Rock's in My Head

By Art Fein

Since first becoming a true believer in the power and importance of rock & roll as a boy in the 1950s, Art Fein has been immersed in music and the music business, taking on many diverse roles:

• Journalist: onetime music editor of Variety, contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, Billboard and many other publications.
• Band manager: Blasters, Cramps
• TV host: Art Fein's Poker Party, a talk-and-live-music public access cable show that ran for 24 years. Guests included Brian Wilson, Dwight Yoakam, Dion, Alison Krauss, Ruth Brown, Jackie DeShannon, Dr. Demento, and loads more.
• Record company staffer: Capitol, Elektra, Casablanca
• Music Consultant, TV and film: Roadhouse 66, Tour of Duty
• Album Producer: L.A. Rockabilly
• Author: The L.A. Musical History Tour
• Blogger: Another Fein Mess
• Add to that: event promoter, photographer, record collector, and rock & roll historian.

In his wry, rollicking and insightful memoir Rock's in My Head, drawing on 10,000 (!) pages of journals he began keeping in the early 1970s, Fein recounts such incredible rock & roll adventures as:

• A week working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. ("I was in the unique position of coaching John Lennon on old rock & roll. Not many records got to Liverpool in the '50s, and a lot of mine were new to him…")
• Watching The Band record and befriending Levon Helm
• Hearing Ike Turner's legal woes directly from the legend himself
• Touring the UK with rockabilly legend Ray Campi
• Throwing wild, rocking New Year's Eve parties for hundreds of revelers with cars as door prizes
• Cooking up an ill-fated album with Ringo Starr ("Twenty-six years later…I was chatting with Ringo and mentioned the rockabilly album we'd planned. He said, 'Did I do the album? Did I stay at your house? I was so drunk in those days.'")

In 1985, Fein did the one thing fans are always cautioned against: he befriended an idol, becoming part of legendary record producer Phil Spector's inner circle. That relationship—often gratifying, sometimes terrifying—lasted through Spector's murder conviction in 2009. In Rock's in My Head, Fein shares startling and intimate details about Spector that have appeared nowhere else.

 

Rock's in My Head is the story of a diehard rock & roll fan who saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, bought now-classic Jerry Lee Lewis 45s the week they reached stores, and then grew up to become an active – and occasionally reluctant -- participant in that world. Fein writes, "It turns out I didn't want to be in the music business; I wanted to be in the music." 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trouser Press Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985658958

Art Fein

Art Fein is a rock & roll scholar. He is the author of The L.A. Musical History Tour. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Variety, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

ROCK’S IN MY HEAD

A memoir by Art Fein

Trouser Press Books

Rock’s in My Head

Copyright © 2022 Art Fein

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 979-8-9856589-5-8

Cover and page design by Laura Baer

Cover photograph by Albert Sanchez

All uncredited photographs by the author or from the author's collection.

Published by Trouser Press Books, New York City, November 2022

www.trouserpressbooks.com

E-mail: [e-mail]

Brian Wilson and me at his Malibu home, 1988, after his appearance on my TV show, Art Fein’s Poker Party.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

—Charles Bukowski

1

OVERTURE

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1973, waiting for Bobby Blue Bland to perform at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, I spotted Phil Spector in a corner booth with an entourage. He was my idol, the genius who transmogrified popular music in the 1960s with his unprecedented signature production style, what the Rolling Stones’ manager dubbed the Wall of Sound. From the time I was a teenager, I’d been knocked out again and again by the beauty and complexity of hit after hit, some of which he also co-wrote: Spanish Harlem, He’s a Rebel, Be My Baby, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin', and more. Most recently he’d co-produced George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and John Lennon’s Imagine. No one had loomed as large in my musical pantheon since I’d encountered Elvis on TV when I was 10 years old and consecrated my life to rock & roll.

I froze in awe. How could I possibly approach Spector? Then I noticed that John Lennon was part of the group. Lennon I knew. I sidled over to say hello. John stood and hugged me.

Great to see you again, he said. Phil, this is Art Fein. He knows everything about music. That nearly felled me. Spector, elfin, with a lavish spill of brown curls, very little chin, and dark aviator glasses, shook my hand. I was 27. It was a good start.

I would remind Phil Spector of this moment twelve years later in the baronial living room of his Beverly Hills mansion.

2

THE SALAD OF JOHN & YOKO

I’D MET JOHN LENNON and Yoko Ono in March of 1973, not long after landing my first job in the music business, seven months before that night at the Whisky. A college friend working as a junior executive at Capitol Records in Hollywood found a place for me there as head of the new and sub-important College Promotion Department, supplying Capitol’s college promotion representatives with new records and info—I wrote a monthly newsletter—so they could coax college radio stations into airing the label’s artists, as proven by the station’s printed playlists. My qualifications were a journalism degree from the University of Colorado, an abiding passion for rock & roll, and a willingness to boost other musical genres for the sake of professional advancement. That combination worked fine, for a while.

My position, I later learned, was created by Capitol’s head of promotion to increase his budget, money that never made it to the college department. But so what? I was young and ambitious and had a foothold in a record company. This was the realization of my greatest (my only) life goal—being among the makers of music, sometimes rubbing shoulders with greatness. And during my stint at Capitol, I got a startling gift: I spent a work-week with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

The pair were in Los Angeles to flog Yoko’s latest album, Approximately Infinite Universe. Capitol wanted to show John Lennon they were promoting it, only without expending any real effort. That’s where I, putative head of the even more putative College Promotions Department, fit in.

Plenty of performers strolled the halls of Capitol with nary a nod from the staff, but when John and Yoko visited the building in April of 1973, that was a big deal. People came flocking from all floors to catch a glimpse of them. I was just as excited, though my heart belonged elsewhere; I was true to a musical style dead for a decade and a half, a worshipper at the altar of earliest rock & roll.

I didn’t know they’d arrived when I was summoned by the secretary of Capitol Vice-President Al Coury to the top floor, the 13th, of the famously round building designed to suggest a stack of records on a spindle. Coury was in a meeting with John and Yoko that also included Bhaskar Menon, the powerful head of EMI International, Capitol’s parent company, and Brown Meggs, President of Marketing, who had signed the Beatles to Capitol for American distribution ten years earlier.

By the time they emerged from a conference room, I was parked outside the door. I rose, and Coury said grandly, John, Yoko, this is Art Fein. He’s very important here. That was news to me, but I smiled warmly and pumped everyone’s hand. Menon, whom I’d never met, turned to Yoko and said, He’ll be doing the promotion on your album. I smiled even more warmly to disguise my surprise, and we all set off for a tour of the 8th floor, HQ for promotion and publicity. I took charge, which seemed to make some of the bigshots turn green (but hadn’t I been anointed as very important?), and invited the group to peek into my small, pie-wedge-shaped office. I’d festooned the walls with pictures of ’50s rockers, among them Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran, and a display of old Capitol 45 sleeves from my collection, including Wanda Jackson and Gene Vincent, pioneers of 1950s rockabilly—hillbilly rock, the blend of country and rhythm and blues that begat the classic rock & roll I consider the quintessence of American music.

John smiled approvingly. This is my kind of music, he said. He pointed to a picture of Gene Vincent, whose biggest hit was Be-Bop-a-Lula. You guys have a whole mess of Gene Vincent stuff, don’t you? That album ought to be out today! I nodded enthusiastically, turned to Menon and said, Yeah, it should, shouldn’t it? Capitol was sitting on a stash of unreleased material by Vincent. Wouldn’t it be nice to see that come out? I said, directing the question to Meggs, who had stalled the project some months back. He looked cornered, nodded eagerly, and probably made a mental note to fire me. Yeah, John said. Every year I ask them about that and every year they give me a new copy of ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and tell me to go away.

After John and Yoko completed the tour and headed for the elevator, I hung around conspicuously. Al Coury picked up on it. Art, would you like to join us for lunch? he asked. I didn’t check my calendar with my secretary because I had neither. Sure! I said.

Along with a young man from merchandising who’d been appointed chief gofer for the Lennons, we all went down to where a Cadillac El Dorado was waiting. The presence of John and Yoko on the street caused cars to screech to a halt. Some kid hailed John and said he was a friend of Tim Leary’s and had a message, but they ignored him and hopped in the back seat. We drove to the Brown Derby, approximately a block away.

Entering the restaurant caused no big stir since only about ten people were there at 11 a.m. We sat in the Capitol booth, established in the 1950s when the Brown Derby was Hollywood’s hottest dining spot and Capitol was Hollywood’s hottest label. Coincidentally, we were seated under a drawing of Gene Vincent. John and I had been swapping favorites already, talking about Vincent and the Jodimars, a ’50s band made up of musicians who’d quit Bill Haley and the Comets in a salary dispute after the success of Rock Around the Clock. We chatted a mile a minute about old music while Yoko listened. I worried that this was impolite, but I didn’t know what to say to her. I did assure her that her album was received with enthusiasm on many campuses, which was true. When it came time to order starters, John said they wanted just a vegetable salad, No dead animals in it. I figured they were vegetarians. Then they ordered steaks.

Coury headed off to a Glen Campbell rehearsal, leaving the young gofer and me to keep things afloat. John and I exchanged more old-record talk. On the way out, the waiter asked for John’s autograph, and outside we encountered a paparazzo from Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, a celebrity gossip magazine, who snapped away manically with two Nikons strapped together until John politely but firmly suggested that he probably had enough shots.

Later that afternoon, Coury told me, You’ll set up radio interviews for Yoko, go to their hotel room every day at 10 a.m., and sit there while she’s doing them. I was exhilarated, but not nervous. I liked the Beatles plenty; I saw A Hard Day’s Night five times and bought their albums. But the four of them didn’t add up to one master: This was John Lennon, not Elvis.

By the following Monday I had arranged some interviews and was given John and Yoko’s secret location. At the door of the Beverly Hills Hotel Bungalow 19, a nice second-floor apartment surrounded by palm trees, I identified myself as Art from Capitol, and John remembered, Oh yeah, the college guy. I came in, said hello and grabbed some scraps from their unfinished salad. No dead animals. A guy from Capitol’s promotion department was already there setting up Yoko’s phone interviews with non-college FM radio stations.

Every morning for the next week I’d show up at their bungalow, make a phone call to a college radio station in, say, Buffalo, and politely summon Yoko to take it in the bedroom. From there she’d be on her own for a half hour to an hour. John and I would sit around talking about old rock & roll. At the end of the first day, while we were waiting for the couple’s friend and spokesman Elliot Mintz, a swami-ish L.A. radio figure, to pick them up for dinner, John whipped out his guitar and ran through a few old songs for me—Be-Bop-a-Lula, Ain’t That a Shame, and some others he later recorded for his 1975 album Rock ‘n’ Roll—a peak and a perk I could never have imagined experiencing. Lennon’s mood was mellow, though he was, I knew, involved in a tough and protracted court battle to avoid deportation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, ostensibly because of a marijuana possession conviction in the UK, but obviously because of his anti-war activism.

The next day I asked Capitol to send over a stereo system for Lennon so we could listen to vintage records from my collection. They reluctantly supplied an old one-piece portable from the ’60s. I owned a few rare rockabilly singles and albums—the reissue boom was still a few years away—and Lennon liked what I had.

I was in the unique position of coaching John Lennon on old rock & roll. Not many records got to Liverpool in the ’50s, and a lot of mine were new to him. John flipped for the original version of One Night by Smiley Lewis, which he’d never heard, and he also dug Ray Campi’s Caterpillar. I pointed out the fine break in 3-D by Big Jay McNeely, The Wild Man of the Saxophone, and John grinned with pleasure, the most common reaction to that remarkable record. We listened to The Rockin’ Lady by Penny Candy—Yoko called out from another room to say she liked that one—Bip Bop Boom by Mickey Hawks, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s first Sun album. In the middle of Jerry Lee’s country ballad Fools Like Me (the flip side of High School Confidential) John shouted, Listen to the piano part, Yoko. It’s so fuckin’ beautiful!

I said that When the Saints Go Marching In had the best Jerry Lee piano break, but John said it was It’ll Be Me. When we played that song and the piano break wasn’t so great, Lennon said, That’s the wrong version. I didn’t exactly laugh at him, but sputtered, Whaddaya mean, wrong version? I bought this album when it came out in May 1958. He insisted it wasn’t the same version he knew from the single, and I just let it go; people always had misinformation. Some years later I was listening to a Jerry Lee reissue and noticed an odd version of It’ll Be Me. The liner notes said this was the original single version, but that Sun had used an alternate take on the first album. Yow! I had never turned my single over to play that song because I had it on the album. (Sorry, John!)

John reacted excitedly to early anything by Carl Perkins, particularly Lend Me Your Comb, which he thought the Beatles had recorded. I assured him that they hadn’t, and he finally agreed. (They had recorded it—but it wasn’t released. Another Fein gaffe!) He said George really used to get into that one.

When I played Eddie Cochran’s Cut Across Shorty, John laughed. We couldn’t understand these American records, he said. Like in ‘Twenty Flight Rock,’ I always thought he said, ‘find my coats draped over a rail.’ It didn’t make any sense, but that was the best we could do. (The actual line is They’ll find my corpse draped over a rail. The English often used their own lyric interpretations, such as Rod Stewart’s version of Cut Across Shorty, where he describes Shorty’s goal to wed Miss Lucy’s hand rather than win it, or the Stones’ change of 63rd to Sixth & Main in Hitch Hike.) John repeated the story that he let Paul McCartney into his band because Paul was the only singer in Liverpool who knew the words to Twenty Flight Rock and said that if he’d been exposed to the records I was playing for him he might never have gone into making his own music, meaning that if he’d been able to hear and buy more, maybe he would have been satisfied just listening to it and settled into a life as a grocer or something.

John asked me to pick up a slew of records for him from Specialty, the L.A. label devoted to R&B and early rock that had introduced Little Richard to the wide world. I called them, identified myself as a Capitol employee, and asked for a bunch of singles, including Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally. The woman said she didn’t have any singles, so I mentioned that they were for John Lennon. Just a minute, she said, and put me on hold. Then: I found some. Is he going to record ‘Long Tall Sally’? I told her he already had. Oh, yeah. Does he want to record anything else? Specialty had the publishing rights to most of its records. The Beatles had already recorded several of them besides Long Tall Sally—Lucille, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy—and the label was anxious for Lennon to record more. When I got to Specialty they’d packed up their entire oldies album selection. John ransacked the package, then headed off to do an interview elsewhere in the hotel. They’d better all still be there when I get back, he said mock-threateningly. I know you like the same stuff.

Lennon had written the titles of records he wanted on a sheet of paper, which I later took to my office and tossed in the trash. I knew at the time that it was valuable memorabilia, but I refused to treat it as such. To have saved it, and other Lennon scraps, would have meant removing myself from the moment and tainting something lovely.

After a couple of days at the Beverly Hills Hotel, John and Yoko decided to hide out at the Chateau Marmont to dodge a barrage of calls from Apple Records in London. Maybe the calls were about lingering litigation surrounding the dissolution of the Beatles, which wasn’t settled until 1974, but I don’t know. I swung by with my ’69 Dodge four-door, helped them load up, and drove them west on Sunset.

I brought my camera so I could shoot photos for the music trade papers showing Capitol at work for its artists. I handed it to anyone who was around and posed with John and Yoko.

We had many room-service meals together, and several of the waiters told John they loved his music and invited him to their houses, perhaps taking literally his Working Class Hero bit. After one left, John shook his head and said, It’s not like New York here. Can you believe it? The fucking waiters invite you to their homes!

One day he read an article in a music magazine that said Ringo seemed to be the only happy Beatle. What the hell do they know? he fumed. He cringed when he saw plans for the upcoming Beatles compilation Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, which Capitol wouldn’t release for another three years. The proposed cover gatefold featured a Coca-Cola glass and a ’57 Chevy in the artwork. Those aren’t us, he said. Those are ’50s symbols. Later, he’d complain to Capitol, and even offered to design the cover himself. I was shocked that he—HE—couldn’t stop them.

At our last meeting, John and Yoko and I sat around swapping stories. They told me how, in 1969, Al Capp, the right-wing creator of the comic strip Li’l Abner, visited their anti-Vietnam War Bed-in for Peace in Amsterdam and raged at them about posing nekkid for the photo on the cover of their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. He had to be thrown out. I told them how Paul Krassner, the radical journalist and self-styled investigative satirist, founder of the political magazine The Realist, had famously responded to an on-air verbal assault by right-wing TV talk-show host and blowhard Joe Pyne by asking him if he took off his wooden leg when he screwed his wife. John and Yoko cracked up and said they wished they’d been able to use that line on Capp, who also had a prosthetic limb. I knew Krassner from a brief stint DJing at an independent northern California radio station where he was a frequent guest. John and Yoko knew him because in the ’60s he’d funded one of Yoko’s conceptual art projects at a New York macrobiotic restaurant: Patrons could mount a wooden platform, step into big burlap bags, and do their thing while other diners nibbled their seaweed. The Lennon-Onos had recently helped The Realist through a financial crisis.

Yoko was very hurt by a negative, stupid review of her album in Rolling Stone. (A nugget: …if there is any other single attribute of Yoko’s that can even be compared to her lyrical idiocy, it is her total obnoxiousness.) But they laughed about the magazine’s latest John and Yoko rumors—they were splitting up; they’d set themselves on fire.

The last day was the best, and I wish they’d requested some other meetings with me, but it was all business, however pleasant. That was okay, though. My time with John and Yoko matched exactly what I’d hoped working in the music business would be like.

April 1973: The erstwhile head of Capitol Records' College Promotions Department and a couple of musicians.

3

ANNAL RETENTIVE

SOME DETAILS OF THIS encounter with the Lennons might have shimmered