World of promise realised
Invercargill-born singer-songwriter Helen Henderson could have had a different life if not for the death of John Lennon, writes Mike Alexander.
Helen Henderson is full of life and vitality despite a dysfunctional upbringing and a music career that had a false start and plenty of pauses for thought.
She’s a baby boomer though, part of a generation that freely experimented with the idea of personal liberation and even now, at the age of 63, age has not wearied her.
Perhaps it’s the yoga teachings, the meditation, or the indefinable grace of receiving Darshan from the various Eastern mystics she has encountered during a life that is fascinating for what it promised and never fully delivered – until now.
The Invercargill-born songwriter and singer recently released what was meant to be her debut album. Simply titled London, it is the best of a series of songs she recorded in London, from 1978 to 1980, at the historic Advision Studios.
Friends introduced her to Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. He told her to ‘‘write your own songs’’, which she did with the help of Robert Rosenberg, who later became a music industry heavyweight, managing Led Zeppelin and The Who.
The back story to the album is as fascinating as the life she has subsequently led.
As a teenager, Henderson, niece of celebrated Invercargill violinist and conductor Alex Lindsay, left her troubled home life and moved to Christchurch with her then boyfriend, Dave Kennedy.
‘‘Life in my parents’ house was painful. But there was also lots of music and love. Did I jump out of the frying pan into the fire? Hell yeah, I did. Did I go out with guys too soon? Yeah. Did I later on take drugs? Yeah.’’
Kennedy joined the band Chapta in Christchurch as lead singer.
They had made the finals of The Loxene Golden Disc Awards in 1971 with their song, Say A Prayer.
‘‘Rock and roll is a cruel business, at times,’’ Henderson says. ‘‘It was pretty obvious the band weren’t that happy the lead singer had a girlfriend. There was the usual assortment of girls and groupies hanging around. I felt a bit like a fish out of water.’’
Henderson ditched the boyfriend and crossed the Ditch, where she settled in Melbourne, spending an aimless year working as a hostess for Annabelles, a nightclub run by Brian Goldsmith. Feminist Germaine Greer worked there at the time.
She discovered songwriter John Prine and Kris Kristofferson, and ‘‘got turned onto drugs, like pot, and opium’’, before deciding she needed a different kind of escape and headed to Coolangatta with her girlfriend. She went cold turkey, became a vegetarian, started to meditate and practise yoga. That’s when she decided to go to India.
With barely $50 in her pocket Henderson headed to London, a stepping stone to a journey to an ashram in Amritsar to study yoga. She travelled with her Kiwi boyfriend overland from England, across thousands of miles of desert, through the Khyber Pass, to India. It was eye-opening, the lost, drugged-out Western hippies and the extreme poverty of the local people. The journey and the sojourn at the ashram brought her back to her childhood dream: music.
‘I tried not to do music. I just gave it up, but I was as miserable not doing it as I was doing it.’ Helen Henderson
Back in London, Henderson was signed by Nigel Grainge to Ensign Records, home to the Boomtown Rats, the Waterboys, and Sinead O’Connor.
With some of London’s top session musicians, she recorded a series of songs at Advision Studios. These tracks captured the attention of Geffen Records in Los Angeles. The only other artist on David Geffen’s new label was John Lennon.
‘‘It’s a funny story,’’ she says of the link to Geffen. ‘‘I was practising yoga in London and was part of this sort of spiritual community. Interestingly enough, so was George Harrison, but I never met him. He did come into
a place I was singing at years later in LA, but that’s another story.
‘‘Brian Eno was connected to the same ashram in India. His engineer liked my songs and got them to John Kalodner, the A&R guy for Geffen Records. He took them to David. I got a call from John who said, ‘we like your songs and we are interested in signing you’.’’
When word got around about this unknown singer from London that Geffen was interested in, a slew of rock managers came out of the woodwork. Two stood out. New Yorker Bud Prager of ESP Management, who managed Foreigner, and Londoner Tony Dimitriades, who manages Tom Petty.
‘‘I eventually signed with Bud Prager. He was an old-school music manager,’’ Henderson says. ‘‘He put me on a retainer and helped develop me.
‘‘Tony Dimitriades was also kind. He took me under his wing a bit in LA, giving me advice and inviting me to a lot of amazing rock concerts.
‘‘I flew to LA and met the Geffen people. Two weeks later, John Lennon was shot. It was tragic. Nothing would ever be the same.
‘‘His record Double Fantasy was bombing. The critics were dogging him, saying he was old news. After he died, all of his records pretty much sold out the next day and Geffen Records went into overdrive.
‘‘Six months later, when the dust settled, they signed Quarter Flash, a Canadian band. Very quickly the music industry had gone from punk to new wave to disco. I don’t think they knew what to do with me.
‘‘I arrived in LA with short punk hair and leather trousers. It was a city full of women who looked like Farrah-Fawcett Majors. I was like ‘what the hell, who are these women with big hair?’
‘‘That was such a hard time. I went to America on my own. Suddenly, I was in Hollywood. It felt like I was in a sea of sharks. I was given the runaround. I had no friends, I almost fell apart. I was nervous, homesick and freaked out. The rejection at the time was quite overwhelming.’’
Slowly, Henderson settled down into another life. She wanted to be a singer, but it felt like a very shallow world. She sang in Top 40 bands and hated it. She also trained as a yoga teacher and a massage therapist.
‘‘I tried not to do music. I just gave it up, but I was as miserable not doing it as I was doing it,’’ she says. ‘‘I went to The Mt Madonna Center in Northern California for a bodywork seminar. I met a silent monk from India there who was the guiding light of the community. His name is BaBa Hari Dass
‘‘I started studying with him. He didn’t speak. He communicated on a chalkboard. He was all about about dharma. You don’t force things to happen, you just show up in a positive manner with good intentions and let things happen around you. That was what he was like.
‘‘He once said to me: ‘So what are you doing?’ I said: ‘What do you mean?’ He said: ‘You are all alone in the world, no husband, no children, no family, what do you want, did you come here to sing?’ And I was like, ‘Yes’.
‘‘He said: ‘So what are you going to do, Are you going to teach yoga or are you going to sing?’ I said, ‘Well, actually, I want to sing’. He flashed this look at me and wrote in capital letters on his chalkboard WELL SING!’’
It took a while, juggling motherhood and the demands of paying bills, but Henderson
eventually dipped her toes back in the music world and released her first album in 1995. It was called Have Your Own Way.
‘‘I might re-record that album at some stage. I think some of best songs are on it. Songs I wrote in Nashville before I had my daughter. I was signed as a songwriter to Barbara Orbison’s company Still Working For The
Man. I was in Nashville a lot between 1993 to 1995. I loved it there. ‘‘I wrote The Ballad Of Minnie
Dean at that time. I felt very at home in the south because it reminded me of our way of life in the deep south of New Zealand.
‘‘I made friends with a lot of Nashville musicians. They thought I was a breath of fresh air. I was a Kiwi, more like folk, rock, alt, country blues.
‘‘It’s a bit Tin Pan Alley down there. They write with someone in the morning and someone else in the afternoon. It’s a real business. I was an artist so I wasn’t really trying to write hits for other people. I was writing for myself.’’
Henderson put out another album in 2000, The Sonora
Sessions. In 2002, she opened with her LA band for Rod Stewart and Simple Minds in Austria.
A significant turning point on her way back to taking her music seriously was a trip she took in 2005 to Muscle Shoals Alabama with an eye to recording there.
She went on to make her third album Twisting Wind at Fame Studios with some of the best session musicians in the US.
‘‘I fell in love with Muscle Shoals. You fly from LA to Memphis on a big plane. Memphis Airport is like a rock ‘n’ roll museum. Pictures of Elvis, Scotty Moore and Little Richard everywhere.
‘‘I flew from Memphis to Muscle Shoals in a tiny plane and landed in a cottonfield. The plane makes one stop in Tupelo where Elvis was born.
‘‘It’s all around you there. You can feel it, such rich history. It’s the cradle of rock and roll.
‘‘Northwest Alabama is kind of a triangle. Muscle Shoals is right smack in the middle, with Memphis on one side and Nashville, Tennessee on the other.
‘‘It’s like black Memphis blues and Nashville country music met in Muscle Shoals and became rock ‘n’ roll. I love the town and the close-knit community. They look out for each other. They are such gifted, fun, generous musicians. A lot of them are international and have played with everyone from Little Richard to The Rolling Stones.
‘‘I bought a little house there, something I could never do as a musician in LA.
‘‘I spend a lot of time down there with my daughter and I rent it out. The house is built on old Indian land with 30 100-year-old oak trees. I go there and enjoy the peace. There, the Mississippi River meets the Tennessee. It’s a beautiful way of life. Very different from LA. I couldn’t always afford to come to New Zealand. Now, I am sort of between Muscle Shoals, LA and wild and woolly Bluff.’’
A call from the blue several years ago led to the release of
London. Rosenberg sent Henderson 30 songs from a reelto-reel tape found in a vault.
‘‘Some of the songs were on the original tape Geffen Records got so excited about,’’ Henderson says. ‘‘I was impressed by the musicianship, the production, and the melodic sound of the tracks. I said to Robert ‘let’s put this out’. I didn’t really think about it too much when I decided to rescue these songs from oblivion. I just knew I had to do it. It gave me a beginning, a middle and a what is yet to come.’’
Henderson and Rosenberg rewrote River and Chameleon Woman and recorded them and
Anyone’s Baby at Phantom Vox Studios in Hollywood with esteemed LA musicians, including her friend and guitarist Doug Pettibone.
‘‘It’s an interesting turn of events,’’ Henderson says. ‘‘I got this wild impulse to put this record out. I chose a beautiful Sanskrit mandala for the inside cover.
‘‘Sometimes, I think to myself, ‘why has it taken this long for my songs to get out there. Why did I have to go through all that?’ Then I think, ‘maybe Helen Henderson and her words are more needed now than then’.’’