‘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…’
In 1965, Billy James moved from Beverly Hills to a funky house on Ridpath Drive. Uninterested in playing the corporate game at Columbia, he wanted an alternative lifestyle and Laurel Canyon seemed to offer it. ‘Billy got very heavily into the Bob Dylan mentality, which was anti-corporate,’ says David Anderle. ‘He was never somebody I would have picked to make that step into the corporate world and sit behind a desk.’
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