LAUREL CANYON

Sky Arts 

Laurel Canyon

The other Sky Arts TV programme I watched last night was the two part film about the artistic community that was Laurel Canyon where many of the great musicians of the period congregated to live the 'boho' dream from Joni Mitchell (Ladies of the Canyon) to Love, The Doors, The Eagles, CSN&Y and many many more. Heck even Frank Zappa had an early home there. That it is was some kind of establishment muso middle class rich folks' indulgence didn't occur to most until later. Although when the Mamas and Papas' John and Michelle Phillips moved out to Bel Air and Michelle found herself looking at her collection of three Rolls Royces in the garage the penny dropped and she found herself thinking 'Hang on a sec! We ARE the establishment!' 

You might have been forgiven for thinking living with one of the greatest (sic) heroin addicts of all time in John Phillips whose accounts of his drug addiction beggars belief at times (he claimed he was injecting grade heroin something like every 17 minutes at the height of his addiction) and his moral descent resulting in claims of incestuous relationships with his daughter seem to indicate the Eric Gill kind of belief system that suggests the ego found them thinking they were above the normal moral compass of the rest of us mere mortals! Something was going to give . . . . . 

Henry Diltz one of the only living folk featured in the documentary and here his shot of Eagle and writer Jackson Browne

In the second part the descent into the ending of the counter culture with the creepy crawl from the Manson gang to the Altamont festival of disaster you knew something was going wrong with this level of indulgence

It didn't make for comfortable viewing and of course conspiracy theories abound about the area. Not least that it was supposedly funded by the anti-war movement being controlled by the C.I.A. (go figure as our American pals would say!) 

Johnny Echols (Love) features large here and the programme looks extensively at who knew Manson and who was likely to have been 'next'. Seem like everyone of the canyon dwellers were ripe for selection! Fortunately Manson and his band of merry acid soaked dysfunctional psychopaths were soon caught although the death toll of the area remains speculative to this day. It is a fact that Manson had met Terry Melcher and had given the address to his gang to get some kind of perverse revenge at being spurned from a recording contract that saw the horrific murder of Sharon Tate and her friends. Slaughter by proxy if you will. It seems now Jim Morrison and his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, left the canyon after the escalation in the level of madness. Other folks started installing security cameras and remembering to lock all their doors. The writing was already on the wall . . . . . . . and written in blood

 Ultimately the death of the Hippie Dream started here . . . . . . . all taking place in one community 

Ersatz Cowboys 'The Eagles'

further reading here - Variety review

Joni Mitchell in her Canyon home that would become her and Graham Nash's 'Our House'

Interview with Laurel Canyon director Alison Ellwood - Variety