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Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood, by Michael Walker
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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 canyon's golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from "California Dreamin'" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" to "It's 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 boom's leading musical lights—including 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 few—who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.
- Sales Rank: #101741 in eBooks
- Published on: 2010-05-01
- Released on: 2010-05-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Beginning in the mid-1960s, a string of successful rock bands emerged out of Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood of Los Angeles tucked away in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard. From the success of bands like the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, and singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb, Walker proposes Laurel Canyon as rock's answer to Jazz Age Paris. It's a plausible concept, but one he stumbles to elaborate past the length of a magazine feature. The journalist, who lives in Laurel Canyon, delivers strong material on some of the musicians he cites, particularly in early chapters about Crosby, Stills & Nash and Frank Zappa, but offers little about other equally significant acts. Instead, he pads the story with lengthy sections on groupies and the music scene in other parts of the city, the Altamont concert (which was hundreds of miles away) and a digression on the history of cocaine. Furthermore, his enthusiasm for the Laurel Canyon legend leads to shaky critical pronouncements. If "the folk stars of the early 1960s were the first rock stars," for example, then what was Elvis? 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Walker recalls, mostly sweetly, the famed breeding ground for the L.A. cool that pervaded late-1960s American rock. He offers candid, insightful glimpses of Frank Zappa's bizarre, brief tenure in early cowboy movie star Tom Mix's old log cabin; the jangly social and musical interaction of the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Joni Mitchell; the rise of the singer-songwriter marketing label; and the scourge of casual cocaine abuse that pervaded the era and, soon, much of the rest of Woodstock Nation. He pads aplenty about tangential issues hardly unique to Laurel Canyon, such as, besides cocaine, those somewhat forgotten but then integral figures on the pop music scene, groupies. Nevertheless, he is pretty comprehensive about a pivotal place and time in American rock. If not quite essential to the rock shelves, the book valuably accounts for how, with the rise of the Eagles and their bland, strictly commercial ilk, the term mellow lost its luster as a pop-music -descriptor. Mike Tribby
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Laurel Canyon is hilarious and true and bittersweet. Michael Walker catches the mood in the air, and gets it right... the interviews are wonderful . . . It's a beautifully-written document of that time and place when the personalities were as big as those stony dreams that fueled some of the greatest masterpieces in rock." �--Cameron Crowe
"Laurel Canyon captures all the magic and lyricism of an almost mythological geographical spot in the history of pop music. The book lovingly limns the story of a more melodious time in rock and roll where the great talents of the 60s and 70s cloistered together in a sort of enchanted valley populated by an all-star cast of characters, including Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Mama Cass and Brian Wilson."
--Stephen Gaines, author of Philistines at the Hedgerow
"In Laurel Canyon, rock and roll history is urban history, California history, American history, global history through the songs and scandals coming from a canyon on the coast of dreams running through the labyrinthine center of our times." --Kevin Starr, Professor of History, University of Southern California and author of Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge
Most helpful customer reviews
124 of 137 people found the following review helpful.
Back to nature in the heart of the city?
By John L Murphy
Like Walker, my age makes me only a child when the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield hit the Sunset Strip and wandered up the canyon that lured so many acid-heads, freaks, cocaine cowboys, groupies, demented dropouts, and fearsome careerists. Unlike him I remember the once-garish area, if only as a boy gawking at the street parade from a car window! He, now a resident, efficiently transmits in polished but unobtrusive prose the Canyon's allure for those who may have been too young, too far removed, or too poor to have encountered it firsthand. He spans the 1965-1980 years. He shows, looking at two snapshots--which I wish he'd included--how from 1964 to 65 at a Sunset Strip nightclub one can see the generation gap widen. The first shot of dancers could have been from around Eisenhower's first election; the next displays longhairs and miniskirts grooving to the far-out vibes.
His account lingers longer over the first half, that is, the last half of the 60s. His strength here is interviews with such figures as Chris Hillman, Kim Fowley, Henry Diltz, and Graham Nash. Walker's extensively documented acknowledgment of Mama Cass Elliot as the truest Lady of the Canyon makes for poignant reading. This era takes up half the book, and this half ends around Altamont.
While readers have chided Walker for extraneous material such as his treatment of this 1969 festival (and the Manson murders and Woodstock), I counter that he smoothly integrates the microcosm of Laurel Canyon into the millions of commodities and manufactured cultural rebellion its denizens peddled to the eager baby-boomers. Walker shows well how pot and LSD cultivated a communal, shared, and idealistic ethos; cocaine and meth heightened greed, egotism, and paranoia. Monkees preceded Manson. His discussion of these forces makes this book, therefore, more than an assortment of gossip.
The book does lurch more unsteadily through the 70s, and the sudden leaps from country-rock to glam to disco to punk to hair metal that marked the decade (and into the 80s) are less assuredly handled. He's memorable on how the Santa Anas flare up wildfires, why musicians' hermeticism worsened with coke addiction, and how contrasts symbolize the divide between the urban Strip and the bucolic Canyon. More pictures of the natural environment, not just its inhabitants, would have made this feature clearer. You also get the sense in this era that no one ever built a new home there. Walker alludes to this early, asserting that the later blight of McMansion tracts don't detract from the canyon charm that much (I disagree!), but surely some of the successful back-to-nature + hitmaking hippies must have bulldozed chaparral for rustic fortresses too?
I don't think if you have never seen the canyons you will grasp wholly their ambiance as expressed on his pages. Perhaps the more jumbled narrative of the book's second half reflects the more fragmented nature of the music scene there by then roaming from bohemian Laurel to more affluent canyons west, but this rude awakening from the hippie dream itself is conveyed less grippingly, although Walker's insights on the shift from naive trust to massive profit by the younger studio heads and their musical charges remain valuable.
What's surprising is that Walker never mentions Barney Hoskyns (Hoskins alternate spelling) "Waiting for the Sun," a panoramic view of L.A. music from the 1940s on. This gave necessary attention to the whole Warner Bros. proto-alternative haven for eccentrics and cult artists in the early 70s that made the Canyon still a refuge for those who hadn't yet made it big on the label. (A follow-up from a couple months later: guess who's just out with his own "Hotel California" book of this same period: Barney Hoskyns. I guess that explains Walker's silence: competing books on the same Canyon rushing to get into print? See my review of HC on Amazon too.)
Walker quickly nods at Elektra Records, but how Asylum, WB, and Geffen all blended and resisted each other as this counterculture commidified remains hidden. I was never clear enough as to what role David Geffen was playing in "the starmaking machinery behind the popular songs," as Joni Mitchell phrased it, and how such monoliths crushed earlier music label & promotional set-ups. Maybe Hoskyns' new book will shed more light on these scenes. (Follow-up: see my review; some illumination, but still weak.)
I caught a few errors. Beechwood Canyon is Beachwood. (Same error in Hoskyns' new book, but repeated not twice but five or six times. What gives? Both authors claim to live in L.A. This canyon's far from obscure, being the long one leading up to the Hollywood sign at the dead-end of a large street named, well, Beachwood.) Melvin Beli is Belli. Silicon Valley did not grow in the area east of S.F., but south of it. However, I read this with interest, and considering that I'm not a fan of most of the musicians who are treated here, Walker's ability to enliven their stories makes a valuable social history of this tumultuous decade and a half.
46 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Music Epicenter from Folk to Hippies to Country Rock
By Rick Spell
If you are looking to explore popular music history, particularly focusing on the 60s and 70s, this is one of the books you must read. The book loosely divides in to two parts, 60s and 70s. But frankly, the charm and fame of music history is centered in the 60s when the first American answer to the Beatles, the Byrds, were becoming a force in the development from American folk to Rock and Singer/songwriter music. All the stars are here and describe how this unique canyon with homes made of wood and no real requirement of heat or air conditioning allowed a bohemian lifestyle with hippies sleeping on the floor and in caves. Surprising influential stars are named like the Turtles and their influence (Volman) but more importantly, Cass Elliot particularly and the Mamas and Papas generally.
But then it all changed after the Manson murders, Woodstock and Altamont. Hippies wandering unknown into homes became worrisome as the utopia dream of Peace and Love were shattered. This led to the hedonistic, cocaine influenced 70s when it all fell apart. If any criticism could be offered in would be that the book does not focus on the title, Laurel Canyon, but rather moves to the Strip and the Troubadour on the south side of the Santa Monica Mountains in West Hollywood.
This is a must read for any music fans and you will learn a lot and have many songs to research. The 60s were a unique experience in American history and this book focuses on the musical influences and how they touched the country. Great job to the author. After reading this book I picked up Hotel California and while it covers the same period and has good overlap, I recommend it also as a companion purchase as they both cover one of the most important periods in American music.
42 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Mixed results for an unevenly written book.
By Old Enough to Know Better
In the summer of 1972 forces that had been building for decades coalesced to give us the opening strains of the Eagles' "Take It Easy" and Country-Rock went from being a musical undercurrent to being a pop phenomena that affected music, fashion and the culture of young adults for the rest of the '70s. Strangely, in the early '80s this musical phenomena vanished much more quickly than it had appeared leaving little to mark its passing until the Eagles reunion in 1994. Now, over 30 years later there are any number of books telling the story of how Folk, Country, Rock and (to some extent) Blues all came together in LA's Laurel Canyon to make LA the musical promised land which bred this phenomena. Likewise, these books explain how it all collapsed into a heap as cocaine inflated egos clashed and creativity was overtaken by monetary concerns and other realities.
Of the books I've read on the subject of the LA music scene in the '60s and '70s this one perhaps best explains the poisonous effects of cocaine and other vices on the whole scene yet he seems to resist the conclusion that the absolute freedom of the times opened the door to its eventual demise. Michael Walker refers to the culture of the '50s as if it were a nasty communicable disease and he seems genuinely surprised that the free spirits of Laurel Canyon weren't able to change the world to their liking and eventually they too had to conform to reality just as their forebears did.
This brings me to my greatest problem with this book, it seems to be written from the viewpoint of someone who wishes he was there and feels as if he missed out. While he is honest in pointing out that drug-related crime and prostitution surfaced in spite of the tidal wave of idealism that existed at that time he seems to write from a viewpoint of wistful nostalgia for something he never actually was a part of. He seems to believe in the fantasy even though he is chronicling its failure. Accounting for the fact that the author is a Chicagoan that relocated to Laurel Canyon helps to explain this; at least to me. The author (and this book) seem divided; one foot rooted in the past "glories" of the era he writes about while the other foot cautiously treads the reality of the present. It's as if part of the author is wishing that some of the old crew would show up in his yard and start partying while the other half of him would call the police in a heartbeat if they did.
I wouldn't warn anyone off of buying this book, it is in fact very informative, but it is nonetheless uneven. It is a book I would recommend to a true afficinado of the subject but not as a sole purchase if you want to read about Country-Rock. A few other books you might enjoy are: Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock, Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends and To The Limit: The Untold Story Of The Eagles.
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