Thanks everyone!

I got to know Carole when I interviewed her for a Brill Building documentary a decade ago and she was then as she is now, like the mother you always wanted. Seeing her work is also amazing. We filmmed her with Kootch and James and the band and she was arranging on the fly. She really understands music in such a natural way. You can picture her as a 18 year old girl in New York sessions says, “Bass, you play this guitar, give me a double-time fill in C Sharp”.

Remember, Carole King wrote several big songs for The Monkees, including Pleasant Valley Sunday and Porpoise Song. It’s all connected…

The Troubadour had a punk phase too. There was an incident referred to in LA Punk lore as “The Trashing of the Troubadour” in 1978. I believe The Bags were headliners. It was a long way from Elton John and Miles Davis.

The Troubadour started as an all-ages coffee house, as most of the folk clubs did. Doug Weston had read an article in Life magazine about how “beatniks” would pay a dollar for fancy coffee called “espresso”, so he opened the first Troubadour in 1957 on La Cienega in the back of what is now the Coronet Theater. His first name for it was “A Bit of Europe”.

And the first Buffalo Springfield show!

I think everybody had to deal with some damage. It’s no secret that Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt had to deal with some pretty heavy stuff in the 1970s.

Carole difficulty wasn’t drugs, it was trying to balance a superstardom with her wish to just be a wife and mom. It was very difficult on her.

Gerry is around and I’ve interviewed him a couple of times. He later wrote lyrics for things like “Theme of Mahogany” and “Savin’ All My Love for You.” He lives in Beverly Hills. He can afford to.

There were scores of acts that payed The Troubadour in the years we concentrate on (roughly ’68-’74). Many of the are brilliant, but more idiosyncratic and less part of the scene. To name a few: Laura Nyro, Judee Sill, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, John Prine, Randy Newman (it’s a long way from the Troubadour to the Kodak Theater).

We knew there was a rise and fall to the story. But the fall was mainly Doug Weston and the Club, which closed for a time in 1975. The artists went on to great fame and fortune. What we concentrated on was the bitter-sweetness of what was lost, which was community.

A couple of more things about (Carole’s manager producer) Lou Adler:

He wrote “What a Wonderful World” with Sam Cooke
He organized Monterey Pop
He Directed “Up In Smoke”
He Produced “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”

Talk about a rock’n'roll Zelig.

We got Carole’s home movies from her dad’s garage and they were amazing. There’s no mistaking that 8 year old girl for Carole.

The movies with Carole and her then husband Gerry Goffin were so intimate. Seeing them dancing at their backyard wedding says so much about where she came from.

Lennon also sent bouquets of flowers to apologize. Nice flowers.

I think I knew a Brandy Alexander.

Thanks Rosalind. We had a great time at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I moved there from LA as a kid and there’s a Laurel Canyon vibe there that’s never left.

The thing that’s (pleasantly) surprised us most about screening the film, is just how much emotion is carried in the music. Everybody has their own histories with these songs and in watching the film, those all come flooding back. It says a lot about the power of music. It’s not that it’s happy or sad, it’s just EMOTIONAL.

Doug wanted to be an actor and, in a way, he was. He had a good character to play, the brilliant madman club owner.

Most people know Doug Weston’s name in town, because it’s still in large, hard-to-miss letters on the club. But I didn’t have any idea who the man was until I started reading about the scene, in books like Barney Hoskin’s “Hotel California”. What you learn is that Doug Weston wasn’t just the impresario, he was the curator of the scene.

It took one long, hard year. We didn’t waste a minute.

Yes, (the) Eagles AND the Byrds were formed at The Troubadour. There must have been something avian about it.

The fact that Steve Martin hung out at the Troubadour club (as did many other comedians and actors), just showed that there was something unifying in the culture and all of these people felt like they were going to change thing– music and film and comedy. And they did.