Fact #168622

What's Up Laurel Canyon…

In the sixties, Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles was a quite astonishing hangout for West Coast musicians, including Crosby, Stills And Nash, Joni Mitchell, The Doors, Frank Zappa, The Turtles and The Mamas And The Papas. Here are some memories of Laurel Canyon in its heyday…

Joni Mitchell : When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said, ‘Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.’ So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.

Mark Volman (vocalist, The Turtles) : We all lived there because it was affordable. It wasn't an overly desirable neighbourhood. All of us were striving and finding our way. I lived there from 1967-1987. It was in the middle of the Hollywood dream. It was close to the music industry and what it represented to the 60's at the time. We came together and wrote songs. It was the spirit of it. A five to seven minute drive down the canyon and you were either on Hollywood Blvd or the Sunset Strip. We mostly rented, there wasn't a whole lot of buying. I remember my wife and I going to Robby Krieger's (The Doors] house and playing Yahtzee with him and his wife or having dinner at John Densmore's (The Doors] house. I also remember hanging out with Three Dog Night and Tim Buckley. There were jamming sessions and hanging out with Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash. Being in The Turtles was my job. When we weren't on the road, my wife and I volunteered at our child's elementary school. Laurel Canyon was where we lived. I never looked at it as a tourist attraction. (Source : interview by Helen Marketti, www.lifestyles2000.net, April 2007)

John Haeny (engineer, Elektra Records) : My Laurel Canyon house was on Ridpath. In the living room was my stereo system, with big electrostatic speakers, extraordinarily exotic for then, and a five-foot hookah that I was keeping for my drug dealer whose mother wouldn't let him have it at home. I extended visiting privileges to him provided he brought the grass. He would show up from time to time with his friends, and I would invite my friends. We would lock all The Doors and windows so the smoke would stay in the room. We were all into popsicles. I had the world's largest collection of popsicle sticks. We would fill the bowl of this huge hookah, a cup, cup and a half, and keep it lit by throwing popsicle sticks in, and pass the rope around till everybody passed out.

I woke up one morning to some chaos, and there was Judy Collins nude in my front yard. The yard had a high wooden fence and succulents, and there was Judy with her clothes off and a photographer. They were shooting the album cover for Wildflowers. They ultimately came into the house. She was sitting on the floor, with some clothes on now, by a curtained wall with light coming through the window and one of my exotic brass vases with some dried flowers in it, and that became the back cover. The nude pictures were scotched.

Also at the Ridpath house I introduced Judy to Stephen Stills and that resulted in their romance, and their romance resulted in Stephen writing 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.'

Carole King was in and out of Ridpath - it was a dog owned by Carole and Gerry Goffin that sired my dog Niki's first litter of puppies. Neil Young was around. I was at some friend's house with David Crosby - we were all in a pack, you know, all buddies then - and somebody had brought a tape in of a young girl that nobody knew much about, except Judy had discovered her as a songwriter, and it was Joni Mitchell.

Elliot Roberts (rock manager) : Jackson was up the block, Joni was two houses down, Zappa lived on the corner. We really did all walk to the Canyon Country Store, smoking a joint together along Lookout Mountain Road

John Haeny : Joni was living on the next road up from Kirkwood. David Crosby was producing her first album. The people who recorded it were basically incompetent, and the tapes were a mess. David was having serious problems with the mix. I was exclusive to Elektra, but David came to me and asked would I sneak out and remix. We did it in the dead of night in a little studio at Sunset Sound. I didn't have a written contract with Jac, but it was a violation. Years later Jac told me he had always known I did it. There wasn't much going on that Jac didn't know about; he was a fox. He let it go because he knew Joni was important.

Henry Diltz : (In Feb. 1968) Mama Cass had her backyard picnic for Eric Clapton, because he didn’t know anybody. I met Eric that day, and Joni Mitchell that day. Mama invited David Crosby up, thinking that he and Eric were both musicians and they’d relate to one another. She was playing the earth mother again. We used to call Mama Cass the Gertrude Stein of Laurel Canyon because she would get people together – she introduced Graham Nash to David Crosby and Stephen Stills. Crosby brought this young girl he’d just discovered – Joni Mitchell. She sat on the grass playing her guitar and Clapton sat there mesmerized with her playing. Joni Mitchell played differently, she tuned her guitar to a chord, and Eric Clapton had never seen that before.

Jackson Browne : I met John (Heaney, Elektra Records engineer) on Ridpath. A great guy, an interesting guy, very funny. He had these two white dogs, huskies, that he loved like they were his family. He was a genius engineer. Intensely talented. He made everybody sound great. Through his mind and his mike placements, he could shape things. And his demos sounded like completed records. He was sort of odd, a little goofy-looking, very sincere, not much of a hipster, probably a kid who had grown up taking apart Wurlitzer theater organs. Very anal retentive. In the studio he was fastidious beyond belief about how he wanted to do things, and he talked about it all the way: "I want to do this, I want to do that." Most people reserve a lot for the mix: "It'll really sound great when we mix it," and then you play this game, Beat The Demo. But John right there in the session could make it sound fantastic. He could hear it all at once.

Bob Zachary (Elektra Records producer) : He used to say, "Watch my hands, when you see them starting to sweat, we are only a take or two away from the best take."

Jackson Browne : John was neurotic as hell, with little tics. "I've got a bladder the size of a walnut," he would say, and go to the bathroom. One time he nearly cut my thumb off in the middle of recording. He was doing an edit, he had the razor in his hand, I was reaching for a book of matches, and he thought I was going to step on the loops of tape cascaded onto the floor waiting for him to take up onto another reel. He screamed, "LOOK OUT!"- and he did like an umpire's safe motion with his hand and cut me right across the thumb, and the blood poured out, blub-blub-blub.

Ned Doheny (guitarist) : I met John on Ridpath too. We were all crashing on that street, in every sense of the word. Incredible String Band was there. Gentle Soul. And Nico, talking about Dr. Hoffman on his bicycle.

Judy James (wife of noted music biz executive Billy James) : Around Ridpath was always an alternative area, with dirt roads, fire roads.

Jac Holzman : I remember someone saying the streets looked like they had been laid out by earthworms.

Judy James : It had gotten rundown and cheap before us, a lot of garages turned into one-room thises and thats, so there were always actors and musicians. There was a sense of hanging-outness, of finding out what was going on in the music business if you walked up and down Ridpath.

Jackson Browne : There was amazing tribal life. There were houses supported by record companies, groups living with an account at the health food store.

Jac Holzman : Billy James' mailbox had listings for twenty groups, plus companies and artists.

Jackson Browne : Billy was my manager, and he ran the Elektra office for a while. Sort of a hipster cat, something like a dancer. And he was very funny, very smart. Like somewhere in between a James Dean and a Mort Sahl. He was older than us, must have been in his thirties, but he was still one of us, he was a freak.

Judy James : No one owned furniture. People would be living on the floor, many of them on our floor. Runaways. Kids who were parentless. Groupies. This tremendous influx of kids from Orange County.

Billy James : Penny Nichols stayed in the laundry room downstairs for a while. Jackson slept over. Pamela Polland. Tim Buckley, Jimmy Spheeris, Greg Copeland, Steve Noonan, wonderful writers. All coming out of Sunny Hills High, Orange County. We were never alone. We had a dining room table made of three-quarter-inch ply with two-by-four legs. Seated a lot of people. Ray Manzarek came to dinner and told me it was the first time he had ever seen an artichoke.

Cass Elliott was living up the hill with Butchy. Tim Hardin was a couple of doors up. Leonard Cohen came calling. Frank Zappa was on Kirkwood, which is the street you take to get to Ridpath, and then he moved to a log cabin at the corner of Laurel Canyon, with a bowling alley downstairs. Lots of people lived in that house with Frank.

John Haeny : Then there were Deering and Billy Howell, rich kids who liked to have stars around. They had a big house. We would head up there at midnight. David Crosby and Paul Rothchild and I ended up in the shower there with lots of Vitabath, which was very big in those days.

Barry Friedman (Los Angeles scenester) : And Jack the castle man, this guy who owned a bunch of castles. Different stars would rent them and move in with their entourage. They could make wonderful entrances down the stone staircases and they were good for practicing in and careening about on the parapets in various states of undress. I remember Nico with Jackson in tow coming down the stairs one day. That was quite a sight.

Jackson Browne : Paul Rothchild lived on Ridpath too. Paul was like a superman. He knew about all sorts of things. He sat me down and had me listen to Kurt Weill and Bertold Drecht, long before The Doors recorded Alabama Song. He drove a Porsche and wore a velour hat, a Borsalino. These were things that denoted one's station, these were the people who had made a fortune or were on the way to making a fortune.

Fritz Richmond (jugband virtuoso and Elektra Records engineer) : Paul's main room was one of the nicest music listening rooms that anyone knew of in Hollywood, and because of that people would come by with their tapes. I had my juke box there, and people would come over to check out what things sounded like on the juke box. The Doors would come up for playbacks. And Janis Joplin. I would wake up in the morning and hear her cackling away downstairs. She had a unique laugh, that woman.

Dan Rothchild (son of Elektra Producer Paul Rothchild) : My father had a story about a couch that Fritz eventually donated to a rummage sale in Portland in 1989. Among those who sat on the couch were Janis Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, Paul Butterfield , Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and another dozen butts of distinction. That couch should have great vibes.

Jackson Browne : So there were interesting houses we could walk to. Or we would catch a ride to Peter Tork's house on Willow Glen. Peter had been a dishwasher at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and now he was a TV star, a Monkee. My friend Ned Doheny and I would say, "Let's go up to Peter's house, see what's going on." Sometimes you would walk in and there would be twelve girls in the pool, naked. And they were beautiful women, people of substance, not bimbos-not that we would have minded if they were bimbos. One time Jimi Hendrix was up there jamming with Buddy Miles in the pool house, and Peter's girlfriend was playing the drums, naked. She was gorgeous, like a Varga girl is gorgeous, this physically flawless creature. She looked like the drawings of Indian maidens that they airbrush on motorcycle tanks. I don't think she was as good a drummer as she was an object of desire, but she was something. Barry Friedman was on Ridpath too, about a block from Billy James, two blocks from Paul Rothchild.

Judy James : Once, Barry phoned everyone and got us all to drop the needle on the new Stones album at exactly the same moment, so that the canyon would echo with music.

Barry Friedman : One night it was full moon, we're all sitting around in various states of decomposure, and a voice is heard echoing over the canyon, "This is God speaking. I have a message for you." And He gave His message. Well, thousands of people throughout the canyon were somewhat freaked by this experience and talked about it for days. It turned out it was Barry McGuire, the 'Eve Of Destruction' guy, who had set up this huge sound system, I think at The Mamas And The Papas' house up at the top of Lookout, and blasted this diatribe to the stoned minions below.

Jackie De Shannon (singer/songwriter) : You had a lot of artists, writers, recording artists, living up there. You could go down to The Strip and, in one evening, have The Byrds at one club, the Lovin' Spoonful at another … The Doors. It was just so exciting. Wee thought it would go on forever. It was just an incredible time. (Source : interview with Pat Curran, Shindig, Nov 2008)

Arthur Lee (Love) : Jim Morrison (of The Doors] used to sit outside my door when I lived in Laurel Canyon. He wanted to hang out with me, but I didn't wanna hang out with anybody.