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Nurit wilde6/27/2023 ![]() 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. Unfortunately, they sucked.) Woodstock bisects the series. (For what it’s worth, Charles Manson tried to make it in a band in Laurel Canyon too. 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. 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. “This was a good time to be starting a band,” Robby Krieger of the Doors remarks at one point, an incredible understatement. Also, at some point, Keith Richards maybe burned down a house. 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. “I would give people a joint and they would get stoned, completely stoned out of their gourd. “I had the best pot in town,” Crosby says in the film. The night Mama Cass brought Eric Clapton over to see her play, he sat gobsmacked. Sometimes Jimi Hendrix, Ringo, and George stopped by to jam.Įveryone fell for Joni Mitchell and/or her talents. The Mamas and Papas swapped partners a half-dozen ways. Everyone swapped copies of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. Women swam naked in Zappa’s duck pond in full view of Joni Mitchell’s living room. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.īetween roughly 19, 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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.
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