LAUREL CANYON: THE INSIDE STORY OF ROCK-AND-ROLL'S LEGENDARY NEIGHBORHOOD
MICHAEL WALKER
BOOK SUMMARY
In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughl
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyons golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from "California Dreamin" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" to "Its Too Late," selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture.
In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby booms leading musical lightsincluding Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a fewwho turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.
BOOK EXCERPTS
Excerpted from Laurel Canyon by Michael Walker Copyright © 2006 by Michael Walker. Published in May 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
PREFACE
In 1968 a British pop star and the refugees from two seminal Los Angeles bands gathered in a cottage on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon, the slightly seedy, camp-like neighborhood of serpentine one-lane roads, precipitous hills, fragrant eucalyptus trees, and softly crumbling bungalows set down improbably in the middle of Los Angeles, and sang together for the first time. The occupant of the cottage, which had moldering shake shingles and draft-prone casement windows, was a Canadian painter, poet, and folksinger named Joni Mitchell. The British pop star, sporting a wisp of a goatee and a thick Manchester brogue, was Graham Nash, founding member of the Hollies. The refugees were Stephen Stills, late of the Buffalo Springfield, writer and singer of For What Its Worth, who had three years before auditioned for the Monkees and, having failed, recommended his friend, a folkie named Peter Torkelson; and David Crosby, late of the Byrds and Mr. Tambourine Man, possessed of a Buffalo Bill mustache, an immaculate harmony voice, and piercing eyes that Mitchell, with typical literary flourish, likened to star sapphires. (Crosby produced Mitchells debut album, Song to a Seagull.) So it was that Nash, Stills, and Crosby sat in Mitchells living room on Lookout Mountain, in the heart of Laurel Canyon, in the epicenter of L.A.s nascent rock music industry, and for the first time, began to sing together.
It is a measure of Laurel Canyons mythmaking powers that this particular watershed may have actually occurred not at Mitchells cottagethough thats the way Nash and plenty of others remember itbut a mile away in the living room of Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, who along with Mitchell briefly co-reigned as unofficial queen of the canyon, one an inscrutable poet-genius, the other a bosomy, meddling mother figure. What is certain is that within the year, Nash, Stills, and Crosby apotheosized into Crosby, Stills & Nash, the third group with Laurel Canyon roots within as many yearsafter the Byrds and Buffalo Springfieldto score a knockout with their first record. Nash moved into Mitchells cottage on Lookout, there to write his ode to countercultural domestic bliss, Our House. Mitchell, in turn, wrote and recorded Ladies of the Canyon, her paean to the strange bohemian netherland where she and Nash nurtured their affair and where it would soon become evident that some of the twentieth centurys most talented and enterprising young men and women had gathered at just the right moment.
Laurel Canyon had been filling up with musicians from Los Angeles, New York, and London since the mid-1960s: Mitchell was a transplant from New York via Saskatoon; Carole King had recently decamped to a place on Appian Way; so had Nico, the Teutonic waif from Andy Warhols Factory. Up the street from Mitchells place were John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, and Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas, who, until they moved west and recorded California Dreamin and Monday, Monday, had busked around as semi-obscure folksingers. British bands touring the States made it a point to stop by Laurel Canyon for a party or twoBeatles, Stones, Animals, Yardbirds, and the rest. Some never leftthe British blues legend John Mayall bought a house just over the ridge from Mitchells place. It was Brigadoon meets the Brill Building, and the repercussions thirty-odd years later continue to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world.
