![]() ![]() In that regard it’s closer to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than Jakob Dylan’s Echo in the Canyon.īut that also makes this historical moment seem more fleeting. Their archival images and films make up the bulk of Laurel Canyon, which makes it all seem more immediate, as though fifty years ago was just yesterday. Rather than the usual musicians rhapsodizing about their youth, Ellwood frames the documentary with remembrances by a pair of photographers, Nurit Wilde and Henry Diltz. There are, refreshingly, few talking heads in these two episodes. Elwood’s documentary strays from the locale in its title, traveling as far away as Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival in 1969, which demonstrate how deeply these new musical ideas were taking across the country. ![]() The popularity of the music written in the hills above the Strip meant that Laurel Canyon’s most famous residents spent more time away from the canyon, spending weeks in the studio recording their next albums or months on the road playing their songs in front of growing legions of fans. It was a neighborhood galvanized by the riots in 1966, when young clubgoers protested a police-imposed curfew - a pivotal moment in ‘60s radicalism and the inspiration for Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” It also gave these musicians access to the city itself - in particular, the happening Sunset Strip clubs like the Troubadour, Pandora’s Box, Ciro’s Le Disc, and the Hullabaloo Club. Laurel Canyon didn’t just offer a sense of community along with unobstructed views of the city at night. The stories go on and on, too much for even a lengthy documentary to contain. about twelve hours early for their audition. ![]() A band of freaks from Phoenix, Arizona, calling themselves Alice Cooper showed up at Frank Zappa’s cabin at 7 a.m. Mama Cass introduced Stills and David Crosby to a British musician named Graham Nash, and the trio became one of the most successful groups of the 1970s. A struggling musician named Stephen Stills flubbed an audition for a TV show called The Monkees, but suggested his roommate Peter Tork try out for a role. Across two 90-minute episodes, Laurel Canyon traces the comings and goings of several generations of folk rockers down the boulevard and up into the hills.Įllwood depicts this place as something like a bucolic community that enabled and encouraged romantic and musical collaboration among its denizens. This strange, paradoxical place - a rustic mountain paradise nestled within the purgatory of Los Angeles - is the subject of a two-part documentary on EPIX, directed by Alison Ellwood and produced by Alex Gibney. Together, they transformed folk music into folk rock and singer/songwriter fare, transforming it with new sounds, new ideas, new priorities, and - it can’t be denied - new drugs. Up these narrow, twisting mountain byways lived many of the musicians who, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, exerted an incalculable influence on popular music: the Byrds chief among them, but also the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Love, James Taylor, the Monkees, and Crosby Stills & Nash. Along the way small roads split off into the mountains like tributaries from a river. Splitting off from Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Laurel Canyon Boulevard runs a circuitous route through unkempt mountain acres, past the Laurel Canyon Country Store, weaving and curving for miles before finally spilling out in Studio City.
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