Entertainers are night people who hate to go home and crash while anything’s happening anywhere in town. Many all-night clubs, coffee houses and deli’s [sic] cater to their insomniac needs. House parties often don’t start until day people are ZZZzzzz-ing.
John and Michelle Phillips farewelled friend Derek Taylor at a groovy midnight-to-dawn blast in their Bel Air eagle’s roost with about a hundred guests milling around the buffet table, music room and swim pool.
Derek and his brood steamered to England for a wintry holiday renewal of old friendships and sealing of new writing deals. The Beatles want him back on their payroll. Derek, once their chief press officer, quit their service after beefs with Brian Epstein but he remained closeasthis with the four fellows. One of his first U.S. jobs was writing a column for Tiger Beat magazine.
Many of the crowd at the Phillips party had gone earlier to the Dean Martin manor for a party celebrating Dino’s 16th birthday. There were five parties and three discotheque happenings that one week. We wrote items about the idols and celebs on the back of an old love letter I’d written (but not mailed) to Lesley Gore.
The Mama’s and Papa’s, all home in Hollywood after the European cop-out, don’t know where they’re at yet. They have no plans for a reunion in a recording studio. Cass Elliott will record as a solo singer. John is more excited about song writing and record producing than performing. Michelle may accept a movie offer after their baby is born. Denny is up in the air.
Scott McKenzie, riding high on the crest of his album and two singles, all written by John Phillips, admits to a light-hearted romance with Anne Marshall, denies any serious complications to it.
Davy Jones doesn’t want to play favorites in the romance sweepstakes. It’s not easy to stay neutral, however, in the fierce competition between two of his best known admirers: Sally Field, the Flying Nun, and Deana Martin.
Meanwhile Tina Sinatra, Nancy’s younger sister, is exercising her feminine wiles on Dino Martin and getting nowhere. Cats like Davy and Dino are too nimble-footed to be caught in the tender trap.
Showbiz being as tricky as it is, Bobby Darin invested a bunch of his singing bread in a factory making clothes with a “Robert Darin Out of Sight” brand name, to be sold in gent’s stores manned exclusively by modern maids in microskirts.
The world’s most famous hair stylist, Vidal Sassoon, has bad news for short hairs: “Young male hippies wearing shoulder-length hair will not turn bald as fast as men woh [sic] are close-cropped. Crew-cut men tend to early baldness.” Footnote by Yul Brynner: “Well, anyhow, baldness is neat.”
Blessings in disguise. The Cake, three thrushes, cried when they were kicked off the Miss Teenage America program in Dallas, Texas, after some mothers got uptight about their hip appearance and mod apparel. “Not the type of girls our daughters should meet,” said one. “They don’t look like clean-cut all-American girls to me,” said another.
That made everybody want to see/hear ’em. The Cake were immediately booked to headline their own concert at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium, later to perform on the Hollywood Palace and Joey Bishop TV shows.
Hollywood Bowl in the rain was more delightfully delirious than dismal. Thousands of dedicated music-lovers, mostly bare-footed bare-legged girls, came to the Bowl hippety-hopping through the rain-dropping for the matinee and evening shows of the White Front Music Festival. They sat in drenching showers for six hours to hear the Sopwith Camel, Sunshine Company, Everly Brothers, Who, Association and Animals.
The Who, wild as usual, were cited by the L.A.F.D. for exploding smoke bombs in the afternoon, so that night they merely threw their guitars around. Keith Moon picked up his tom-tom and hurled it into the fountain pool in front of the stage. Several kids jumped in to get it but the Who’s instrument jockey reached it first.
When Eric Burdon and the Animals were on, wind whipped the rain inside the stage’s shell and soaked them all. Already drenched to the skin Eric decided to switch the usual scene. Instead of girls jumping into the pool after the guys, Eric took a running leap into the water after the girls. It was deeper than he thought, and he can’t swim. Fellow Animals let him thrash around awhile before they yanked him out.
Later in his dressing room Eric turned serious when we asked about the album he’s now recording in Hollywood, still untitled. It’s about the concept for Holy War and people at home dividing themselves into conflict between hawks and doves.
War is a bummer, he says, and we can’t put the blame on the kids of either side who have to fight it. Ranks of the Viet Cong are filled with children from 12 years up. The majority of U.S. draftees are teenagers, and half of them would be arrested for 10 p.m. curfew violation in cities like Los Angeles.
With a heart as soft as a moonbeam, Eris [sic] Burdon feels sorrow and pity for the youth of any country or race torn from home and sent into life-and-death combat which he didn’t start and wants no part of. The new album will vocalize his personalized version of the tragedy of international bloodshed. There are six thematic movements: Peace, The Games of Life, War!, Aftermath, Realization and Awareness, and a reprise on Peace and the old tired political pledges of never going to war again.
A recent Animals instrumental single, We Love You, Lil, is based on a World War II song, Lili Marlene, which German troops sang with infinite sadness and longing. It leaped the lines and became popular with British and American soldiers; sometimes when the bombing and shelling quieted, the suffering soldiers of both sides could be heard singing it in unison.
Anything about hippies makes waves these days. Strange and unexpected candid comment on the controversy came from the basically conservative and very straight actress Candice Bergen.
“The Establishment is in such a bind and I get a kick out of watching it squirm,” she told Dorothy Manners. “I personally think the hippies are the only exciting thing to come along in years, and why should smug people criticize them so violently with no attempt to understand them? They are only trying to find their way out of the high pressures of present society.”
There’s all this rapping about the Generation Gap—but how about the ’Tween-Teen Gap? It’s for real and it’s here to stay.
The gapping age between the junior and senior teen tribes seems to be about 14.
Having survived the rat race to the ripe old age of 15 or 16, a chick begins to look down her nose at the ideals, ideas and idols of the 10-to-14 years who, in her new lofty view, are now “teeny-boppers” and “bubble-gummers.”
We checked out what’s happening with musicians, booking agents, promoters, record distributors, deejays and others who ought to know. They say:
In the early Beatles era teenagers could be lumped into one think-alike bag. Almost unanimously they were rabid fans of the Beatles, Stones, Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and other heroes of that day.
Not so no more, man! The two age groups don’t think on the same level and don’t see eye to eye on many things. In some ways the younger girls are more conservative than the adventuresome and experimental seniors.
Radio: Junior teeners lay ears on the shouter deejays of the Top 40 stations while seniors shift over to stations with cooled-out DJs who introduce selected album cuts and play choice new singles as well as chart-toppers. The Top 40’ers are hurting bad from loss of the top teen trade.
Records: Only the under-14 kids buy the 45 rpm singles any more and singles sales are on the skids, say some platter marketeers. Senior teeniors have almost completely turned to stereo albums and tapes. Mono is dead.
Pop Music: The junior tribes are super-loyal to the Monkees, Raiders, Hermits and other very own favorites. Elder teens are seekers of music-makers, unknown or well-known, who are exploring the bold wild unorthodox sounds of soul and rock-n-roll.
Boys: Younger girls blow their minds for “cute” guys with phab physiques. Gals in the last half of their teenhood care a lot less about looks and much more about intelligence, wit and humor, personality, understanding and an ability to communicate, sometimes called “rapport.”
Bob Dylan is Alive and Well in Nashville, we hear tell. Though Dylan is as elusive as a butterfly, sneaks who took peeks at Dylan through the recording studio control window report that he has put some meat on his bones, scissored some hair off his head and added a Lincolnesque beard to his chin. The album he cut in Nashville is so great, it’s said, Columbia decided not to release a single from it.
Ken Bloom owns 15 musical instruments and doesn’t know how many others he can play, probably 50 or 100. As a member of the beautiful Lewis and Clarke Expedition, he plays such diversified instruments as the electric, flamenco and steel guitar, banjo, clarinet, trumpet, flute, French horn, Greek bouzouki, Indian sitar, vina, esroj and dobro.
Just everyone in and out of the music business has been flipping out over the Bee Gees’ fantastic records, but there was still some doubt if they could put on a stage show of equal quality and excitement.
The verdict was handed down unanimously by the British press when the Bee Gees did a concert at the Saville Theater in London: The Bee Gees are here to stay!
One reporter wrote: “The Bee Gees got the full treatment. Hysterical fan worship, the fainters, the screamers, adulating Beegeeboppers rushing the stage and waving their arms in ecstasy at the footlights. The normally sedate Saville can rarely have scenes like it.
“The atmosphere was electric and it intensified further when compere Tony Hall told us that the crowd from the first house were so knocked out they were still dancing in the street outside and that the boys were celebrating their success with champagne in the dressing rooms.
“And there can be no doubt that the Bee Gees will be big, because they are talented, and largely because they fill the gap left by the progression and the advancing remoteness of the Beatles and the Stones.
“The young fans want someone they can see, someone they can scream at, someone they can really understand and the Bee Gees are that. They are here, now, they can be seen, they’re untouchable but within touching distance and they’re young, good-looking and talented. What more could you ask?”
