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Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon (2009)

by Harvey Kubernik(Favorite Author)

3.91 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1402765894 (ISBN13: 9781402765896)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Sterling

review 1: This is a beautiful, deeply satisfying book. It is a coffee-table book filled with pictures and oral history about the Los Angeles music scene in the 60's and 70's. Laurel Canyon is the mountainous area just above West Hollywood, a 5 minute drive from the Sunset Strip, an easy commute from where proto-hippies lived, created music, made popular history at the various clubs and recording studios. Let’s see: Frank Zappa, Brian Wilson, The Doors, the Monkees, Love, The Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash,Jackson Browne, The Momma’s and The Poppas, Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Donovan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, among others, lived in Laurel Canyon at one time and changed the musical world. I read this immed... moreiately after finishing Electric Eden, Rob Young’s seminal tome on English folk music, acoustic and electric. The contrast is striking; The Brits made ethereal music, usually with no thought of commercial potential, and remained total amateurs, drifting into obscurity. In Laurel Canyon, the long-hairs went down the mountain to sell their wares, working with the best engineers and record producers in America and achieved riches and immortality: You remember a pop song from the 60’s and 70’s? It’s likely produced in Los Angeles by one of the above strivers. Americans do commerce and hedonism, often at the same time. New York produced the Velvet Underground, San Francisco the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and L.A. everyone else.
review 2: Honestly, I can't say I read the whole book. The narrative voice was just too trying! Either it was devoted to linking short quotes by musicians (mostly name dropping) or it focused on giving you a sense of the setting using really stilted hip-in-the-sixties speech, man. I liked looking at the pictures and getting a sense of the scene, however. The book itself was beautifully bound and the page layout was very attractive. Nice matte paper. less

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