Customer Reviews

Laurel Canyon

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I spent a great amount of time in Laurel Canyon in the late '60's and the early part of 1970. This is the best account I've read of what it was like. Nobody I knew realized that we were at the epicenter of cultural and musical events that over time were going to become mythologized. We were young and extremely excited about each other and what was going on around us. Money and human greed changed everything. I left in 1970 because, after Manson and some people's growing affection for extreme stimulants,everything changed. It got real hard and real cold---and in some cases---real lethal. But for a short period of time,it was truely exceptional.

A cool re-count of an exceptional and phenominal time in Hollywood Hills history.

I was living in the canyon, but border line too young to have been totally involved with all this creative energy, but as a teenager, I was the babysitter for the off spring on many of these relations & it was an amazing experience. Glad to see a "history" book on the scene.

It makes me sad that people will read this book and take it to be the true history of the people and the spirit of the 1960s music scene. Although he gets the facts straight and has interviewed a handful of people, the author misses on the magical mojo. He approaches the sixties with a journalist's sarcastic smarminess. For instance, right at the beginning, in order to elevate Laurel Canyon, he belittles North Beach in San Francisco as "tired" and comedian Lenny Bruce as "irrelevant." Neither adjective could be further from the truth.

The author has a habit of referring to celebrities as "the Joni Mitchells," "the Jim Morrisons," "the Roger McGuinns..." as if they each represent a category rather than an individual. It set my teeth on edge.

Unique creative artists deserve better treatment than they receive at the hands of this author. He may have his fact right, but he just doesn't get it.

I grew up less than 5 miles from that area during this time and never realized what was going on there. I remember driving through Laurel Canyon to go out to the San Fernando Valley to visit my cousins and to find out about these singers living in that area was amazing to me. The book is so good that my employees at work are reading it. There is a list of people of who gets it next. I have never had a book where so many people have wanted to read it after I finished with it.

Walker offers an uneven but overall still worthy recap of the Los Angeles music scene from the 60s to the 70s, as centred around Hollywood and West Hollywood, and using the Laurel Canyon neighbourhood as a proxy for these.

Luckily, the book does have a good map showing these areas, and the key nightclubs like the Troubador and the Roxy. There are also some nice photos of various stars who form distinctive portions of the plot. But as another reviewer commented, a few more photos of the Laurel Canyon area from that era would have been worthy inclusion, given the book's remit.

You can read Walker as providing a neat counterweight to the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury cultural nexus of this period. One which is celebrated far more in our collective perceptions. Yet Walker rightly points out that in the music scene, as opposed to the broader cultural influences, Los Angeles was the more vital place to be.

Perhaps given space considerations, Walker was unable to give full coverage to important trends in the Los Angeles of the 70s. The discussion of glam and disco are rather cursory. Though he might argue that these had little to do with the Laurel Canyon crowd.

Put on your wire-rimmed granny glasses when reading "Laurel Canyon", an affectionate and breezy evocation of the area that virtually birthed the "laid back" California musical sounds of the 60's and 70's.

Author Michael Walker painstakingly constructs a portrait of this sequestered piece of real estate, with its narrow, winding roads, quaint bungalows, and eucalyptus trees. It came to serve as a refuge, salon, and social laboratory for the Western fringe of the Woodstock generation.

A whole rogues' gallery of rock stars, groupies, club owners and passers-thru is recreated, to accurately reflect the milieu of people that interacted, "back in the day." You'll get a ringside seat at Frank Zappa's audition of Alice Cooper, see David Crosby careening down the road, cape flying, on his motorcycle, and find Arthur Lee of "Love" tripping on a hill top.

It's heady stuff. And don't believe the snide comment about "a magazine piece" from Publishers Weekly. Yes, there may be a resemblance to the kind of recreations of times and places that "Vanity Fair" publishes... but I view that as a GOOD thing. The writing in "Laurel Canyon" is crisp--it's juicy and it flows. It has flair, it's not prosaic, and that's what you want in a book about places where great music originated. Grab a glass of vintage wine and enjoy.

***Recommended cds to accompany reading:

"Ladies of the Canyon", Joni Mitchell
"Deja Vu", Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
"Blues From Laurel Canyon", John Mayall
"Forever Changes", Love
"Permanent Damage", the GTOs
"Jackson Browne" ("Saturate Before Using"), Jackson Browne

Very interesting and highly readable book. Gives great insight to the climate and culture of Laurel Canyon and its impact on those that called it home. The author gives you and inside look as the creative environment that proved to be the birth of the sound of CSN&Y, The Eagles and Joni Mitchell among others. The singer songwriter era which remains with us today. He talks about the fact that while these artists were of the flower generation they were also competitive particularly after realizing the amount money they would earn. An interesting perspective. He also gives insight to the flood of drugs that ultimately changed the climate of the canyon. Great anecdotes and photographs. More photographs and a list of characters section would have enhanced the book.