A Playlist by Michael Walker
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/living-with-music-a-playlist-by-michael-walker/
By Dwight Garner
April 9, 2008
On Wednesdays, this blog is the delivery vehicle for "Living With
Music," a playlist of songs from a writer or some other kind of
book-world personage.
This week: Michael Walker, author of "Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story
of Rock and Roll's Legendary Neighborhood."
Michael Walker's April 2008 Playlist:
Each song was either written in or about Laurel Canyon, or the
performer lived there.
1) Our House, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Graham Nash and Joni
Mitchell were in the thick of their affair and living together in
Mitchell's Laurel Canyon cottage when Nash wrote what would become
the counterculture's ode to domestic bliss. He and Mitchell had just
returned from breakfast and a stop at an antiques store where she
bought the song's storied vase. "It was one of those L.A. mornings
that are gray and not-quite-rainy," Nash told me, "I said to her,
'Y'know, why don't you put some flowers in the vase and I'll light a
fire.' And I started to think: here we are, Joni Mitchell and Graham
Nash, and I love this woman, and this moment is a very grounded
moment in our relationship. And I sat down at the piano and an hour
later 'Our House' was done."
2) Ladies of the Canyon, Joni Mitchell. The title song of Mitchell's
breakthrough 1970 album essayed with bemused affection the women
passing through her Laurel Canyon cottage (which she still owns).
What some may not realize is that those are real-life ladies
populating the song. "I was the Trina who 'sewed lace on widows
weeds,'" Trina Robbins, now a San Francisco-based comics writer and
artist, wrote to me after "Laurel Canyon" was published. "The coat
that was a 'second-hand one' was a three-quarter length skunk coat
from the 1940s, which, with its big shoulder pads, was as wide as it
was long. I made clothes for people like David Crosby, Donovan and
especially Cass Elliot, because she couldn't find anything decent in
her size." Gary Burden, who designed the covers of the first Crosby
Stills & Nash album and Mitchell's "Blue," told me the Annie in the
song ("Annie sits you down to eat…") is his wife.
3) Laurel Canyon Home, John Mayall. John Mayall bunked with Frank
Zappa at the latter's Laurel Canyon log cabin in 1968 and became so
besotted with the canyon he wrote a song-cycle about it. Centerpiece
of the "Blues from Laurel Canyon" album, "Laurel Canyon Home"
captures the canyon's sleepy inertia perfectly ("got the sun and
trees and silence / I'm in my Laurel Canyon home"). Mayall moved into
his own Laurel Canyon home thereafter; the house was destroyed in a
1979 wildfire but Mayall rebuilt and hung on until the mid-90s before
moving to the San Fernando Valley, the last of the canyon's 1960s
music fraternity to leave. On the same album, Mayall recalls the
frantic scene at the Zappa household on "2401" (the Zappas lived at
2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard) which was overrun day and night with
members of the Mothers of Invention and half the freak population of
L.A. Mayall's lyrics name-check Zappa's wife, Gail, and infant
daughter Moon, as well as members of the GTO's groupie clique and a
gun-toting intruder identified as "The Raven." (Zappa artfully talked
him out of his gun - and the house - and moved soon thereafter.)
4) Twelve-Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon), the Mamas
and the Papas. John Phillips started writing "12:30" when he was a
folksinger living in New York. Joining forces with folkie veterans
Denny Doherty, Phillips and his second wife, Michelle, moved to L.A.
and, with Cass Elliot, coalesced as the Mamas and the Papas around a
string of landmark hit singles in the mid-'60s, including "California
Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday." The band installed themselves in
houses in Laurel Canyon; Elliot's would become the canyon's de facto
salon (see "You Don't Have to Cry," below). Plagued by internecine
rivalries, infidelities and drug debilitation, the group was close to
disbanding when "12:30 - their last hit - was released in 1968. A
combination of the song Phillips started in New York and another
begun after he'd moved to the canyon, it opens with Phillips
lamenting that New York was "dark and dirty," the view outside his
window a church clock with hands stuck at 12:30. When the song moves
to Laurel Canyon for the chorus the tempo picks up, the harmonies
soar and Phillips exults at the now much-improved view: the "young
girls" of the title - proto groupies looking for rock stars - such
that he "can longer keep my blinds drawn." California dreamin' indeed.
5) Love Street, the Doors. Among Jim Morrison's many temporary Los
Angeles domiciles was an apartment in a house catty-corner from the
Laurel Canyon Country Store on Rothdell Trail. From this perch, when
not sparring with long-suffering girlfriend Pamela Courson or
sleeping off one his epic benders, Morrison could watch customers
drift in and out of the store in their hippie splendor. It is an
article of faith among canyonites that the line in the song "there's
a store where the creatures meet" refers to the Canyon Store and its
clientele. (But then, who wouldn't want to be immortalized in a Doors
song?) During the '90s, when the house was derelict, somebody
spray-painted "MR. MOJO RISIN'" across the front; a subsequent owner
installed a three-story totem pole with carved likenesses of
Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
6) You Don't Have to Cry, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Graham Nash always
maintained that he, Stephen Stills and David Crosby first sang
together in Joni Mitchell's Laurel Canyon cottage; Stills just as
adamantly insists it was at Cass Elliot's. The casual evidence seems
to support Stills. Elliot was renowned on the L.A. music scene as a
hippie yenta, and her house on Woodrow Wilson Drive was everyone's
second home and salon in the carefree, pre-Manson days. There was a
pool, privacy and plenty of good food and dope to share in a scene
rapidly fragmenting as people's records and careers came in. When
Elliot found out that Crosby and Stills were busking around the
canyon with new songs and desultory plans to form a group, she
dragooned Nash, in L.A. on tour with the Hollies, to the Woodrow
Wilson house, where Stills and Crosby sang for Nash "You Don't Have
to Cry." Nash asked for them to sing it twice more then laid in his
harmony. The rest, as they say, is history. "When David and Stephen
and I were halfway through 'You Don't Have to Cry,"' Nash told me,
"all of a sudden we realized we'd have to be a band." Elliot's
clairvoyance still amazes Nash. "What an incredible thing first of
all to envision and secondly to pull it off. She knew what we had to
do - but how do you know that when we haven't even sung together?"
7) Seven & Seven Is, Love. Written and sung the world-class eccentric
Arthur Lee, this blistering piece of proto punk rock and psychedelia
from one of L.A.'s most inventive bands served notice of the creative
fire burning through the canyon in the mid-'60s. To say Love was
groundbreaking would be extreme understatement, including where their
leader chose to lay his tinted granny glasses - Lee, who died in
2006, always claimed he was the first of the '60s musicians to move
to the canyon. He also recommended the Doors to Elektra Records
founder Jac Holzman; Jimi Hendrix may have copped from him his groovy
Regency look; and years later, the many incarnations of Prince are a
testament to Love's racially integrated lineup and Lee's inscrutable
charisma onstage and off. Lee's former house at the very top of the
canyon is still pretty much as it was in the '60s; several scenes in
the Jack Nicholson-scripted 1967 counterculture-exploitation classic
"The Trip" were shot there - look for an indoor-outdoor swimming pool
spanned by a bridge.
8) Cocaine, Jackson Browne. As the 1960s bled into the 1970s and
cocaine supplanted pot and acid as the drug of choice across the L.A.
music scene, a wave of canyon-based singer-songwriters became
superstars singing about romantic succor and earnest introspection.
Among them was Jackson Browne - who a few years before was billeted
in a music publisher's laundry room in the canyon. He and future
Eagle Glenn Frey wrote this adaptation of Rev. Gary Davis's
folk-blues standard, rendered as a woozy field recording punctuated
by loud snuffles and sniggers on Browne's 1977 "Running on Empty"
album. The 1970s coke blizzard killed off whatever was left of Laurel
Canyon's 1960s atmospherics; Browne later sharpened the cautionary
notes sounded in his and Frey's version of "Cocaine" with the lyric:
"There was damage to the body, there was damage to the soul, there
was damage to the rock and roll."
9) Mr. Tambourine Man, the Byrds. The folk-rock explosion that put
L.A. and Laurel Canyon at the epicenter of the post-Beatles
youthquake starts here, in 1965, with the Byrds' jingle-jangling
adaptation of Bob Dylan. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was a worldwide No. 1
smash and catapulted the fledgling Byrds into superstardom, along
with Beach Boys the first American band to seriously challenge the
primacy of the Beatles, whom both wound end up influencing. Chris
Hillman, along with Byrds founding member Roger McGuinn, moved to a
house in the canyon just as it was starting to fly its freak flag
high. The Byrds' ethereal harmonies captured the Edenesque feel of
the place perfectly and evoked the eucalyptus- and marijuana-scented
hills where David Crosby would thunder down Laurel Canyon Boulevard
on a Triumph motorcycle with a cape flapping from his neck -
"Lawrence of Laurel Canyon," sneered the Byrds' manager, Jim Dickson.
"Laurel Canyon was sort of the mecca," Hillman said. "It was quite
the place to be."
10) Laurel Canyon, Jackie DeShannon. The fingerprints of the
gloriously prolific singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon - she wrote
songs with Jimmy Page! she toured with the Beatles! - could be found
all over the music coming out of the canyon, first in the folk-rock
era (the Byrds covered her "Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe") and later,
in the glossy pop-country-whatever L.A. sound of the '70s, prefigured
in her 1969 smash "Put a Little Love in Your Heart." "Laurel Canyon,"
DeShannon's mash note to the canyon from the 1968 album of the same
name, hints at the soulful country-funk about to explode via Eric
Clapton's collaboration with Delaney & Bonnie and includes couplets
like "shades of Camelot / giving all I've got to Laurel Canyon." (The
album cover was shot on the Canyon Country Store's steps.)
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