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Echo in the Canyon
Laurel Canyon is a beautiful hilly area just a few miles northwest of downtown Hollywood. And in the late ’60s, it became ground zero for a sort of Cambrian Explosion of rock music. Somehow, all the greats collected there at the same time: Frank Zappa, CSNY, The Mamas and the Papas, the Monkees, the Doors, Carol King, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, and so many more. And they were all feeding off of each other’s musical creativity (and drugs).
Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob, has just released an impressive documentary of the scene.
But there’s more here, not surprisingly. Jakob Dylan brings together the old musicians for their stories, newer musicians to connect, and creates fascinating cultural bonding.
It’s not exactly passing the torch, but it’s pretty close – I’ll call it the presentation of the torch service manual.
I can’t recommend this highly enough if you’re a musician, or if you love this music.
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Published in Culture
Of the albums shown in the clip Buffalo Springfield Again is my favorite.
And I see that Graham Nash is as silly now as he was 50 years ago.
Much appreciated
Interesting.
Of course, I’m going to be a little biased…
That guitar is a Rickenbacker electric 12-string, and it figures prominently in many scenes of the film.
I have one of these, and I love it.
It’s time to brush up on my Byrds songs.
Is there much on Joni Mitchell? Didn’t care for her early stuff but Blue and Court & Spark remain favorites.
Roger McGuinn, yes.
Not that much. Of course she’s mentioned a bunch of times, but there are no interviews with her.
No, that’s me playing.
Oh, the guitar? Why, yes, actually. I guess you know your Ricks. It’s the Roger McGuinn limited edition model.
It’s very sad to see how much of a wreck she has become.
How so? She has been laid up by a stroke, but there are recent interviews on youtube where it seems like she is holding her own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKdS6s3a3sc
Always wanted a 12 string but it seems like they always need to be tuned and it takes 20 minutes to tune one of those things.
That’s why I stick with four strings.
To give some background on Laurel Canyon; it is a often very steep hilly area developed just after the turn of the century when the area was many miles from most of the developed city of LA. As such many of the houses built then were like vacation cabins, plus a few of unique eccentric other kind of houses that only Hollywood could do. In fact there used to be until the late sixties when the City widened Laurel Canyon boulevard a fairly decent sized log cabin at the corner of Lookout Mountain and Laurel Canyon. Most of these houses were very rustic and not very big. The lots were oddly narrow and long (25′ x 100′) and platted in odd ways in the canyons that sprang from the main Laurel Canyon. Many of the upper streets are poorly paved if at all, narrow and often scarily steep next to some cliff like drop-offs. Imagine an often inaccessible backwoods, eccentric vacation retreat area in the middle of a huge city- that is Laurel Canyon. These factors led the area to be a perfect place for hippiedom.
Another factor is that at the bottom of the canyon, running perpendicular to the canyon along where the steep Hollywood Hills hit the alluvial plain of West Hollywood is the Sunset Strip- that portion of Sunset Boulevard where most of the famous Hollywood Nightclubs were like the Whiskey A Go Go, Gazzari’s, the Troubadour etc. These famous clubs were just a hop, skip and a jump from these stars hippie idyll up in the canyon. In fact at the intersection in what is now an impossibly tiny traffic island where Laurel Canyon Boulevard hits Sunset and becomes Crescent Heights was the rowdy hippie club Pandora’s Box which sparked riots in ’67 when the Police tried to shut it down. Those riots were immortalized in the Buffalo Springfield song For What’s It’s Worth.
Also for what it’s worth, my first home that I came home from the Hospital to in 1951 was a cabin down a very long narrow winding brick road back in the trees on Horseshoe Canyon Road in Laurel Canyon.
The first Zappa house! (Click on photo for link.)
I have a Yamaha acoustic 12-string that I have played at for years. It’s one of the best cheap guitars ever made in my opinion. I am a musician only in the very loosest sense of the word, but it helps me sound better than I am. That Rickenbacker looks like one sweet instrument.
Well..
Don’s 12-string hint: A strobe tuner is about 10 times the accuracy of a digital tuner.
A digital tuner tries to figure out what note you’re playing, and then tries to figure out how sharp or flat the note is, and displays the result. This is an imprecise operation, especially considering the guitar waveform is not that clean, and the harmonics on a physical string run a little sharp.
A strobe tuner simply does a “wagon wheel movie effect” between the note being played and a reference pitch. With a spinning disk, and the guitar driving a strobe light. And you can visually average all the cruft out, and see the slightest tuning error as a position that accumulates over time.
So many of our favorite musicians always had a strobe tuner on stage.
Neil Young tunes all the strings at once:
Peterson Tuners makes the mechanical strobe tuners, but they also have a software simulation. It’s available as an iPhone/Android app for 10 bucks, and it’s the best tuner for the money anywhere. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
12-string guitars have a long history, going back to Pete Seeger and Lead Belly. But the instruments themselves have been somewhat rare. I don’t think either Martin or Gibson has ever had a 12-string acoustic model in production for very long. And in the electric world neither Fender nor Gibson has.
The folk duo, the Rooftop Singers, had to wait for two Gibson acoustic 12-strings to be custom built before recording “Walk Right In, Sit Right Down”.
Michael Nesmith of the Monkees is famous for playing a 12-string Gretsch, but that was built up from 6-string model, as Gretsch didn’t offer a 12-string model at the time.
And I believe David Crosby had a couple of Gibson 6-string electrics converted into 12-strings.
Hat’s off to Guild Guitars; they’ve almost always supported both acoustic and electric 12-string guitar models in their product lines.
Added…
Oh man, the Wikipedia page for 12-String Guitars is abysmal. In accuracy, in depth, in writing. What a mess.
Slight spoiler alert…
My favorite line in the film is when Roger McGuinn is relating a story to Jakob Dylan.
Laurel Canyon was where Robert Mitchum got busted for smoking pot.
Not to completely guitar nerd out on you…but Fender produced an awesome 12 string back in the ’60s. Jimmy Page used one and apparently still does. Here’s a few pics. Note the awesome or atrocious (depending on who you ask) “hockey stick” headstock.
Oh yes, please nerd away!
Indeed, and it was a really fine instrument. And it was especially nice because it was unlike any of their other instruments, it wasn’t a 12-string version of an existing 6-string model.
But it was only in production for 4 years, probably less, half a century ago.
Fender also did very small production runs of a 12-string Stratocaster, with a pretty tasteful headstock, a 12-string Telecaster, and a 12-string Coronado.
Unfortunately none of these were in production long enough, or in high enough quantities, to have any reasonable level of availability.
Ah the Coronados…those were cool and strange. Even better in Antigua finish. I won’t post as it is so hideous I might get a CoC violation.
Antigua wasn’t bad. Now the Wildwood…
I cannot deny this truth. Fender made some odd decisions in that era.
!!!
Literally around the corner from Joni Mitchell’s house.
I just saw the movie Sunday and only solo female singer from that era was Judy Collins that I remember.
Good movie, interesting facts that I never knew, like David Crosby in Byrds? I was more of a MoTown guy.
Saw a documentary on cable some years ago about a photographer who shot several album covers in the era. The story that sticks with me is about the “Crosby stills & Nash” album cover, where they’re sitting on a sofa on a porch. They’re sitting in the “wrong” order for their names. The story was that they hadn’t decided on the exact name of the group yet. They were drivign around with the photographer and he saw this sofa sitting on the porch of this dilapidated house. They jumped out of the car, took the pictures, and drove off. A couple days later they finalized the name of the group, realized they were sitting wrong, and went back to retake the photo, but the house had been torn down. So they went with the photo they had.
While you’re waiting for the film to come by your local art theatre, here’s a pretty good tv news production: