Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns

       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