THE INTERVIEW: LARY CHAPLAN
Many music business veterans scoffed at the 2016 HBO series, Vinyl. The critics said that the portrayal of decadence and self-indulgence in the early 1970s rock world was unfair and overwrought. Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese were the masterminds behind the short-lived Hollywood representation of New York’s Lower East Side, which featured The New York Dolls and Warhol as we wobbled toward the rise of disco and punk. The use of poetic license was heavily employed but I accepted this phantasmagorical setting and waited excitedly each week for the latest episode. Vinyl was put out to pasture after one glorious season.
I attended one of the infamous Chathamport Lodge Open Mics a year or so later. A duo featuring a pleasant six-stringing singer-songwriter and one slightly older distinguished-looking violinist. In a break between songs, the singer introduced his violinist as one Mr. Lary Chapman and implored him to reveal to the audience who he was and share some quick anecdotal stories about his storied career. As he spoke I would lean toward our host Kurt Ribb and whisper the finish to the man’s sentences before he had the chance. Vinyl. Mercer Arts Center. The Modern Lovers. It became apparent that Mr. Chaplan, though I knew not who he was, was a firsthand witness and hands-on participant in one of modern music’s most magical periods. We later exchanged pleasantries and phone numbers.
The First Annual Outsiders Festival is proud to be working with Lary on our reading of Jackie Curtis’ Vain Victory and Billy Hough’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
MLTV: Lary Chaplan. Why only one “R”?
LC: I dropped it because everyone I was involved with – we had a great record deal – changed their name. All of the band members from Francis to Sesu from Tony to Young Blood and I changed my spelling. I thought it was easier to keep my name. And it stuck and I like it. (laughs)
MLTV: Where did you grow up?
LC: In Los Angeles. Hollywood actually. In Chicago, my mom was pregnant. Driving from Chicago to California, I was born in Hollywood Hospital, Los Angeles. I grew up in LA and stayed for about 20 years. I went to UCLA.
I started playing violin when I was five. In Jewish families, everybody took lessons so we found a violin teacher for two dollars a week. I got myself into the California Junior Symphony Orchestra and we did a lot of performances in Hollywood that were wonderful. We worked with Jack Benny, of all people, and got involved with Hollywood film composers like Alex Berko who wrote “Exodus.” I was playing music and I said, “You know, what would happen if I’m playing music and start messing with it?” I could play a passage and it would stay in my mind and I found it entertaining for me to be able to keep the structure of the music, but at the same time to kind of go off and take it to other places. When you play with a symphony orchestra, you absolutely can’t do that. You get fired.
MLTV: How did the transition from classical to rock ‘n’ roll happen?
LC: When I was 18, still in high school, we hung out at Canter’s Restaurant at Fairfax, which is still there and I noticed the guy was playing oil cans like a kind of bongo drum thing style and I had a violin in the car and I took it out and just start playing along with him. Somebody came up and said you know there’s a club called the Omnibus and there’s a guy looking for a violin player. Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees used to play there. So I went there and I waited for this guitar player for about two or three hours. We played but I couldn’t really hear myself. We went to his house. We smoked a little bit and when I came back I taped a small microphone to the bottom of the instrument so that I could be amplified. That was 1967 and we stayed together. We worked at the Omnibus for months. There’s nothing wrong with the Beatles – they were like something else – but we were coming from a place before them.
MLTV: What was the difference between Los Angeles in 1967 and the Summer of Love in San Francisco?
San Francisco was the Jefferson Airplane and stuff like that. Maybe it was the singers. Who knows? Maybe it was the acid.
We ended up playing the first Love-In in LA. We were the opening band and we were told to stop immediately by the police but we kept on playing anyhow. The Strawberry Alarm Clock… we opened for them. We got a drummer and we called ourselves Messiah. We were a trio and we didn’t have a singer We were still performing at the Omnibus. That was catastrophic. Maybe I should’ve seen the signs. We’re playing there after hours til six in the morning and you get paid whatever. I don’t know, one guy was sitting in the front of the place with a small table. The lights are coming on and it’s time to leave. One of the guys pushed him over and he was dead.
The drummer was a phenomenal drummer who before us played with Miles Davis. I recall he was hitchhiking, and he got a ride and this guy Eric Emerson was in the car. He was in the Warhol movie, Lonesome Cowboys, and they were in L.A. promoting Eric Emerson as one of his (Warhol’s) superstars.
So the drummer says you know we have a band and we are looking for a singer. Emerson goes, “Wow!” We hooked up and we ended up working with Eric. The drummer had these delusions of grandeur. He took a lot of acid and at one point just decided he was gonna be the singer and he got in a fight with Eric and that didn’t really go too far. Eric had a real history. He was a state champion wrestler state champion and also a performing ballet dancer. He had an interesting background. His father was an engineer and I believe he put the antenna on top of the Empire State. Eric was from New Jersey and ended up in New York. He wasn’t terribly literate, but he was entertaining and so anyway, we hooked up with him but soon he was supposed to go back to New York. This was around the time that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas.
Eric kind of left us, and the guitar player and I were wandering around Sunset Boulevard and there’s a building and there are some guys just sitting there. They said, “We don’t know what to do. We just got it. We just bought the building.”
I literally just said, “You know, let’s have a club, and let’s do things. Let’s come up with things to do.” And I said to the guy, “So, what do you do? ” He was an instructor at a karate school in Texas and took lessons with Chuck Norris. And then another guy says, “I just got out of jail and in jail I was a chef.” And then another guy was a commercial artist. So he decorated the place and painted. So we had the karate school and we had the art school and we had the music and we had a restaurant and I taught music as well. We called it the Temple of the Rainbow. We were the house band and we booked other bands. That was Messiah without Eric Emerson. The place was pretty much full every night. We didn’t serve booze so we would never be in trouble with the police.
We managed to book The Mothers of Invention (Frank Zappa). We had Black Oak Arkansas. Jim Dandy was there. We had a wonderful group called Space.
Messiah had a great draw because it was violin, guitar, and drums. We said, “We gotta get a record deal.” We made a tape and walked into every agency and every managerial place on Sunset Blvd. trying to get interest and representation. Nobody was interested but we got a phone call from this guy who had seen us at the club. Suddenly, we had a management firm that at the time was managing TheTurtles and Bobby Rydell.
The band was soon signed to MCA and Eric Emerson was wooed to return to LA. In a series of Spinal Tap-worthy mishaps among legitimate industry stalwarts, ticks of bad timing, and scheduling conflicts with studio time, the band was passed from producer Frazier Mohawk (Nico’s The Marble Index), to Jimmy Webb engineer (Brian Ingoldsby), a befuddled management featuring Jeff Wald (Helen Reddy management) and a change in staff at MCA. $36,000 later and a meeting gone awry that descended into fist-o-cuffs in the MCA offices, the band was dropped.
Lary picked up a cassette of the session and slipped it into his pocket before leaving the West Coast office. It would be the only surviving copy of their ill-fated, never-to-be-released, major label debut.
On February 9, 1971, Mother Nature sealed their fate when the San Fernando Earthquake struck.
PART II: NEW YORK OR BUST
