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Music / Musik » alt.fan.frank-zappa » Back to the Garden - The music and mythology of Laurel Canyon
| Back to the Garden - The music and mythology of Laurel Canyon [message #283239] |
Mi, 14 Juni 2006 23:37 |
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Back to the Garden
The music and mythology of Laurel Canyon
By STEFFIE NELSON
Wednesday, June 14, 2006 - 12:00 pm
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/back-to-the-garden/ 13748/
http://www.laweekly.com/images/stories/06/30/30canyon.jpg
Roxy (and Troubadour) music: Stills, Young, Greg Reeves, Dallas
Taylor and Nash rehearsing for Woodstock, 1969 (Photos by Henry
Diltz)
Money may not buy you love, but $2.4 million can buy you prime
real estate on “Love Street” — as in the song Jim Morrison wrote
about living in Laurel Canyon in the ’60s. The Doors’ singer and
his girlfriend rented a house near “the store where the creatures
meet” (the Canyon Country Store) but nobody remembers exactly
where. “It’s like bars where Hemingway drank,” says Laurel Canyon
author Michael Walker as he opens the gates of 2401 Laurel Canyon
Boulevard, marked with a Sotheby’s “For Sale” sign. “Jim Morrison
lived in every house.”
Morrison did not live at this corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout
Mountain Avenue, where a huge log cabin built by Tom Mix stood
until it burned to the ground in 1981. Frank Zappa did though,
with his wife, Gail, and daughter Moon Unit, their in-house
nannies the GTOs, and a host of rock royalty and freaks who
streamed in at all hours of the night and day. (Alice Cooper
auditioned for Zappa’s record label at 7 a.m. and got signed.)
From what was once a bowling alley, the rambling, bucolic
property rises up unmortared stone steps dotted with colorful
tile, to seating nooks built into the hillside, where visitors
would get stoned before entering Zappa’s strict no-drugs zone.
Artesian waterfalls flow into ponds, and there are caves big
enough to sleep in if you don’t mind bats. “It was just magical,”
recalls groupie goddess and former GTO Pamela des Barres (who
remembers exactly where Morrison lived). “It was like going into
what I would imagine to be a forest where Pan frolicked around.
It was my playground, but I was still in awe of it.”
The golden years of the Laurel Canyon scene, roughly 1967-’74,
saw the birth of the singer-songwriter movement and the rise of
huge stars, from folk-rock bands like the Byrds and the Mamas and
the Papas to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young,
Jackson Browne, Carole King, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, the
Flying Burrito Brothers, America, and the Eagles — many of whom
played on each other’s records and slept in each other’s beds.
This concentrated blitz of creativity and passionate
entanglements has been compared to Paris in the ’20s, and
although that’s a stretch, it was certainly as influential as the
Greenwich Village folk scene and Haight-Ashbury during the Summer
of Love. Although other musicians lived in the neighborhood,
including Love’s Arthur Lee, the signature canyon sound was folky
and introspective, representing a deliberate retreat from the
darkness of the late ’60s and the chaos of the Sunset Strip.
Two new books, Walker’s Laurel Canyon and British music
journalist Barney Hoskyns’ Hotel California, delve into the myths
and the music created during this era. While taking different
paths, both chart the scene’s idealistic, communal beginnings in
the late ’60s through its devolution into crass commercialism,
drug binges and broken friendships by the mid-’70s.
“In a way it’s a death-of-’60s-utopianism story,” says Hoskyns,
who previously explored Los Angeles’ music history in 1999’s
Waiting for the Sun. “When you look back down the corridors of
rock & roll time there aren’t that many homogenous scenes that
you can write about, that are like stories of dysfunctional
families where there’s a real coherence in what a group of
artists is trying to do and say. It seemed to be crying out for
an overview. Plus you have this great setting, this rural oasis
right in the midst of freeway hell.”
Always a bohemian enclave, Lookout Mountain Avenue was settled
before building codes existed, on an impossibly narrow, winding
road with a couple of flimsy wooden guard rails that “wouldn’t
even stop a skateboard,” notes Walker as we drive past. Tiny,
Hobbit-like cottages are piled on top of modern boxes, and the
views are some of the best in Los Angeles. Here, Joni Mitchell,
herself “discovered” by David Crosby, bought a cottage that her
boyfriend Graham Nash would later immortalize in the song “Our
House.” According to lore, it was at this cottage with the two
cats in the yard that Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonized together
for the first time, although some insist the historic moment took
place at Cass Elliot’s, nearby. Mama Cass, true to her nickname,
hosted regular salons where musicians and freeloaders would come
to swim in the pool, get high, eat and jam, and she definitely
did play musical matchmaker, asking the newly formed duo of
Crosby and Stills if they might need a third voice. As Nash
recalls the moment in Laurel Canyon, it took them three tries to
get Stills’ “You Don’t Have to Cry” perfect, and then they all
started laughing because it sounded so amazing.
These artists were tapping into the public’s desire for a softer
sound. “After 1968 I think there was a sense in the global music
community that we need to slow down and chill out,” says Hoskyns.
“We’ve got to get ‘back to the garden,’ to use Joni’s phrase. And
I think what Laurel Canyon represented was a place of refuge. And
it happened to be right in the middle of the city. The recording
studios were there, the clubs, down on the Strip. I think it was
a place to stop and take stock. What did the seismic ’60s
phenomenon mean? People had not looked inward up to that point;
everyone was looking outward, usually through the prism of drugs.
And now it was like, ‘My god, we really need to look inside and
ask ourselves some questions.’ ”
And the answers happened to sound like hit records. In 1969,
David Geffen, then a 26-year-old talent agent who managed Laura
Nyro, took on Crosby, Stills & Nash. Soon he partnered with Joni
Mitchell’s manager Elliot Roberts; Lookout Management became
Geffen-Roberts and in 1971 the multitasking Geffen launched
Asylum Records with the backing of Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun. Says
Hoskyns, “In essence what people like David Geffen did was to
market the very non-commercialism, turn that kind of laid-back,
patched-denim dropout thing into a product.”
http://www.laweekly.com/images/stories/06/30/30canyon2.jpg
Joni Mitchell in ''Our House,'' which she shared with Graham Nash
Laurel Canyon scenesters found a regular hangout in The
Troubadour, which opened as a folk club in 1957. “It was like the
clubhouse,” says the scene’s unofficial photographer, Henry
Diltz, who also played on its stage with his band the Modern Folk
Quartet. “It was a place you would go and all your friends would
be there. You knew all the groups that were playing, you had
affairs with the waitresses, and Harry Dean Stanton would be
sitting at the bar.” For ambitious singer-songwriters, this was
also the only game in town; multi-night runs bestowed instant
stardom on both Joni Mitchell and Elton John. And for the period
of time that the scene was small and new enough to be contained
inside the club’s doors, the Canyon’s idyllic feel was carried
down into Hollywood.
But in 1973, the Roxy opened in direct competition with the
Troubadour. Its owners were Geffen, Roberts and Lou Adler, so
naturally they had money on their minds. “The Roxy was very
symbolic of a shift toward something that was more glitzy and
in-crowd and movie-star oriented,” says Hoskyns. “Maybe this was
the dawn of the celebrity era. You think of it in terms of Cher
and people like that. It certainly isn’t about banjos anymore.”
Geffen was changing — dating Cher, for one thing — and with him
the scene.
In Hotel California Hoskyns tells the story of a legendary summit
in Geffen’s sauna, during which he informed his guests — Glenn
Frey, Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Ned Doheny — that he was
starting a small record label: “I’ll never have more artists than
I can fit in this sauna.” Yet just two years later Geffen sold
Asylum to Warner Bros., and then in 1973 the label merged with
Elektra. Geffen immediately cut Elektra’s artist roster and soon
he was racking up enemies almost as quickly as the zeros in his
paychecks. By the early ’80s the Bronx entrepreneur’s ruthless
business practices had led to his falling out with Joni Mitchell,
Neil Young and Henley.
In 2000 Geffen told his biographer that if he never spoke to Joni
Mitchell again he “wouldn’t miss her for a minute.” Yet he tells
Hoskyns that his Laurel Canyon experience was “the greatest ride
that one could possibly imagine.” Hoskyns is touched by Geffen’s
sentiment: “The era still means way more to him than anything
that happened subsequently. I’m convinced that he did care about
these artists, he did care about their music. At the same time he
saw them as a stepping stone to far greater riches.”
http://www.laweekly.com/images/stories/06/30/30canyon7.jpg
Mitchell, Crosby and Eric Clapton in Cass Elliot's backyard, 1968.
Voices of a generation or not, by the mid-’70s some of the
leading lights of the scene — including Crosby, Stills, Henley,
and Frey — began, says Walker, “to behave very much like Nero on
his way to the vomitorium.” Hoskyns doesn’t spare us the sordid
details, and it gets a little tedious. But then, for some, it was
always tedious. A string of early ’70s feel-good hits like
America’s “Ventura Highway,” Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes,”
and the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” (co-written by Browne), made the
Hollywood hippies easy targets. Frank Zappa came up with the
derisive term “navel gazers” to describe his former neighbors.
Tom Waits, whose song “Ol’ 55” was covered by the Eagles, said
the band was “about as exciting as watching paint dry.” Taking
those sentiments a few steps further, Lester Bangs wrote the
essay “James Taylor Marked For Death,” declaring, “I call it
I-Rock . . . because most of it is so relentlessly, involutedly
egocentric that you finally actually stop hating the punk and
just want to take the poor bastard out and get him a drink, and
then kick his ass.”
Although Walker says his most revelatory musical discovery during
the writing of Laurel Canyon was Arthur Lee’s dark, orchestral
psych pop, he believes in the lasting influence of the
navel-gazing singer-songwriters. “Whether you like it or not a
whole generation defined itself by the music that was made here
during the late ’60s and early ’70s. It was an ongoing history
while they were living it, and that really helped people shape
their lives and understand their values.” And who can argue with
the lasting testimony: Young’s “Ohio” (written in Nash’s
backyard), or King’s Tapestry or Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon,
Blue and Court and Spark; or even the Eagles’ canonical (if
overplayed) Hotel California, which chronicles the scene’s
decline into nihilism.
Laurel Canyon, born of personal curiosity about the neighborhood
Walker has lived in for the past nine years, doesn’t wallow too
long in this dirt. “I was trying to write about the psychology of
what it was like to be here,” he says. “I deliberately stayed
away from certain stories.” So we don’t meet Crosby or Stills
clutching their freebase pipes in the ’80s, but we do get a
somewhat long-winded — and not especially relevant to Laurel
Canyon — social history of cocaine, from the Incas to Coca Cola
and Cole Porter lyrics. One former Elektra employee says that
doing lines was so routine within the Hollywood music industry,
the label handed out promotional coke mirrors to announce the
release of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”
These sorts of distinctions make the two books interesting
companion reads. Hoskyns the music historian clues us in to
lesser-known talents like Judee Sill, a folkie junkie whom he
believes “should be rediscovered like a Nick Drake . . . I think
she was really nothing short of a musical genius.” Walker,
meanwhile, introduces us to then-16-year-old Morgana Welch, a
second-generation Sunset Strip groupie and Laurel Canyon dweller
who was a preferred consort of Led Zeppelin.
“I tried to interview as many people that were on the periphery
of these music stars as the music stars themselves,” says Walker,
“because Graham Nash and those guys had created this sort of
popular-culture hurricane, and they were in the eye of it. And
the eye of a hurricane is a pretty good place to be — it’s calm
and balmy. But right on the edges of it is where the maelstrom
is, and that’s where a lot of these people found themselves.”
The Roxy
http://www.laweekly.com/images/stories/06/30/30canyon6.jpg
Photo Courtesy Numero Group
There was, however, one peripheral figure who brought the edge,
the maelstrom, right into the hurricane’s eye. Both Walker and
Hoskyns retell the saga of an aspiring singer-songwriter named
Charlie Manson, a hippie hanger-on who was befriended by Dennis
Wilson and Byrds producer (and Doris Day’s son) Terry Melcher,
and whose fractured lo-fi folk was championed by Neil Young.
Young even recommended Manson to Mo Ostin, who wasn’t impressed,
but Melcher made the fatal mistake of backing down on a promise
to connect Manson with Columbia Records. This slight wasn’t the
only source of Manson’s wrath, but it was one of them, and as it
happened the house in Benedict Canyon that Roman Polanski and
Sharon Tate rented during the summer of 1969 was owned by Terry
Melcher. It’s unclear whether Manson had put a hit on the
producer and his friends or whether he was just sending him a
message. Either way, a chill set in, and doors in the canyons
were locked at night for the first time.
There are some who say “the sixties” didn’t end until mid-way
through the ’70s, others who believe Helter Skelter in August
followed by Altamont in December slammed the book on the decade
the minute the clock struck 1970. The hippie look and lexicon
certainly lasted well into the ’70s, but purity in any movement
is fragile and fleeting. Born of isolation and insulation, the
Laurel Canyon scene couldn’t survive the scrutiny or the influx
of drugs and money. By the end of 1969 the royalties from CSN’s
massively successful debut album had already bought the musicians
new homes in other, more upscale neighborhoods.
Yet the magic of recorded albums is that they are, truly, a
record — of a mood, a time and a place. Gorgeous specimens like
Crosby, Stills & Nash can exist separately from the flops and the
feuds, the rehabs and the reunion tours. Happening upon “Suite:
Judy Blue Eyes” on the car radio, you can still feel the electric
thrill of a moment that was less about dropping out than tuning in.
LAUREL CANYON: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary
Neighborhood | By MICHAEL WALKER | Faber & Faber/FSG | 277 pages
| $25 hardcover
HOTEL CALIFORNIA: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills,
Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, The
Eagles and Their Many Friends | By BARNEY HOSKYNS | Wiley | 336
pages | $26 hardcover
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| Re: Back to the Garden - The music and mythology of Laurel Canyon [message #283245 ] |
Do, 15 Juni 2006 00:27 |
|
In article <449081B6.7010004 [at] newsguy.com>,
Shrike <caltrops [at] newsguy.com> quoted:
> http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/back-to-the-garden/ 13748/
>
> Money may not buy you love, but $2.4 million can buy you prime
> real estate on ³Love Street² ‹ as in the song Jim Morrison wrote
> about living in Laurel Canyon in the ¹60s
which Arthur Barrow inserted into The Radio Is Broken.
--Charles
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