Post by the Scribe on Jun 11, 2020 12:46:04 GMT
Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time Delves Into a Dreamy, Horny Lost Era
www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/06/laurel-canyon-place-in-time-epix-documentary-review
A new documentary examines a singular music scene—and the Boomer generation’s abandoned principles.
BY TRACY MOORE
JUNE 1, 2020
The Eagles’ Glenn Frey in his Laurel Canon days.COURTESY OF EPIX.
As subjects go, the quaint hippie hood of Laurel Canyon is the gift that keeps on giving—much like the STIs traded freely among its inhabitants. In the half century that has passed since its peak, scads of books, television programs, and oral histories have thumbed a reverential ride back up the winding roads between Sunset and Mulholland.
Now Epix is premiering a new documentary on the subject: director Alison Ellwood’s new two-part docuseries Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time, that premiered May 31. Through newly found, playfully intimate photos and footage, fresh interviews with a few dozen key players, and extensive photography collections and narration from Canyon photographers Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde, Ellwood serves up a sun-dappled, quarantine dream of a place whose significance to the era’s music scene can’t be overstated.
Between roughly 1965 and 1975, Laurel Canyon—a charmed cluster of swerving roads and offbeat cottages that recline between Hollywood and the Valley—lured grade-A musicians from Joni Mitchell to the Byrds, Love, the Turtles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, the Doors, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, and more. They lived within weed-wafting distance from each other; crafted and recorded transcendent, genre-swirling, wildly successful music; threw all-night, epic soirees and pool parties (with ping pong tournaments!); stayed constantly baked; and got extremely laid.
Together, they would enshrine the moment folk went electric, seducing country, blues, jazz, classical and psychedelic rock as well—and everyone got Rolls-Royce rich off the windfall. (Literally, as shown in the documentary: Stephen Stills buys a Rolls Royce. The Mamas and the Papas buy three, and a couple Porsches. And the Eagles will out-earn them all.)
Ellwood uses audio-only interviews in lieu of on-camera shots of the musicians in the present day, a remarkable way of preserving this atmosphere without intruding on it. The mood A Place in Time gives us is a big, dreamy, horny one, not entirely unlike the one we all seem to be pining for today—whether we realize it or not.
This is an era when one could easily rent an entire house in Los Angeles and never lock the door—at least, until Charles Manson’s murderous followers chilled the city. Minds, we are reminded a half-dozen times by Jackson Browne, David Crosby and others, were routinely expanded, cracked open and blown, mostly due to some of the most potent weed then known to man. All of it was set against Insta-worthy backdrops we’d loosely refer to today as “goals.”
Laurel Canyon isn’t just about the neighborhood as seen through Ellwood’s eyes, shot as if every hour is the golden hour. It’s not just about the lifestyle recounted by its then-barely-adult participants, where drugs were free-flowing (Peter Tork of the Monkees once told Rolling Stone that kilos of weed were often casually dropped off in suitcases) and bodies even freer. It’s not just about the aesthetic, either, with its indoor-outdoor living vibe, garden patches, wild flowers, a flood of natural wood and light, and the calling card of young, modern decor, cacti.
It’s about what the landscape and its denizens fused, musically and personally, and the age-old tale of music scenes that build, peak, and flame out that keeps the story alive, which Ellwood gives us with a steady flow of matter-of-fact reflections.
This is where Neil Young moved to join Richie Furay’s band, Buffalo Springfield, on lead guitar with Stephen Stills, then left to form Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, then decided to go solo. Where Love—with its two black members, Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols—would be barred from touring the south, and struggle to match the success of peers like the Doors.
It’s where David Crosby would be kicked out of the Byrds, but first harmonize with Stills and Nash (at Joni Mitchell’s house? In Mama Cass’s living room: No one can remember; they were all too stoned). This is where Stills would lose a spot in the Monkees to Peter Tork—he had a snaggletooth execs didn’t love—while Tork, a nudist, threw fabulous parties. Women swam naked in Zappa’s duck pond in full view of Joni Mitchell’s living room. Everyone swapped copies of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. The Mamas and Papas swapped partners a half-dozen ways. Sometimes Jimi Hendrix, Ringo, and George stopped by to jam.
Everyone fell for Joni Mitchell and/or her talents. The night Mama Cass brought Eric Clapton over to see her play, he sat gobsmacked. “I had the best pot in town,” Crosby says in the film. “I would give people a joint and they would get stoned, completely stoned out of their gourd. They’d listen to Joni play and their brains would run out their noses into a puddle on the floor, and that’d be that.” Crosby was in love with Mitchell, but Mitchell would fall for Graham Nash, before ghosting him via telegram. Also, at some point, Keith Richards maybe burned down a house.
“This was a good time to be starting a band,” Robby Krieger of the Doors remarks at one point, an incredible understatement. The live footage here, it must be said, is a fan’s dream: at one point in time, you could catch the Doors, Love and the Byrds on the same bill at a club that held no more than 500 people, or see Steve Martin do standup in a tiny club opening for Linda Ronstadt.
Laurel Canyon’s bubble would be slowly deflated by real life: the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the stabbing of 18-year-old black festivalgoer Meredith Hunter at Altamont by a Hells Angel, and the Manson murders. (For what it’s worth, Charles Manson tried to make it in a band in Laurel Canyon too. Unfortunately, they sucked.) Woodstock bisects the series. The second half of the doc (airing June 7) will take on the first five years or so of the ’70s and the second wave of residents, like Linda Ronstadt, J.D. Souther, and the Eagles—as well as coke’s swift dethroning of grass as the drug du jour.
Bands would come and go, and eventually, all that money would relocate the more successful Laurel Canyoners to wealthier enclaves like Bel Air. Notably, Don Henley explains in the film, the second that real money was on the table, those all-night jam sessions were abandoned—seen as opportunities to steal each other’s melodies.
The cash grab that ends Part One of Laurel Canyon is the only tipoff to what will become of Boomers and their eventual descent into crass, destructive consumerism. But those of us who aren’t of that generation should remember that we’re so disappointed in them largely because of beautiful moments like Laurel Canyon. The film emphasizes how at the time, Boomer ideals matched what any so-called woke person might care about in the present day. “Hippies,” Jackson Browne mentions at some point, may now be an easily mocked concept—but once upon a time, becoming a hippie meant “getting hip, opening up” to the world around you, turning on to the realities of injustice and human possibility.
From the Archive: It Happened in Laurel Canyon archive.vanityfair.com/article/2015/3/it-happened-in-laurel-canyon
Seeing these bands in peak, art-making collaboration, alongside near baby-faced photos, underlines something else: they’re kids, really, as naive about the world’s problems and solutions as they are prescient about music.
Ellwood isn’t telling us what to make of all this in the context of 2020, not any more than her subjects seem able to. They simply were as they were, and A Place in Time is merely a snapshot of a particularly fertile yet myopically flawed moment of youth culture. (Most of the good ones are both.)
“A writer can move time around,” Joni Mitchell says about halfway through Part One. “You can take incidents that happened over a span of 15 years and make them occur in one moment. Maybe the truth doesn’t rhyme.”
www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/06/laurel-canyon-place-in-time-epix-documentary-review
A new documentary examines a singular music scene—and the Boomer generation’s abandoned principles.
BY TRACY MOORE
JUNE 1, 2020
The Eagles’ Glenn Frey in his Laurel Canon days.COURTESY OF EPIX.
As subjects go, the quaint hippie hood of Laurel Canyon is the gift that keeps on giving—much like the STIs traded freely among its inhabitants. In the half century that has passed since its peak, scads of books, television programs, and oral histories have thumbed a reverential ride back up the winding roads between Sunset and Mulholland.
Now Epix is premiering a new documentary on the subject: director Alison Ellwood’s new two-part docuseries Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time, that premiered May 31. Through newly found, playfully intimate photos and footage, fresh interviews with a few dozen key players, and extensive photography collections and narration from Canyon photographers Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde, Ellwood serves up a sun-dappled, quarantine dream of a place whose significance to the era’s music scene can’t be overstated.
Between roughly 1965 and 1975, Laurel Canyon—a charmed cluster of swerving roads and offbeat cottages that recline between Hollywood and the Valley—lured grade-A musicians from Joni Mitchell to the Byrds, Love, the Turtles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, the Doors, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, and more. They lived within weed-wafting distance from each other; crafted and recorded transcendent, genre-swirling, wildly successful music; threw all-night, epic soirees and pool parties (with ping pong tournaments!); stayed constantly baked; and got extremely laid.
Together, they would enshrine the moment folk went electric, seducing country, blues, jazz, classical and psychedelic rock as well—and everyone got Rolls-Royce rich off the windfall. (Literally, as shown in the documentary: Stephen Stills buys a Rolls Royce. The Mamas and the Papas buy three, and a couple Porsches. And the Eagles will out-earn them all.)
Ellwood uses audio-only interviews in lieu of on-camera shots of the musicians in the present day, a remarkable way of preserving this atmosphere without intruding on it. The mood A Place in Time gives us is a big, dreamy, horny one, not entirely unlike the one we all seem to be pining for today—whether we realize it or not.
This is an era when one could easily rent an entire house in Los Angeles and never lock the door—at least, until Charles Manson’s murderous followers chilled the city. Minds, we are reminded a half-dozen times by Jackson Browne, David Crosby and others, were routinely expanded, cracked open and blown, mostly due to some of the most potent weed then known to man. All of it was set against Insta-worthy backdrops we’d loosely refer to today as “goals.”
Laurel Canyon isn’t just about the neighborhood as seen through Ellwood’s eyes, shot as if every hour is the golden hour. It’s not just about the lifestyle recounted by its then-barely-adult participants, where drugs were free-flowing (Peter Tork of the Monkees once told Rolling Stone that kilos of weed were often casually dropped off in suitcases) and bodies even freer. It’s not just about the aesthetic, either, with its indoor-outdoor living vibe, garden patches, wild flowers, a flood of natural wood and light, and the calling card of young, modern decor, cacti.
It’s about what the landscape and its denizens fused, musically and personally, and the age-old tale of music scenes that build, peak, and flame out that keeps the story alive, which Ellwood gives us with a steady flow of matter-of-fact reflections.
This is where Neil Young moved to join Richie Furay’s band, Buffalo Springfield, on lead guitar with Stephen Stills, then left to form Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, then decided to go solo. Where Love—with its two black members, Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols—would be barred from touring the south, and struggle to match the success of peers like the Doors.
It’s where David Crosby would be kicked out of the Byrds, but first harmonize with Stills and Nash (at Joni Mitchell’s house? In Mama Cass’s living room: No one can remember; they were all too stoned). This is where Stills would lose a spot in the Monkees to Peter Tork—he had a snaggletooth execs didn’t love—while Tork, a nudist, threw fabulous parties. Women swam naked in Zappa’s duck pond in full view of Joni Mitchell’s living room. Everyone swapped copies of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. The Mamas and Papas swapped partners a half-dozen ways. Sometimes Jimi Hendrix, Ringo, and George stopped by to jam.
Everyone fell for Joni Mitchell and/or her talents. The night Mama Cass brought Eric Clapton over to see her play, he sat gobsmacked. “I had the best pot in town,” Crosby says in the film. “I would give people a joint and they would get stoned, completely stoned out of their gourd. They’d listen to Joni play and their brains would run out their noses into a puddle on the floor, and that’d be that.” Crosby was in love with Mitchell, but Mitchell would fall for Graham Nash, before ghosting him via telegram. Also, at some point, Keith Richards maybe burned down a house.
“This was a good time to be starting a band,” Robby Krieger of the Doors remarks at one point, an incredible understatement. The live footage here, it must be said, is a fan’s dream: at one point in time, you could catch the Doors, Love and the Byrds on the same bill at a club that held no more than 500 people, or see Steve Martin do standup in a tiny club opening for Linda Ronstadt.
Laurel Canyon’s bubble would be slowly deflated by real life: the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the stabbing of 18-year-old black festivalgoer Meredith Hunter at Altamont by a Hells Angel, and the Manson murders. (For what it’s worth, Charles Manson tried to make it in a band in Laurel Canyon too. Unfortunately, they sucked.) Woodstock bisects the series. The second half of the doc (airing June 7) will take on the first five years or so of the ’70s and the second wave of residents, like Linda Ronstadt, J.D. Souther, and the Eagles—as well as coke’s swift dethroning of grass as the drug du jour.
Bands would come and go, and eventually, all that money would relocate the more successful Laurel Canyoners to wealthier enclaves like Bel Air. Notably, Don Henley explains in the film, the second that real money was on the table, those all-night jam sessions were abandoned—seen as opportunities to steal each other’s melodies.
The cash grab that ends Part One of Laurel Canyon is the only tipoff to what will become of Boomers and their eventual descent into crass, destructive consumerism. But those of us who aren’t of that generation should remember that we’re so disappointed in them largely because of beautiful moments like Laurel Canyon. The film emphasizes how at the time, Boomer ideals matched what any so-called woke person might care about in the present day. “Hippies,” Jackson Browne mentions at some point, may now be an easily mocked concept—but once upon a time, becoming a hippie meant “getting hip, opening up” to the world around you, turning on to the realities of injustice and human possibility.
From the Archive: It Happened in Laurel Canyon archive.vanityfair.com/article/2015/3/it-happened-in-laurel-canyon
Seeing these bands in peak, art-making collaboration, alongside near baby-faced photos, underlines something else: they’re kids, really, as naive about the world’s problems and solutions as they are prescient about music.
Ellwood isn’t telling us what to make of all this in the context of 2020, not any more than her subjects seem able to. They simply were as they were, and A Place in Time is merely a snapshot of a particularly fertile yet myopically flawed moment of youth culture. (Most of the good ones are both.)
“A writer can move time around,” Joni Mitchell says about halfway through Part One. “You can take incidents that happened over a span of 15 years and make them occur in one moment. Maybe the truth doesn’t rhyme.”