Parlor Showcase

I like the way your sparkling earrings lay

Against your skin so brown.

I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight,

A billion stars all around.

- Jack Tempchin

I remember the first time I heard "Peaceful, Easy Feeling." It was the late '70s and I had one of my first jobs: selling junk at the old El Cajon swap meet. I was 16, had my drivers license, and worked for a Vietnam vet who stayed up late at night fixing bikes and lawn mowers - anything that had gears or movable parts he could wrench on. Like many in El Cajon at the time, he did his best work from midnight 'til dawn, his garage door half closed, a radio buzzing just loud enough for the neighbors next door to ask each other, "Do you hear something?" When he finished rebuilding some wayward Schwinn or Briggs and Stratton, he'd throw it into the back of his pickup truck. By Sunday dawn, the truck was full and ready for me to take to the swap meet. He'd pay me a commission: half cash, half Burgie beer. Again, I was 16 and loving it.

The swap meet would open just as the sun was rising up from the desert, a place where I ventured often as a kid and teenager, both with my parents and later with my carousing friends. The desert, in fact, is a unifying force in El Cajon, some go to ride sand toys, some go to escape the noise and find silence. I'd grown up doing a little bit of both.

Inside the swap meet, the vendors would unpack their wares, usually just various shades of junk with an heirloom or two tucked in somewhere. The obligatory radio station in El Cajon at the time was KSON, then the country radio station in the county. Pronounced as one word as in "Khe-Sahn," the infamous U.S. military base in Vietnam, KSON was your membership into the redneck country club. No one in El Cajon pronounced the individual call letters K-S-O-N like they do now. That just wasn't cool.

So, it was surprising to suddenly hear an Eagles' song announced. I'd already worked my way through the junior high and high school dances listening to Desperado, On the Border, and Hotel California. But, it surprised me to hear the Eagles announced on the decidedly country KSON.

As the guitar intro ceded to the first verse, an incredible thing happened: voices from around the entire swap meet began to sing along. As if Wavy Gravy had jumped on the roof of the snack bar to yell to the white trash masses, "This is the second coming of Woodstock…everyone join in," the skinny, the fat, the tattooed, the toothless all began singing (well, some just hummed), "peaceful, easy feeling." The only thing missing were the flaming Bic lighters.

Then, as quickly as it had come on, the song segued to something by either Freddy Fender or the Oak Ridge Boys and that was that. The desert gods had spoken or sung for that matter. And, the faithful had responded in a brief, three-minute burst of pure religiosity. I've never witnessed such a socially spontaneous moment since

The songwriter who gave us "Peaceful, Easy Feeling" - Jack Tempchin - grew up in San Diego, in Rolando near SDSU to be exact, that stretch of windy streets and single family homes squared by 54th Street to the west, 70th Street to the east, and the busy thoroughfares - El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue - to the north and south. Without fanfare, he attended Rolando Park, Horace Mann, and Crawford High School. To emphasize the dreamy suburbia of 1950s' Rolando, Tempchin is quick to remind people that he grew up straddling America's first shopping mall - College Grove - and America's first drive-through: the pilot Jack in the Box near College Ave. and El Cajon Blvd. Other topographical markers of post-war Americana - the College Drive-In, the Alvarado Drive-In, and the Helix Theater - defined the area, heaping out doses of Hollywood westerns, sci fi, and fantasy. Tempchin fell in love with music by way of his transistor radio, which stayed tuned to the local post-Elvis, pre-Beatles Top 40's stations such as KCBQ.

Jack started playing the guitar at the age of 18, the same year he entered San Diego State where he later graduated in the late 1960s. Instead of learning the songs of others, he immediately began writing his own songs and soon had a repertoire of music that he took with him to the various hoots and open mics around town.

Fueled by the folk music boom of the early 1960s and the large student body at San Diego State College then, coffee shops began dotting El Cajon Blvd, University Ave., and beyond. These included Circe's Cup, Bi-Frost Bridge on Spring Street in La Mesa, and the Candy Company near 70th St. One of Tempchin's first stops was the Heritage in Mission Beach where he met another future star: Tom Waits. (A bootleg of Tempchin and Waits playing an original song titled "Tijuana" has been circulating for years.)

Closer to his Rolando home turf, Jack started playing regularly at the Candy Company. He instantly became the one-man house band, opening up for whoever came to town.

In this atmosphere, it wasn't unusual for blues and folk legends to play alongside local kids. Tempchin remembers when Lightnin' Hopkins headlined the Candy Company, the crowd outside was spilling into El Cajon Blvd.

At that time, a number of up-and-coming musicians would travel the coffee house circuit, driving down to San Diego from L.A. and beyond. In 1970, three still struggling musicians started venturing into the Candy Company on a regular basis. These three young musicians were Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, and Glenn Frey. They all made quick friends with Jack and even slept at the Tempchin home on a few occasions.

During this time, Jack also managed the Backdoor at San Diego State for a couple of years, gaining a sense of the money side of the music industry. In fact, it was at the Backdoor that Jack wrote "Already Gone," which would sit on the shelf for several years before the Eagles finally recorded it. As Tempchin tells it, "Glenn Frey heard me sing the song, which I wrote one night at the Backdoor Coffeehouse with Rob Strandlund. Later, Glenn decided it would be a good rock song and the Eagles recorded it." Glenn Frey also made a number of behind-the-scenes appearances at the Backdoor, one day helping Jack round up a bunch of old carpet from around town that they used to sound-proof that room. (For those who don't remember, the Backdoor was in the basement in Aztec Center that included a block of shops and eateries on the SDSU campus where the infamous bar Monty's Den also stood for many years.)

By 1972, however, the San Diego folk scene died and the clubs, including the Candy Company, closed. On the flip side, the L.A. scene, patterned after Doug Westin's Troubadour, was booming. Browne returned the earlier Tempchin hospitality and Jack was soon living at his place in Echo Park. Glenn Frey had a practice studio nearby and was putting together his own amalgam of folk, country, and post-'60s rock talent. An artist friend designed a poster for Jack replete with made-up quotes from fictitious music critics singing his praises.

Living on the shoestrings of a folk musician, Tempchin took work where he could get it, even travelling out to the desert town of El Centro. There, he found himself smitten by the waitress in a club he was playing. Like so many women of that border town, she was of Latina descent. In El Centro, then, Tempchin wrote the first version of "Peaceful, Easy Feeling." And, that handwritten draft exists to this day, the lyrics on a scrap sheet of paper alternating with a list of scribbled living expenses Jack needed to keep his car running and survive through the month.

Shortly after, while Jack was visiting San Diego, the vision of his Mexican/Native-American desert goddess reappeared, this time in Old Town. Jack remembers she was wearing the silver and turquoise jewelry so popular at the time. He saw a few more women who reaffirmed his fantastical image of the one he wishes to sleep with in the song. But, as the creative muse often works, the final verses to "Peaceful" came to him ironically while sitting at the Der Wienerschnitzel on Washington St. in Mission Hills. The song complete, he took it back to his friends congregating around L.A.'s Troubadour and Echo Park.

His buddy Glenn Frey suggested that his yet-unnamed group give the song a try. When Jack heard Frey's new combo, which consisted of fellow San Diegan Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner, and Don Henley, interpret the song, he knew his words and lyrics had found a home. So, Tempchin gave Frey his blessing: the band could put the song on its first album.

Several months passed and Jack continued gigging, writing, and trying to make in-roads into the music business. "I was driving up the California coast. When I stopped to visit a friend, we were all sitting around his kitchen table, and suddenly the Eagles' ‘Peaceful, Easy Feeling' came on the radio." And, thanks to ASCAP, the royalty checks started flowing soon afterward.

Next, Tempchin parlayed his management skills (he'd already managed the Backdoor) into his own business: he bought a club called the Stingaree in Encinitas, which took its name after the turn-of-the-century red light district in downtown San Diego. The roots he planted in Encinitas lasted long after the bar itself. Jack still calls the Highway 101 beach town home to this day. Around 1974, as luck would have it, everything happened at once. Just as he bought the bar, the L.A. music moguls came a-calling.

Jack had already talked contracts with Doug Westin. He'd also been eyed over by David Geffen, who was signing most of the SoCal country-rock acts. Now, it was Clive Davis' turn. Basically, sight unseen, Davis gave Tempchin and his band - the Funky Kings - a record deal and enlisted Paul Rothchild of Doors and Joplin fame to produce.

Unfortunately, the album went nowhere as did a follow-up solo album. Yet, it did result in the song "Slow Dancing," a song that would momentarily fade with the band's luck. This momentary setback was thankfully short lived. In 1977, Johnny Rivers, the soulful pop standard-bearer, recorded "Slow Dancing (Swaying to the Music)" and hauled it up the charts into the Top 10. Again, the royalty checks started pouring in.

In support of the Funky Kings' album, Jack left the bar business and hit the road. After the Funky Kings tanked, he continued touring on his own. In fact, he spend the next 12 years, from 1975 through 1987, living the life of a travelling musician and opening for such acts as Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, Poco, Dolly Parton, Chicago, Dave Mason, Emmylou Harris, and Air Supply along with his old friends from L.A. - Jackson Browne, Glenn Frey, and Joe Walsh.

He also teamed up with Frey from 1980 to the Eagles reunion in 1994 to write 11 hits, including "Smuggler's Blues" in 1984. This song would become the theme for the hit TV series "Miami Vice," introducing Tempchin to another medium: the soundtrack. Since the mid-'80s, Jack has written songs for such movies as Thelma and Louise, The Big Lebowski, Sargent Bilko, and Girls Just Want to Have Fun, not to mention the TV show "Married with Children."

After the Eagles reunited, and his songwriting partnership with Frey put on hold, Jack found himself eager to get back out on the road. It had been 1987 since he last toured. Always graced by serendipity, Tempchin was picked by Ringo Starr to open for his 1995 U.S. tour. The next year was spent "riding the bus with the All Starr Band." On the road, he had a chance to meet and write songs with Felix Cavaleri and Randy Bachman. Mornings included breakfast with John Entwistle and Billy Preston. And, here and there, he'd get a chance to sit down and have a conversation with Ringo.

His next career highlight came in 2000 when he was asked to oversee a professional open mic of sorts called Big Monday at the Joint in L.A. An impressive array of rock talent was assembled, including road musicians from Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, and longtime Rolling Stones' collaborator Bernard Fowler. The weekly guest included the likes of Roger Daltrey, friend Johnny Rivers, and even Terry Reid, Jimmy Page's first pick as singer of Led Zeppelin. Jack was able to showcase his own songs and explore old favorites and requests with the all-star house band, while providing guests with a musical backbone to get up and belt out their own hits. The audience itself was often a who's who of pop stardom.

After a few years of commuting to L.A., Tempchin decided to retreat from Big Mondays and put an album together. In addition to all of the songwriting previously mentioned, he has issued six studio albums over the last 30 years. The new result is Songs released in 2008 (reviewed this month). Here Jack takes on many of the original themes: the first song "Out of the Desert" along with "East of Eden" recapture the youthful '70s idealism of escape and return to a simpler place. A reissuing of "Smuggler's Blues" touches on the outlaw theme that steered its way through the Eagles' and much of Jack Tempchin's mystique. Yet, songs like "Something in the Image" and "Couch Rider" show us that Jack knows full well that much of that mystique is simply the product of the electronic media. "Something" recounts the narrator's infatuation with a girl he sees on a computer screen. He falls in love with her "pixels." "Couch Rider" takes us down that old dusty road of outlaws and the Wild West. But, we quickly find out that the hero is holding a remote control in his hand, not a six-gun. The song is a mature look at how American self-image, male ego, and fantasy sometimes blur, especially when egged on by Hollywood. "It Could Have Been You and Me" shows both the worldly and romantic side of the Tempchin opus. "You and Me," which has charted in Europe, takes us far away from the dusty desert and SoCal gestalt. It nestles us in the innocence of boy-girl love as could only happen on the streets of Paris.

The rest of the songs on the CD fall somewhere in between, nostalgic and futuristic, tough and fantastically macho yet tender and romantic. I had a chance to catch Jack recently, playing one of his regular gigs at the Calypso on Highway 101 in Encinitas where he headlines every Tuesday night, often with his band Rocket Science. After 40 years in the business, Tempchin is far more than a songwriter and performer. He's a storyteller. He's seen enough to write his own book several times over. He's felt enough to act as shaman for our own pop cultural emotions. He has the power to exorcise us of both our angst and demons, which go along with living in post-1960s America.

If you've read my articles before, you know one of my favorite rants is to talk about how underappreciated San Diego is. This is a city with an incredible amount of talent, a city that has given pop music and its extended pop-music culture the likes of Jack Tempchin, Chris Hillman, Bernie Leadon, the Kingston Trio, the Cascades, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Diamanda Galas, the Beat Farmers, Lester Bangs, Cameron Crowe, etc, etc. Yet, the San Diego part of the equation is discarded when searching for the reason-behind-the-talent. Too often, San Diego's talent pool is subsumed by that all-encompassing moniker "Los Angeles." Or, it is scoffed off altogether in a diatribe of dumb blonde surfer and too-much-sun jokes.

But, the truth is the truth: this is a city that has given popular music more than its fair share of talent. Not unlike Liverpool to London or Tupelo to Memphis, San Diego provides L.A. with that provincial spark. We give it that folk culture that can then be refined, repackaged, and sent out to the world via the airwaves. Jack Tempchin is that quintessential San Diego talent, caught in the crossroads of fantasy and California horizons, yet grounded in a solid sense of community and place.

Another San Diego trait that Tempchin has is that he is unspoiled by his fame. And, like San Diego itself, he understands the distance between here and L.A. and is able to find obscurity when he wants to. Like the San Diego image in general, Jack is simply a nice guy. While he probably watched a few too many westerns at the College Drive In or the Alvarado or the Helix Theater, he doesn't dwell in Hollywood's aura. And, his congenial personality is pleasantly void of the L.A.-noir that trails after many performers. As a decidedly San Diego songwriter (he thinks of himself as a San Diego songwriter in contrast to the many who have tried to hide their roots), he writes world-class songs and sings them with a journeyman's timbre. Yet, he writes songs that ordinary San Diegans can recognize as "camping trip music." Listening to Jack's music, even the more fantastical songs, is like going back to 6th grade camp at Camp Cuyamaca. There's a sleeping-bag-and-campfire appeal that reflects the fact that through all of these years, Jack has stayed grounded. Shouldn't this be expected though? After all, he entered the business as a teenager, playing the Heritage and the Candy Company for sheer kicks. Likewise, the young kids who would later become the Eagles were just having fun dragging old carpet in from the dumpsters to get a better sound out of the concrete basement below Monty's Den. It was all fun in the beginning. And, for Jack Tempchin anyway, it's obvious that the fun never went away.