In 1976, he was playing bass for Johnny Rivers when the opportunity to join a band called Silver came along, which was signed by Clive Davis. “I learned about publishing and how people can rip off your publishing and I didn’t get all the money I was supposed to get but I did get a lot of it. Living with his brother Bernie in Topanga Canyon, he was impressed enough with his natural surroundings to write a song called “The Acacias Are Blooming,” which was then given to Glenn Frey and Don Henley, who rewrote it and recorded the resulting tune on a song from “One of These Nights” called “Hollywood Waltz.” “It helped a lot, and was a real education in the music business,” Leadon told Gainesville Rock History. The following year, he briefly joined rising star Linda Ronstadt’s band. Leadon left Mudcrutch and moved to Los Angeles as 1972 came to a close. I was getting where I wanted to do more bluegrass and country music, and we weren’t hanging out as often any more.” I was kind of hot-headed and I had some kind of arguments with Petty. I became impatient at that point with the band’s progress toward that, and I didn’t have a lot of patience when I was 20 years old. And the Eagles were so great and they were doing the kind of thing I wanted to do which is more of a country-rock kind of thing. “He invited me to come and live with him in L.A. “The reason I really left the band was, I had been wanting to go to Southern California and be part of the country-rock thing that had been going on there for a long time,” Leadon said, noting that his brother had already made the trek and joined the nascent Eagles. “I’m just sorry I didn’t stay around in those days when Benmont started playing with them,” he said. Another future member of the Heartbreakers, keyboardist Benmont Tench, eventually joined as well, but only after Leadon had left the group. Soon enough, Marsh’s housemate at a nearby farm, Mike Campbell, was a member of the group as well, as the group adopted the name of that property, where many concerts and festivals took place - Mudcrutch. “We were pretty much inseparable. I was fascinated with Petty.” Another member, Randall Marsh, answered an ad and joined up on drums. After seeing Petty play at a rehearsal, he returned the next day, knocked on the door, “and basically I went over there practically every day after that for about three or four years!” Leadon said in an interview with Gainesville Rock History. Petty was in a rival teen band, the Sundowners. He joined the local Gainesville band the Epics at age 13, after precociously playing behind a Black church choir prior to that.
Both parents were musical, with his mother playing piano for the church choir and his father, an aerospace worker, singing in it. Leadon was born in 1952 in Rosemount, Minnesota, a farming community near Minneapolis, and moved with his family to San Diego in 1957 and finally Gainesville, Florida, in 1964, where he was to fall in with his future Mudcrutch bandmates. Leadon also had a hit as a member of the group Silver with the top 20 song “Wham Bam” in the mid-’70s.
0 kommentar(er)
