by Chris Price
I'll light the fire
You place the flowers in the vase
That you bought today.
You might recognise that lyric from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's 1970 album Déjà Vu. They're the opening lines of 'Our House', a jaunty little portrait of domestic bliss which serves as a homely interlude in an album which is otherwise paranoid, lonely and helpless. It's a very pretty song.
Or you might know them from a nineties advert for the Halifax Building Society – the one with a house made out of people – who used the song to get a little extra help flogging mortgages. Either way, as you hear the song in your head it probably conjures up a picture of conjugal harmony:
Our house is a very, very, very fine house,
With two cats in the yard,
Life use to be so hard,
Now everything is easy 'cause of you…
Purty, ain't it? The house in question, a ramshackle wooden bungalow set into the hillside on Lookout Mountain Avenue, belonged to Joni Mitchell during the late sixties. It sat in a quiet district of Los Angeles called Laurel Canyon, a craggy mountain pass which connects, or rather separates, West Hollywood to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north. Look at a map of the city and you'll notice that just north of West Sunset Boulevard the neat crosshatch of the LA grid system suddenly twists into a knot of elbows as steep, winding lanes tuck themselves into the folds of the Santa Monica Mountains. Cabins, cottages and chalets clamber over one another on dizzying bluffs to sneer at the frenzied affairs of La-La Land beneath them. This quiet and occasionally inaccessible haven was to become one of the most creatively prolific and commercially successful enclaves in rock music.
Mitchell's canyon home had stained glass windows, a grandfather clock given to her by Leonard Cohen, a stuffed elk's head hanging on the wall and all manner of hippie accoutrements besides. She shared this haven of countercultural domesticity with the N of CSNY, Graham Nash, a British singer-songwriter and founder member of the Hollies who had relocated to LA and comprised one quarter of the folk-rock supergroup. Mitchell, one time lover of the C from the same band, David Crosby, had swapped one member for another and moved Nash in with her.
And so it was that Nash came to immortalise this idyllic California setting in song, rhapsodising on his new life and love in the canyon and, without knowing it at the time, selling a few thousand mortgages into the bargain. Laurel Canyon was a tranquil, creative retreat that for a time during the late sixties and early seventies attracted musicians and their coterie almost without number. It was the type of place where you could pop out for some home furnishings in the morning, nip home and pen a song about it in the afternoon, and then release a multi million selling album off the back of it weeks later. Minutes from the screaming neon cyclone of Sunset Boulevard, LA's playground of debauchery and vice, the canyon was a rambling, shambling collection of houses tucked quietly and inconspicuously into the hills just north of West Hollywood. It was country living, of a type, bang in the middle of Los Angeles, less than a stone's throw away from all the action. If the Troubadour was where this new breed of thrift-shop millionaires went out to play, Laurel Canyon was where they retired afterwards for a nice cup of tea and a sit-down.
It was in Laurel Canyon that David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash reputedly first sang together. Exactly where depends on whose account you believe. Some, Nash included, have it that it took place in the front room of 'Our House', Joni's tumbledown cottage on Lookout Mountain Avenue, while others maintain it was at the home of 'Mama' Cass Elliott of The Mamas & the Papas who, along with Mitchell, reigned as de facto 'queen of the canyon', keeping a motherly eye on all the drug-addled goings-on in this curious little neighbourhood.
The fact that nobody can quite remember was all part of the appeal. Probably it was swept away in the blizzard of cocaine that blew through the canyon most days during its heyday, but I prefer to think that this quietly momentous occasion just got lost in the everyday like hundreds of other humdrum happenings in countless cosy areas like it. That was what I loved – the homeliness of it all. The idea that there was a place like Laurel Canyon, packed to the gills with such prodigious music talent, where life just went on like it did for everybody else. A place where Roger McGuinn would pop round to David Crosby's house to borrow a cup of sugar and stop to plot the rise of country rock over a cup of coffee and a chat. Where Jim Morrison could wander over the road to the Canyon Country Store, score a pint of milk and a few tabs of acid, and pay his newspaper delivery bill while he was there. On the way out he might bump into Graham Nash, who would ask him to feed his and Joni's cats while they went on tour. It all seemed so gloriously, thrillingly mundane.
But the reality of life in the canyon was a good deal more industrious than in my romantic imaginings. Its hungry, over-achieving inhabitants didn't just switch off their ambition when they walked through the front gate, and their lives were anything but mundane. Laurel Canyon was a squall of activity, much of it creative, a lot of it business. David Geffen famously announced to four of his artists, whilst sitting in the hot tub at his Laurel Canyon home, that he would keep the Asylum label to which they were all signed very small and intimate, declaring: 'I'll never have more artists than I can fit in this sauna.' Two of them, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, would go on to release America's biggest-selling album of all time – Their Greatest Hits by the Eagles. Laurel Canyon may have started out as a cottage industry in every sense of the term, but it was one which had much loftier aspirations than the homespun apparel adorning its hippie inhabitants would suggest. It was where the countercultural ideal met commerce head-on, and the output from both over ten or so prolific years changed the American music landscape forever.
Other famous residents included Frank Zappa, Jackson Browne, Arthur Lee, Carole King, Jimmy Webb, Alice Cooper, Orson Welles, Errol Flynn and Robert Mitchum. More recently, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Aniston, Marilyn Manson and Justin Timberlake have moved in.
And we were about to take a trip through the canyon with one of LA's newest and most ambitious young stars, Terra Naomi, and her producer Paul Fox. There was an aptness to our unintentional selection of tour guide. Terra knew virtually nothing about the Laurel Canyon era we were so keen to explore (beyond what she had been able to deduce from the pissed, rambling account the night before), but showed all the drive and hunger of a young David Crosby trying to make a name for himself on the LA folk scene. She had all the manner and accessories of a celebrity in waiting: an entourage in the shape of a camera crew, a small, fluffy, yapping dog and the kind of self belief that is a prerequisite for anyone wishing get ahead in the music business in LA.
Paul was older and wiser, having apparently worked in music long enough to have seen his fair share of talent through the mill. He was also tuned into the Laurel Canyon vibe, knew exactly the kind of muso tourists he was dealing with and what kind of sights to show us. It helped that he knew virtually all the houses we were interested in by road name and number.
We followed in convoy into the canyon, the wide roads of West Hollywood sharply giving way to Laurel Canyon Boulevard as we gained height. At the corner of Kirkwood Drive, a short distance from Sunset, the green awning and bright orange facade of the Canyon Country Store peered out over trellis and shrubbery. We parked next door in front of a stone-clad launderette, to the right of which, behind a cascade of rhododendrons, was the wood-fronted villa occupied for a time in the late sixties by Jim Morrison. The store, made famous by Doors tune 'Love Street' as the place 'where the creatures meet', had been the epicentre and focal point of the neighbourhood; the same spot Joni Mitchell et al. had popped out to for their morning papers. The sign above the door was more Grateful Dead tour T-shirt than village corner shop, and to the left was mounted a circular mirror, decorated around its circumference with brightly coloured, psychedelic lettering announcing confidently – and quite beyond argument – that 'You Are Here'.
Inside, yel
low strip lighting washed densely-packed shelves with tones of sepia. Traditional convenience store fayre competed for space with more unlikely items: we placed potato chips, some 'Love Massage Oil' and a gourd into a basket before selecting some beers from a capacious cooler at the rear of the store. The purpose of coming had been to set up the trip in a short piece for Terra's YouTube channel, in which Joe and I would be filmed buying supplies for our journey. After all, we had a long trip ahead of us and where better to stock up for it than the place where so many musical trailblazers had done the same? We wandered through the aisles with Terra acting as personal shopping assistant while Joe and I played the role of wide-eyed Brits lost in a bounteous wonderland of unbridled retail opportunity.
Shopping complete, we returned to the car and headed higher into the canyon, Paul pointing out the attractions from behind the wheel. The hairpins grew tighter, the roads narrower and steeper. Houses were crammed into the tucks and turns of lanes overhung with dense green foliage. Each was unique – neat white bungalows alongside tottering wooden villas next to sturdy brick chalets. Often an apparently single-storey house would turn out, upon rounding the next bend, to fall away on the opposite side with a three-floor glass facade onto vertiginous views of Hollywood.
We passed the Houdini mansion, eliciting a small whoop from Joe, on through Lookout Mountain Avenue past the cottage that Joni Mitchell had shared with Graham Nash (just 'very fine') and – this was an unexpected treat – pulled up outside a garage where Boston had rehearsed before hitting the big time. Further up we came upon the house from where 'Mama' Cass Elliott had ruled the canyon roost, cruised past Jimi Hendrix's temporary home and, lastly, stopped outside the reason why Paul knew so much about the area in the first place – the house he himself had occupied during the seventies and early eighties. Joe enquired as to precisely what had attracted so many musicians and actors to this part of LA.
'Well I think part of it was that it was like living in the country right in the middle of the city. It was very free – hey, up this driveway was where Paul Rothschild lived – and because people could walk around doing whatever they wanted, nobody came up here unless they were part of that whole community, which was really just a bunch of hippies. It was just bands playing in their backyards, everybody was high on one thing or another, just walking from one house to the next. People didn't lock their doors. It was just a very communal kind of a feeling. Each one of these houses has its own unique character, and because they were designed not to be year-round residences they were fairly affordable too. I took Dave Gregory from XTC up here and he said this was the "centre of the universe". And in a way it really was.'
Cameraman Matthew asked us to say a few words for the tape about how we were feeling. I clammed up at first – 'You mean you actually want me to actually say something? Off the top of my head?' – before stuttering out something about this being the 'real' start of the trip.
It was true. This magical mystery tour had really kickstarted the journey. Our quest was, after all, about making connections between music and places, and this we most assuredly had done. Joe had snatched a glimpse of the Houdini mansion and I had been able to peer into the front yard of 'Our House'. My only disappointment was the absence from it of two cats.
Terra and I celebrated with an a cappella rendition of the song for the camera. She took the high part and I took the low. Concentrating on the 'la-la-la' interlude towards the end, we made a passable attempt at close harmony, bobbing our heads from side to side and gazing at each other as we sang like Sonny and Cher doing 'I Got You Babe'.
We slalomed our way to the top of the canyon, briefly pausing to take in a spectacular view of downtown LA before dipping down into the Valley on the other side and making our way to the next stop on the tour.
The Alley is a rehearsal space, hideaway and closely-guarded secret located in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. It is home to more music memories – and memorabilia – than all of the Hard Rock Cafes the world over rolled into one. It's not listed in the phone book and it does not have a website. If you weren't a musician yourself, or closely connected to people that are, you might never even know it existed. The only way of securing a booking is by recommendation or referral by another musician. It is an Aladdin's cave to which only a privileged few are granted access, and our names were about to be added to the guest list.
Terra introduced us to Shiloh, the Alley's proprietor, curator and guardian angel who, along with her husband Bill, had lovingly tended this patch of rock and roll history since they acquired the building in 1973. Shiloh was a softly spoken, bosomy lady in her fifties with long, blonde hair cut into a wispy fringe which looked like it had framed her face unchanged since the sixties. In slow, rounded tones with an accent somewhere between LA and Vancouver, she described how her love affair with the place had begun. She and Bill had set about transforming the place, previously used as a recording studio, into a rehearsal-space-cum-musicians'-retreat from the moment they found it and had been filling its nooks, crannies and cubbyholes with curios, mementos and bric-a-brac ever since.
'Our first clients were Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Etta James. Since then we've had Minnie Ripperton, the Eagles, Emmylou Harris, Jack White, Alice Cooper, you name it. Everyone who plays here signs their name on that wall over there.'
Behind the stage a whitewashed brick wall shrieked a scrawl of signatures from floor to ceiling. We wandered over to take a look.
'They're all real people. Some famous, some not. Some alive, some dead,' added Shiloh.
As we marvelled at the roll call of legends who had honed their skills on the very stage we now stood on, Shiloh revealed what she felt gave the place its magic atmosphere.
'I believe that everybody who plays here leaves a little spark of energy, and it's that collective energy you feel when you come in the place, that vibe when you walk in the door.'
Vibe was exactly the right word. Vibe was the only word.
Next, Shiloh led us through a heavy wooden door along a passageway hung with tour posters and other psychedelic artwork. At the end of the corridor a second wooden door, replete with brass porthole and an elk horn for a handle, led to another rehearsal space called The Loft. This room was much larger than the first, with high ceilings and a wide stage occupying almost half the room. To the left a rope ladder led up to the loft which gave the room its name. We went up. A rocking chair in one corner called to me to sit down and, well, rock. Like a ten-year-old in his tree house with nothing but a long summer and a pile of unread comics to look forward to, I was utterly content. I looked up at Joe standing among the rafters.
'Mate, you know that trip we've been planning?'
'I think I know the one you mean.'
'I might just stay here instead. Sit here in this chair and rock. Maybe take up smoking.'
He sighed. 'This place is wonderful isn't it? I just love the fact that everything creaks. There's something of the pirate ship about it. I think we've already found the soul of American music. Why don't we forget the road trip and sit by the pool for three weeks.'
I rocked a final rock and reluctantly prised myself from the chair to return to the rehearsal space below. The wall behind the stage resembled the side of a barn with short, vertical wooden boards between longer horizontal beams that ran the length of the room. Two enormous cross beams extended diagonally from corner to corner forming a huge X behind the stage. A patchwork of patterned material stretched over every second vertical section, like a quilt thrown over the bed in the back bedroom. On closer inspection these turned out to be tour T-shirts for bands that had used the room ahead of going out on the road. They were all there – Alice Cooper, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Eagles.
'This is real hallowed turf, isn't it?' I cooed.
'It sure is,' said Shiloh. 'I'm honoured to be a part of it. It's kind of like a living rock and roll museum. A very
special place.' She spoke with the reverence
of a Westminster Abbey tour guide and seemed to love this place like it was one of her children.
Next we made our way upstairs to the living space. The lounge area was a treasure trove of junk, a mess of rock and roll miscellany strewn over every available space. Every inch of its wood-panelled walls was covered with photographs, mirrors, plaques, plates and other assorted adornments. A cello leaned against the mantelpiece next to a grandfather clock. Guitars of all shapes and sizes were crammed into every available cranny. A television set flickered unwatched in the farthest corner. Every bric, every brac, every knick and every knack was flawlessly arranged to create a harmonious hotchpotch of clutter and clobber.
To the left, two doors stood facing one another across a hallway, painted with what looked like scenes from Easy Rider. Each depicted a lone motorcyclist cruising along a highway, one towards us and the other away into the distance. The story behind them, it turned out, made a direct but unexpected connection to the reason for our trip, and it knocked me for six. One of the men in the paintings was Phil 'Road Mangler' Kaufman, the man who had cremated Gram's body. Shiloh will explain the rest:
'This door was on Phil Kaufman's house. When he moved he left the door and we were afraid it was going to be painted over or replaced. So we went and got the door and put it on our bathroom here. It shows Bill, my husband, coming towards you and Phil Kaufman riding away.'