Oral history of late ‘64/early ‘65 w/ new quotes from (the late?) Loren Schwartz

[rn57]

http://pleasekillme.com/glen-campbell-brian-wilson-beach-boys/

Some here will have read Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk rock Please Kill Me. For a while they’ve been at work on a new book focusing on LA from 1964 to the Manson trial, of which the article linked above seems to be a result. It’s billed as an oral history of the period between Brian’s breakdown with Glenn Campbell replacing him on the road, up to the recording of CG. Most of the quotes are from previously published books and articles, but McNeil and McCain did do an interview with Loren Schwartz, which covers ground he’s talked about before but has a detail or two that seems new to me. It does make me wonder who else the authors might have been talking to for their book.

PS Reading this idly made me wonder if any music forums online had new posts about Schwartz/Daro. So I put his latter day adopted name into Google and the first thing to come up was this

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/lorren-daro-obituary?pid=1000000183395277&view=guestbook

Which if not a hoax indicates he died early this year. Don’t remember reading about that anywhere before now. I guess the quickest way to determine if Lor(r)en is really gone is to look him up at familysearch.org

Pps- just checked that site, put every variant of Loren or Lorren Daro or Schwartz into the search, and no listing of him at Social Security Death Index or any similar database comes up. If there were a paid death notice or obit in any paper, it should have shown up at Legacy.com but I can find nothing of that kind.

However the funeral home named in the link exists and is near Cobb California where he lived so I’d guess this is for real.

[MrRobinsonsFather]

Interesting read thanks for posting. Those Brian quotes are mostly from his first autobiography and we all know how accurate that one is. Those new Loren quotes are good makes me wish he stayed around here a little longer.

[rn57]

Well, I noticed the guestbook to Lorren Daro’s page at Legacy.com had one entry, by a Michael Levesque of San Francisco.
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Vitamin-Dictionary-Contains-Everything/dp/0970660812
shows Levesque wrote a book which Daro published in 2002 so now I’m pretty sure Daro passed away. As to why there was no death notice my guess, based on his general attitude as manifested on this board and other places, is that he was rather bitter about the fact that he was going to be remembered primarily as the guy who gave Brian acid, so he didn’t feel like having the world learn of his death right away.

[MrRobinsonsFather]

Well, I noticed the guestbook to Lorren Daro’s page at Legacy.com had one entry, by a Michael Levesque of San Francisco.
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Vitamin-Dictionary-Contains-Everything/dp/0970660812
shows Levesque wrote a book which Daro published in 2002 so now I’m pretty sure Daro passed away. As to why there was no death notice my guess, based on his general attitude as manifested on this board and other places, is that he was rather bitter about the fact that he was going to be remembered primarily as the guy who gave Brian acid, so he didn’t feel like having the world learn of his death right away.

That's sad to hear. Must of been more recently. I remember a few years ago he came here answering questions. He sort of had no filter when talking about certain people which angered a lot of people and some of his stories clashed. I think some people overreacted too much, we may have learnt more from him.

[rn57]

The last time Lor(r)en was on this board was in November of last year when he posted that he had been pleasantly surprised to find that Mike’s book, in his view, had discussed him fairly. So he must have died between then and when the post in the guestbook of the Legacy page went up two months later.

The pleasekillme.com article has a quote from him about being in a car with Brian while fans were swarming over and in it, which would refer to the time he said he spent as the BBs tour manager in 1963. I’ve sometimes wished he were asked more about that and the earlier part of the period he knew Brian, since discussing the acid trip always seemed to make him defensive and argumentative.

And I’d like to know what was true and what was exaggerated about the rest of his career. For example he wrote several times that he once was The Who’s tour manager but his name has never been mentioned in any books or articles about that group...that I’ve seen anyway.