Laurie Pepper: A Taste of Musical Los Angeles in the ’60s

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Author: Emma Lodes

Sex, drugs and jazz: The defining elements of Laurie Pepper’s early life swept up by the culture of arts and music in 1960s Echo Park. Now her hair is white, but her charming and devious grin is the same one that got her jobs photographing famous musicians and ushered her into a roller coaster marriage with world-famous mid-century jazz artist, Art Pepper. Along with being a wild personality, she is quite the storyteller.

Laurie Pepper’s stories are windows into life in L.A. in the ’60s and what it’s like to be married to a world-famous musician. Personal accounts from the perspectives of rock stars and celebrities are abundant, but it’s less common to hear the husband or wife’s point of view. Laurie Pepper’s stories also give the reader perspective on how the local music scene has mellowed out since then.

Once she married Art Pepper, Laurie Pepper was thrown into a rollercoaster ride of drug-related prison sentences and lapses into an unshakable heroin addiction. She operated as his manager and caretaker. Ironically, she pulled her own life together while she managed Art Pepper’s and transformed herself into a successful business woman with her own record business and two books under her belt. Now she is finishing up a memoir that will be coming out within the next year.

But before all the success, she had to hit rock bottom.

“Life in the music business looked glamorous; it looked like fun,” Laurie Pepper said. “The fact that I was loaded 24 hours a day didn’t seem to be a problem. Everyone I knew was those days.”

She insists that she never regretted any of it. But she did try to kill herself.

At the time she was working for the Free Press as a photographer, shooting album covers for Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and Leonard Cohen. Then her daughter left her and Laurie Pepper lost her job. A friend robbed her of all her money and all her drugs except for two valium pills. She took both, closed the doors and windows, and turned on the gas. “If I had killed myself, that would have been sad,” she said. “But I was unsuccessful.”

As she laid on the floor preparing to die, gas choking the room and the drugs taking effect, she put a record on to play over and over: “Visions of Joanna” by Bob Dylan.

“I lay there for hours, and I did not die– I didn’t even fall asleep,” Laurie Pepper said. “I didn’t even get sleepy, and I got so bored.

She got up, turned off all the gas, relit the pilot light and opened all the windows. Laurie Pepper’s new, unexpected continuation of life prompted her to turn her life around.

First, she went to a fortuneteller. He told her that she would become a teacher at a school in Hawaii. A few months later, Laurie Pepper was teaching art and photography at an extensive drug rehabilitation center called Synanon. Located in Santa Monica, Synanon sat in a grove of palms and faced the azure Pacific. Just like Hawaii.

In Synanon, Laurie Pepper grew up a bit. She had a job, she was surrounded by a caring community, and she met the person who would shape the rest of her life: Art Pepper.

The two were lovers in Synanon, and the jazz musician started to tell Laurie Pepper stories about his life. She was intrigued. She decided that she had to compile his stories into a book.

“I thought that was my big chance to try and make it out there,” Laurie Pepper said. “When I’m obsessed, I’m really obsessed. I wasn’t going to stop for anything.”

She married Art Pepper within a couple years and was forced to be the backseat driver as he navigated a life of jail sentences and drug addictions. Her professional life blossomed out of managing his. Then ten years after they got married, Art Pepper died, and Laurie Pepper truly launched her current dynamic and professional life.

“Art never published his work, so I just learned about the music business because I had to,” she said.

She learned how to publish records, negotiate and read contracts and audit. She started to put Art Pepper’s albums out herself and started a record company. The company has released seven albums..

Her upcoming memoir is all about marriage and music and her involvement in the arts and music scene in L.A. It’s a tale of a girl who–– despite being swept up in a marriage with a junky and a jazz star–– grabbed life by the horns and always did exactly what she wanted at the moment. And got what she wanted every time. She certainly has some wild stories to tell.

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