, sometime around 1976, of Jackson teaching me to sing Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” plugging a song for