Rock: 'I can only liken it to Vienna at the turn of the century or Paris in the '30s" said Graham Nash. "Laurel Canyon was very similar in that there was a freedom in the air, a sense that we could do anything."
Including, apparently, self-aggrandise. It was, in fact, Los Angeles in the late 1960s and, in the beginning, what a talented but broke bunch of singer- songwriters did was to sit on each others' wooden porches in the green hills above the city, play their new songs, smoke dope, sleep with each other and generally live the hippie dream.
The group included Nash and his soon-to-be bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Neil Young; Joni Mitchell; Mama Cass Elliott (of the Mamas and the Papas); Linda Ronstadt; Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Carole King.
Over the next decade they would write a lot of good songs about themselves and each other, become massively successful - and unwittingly help spawn a generation of guitar-toting buskers.
Browne was a native Californian but the others had come from elsewhere, drawn by the healthy folk music scene in LA, by the sunny weather and the laid-back surfers' lifestyle, and by the proximity of the high desert, important in Native American spirituality, and thus to counterculture types. The canyons, long favoured by artists, actors and radicals, were the perfect place to live, a short drive from the folk clubs and bars of Sunset Strip but a world away from the city's smog and urban ghettoes.
As British music journalist and author Hoskyns makes clear in his thorough and mainly fascinating chronicle, it was a dynamic (or devilish) duo of New Yorkers, David Geffen and Elliot Roberts, who turned the canyon talent into gold.
Roberts, who had become Joni Mitchell's manager while the Canadian-born songwriter was living in New York, moved to LA in 1967, with Mitchell following in early 1968. Their contact was David Crosby, who had been a member of the Byrds, a seminal folk-rock band famous mainly for their cover of Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man. Joni Mitchell had had a brief relationship with Crosby, who encouraged Roberts to get her a record deal with Warner's Reprise label and produced her first album.
With her first, modest advance from Reprise, Mitchell put a down payment on a wooden chalet-style house in Laurel Canyon. Soon she was sharing it with Graham Nash, a former member of British band the Hollies, who immortalised it in his song Our House. Mitchell herself captured the spirit of the place and time on her album Ladies of the Canyon, in 1970.
Mitchell also soon met fellow Canadian Neil Young, then a member of Buffalo Springfield, who had come to LA via Detroit a couple of years earlier. When tensions between Young and his bandmate Stephen Stills escalated, Elliot Roberts looked to his friend, bumptious, ambitious New York agent David Geffen to help him negotiate a Reprise solo contract for Young. Geffen commuted between the east and west coasts for a while, but, seeing the golden opportunity in this pool of talent, he soon moved to LA himself. He and Roberts were agents for Mitchell, Young and others and eventually set up their own label, Asylum.
"Geffen-Roberts was a fearsome double-act," writes Hoskyns, " . . . Elliot was the people person, emotional caretaker to the sensitive stars. Geffen was the financial wizard behind the scenes, outsmarting the industry's cleverest titans."
Geffen and Roberts prided themselves on handling the business end, leaving the musicians free to create. Opinion may be divided as to whether they were nurturing geniuses or indulging navel-gazing brats, but there's no denying that in the first years of the 1970s their stable of artists released a series of enduringly beautiful "confessional" albums, including Joni Mitchell's Blue, For the Roses and Court and Spark and Neil Young's After the Goldrush, Harvest and On the Beach. (Young also teamed up with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the "supergroup" CSNY).
IN ADDITION TO its folkies, LA's music scene also had a country strand, a legacy of the Oklahoma workers who had migrated west from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. It attracted singers such as Tucson-born Linda Ronstadt and songwriters such as Gram Parsons, JD Souther, Glenn Frey and Don Henley.
Frey, Henley and guitarist Bernie Leadon were all in Ronstadt's backing band when they left to form the Eagles. Unlike Mitchell and Young, who remained "intuitive and unpredictable", Hoskyns writes, Frey and Henley set about success with all the pragmatism of a Tin Pan Alley partnership.
"The Eagles were made to sell a million records," Elliot Roberts is quoted as saying. "They wrote to be huge."
And they were. Their debut, self-titled album, which featured such songs as Take It Easy and Peaceful Easy Feeling was a massive hit in 1972. Mellow (ie bland) enough to be played on AM as well as FM radio, the Eagles soon were regarded as epitomising the Southern California Country Rock sound. They cultivated this with a vaguely Western, denim-and-cowskulls visual image, undeterred by the fact that no one in the band was actually from California.
Linda Ronstadt, too, signed to Asylum and released a series of successful albums, though she was less happy to be a bridge between the avant-garde and the commercial and felt her breakthrough album, Heart Like A Wheel, was too slick and poppy.
By the mid-1970s Geffen and Roberts had essentially transformed the folkies and cowpokes into "Lear-jet superstars". And with the money came cocaine. Mountains of it. Always drug-friendly, the LA scene now was increasingly fuelled by coke. At the Troubadour venue and the Roxy, the Sunset Strip club partly owned by Geffen and Roberts, it was rampant. People proudly sported tiny gold spoons around their necks and at meetings at Asylum the trips to the bathroom became alarmingly frequent. According to some observers, musicians were doing so much of the stuff they were walking onstage with nosebleeds.
There were other changes too: many of the former Laurel Canyon crowd moved to upmarket Malibu and began hanging out with film stars and the Hollywood elite. They swapped their battered old jeeps and dune buggies for chauffeur-driven limos. Mitchell captured the changes on Court and Spark, released in 1974.
In that year, Geffen, who had already amalgamated Asylum with Warner Brothers' Atlantic and later Elektra labels (much to the chagrin of many of his artists), was hailed by Time magazine as "the financial superstar of the $2 billion pop music industry".
Inevitably, as the 1980s crawled closer the rot really set in. The list of drug casualties grew. Punk exploded. Joni Mitchell turned to jazz before eventually giving up music for painting. Always an outsider, Neil Young continued to write and record, treading his own wayward path (he was sued by Geffen in 1983, allegedly for making "musically uncharacteristic records"). Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have also re-formed on occasion for concerts.
The Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), released in 1976, became the biggest-selling album in US history, selling more than 28 million copies. Hotel California, also released in 1976, whose songs epitomised the era's coke-fuelled, palm-trees-and-mirror-shades hedonism, was their biggest-selling studio album. But racked by drugs and personal differences, the brand broke up in disarray in the late 1970s. They re-formed for touring purposes after they met up and played at the band's induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Their European tour later this year includes Dublin in June.
BARNEY HOSKYNS CHRONICLES this neglected period of rock music history in depth. It's a timely endeavour, as, after being reviled in the punk and post-punk eras, singer-songwriters are once again fashionable.
In the book, the songs and the squabbles, the affairsboth business and romantic, and the songs about the affairs, are diligently documented and woven together into an elegy for the scene. It may have turned ugly in the end but for a while it was a kind of Eden. Even today Laurel Canyon has a certain ghostly Bohemian cachet. Or as one "punk rocker turned TV composer" quoted by Hoskyns puts it: "I hate calling it magic, because that's crazy hippie talk. But the '60s culture definitely had a lasting effect."
Cathy Dillon is an Irish Times journalist
Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons 1967-1976 By Barney Hoskyns Fourth Estate, 316pp. £14.99
