A Career on the Whisky A Go Go Side of Town

One day in 1960, when Johnny Ramistella was living in Baton Rouge, La., with his parents, his mother answered the telephone. “Johnny,” she said. “It’s some guy who says he’s calling from Hollywood.”

The caller was James Burton, a musician from Shreveport who was working with pop idol Ricky Nelson’s band on the coast. Burton had made the 18-year-old Ramistella’s acquaintance while on vacation, catching him singing and playing guitar on the popular “Louisiana Hayride” radio program.

“You know that song you sent me?” Burton asked, six weeks after receiving a demo recording in the mail.

“Yeah?” said the kid.

“Rick wants to record it.”

It didn’t take long for Johnny, who had already changed his professional stage name to Rivers, to say he’d be catching a plane to California.

Which he did, carrying $100, a suitcase and a guitar.

*

Few places and voices are as evocative of an entire generation of American music as the Whisky A Go Go club on the Sunset Strip and its opening act. Some called it a discotheque 35 years ago when shimmying women danced in a cage and the young Johnny Rivers appeared on stage, about to become as hot internationally as he already was in town.

Rivers will be performing and recording a new album next Monday through Wednesday nights at the Whisky, just the way he did in 1964, when the entire concept of a live album was practically revolutionary.

In an age when so many lesser artists are revered as legends and so many inferior ones get so much exposure, excuse us for wishing that more of today’s popular variety outlets--Jay Leno’s producers, take note--would appreciate the longevity of someone who once cranked out Top 40 hits as fast as the Beatles did and is every bit as easy to listen to now as he was then.

“Johnny Rivers at the Whisky A Go Go” was the first album he ever cut, back in the summer of ’64. It was such a success for Imperial Records that four months later came a second live disc, “Here We A Go Go Again.”

Funny to be go-going again. Like little black caskets, guitar cases line the floors of Rivers’ compound high above Mulholland Drive, where he is preparing for next week’s gig. He has never stopped touring, still looking fit and many years younger than his 57.

That day he first came to L.A., knowing virtually nobody, Rivers asked a stranger at the airport how to get to Hollywood. He was pointed to a bus.

Next thing he knew, he was being dropped off at the Knickerbocker Hotel, which was far more swank than a naive Baton Rouge boy knew.

“Is this a good hotel?” he asked a doorman.

“Oh, yeah. Elvis stays here,” he was told.

Nobody asked for ID or a credit card back then. Rivers registered without inquiring about room rates. After all, he had a hundred bucks.

A couple days later, the front desk wanted to settle the bill. He already owed $78. “How’d you get there, man?” Burton asked, steering Rivers to a hotel that charged $12.50 a week.

Luckily, that song he had sent, “I’ll Make Believe,” was recorded by Ricky Nelson, whose career had flourished while Elvis Presley served in the Army. At the end of each TV show that Nelson did with his parents, Ozzie and Harriet, he performed a new song.

“They were like the first music videos,” Rivers remembers.

His own career took a while to take off. There was an after-midnight joint on La Cienega where a jazz trio usually appeared. The owner was desperate for an act, any act. He hired Rivers and a drummer. Word got out, and soon the place was packed every night.

Rivers could afford better hotels. He went from $350 a week to $5,000 a night, and was asked to headline at a new club at 8901 Sunset with a weird name.

*

Thirteen top-10 hits and more than a third of a century later, Rivers is returning to the Whisky A Go Go--which took its name from a tiny Paris disco--with his trusty Gibson ES-335 guitar.

His popularity worldwide remains great--70,000 turned out for a 1998 concert in Brazil--while a newer audience has picked up on 1966’s “Secret Agent Man” from its use in an Austin Powers spy film.

There are others who must be living with little memory of Johnny Rivers’ music, but theirs is the poor side of town. Here is a guy who can just pick up a guitar, walk onto a stage and make 1964 sound so much better than 1999.

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com