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Music: Woke War I, Prelude
Laurel Canyon is an Epix documentary about a Los Angeles hillside neighborhood and the years when it first became a refuge for like-minded folk and rock musicians. Like a Simon and Garfunkel lyric whose out-of-date-ness always amused me, “Thirty dollars pays your rent on Bleecker Street,” the idea that Laurel Canyon was once a cheap place to get a house with a pool was already long untrue by the time my wife and I moved to the Hollywood hills in 1977, but in the mid-’60s, it was a bohemian paradise.
Laurel Canyon would be a good companion piece for All Things Must Pass, the recent documentary about the Tower Records store on the Sunset Strip. They take place next door to each other in a unique physical environment where busy boulevards, and much of the business infrastructure of the west coast music industry, is only minutes away from bucolic hillsides. The films share a sense of whatever camaraderie the LA recording industry had in the ’60s and early ’70s, when much of New York’s popular music scene was moving to California.
Everyone looks incredibly young in photos and 8mm and 16mm home movies, which brings us to one of the interesting choices of this doc: other than the two elderly photographers who took many of the pictures and provide some connecting narration, you don’t see any people as they look today. You hear them speak, sounding candid and often funny. But since the movie is about a certain long-ago time and place, not about individual lives or careers, it doesn’t distract you with discordant notes of how they—and boomer viewers like me—have aged since those days of Monterey and Woodstock.
The status of women in pop music, and in general during this period, was changing but still traditional in more ways than we’d think. Hippie husbands still expected dinner on the table at seven. In the summers of love, sex appeal still ruled. Michelle Philips and Joni Mitchell, major characters in this doc, were very attractive, and it’s not sexist to note that a lot of the access that got them where they were was based on beauty. They and others of that time, and of every time, go through lovestruck enablers like knives through butter, break hearts, and make strategic career alliances as instinctively as the women of the court of Louis XIII.
One of the narrators of Laurel Canyon says, self-deprecatingly, that despite their progressive image, the LA music “scene” in general wasn’t very advanced politically until the very end of the ’60s. The country was weary of the Vietnam war, to be sure, and no doubt there was scarcely a Nixon vote in the whole rock music industry.
But most of these folkies and sweet harmonizers of the Canyon, though certainly pacifist in spirit, weren’t hard-edged cultural leaders either. It’s one reason why they enjoyed mainstream success.
We were reminded just how tight-knit and local a scene this all was when the documentary kept mentioning an up-and-coming band called Love, a fixture at Sunset Boulevard’s folk-rock music clubs. The group had a recording contract and apparently “charted” modestly but I have to admit that I’ve never heard of them. A band member claimed it was because they had a black singer in the group, but frankly the song fragments we hear are not all that special.
Love is a case of one of the oldest bits of showbiz drama—not just the has-beens, or the never-will-be’s, but the almost made it, the one-hit wonders who missed major stardom by that much; the coulda-been-big if they’d had just slightly better luck, timing, or management. It’s only a sidelight in the film’s wider stories of friends, partners, careers, and rivals.
The ones who did make it are a motley bunch; Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, The Mamas and the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, and The Byrds, who make a point of noting that they were acoustic folk singers who became electric rockers, not the other way around. “We were never a garage band.” David Crosby is one of the centers of the story, including the personnel shifts that led to the formation of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Hugely popular in their day, CSN&Y was rarely a critic’s favorite in the decades afterward.
Being neighbors in Laurel Canyon meant improbable-seeming backyard friendships that extended from the Mothers to the Monkees, Columbia Pictures Television’s answer to the Fab Four. Plenty of musicians weren’t originally from city streets and the quirky almost-rural charms of the nearby Canyon appealed to them.
Part 1 of Laurel Canyon more or less ends in the summer of 1969. It was the year of Woodstock, but also of Altamont; of the Moon and the Mets, but also of Manson. The Pepperland-like dreaminess that people talk about in this documentary was real, but so was the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood dark reality in its shadows.
The changeover point between decades is usually exaggerated, but in 1969/70, it really did line up pretty neatly with a time that claimed to have a mandate for limitless change. The results show something else entirely. When the campuses exploded and the cities burned, the country didn’t turn left. Instead, they turned to Richard Nixon, a much-scorned, politically battered figure of the ‘50s, because he was the tough SOB who seemed able to handle it.
The problem was, much of the news media, academia, Hollywood, and culture in general was already locked into a victorious 1967 narrative that anticipated a lurch leftwards. They wrote metaphorical checks, and in Hollywood literal ones, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, predictive bets of radical social change in 1969-’70; bets that 1971-’73 would refuse to cash. I had a post last year about that changeover point, then applying to movies and TV shows. It was a time when 20th Century Fox tentatively added Salute to a Rebel to the title of Patton because some were afraid that America was no longer willing to honor warriors. Hollywood did not really intend to make screen heroes out of General Patton, Popeye Doyle, Archie Bunker, Dirty Harry, or Vito Corleone, but the people decided for themselves.
The music industry briefly joined the revolution, then sheepishly retreated. With few exceptions, the folk-rock Los Angeles musicians that are the center of this story were harmonic, not discordant, without urban grit or blue-collar edge. Today, singers like Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills are gently ribbed by Gen-Xers and Millennials as Things White Boomers Like.
In part 2 of Epix’s Laurel Canyon, the next generation of Canyon dwellers were more unabashedly commercial than their predecessors, less hung-up on progressive ideals. Think Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, or The Eagles. Sixties folk/rock musicians were delighted to discover that you could make a good living doing what they loved. By the ‘70s, it was now possible to become seriously rich. The communes and the Maharishi and the acid were faded memories by then.
This post is part of the June 2020 Ricochet Group Writing project, relating to “Music that makes me want to…”
Published in Culture
Apparently they had a blast…
The Beach Boys often didn’t play on their recordings either.
True. Dennis Wilson barely knew which end of a drumstick was up for quite awhile. Still, Brian Wilson is a real musical genius.
We should also credit Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart–great pop songwriters– who helped the Monkees along.
John Lennon and Harry Nilsson didn’t seem to have any problems with Mickey Dolenz joining their mega-benders as “the vampires” in the private VIP rooms of this or that LA nightclub for a time in the early 70s.
Speaking of abusing substances with John Lennon in early-70s LA, David Bowie — looking back in anger (pun intended) at his death’s-door multi-year cocaine addiction in that city — was on record (no pun intended) as declaring that he wouldn’t shed a tear if a thermonuclear weapon extirpated the place.
What a difference by the passage of just a few years following and the drift to a few streets over from the late-60s Laurel Canyon idyll.
Of course, I rather doubt that The Thin White Duke would have had the slightest trouble locating an equal amount of cocaine in London.
Yep. People tend to break artists down into geniuses and hacks. There are always a couple of the former and a lot of the latter at any time or place, but there’s also an in-the-middle category, professionals, recognized from the inside, that overlap the other two, whether we’re talking about baseball players, car designers, cameramen or musicians. Los Angeles studio session musicians took the job seriously. The rockers among them generally had fewer problems about doing flat-out commercial work than their counterparts in San Francisco or New York.
My first duty station in the Coast Guard was on a buoy tender in San Pedro (Los Angeles). One of the crew members I befriended had parents who lived in Laurel Canyon, and I was invited to their home.
This was in 1979, and they had probably lived there since the late 1960’s. My friend’s step-dad worked as an engineer at Lockheed, and by the time I got to know him, he had retired from them.
So for me, this is not a story of music bohemians, but of those middle-class people the OP mentioned who could afford a house with a pool north of Los Angeles. I had no inkling such a bohemian society existed there.
The idyllic places in L.A. weren’t all occupied by movie stars and millionaires; as a couple of commenters here have said, for generations one of the attractions of SoCal life was (relatively) open space and (comparatively) cheap land. Even when rising prices leveled that advantage considerably, the city’s unusual topography meant there were a lot of hidden nooks and steep crannies that couldn’t be easily turned into normal suburban development.
As a general rule, that unusual topography meant that it cost a lot more to build there.
The most buildable lots were occupied by the early 1950s, with modest standards of square footage and luxury. Labor and materials were cheap. The most ambitious LA architecture–futuristic extravaganzas like the Chemosphere House were built on difficult plots. Getting materials up the ridge was a nearly heroic task, but the results still stir memories of a space age when anything was possible.
Wow, a comment from @michaelsmalone! For anyone who loves the way that technological history can blend with politics and culture, this is like having Glenn Gould stop by your music store…
Seems appropriate here for a story from May Pang. Apocryphal? You be the judge.
Lennon and Nilsson were tying one on at an LA club, and Lennon had placed a feminine hygiene product on his head as a “hat.” Dissatisfied with the service, Lennon said something to the effect of “Don’t you know who I am?” To which the waitress responded “Yeah, you’re some “a-h” with a Tampax on his head.”
As a long time FZ aficionado I just about feel out of my chair when I saw that episode back when MTV was running the Monkees in the 80s.
It’s a shame that “Head” is such an unwatchable film. Not that “200 Motels” is either.
“200 Motels” is a mess, but a weirdly interesting one. It was one of very few films that were shot on videotape and transferred to 35mm film after editing.
BTW, not that you guys wouldn’t trust me, but here’s the original February 5, 1970 NYT review of what was then titled “Patton: Salute to a Rebel“.
I’d mentioned in a comment last year that “Kelly’s Heroes”, later in 1970, had the same kind of studio nervousness about trying to sell a war picture to allegedly battle-phobic audiences. First they released a Peter Max-styled poster with the slogan “They had a message for the Army…Up the Brass!”
But after Fox’s “Patton” became a huge hit, they hastily revised the marketing materials for “Kelly’s Heroes”. Now the poster tag line was “They started out to rob a bank, and damn near won a war!”
Kelly’s Heroes followed anti-war MASH as to release date? With Sutherland in both. I don’t know when filming was done, but it seems people would make the connection between Hawkeye and Oddball.
Well, I knew he was Hawkeye and Oddball.
I wish I had some idea what I knew then.
I saw MASH in a theater when I was in college. I can’t remember when I first saw Kelly’s Heroes.
The first movie I remember him in was as one of The Dirty Dozen.
I don’t think I ever saw that.
Definitely not an anti-war film. Great cast, Lee Marvin, Sutherland, Jim Brown, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, John Cassavetes, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Clint Walker and the underrated Richard Jaeckel. Not to mention Trini Lopez!
Hah! Another Richard Jaeckel fan. Back in the day, we were required to like the movie version of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion . And later, “Spenser for Hire.”
I did like Sometimes a Great Notion; except the first time I saw it it was entitled Never Give an Inch, I think.
I liked it enough that I read the book. Then I read One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, then The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.
Sure, it’s a sloppy rendition. But that’s not his primary instrument or genre.
And he got all the notes in.
For the hardcore it stands as a time capsule. I really don’t believe if Frank were able to tape/film the whole script, it would’ve fared better. The “Story of 200 Motels” is more fun to watch than the actual film.
Frank could write skits, but was unable to maintain a narrative (see also: the horrid “Thing Fish” and more successful Joe’s Garage”).
Nobody held their sticks like Ringo did until Ringo did. Then everybody did. It’s the dominant technique now. And whatever faults Ringo might have had, he was a freakin’ metronome.