18. The Mermaid in Topanga (1990)

 

Topanga Canyon, CA (1990)

My wife Claire and I were living in the mountain community of Topanga Canyon in southern California. The location was magic: while it was commuting distance to Hollywood and downtown LA, it was still remote enough to retain the trees, creeks, animals such as bobcats and coyotes,  and general woodsy feel. Artists and musicians loved it, and there were parties and crazy scenes going on all over the place. Many famous entertainers lived there, well, the ones who preferred something other than Beverly Hills luxury. A great many of the properties were originally built as vacation homes, cheap and cheerful but don’t look too closely for adherence to building regulations! For example, if we ran a hair dryer in the downstairs bathroom, a circuit breaker would pop in the upstairs apartment, which wasn’t even our accommodation! We once had an entire window fall out-frame and all, because someone foolishly tried to clean it. I guess it was never properly installed, only tacked in using pin nails.

Despite all the lunacy, we loved the place. Our landlord was Fred Tackett, guitarist from the band Little Feat. (I am a huge fan). He built and lived in a gorgeous house across the lane. The only other house was literally a 2 room shack where Fred’s son Miles was living. The previous tenant for at least awhile was the much revered founder of Feat, Lowell George. According to legend, this was the shack where Lowell wrote “Dixie Chicken”. Woah dude!.....

One day I got a call from my dear friend in Tokyo, Mr. S. He was enormously intrigued with Topanga, and decided he would like to put together a recording project similar in concept to The Band’s “Music From Big Pink” album, where the entire band live together in a house and make music (and err, party…) whenever they want. Would I please locate a suitable house (it would have to be fairly isolated), arrange to convert it to accommodate and record about 10 people, with the latest studio gear, computers etc? This was by far the biggest challenge I have had as a production manager.

Now Topanga Canyon, for all it’s hippy foibles, is the home to quite a few very wealthy people, and I set about locating these folks to propose having them rent their property to us in order to have a rock band move in to their home for a month to make a record. I enlisted the help of one of Topanga’s most renown real estate agents. She knew who these people were and how to approach them.

You can imagine how that went down. We saw some truly amazing properties, places I never dreamed were even there. One set of owners only flew in on their jet on weekends from their main property in Texas. They ran a publishing empire, and were fine to let us rent the house for a month (at a ridiculous rate) UNTIL they heard what the purpose of the rental was to be. The deal died right there. It was the same every time. I guess these people couldn’t handle the thought of what these Rock musicians might do to their precious properties.

It was at this point that I got a suggestion from a friend of mine named Bill, who also lived in a property in Topanga. Why don’t I consider using his place for the project? This house was pretty special too, in its own way. His place was called The Mermaid Tavern, and it had an infamous past. In the 1940’s it was a gambling house run by a notorious gangster, in the 50’s a gay night club run by a former vice cop, then an American Legion Hall, Jewish Boy’s club, a theatre and a celebrated concert hall called the Mermaid Tavern. Located way up a side road in Topanga, I guess you could get away with anything, especially back in the day, so I’m ready to believe the story. Anyway if was a beautiful place. It had a huge main room with a wooden floor and high oak beamed ceilings, a suitable kitchen and enough space to create bedrooms for the guests. It also had the most beautiful gardens and a large pool. Bill used the place as a wedding venue and photo shoot location. It would take some creative thinking and not a little work to make it into what I needed, but the most important thing was, Bill was willing to let us have the run of the place and the price was right!

Claire and I both got gigs on this project. In addition to engineering and mixing, I was designated as project manager and Claire was the official House Manageress (cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping,  the poor girl never stopped)! Our days were full but we managed to get home to our own bed every night and then back to the Mermaid in time to prepare breakfast each morning. We rented everything we needed: Beds, tables, chairs dishes, glassware, you name it, it came in from the rental houses by truck. I created a control room in one of the bedrooms with the help of a carpenter friend of mine who took care of the sound proofing. There was a large basement underneath the house where Bill had his living space, and there were several unfinished store rooms with stone walls- perfect acoustic isolation from the neighbors. We stuck a Marshall amp down there for the louder guitar bits. (Very sorry, Bill)!  I hired a small Neve console, 24 track tape machine, various toys, mics, computers, etc. I had my own personal monitors, a pair of Genelecs I travelled around with. They worked fine. This all must have been hugely expensive for Sony Japan, but not compared to the “traditional” method of putting everyone into hotels and fancy LA studios. Besides, this way everybody could behave just as badly as they wanted, at any time! I was also in charge of finding any other things the band needed- use your imagination. A phone call was all it took. We even had one of the bartenders at the local bar turning up with boxes of booze to make everyone his classic margarita cocktails. In the evenings, the Mermaid was the Place To Be for sure, for those In The Know!

The Mermaid’s owner Bill was having a fine time with us as house guests, but one afternoon he approached me with some trepidation. He knew we had complete “Carte Blanche” on use of the place, but he wanted to know if we could do him a special favor? One of his best clients desperately wanted to use the gardens and pool for a special photo shoot. They would not bother us at all and wouldn’t interfere with the recording. The client was PLAYBOY MAGAZINE and they wanted to shoot their monthly playmate spread. Well, you can imagine the answer back from the band on that one: “Yes, but only if we could be allowed to observe”. Trust me, very little work got done that day but it was without question the highlight of the band’s Topanga adventure. The model even posed for pictures with the guys and signed autographs. I’m sure the stories about this recording adventure lived on famously within the rock band community in Tokyo for a long time!