Laurel Canyon will probably never again witness the perfect cultural storm that formed over it in the mid-’60s and raged through most of the ’70s. The confluence of a huge generation hitting their early twenties simultaneously, a monolithic popular culture left over from the ’50s that invited scorn and reinvention, and a recording industry coming of age along with its gigantic new constituency was unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable.
In the early ’80s, a new generation of post-punk L.A. bands began hitting the boards up and down the Strip, revitalizing the Whisky (which had closed for several years) and Gazzari’s—launching pads for the Doors, the Byrds, and the Buffalo Springfield. The music was the hard rock of Led Zeppelin shot through, in the early days, with fresh energy and irreverence, though the message was a dreary litany of sex and party escapades. It was loud, uncomplicated, and blatantly commercial, and it fit right in with a country swinging violently toward social conservatism and unfettered capitalism. Ronald Reagan, despised by the canyon elite during his scolding-father reign as California governor in the 1960s, was now, unbelievably, president. The National Endowment for the Arts emerged as the favorite whipping boy of freelance cultural censors for trickling out grants to artists whose cultural and sexual orientation varied from that of pious and punishing middle-American white males. MTV arrived in 1981, favoring bands as much for their telegenics as for their musicianship, which suited the boys now pummeling the Strip just fine. Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt, and the rest jacked their hair into towering roosterish bouffants and blackened their eyes with mascara—a holdover from glam minus the androgyny that held no interest for the studly “hair” bands.
Some of the new breed took their places in Laurel Canyon—Mötley Crüe’s bassist, Nikki Sixx, among them—but a second coming of the canyon as a collective for musicians and their retinues to share ideas, dope, and generational solidarity was not to be. For one thing, the careerist streak that the ’60s canyonites had managed to keep nominally in check was now out in the open. There was brutal competition to succeed, to rack up platinum albums almost immediately. The coke, heroin, booze, and partying, despite the dire warnings of AIDS and high-profile death and debilitation, were out of control from the start. Finally, there was no unifying subtext to the music beyond exhortations to party till you puked. Even at their commercial zenith in the ’70s, when their self-absorption was at its most annoying, the canyon singer-songwriters had a nodding acquaintance with emotional intimacy and, in the Eagles, a journalist-like fetish for chronicling the times in which they were living.
The metal lite coming out of L.A. in the early ’80s, while selling millions upon millions of albums, was mostly mindless party music, as enlightening as a shot of Jägermeister and a bump of coke. Only the “hair” bands that survived the first rush of success and stupidity and allowed themselves to mature, notably Mötley Crüe, made music of any consequence. Not until the rise of post-punk alternative rock late in the decade, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, would yet another wave of bands from L.A. have any real impact. Meanwhile, Guns N’ Roses, who claimed the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Strip as their spiritual home, led a separate charge with chiseled rock that, briefly, held promise for an aggressive new form for the musician.
It can be argued that many of the conditions that allowed Laurel Canyon to become such a hothouse of creativity exist again today. Generation Y, spawn of the baby boomers, is statistically a larger generation and is hitting young adulthood in a massive demographic bulge. There is even an unpopular and desultory war steadily picking off its cannon fodder in a manner eerily reminiscent of Vietnam. Yet Gen Y has yet to show an inclination for speaking with one voice, or rallying behind a single band, as the Boomers did around the Beatles and then the L.A. bands of the ’60s and ’70s. Unlike their parents, who seized the moment and, with narcissistic glee, bent the world to their will, Gen Yers are balkanized as a cultural force and exert their influence piecemeal. Thus far their only truly huge music stars have been the Britneys and Christinas and J.Los, manufactured by boomer-age record company executives for maximum market penetration in the same manner as the Brill Building machine of the ’60s, only with far more cynicism and far fewer good records. Even the notion of chops and paying one’s dues has gone out the window in an era when everybody is a star. “Look at what we’re dealing with now,” grouses Chris Hillman, “the end game: American Idol.”
More promising is hip-hop, Gen Y’s one universal cultural obsession. Hip-hop’s deconstructed riffs and postmodern pastiche have resulted in intriguing compositions that reach across decades but still sound fresh, such as Eminem’s rap over Aerosmith’s 1973 chestnut “Dream On.” It is a testament to the sturdiness of the era’s music that it can be recycled in this fashion. And while it’s true that bands from the ’60s and ’70s reinterpreted older musical forms, especially folk and blues—the Doors went so far as to record Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song” from Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s modernist opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny— Gen Y may be the first generation of twenty-year-olds to venerate and personalize the hits of their parents’ salad days, the equivalent in 1976 of Jackson Browne covering Perry Como.
The musicians of the canyon in the 1960s and ’70s wanted to create music first and foremost for themselves. “You gotta remember one thing from my era,” says Hillman; “we got into music because we liked to play.” Part of the mission was also building a culture their parents didn’t—and couldn’t—understand. Yet hip-hop unquestionably fulfills those criteria. It’s been twenty-seven years since the first hip-hop Top 40 hit, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” and the recordings of hip-hop’s first generation of stars such as Grandmaster Flash, Run-D.M.C., Ice Cube, and Public Enemy retain their cultural relevance—indeed, have become “classics” played on radio stations devoted expressly to old-school hip-hop just as there are classic rock stations devoted to Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton.
Whether Gen Y’s best and brightest will ever coalesce in a particular place and time, as their elders did in Laurel Canyon, remains to be seen. The evidence would suggest not. Despite their great numbers, Gen Y is far more diverse racially, ethnically, and demographically than the boomers; hip-hop notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a single issue or cultural trend that could unite them as thoroughly as their parents bonded over the Vietnam War or rock and roll. They are also able, thanks to the Web, digital file sharing, and powerful recording software, to consume and create music without the intervention of the recording industry. While there will always be scenes where young musicians inspire one another—New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood is a recent example—it’s just as likely the modern equivalent of Stephen Stills running into Neil Young on the Strip will take place within the Web’s virtual Laurel Canyon. The potential is tremendous. Because of the Web, young artists are exposed to an arsenal of ideas unimaginable in the ’60s, at warp speed. And maybe that’s the point. A constant refrain, invariably posed by smug boomers, asks when the new generation will create “their Beatles.” The answers are: never, and, they already have. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy in the ’60s was right: the medium and media have reached parity. The Web is Generation Y’s Beatlemania.
Every year—sometimes in July and sometimes in August, you never know until the last moment—the people of Laurel Canyon come down from the hills to get their picture taken in front of the Canyon Country Store. They come from the Kirkwood Bowl and Lookout Mountain, from Grandview and Colecrest and Ridpath and Jewett and Yucca and Willow Glen and Wonderland. There’s undoubtedly a good reason for this tradition, which involves lots of drinking of Red Bull while the photographer, on a teetering ladder across Laurel Canyon Boulevard, waits for a break in the traffic, but nobody remembers what it is. Most canyonesque, nobody cares. As soon as the picture is taken—and everyone conspires to delay this moment as long as possible—the subjects melt back into the hills. There’s something affirming about this ritual, as organic and inevitable as the waxy yellow flowers that bloom every winter and fill the canyon with jasmine musk. It’s as if once a year the “creatures,” as Jim Morrison immortalized them in the Doors’ “Love Street,” are driven to renew their neighborhood vows.
Forty years have passed since the folk rockers first arrived, but Laurel Canyon carries on as ever. Since then it has survived attempts to ram an eight-lane freeway through its heart, two major earthquakes, and countless mudslides and fires without losing its essential character. Of all the L.A. city canyons—Benedict, Beverly Glen, Coldwater, Nichols, Beachwood, and the rest—Laurel Canyon stands apart for reasons, like the fabled marijuana high, that tend to defy explication. Lisa Cholodenko, who wrote and directed Laurel Canyon, about an aging record producer’s fumblingly chaotic life on Lookout Mountain, gets close when she describes the canyon as “kind of lazy and kind of dirty and kind of earthy and sort of reckless. That you can tuck yourself in a canyon in the middle of Los Angeles—that’s extraordinary.”
Even locals’ attempts to codify the canyon’s bona fides tend to fail. A proposed sign at the intersection of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Mulholland Highway “welcoming” motorists to the canyon inspired a half hour of contentious debate at a community board meeting. Serendipity—like the wild fennel that pokes up through the canyon’s crumbling granite walls—is tenacious here. “People like to preserve a certain kind of quality of their lifestyle,” says Gail Zappa. “They aren’t so anxious to develop it so that it loses its charm. I think it’s something very vigilant and very aware—like, ‘Don’t fuck with this, because we’re not gonna let you in here to mess with it.’” Several years ago little gravity-defying rock sculptures appeared along Laurel Canyon Boulevard. They just materialized, like crop circles. No one seemed to know where they had come from, but they looked cool and were therefore subsumed into the canyon’s free-ranging aesthetic. Word later got around that the chef at the pizza joint underneath the Canyon Store had put them up as a freelance beautification project, because he felt like it. That, everyone agreed, was very cool.
The nexus for all of the above, the Canyon Country Store, opened in 1919. The original foundations that survived its 1929 fire form the grotto-like walls of Pace, the funky-chic restaurant downstairs, which has successfully imbibed the canyon’s esprit right down to pizza-box graphics that wouldn’t look out of place on a poster promoting a Buffalo Springfield concert at the Kaleidoscope. Over the years the building has housed a combination art gallery–restaurant, while the parking lot has served as a clearinghouse for untold volumes of contraband. Glenn Frey, then a callow folkie fresh from Michigan, later said that when he happened to glimpse David Crosby sitting on the steps of the store, he knew he had made the right decision to come to L.A. “The Country Store was like the lobby of the Laurel Canyon hotel, and therefore was a fabulous fucking place,” says Michael Des Barres. “The residents of this crumbling establishment would gather for their milk and cookies. We used to go there at all hours of the day and night. It was lovely, just catching up with the dealers.”
By all that is logical, the store, with its old-timey Coca-Cola sign and twirling ceiling fans, ought to have been gentrified years ago into a merry market like the famed Oakville Grocery in Napa Valley, with pots of pesto and aioli on the sandwich board and the sort of staff that could step into a Ralph Lauren ad. Instead, it remains deeply idiosyncratic and utterly unpretentious, its only concession to trendiness being the addition of an espresso bar that hosts a daily gathering of goldbricking locals who smoke and talk while their dogs slumber in the morning sun. The Canyon Store is where ashen locals instinctively massed at daybreak the morning of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, shopping for reassurance as much as for what they could buy from the toppled stock. And where bottles of Johnnie Walker and Ketel One were cinched into sacks amid stunned silence on the evening of September 11, 2001.
Celebrities of all stripes continue to treat the store as a sort of demented commissary. While he was renting on Lookout Mountain, Liam Neeson would stop by for his morning orange juice, towering over the starstruck girl at the checkout. One night it would be a Beastie Boy by the beer cooler; another, Keanu Reeves by the magazine racks; still another, Renée Zellweger, Renée Zellweger’s sister, Renée Zellweger’s mom and dad, and George Clooney around a table at Pace (Clooney paid), while Matthew Broderick wandered the aisles upstairs.
Tommy Bina, the genial Iranian expat who’s owned the store since 1982, modestly allows, “I don’t think there is any store in the entire world that has so many celebrities come through.” With little prodding, Bina names a few. “Sophia Loren, she still comes in every once in a while. Everybody from Beverly Hills 90210, Ben Kingsley—he was Gandhi—Sofia Coppola, Johnny Depp—he always was thinking—Don Henley, Bruce Springsteen.” Bina pauses. “Robbin Crosby from Ratt.” The canyon’s omnipresent Brit faction has its own aisle marked with a miniature Union Jack stocked with HP Sauce, Weetabix, Oxo cubes, and other delights from the empire, started when David Bowie sheepishly prevailed upon Bina to order Cadbury Flake bars. Mick Jagger thereafter suggested U.K.-style Kit Kats. Before his incarceration in the Bonny Bakley murder case and subsequent acquittal in its criminal trial, Robert Blake, who was trying to quit smoking, kept an open pack of Parliaments behind the register and asked that the staff dole them out to him, one per visit. Blake later extended privileges to other jonesing smokers.
Regulars make piecemeal contributions to the decor. Christina Applegate, raised on Lookout Mountain, donated an American flag bearing a likeness of the ubiquitous Morrison, which hung over the front doors before shredding during an El Niño. The psychedelic art-nouveau exteriors were painted in 1968 by Spike Stewart, now a film director. The walls and counters are cluttered with totems: the sleeve from Jackie DeShannon’s Laurel Canyon album, a grainy photograph of the canyon dusted in snow from a freak storm in the ’40s, hand-tied incense smudges made from locally picked wild sage, and, over the front door, enormous blowups from Photo Days past. And it is here, finally, that Bina clears up the origins of the tradition.
In 1994, when Stewart touched up his paint job on the store’s facade, he concurrently designed a T-shirt, the proceeds from which were to be applied toward local animal-welfare causes. Somebody got the idea of taking a group photo of T-shirt owners wearing their purchases in front of the store on, say, the Fourth of July. This was a success. The T-shirts kept right on selling, however, so the next year another picture was taken, and the next year, and so on. Before long Photo Day was augmented with corn dogs and balloon hats and live music from unsigned canyon bands. Residents proudly display their livestock, from pit bulls to, one year, a brace of billy goats.
To happen upon these events in the middle of a Saturday afternoon—part English country fete, part founders-day celebration, part honorary love-in—is to witness the various inscrutable personalities of Laurel Canyon finally made flesh. In this city famous for having no psychic center and paltry traditions, once a year the canyon faithful jockey for position on the store’s front porch as the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard slows to gawk, just as it did thirty years before when the hippies gathered with their joints and apple wine on the concrete traffic triangle across the street, now occupied by a photographer screaming at everyone to shove over, he can’t get everyone in the frame. The impulse, then and now, is the same: Behold, the tribe has gathered. Make of us what you will, but you will know that we are here, now, in this canyon. There’s even a freak flag, flying high, as everyone flashes peace signs, hoists dogs and children and over-caffeinated beverages skyward, and cheers madly, waiting for the photographer to signal that he’s got the shot.
And then, having reminded themselves why they live here, everyone drifts back up the hill to their Laurel Canyon homes.