Russell Buddy Helm

Born in North Carolina, given to adoption, then bounced from one foster home to another until she was unceremoniously dumped from the adoption system at the tender age of thirteen. Frankie was on her own at an early age. She was legally adopted by a famous rock star who brought her to the U.K. Decades later, her grown daughter pours over the scrap books of her mother’s photos.

“Mo-om!” Her daughter, already a top line all grrrl band opening for world class rockers, “You were everywhere!”

“We did get around.” Frankie smiled softly as her daughter studied  photos of Frankie with Led Zep, Beatles, Donovan, Eric Clapton, Bill Graham, David Bowie, on and on and on…

Frankie was royalty. Everyone knew it and treated her accordingly. It was obvious that she was smarter and quicker with a repost than most rock stars and adept at social networking before it was ever conceived of and generally one of the hottest most gorgeous women anyone, even rock stars, would ever be privileged enough to be in the same space with. Apple Records in London was on the upswing. The Beatle’s earnings had created one of the biggest parties in the history of rock n roll.

“I was the coffee?… Tea?… or Me?… girl at Apple Records.” Frankie confided demurely. Speaking in her totally assimilated upper class British accent she confided in many secrets, one of which was the number of hit songs that had been penned in her honor.

“I was with a singer/songwriter who had a partner. When my boyfriend left town, his partner wanted to get involved. When singer/songwriter number one came back and found out that his partner had been boffing me, they had a terrible row. Like two queens really. Imagine Betty Davis and Marlena Dietrich going at it. A seismic event. Thermonuclear emotions. They decided to break up their songwriting team and go their own ways. But I stepped in and said that I would leave instead. I did not want to be the cause of their break up. I left and they wrote their first platinum hit about me leaving them both.”

1977

Joni Mitchell was crawling around on the floor with tufts of aluminum foil in her hair. Shell, her personal hair care specialist had closed the front door of his exclusive Sunset Strip hair salon for the afternoon and was focusing on Joni’s roots. The little aluminum bow ties at the base of her blonde hair adorned her head like an extraterrestrial halo plus she was wearing a salon smock so she looked like an alter boy from Alfa Centauri. She was wearing a very nice pant suit as she crawled around examining photos she had spread out all over the linoleum floor. The empty padded salon chairs were her only audience.

“What do you think?” She asked me. “I’m trying to decide which pictures to put on the album. “I’m calling it, ‘Don Juan’s reckless daughter’.”

Shell’s mate was the reason I was there. He was the lead singer/star of a musical I was asked to create for Peter Brown, a producer at Apple records. It was called, “The Last Rock n Roll show”. A puppet production with full size mannequins. The lead singer’s doppleganger was already done and it was unnerving to see both, the androgynous, Bowie type star and his stringed puppet twin standing together at the assembly plant in Pasadena where the Rose Bowl sculptors had been commissioned to build the fantastically weird human sized puppet cast of characters during their time off from building the flowered Rose Bowl floats. Shell was helping the production along as we painstakingly assembled a cast, score and the libretto. I had no idea anyone was going to walk in on our private meeting. Shell’s hair salon was on the Strip just a few blocks from the Continental Hyatt House (Riot House) where every rock star had tossed the mandatory television set off the tenth floor balcony into the swimming pool, splashing chlorinated water onto the Lambourginis and Porsches whizzing along Sunset Boulevard.

Joni, on her knees, studied dozens of photos of a black man, thin, smiling, various poses of coolness, nice snappy togs from the hip wardrobe of that era. I focused on the photos of this grinning gentleman and asked her,

“Who is this guy? Someone you played with on the album?

For a moment, she was Mona Lisa. I sensed I was being had. I looked again and saw that it was her in black face. She started to explain why she decided to do this and that, and her artistic intent. I didn’t really get it, although I could see that she might get flak from what became the P.C. crowd but that sort of thing didn’t deter her. I asked about her tunings. There was a wonderful new person in her life who had given her a long lost gift; hand written transcriptions of all of her early tunings. The tunings that she had never written down. They had been lost to her until Shell met someone who had transcribed all of her early tunings- something that needed to be done but she had never gone back to do it until the tunings faded away in her memory. Shell had delivered the loyal genius to the backstage entrance at Joni’s concert at the Greek Theater, but alas her illnesses caught up with Joni and she cut the concert short and left without ever meeting the eleven year old girl transcriber/detective with the impeccable ears who had created such a historically relevant musical artifact. It meant a lot to Joni to have this lost information. Backstage All Access passes at the Greek are as precious as emeralds and hard to come by.

Joni was now sitting regally in a salon chair and her hair looked great. She was happily holding the pictures that were her final choices for the album cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Talk turned to Coconut Grove and old friends, then conversation degenerated into light harmless gossip. Gregg and Cher were separating at the time and it was all over the grocery store gossip rags.

“That’s a tough way for Gregg to get inspiration for song lyrics. ” I said in what I hoped was my best cryptic imitation of the Coconut Grove bards. She gave me a silent smile that said so much but admitted nothing.

Thirty eight years later I am speaking on the phone with a friend who had purchased a drum from Seasons, our store in Santa Monica. She is totally informed about alternative medicine and works with people and with pet animals for no charge to help them heal. She had been injured in a car accident and was walking with some hesitation but still full of light in her smile. Joni’s health situation was on the news and although Karen had never met Joni she related to me one of her childhood pet projects. She had figured out Joni’s arcane tunings by listening to the songs and isolating in her hearing which notes were being played on an open string. She compiled all the song’s tunings by identifying each open string. She then meticulously wrote it all down and presented it to Shell, her friend who also was Joni’s hair specialist. Shell had then escorted eleven year old Karen to meet Joni at the Greek. She heard her name confirmed by the girl at the Will Call Window, a young girl’s wish come true, only to be informed that her muse had already gone.

excerpt: “History of the Groove” Russell Buddy Helm ©2015

I was Peter’s drummer for many special occasions. One of which was shooting a comedy for Paramount starring Mark Blankfield in, “Jekyl and Hyde Together Again.” We were standing around the downstairs entrance to Madame Wong’s Cafe in Gin Ling Square, made-up to look like a joke punk band called “The Shitty Rainbows” They had made me up to look like a Kabuki SS officer with safety pins in my torn military shirt and a military hat on my badly dyed blond hair. Peter worked on his karate punches to my face as we stood around in the heat, spike hair wilting, waiting for the crew to be ready for our performance. Every punker in the then small LA punk world was an extra. Punks in Chinatown looked good. It was a real fashion statement. These were the kids who had forsaken arena rock and went out looking for music that was vital to their sense of humor, which was very sophisticated. Peter was the harbinger of New Wave before it was called that by the posers who wanted to hang out and snort drugs with people who were afraid of real punk music, so they invented “New Wave” to make it more socially acceptable. Claude Bessey, the music critic for Slash, the punk zine from the late Seventies is quoted saying as much in the punk documentary film “Decline of Western Civilization”, which I am also in at the very beginning, with a stingy brim hat, lots of buttons and a few chains. I was also writing the Star Wars Comic strip for George Lucas at the same time, so my perspective was otherworldly to say the least. Peter was an educated artist, having been to Harvard, so his sojourn into the punk world was with a certain amount of objectivity and bemusement. His music was not really angry, it was clever and intelligently performed by very talented players. He was a good organizer and he paid well. One week we would be recording a sound track for FilmEx, the next week, a sound track for Ron Howard’s first movie, “Grand Theft Auto.” then down for a video art piece at the first student video production facilities at Long Beach State. There were various encounters with real nightclub crowds at various venues around Hollywood. His crowd was a lot of film people as well as the kids. Mark Blankfield was a great comedian, and was featured on “Friday Nights” which was an LA version of SNL. The movie, “Jekyl and Hyde Together Again” holds up pretty well. It’s actually still funny. New Wave music has gotten a backseat by music critics but it was a necessary evolution of the pop grooves that had grown stale with corporate music production taking over the airwaves. It was an opportunity for non musicians to play instruments, make mistakes, call it art, and get a recording deal. Peter’s fans, like Devo, Talking Heads,  John Cale, and others encouraged his quirkiness. Peter’s tempos and arrangements were not conventional pop arrangements. He sang in puns, “My Girl’s from Alfa Centuari, Free The Funk, Girls of the Third World” etc. Most of his musicians were classically trained and even worked with the LA Philharmonic, but they could still respect Peter’s musicality. He was way ahead of the curve. The fun moment for us at the shoot in Gin Ling Square was when Esther Wong, the owner and resident dragon lady of Chinatown introduced us,

“Ladies and Gentleman. I am unhappy to introduce to you…., The Shitty Rainbows.” If you get a copy of the movie which is still available, You will see that I missed the music cue right after Ester’s excellent punk introduction. It was too funny.

In the groove, staying present

I shot and edited this footage back in the early eighties when I was a partner in the first video nightclub. We shot ervery weekend and I edited then showed what we had the following week. Late night revelers and celebs. Learning how to shoot in a night club. Ron Sill helped a great deal.

“At Sunset” was an illegal after hours nightclub on Sunset Strip right next to the Whiskey Ago go which was shut down and boarded up. It’s hard to imagine Sunset Strip shuttered but in the early eighties there was not much going on. An entrepreneur, brother of the Roots clothing company creator, got permission to use what had been the old Unicorn nightclub (where Lenny Bruce performed). The back door was the only way to get in and it became the most notorious private nightclub in the US and Europe; the first live video nightclub. There is an article in the French Playboy 1984, about my video crew shooting in the club during the weekend madness. “Beverly Hills 90210” was created there with Brett Easton Ellis hanging out when he was just a typical Beverly Hills high school brat. We had the makings of a late night TV music variety show. All the cable networks were looking for a pilot. The concepts we shot eventually morphed into MTV. We got absolutely nothing but we had a great time. I invited Peter Ivers in to host some episodes. This segment starts with Peter putting his clothes back on after interviewing people while he was naked.