Book Description

"Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boom's leading musical figures - including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few - who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed." "In new interviews with Graham Nash, the Byrds' Chris Hillman, the Turtles' Mark Volman, Gail Zappa, legendary groupie Pamela Des Barres, and other insiders, Walker traces Laurel Canyon's transformation from a countercultural paradise in the sixties, when a song written on a redwood deck could enter pop culture's permanent collection within weeks, to the dark decadence of the seventies, when fame, fortune, sex, cocaine, and, finally, murder shook the flowers from everyone's hair." What surfaces is the untold story of how an indelible swath of popular culture was created by a handful of talented and willful young adults: how a canyon in the middle of one of America's most unsparing urban landscapes played a part; and why, in the end, they made such beautiful music together.