C a n y o n

o f

D r e a m s

C a n y o n o f

D r e a m s

H a r v e y K u b e r n i K

F o r e w o r d b y r a y M a n z a r e K

a F t e r w o r d b y L o u a d L e r

T h e m a g i C a n D T h e m u s i C

o f L a u r e L C a n y o n

a L av i s h Ly i L L u s T r aT e D i n s i D e r ’ s L o o k aT 8 0 y e a r s o f m u s i C a n D C u LT u r e i n L a u r e L C a n y o nLaurel Canyon is a zip code with its own play list. To name just a few: sonny & Cher, The Doors, The Turtles, Canned Heat, The monkees, The Byrds, Buffalo springfield, Joni mitchell, Jackson Browne, Crosby, stills, nash & young, The eagles, Carole King—they all cultivated their immortal sounds in this L.a.-based musical fraternity. Canyon of Dreams, written by a long-time Canyon resident, Harvey Kubernik, who knows them all, traces the history of this community and its enduring legacy. Taking a deeply personal approach, he uses a multiple-voice narration based on exclusive interviews with the area’s musical elite. Because of their close and long-time connection with Kubernik, some of these stars are speaking openly for the first time.

This is the first full-color illustrated book dedicated to the Laurel Canyon scene. It features a foreword by ray manzarek of The Doors, and an afterword by Lou adler. and it contains more than 350 photographs, album covers, candid home photos, ticket stubs, and original flier artwork, including 100 photos—some never before seen—by acclaimed Woodstock photographer Henry Diltz, a Canyon fixture for the past 40 years.

eye-opening both visually and informationally, this is a book no music lover can be without!

I n T e r v I e W H I g H L I g H T s :

• randy meisner reminisces about the eagles first gig and the recording of “one of These nights.”

• graham nash reflects on life with Joni mitchell and describes writing “our House.”

• for the first time in years, the three surviving Doors members talk about performances, recordings, band dynamics, and, of course, Jim morrison.

• Lou adler discusses his legendary sunset strip venues—the Whisky a go go, roxy Theater, rainbow Bar & grill, and Tapestry—and, with michele Phillips, reflects on the monterey Pop festival.

• slash, a child of the Canyon, details the formation of guns n’ roses.

H a r v e y K u b e r n i K , a lifelong resident of Los angeles, is a veteran music journalist whose work has been published nationally in melody maker, The Los angeles free Press, Crawdaddy, musician, goldmine, miX, The Los angeles Times, and moJo, among others. He has been a record producer since 1979 and was a former West Coast Director of a&r for mCa records. as a West Hollywood and Laurel Canyon insider, Kubernik has unparalleled access to the sources and personalities still based in the beauty of the Canyon.

National publicity • 20-city morning drive radio tour • Features and reviews in music and general interest magazines Newspaper coverage in arts, entertainment, and book review sections • Online coverage and blog outreach

Author events in San Francisco, CA • E-blads available

MUSIC • October 2009 • $29.95 ($38.95 Canada) • Hardcover • 9 x 12; 384 pages; full color • ISBN 978-1-4027-6589-6

Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this uncorrected proof before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

For more information, contact Megan Perritt at (646) 688-2526 or mperritt@sterlingpublishing.com. Cover design and collage by B

en gibson

Harvey Kubernik

Scott Calamar, editor

The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon

DreamsCanyon

of

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarksof Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016© 2009 by Harvey Kubernik and LightSpeed Publishing, Inc.Foreword © 2009 by Ray ManzarekAfterword © 2009 by Lou Adler

Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishingc/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin StreetToronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution ServicesCastle Place, 166 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, England BN7 1XUDistributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd.P.O. Box 704, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

Packaged by LightSpeed Publishing, Inc.Interior design by X-Height Studio

Picture credits on page 360 constitute an extension of this copyright page

Product names mentioned in this book may be trademarks,registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective owners.Neither this book, nor its publisher, are authorized, endorsed,licensed or sponsored by, or affiliated in any with the productsfeatured herein.

Printed in ChinaAll rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-6589-6

For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special SalesDepartment at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

To Hilda and Marshall

Kubernik, who left Culver

City to move to the Fairfax

district. This book exists

primarily because of you.

Foreword by Ray Manzarek viii

Acknowledgments x

Introduction xiii

Chapter 1The Far Back Lot, Singing Cowboys, and All That Jazz 1

Welcome to the Garden 1

Chapter 2The Jazz Heads Were There First 9

The Birth of the Hot 9

Building to a Crescendo 14

The Dragon’s Lair 18

A Randi Musician 21

Voice Your Choice 25

Chapter 3Between Sunset and Mulholland 29

Born in Boyle Heights 29

Kentucky Woman 33

The Song Is You 36

Out of Their Heads 44

Chapter 4The Canyon Comes into Focus 49

Point and Click to the Music 49

Somewhere Friday Night 60

When New York Came to Town 64

Chapter 5Walking on Sunset 75

See You at the Go-Go 75

Love Street 83

Contents Chapter 6Swinging on the Vine 91

Hey, Hey, We’re Charting! 91

Where the Buffalo Roamed 101

Chapter 7The Storm and the Aftermath 107

Paranoia Strikes Deep 107

Powered by Flowers 115

Living the Blues 124

Chapter 8Candy for the Ears and Eyes 127

Invaders from the Inland Empire 127

Wizards of Oz 131

A Lot of Young Girls Are Coming to This Canyon 138

Chapter 9From the Canyon to the Bay 143

The Monterey International Pop Festival 143

Stormy Waters Ahead 154

Chapter 10A Melodic Menagerie 159

Wonderful, Wonderful 159

From Another Land 164

It’s the Song, Not the Singer 169

Chapter 11Underground, on the Airwaves 173

Flying on the Ground Is Wrong 173

The Crystal Ship Sets Sail 178

Chapter 12Blues Hit the Canyon 187

A ‘Spoonful’ of Laurel Canyon 187

Spill the Wine 194

Cielo Drive Blues 199

Chapter 13Country Comforts 203

On the Way Home 203

On a Carousel 212

Chatelaine of the Canyon 230

Chapter 14The Epicenter of a Sound Revolution 239

Your Mothers Should Know 239

I Feel the Earth Move 251

Chapter 15A Peaceful, Easy Feeling 263

Feat Don’t Fail Us Now 263

Browne-ian Motion 268

The Eagles Have Landed 272

Chapter 16Your Name Is on the List 285

Turn Up That Radio 285

Snow Falls in Laurel Canyon 289

Hollywood Nights 299

Clubland 304

Chapter 17Cultural Creatives 309

Home at Last 309

Elegant People 315

Chapter 18Detour Ahead 319

Even Paranoiacs Have Enemies 319

Rip This Joint 322

Buddha with a Beat 330

Chapter 19Laurel Canyon 2.0 337

Go for the Youth Market 337

Chapter 20Not Resting on Their Laurels 345

Long Promised Road 345

Summer Rain 348

Afterword by Lou Adler 357

About the Author 359

Photo Credits 360

Index 361

THAT CANYON. That deep green crease

that runs through the Hollywood Hills from

the Sunset Strip to the San Fernando Valley.

That curving, twisting boulevard of hipness and

psychedelia; of movie stars and mystics and jazz and folk

and rock; of Harry Houdini, Clark Gable, Shelly Manne, and

Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, and The Doors.

Not to mention the ladies—the flower children, the

witches, the punkettes, the starlets. The fine and sweet and

innocent chicks. Yes. The chicks. For that is what we called

them in the ’60s. All soft and bejeweled and feathered and

wrapped in their soft garments from antique clothing stores.

Clothes from another era, from a different place, from

anywhere else than where we were at the moment. From a

fantasyland of poets and knights and kings and queens of

the realm. Ahh, the girls. How loving and supportive they

were . . . and are to this very day. Taking care of their men;

their jazz musicians, their hippie guitarists, their poets, the

scribblers of tales.

And the men. Seeking fame, art, enlightenment. Seeking

knowledge. Knowledge of the world, of the human psyche, of

the machinations of the power elite of “show business.”

Seeking to make it! Seeking a way to subsist on the creations

of their minds, their brains, their hands, and finally and

truly, their guts. Pulling ideas free from the confines of their

souls. Their boiling and turbulent souls. Jim Morrison once

said, “A child is like a flower. His head is just floating in the

breeze.” And so are the men of the canyon. The men of

Laurel Canyon. The artists of Laurel Canyon.

And I was there. With Jim and John and Robby. With The

Doors. I spent many a day and night at John’s house up on

the top of Appian Way overlooking the City of Lights. He was

married to Julia Brose, and the gang would motor up to their

house for pool cue time, a touch of God’s good green herb,

bull sessions, and health food boozing. Julia was the Hostess

with the Mostest and kept the larder well stocked. Dorothy

(my wife and Doors muse), Lynn (the fox from New York)

and Robby, Jim and Pam (his cinnamon-sprinkled poetess

love) gathered up there, atop Laurel Canyon, to be young

and mad and in love.

Up in that cool-air height, Jim worked on a batch of new

songs with Robby playing acoustic guitar. They would bring

them down from Laurel Canyon to The Doors’ workshop on

the corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega. Robby would

pick up his electric Gibson, plug it into his Fender amp, and

begin to play. Jim would sing into his Shure mike plugged

into his own Fender amp, as John and I would listen to their

latest creation and then join in on beats and organ chord

changes. They would always have something cool up their

sleeves, like two monks coming down out of the Himalayas

with some holy (or unholy) ideas, or like Zarathustra

coming down from his high to whisper in Nietzsche’s ear the

words he spake. There was always a sense of excitement

about what they had created, and John and I, whipped up to

a high state of spine-tingle, would put the mood and the kick

to the juice they carried.

And out of that Laurel Canyon stimulation came such

songs as “Road House Blues,” “The Soft Parade,” “Wild

Child,” “Peace Frog,” “Five to One,” “Riders on the Storm,”

“Shaman’s Blues,” and Jim’s autobiographical ode to that

green crease in the mountains, “Love Street.”

He sang, “I see you live on Love Street.

There’s the store where the creatures meet.

I wonder what they do in there.”

Jim and Pam lived just behind the Canyon Country

Store. Legend has it in the same apartment that Clark Gable

conducted his trysts. The Canyon Country Store was the

only market in the Canyon and it was loaded with provisions

for heads with the munchies. Jim would love to sit out on

his balcony and watch the comings and goings of both the

elite and the hoi polloi. Or, as he liked to call the

exuberantly dressed children of the light, “the creatures.”

Danny Sugerman was one of those creatures. He was The

Doors’ manager for the last fifteen years of his too-short and

too-wild life. The original “Wild Child,” he started out as our

office boy at the age of fourteen, became Jim’s friend, was my

publicist and manager after John, Robby, and I went splitsville

in ’73, and worked his way up—through sheer grit and wit—

to take on the whole ballgame: Doors’ chief cook and bottle

washing manager! And he did a fine job of keeping Jim alive.

viii

Foreword

ix

Danny and I both wanted people to know that The

Doors’ lead singer was a damn fine American Poet. In those

managing years, Danny lived at 8632 Wonderland Avenue

(dig the rhythm of that address!), and worked out of the

upstairs office while I rehearsed the band “Nite City” in the

soundproofed living room. What madness in that two-story

Spanish bungalow. Iggy Pop falling by for bouts of uptown

and downtown revelry—with Danny matching his bud’s

every excess. Paul Warren, guitarist extraordinaire, downing

raw eggs in his beer and downing anything else he could

sniff out of Iggy’s stash of medications. Noah James just

being the mad lead singer. Nigel Harrison being an absolute

“glamour boy” bassist. Jimmy Hunter, our drummer man,

laughing at everything like a blissed-out Buddha-like Dean

Moriarty. And Ritchie Wright, our dwarf-man from New

Jersey, dropping by to act as mascot and instigator

whenever things got slow. What times we had in Laurel

Canyon! Damn, I miss the Sugerman.

And I miss Paul Rothchild, Doors’ producer and fine New

York intellectual. He bought twenty acres in Laurel Canyon,

with a very woodsy chalet-like home, and sold off a couple

of acres every few years to keep a nice SoCal lifestyle going

through all his fifty-nine years. Paul was the fifth Door.

Couldn’t have made the records we did without him. He was

in charge of the studio and Jim’s resident psychiatrist at the

sessions. Easy at first and damned hard later in our career.

But he did a terrific job. And he knew his music. He was a

J.S. Bach maven and Greenwich Village folk music scene

luminary in the early ’60s. Knew his Miles and ’Trane, too. I

loved that cat.

And I loved Dick Bock, the head and founder of World-

Pacific Records! The man who brought the cool West Coast

jazz scene to America. All that super-cool Gerry Mulligan,

Chet Baker piano-less quartet jazz, and the Shorty Rogers

septet-octet recordings, and Shelly Manne and Barney

Kessel of smooth guitar—who also lived in Laurel Canyon—

as did Mr. Richard Bock. Now here’s the coincidence: I heard

a fair amount of World-Pacific records in my growing-up

years in Chicago and loved that California sound. I

especially remember a Kenneth Patchen poetry reading of

“Lonesome Boy Blues” with the Modesto Brisenio’s Chamber

Jazz Sextet backing him. It was cold mid-December and the

warmth of Patchen’s voice and the honey of Modesto’s

baritone sax made me want to get to California now! That

record was a Dick Bock production. So, I finally got to L.A.

and my brother’s surf-blues band—Rick and the Ravens—

got signed to, guess what, World-Pacific Records—the rock

subdivision, Aura Records. I finally met Dick Bock and we

got to talking about LSD and spirituality—he brought Ravi

Shankar to the American ear. He knew his Indian mysticism.

I told Dick I was in the throes of a bad acid meltdown after

having blissful experiences of oneness on the chemical. I

wanted that bliss back! Instead, I was lost in the paranoid

darkness of ego trap. A classic bummer. Dick said, “Why

don’t you try listening to this guy?” And he gave me two

discs by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi! He said a

class is going on in mantra meditation and maybe I should

take it. I listened, dug it, and took the class. I was going to

get high naturally. Well, I didn’t really get high but I did calm

down my jangled nerves. And the point of this story is,

guess who were in that small, maybe twenty-person,

class? John Densmore and Robby Krieger. Looking for

enlightenment! No Dick Bock, no Doors. Did somebody say

“serendipity”? Or was it Laurel Canyon?

There was always some kind of magic afoot in that

Canyon. The light and the sun infused that zone with a sense

of joy. There was always something spiritual about that slice

through the green earth, but never more so than in the ’60s.

A generation had opened the William Blake/Aldous Huxley

Doors of Perception. We had seen the oneness of all creation.

We had left behind the strictures of organized religion. We

had become the new tribe. Inter-racial, inter-generational,

inter-national. And it felt as if we were spreading the

message of (dare I say it today) “Love” to a new world.

Come, join us in this celebration of the planet we cried

out. Come, join us in this celebration of the light, of potency,

of magic, of enlightenment. We are all one! And for the time

that it lasted, we were golden. We were the precursors of the

Golden Race, of that time to come when the races and

religions of the earth will blend together to become the new

people of the planet. The lovers, not the killers. Born to

dance and sing and have great, golden copulations. The

caretakers of this Garden of Eden. Bedazzled by this

thousand-faceted diamond that we call existence. Nurturing

the soil. Honoring all the creatures we share this globe with.

Ultimately being the new Adam and Eve. Alive!

And that was the foundation of Laurel Canyon.

Ray Manzarek

March 2009

xiii

LIKE SO MANY characters who come to

Southern California in search of a new

narrative, even the eucalyptus trees are not

native. Imported from Australia as wind blocks, they serve

as vigilant sentinels deployed upon escarpments that define

so much of the topography of Laurel Canyon.

On this particular late summer night, the paradoxical

charms of the canyon reveal themselves; an eerie quiet

settles over the snaking boulevard that is choked daily by

beleaguered commuters desperate to reach West Hollywood

at one end or the San Fernando Valley at the other.

Sandwiched between these two ravenous cauldrons of

commerce, Laurel Canyon is both an escape into a bucolic

Neverland and a playground for real estate developers

anxious to sell the “canyon experience.”

It’s after midnight when the music kicks into high gear. It

is emanating from a decrepit stucco house perched near the

Laurel Canyon Store, the hitching post center-of-town for the

local denizens. Traipsing up its steep, shambling steps to a

surprisingly capacious terrace, past a throng of enraptured,

Introduction

Workers removing loose rocks from embankment alongLaurel Canyon Road, 1920.

xiv C A N Y O N O F D R E A M S

glassy-eyed bodies, one cannot help but submit to this mise-

èn-scene that screams, “Dude, you are where it’s at!”

Meanwhile, a middle-aged vinyl geek gleefully surveys

life-altering Phil Ochs, Chris Darrow, Gram Parsons, and

Flying Burrito Brothers LP sleeves while his buddy DJs from

behind a cranky turntable, spinning the snap, crackling

sounds to an appreciative crew milling outside.

An alluring Mex-Tex Aquarian emerges from the shadows

and asks for a light. With her long, radiant dark hair parted

willfully down the middle, a batik scarf masquerading as a

blouse, tanned coltish legs sheathed in boots of Spanish

leather, her sly, unspoken gestures promise more than just

a smoke.

“I’m just back from the Thai/Burmese border,” she

murmurs. “Peace Corps, y’know. South America’s next.

“God, I love the Canyon. It’s my first time here. I love

the vibes.

“Home? I’m from New Mexico but I could really love living

here. It’s got soul. I’m listening to a lot of Otis Redding . . . ‘Try

A Little Tenderness.’ Yeah!”

She starts to sway to music only she can hear, in a

motion that Tina Tuner calls “nice and eeeasy.”

Much later, Jim Kweskin is holding court, dosing the

room with his gentle acoustic reveries. He was one of the

headliners at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival, the infamous

event where Dylan went electrical bananas. It’s a trip to see

him up close. He’s surrounded by recording equipment that

even Pete Seeger could manage; an Ampex 2-track is

huddling with Leo Fender’s reverb unit while a honky-tonk

piano sits catty-corner from a Hammond organ.

Kweskin has the room singing in grainy harmony. And all

the girls, resplendent in their youth and beauty, have that

blissed-out look of enchantment that can drape this cruel

world in evanescent fantasy.

But this is not a ’60s flashback nor the feverish story-

boarding of a film school graduate high on his first feature.

This is the home of Jonathan Wilson: musician, guitar builder,

recording engineer, and all-American grounding wire from

North Carolina. He has set up shop in Laurel Canyon, in the

year of our gypsy renaissance 2008.

“I wasn’t tryin’ to re-create anything,” says Wilson on a

sunny late afternoon when the house is empty, silent, and

stoic. Guitars line the walls like blue ribbons from a county

fair, and the inclination is to sit a spell, unwind, repose, and

compose. “I wasn’t thinkin’ ’bout the history of Laurel

Canyon and all the great players livin’ round here. You can

throw a Frisbee from the porch and hit the vacant site of

the Frank Zappa cabin. I just learned about that. It’s just a

great place to get some work done, you know.”

Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes has been a recur-

ring presence as has Barry Goldberg, a keyboard maestro

from the halcyon ’60s.

“I don’t know what it is, but you just mention Laurel

Canyon and it gets everybody’s musical juices flowin’, like

there’s somethin’ in the air,” Wilson avers.

Laurel Canyon’s stature as a thrumming hub of creative

co-habitation places it in very rarefied company. Artists of

all stripes have historically clustered in metropolitan cul-de-

sacs, where rents were cheap, women plentiful, and dealers,

hustlers, patrons, and poseurs could generate critical mass

by stoking ambition and opportunity. From the shabby

studios of Montmartre, where Picasso and Modigliani

caroused with artistic impunity, to the third-floor walk-ups in

’50s Greenwich Village, where Beatniks bopped to the birth

of the cool, big cities have always provided sanctuary from

the straights and suits.

Unlike its kindred habitats in Paris and New York,

however, Los Angeles’ bohemian grove was no sheltered

oasis. Rather, it was part of the city’s all-consuming effort to

package and market a Mediterranean arcadia to land-thirsty

Easterners enthralled with the baronial prospects of owning

Spanish haciendas and Moorish estates. Providing water to

this blossoming splendor has filled reservoirs with both

myth and movies—most famously Roman Polanski’s

Chinatown, a paean to the black art of squeezing blood from

a rock. Against this morally dubious backdrop, Laurel

Canyon grew slowly, sprouting wood cabins among the

copious outgrowths of chaparral and sage. A spring-fed

stream provided the precious elixir.

As much a part of the native flora and fauna, the Canyon

attracted its share of cranks and kooks. Frederick Shaw, aka

“Crazy Shaw,” took hold of the local imagination in the

early 1900s. He was either prescient or a crackpot; probably

a little of both. His proposals careened wildly from Jules

Verne-like contraptions to a new Eden based on vegetari-

anism and nudity. He was, in historian and Shaw biographer

Ralph Shaffer’s view, “the first counterculture resident of

Laurel Canyon, an apt forerunner of the Zappas, Mamas and

Papas and all the other denizens of the canyon almost a

century later.”

xvI N T R O D U C T I O N

Shaw never made any money but he did acquire 160

prime canyon acres that are worth tens of millions today

(bursting real estate bubbles notwithstanding).

Charles Spencer Mann, engineer and land speculator,

raised the stakes, figuratively and literally, in furthering the

development of the canyon. Mann and his partners bought

property along the boulevard and up the hillsides. Historical

information provided by The Laurel Canyon Association

reminds us that “he installed the nation’s first trackless

trolley in 1913 to bring residents and prospective buyers

from the streetcar line at Sunset Boulevard to a roadhouse

tavern at Lookout Mountain Avenue. The fare was ten

cents.” It was this log cabin roadhouse that later became the

home of silent film star Tom Mix; eventually it morphed into

the antic playpen of Frank Zappa, who occupied it for a

crucial six month period in 1968. His residency has taken on

Alice-in-Wonderland proportions with Canyon mythologists

and gossips. It burned to cinders in the 1970s, taking all its

real (and imagined) secrets with it.

The trolley, like L.A.’s famous red cars, ultimately gave

way to automobiles, the boulevard providing asphalt

nourishment to the tracts of homes, many cantilevered atop

perilous hillside bluffs, which forever altered the physical and

psychic landscape of the Canyon. This, in turn, provided an

irresistible challenge to some of the world’s leading architects

to plant their visions on this most unorthodox canvas.

Rudolf Schindler’s “Fitzpatrick House,” for example, built

in 1936, is a tour de force of modern design, weaving the

deft symmetry of European classicism with the uniquely

improvisational nature of SoCal living. Space and form never

demonstrated such nerve.

Other distinguished architects who brought their talents

to the Canyon included John Lautner (check out his way

cool “Chemosphere” house off Mulholland Drive) and Walter

Gropius, founder of the fabled “Bauhaus School,” a design

movement of the early twentieth century, which promised

humanistic progress in the daunting machine age.

In the Fifties, Arts and Architecture magazine

commissioned a series of “case study” houses: steely-

efficient, unadorned models crafted with a Lego-esque logic

that anticipated the housing tastes of the Jetsons. Julius

Shulman’s shimmering photograph of Pierre Koenig’s case

study house #22 is as seductive to the eye as any David

Bailey fashion spread.

With its proximity to the Hollywood dream factory, it

wasn’t long before a parade of screen stars took possession

of these architectural jewels. Clara Bow, Ramon Navarro,

Errol Flynn, and Harry Houdini, among a cast of thousands,

closed escrows in this sumptuous new retreat. (Houdini

lived only briefly in the Canyon before departing this mortal

coil; his wife, Bess, continued to hold séances in their living

room for years after. Given the notoriously faulty cell

reception in the area, it’s unlikely she ever made contact.)

Producer, music mogul, and magician’s apprentice Rick

Rubin recorded the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Blood Sugar Sex

Magik multi-platinum album in his Laurel Canyon home

studio as well as albums by Audioslave, System of a Down,

and Linkin Park.

But where exactly does “Laurel Canyon” reside: in its

broken rows of sun-bleached, birds-eyed bungalows, which

creep up the granite terrain to the crest of Mulholland

Drive? Or is it found in the artists themselves, arriving each

decade like migrating swallows, endowed with new songs,

new beats, and a new vantage point from which to fix their

true north?

Laurel Canyon was the place where you ran away from

your parents, hid from authorities, wrote music, books,

screenplays, and hung with bands, chart-toppers, and

pretenders. A territory that promised breezy brunettes and

bottle blondes. And the music it gave birth to, from the early

’50s through the end of the ’70s—before swollen egos and

swollen nostrils brought a heavy rain down—through rising

rents, floods, fires, and earthquakes, somehow still informs

the soundtracks of our lives. It was an area where you

created by retreating, and did not flash your cash. To get

discovered or to get covered (a royalty being the biggest

high of all). It was where Los Angeles and Hollywood met in

a rollicking soul shake.

This book is a guided journey through the Canyon,

explored in the personal reminiscences of its longtime

residents, of native Angelenos, and even some survivors

of Hollywood High School and Fairfax High School in West

Hollywood (an institution I graduated from), which were the

staging grounds for so much of what came to be known as

the Canyon culture. These imagineers nurtured the soil for

the innocents and wannabes—those who came for fame and

then split when the good times turned sour. The locals, for

the most part, stayed. This is their story.

Canyon of Dreams focuses on the regional wordsmiths,

authors, musicians, photographers, rock bands, record label

xvi C A N Y O N O F D R E A M S

owners, careerists, poets, dancers, session cats, cool kittens,

hardcore record collectors, blues and folk-rock aficionados,

DJs, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers and the pure players—a

verdant field where the lyricist and the bassist are equals.

Many of the contributors are familiar and others are coming

forward for the first time.

We will follow the toe-tapping path of the jazz artists

who arrived in the post-war ’40s—like guitarist Barney

Kessel—to the scene-addled poets who set the table for the

newly-forming electric bands. Sharing street corners with

studio contract composers, a new breed of artists created

widescreen images with their words and music.

Much of the existing writing about Laurel Canyon

invariably runs toward a world of heedless sex, drugs, and

great heaps of money—in a word, the record business. One

reads the litany of police busts, rioting youth, empty

political gestures, and the drug-drenched comings and

goings of a pampered rock elite that brings a weariness to

the soul.

Canyon of Dreams presents and documents a different

side of Laurel Canyon. In this world, the local kids and

transplants regale us with their hitchhiking adventures; of

sharing a ride with a music legend heading down the hill for a

pack of smokes and a six-pack and a timeless melody. While

walking the dog you could stumble upon a jam that brings

tears to the ears of archivists and collectors. It was as much a

commune as a community—a zip code with its own play list.

The imperishable sounds of Sonny & Cher; The Doors;

Love; Turtles; Association; Canned Heat; Monkees; Byrds;

Jackie DeShannon; Poco; Buffalo Springfield; MFQ; Mamas

and the Papas; Joni Mitchell; Jackson Browne; Crosby, Stills,

Nash & Young; Eagles; War; Carole King; John Mayall; The

Factory; Little Feat; Guns N’ Roses; and Piscean soul legend

Bobby Womack were cultivated in the Canyon.

Paul A. Rothchild, Lester Koenig, Richard Bock, Dusty

Springfield, Johnny Echols, Alice Cooper, Saul Hudson,

Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart, Anthony Kiedis, Barry McGuire,

Humble Harve, Larry Williams, David Carradine, Sky Saxon,

former Governor of California Jerry Brown, Chris Bunch,

Toni Stern, and Mama Cass Elliot have called it home.

B. Mitchel Reed, Les Carter, Don Randi, Derek Taylor, Wayne

Shorter, and members of the Firesign Theatre bunked in the

area. Meanwhile, Jack Nitzsche, Gerry Goffin, Quincy Jones,

and Dr. James Cushing all resided nearby, just off the

melodic intersection of Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland.

Marilyn Manson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lili Haydn,

Tom Morello, Mark Mothersbaugh, the Telacasters, Bill

Mumy, Geoff Emerick, Danny Hutton, Jeremy Toback, Barry

Goldberg, Entrance, Zowie Scott, Gary Calamar, Ione Skye,

Ben Lee, Jan Henderson, and Dweezil Zappa continue the

tradition in today’s digital wonderland.

Once, there was a world consisting of guileless true

believers living in a woodsy cloister. They drove ten minutes

down Sunset Blvd. to earn their keep: plentiful studio work,

publishing deals, a robust club scene. And, as the smog-

shrouded daylight gave way to the vermilion dusk,

musicians tuned their—and our—expectations to a jingle-

jangle “A,” which resulted in a body of work that continues

to be played, parsed, sampled, siphoned, stolen,

repackaged, re-released . . . revivifying.

Laurel Canyon.

Come. Listen to this neighborhood.

Harvey Kubernik

Hollywood, California

The Garden was a place for Hollywood people to stay or

just to hang out. They could pull their escapades out of the

public eye, even though you could stand at the corner of

Sunset and Crescent Heights and toss a rock into the place. In

that regard, it was what Laurel Canyon itself would become: a

little semi-private area that was very close to Hollywood itself.

Anthony Quinn first saw the complex in 1939, looked around

at all of the trysting going on, and pronounced it “The Riding

Academy.” John Barrymore went on drinking binges there.

1

Welcome

to the Garden

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH apartment

complex was a three-and-a-half acre oasis

for Hollywood people, right near Sunset

Blvd. and Crescent Heights, at the entrance to Laurel Canyon.

It had been built by one of Rudolph Valentino’s wives—the

actress Alla Nazimova—and boasted a swimming pool

shaped like the Black Sea. It opened in 1927 as a private

housing and hotel complex with a Moorish-styled main

building and twenty-five little bungalow villas.

The Far Back Lot, Singing Cowboys, And All That Jazz

The Song

Is You

36

PRIOR TO THE BEATLES, pop singers

were primarily distinguished by their

interpretive skills. From Sinatra to Presley,

from Peggy Lee to Patsy Cline, the voice was put at the

exclusive service of a professional songwriter’s felicitous

marriage of words and music.

Lennon and McCartney, however, shifted the paradigm,

wherein the artists themselves composed and performed

their own material. Their unprecedented success threat -

ened to extinguish the careers of mere singers.

In this grave new world an interpreter could chart a hit

course provided that the song demonstrated a challenging

edge—one that subverted the commercial mainstream. Glen

Campbell became the voice to songwriter Jimmy Webb’s

wholesale assault on the tyranny of the verse/bridge/chorus

structure; Danny Hutton championed such iconoclasts as

Randy Newman and Laura Nyro; and Van Dyke Parks, like a

surrealistic Schubert, wrote and arranged music for artists

Glen Campbell racked up a number of gold records in the 1960s.

Campbell is most acclaimed, of course, for his sterling

renditions of composer Jimmy Webb’s mini-masterpieces:

“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” and

“Galveston.” These songs have secured for Campbell the

rare distinction of being both a musicians’ and audience

favorite. His television show for CBS, Glen Campbell’s

Goodtime Hour, further endeared him to a generation of easy

listeners. Now in his seventies, Campbell is enjoying a

healthy reappraisal of his early work. Like Johnny Cash, he

has been “rediscovered” by younger, fresher ears, for whom

the charge of MOR [Middle of the Road] artist carries no

disrespect. Glen Campbell has never played an inauthentic

note. Few can make that claim.

Born in Billstown, Arkansas, April 22, 1936, Campbell

moved to Los Angeles in 1960 from Albuquerque, New

Mexico. His first job was playing guitar on a demonstration

recording songwriter Jerry Fuller wrote for Sam Cooke.

37T H E S O N G I S Y O U

who took no prisoners. Together, they represented the next

wave of interpretive voices and, providentially, renewed the

art itself.

By the Time I Get to . . . Sunset

Glen Campbell arrived in Los Angeles in 1960, a young man

with as much gumption as talent. He could play guitar with

natural ease, an all-rounder who fit effortlessly into the

studio industrial complex. You would be hard-pressed to

name a hit from the tunedex that he didn’t play on circa

1962 to 1967.

During that period, Campbell was a much in-demand

studio session guitarist and his credits include dates for The

Monkees, Merle Haggard, Nat Cole, Ricky Nelson, Johnny

Cash, Dean Martin, Gene Clark, The Mamas and the Papas,

Jan & Dean, Bobby Darin, Nancy Sinatra, Phil Spector, Brian

Wilson, and Lou Adler. He’s heard on The Beach Boys’ LP

Pet Sounds, The Crystals’ “He’s A Rebel,” and Elvis Presley’s

“Viva Las Vegas.”Legends Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Buck Owens alongwith Glen on his CBS TV show

174 U N D E R G R O U N D , O N T H E A I R W A V E S

Neil Young in Laurel Canyon, 1967

Neil was already telling Teen Set magazine-type people he

was working on a ‘mini-opera.’

“Neil had two incredible abilities which impressed a guy

like Nitzsche, who had listened to hundreds of songs and

countless singer-songwriters. Jack was used to everyone

with a little Martin acoustic guitar just strumming. Neil really

took into consideration going to a minor chord, which few

people liked to do. And he also was very good—like on their

debut Buffalo Springfield album and ‘Nowadays Clancy Can’t

Even Sing’—playing with time changes. Like where Frank

Zappa could throw my ass a curve ball anytime he wanted

to: ‘Okay, we’re going to 6/8 time.’ And I only knew 4/4. I

heard that song and said to Neil: ‘You need to do this song.

Forget about The Everly Brothers. You need to cut this.’”

Bruce eventually attended a few sessions when

“Expecting to Fly” was being recorded at Columbia and

Sunset Sound studios.

“A whole lot of it focused on the drummer really being

able to give it a flow,” explains Bruce. “There were stops in

that song. Nitzsche was famous for his Wagner-like

arrangements and brought Wrecking Crew musicians into

the mix like Don Randi, Jim Horn, and Hal Blaine. They spent

a lot of time on it.

“Neil oftentimes didn’t like going out per se. A lot of it

had to do with his epileptic condition. There were some

nights where he would say, ‘I need to be contained by the

four walls here.’ And I saw all the anti-seizure yellow pills

he was taking. And later, on the way to Buffalo Springfield

shows, Stephen Stills would say to him, ‘Don’t forget your

medicine, Neil.’”

Denny Bruce can be heard banging tambourine on the

Nitzsche-arranged “Porpoise Song,” from the soundtrack to

The Monkees’ feature film Head. Neil Young played with

Bruce on “As We Go Along” from Head as well.

In 1967, John Densmore was living on Utica in Laurel

Canyon, directly next door to Neil Young.

“The landlord was Kiyo. She had this rambling Hobbit-

like place with two or three guest houses,” Densmore

175F L Y I N G O N T H E G R O U N D I S W R O N G

Felix Cavaliere (of The Young Rascals) with Stephen Stills and Neil Young (seated) shopping for clothing at De Voss on Sunset Blvd.

Neil was really upset. You know, the

vibration, the ignorance. That did it.

At that moment, he started writing

‘Southern Man.’ I was there; I

experienced the same moment. I knew

what was going on in Neil’s head.

“During the tour, Steve Stills,

knowing the band was on the way out,

said, ‘Hey listen, Dennis. We’re starting

a new band. Do you want to be the

drummer?’ ‘Thanks anyway, Steve, but

I have to hang at the beach. I have my

own thing to do.’ And the band that

emerged out of that was Crosby, Stills

& Nash. I later visited Neil Young in

Topanga a couple of times. One of our

tour photos was included in his

Decade album.”

176

remembers, “and Neil was in one and I

was in the other. I can remember when

Neil said, ‘Come on over. I want to play

you something.’ And he played me

‘Expecting to Fly.’ He mentioned that

he had bought a house in Topanga. He

had just quit Buffalo Springfield and

was moving out. And he said, ‘Well, I

got forty grand, that’s what I got out of

Buffalo Springfield and bought this

house. I’m out of here!’

“One night at the Whisky, Buffalo

Springfield was playing and they

flipped on some strobe lights in the

middle of their set and Neil stopped

playing and put his forearms over his

eyes. ‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’ ’Cause

that stuff messes up epileptics, you

know. Maybe ‘Expecting to Fly’ is a

little bit about that,” reflects Densmore.

In 1968, Dennis Dragon was

playing percussion with The Beach

Boys as part of a tour of the South,

along with The Strawberry Alarm

Clock and Buffalo Springfield. One

night after a show in Alabama, Dragon,

Neil Young, and Dragon’s brother

Doug—The Beach Boys’ pianist, went

to a local restaurant.

“This was during the time of Easy

Rider, that cracker mentality. I went out

to eat with my brother Doug and Neil,”

recounts Dennis, “and some guys were

in the room, sitting near us, bugged by

our long hair. We overheard them

saying, ‘Now, you take the one with the

curly hair and I’ll take the other one

and we’ll do ’em up!’ We had to split.

Luckily one of the big guys from the

crew appeared, a big roadie who came

in and said, ‘I think it’s time to leave.

We’re outnumbered.’ And they didn’t

want to fuck with him. You know what I

mean. Neil had been having epileptic

seizures and I saw one onstage. And

The poster for Buffalo Springfield’s last concert

U N D E R G R O U N D , O N T H E A I R W A V E S

“I went to the last Buffalo

Springfield concert in Long Beach in

1968 where they played with Canned

Heat and Country Joe & the Fish,”

recalls Denny Bruce. “I rode in the

limo with Neil Young and Jack

Nitzsche. We gave Jim Messina, who

was in the band at the time, a ride

home back to Hollywood that night.

Jim was crying like a baby. Neil was

not bummed out Buffalo Springfield

was ending. He was relieved. That’s

why he rented the limo. He liked the

whole experience. I don’t remember

the show. They were better at earlier

gigs than they were that night.”

“At the Troubadour I ran up to

Neil Young after he left Buffalo

Springfield and when he was starting

his solo career in 1968,” says Kim

Fowley. “Neil was visiting the room

and I mentioned, ‘I think your song,

“Broken Arrow,” is great!’ And he

replied, ‘So do a lot of people.’ ‘And it

means a lot to a lot of people.’ ‘Right.’

That was it.”

“I did the PR photos for Neil

Young when he did his first solo LP,”

Nurit Wilde recalls. “He had already

left Laurel Canyon and was living in

Topanga. Part of it was achieving the

kind of success that they did in a high

profile industry; it makes a lot of

people crave privacy. And Neil was

always a bit of a loner. And I never

knew this at the time, but Neil liked to

micromanage everything.”

177

The House That Barney Buil t

Barney Kessel’s “Music World” in Hollywood on Vine

opened in July 1967. The store was so close to the hub of

the record business that guitarists could park in the Capitol

Records lot—with validation, natch—if they couldn’t find a

spot on the street. Milt Owen was the premiere guitar repair

person in town. Frank Zappa, Chris Darrow, and members of

The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield would trek to the

store for new equipment or repairs. Visiting English music

royalty like Eric Clapton and John Lennon were customers, too.

Barney’s son David Kessel still has the Kay bass that was

used on The Association’s “Windy.”

“For some reason they had no bass for the session and

someone came over from Capitol Records where they were

recording and asked to borrow a bass. The thing about the

Kay bass is that it’s a hollow body/solid body instrument. It’s

like a Hofner without the ‘F’ holes. It has air inside a solid

outer covering. I got it for my fifteenth birthday and still

have it.”

F L Y I N G O N T H E G R O U N D I S W R O N G

182

Manzarek has another Laurel Canyon Morrison memory

to share:

“I’m picking up Jim at his house that overlooked the

Laurel Canyon Store, the place that ‘Love Street’ is about.

You could look down and see all the hippies going in and

out. It’s middle of the afternoon, and we’ve got a flight at 4

p.m. at LAX.

“I go upstairs and knock on the door. ‘Hi Jim. It’s Ray.

Let’s get going.’ I’ve come in a limo. We’re big-time now. It

picks me up and off we go to Laurel Canyon to pick up Jim,”

Manzarek continues. “I walk in and somebody says ‘Come

in.’ There’s a girl and Jim. He’s sitting on a chair, rocking

back and forth. His bag was packed for a two-niter. ‘Come on

man, let’s go. We have to get to the airport.’ ‘Ray, Ray,’ his

eyes were blank and he was staring into the future and his

voice was soft. ‘Hey, what’s wrong,’ I said, and he said, ‘Ray,

what do you think happens when you die?’ And I said to

myself, ‘Oh no, not a philosophical discussion now. No.’ I

said, ‘I’ll tell you what man, I don’t think you ever die.’

“And the girl who was sitting there responds with, ‘Oh

yes. That’s it. That’s it. You never die.’ And Jim said, ‘I don’t

know about that, man. I just want to know what happens

when you die.’ ‘Well, that’s all I can say on the subject dude,

’cause we’ve got to catch a plane, man.’ ‘All right.’

“So I lift him up by the arm and off we went down the

stairs and never discussed it again. There was that

existential moment where he scared the shit out of me. My

insides dropped. The angel of death passed by, flapping its

wings, and hit me in the gut. And I had psychic bowel

evacuation and the angel of death moved on. And, you know,

he only lasted about three more years after it.”

The Doors began recording The Soft Parade in November

1968, and completed it in July 1969. The album was recorded

in West Hollywood at Elektra Records studios on La Cienega

Blvd., produced by Paul Rothchild, who brought in arranger

Paul Harris to do the string and horn overdubs.

“When we started The Soft Parade,” explains Robby

Krieger, “it was after The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. I never liked

U N D E R G R O U N D , O N T H E A I R W A V E S

183T H E C R Y S T A L S H I P S E T S S A I L

the idea myself of strings and horns. It was an experiment.

But once we decided to do it, we did it. In fact, we knew

going in that the arrangements we made for the songs were

actually tailored to have strings and horns. I would work with

Paul Harris ’cause I knew very little about orchestration. I

would give him ideas for a horn line here and there and hope

for the best. But he really did most of the work.”

Krieger and The Doors were particularly thrilled about

the participation of well-regarded jazz veteran Curtis Amy

on the project. “On ‘Touch Me,’ Curtis took the sax solo.

That was the first time that happened. It served the song.

That was another example of egos not getting in the way for

the sake of the song. Doug Lubahn and Harvey Brooks were

the bass players on The Soft Parade.

“When we did the first Doors album, Jim was totally

inexperienced in the studio as far as recording his vocals.

He had a year with his voice playing live every night. He had

never done anything in the studio. And I think by the time

The Soft Parade came around, his voice had matured a lot as

far as low notes and range. I don’t think he could have sung

‘Touch Me’ nearly as good if that was on our first album,”

Krieger speculates.

That same month, The Doors were asked to headline the

17,505-seat “Fabulous Forum” in Inglewood, California. “The

Doors were the first to feature ’50s rock ’n’ rollers on our

shows,” says John Densmore. “For the Forum we got to

choose the second act; initially we suggested Johnny Cash,

but the promoter said no because ‘he was a felon.’ We then

secured Jerry Lee Lewis, because he was ‘acceptable.’”

In 1969, The Doors booked a couple of shows at the

Aquarius Theater on Sunset Blvd.

“I used to go there for midnight shows when it was the

Kaleidoscope,” Densmore continues. “I remember The Fool,

who were from Holland, and they were painting the

Aquarius. I saw HAIR there. It had an influence on some of

my theater work.

“When The Doors played the Aquarius, it was my idea

for the second set, I said to Jim—this is after Miami, and it

“When we did the first

Doors album, Jim was totally

inexperienced in the studio

as far as recording his

vocals. He had a year with

his voice playing live every

night. He had never done

anything in the studio.”—Robby Krieger

184 U N D E R G R O U N D , O N T H E A I R W A V E S

was a small venue for us and we didn’t have a lot of gigs:

‘You know, you see that rope from the balcony that they

used to swing around in HAIR, you might, in the middle of an

instrumental, go around there, and he fuckin’ did it. He

swung on a rope down to the stage like Tarzan. And

everybody went nuts. It was a great moment, a little scary.

He was gaining some weight and had a beard, ‘hang on

tight.’ But it was great,” Densmore reminisces.

“The best show I ever saw was The Doors in 1969 at the

Aquarius Theater,” claims Kim Fowley. “I had seen them in

1966 at Ciro’s. I also went with my driver, Warren Zevon, in

’69 to see Morrison read poetry with Robby Krieger at a

Nancy Chester and the Dutch band, The Fool, painting the psychedelic wall at the Aquarius Theater

185T H E C R Y S T A L S H I P S E T S S A I L

benefit for Norman Mailer’s political campaign at a place on

Sunset Blvd. I had met Pamela Courson, Jim’s wife, at the

Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Morrison later said to me,

‘When you fall in love, you’ll be a better poet.’”

Doors producer Paul Rothchild lived on Ridpath Drive in

Laurel Canyon. Rothchild worked closely with Elektra

Records’ President Jac Holzman and helmed the recording

console on The Doors’ first five albums. Ray Manzarek sheds

some light on how their albums were “taste-tested” by

Rothchild and the band members before public

consumption.

“Paul Rothchild was a stone-cold intellectual. A fan of

Bach. Out of New York City. One of the most intelligent guys

I ever met in rock ’n’ roll. Great ears. Rothchild had two

types of marijuana. Paul had these little vials. One was ‘WD,’

called ‘work dope,’ and the other was ‘PD,’ ‘playback dope.’

‘WD’ was not too strong, you could get a little buzz, a little

mellow, and enter into a proper space and you had your wits

about you and had your energy, and could play your

instrument. And then after the evening’s recording you

could sit back and have something a little bit stronger. ‘This

is the listening dope. Light up a joint, have a couple of puffs.’

“The Doors weren’t potheads or dope addicts or

anything,” Manzarek continues. “All it took was a couple of

tokes and you were stoned. ‘Now let’s hear what we’ve

done.’ And we would give it the pot test. The takes that

218 C O U N T R Y C O M F O R T S

In December of ’68, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Paul

Rothchild went into the studio and recorded two songs:

“You Don’t Have To Cry” and “Helplessly Hoping.” “And

they’re pretty stunning,” Graham feels.

Ultimately, the band decided on producing themselves

at Wally Heider’s in Hollywood with engineer Bill Halverson.

“I must tell you that Stephen Stills was an incredibly

impressive musician at that point,” says Nash. “He played

everything. He was an amazing musician. And generous. And

one of the things that we loved was that there were no rules.

And there have never been any rules. And there will never

be any rules in CS&N. It doesn’t matter who sings, maybe we

switch in the chorus, ‘you sing the high part and I’ll sing the

low part.’ There were never any rules.

“Joni (Mitchell) loved Crosby, Stills & Nash as much as

we did. She was the very first person on this planet to hear

that sound. We did go and sing for Cass but the very first

time was in Joni’s living room.

“It’s not lost on me that I am coming from Laurel Canyon

into Hollywood to record. And sometimes I would walk from

Joni’s house to the studio. I was in heaven. I was a musician

making music with incredible people with a bunch of

incredible songs and the freedom to keep everybody out of

the studio that would fuck it up.”

They also knew that they needed high-powered

management to do the dirty work and heavy lifting required

to get their album promoted and marketed in the radio and

retail universe. Graham Nash initially wanted Larry Kurzon,

who was then affiliated with the William Morris Agency and

a good friend of his from London.

Kurzon had already heard the Paul Rothchild-produced

two-song demo of CS&N and wanted desperately to be their

manager. He met with them, as did Albert Grossman, Bob

Dylan’s manager. David Geffen and Elliot Roberts, however,

were warming up in the bullpen and angling to take over

the game.

“Larry was completely blown out of the water by Geffen

and Roberts,” Nash admits. “Because they were sharks. I

loved Elliot. He was an incredibly funny man. You know,

he should have been a stand-up comedian. He really should

have. With any balls he should have. He loved the music.

Don’t forget, he was already managing Neil and he

was already managing Joan. So we knew that he had

incredible taste.

“When David (Crosby) was producing Joni’s first record,

obviously he was one of Elliot’s best friends. And so it made

sense that Elliot, who managed Joni, managed Neil, was best

friends with David, knew Stephen, it was obvious that he

would be our manager. Then we needed business acumen

that wasn’t there in Elliot at that point.

“So we arrange a meeting with this guy, David Geffen. I’m

David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash

219O N A C A R O U S E L

in New York. We go to this building that is fifty-eight

thousand stories tall and go to the twenty-eight-thousandth

floor. When we get out and meet Geffen in his office, well,

there’s no desk. And I loved that. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is

fuckin’ cool. He doesn’t even have a desk. He’s not sitting

behind some throne and looking down on us. This guy is

real.’ It’s only years later I find out that not only did he not

have a desk but it wasn’t even his fuckin’ office! Geffen had

borrowed it for the meeting.”

And what was the clincher for the team of Geffen and

Roberts?

“When they both said to us, ‘Listen. Do what you do.

230

Chatelaine of

the Canyon

IT IS ONE OF rock’s most poignant images: a fair-

haired, anxious, young performer, seated at a

piano on a makeshift stage; a near-riotous crowd

of 300,000-plus drug-addled music fans hovering ever nearer.

Only the palpable force of her fraught yet resolute appeals

for calm keeps this sea of madness at bay.

It’s August 1970, at the Isle of Wight, which is playing

host to the biggest pop music festival ever held. Appearing

just prior to the inscrutable Miles Davis and his wall of

electric voodoo, Joni Mitchell is accompanied only by her

elastic soprano voice, an oddly tuned acoustic guitar, and

the aforementioned piano. Preserved for posterity by

documentarian Murray Lerner in his film, Message to Love,

Mitchell walks a fine line between a professional’s need for

composure and the sensitive artist’s quest for emotional

authenticity. That she restores order by virtue of her

songcraft is a testament to the unique position this

Joni Mitchell playing dulcimer in Laurel Canyon, October 1970

Canadian-born poet of the open

wound held at the turn of that decade.

Just three years earlier, Mitchell

was busking around Greenwich

Village’s folk club scene. There she

met Elliot Roberts, a true believer,

who quit his job to take the reins of

her inchoate career. Roberts, who

would later join forces with music

impresario David Geffen to form the

most powerful artist management

company in the business, followed

Mitchell to a gig in Florida, where a

serendipitous encounter with David

Crosby led her to forsake the Big

Apple for the ripening prospects in

the city of lights, Los Angeles.

Mitchell signed with Reprise

Records, an affiliate of the much-

admired Warner’s family. Her debut

recording was cut at Sunset Sound

Studios, with David Crosby producing,

and Buffalo Springfield tracking across

the hall. It was heady times, indeed, to

be young and gifted.

Such acute proximity to rock ’n’

roll’s reigning stallions led Mitchell

into a series of professional and

personal partnerships that have

acquired mythic proportion. In 1969,

she famously set up house with the

gentlemanly Graham Nash—their

Lookout Mountain cottage becoming

the epicenter of Laurel Canyon’s hip-

geoisie. Nash would write “Our

House,” one of the most enduring

songs on CSN&Y’s Déjà vu, about

his illustrious co-habitation with

Mitchell.

Mitchell’s every release delivered

striking musical vistas—peculiar

chord voicings, obtuse rhythms—that

cast the arch-intimacies of her lyrical

flights into a sui generis whole. From

Ladies of the Canyon, through Blue,

Court and Spark, and The Hissing of

Summer Lawns, Mitchell held queenly

sway over the ’70s; a totemic

presence for impressionable young

women, a giantess in the ears of

seasoned musicians and the next

wave of striving singer-songwriters.

“The first time I saw Joni Mitchell

was when she opened for Crosby,

Stills, Nash & Young at the Greek

Theatre in Los Angeles,” offers Robert

Hilburn, former pop music critic for

the Los Angeles Times, who reviewed

Mitchell’s work in the paper for several

decades, “and I’m sorry to say I didn’t

think she had all that much of a future.

Even though she sang such exquisite

songs as ‘Both Sides Now’ and

‘Chelsea Morning’ that 1969 night, I

couldn’t imagine any female ego in a

rock ’n’ roll world filled with sexism.

Some people in the audience thought

the only reason she was on the

bill was that she was Graham Nash’s

girlfriend.

“But all that changed in the 1970s

when Joni turned out a series of

albums as insightful and well-crafted

as any in pop history,” Hilburn

continues, “Ladies of the Canyon, Blue,

For the Roses, and Court and Spark

each brought us new levels of

231C H A T E L A I N E O F T H E C A N Y O N

232 C O U N T R Y C O M F O R T S

“‘Our House’ was the house with Joni,” explains

Graham Nash. “It was on Lookout Mountain. It

was owned by Joni and still is. And we lived together

there for at least a year and a half. We were together for

about two years. I have nothing but warm feelings about

that house. Joni is obviously an incredible artist and so

surrounds herself with beauty as she should do. Hers was

a very simple beauty: ‘Our House . . . ’ I think every

musician that writes a good song that he thinks is worth a

shit wants to broadcast it out there. We’re communica-

tors, after all.

“Joni and I had been to breakfast at Art’s Deli on

Ventura Blvd. and were walking back to the car and she

passed a small antique store and saw a small beautiful

vase in the window, and Joni, you know, probably still

has her first Canadian dollar. She does not spend a lot of

money frivolously. It was expensive then. About $150 and

she loved it. So we went in and bought it and put it in her

bag and then put it on the table. And I said, ‘You know

what? Why don’t you put some flowers in there and I’d

light a fire.’ Because it was one of those Los Angeles

Graham Nash on His Song “Our House”mornings where it’s not quite raining but it’s cold and

damp and stuff. And so I’d lit a fire and I said, ‘What a

fuckin’ ordinary moment that was. But wait a second.

We all have these ordinary moments and this one I

want to celebrate.’ So it was one of the only times when

she was putting flowers in the vase that she wasn’t at

the piano. By the time she’d finished making this

beautiful flower arrangement and the fire was ready to

go, the song was born.

“The house had a large, life-size, wooden carousel

pig in the corner. Bricks, wooden floors, lace curtains, a

couple of stained-glass ornaments in the window, which

were the jewels that I was talking about in the song. The

piano was a small dark Steinway. Maybe five and a half

feet long. I became a better songwriter there because I

was free. I was free of all the silly stuff with The Hollies

and I was in a brand new place that was exciting. I was

hanging out with David and Stephen and Joan who

were tremendously involved in a new kind of

communication. I was on top of the world. And every

time I go past that house, I smile.”

Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon home was ‘Our House’

achievement and ambition. Though her melodies were as

original and absorbing as anyone in the singer-songwriter

movement, it was her words that connected most strongly.

The lyrics she spoke moved beyond the surface of romance

and heartache to speak with breathless delicacy about the

contradictions and frustrations in the search for a

relationship.

“Her greatest strength—also the hallmark of such later

albums as The Hissing of Summer Lawns and the

incomparable Hejira—was her ability to look at life with a

fearless honesty that ruled even the thought of trying to

filter, soften, or glamorize what she saw and felt. In the

decade of singer-songwriters, she was rivaled only by

Dylan,” he concludes.

Musician-guitarist Slash, of Guns N’ Roses fame, first

heard Mitchell’s early albums as a young child growing up in

Laurel Canyon. “Joni is an amazingly convincing poet who

sings with a soothing delicate vocal delivery that

is very warm and comforting in a strangely distant kind of

way, which makes her haunting. But, just as important as her

voice, she is an amazing songwriter and guitarist, using fan-

tastic chord voicings to support her ethereal melodies. I love

all her records but Ladies of the Canyon is definitely one of my

favorites.”

UK author, Eddi Fiegel, who penned the book, Dream a

Little Dream of Me: The Life of Cass Elliot, also feels that, with

the exception of Mama Cass Elliot, “Joni Mitchell held a

unique position at the heart of Laurel Canyon, accepted not

only as a lover by lynchpins of the

community David Crosby and Graham

Nash, but more importantly as a

fellow artist and equal. Her combina-

tion of vocal purity, musical artistry,

and sophisticated lyrics resonating

with sage observations on life, love,

and loss was as striking then to the

musicians of the Canyon as it remains

several decades on. Ladies of the

Canyon and Blue are not just snap-

shots of an era when there were ‘lots

of pretty people,’ but captivating

reflections on life itself.”

Ola Oliver was a Hollywood High

School girl who struck out for England

in the ’60s, in quixotic pursuit of all

the glittering prizes. She found them,

not there, but back in Los Angeles, as

a fashion designer for some of the

leading female voices in pop—Joni

Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt among

many others. Her husband, Tony

Hudson, exercised his artistic gifts as

the designer of the some of the most

memorable album covers on Geffen

Records. But the Hudsons’ most

ballyhooed creations are undoubtedly

their sons Albion (aka Ash), a noted

clothier himself who owns Conart,

and Saul, who goes by the more

recognizable moniker: Slash. Yes,

that’s right; underneath that black top-

hat and Rapunzel-esque cascade of

curls is the dutiful son of a mixed-race

couple who allowed this Laurel-

Canyon-raised stripling to go for the

gold in bad-boy behavior with Guns

N’ Roses.

Ola Hudson came back from

Europe in 1968. Her mother had

gotten a house in Laurel Canyon on

233C H A T E L A I N E O F T H E C A N Y O N

‘Can we please pack up all this food.’

That was mortality speaking. I swear I

remember Frank needing me to

literally carry him up the stairs after I

gave the food to Gail and pretty much

got him into the bedroom. And that

was really verboten. I mean, if there

was one place you never went that

was in the Zappa house, it was the

bedroom. I had been to that house

one hundred times and never saw

the bedroom. On this trip I’m in the

friggin’ bedroom. And I know I

realized, and it all hit me, that this

would probably be the last time I

would ever see him. And I remember

Frank, and I’ve never told anybody

this, I remember him laying there and

reaching out to me and he put his

hands on me and said, ‘I just want you

to know how great it was to have you

guys singing with me.’ And I wanted to

say, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ And then he

said, ‘I want you to tell your partner

that he was just the best singer that I

ever had.’ I said to him, ‘You know

248 T H E E P I C E N T E R O F A S O U N D R E V O L U T I O N

music than Jackson Browne and The

Pretender. No disrespect intended—

he’s a genuine part of Laurel Canyon

history, too. But even that would have

never happened without Frank Zappa.

“In our Flo & Eddie show, we

did satire and parody, and carried on

Frank’s mission to make fun of

what? You tell him. I can’t tell him.

You’re gonna have to be around just a

little bit longer ’cause you’re gonna

have to do that. I don’t want to be the

bearer of any bad news and I’m not

gonna do that.’”

Volman confirms that Zappa never

bothered with such vanities as his

musical and cultural legacy, let alone

the undeniable influence his vast

catalogue had (and still has) over

generations of players and listeners.

“Frank never worried about what

impact he had. He never worried

about what reviewers thought of him.

He was constantly working. We

would finish an album and it would

get released. He would work, tour,

do promotion, and he was already

working on the next thing.

“Alice Cooper was Zappa’s

invention, too,” reminds Mark Volman.

“With his Bizarre/Straight record label,

Frank opened the door to Captain

Beefheart, the GTOs; he created a

more exciting period of American

“Frank was not like any rock person I

knew. He didn’t go out to the movies;

he didn’t go to Starbucks; he wasn’t

pining for attention like every other

star. He felt best when he was at home

in Laurel Canyon.”—Mark Volman

celebrity. We were one of the first acts in pop music to say,

‘This is not all it’s cracked up to be. Look behind the

curtain.’ I know that Frank worked with a shitload of great

musicians, but I think the difference was that we were the

only two people allowed to traverse that line you did not

cross. It was an unspoken thing. Frank at home was one

thing—when you were on stage, that was business. The

question I am always asked the most is, ‘What was Frank

like offstage, out of the image?’ And I always say, ‘There was

no image.’”

Volman marveled at Zappa’s non-stop work ethic.

“Frank was not like any rock person I knew. He didn’t go out

to the movies; he didn’t go to Starbucks; he wasn’t pining

for attention like every other star. He felt best when he was

at home in Laurel Canyon. He was there to sleep, he was

there to write, and he was there to raise a family. He was

249Y O U R M O T H E R S S H O U L D K N O W

Frank Zappa on the set of The Monkees back in 1966

Engineer Hank Cicalo, Carole King, and Lou Adler (right) recording Tapestry

256

Lou Adler on theBirth of Tapestry

“The climate of the late ’60s had no women in the Top Ten

charts, except Julie Andrews on The Sound of Music

soundtrack,” Tapestry producer Lou Adler explains. “Before the

Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, I flew to New York and

tried to sign Laura Nyro. I invited her to perform at the Festival.

Carole was in a group, The City, who I produced for Ode in 1968.

The LP was called Now That Everything’s Been Said. The City

album was supposed to be a group, even though it sounds a little

like Tapestry, not so much in the subtleties, but in the way the

group plays off of each other.

“At the time Carole did not want to be a solo artist. She

wanted to be in a group and she was more comfortable in a

group. She didn’t want to tour that much or do any interviews.

And we started to get those kinds of songs that would then

lead us to Tapestry. Toni Stern, a writer for Screen Gems,

collaborated with Carole earlier on the Monkees’ Head

soundtrack and Carole’s City album, and her debut album

Writer. I knew her a little bit. She was introduced to Carole

by Bert Schneider of RayBert Productions, producers of

The Monkees. I saw her when the songs were presented with

Carole to me for Tapestry.

“Danny Kootch [Kortchmar] and Charlie Larkey were on

The City album, they are the core certainly of Tapestry—

Larkey on both electric and acoustic stand-up bass and his

relationship with Carole at the time, husband. And father

of babies to be. His bass was very important to the sound

and feel of Tapestry.

“As music often does, it becomes the soundtrack of the

particular time. What I think happened in ’70 or late ’70 to

’71—James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Carole—is that

the listening public and the record-buying public bought

into the honesty and the vulnerability of the singer-

songwriter, naked in the sense—you know, what James

was singing about, “Fire and Rain.” Their emotions that

they were laying out there allowed the people to be okay

with their own (emotions). And I think the honesty of the

records—there was a certain simplicity to the singer-

songwriter’s record because they either start with vocal-

guitar or piano-voice.

T H E E P I C E N T E R O F A S O U N D R E V O L U T I O N

could visualize the musicians that were playing the

instruments. And also tie Carole to the piano so that you

could visualize her sitting there, singing and playing the

piano, so that it wasn’t ‘just the piano player,’ it was Carole.

And that came from the demos, which would start with

Carole playing and singing, as well as doing some of the string

figures, always on piano.”

James Taylor contributed acoustic guitar to “So Far

Away,” “Home Again,” “Way Over Yonder” and “You’ve Got A

Friend,” in which he and Joni Mitchell provide background

vocals. Taylor covered “You’ve Got A Friend” on his

257I F E E L T H E E A R T H M O V E

June Christy’s Something Cool did infuse Adler’s

approach to Tapestry—Adler calls the former “a smooth

ride,” resulting from the sequencing and continuity of songs.

He also pays homage to jazz-great George Shearing who,

especially when working with Peggy Lee, doubled his piano

with other instruments such as the guitar. Adler said he did

the same, doubling King’s parts with Danny Kortchmar’s

guitars.

“Carole’s piano playing on the demos dictated the

arrangements,” Adler explains. “What I was trying to do was

to re-create them in the sense of staying simple so that you

CLYDE JACKSON BROWNE was born in

Heidelberg, Germany to American parents.

He and his family returned to the United

States, to the Highland Park section of Los Angeles, when he

was three. The clan then moved to Orange County where

Browne attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton,

California.

Chris Darrow is one of Jackson Browne’s favorite

songwriters and has known Jackson since 1966 when

Darrow was in the band Kaleidoscope. Darrow was later a

member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

“Jackson would show up at our gigs,” Darrow recalls.

“Always the singer-songwriter, he set himself apart from his

contemporaries at the time. His boyish good looks and his

ability to write lyrics that were beyond his age gave him an

identity all his own. He had both memorable lyrics and

hooks that made his music stand out against the more

sensitive singer-songwriters of the time, who tended to be

more introspective and insular. The great singer-songwriters,

from Dylan and James Taylor to Leonard Cohen, all have the

ability to write personally in a way that makes their words

268

Browne-ian

Motion

seem to speak to everyman. Jackson’s second album was

called For Everyman, and he became, along with the

aforementioned, the front man for the singer-songwriter

movement in California in the 1970s.”

Back in 1966, Browne performed on the Southern

California coffeehouse circuit and then joined the Nitty

Gritty Dirt Band himself for a few months. The group did

some of his songs on two of their albums.

In 1967, Browne landed a publishing deal with Nina

Music/Elektra Records, which placed his tunes in 1968 on

Jackson Browne in 1966

269B R O W N E - I A N M O T I O N

Jackson Browne,April 1972

albums by Joan Baez, Tom Rush, and

Steve Noonan. During that time

period, Browne split to New York and

backed Tim Buckley while also

teaming with Nico, who recorded

three of his compositions, including

“These Days,” on her Chelsea Girl LP.

Browne then returned to Los

Angeles. He quickly found accommo-

dations on the laundry room floor of

industry-mensch Billy James’ Laurel

Canyon retreat. James, not for the first

(or last) time, provided unwavering

support to an artist who ran counter

to the prevailing winds. Browne

unsuccessfully tried to record a solo

album and formed a folk group with

Ned Doheny and Jack Wilce.

And, like so many other aspirants,

Browne stood dutifully in line at the

Troubadour’s open-mic Monday Night

hootenanny—a showcase that years

later would take on biblical import,

but, in 1970, it was the last train to

nowhere for almost all who took the

stage. Browne was among the eager

wannabes—a prolific composer of

earnest, brown-eyed soul who watched

with increasing frustration as his

window of opportunity began to close.

Browne continued to play local

clubs and music venues, and his

reputation as a songwriter continued

to grow around the business and

among recording artists. David Crosby

touted his songs around town and

during interviews.

Local DJ Johnny Hayes on radio

station KRLA would mention Browne’s

name over the airwaves between

1969 and 1971 when spinning Nico or

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band records on his

Collage program. Linda Ronstadt and

The Byrds then did Jackson’s songs.

By late 1971, partially on the

270 A P E A C E F U L , E A S Y F E E L I N G

strength of a widely circulated demo tape,

Browne signed to David Geffen’s fledgling

Asylum Records label.

Henry Diltz first met Jackson Browne at

the Troubadour in the late 1960s. “I first

knew Jackson Browne when he lived around

the Hollywood Bowl. Gary Burden, my

partner and graphics artist, and I were hired

by David Geffen to go over to this young

songwriter’s house and take pictures of him

around 1971.

“We had a beer and talked for a few

minutes. Jackson said, ‘You want to hear

some of the music?’ And we went to the living

room and he sat down at a grand piano and

played a chord. ‘Holy shit!’ Being a musician

I loved the music and was enthralled by it. He

sat down there and played ‘Rock Me on the

Water.’ Blew my mind. My jaw dropped. I got

chicken skin. Goose bumps.”

In 1972, Jackson Browne, his debut album

of all original songs, was released. “Rock Me

on the Water” and “Jamaica Say You Will”

featured David Crosby on harmony vocals,

while “Doctor My Eyes” included background

vocals from Crosby and Graham Nash.

Browne’s voice had a callow, post-

adolescent yearning that struck many industry

ears as amateur, but his songs were finely tuned

to the emerging ethos of the confessional that

would soon become all the rage.

For Everyman was issued in 1973 and included “These

Days” and “Take It Easy,” which he had co-written with

Eagles’ Glenn Frey. It had been their debut single and a hit

record in 1972. “Take It Easy,” with its polished veneer of

country comfort and gritty guitar interplay, was Browne’s

ticket to ride. He wasted no time in establishing himself as

the most sensitive singer-songwriter in the newest wave of

rock sensations.

Then came 1974’s Late For The Sky, followed by The

Pretender in 1976 and 1977’s Running On Empty.

The plaintive For Everyman, the scouring self-scrutiny of

The Pretender, and the painterly ambition of Running On

Empty were all pieces of a contemplative musical mind. This

one-time student of Canyon shaman Lowell George made it

safe to “feel” the music more deeply than ever before.

Running into the sun wasn’t just a metaphor; it was a call to

urgent action, a time to lay open your heart.

271B R O W N E - I A N M O T I O N

“In 1971, The Byrds on their Byrdmaniax album did

a rendition of Jackson Browne’s ‘Jamaica Say You

Will’ while he attended the recording session,” Kim

Fowley recalls. “I was also present at the Columbia studio

when The Byrds covered three songs I had written with

then Byrds-member, Skip Battin: ‘Tunnel Of Love,’

‘Citizen Kane,’ and ‘Absolute Happiness.’ Terry Melcher

was one of the producers of the album. I was in the studio

with Jackson and J.D. Souther. I remember The Byrds cut

a version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like A Woman’ at our

session and Jackson played piano on that track.

“I had heard of Jackson earlier. I had known about

him from a music publisher, Mickey Goldsen, who was

Johnny Mercer’s publisher and had Lee Hazelwood

copyrights at Criterion Music. His son Bo Goldsen told me

about Jackson and they had Jackson Browne as a writer

in those days. I think they had a few of his songs like

‘These Days.’

“Souther was in the Columbia studio and said, ‘Hey,

me and Jackson are writing a song called ‘James Dean.’

Come down and finish it with us in Silver Lake.’ ‘No. I’ll

stay here. You guys grab it.’ I had a date that night with

Kate Taylor, the sister of James Taylor. Well, the Eagles

ended up covering it and that would have been a pension

fund for me. That was my bad choice.”

Kim Fowley Joins the Flight

C a n y o n

o f

D r e a m s

C a n y o n o f

D r e a m s

H a r v e y K u b e r n i K

F o r e w o r d b y r a y M a n z a r e K

a F t e r w o r d b y L o u a d L e r

T h e m a g i C a n D T h e m u s i C

o f L a u r e L C a n y o n

a L av i s h Ly i L L u s T r aT e D i n s i D e r ’ s L o o k aT 8 0 y e a r s o f m u s i C a n D C u LT u r e i n L a u r e L C a n y o nLaurel Canyon is a zip code with its own play list. To name just a few: sonny & Cher, The Doors, The Turtles, Canned Heat, The monkees, The Byrds, Buffalo springfield, Joni mitchell, Jackson Browne, Crosby, stills, nash & young, The eagles, Carole King—they all cultivated their immortal sounds in this L.a.-based musical fraternity. Canyon of Dreams, written by a long-time Canyon resident, Harvey Kubernik, who knows them all, traces the history of this community and its enduring legacy. Taking a deeply personal approach, he uses a multiple-voice narration based on exclusive interviews with the area’s musical elite. Because of their close and long-time connection with Kubernik, some of these stars are speaking openly for the first time.

This is the first full-color illustrated book dedicated to the Laurel Canyon scene. It features a foreword by ray manzarek of The Doors, and an afterword by Lou adler. and it contains more than 350 photographs, album covers, candid home photos, ticket stubs, and original flier artwork, including 100 photos—some never before seen—by acclaimed Woodstock photographer Henry Diltz, a Canyon fixture for the past 40 years.

eye-opening both visually and informationally, this is a book no music lover can be without!

I n T e r v I e W H I g H L I g H T s :

• randy meisner reminisces about the eagles first gig and the recording of “one of These nights.”

• graham nash reflects on life with Joni mitchell and describes writing “our House.”

• for the first time in years, the three surviving Doors members talk about performances, recordings, band dynamics, and, of course, Jim morrison.

• Lou adler discusses his legendary sunset strip venues—the Whisky a go go, roxy Theater, rainbow Bar & grill, and Tapestry—and, with michele Phillips, reflects on the monterey Pop festival.

• slash, a child of the Canyon, details the formation of guns n’ roses.

H a r v e y K u b e r n i K , a lifelong resident of Los angeles, is a veteran music journalist whose work has been published nationally in melody maker, The Los angeles free Press, Crawdaddy, musician, goldmine, miX, The Los angeles Times, and moJo, among others. He has been a record producer since 1979 and was a former West Coast Director of a&r for mCa records. as a West Hollywood and Laurel Canyon insider, Kubernik has unparalleled access to the sources and personalities still based in the beauty of the Canyon.

National publicity • 20-city morning drive radio tour • Features and reviews in music and general interest magazines Newspaper coverage in arts, entertainment, and book review sections • Online coverage and blog outreach

Author events in San Francisco, CA • E-blads available

MUSIC • October 2009 • $29.95 ($38.95 Canada) • Hardcover • 9 x 12; 384 pages; full color • ISBN 978-1-4027-6589-6

Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this uncorrected proof before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

For more information, contact Megan Perritt at (646) 688-2526 or mperritt@sterlingpublishing.com. Cover design and collage by B

en gibson