The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir by Jimmy Webb

Author:Jimmy Webb [Jimmy Webb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466862579
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Jimmy Webb and Ray Rich at the Royal Albert Hall, London. (Courtesy of Ray Rich)

CHAPTER TEN

This is the answer to the letter unsent which even so arrived some years later

Like a song sometimes written for love long before it is alive …

— JLW, “Simile,” 1972

1966

Benny Shapiro bore an uncanny resemblance to Captain Kangaroo.

In the fifties he had started a beatnik club just across the street from the forties nightclub Ciro’s. He called it the Renaissance. It became a mecca for the beats and it was where Lenny Bruce got his start. It was also where Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and many others had blazed the first trails of modern jazz.

Benny had a house full of kids and a happy wife. The walls of their home were decorated with representations of India’s deities and Sanskrit banners, the atmosphere heavy with incense, and wind chimes tinkled softly in the garden. He was Ravi Shankar’s manager.

In 1966 Benny had an idea. It was a big, goddam, explosive show business idea. Why not harness the powerful tribal instinct that had kids out in the streets in the thousands, burning vehicles and stoning cops? What about inviting them all to the biggest, ass-kicking-est Battle of the Bands ever staged on the planet? He would start with Ravi and build around him. He chose Monterey, already the site of the Monterey Jazz Festival. It was a nice central location where the Haight-Ashbury scene could drift south. The Sunset Strip, Venice Beach, and Topanga crowd could hitchhike north up the Pacific Coast Highway to one of the most beautiful places on earth. Monterey would be the place.

I remember Benny telling me and Johnny Rivers about it and Johnny getting extremely excited and sharing the idea with mega-producer and founder of Dunhill Records, Lou Adler. Lou involved his attorney Seymour Lazar and inevitably told the Mamas and the Papas about this once-in-a-lifetime event and its nascent opportunity. As the players became more important and influential, other financiers heard of Monterey and became interested. The pressure mounted on Benny, a small-time promoter in the opinion of many. However, Benny had earned himself a place at the table by copywriting the name, and protecting the concept under the banner of the Monterey Pop Festival.

Benny was getting elbowed by some powerful people to take a secondary role or perhaps just walk away, but he was a stubborn guy and wouldn’t surrender his brainchild that easily. Through it all he was adamant that it would be a free concert. Lou Adler and John Phillips redoubled their efforts to wrest it away from him. How do I know this? Benny told me.

One idyllic Sunday afternoon while Benny and his wife were at the movies, their house burned to the ground with all the mystic Indian gods and the Sanskrit banners unable to prevent it. The housekeeper was able to escape safely with the Shapiro’s children.

It would be unseemly of me to suggest there could be any possible connection between the fire and the

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