Hoyt Axton, Content to Strike a Balance

One of the ancillary benefits of being a journalist is the opportunity to meet truly interesting people. Two of the most interesting I’ve met in more than 35 years of reporting just died, within two weeks of each other, both in their early 60s. One was Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball superstar; the other was Hoyt Axton, the folk singer, songwriter and character actor.

Not surprisingly, Hoyt’s death received only a tiny fraction of the coverage lavished on Wilt. After all, Hoyt wasn’t a legend or a household name. But he was a gifted performer and composer, typical in many ways of those who achieve some success in the entertainment world but never quite reach the level of true stardom.

I first met Hoyt in 1962, when I was a college student and part-time reporter and he was singing at a small, now-defunct coffeehouse--the Satyr, in South Gate. I was dazzled by the power of his lyrics, the growl in his voice and his playful onstage demeanor. Six years earlier, the first time I saw Elvis Presley on television--before any of my friends had ever heard of Elvis--I had told everyone that he would be “the biggest star ever,” and emboldened by my success with that prediction, I ventured a similar, if somewhat less-exaggerated appraisal of Hoyt’s potential.

I was wrong about Hoyt, alas. But in those post-Beat, pre-hippie early ‘60s in Los Angeles, the coffeehouse/folk-club scene was thriving, and he always had a gig somewhere. I wrote feature stories about him for two different newspapers relatively early in both our careers, and while we never became friends, we did get to know each other moderately well. I went to his house a couple of times, and I’d occasionally visit him backstage before or after his various singing engagements. I found him as delightful and amusing offstage as on, and friends and I would go see him whenever he was in town at the Satyr, at Cosmos in Seal Beach, the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and, in time, at the most important local club of the period, the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

By the time Hoyt was headlining the Troubadour, the Kingston Trio had recorded his song “Greenback Dollar,” and he’d had his first real taste of both financial success and the corrupting, disillusioning effects thereof. In Hoyt’s own version of the song, he sang it as he wrote it, including the lyric “And I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar.” But standards were much stricter in those days, and in the Kingston Trio’s version, the word “damn” was replaced with an innocuous guitar thump. No words, just a thump.

Between numbers in a performance at the Troubadour one night, a fan shouted at Hoyt from the audience, asking why he’d allowed the Kingston Trio to “mutilate” his composition. Axton broke into his trademark rollicking laugh and, referring to his royalties on their records, said, “Man, you ever try to count 10 million pennies?”

Amid the burgeoning idealism and antimaterialism of the ‘60s, some fans never forgave Hoyt for that “sellout.” Their disenchantment grew when he began writing and singing jingles in TV commercials for McDonald’s and Busch beer. But most of us continued to enjoy him for what he was--a unique talent and a larger-than-life figure--and since we were disappointed that he did not achieve the level of superstardom we’d all hoped for, we certainly didn’t begrudge him his compromises with contemporary commerce and we welcomed his occasional big-time successes. Steppenwolf recorded his songs “Snow-Blind Friend” and “The Pusher” (which became part of the soundtrack for the movie “Easy Rider”), and Three Dog Night recorded his “Never Been to Spain” and had a huge hit with his “Joy to the World.’

From time to time, Hoyt acted in various TV shows (“Bonanza,” “McCloud,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “WKRP in Cincinnati”) and made a few movies (“Gremlins,” “The Black Stallion,” “We’re No Angels”), almost invariably typecast as a small-town sheriff or in some other character role.

Having predicted that he would become far more successful than he did, I asked Hoyt on several occasions why he thought he hadn’t made that final leap. He always gave me the same good-natured answer, and while I hadn’t seen him for at least a dozen years before his death I can still hear that familiar, gravelly-voiced reply: “David, it ain’t how big you are that matters, it’s how much you like what you do.” And then--inevitably, cackling--he’d break into a line from his song: “I love to sing. I love to sing.”

That he did. But what he really loved was living. I never thought it was lack of talent that kept him from becoming a superstar, just lack of commitment--or more precisely, a different set of priorities. He seemed too busy enjoying life to make the kind of all-consuming commitment to his career that the most successful people in any field feel compelled to make, often to their ultimate unhappiness.