ISBN: 0571211496
List Price: $25.00
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: Plenty of local LA color, an easy read
I bought this book to see the history of the canyon 5 miles east of my current residence (I've not quite moved to Seattle yet, despite my profile), and because I'm a Joni Mitchell fan.
It was an pleasurable as hoped, probably of greatest interest to Los Angelenos, but also to those impressed with the 70's folk/pop scene. There are ample amusing anecdotes, a light dose of sociological philosophy, some lurid crimes. The story is built from a relative small number of interviewees, as far as I can tell, and not all were so remarkable, but the narrative hangs together.
A third of the way in, I was afraid it would devolve into Rolling Stone-style musical over-analysis, but that misstep was temporary, and then I particularly enjoyed the demise of folk-pop by glam, punk, disco, greed, drugs, etc..
While not encyclopedic, a diverting excursion through the a critical stage in American music and America.
Summary: Los Angeles and music in the 60s and 70s
Walker offers an uneven but overall still worthy recap of the Los Angeles music scene from the 60s to the 70s, as centred around Hollywood and West Hollywood, and using the Laurel Canyon neighbourhood as a proxy for these.
Luckily, the book does have a good map showing these areas, and the key nightclubs like the Troubador and the Roxy. There are also some nice photos of various stars who form distinctive portions of the plot. But as another reviewer commented, a few more photos of the Laurel Canyon area from that era would have been worthy inclusion, given the book's remit.
You can read Walker as providing a neat counterweight to the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury cultural nexus of this period. One which is celebrated far more in our collective perceptions. Yet Walker rightly points out that in the music scene, as opposed to the broader cultural influences, Los Angeles was the more vital place to be.
Perhaps given space considerations, Walker was unable to give full coverage to important trends in the Los Angeles of the 70s. The discussion of glam and disco are rather cursory. Though he might argue that these had little to do with the Laurel Canyon crowd.
Summary: Back to nature in the heart of the city?
Like Walker, my age makes me only a child when the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield hit the Sunset Strip and wandered up the canyon that lured so many acid-heads, freaks, cocaine cowboys, groupies, demented dropouts, and fearsome careerists. Unlike him I remember the once-garish area, if only as a boy gawking at the street parade from a car window! He, now a resident, efficiently transmits in polished but unobtrusive prose the Canyon's allure for those who may have been too young, too far removed, or too poor to have encountered it firsthand. He spans the 1965-1980 years. He shows, looking at two snapshots--which I wish he'd included--how from 1964 to 65 at a Sunset Strip nightclub one can see the generation gap widen. The first shot of dancers could have been from around Eisenhower's first election; the next displays longhairs and miniskirts grooving to the far-out vibes.
His account lingers longer over the first half, that is, the last half of the 60s. His strength here is interviews with such figures as Chris Hillman, Kim Fowley, Henry Diltz, and Graham Nash. Walker's extensively documented acknowledgment of Mama Cass Elliot as the truest Lady of the Canyon makes for poignant reading. This era takes up half the book, and this half ends around Altamont.
While readers have chided Walker for extraneous material such as his treatment of this 1969 festival (and the Manson murders and Woodstock), I counter that he smoothly integrates the microcosm of Laurel Canyon into the millions of commodities and manufactured cultural rebellion its denizens peddled to the eager baby-boomers. Walker shows well how pot and LSD cultivated a communal, shared, and idealistic ethos; cocaine and meth heightened greed, egotism, and paranoia. Monkees preceded Manson. His discussion of these forces makes this book, therefore, more than an assortment of gossip.
The book does lurch more unsteadily through the 70s, and the sudden leaps from country-rock to glam to disco to punk to hair metal that marked the decade (and into the 80s) are less assuredly handled. He's memorable on how the Santa Anas flare up wildfires, why musicians' hermeticism worsened with coke addiction, and how contrasts symbolize the divide between the urban Strip and the bucolic Canyon. More pictures of the natural environment, not just its inhabitants, would have made this feature clearer. You also get the sense in this era that no one ever built a new home there. Walker alludes to this early, asserting that the later blight of McMansion tracts don't detract from the canyon charm that much (I disagree!), but surely some of the successful back-to-nature + hitmaking hippies must have bulldozed chaparral for rustic fortresses too?
I don't think if you have never seen the canyons you will grasp wholly their ambiance as expressed on his pages. Perhaps the more jumbled narrative of the book's second half reflects the more fragmented nature of the music scene there by then roaming from bohemian Laurel to more affluent canyons west, but this rude awakening from the hippie dream itself is conveyed less grippingly, although Walker's insights on the shift from naive trust to massive profit by the younger studio heads and their musical charges remain valuable.
What's surprising is that Walker never mentions Barney Hoskyns (Hoskins alternate spelling) "Waiting for the Sun," a panoramic view of L.A. music from the 1940s on. This gave necessary attention to the whole Warner Bros. proto-alternative haven for eccentrics and cult artists in the early 70s that made the Canyon still a refuge for those who hadn't yet made it big on the label. (I add a few days after I wrote this review: guess who's just out with his own "Hotel California" book of this same period: Barney Hoskyns. I guess that explains Walker's silence: competing books on the same Canyon rushing to get into print?)
Walker quickly nods at Elektra Records, but how Asylum, WB, and Geffen all blended and resisted each other as this counterculture commidified remains hidden. I was never clear enough as to what role David Geffen was playing in "the starmaking machinery behind the popular songs," as Joni Mitchell phrased it, and how such monoliths crushed earlier music label & promotional set-ups. Maybe Hoskyns' new book will shed more light on these scenes.
I caught a few errors. Beechwood Canyon is Beachwood. Melvin Beli is Belli. Silicon Valley did not grow in the area east of S.F., but south of it. However, I read this with interest, and considering that I'm not a fan of most of the musicians who are treated here, Walker's ability to enliven their stories makes a valuable social history of this tumultuous decade and a half.
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