Chapter Seven
One of the most incomprehensible things about women who stay in abusive relationships is not just that they don’t leave, but that they don’t want to leave. For more than a year I had suffered physically and emotionally from Rick’s violent outbursts. By 1977, after all those weeks and months, I had to know he wouldn’t change. I should have left. I could have left.
So why did I stay?
It’s well known that women have the ability to forget pain. If we didn’t, no woman would ever have a second child. That ability helped me forget the bad times and allowed me to think of Rick as the man I wanted him to be. After he hit me, the power shift gave me the illusion of control for a while. And I still believed I needed Rick to help me find the place of my dreams.
I kept hoping that once we left L.A., Rick’s anger would disappear. His disposition did lighten considerably when we found the perfect place on Robie Creek, a tributary of Mores Creek off Highway 21 between Boise and Idaho City. The day I signed the check, I, too, was happy. I had just become an Idaho landowner.
In the mid-seventies, most of the land along Robie Creek was relatively undeveloped. After leaving the paved highway we had to negotiate two miles of rocks and potholes on a winding dirt road to get to the property. I was okay with that. I found it infinitely preferable to sitting in stop-and-go traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway. The property had a flat area near the creek with enough room for a large garden, a small pasture, and the double-wide trailer that would accommodate our family until we could build a more permanent log home. We had already chosen a site higher on the property along Ashton Creek, a small, year-round tributary of Robie Creek. The place felt entirely rural, yet we were only a half hour out of Boise. It was the best of both worlds.
Back in L.A., school had just let out for summer in 1977. I arranged for someone to stay in the house on Appian Way, packed our belongings, and prepared to move my family to Idaho. With Charlie’s cautious consent, Levi, Molly, Sherry, Rick, and I began the thousand-mile drive to Robie Creek without Louise.
At seventeen, Louise had just finished her junior year in high school. When I told her we were going to move, she unambiguously let me know that she did not wish to relocate to “an isolated place in the middle of nowhere.” I was so set on going that I convinced myself it was okay to allow her to stay in L.A. She was determined to finish high school, she was competent and responsible, she had just been signed to a record deal with an advance, seventeen was almost eighteen, and she would be living near her father.
It was a seriously misguided decision on my part. As much as Gerry loved his children, his illness made him incapable of being a responsible parent. If anything, Louise was Gerry’s responsible parent. That she graduated from high school and made a good life for herself is a tribute to her. She never lost sight of who she was, and she persevered in the face of adversity. She turned my leaving her to fend for herself into an opportunity to develop her own strengths. She learned how to play multiple instruments and wrote and recorded her own songs. In 1984, she moved to London and became part of the UK community of songwriters and musicians. After she returned to L.A. in 1994, she went out on tour in 1996 with Tears for Fears, playing lead and rhythm guitar and singing backup. Louise has been a productive member of the music community ever since, pausing only to have two sons and be the attentive parent to them that she would have liked her parents to be to her.
As the parent of a minor child, I could have insisted that she move with the rest of us. Or I could have given up my dream in support of her well-being, as many parents do for their children. Or I could have waited a year to move. But even if waiting had been in my nature, it wasn’t in Rick’s. Louise was already on a path to becoming the woman she wanted to be. She would have been miserable in Idaho. It’s likely that I didn’t force her to go because of my core characteristic: I just wanted everyone to be happy.
Do I regret leaving her? First, I have to reject the word “regret.” I find regret, shame, and guilt unhelpful. Instead of carrying those feelings around with me, I figure out how to apply them to my future behavior. At that point they stop being regret, shame, or guilt and become a lesson learned. I don’t feel great about my decision. But then I ask myself what I might have done differently. My dream was to leave California and live in a place very different from L.A. If I hadn’t met Rick, I would have found some other way, some other place, and, most likely, some other man.
Speaking years later about this, Louise said, “Eventually I came to understand that you found peace and sanity in Idaho. But I wouldn’t have made the choices you did. I must have had angels watching over me.”
Sherry was fifteen that June. With even less interest than Louise in a rural lifestyle, she protested loudly and frequently. Notwithstanding her piteous pleas that she didn’t want to leave her friends, I gave her no choice. She would come with me to Idaho and attend Boise High in the fall. The sole attraction for Sherry was that she loved horses and had been riding and caring for a palomino mare named Sweetheart. When I offered to trailer Sweetheart to Idaho, Sherry continued to protest, but at a lower volume.
As it turned out, there was another attraction. In California she would have had to wait until she was sixteen to get a driver’s license. In Idaho teenagers could then legally drive at fourteen. In theory fourteen was a tender age, but in practice many kids in Idaho had learned to drive tractors while sitting on the lap of a parent. It wasn’t much of a leap for them to drive cars and trucks as soon as they could see through the steering wheel. Idaho law would allow Sherry to legally drive herself to and from Boise every day. Her route would include the unpaved stretch of road along Robie Creek during a particularly icy winter. Her vehicle was a CJ5 Jeep, about the size of an army Jeep, with sturdy snow tires, four-wheel drive, and a roll bar. I was immeasurably thankful for such precautions when Sherry had several minor vehicular mishaps and suffered no injuries. Evidently she, too, had angels watching over her.
Although it was I who precipitated the move, I had my own moments of doubt. Having spent most of my life around people and buildings, the first time I went for a walk alone in the woods I felt uneasy as soon as I lost sight of people and buildings. After a couple of months of such walks I felt more comfortable among rocks and trees. I cherished walking in the rain and watching little streams merge into bigger ones. I loved the cool quiet of the glade along Ashton Creek. My new surroundings taught me to appreciate solitude and nature. Though I continued to be surrounded by nature, solitude would become a rare commodity.
Rick had named the place “Welcome Home.” The name was prophetic. We had a profusion of visitors, virtually all friends of Rick. Soon a pattern developed. First they came to visit. Then they came to stay. Before long Welcome Home became a sort of commune, with Rick as its social center and me as its financial center. It might have been a typical seventies commune except that only one of its residents had a steady income. It was a good thing my songs were generating enough money to ensure that my family would have enough to live on if I were reasonably prudent. As long as I defined “reasonably prudent” as making more than I spent, I was meeting that definition. The definition of “my family” was another matter entirely. At Welcome Home the concept of family was elastic. Still, I was living my dream. Our garden was producing abundantly, and our little community was enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of everyone’s labor. With Rick’s dark side seemingly left behind, I was optimistic enough to commit to a third partner. On August 24, 1977, the day Rick and I were married, I was thirty-five and Rick was thirty. Louise, in L.A., was seventeen. Sherry was fifteen, Molly five and a half, and Levi three. I didn’t know Rusty’s age, but he, too, was in attendance.
I spent many enjoyable evenings listening to music sung and played by my new friends and neighbors not just from Welcome Home but from up and down Mores Creek. From Idaho City to Boise, whatever the genre—usually country, bluegrass, folk, or pop—and whatever a person’s economic status or educational background, everyone participated, even if only by clapping along. Maybe a gal couldn’t pay her phone bill that month, or maybe a fella couldn’t afford a TV, but somehow these long-haired denizens of southern Idaho managed to come up with enough money to buy a guitar, a banjo, a fiddle, a string bass, a tambourine, or a preowned set of drums.
Another essential item was a device for listening to music. Most often it was an eight-track, though for some it was a cassette player or a car radio. There was no question about my new friends’ priorities: music was at the top of everyone’s list. At first I was skeptical, but after I heard the enthusiasm and, in some cases, skill with which these untutored players executed complicated maneuvers on their instruments, I could see that they had their priorities in order. For most of my life my connection with music had happened in solitude. It was highly educational for me to play with and listen to this group of mostly unschooled musicians who, rather than aiming for commercial success, seemed to be playing music purely for the love of it.
As it turned out, that wasn’t exactly the case. They might not have been aiming for commercial success, but more than a few of my new friends harbored a fantasy of becoming the very thing that I was assiduously trying not to be—a star. This was true for no one more than Rick. The extremes of our relationship had manifested themselves the previous year in songs to which Rick had contributed, and songs I wrote on my own. My internal conflict could be heard in “To Know That I Love You,” cowritten with Rick, and “God Only Knows,” which I wrote alone. These and eight other songs became the ten tracks on Simple Things, my first album for Capitol Records.
Not all the songs on Simple Things reflected conflict. “One” was a pure expression, unfiltered through Rick, of my long-held belief that each of us has the power to change the world. I wrote “In the Name of Love” to assuage my grief and comfort others after Willa Mae passed away. And I was inspired to write “Hard Rock Café” after I drove past a bar with that name in downtown L.A. and then, on another occasion, dined in a Main Street eatery with that name in a small Idaho town. I was not yet aware of the Hard Rock Café with 1950s décor in London that would become the flagship of a world-renowned chain of restaurants.*
In previous discussions with friends in coastal cities about whether anxiety or serenity inspired better art, I had always held that good art could be made just as easily from a place of contentment. However, in practice, without the tumult, stress, and competition typically found in cities I found that I had no interest in writing three-minute pop tunes. My children, my garden, and the additional horses we acquired (one being Whiskey) occupied most of my time. While I was living what I thought of as a normal life, I was neglecting my music. The impetus to write that year came mostly from Rick’s need for recognition, which he believed was imminent, and my contractual commitment to deliver another album to Capitol.