Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns

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СКАЧАТЬ Accepting a $10,000 payoff from the Byrds, he was ready to cut loose and take time out. An obsession with sailing got him thinking about boats. He hung with Mama Cass, now holding court in a funky new abode on Summit Ridge off Mulholland Drive. A bold narcotic adventuress, Cass was even dabbling in heroin and pharmaceutical opiates – a major no-no in the LSD and marijuana community of that time. ‘[Smack] was always the bad drug,’ Crosby would write. ‘It got a little more open around the time that Cass and I were doing it, but it wasn’t something you told people.’

      Crosby was the nexus of a nascent scene, the supercool spider at the centre of a web of new relationships. ‘He was the main cultural luminary to me,’ says Jackson Browne, then struggling on the hoot scene. ‘He had this legendary VW bus with a Porsche engine in it, and that summed him up – a hippie with power!’ For Bronx-born Ron Stone, owner of a hippie boutique on Santa Monica Boulevard that Crosby regularly frequented, the ex-Byrd was the scene. ‘The Byrds were the California band of the time,’ he says, ‘and there he was, the rebel within that group, tossed out on his ass. There was no question that it all spun around him and Cass.’

      If Crosby used the Monterey Pop Festival to sabotage his position in the Byrds, he was nonetheless a key presence on that seminal weekend in June 1967. Bridging a sometimes insurmountable gulf between the Los Angeles faction behind the event and the Haight-Ashbury bands that dominated it, David hobnobbed with everyone from an edgy Paul Kantner to a diaphanous Brian Jones. Of all the LA stars he was the one who’d responded the quickest to what was happening in the Bay Area.

      The brainchild of Lou Adler and John Phillips – whose Mamas and the Papas hits had made both men rich – Monterey Pop was effectively a rock ’n’ roll trade show masquerading as a love-in. Wresting control of the festival away from LA-based paper fortune heir Alan Pariser, Adler and Phillips transformed it into a seismic event starring as many of their superstar friends and contacts as they could cram into one long weekend. Also present at the event were the key rock executives of the day: Clive Davis of Columbia, Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic, Mo Ostin and Joe Smith of Warner/Reprise. Following Mo’s acquisition of Jimi Hendrix, Joe had signed the Grateful Dead, the quintessential Haight-Ashbury band. Clive Davis now picked up Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin.

      Country Joe McDonald described Monterey as ‘a total ethical sellout of everything that we’d dreamed of’. Perhaps it was. But it was also the inevitable moment when the underground went mainstream. ‘The San Francisco groups had a very bad taste in their mouths about LA commercialism,’ Adler admitted decades later. ‘And it’s true that we were a business-minded industry. It wasn’t a hobby.’

      From the perspective of Haight-Ashbury, LA was an apolitical anti-community, a sprawl of suburbs whose only focus was the lie of mass entertainment. The Haight bands would have agreed with embittered folkie Phil Ochs, who described his adopted Los Angeles as ‘Death City…the ultimate in the materialistic exaggeration of America’. Yet it was the very tension between LA and SF that made Monterey so fascinating. ‘I saw everything change there,’ Judy James, wife of Billy James, says. ‘It was as if everyone went, “Wow! We’re no longer preaching to the converted.” They walked into this candy store of drugs and sex and saw that people would buy the music as the soundtrack to that.’

      ‘The industry totally changed after Monterey,’ says Tom Wilkes, who designed the famous poster for the festival. ‘The festival was basically a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War, against racism and all those things that were going on. Afterwards, everything opened up.’

      A year after Monterey Pop, English underground poet Jeff Nuttall looked back in disillusion at the summer of love. ‘The market saw that these revolutionaries could be put in a safe pen and given their consumer goods,’ he wrote. ‘What we misjudged was the power and complexity of the media, which dismantled the whole thing. It bought it up. And this happened in ’67, just as it seemed that we’d won.’

       2 Back to the Garden: Getting It Together in the Country

       I: Little Village

      In the summer of 1968 a gawky teenage boy from Philadelphia disembarked from a bus at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights. Vacationing near Disneyland with his folks, 16-year-old Joel Bernstein had split for the day and set off to locate the magic kingdom of Laurel Canyon. The canyon was where his hero Joni Mitchell – and many other musicians of the day – lived.

      Square-looking in his braces and Paisley shirt, Bernstein carried a camera with a long zoom lens around his neck. He looked like the gauche kid in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous – sixteen going on twelve. In the blinding sunlight he consulted a 1966 map that Frank Zappa had overseen for the Los Angeles Free Press. The map referred to Laurel Canyon as ‘the Freak Sanctuary’.

      The road climbed steadily. Joel trudged on in the glaring smoggy sunshine. Cars whooshed past him regularly on the Boulevard’s snaking bends. He became aware of sounds that seemed to come from the walls of the canyon. It was as if someone had switched on a giant radio. Round the next bend, Joel happened on two longhairs – two of Zappa’s ‘freaks’, perhaps – on the porch of a house nestled into the side of the canyon. They were sitting in the shade and strumming guitars. Without condescension they invited him in and offered to share a joint. He declined but appreciated the implicit acceptance of the gesture. A little while later he continued on his way, eventually coming to the Laurel Canyon Country Store at 2108 Laurel Canyon, as marked on Zappa’s map. Thirsty after his slow, steady ascent, he bought and guzzled a soda there.

      Higher up, at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain Avenue, Joel noticed a large log cabin. Outside was stacked a mound of garbage from which protruded the mounted artwork for Zappa’s latest album Lumpy Gravy. He walked around the cabin and came upon a pretty woman holding a dark little girl. It was Zappa’s wife Gail and their infant daughter Moon Unit. Joel snapped a surreptitious shot of them in their backyard.

      Joel never found Joni Mitchell, who was out of town. But in the summer heat and light, Laurel Canyon was so extraordinary he didn’t care. It seemed a place unto itself, the city as distant as if Joel had walked into the back of beyond. ‘If you were one of the myriad people who came to Los Angeles from the East,’ Bernstein says today, ‘your Hollywood experience was basically centred around Sunset or Santa Monica Boulevard. So when you started driving up those canyons, you were like: “Are you telling me this totally rural setting is just a half mile from that office we were just in?”’

      Bernstein’s reaction to Laurel Canyon was typical of the late ’60s, when scores of musicians and scenesters swarmed into the area. A warren of winding, precipitous lanes, the canyon drew rock and roll people in the same way it had attracted artists of all types for half a century. Rising between the flatlands of Los Angeles to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north, Laurel Canyon was above it all – a funky Shangri-La for the laid-back and longhaired, who perched in cabins with awesome views of LA’s sprawling basin. Pine and oak grew alongside palm and eucalyptus trees. Yucca and chaparral covered the sheer hillsides and hung over the wedged-in homes. Rabbits and coyotes lurked in the vegetation. ‘The СКАЧАТЬ