A Conversation with Johnny Rivers – HuffPost 12.31.13

Mike Ragogna: What have you been working on lately, Johnny?

Johnny Rivers: Well, just what I’ve been working on for the last fifty years–music. Doing gigs, working on some recordings, writing a couple of songs. But recently here, we’re working on the fiftieth anniversary concert that Jimmy Webb and I are going to do at the Saban Theater here in Los Angeles. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the night I opened the Whisky A Go Go, January fifteenth, 1964. Hard to believe it’s been fifty years, but I guess it has.

MR: That says a lot about rock ‘n’ roll and what’s been going on over the last few decades since its opening. And you, sir, are one of the pioneers.

JR: When I opened the Whisky, no one was playing any rock ‘n’ roll or blues here in LA. The closest thing to any kind of rock ‘n’ roll was The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, so I brought that South Louisiana funky blues, stuff like that. I even used to close my set at the Whisky with a tribute to John Lee Hooker. I would say, “Here’s John Lee Hooker,” and I remember one night, a guy came up and said, “Hey, play that ‘Join Me, Hooker’ song!” They didn’t even know who John Lee Hooker was, it was so far ahead of when Bonnie Raitt and all of them jumped on the John Lee Hooker bandwagon.

MR: Johnny, it’s great to see how many artists took a cue from you. I think you influenced many artists, especially with the groove and party of your live albums. How many of them did you record at the Whiskey?

JR: I did five albums live at the Whisky A Go Go, but in between, we did some studio albums as well. My third album, In Action, which had “Mountain Of Love” on it, that was a studio album.

MR: And even that felt like it was live. How did you choose the material in the early days?

JR: A lot of the earlier songs that I did were covers of earlier artists’ stuff because I was playing songs that people were familiar with and that’s what they enjoyed dancing too at the Whisky. I was also writing songs, but commercially, we thought it was better to just put out songs that people had already heard–the Chuck Berry stuff and this and that. We kind of stuck with that until I released “Poor Side Of Town,” which was a song I wrote. But I played songs like “Seventh Son” and “Midnight Special,” funky old tunes I used to play in my high school band back in Baton Rouge in the fifties.

MR: Let’s talk about “Poor Side Of Town,” what a classic. Can you remember writing it?

JR: Well, I didn’t write it all in one day. It was one of those things where I had the chord changes and I kept working on it. I had the guitar riff and then I got the hook, “Welcome back, baby, to the poor side of town,” and the idea of a gal taking off with some wealthy guy and really finding out later on that he was kind of a jerk and coming back to her boyfriend on the poor side of town. It’s kind of a story of forgiveness and redemption and reconciliation.

MR: You surrounded yourself with such talented musicians and the like, such as Jimmy Webb, Marty Paich…

JR: Prior to that, even, “Mountain Of Love” was where Hal Blaine, Joe Osborn–who was my bass player at the time, formerly Ricky Nelson’s bass player–and Larry Knechtel came together and became the hot recording trio in Los Angeles that played on The Mamas & The Papas and even Simon & Garfunkel’s stuff and on and on.

MR: Johnny, how did Jimmy Webb come to your attention?

JR: Marc Gordon, who managed The 5th Dimension sent me this tape because I guess they had been associated with Motown and I guess Jimmy Webb had been as well. He’d been writing some songs over there, so Mark sent me a tape of about ten songs and he said, “You’ve got to listen to this guy, he’s a great songwriter, he’s really unusual,” so I had this tape and I was listening to it, but the songs were not my kind of thing. They weren’t real bluesy or funky rock, they were more pop and Broadway sounding. It’s really funny–you need to listen to all the songs on a tape because you never know. I started to get up and turn it off a couple of times but I went, “Eh, I’m going to keep listening,” and the last song on that tape was “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.” So when I heard that, I went, “Whoa, what a great song!” It just jumped out because it was such a great classic song. I called Mark Gordon and said, “Hey, I want to meet this guy.” He gave me Jimmy’s number and I called him and said, “Hey, let’s get together, I want to hear some more of your stuff. I really loved your tape and like your style of writing, especially this song, ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix.’ I want to cut it.”

Jimmy and I got together and went into the studio and I recorded “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” the first recording of it. It was actually on the same album that “Poor Side Of Town” was on called Changes. Marty Paich did the string charts for it. But we thought that “…Phoenix” sounded a little bit too much like “Poor Side Of Town,” it had major seven chord changes and stuff, so we decided not to release it and we put out “Baby I Need Your Loving” instead, which took off like a skyrocket. But in the meantime, I was sitting there with this song that I knew was a hit and I had signed Jimmy, I bought his contract from a little studio he was signed to with a bunch of his songs and we had started working together. But I had this song that I knew was a hit and since “Baby I Need Your Loving” was going on the charts, I couldn’t release it. So I was driving down the road and I heard “Gentle On My Mind” by Glen Campbell, which was just coming off the charts, and I went, “Wow, Glen Campbell.” Glen and I used to hang out together; he and I and Jimmy Bowen were old buddies in the early sixties. We hung out around LA and Sunset Boulevard at a publishing company up there, trying to get stuff going. So I called Glen’s producer at Capitol–I had a little office down at liberty records because I’d already started Soul City and they were distributed by Liberty Records–and I asked Al De Lory to come in. I said, “I’ve got a great song for Glen Campbell,” and I had my test pressing for my album. “…Phoenix” was the first cut on it, and I put it on and he goes, “Whoa, what a great song, Glen could really do that,” and I said, “Well here’s my test pressing,” because I published the song. I remember as he left, he put that thing under his arm and walked out of there, and Macey Lipman, who was running the company for us, was across the hall in another office and he came running over and said, “Why in the hell did you give him that song, man? That would’ve been a smash!” I said, “Macey, how many hits can you have at once? I just came off of ‘Poor Side Of Town,’ ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’ is heading to the top ten, I think that’d be a great song for Glen.” Sure enough, about two weeks later, I hear Glen’s record on the radio–“By The Time I Get To Phoenix”–and it was an exact copy of mine. It was his first number one record. That really was what got Jimmy Webb going. Then I did an album called Rewind with several of Jimmy’s songs.

In fact, Jimmy wrote the liner notes on the Rewind album. Then everybody started recording “Phoenix.” It was one of those songs that everybody that did an album had to record. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Isaac Hayes, anybody you can think of did their version of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.” At some point by the end of the sixties, “…Phoenix” was one of the most recorded songs of all time; it was a very important song. That’s how Jimmy Webb got going and then we went from there. At that time, Webb and I started working on a song called “Up, Up, And Away,” something he wrote for a Broadway play that never happened, something about balloons. We started working on The 5th Dimension’s album and that ended up being the title song. Then we released it as a single in the middle of the folk rock thing in San Francisco, the “Wear some flowers in your hair” era. Here’s this Broadway-sounding song that just cut through everything and wound up being record of the year and song of the year and won seven different Grammys for all the different stuff.

MR: And The 5th dimension was a huge act on your label, their having an amazing string of hits.

JR: I produced their first album and Jimmy Webb worked on it with me. I was so far behind on my own commitment with my own albums that Al Bennett–who worked at Liberty Records and was also my partner in Soul City at the time–said, “You’ve got to make a decision. Do you want to be an artist or do you want to be a record executive?” I said, “No, I’m an artist, first off,” and he said, “Then you’ve got to get someone else to produce this group.” The natural guy to do it was Bones Howe, who was the engineer on all this stuff and he had already produced The Association, so I turned The 5th Dimension over to Bones Howe who did an excellent job producing hit after hit after hit.

MR: The musical output of your hub of creative people was pretty amazing. The Glen Campbell record of “…Phoenix” mimicked yours, but a lot more started in the Johnny Rivers camp.

JR: Yeah, not only that, but the rhythm section that I wound up putting together and the bass player that I had became the rhythm section for The Mamas & The Papas, who became very successful. It all started off of my sessions.

MR: Right. And those were the days when you were able to have hits over decades and have a nice, long, wonderful career, much like you did.

JR: Those were the days of real radio stations and vinyl records and a real record business before it all went to hell and fell apart. So yeah, it was a different era and the timing was good.

MR: It should be noted that it was you who immortalized quite a few songs beyond their songwriting artists. Songs that immediately come to mind are “Memphis” and “Maybelline.”

JR: Yeah, I was one of the first guys who started doing Chuck Berry material. Nobody was doing it, and then The Beach Boys did their own surf versions, like “Surfing USA,” which is just a Chuck Berry song with different lyrics.

MR: And there’s “Mountain Of Love,” your version of “Cupid,” “Seventh Son,” even “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”

JR: That’s me playing guitar, although those were classic hooky riffs. Then of course the big one, “Secret Agent Man”; that’s the riff of all guitar riffs, which I came up as just a steal from the James Bond thing. I run into great guitar players like Eddie Van Halen who go, “Man, it’s really great meeting you, I learned to play guitar listening to Secret Agent Man.”

MR: Nice. Johnny, you hinted at your passion for Louisiana blues. Who influenced your guitar playing?

JR: Just like anybody else, Chuck Berry was one of the great influences, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Jimmy Reed… Those were the early artists I listened to. I also listened to Fats Domino, a lot of the New Orleans guys… There were so many South Louisiana guys including Slim Harpo; he was from Baton Rouge. Being a young guitar player, I always gravitated to guitar songs. Back in those days in the fifties and sixties, there were a lot of guitar instrumental hits like “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett. That was one of the first songs where, as a guitar player, you’d try to play the little riff on that, but it wasn’t that easy to play. There was “Walk, Don’t Run” and all of these guitar instrumentals.

MR: I just want to throw out there that Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” seem to pay a little homage to Johnny Rivers’ Whisky recordings.

JR: How about Creedence Clearwater Revivial? That was years after I played that rhythm on those Whisky A Go Go albums, you can hear it clear as a bell. I did “Susie Q” on my second album at the Whisky. My “Susie Q” was a copy of the original Dale Hawkins one, and then of course, two or three years later, Creedence did theirs. And “Midnight Special,” I did that one way before Creedence did theirs. As a matter of fact, I rewrote it and it became the theme for the television show Midnight Special. I hosted the second show and I talked Burt Sugarman into letting me bring Wolfman Jack on as a guest. They were fighting me all the way, saying, “Oh, he’s just a DJ,” and I said, “He’s a character, he’s got a record out, you’ve got to bring him on, he’ll make the show really colorful.” So I talked them into letting me bring him on and the next day, they had him up there negotiating taking over the show, he was the host for twelve years. I was thrilled! That meant I was right about bringing him on, he really lit up the show.

MR: I’m a fan of so many of your albums, my favorites being Changes and Rewind, and it seems like there have been many phases to your career. Looking back at where you started at the Whisky A Go Go all the way up to the last few years, what do you think about Johnny Rivers’ career?

JR: Boy, it’s a blessing. How many people have been able to have a career in anything for fifty years? Mine goes even beyond fifty years, because I started playing in Baton Rouge and actually had a little single that was a hit in South Louisiana and Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast back in the fifties, 1957. It’s a blessing. What can I say? I’m just glad to be along for the ride.

MR: What was that song?

JR: It was called “Hey Little Girl,” just a little song I wrote. I recorded it in New Orleans at Cosmo Studio with the same band that played on Fats Domino and Little Richard’s records. At the time I cut that single, there was this young guitar player, just a teenager that they brought in to play lead guitar on it because I was playing rhythm and his name was Mac Rebennack. He became Dr. John, but at the time, he didn’t even know how to play piano. He was just a guitar player.

MR: Hey, what made you decide you needed to make music?

JR: My dad was a guitar player. He had a great ear, he played guitar and mandolin and sat around and played these songs that he would hear, even pop songs. He played a lot of old Italian folk songs, my parents were both Italian. And my dad had perfect pitch. He couldn’t read music, but if he heard a song, he could turn around and play the melody right back, so as a kid, I grew up with that. Then when I was about eight or nine years old, he bought me a little cheap guitar and showed me a few chords and that’s how I got started. My dad was really my main influence, I owe it all to him.

MR: Was he in the background of your career going, “That’s my boy!”

JR: Yeah, exactly! He was really proud. The thing that was cool about my dad was he was a good critic, even when I was rehearsing with my band in Baton Rouge, working on songs in the living room. My dad would go, “Johnny, don’t do that song because you’re not hitting the notes. You’re singing flat.” He would be like a vocal coach! He’d say, “Now that song, you do really well, so keep that song in your repertoire, but that other one is beyond your range.” He’d show me that everybody has limits. It reminds me of that Clint Eastwood movie where he shoots that guy and then he goes, “A man needs to know his limitations.”

MR: [laughs] You and your dad were pals.

JR: Yeah, I idolized him because of his musical talent. He couldn’t make a living at it, it’s not what he did for a living, but he would get together with his uncle on weekends and the two of them would sit together and play stuff and I’d sit there and just watch him. I guess later on, there are things that happen in your life that really are decisive, where you know it’s what you want to do. I’ll tell you a great story. There was a country music show at the end of 1954 that came through Baton Rouge that had Minnie Pearl and Little Jimmy Dickens and it was at my old high school auditorium. Me and a friend of mine decided we were going to go see this country music show, so we’re sitting there and in the middle of the show, Minnie Pearl comes out and says, “We have a special surprise guest, he’s a musician from Memphis, he’s going to do his new record,” and out comes Elvis Presley with Scotty [Moore] and Bill [Black]. He gets up there and people start laughing at him. They thought he was a clown because he was jumping around and wiggling while they were setting up the amps–it was just the three of them, they had no drums and Elvis had an acoustic guitar.

He goes into “That’s All Right Mama,” and me and my buddy looked at each other and said, “Wow, that’s that record we really liked from the radio! That’s that guy!” To me, that was so important. I went, “That’s what I want to do,” after seeing Elvis on stage playing his own record. We went backstage and he had a ’54 Cadillac with a trailer where they were putting the bass and the amplifiers and guitars and stuff and Elvis is standing around talking to some of those country music guys talking about cars. I was a little kid and Elvis was about eighteen or nineteen years old at the time. I was thinking, “This guy is really cool” because he had the greasy hair and sideburns and s**t. It was something I’ll never forget. It was a real typical moment when I said, “Wow, that’s what I want to do.” Later on, I became friends with Elvis. I told him that story, I said, “Man I saw you when I was just a kid, you were playing at Baton Rouge High School. That was really influential for me, man. It made me want to do what you were doing.”

MR: Did Elvis ever cover any of your songs?

JR: I don’t know. I used to go up to his house in Bel Air in the early sixties because I was friends with Ricky Nelson. That’s how I first came to California; I met James Burton when I did the Louisiana Hayride, which Elvis had done too, that’s how I kind of got started. James Burton was there, he was Ricky Nelson’s guitar player and I had written a song that I thought would be a great song for Ricky, so I told James. He was there on a vacation and would be coming back out to LA to work with Ricky, so I sent that song to him and about six weeks later, he called me and said, “Hey, that song you sent me, I played it for Ricky and he really likes it.” I went, “You’re kidding!” That was big because Elvis was in the army and Ricky was the man at the time. When he was singing his new records at the end of The Ozzie & Harriet Show. Those were like the first music videos.

MR: Was that the song, “I’ll Make Believe?”

JR: Yeah.

MR: Interesting, I never attributed Ricky Nelson’s success to Elvis going in the army.

JR: He was in the army. He was already gone, so Ricky took over and became the big teen idol. He filled in that void that Elvis left when he took off. Ricky was natural, he stepped right in there, it was perfect. When James told me that Ricky was going to record my song, I saved up money and flew out to LA and hung out with those guys for about two weeks and got the California bug. I said, “I know I’m coming back,” and I did in the early sixties and hung out with Jimmy Bowen and Glen Campbell and all of those guys who were trying to get stuff going. I put a little band together during “The Twist” thing and went up and played in Vegas at The Lounge. I actually played at The Thunderbird Hotel in Vegas from twelve midnight to six o’clock in the morning, switching off with Dinah Washington. Can you imagine listening to Dinah Washington singing the blues, one of the greatest blues singers of all time? All of this stuff influenced me, man.

MR: Getting back to the Whisky A Go Go, when does that come into your life?

JR: I was working at Jimmy Bowen’s at the time, who was producing for Frank Sinatra’s new label, Reprise. He had cut a new single with Dean Martin. Jimmy and I were roommates and I was kind of helping him out in the studio. We would go to a little restaurant down on La Cienaga Boulevard near Beverly that stayed open late, a place called Gazzarri’s–the original Gazzarri’s, not the one that eventually opened on Sunset. Gazzarri was a big Frank Sinatra fan, so he would always come over and bug Jimmy Bowen about Frank Sinatra when we were trying to eat our late dinner. Bowen would go, “Listen, I never see Frank.” One night, we went in there and Gazzarri was all upset because his little jazz trio had left and he couldn’t find a band to replace them. He looked at me and he said, “Well you play, why don’t you come in and help me for two or three nights until I can find a band?” I said, “You don’t want the kind of music I play in here while people are trying to eat dinner.” He said, “I don’t care, just play anything, but don’t play too loud.”

I called Eddie Rubin, who was a jazz drummer playing with Don Randi. I said, “Eddie, you want to play a gig for a couple of nights at this little place down in La Cienaga?” We talked about it and he said, “Yeah, that’s cool,” because they were playing in a place up on Sunset called Sherry’s Lounge–which was a jazz club–two or three nights a week. I’d go in there and listen to them, that’s how I met Eddie. I called Eddie and we started playing and the second night, some people got up and started dancing. It was a teeny little dance floor, something like ten square feet and a bandstand that was big enough for three pieces, but it was just me and Eddie, we didn’t even have a bass player. The third or fourth night we were there, Natalie Wood came in with a bunch of her friends and got up and started dancing and it got into trades like Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The next night you couldn’t even get near the door, so Bill had to hire a guy at the door. Now I’m going, “Hey, Bill, I’ve got to get back to my gig with Jimmy Bowen,” and he goes, “No, no, you’ve got to stay in here,” because it’s packed and it’s making him all this money. People were getting up and dancing, but it was like a steam room, it was so small; it was packed. All of a sudden, it became a little hot spot in town.

So one night, in walks this guy and introduces himself to me, his name was Elmer Valentine, and he was one of the owners of a club called PJ’s, which was the hot spot prior to Whisky. It was on Santa Monica and Crescent Heights. Trini Lopez had recorded a live album there. Well, Elmer came down to Gazzarri’s to figure out what the fuss was all about because I guess we were taking some of their business away. So he comes in and he waits and he talks to me on my break and says, “You know, there’s a club up there on Sunset that me and my partners are looking at, it’s called The Party. This guy put a lot of money into it, but it’s not doing well, so we’re thinking about taking it over and I want to call it the Whisky A Go Go.” I go, “What kind of name is that?” and he says, “I was just over in Europe on vacation and in Paris, there’s a little club that only plays records and people dance to them and it’s packed. It’s called the “Whisky A Go Go” and it’s called a ‘discotheque.'” I’m going, “What the f**k is he talking about?”

He says, “Look, if you’ll sign with us, we’ll take over that place on Sunset, we’ll give you a full contract with options out to a year. We’ll pay you a lot more money.” I said, “Elmer, let me think about this. I’ve got to go to Bill Gazzarri.” I said, “Bill, I need a raise, man. I lost my job with Jimmy Bowen, I can’t even buy gasoline for my car.” He said, “Well, there are a lot of people here, but they’re not spending.” He gives me the old poormouth story, and I said, “Bill, you think about it.” I thought about it for a while, but what really made my mind up was that on November 22nd, 1963, Kennedy got assassinated and Bill Gazzarri wanted me to come in and play that night. I said, “Bill, there’s no way in the world I’m going to play a thing tonight.” Everybody was shut down, the world was crying and mourning and in shock, and this guy wanted me to come in, so that made my mind up. The next day, I called Elmer and said, “Hey, do you still want to do that thing with that club on Sunset?” He goes, “Sure!” I said, “Okay, let’s do it,” and we signed a contract. That’s how the Whisky A Go Go came about. They wouldn’t have even taken over that place if I hadn’t agreed to sign with them. I also took my following from Gazzarri’s. The night we opened the Whisky, January 15th, 1964, Bill Gazzarri’s place was empty. The following just came up to the Whisky A Go Go. It was a smash opening night.

MR: Wow. Did you ever mend fences with Bill?

JR: No, not really. He and I had a bad falling out.

MR: These are just such amazing stories.

JR: I’m working on a book! I’m just in the first draft stage.

MR: Well when you have your book let’s do this again, these are great stories.

JR: Yeah, this is rock ‘n’ roll history. Not that I made it, but I was part of it. I brought blues and rock ‘n’ roll to the Sunset strip. The funky stuff that I had been playing in my old band back in Baton Rouge, people had never heard that stuff out here. Like I said, I’d play that John Lee Hooker riff to close out at the Whisky, we’d play it for fifteen or twenty minutes and people would dance to a big crescendo at the end and that guy would still call it “Join Me, Hooker.” They didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, they just heard the word “hooker.”

MR: How did The 5th Dimension end up on Bell Records after Soul City? They had such incredible success on your label.

JR: We made that deal with them. Their contract was expiring and I was so far behind on my personal commitments, me and The 5th Dimension and Marc Gordon all got together and I negotiated a really good deal for them at Bell Records–a higher royalty rate and all of that–and we signed Bones Howe as their producer and actually wound up selling their contract to Columbia Pictures Industries, which owned Bell Records. That was a big sale, but it was great for me and it was great for The 5th Dimension. We put it together properly; I didn’t just sell it down the river the way Berry Gordy did with the Motown guys.

MR: Bell set the group’s Portrait album up well by having The 5th Dimension appear on It Takes A Thief, their recordings of “One Last Bell To Answer” and “Puppet Man” actually worked into the plot.

JR: And the thing with that, David Geffen was a young manager at the time, he had Laura Nyro as his artist and that’s where those songs came from, “Stoned Soul Picnic” and all that stuff. It was a perfect connection, it worked great.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

JR: Always take your wallet on stage.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne