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2 Back to the Garden: Getting It Together in the Country
I: Little Village

In the summer of 1968 a gawky teenage boy from Philadelphia disembarked from a bus at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights. Vacationing near Disneyland with his folks, 16-year-old Joel Bernstein had split for the day and set off to locate the magic kingdom of Laurel Canyon. The canyon was where his hero Joni Mitchell – and many other musicians of the day – lived.

Square-looking in his braces and Paisley shirt, Bernstein carried a camera with a long zoom lens around his neck. He looked like the gauche kid in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous – sixteen going on twelve. In the blinding sunlight he consulted a 1966 map that Frank Zappa had overseen for the Los Angeles Free Press. The map referred to Laurel Canyon as ‘the Freak Sanctuary’.

The road climbed steadily. Joel trudged on in the glaring smoggy sunshine. Cars whooshed past him regularly on the Boulevard’s snaking bends. He became aware of sounds that seemed to come from the walls of the canyon. It was as if someone had switched on a giant radio. Round the next bend, Joel happened on two longhairs – two of Zappa’s ‘freaks’, perhaps – on the porch of a house nestled into the side of the canyon. They were sitting in the shade and strumming guitars. Without condescension they invited him in and offered to share a joint. He declined but appreciated the implicit acceptance of the gesture. A little while later he continued on his way, eventually coming to the Laurel Canyon Country Store at 2108 Laurel Canyon, as marked on Zappa’s map. Thirsty after his slow, steady ascent, he bought and guzzled a soda there.

Higher up, at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain Avenue, Joel noticed a large log cabin. Outside was stacked a mound of garbage from which protruded the mounted artwork for Zappa’s latest album Lumpy Gravy. He walked around the cabin and came upon a pretty woman holding a dark little girl. It was Zappa’s wife Gail and their infant daughter Moon Unit. Joel snapped a surreptitious shot of them in their backyard.

Joel never found Joni Mitchell, who was out of town. But in the summer heat and light, Laurel Canyon was so extraordinary he didn’t care. It seemed a place unto itself, the city as distant as if Joel had walked into the back of beyond. ‘If you were one of the myriad people who came to Los Angeles from the East,’ Bernstein says today, ‘your Hollywood experience was basically centred around Sunset or Santa Monica Boulevard. So when you started driving up those canyons, you were like: “Are you telling me this totally rural setting is just a half mile from that office we were just in?”’

Bernstein’s reaction to Laurel Canyon was typical of the late ’60s, when scores of musicians and scenesters swarmed into the area. A warren of winding, precipitous lanes, the canyon drew rock and roll people in the same way it had attracted artists of all types for half a century. Rising between the flatlands of Los Angeles to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north, Laurel Canyon was above it all – a funky Shangri-La for the laid-back and longhaired, who perched in cabins with awesome views of LA’s sprawling basin. Pine and oak grew alongside palm and eucalyptus trees. Yucca and chaparral covered the sheer hillsides and hung over the wedged-in homes. Rabbits and coyotes lurked in the vegetation. ‘The canyon was old and woodsy and strange and interesting,’ says Lenny Waronker, who grew up in posh Bel Air but occasionally visited his canyon-dwelling artists. ‘It was interesting because of the geography as it related to the rest of Hollywood.’

‘You’d go up Laurel Canyon Boulevard from the Sunset Strip, and then you’d hit the Country Store on your right,’ says Henry Diltz, who moved into the canyon in 1964. ‘You’d then make a left on Kirkwood Drive, which was one big spur that went up. Lots of musicians lived up there, and they’d all come down to gather around the Canyon Store.’ A second spur was Lookout Mountain Avenue, off which Frank Zappa dwelt with family and entourage. A little way up the street lived Joni Mitchell. ‘About a quarter of a mile after Joni’s place you came to the Wonderland school,’ Diltz continues. ‘Then you’d either go left and carry on up the hill on Lookout or you’d go straight past the school and on to Wonderland Avenue. There were lots of little veins and arteries and capillaries, and lots of musicians lived on those winding streets.’

For Diltz and his fellow musicians, Laurel Canyon was the perfect antidote to urban stress and pollution. ‘That you can actually tuck yourself away in a canyon in the middle of Los Angeles is extraordinary,’ said Lisa Cholodenko, director of the 2003 film Laurel Canyon. ‘[There’s a] kind of irreverent, Land of the Lost thing that people get into up there in the middle of a high-pressure, functioning city.’ Cholodenko set her rock movie in Laurel Canyon because – despite the steady influx of lawyers and other professionals into the area – the place still seemed to her ‘kind of lazy and kind of dirty and kind of earthy and sort of reckless’.

The mountainous geography of the Los Angeles basin means that there are numerous canyons running north to south most of the way from the desert to the ocean. Laurel Canyon, being the closest to Hollywood, is merely the most populated. ‘There are canyons every twenty or thirty miles at least,’ says Chris Darrow. ‘They’ve always tended to be havens for artists and musicians and people who had alternative lifestyles.’ In the first decade of the twentieth century, Laurel Canyon was virtually a wilderness – the area wasn’t even annexed to the city of Los Angeles. The Laurel Canyon Boulevard of today was no more than a graded dirt road running to the top of Lookout Mountain, where a summer hotel stood till it burned down in 1918. Movie stars built hideaways and hunting cabins in the canyon, but only the odd hermit lived there year round. In 1909 the Laurel Canyon Utilities Company constructed an experimental trackless trolley that ran from Sunset Boulevard to Lookout Mountain Avenue. The experiment failed: Stanley Steamer buses replaced the trolleys in 1915. Four years later, the original Laurel Canyon Country Store was built in the location where it stands today.

A residential building boom began in the ’20s, with Laurel Canyon parcelled into lots by developers. Larger tracts were acquired by stars such as Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields. Harry Houdini built a stone castle with underground tunnels. Other properties housed brothels and speakeasies: hidden away in the canyon, they were harder for the police to find than dives in the flatlands. By the late 1950s there were over a thousand properties in Laurel Canyon, most of them on – or just off – the principal arteries of Lookout Mountain Avenue, Kirkwood Drive and Willow Glen Road. The canyon housed a motley community of artists and radicals, many seeking refuge from the climate of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Caine Mutiny director Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten, lived in the canyon. The hippest young actors (Marlon Brando, James Dean, James Coburn, Dennis Hopper) and artists (Ed Ruscha, Ed Keinholz, Billy Al Bengston, Frank Stella, Larry Bell, Bob Cottingham) gravitated to the area. ‘It was more like the Village, or like the bohemian parts of Paris or London,’ says June Walters, an Englishwoman who moved into the canyon in the late ’50s. ‘All the artistic, radical people had come up here. It wasn’t a chic place to live.’

‘Laurel Canyon was darker and denser than the other canyons,’ says Jill Robinson, daughter of movie producer Dore Schary. ‘It was inherently the outsiders’ community, and it was more political because it was closer to Hollywood. There were lots of communists living in Laurel Canyon. You could hide there and have meetings and gatherings. We felt that LA was becoming something quite different from what it had been. We were redefining what the city was.’

A singular advantage of Laurel Canyon was that a car got you down to the clubs and coffee houses on the Sunset Strip in minutes. ‘The first espresso machines came on to the Strip, so the coffee houses became like bars,’ Walters recalls. ‘People would read poetry and there was so much activity. I’d have breakfast with Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl.’ Another magnet was the strip of avant-garde art galleries along La Cienega Boulevard. ‘Every Monday night,’ says Jill Robinson, ‘you could see a circle of the cars going down Lookout Mountain and Wonderland and Laurel Canyon Boulevard towards La Cienega. We’d wander around the galleries, talking to each other, drinking coffee at Cyrano’s on the Strip.’

Folkies, too, liked the proximity to the Strip when they began moving into Laurel Canyon in the mid-’60s. ‘You could always hear a couple of banjo tunes coming around the hills, echoing and stuff,’ Roger McGuinn recalled. Up in the clouds one minute, they could be at the Whisky a Go Go club ten minutes later, usually after a slalom down Laurel Canyon Boulevard in a dented sports car. ‘People would swoop down from the canyon to the Strip and then retreat back to the mountains,’ says Barry Friedman. ‘The canyon had great roads to drive Porsches fast on, which was definitely another attraction.’

‘The canyon was part summer camp and part everybody’s first apartment,’ says screenwriter Carl Gottlieb. ‘Except the apartment turned out to be a little house with trees and bucolic surroundings.’ More than anything, the canyon represented escape. ‘It was so exciting just to be there and to get out of Burbank, where I grew up,’ says Jerry Yester, who moved to the canyon cul-de-sac of Rosilla Place in early 1962. ‘Laurel Canyon meant freedom. It meant being able to go somewhere.’

With money from the success of The Monkees, former child actor Mickey Dolenz bought a house on Horseshoe Canyon Road. TV idol he may have been, but native Angeleno Dolenz nonetheless exemplified the cool canyon lifestyle. ‘When I was a kid growing up in the Valley, the canyon was obviously very rustic,’ he says. ‘I’d heard stories about how it was a hunting retreat and a place where people went camping at weekends. But when I moved in, there were already lots of actors and musicians and artists living up there.’ Dolenz’s house became one of the key canyon hangouts of the late ’60s. June Walters, who lived opposite, remembers endless actors and musicians swimming naked in Mickey’s pool. Jack Nicholson, who wrote the satirical Monkees film Head, was a fixture. So were Head’s director Bob Rafelson and Jack’s pals Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton. After Dolenz married model Samantha Just, his new mother-in-law asked Jack and his cronies to show some consideration and wear swimming trunks. ‘It was a tough adjustment for Samantha,’ Dolenz smiles. ‘On one of her first days in the house, she went down into the basement to do some washing and stepped on one of my friends who was sleeping in the laundry. But that’s very much how the canyon was.’

If Dolenz was typical of the musicians moving up into the canyon from the Hollywood ‘flats’ below, the exodus from city to country had begun with the arrival of Love’s Arthur Lee and singer Danny Hutton, along with producers Paul Rothchild and Barry Friedman. Lee was a canyon maverick, a law unto himself. A black man fronting a psychedelic, Byrdsish, garage-folk-rock band, Arthur hid away in various places – on Briar, Kirkwood, Sunset Plaza Drive. In awe of Arthur was the young Jim Morrison, a fellow Elektra artist. ‘Jim Morrison used to sit outside my door when I lived in Laurel Canyon,’ Lee recalls. ‘He wanted to hang out with me. But I didn’t want to hang out with anybody.’ Morrison himself became a canyon dweller, living on Rothdell Trail across the street from the Country Store – ‘the store where the creatures meet’, as he sang on the Doors’ ‘Love Street’– with his feisty redhead girlfriend Pamela Courson. ‘I remember Jim showing up at the Fillmore with Pamela and she just looked like someone had been dancing on her jaw,’ says Linda Ronstadt. ‘I asked her what had happened and she said, no pun intended, “I ran into a door!”’

Paul Rothchild, who produced both Love and the Doors for Jac Holzman, was already established as one of the canyon’s leading lights. The house on Ridpath that Rothchild shared with engineer Fritz Richmond became a de rigueur drop-in for anyone interested in sex, drugs and music. ‘Paul really believed in the canyon,’ says Carl Gottlieb. ‘He had a real hippie house, and the more money he made the more he expanded it. That was the quintessential canyon house.’ Like Rothchild, Barry Friedman was a Jewish wild man running riot in the nascent rock industry. ‘People like Paul and Barry contributed a huge amount,’ says Jac Holzman, ‘mostly as sous-chefs who stuck very large spoons into the pot of Laurel Canyon and stirred it up.’

‘It was always open house at Paul Rothchild’s and Barry Friedman’s,’ says Jackson Browne, a protégé of both men. ‘People were constantly dropping in.’ Among them was a gaggle of girls who mainly lived at Monkee Peter Tork’s house. ‘They kept coming over with these big bowls of fruit and dope and shit. They’d fuck us in the pool.’ In his pad at 8524 Ridpath, Friedman pushed a bunch of beds together and staged semi-orgiastic groupings involving Browne and other good-looking corruptibles. A Keseyesque ringmaster of depravity, Friedman could often be seen around town in a King Kong suit bequeathed to him by a hooker in Las Vegas. ‘Barry was off the scale of craziness,’ says Jac Holzman, ‘but always there was a kernel of something worthwhile to what he did.’

Holzman himself dipped the occasional toe into the canyon craziness but remained wary of fully letting go. ‘Jac would make his royal visits,’ remembered Elektra engineer John Haeny. ‘We all gave him denim points.’ Former MGM A&R man David Anderle competed with Paul Rothchild to see who could roll the best joints for Holzman. He himself made another interesting addition to the Elektra family. ‘LA was all about hanging in those days,’ he reminisces. ‘It was the constant hanging at other people’s houses, which was the magic of the hills and canyons. All you had to do was drive up into Laurel Canyon and so much would happen en route.’

‘David Anderle, Paul Rothchild, Bruce Botnick, John Haeny were a combination of loners and orphans,’ Elektra staffer Michael James Jackson reflected later. ‘All of immense gifts, all uniquely fucked up, bound by mutual dysfunction…’