For anyone that has spent significant time on this blog, or who has followed its many postings over the years, the subject of Eden Ahbez‘s “Scripture of the Golden Age” project remains both perennial and somewhat mysterious.
Yours truly (Brian Chidester) has had several articles about it published in newspapers and magazines, including one about Ahbez’s attempted 1970s version of the “Scripture” (see here), and another about his final iteration in the 1990s (see here). The latter featured a key interview with recording engineer and Ahbez friend Joe Romersa.
There was also apparently an attempt made by Ahbez on the “Scripture” project in the 1980s; one that hovered mostly in the demo-tape territory. Among the main people involved with Ahbez then was a guy named Rob Mackenzie.
of Eden Ahbez in the 1980s.
Mackenzie, like Romersa, is a musician, songwriter, and engineer who at the time maintained a small recording studio in his home in the Los Angeles area. Also like Romersa, Mackenzie played the local clubs around L.A., including a placed called “The Central” in West Hollywood (later the Viper Room).
Mackenzie and Romersa, in fact, met at the Central one night during a Tuesday night jam in the early ’80s, with Romersa playing drums and Mackenzie on guitar. Nothing came of it then; but the two would bond a decade or so later over their shared experience of having known and worked with Ahbez.
To the wide world these days, Eden Ahbez is best remembered as the original hippie; the guy who wrote the American standard “Nature Boy”; and the bearded, toga-wearing eccentric who lived under the first “L” of the Hollywood sign. To Romersa and Mackenzie, however, Ahbez was a friend, a mentor, and in the case of Romersa, one of his many musical clients.
They first met at Fidelity Studios sometime between 1987 and ’89. Ahbez, then in his late seventies, sauntered in without an appointment, while Romersa (29 or 30) just happened to be the available engineer on the schedule that day. Ahbez told Romersa he needed an edit on his two-track tape; a request the young engineer fulfilled without difficulty. The two would develop a working relationship from there; one which spanned the last seven-plus years of Ahbez’s life.
Romersa remembers that Ahbez split his time mostly between L.A. and the California desert area around Palm Springs. There were also semi-annual pilgrimages by the elderly nature boy to southeast Florida (which he mentioned to Romersa from time-to-time).
Whatever the case, when Ahbez came to L.A., it was primarily to record his own material. He’d often stay in a motel room; but would sometimes stay with friends. Mackenzie was one of those friends. For years Ahbez had a room of his own at Mackenzie’s place, and according to the latter, stayed in it for weeks at a time, sometimes up to a month.
Mackenzie also recalls making one of those infamous trips with Ahbez to Miami Beach (c. 1983). The two thought at one point that Ahbez’s white Econoline van, which the composer slept in as well, had been stolen.
As recorded for posterity by the Miami Herald, Ahbez’s van was taken “between 3:20p.m. and 5p.m… hours after the men had arrived.” Police did not expect to recover the vehicle unless they could “get a snitch on the street to talk to [them], or get lucky.”
Ironically, as Mackenzie would share with Romersa decades later, the van wasn’t stolen after all. They’d arrived in Miami, exhausted and hungry after endless hours of driving, parked the van, then walked to get a bite to eat. When they finished, however, the van was nowhere to be found. The next day, after already reporting the incident to Miami PD, they walked back to where they remembered parking the night before, and as luck would have it, found the van… just where they’d left it.
Back in L.A. during the early-to-mid-’80s, Ahbez, besides crashing occasionally at Mackenzie’s, also used his home studio to record some demo tapes. These, as it turns out, were recordings of some of the same “Scripture of the Golden Age”-related songs he (Ahbez) had laid down in the ’70s with producer John Greek. The same he would try again with Romersa in the ’90s. Same titles; often quite different arrangements.
Songs such as “As the Wind,” “The Clam Man,” “Nature Girl,” “A Neat Song,” and “The Path” were in fact ones Ahbez recorded across three decades. Some of them even originated as melodies with different titles as early as 1961-62; and it was these earliest iterations that were recorded from Ahbez’s original lead-sheets for the Dharmaland album by Ixtahuele in 2021. That makes four decades in which the music related to the “Scripture” project gestated for its composer.
What is fascinating about all of this is how Ahbez’s work and friendship with Mackenzie and Romersa crossed paths. Sort of.
While Mackenzie worked with Ahbez on some home recordings at that time, several young musicians collaborated with the elderly composer too, including Dale Ockerman, who cut a new version of “Nature Boy” in 1980 with Ahbez’s preferred lyric change (see here for that story). There was also the power-pop musician Kyle Vincent who recorded a version of “Nature Girl” with Ahbez, c. 1984, and there was a guy named Scott Seely, a producer/arranger from the desert area with a rather provincial track record, who in 1985 cut a ten-minute new-age version of “As the Wind” which was later included on the posthumous Ahbez disc Echoes from Nature Boy. Most of these tapes Ahbez would either leave at Mackenzie’s house or carry around with him in the back of his van.
In fact, by the time Romersa and Ahbez started working together in the late ’80s, the latter’s van had actually been broken into on multiple occasions. It was also, according to Romersa, often messy and chaotic inside. Romersa therefore offered to store the tapes and other fragiles at his residence and Ahbez took him up on it.
Also, at the time, the technology used in recording studios was transitioning away from analog tape to digital recordings, and Romersa offered to transfer Ahbez’s previous recordings to the newer DAT format at no charge. Ahbez said yes to this offer as well and informed Romersa he had even more recordings at a “friend’s” house. The two then scheduled a time to pick up these recordings and drove to the home of, you guessed it, Rob Mackenzie.
By this point, Mackenzie was playing guitar with the doo-wop revival group Sha Na Na, while Romersa, besides engineering at various L.A. studios—including sessions with Howie Epstein, NWA, and John Prine—was leading the popular local band Soy Cowboy. He and Mackenzie would continue to run into each other at Fidelity Studio: Mackenzie when he stopped by to record; Romersa as an in-house engineer. It wasn’t until about 1991 that the two, who had brushed shoulders for nearly a decade at that point, became conscious of their mutual friendship with Ahbez.
From approximately 1988 to December ’94, Romersa recorded ceaslessly with Ahbez, including fully-arranged productions, half-finished ones, demos galore, and conversations/dramatic readings of Ahbez’s many poems and aphorisms. The aim for Ahbez was to finally finish the elusive “Scriptures” album (which he wanted to release in tandem with a book by the same title).
Then in February 1995 Romersa received the call that Ahbez had been injured in a car accident, was in the hospital in the Palm Springs area, and was unconscious. He drove from L.A. to the desert to be with his friend.
Romersa spoke to Ahbez as he lay there in a coma, remembering out loud their times together in the studio, a few personal memories, and how much he (Ahbez) meant to him. Romersa also promised Ahbez that his last works would eventually be released.
On March 4, 1995, Romersa received the phone call that Ahbez had died. Soon after he went about trying to honor his promise to his late friend.
Unlike today, in the mid-1990s, it was still difficult and vague for artists to self-release music. This was four years before the advent of Napster, eight years before iTunes, and about ten years before releases of lost or unfinished works by legacy artists starting becoming commonplace. Finding distribution and PR outside the record industry was especially difficult for indie projects then. Regardless, Romersa set himself the task of compiling and conceptualizing a package of Ahbez’s final work, and getting it in front of people who might be sympathetic to its message of universal love.
One such industry heavyweight was former Beatle George Harrison (with whom Ahbez shared an affinity for Eastern philosophy in his lyrics). Romersa thought that if Harrison took an interest, he or someone with some clout might be willing to produce the album, or at least “lend” their industry connections to getting a CD of it released and distributed. Through friends, Romersa even got so far as setting an appointment with Harrison, with the intent of playing some of the recordings he (Romersa) and Ahbez had made together in the ’90s.
With excitement, Romersa shared news of this opportunity with David Janowiak, the latter being a friend of Ahbez’s from the desert area who referred to himself, following the composer’s death, as “the successor-trustee of Eden Ahbez.”
Janowiak was, in fact, a real estate agent in Desert Hot Springs whom Ahbez had paid to manage his books and financial affairs during the last couple of years of Ahbez’s life. (Janowiak’s death certificate also claims he was a member of the clergy… something I have yet to verify).
After Ahbez’s death Janowiak told Romersa that he (Janowiak) was now “in charge” of the music. Yet instead of embracing the opportunity presented by Romersa to play the work for George Harrison, Janowiak instead threatened Romersa with a lawsuit if he shared Ahbez’s music with anyone, regardless their stature in the industry. And that was that.
Romersa never met with Harrison; Harrison never heard Ahbez’s final music or its heartfelt narrations; and it didn’t take long before Romersa realized that Janowiak would essentially block any future effort to release these works.
Janowiak subsequently self-released the Echoes from Nature Boy CD in 1997 without any imput from Romersa and with none of the final recordings which Ahbez oversaw and paid for in the studio with Romersa. The disc included three vintage Ahbez recordings from the ’70s (“Nature Girl,” “Anna Was Mine,” “The Path”), two from the ’80s (“Once There Was a Girl,” “As the Wind”), a demo tape whose date is unknown (“No Bums Allowed”), and five new recordings of Ahbez compositions, produced by Scott Seely, performed by Lawrence Welk Orchestra guitarist Buddy Merrill. Besides being culled from recordings that Ahbez himself had previously deemed insufficient for release, the tone was more or less a hodge-podge, the personnel about as relevant in 1997 as a plotline from The Ozzie & Harriet Show.
Janowiak complained in an interview with an Australian radio journalist in 1998 that the CD got no attention and no distribution; that he’d tried placing it at a local K-Mart in the Palm Springs area, as well as a few bookstores, before giving up. The failure of Echoes, in fact, was the reason Janowiak gave to me for not allowing any more of Ahbez’s music, besides “Nature Boy,” to be released in the years after his death—Romersa’s included. This despite the fact that Ahbez’s 1960 album Eden’s Island went through a dozen pressings between 1995 and 2011, the latter being when Janowiak himself passed away, and had songs from it covered by half-a-dozen prominent indie artists (including Victoria Williams and the Wondermints).
As for Romersa, for the past thirty years he has been telling anyone who would listen that he and Ahbez worked on an album’s worth of music and narrations which were specifically overseen by Ahbez himself, and which have never been released. He’s placed this message on his website. He’s been interviewed countless times on TV, radio, and in print regarding his collaboration with Ahbez in the studio.
Romersa also continues to recieve emails from people around the world asking to license Ahbez’s music for their film projects; people wishing to share their own personal memories of Ahbez; people curious about Ahbez’s lifestyle and message; and some who write simply to show their support of his (Romersa’s) unwavering efforts to keep his deathbed promise to Ahbez.
Over the decades, Romersa has become known as “the surviving friend” in Ahbez’s life, the go-to person whenever people want information about what Ahbez was actually like (as opposed to the oft-repeated myths).
These days, Romersa finds himself once again in the media spotlight, albeit this time as someone who is fighting back. He asked the courts in California, in 2023, to have Ahbez’s final will and testament admitted for probate, with the hopes of ultimately getting the final recordings out to the world. He and Rob Mackenzie are amongst the last alive who actually knew Ahbez personally and knew what he was aiming for in his final years with regards to his music and his message.
As for myself, I have been on the Ahbez research trail now for 29 years, having written dozens of published articles and worked on four Ahbez reissue albums. I take no pleasure in getting political on this subject, especially on this blog, which was always meant to be an informational forum, not a place for partisanship or PR.
Next year, however, will be thirty years since Ahbez’s death, and it’s unfathomable to me that all but the works of his that are either presided over by record companies like Capitol and Del-Fi, or songs of his that are in the public domain, remain sequestered by the acting Ahbez estate (read: Janowiak and his heirs). It’s ridiculous that the bulk of his catalog is being purposefully withheld from the public. It’s a crime against art. And for what reason?
Enough already! Give Romersa the permission he deserves to release this music! Free Ahbez!!
Brian Chidester (April 11, 2024)
EDEN’S ISLAND 