A Place in Time to premiere on EPIX on May 31st 

     Harvey Kubernik the head of editorial at cavehollywood.com in 2019-2020 served as a

consultant on a new 2-part documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time. Alison Ellwood is the director who previously helmed the authorized History of the Eagles.   

     Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time debuts on cable television Premium network EPIX that will be broadcast on Sunday, May 31st at 10 p.m., and conclude the following Sunday, June 7th at 10 p.m.  

     It’s an intimate portrait implementing rare and newly unearthed footage mixed with audio recordings and photos, features all-new interviews with Love co-founder Johnny Echols, Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Little Feat’s Paul Barrere, Sam Clayton and Bill Payne, Alice Cooper, Richie Furay, Michelle Phillips, Micky Dolenz, Graham Nash, Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger of the Doors, the Turtles’ Mark Volman, Jim Ladd, David Crosby, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, Bernie Leadon, Eliot Roberts, David Geffen, Russ Kunkel, Owen Elliot-Kugell, daughter of Mamas Cass Elliot as well as photographers Nurit Wilde and Henry Diltz whose work is spotlighted.   

     Executive produced by Frank Marshall, The Kennedy/Marshall Company; Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey, co-presidents of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television; Craig Kallman and Mark Pinkus, Warner Music Group; Alex Gibney, Stacey Offman and Richard Perello, Jigsaw Productions; and Jeff Pollack. The film is produced by Ryan Suffern, The Kennedy/Marshall Company, and Erin Edeiken, Jigsaw Productions.   

    “As for Laurel Canyon…My father Barney Kessel, a jazz icon and record producer, lived in Laurel Canyon in the late forties on 8051 Willow Glen Road,” offers David Kessel, CEO Cavehollywood.com.    

   “Barney resided in this now heralded region which gave him easy access to Hollywood and San Fernando Valley to drive to Norman Granz-produced recording sessions with Charlie Parker, Fred Astaire, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as well as live bookings in downtown Los Angeles and the Light House in Hermosa Beach. 

     “During 1956-1960 he headed A&R for Granz’s Verve label in Beverly Hills while holding the number one guitarist position in the Down Beat, Playboy and Esquire magazine polls from 1947-1960.   

    “In the fifties and sixties he was a first-call session guitarist on recordings by Elvis Presley, the Coasters, Larry Williams, Julie London, Ricky Nelson, the Monkees, the Byrds, Sonny & Cher, the Beach Boys, John Lennon, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, and Phil Spector-produced Wrecking Crew dates while working with Shelly Manne, Ray Brown, and collaborating with Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd in the Great Guitars.

  “In 1967 Barney Kessel’s Music World was located on Vine St. in Hollywood.  Customers included George Harrison, John Lennon, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Chris Darrow, Frank Zappa, Al Jardine of the Beach Boys and Bobby Womack.  In 1969 Barney did an album for Atlantic Records, HAIR IS BEAUTIFUL. 

     “Over the last two decades cavehollywood.com has proudly exhibited a plethora of Harvey Kubernik articles, essays and interviews with veterans of Laurel Canyon: Micky Dolenz, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Johnny Echols, Mark Volman, Howard Kaylan, Richie Furay, Don Randi, Guy Webster, Michelle Phillips, John Mayall, Danny Hutton, Graham Nash, Henry Diltz, and Nurit Wilde around his 18 published book titles.       

     “Harvey’s literary music anthology Inside Cave Hollywood: The Harvey Kubernik Music InnerViews and InterViews Collection Vol. 1, was published in December 2017, by Cave Hollywood. 

     “In 2009 Harvey wrote the acclaimed coffee table book Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon, published in paperback edition in 2002.

       “New Mexico-based reviewer Damien Willis in the Los Cruces Sun News touted his title. ‘If you’re interested in learning more about the Laurel Canyon scene, I’d recommend a fantastic book by Harvey Kubernik. It features a foreword by Ray Manzarek of the Doors and an afterword by music producer Lou Adler.’  

   

   “After seeing the EPIX preview trailer of Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time I asked Harvey, a graduate of West Hollywood’s Fairfax High School, who took his Driver’s Education class lessons in Laurel Canyon, to provide oral histories from his own 1974-2020 interviews with the Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time screen participants. 

  

  “Harvey and I really wanted to give our viewers a real authentic sense of Laurel Canyon’s legendary 1965-1975 musical community. Harvey suggested transcribed voices in a multi-voice narrative. He selected over 30,000 words from the 1.2 million in his Laurel Canyon file that I’m proud to display around Henry Diltz’s photographs.  

     “In 2013 Harvey, Henry and archivist/librarian Gary Strobl teamed with ABC-TV in 2013 for their Emmy-winning one hour Eye on L.A. Legends of Laurel Canyon program hosted by Tina Malave.   

    “Special thanks to Henry Diltz and Gary Strobl for supplying pictures which Harvey picked for display.” 

Henry Diltz: 

 “The Beatles changed everything. They took our Everly Brothers harmony and put it together with that skiffle music and came up with a new joyful thing. As folk musicians in early 1964 we heard and saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show. We pulled into a motel, rented a room and watched them on television. We saw them and said, ‘Wow.’ We want to make music like that. Why are we singing about the ox driver? We want to make joyful music, and we need to get an electric bass and trade in our upright bass. So did every other folk group, like the Byrds and then Buffalo Springfield.      

  “We would go back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. We’d sometimes play the Troubadour for a week or two weeks in a row. And A Hard Day’s Night was billed at an all-night movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard. There were two houses on Hollywood Boulevard that had double features and open to 4:00 am. We went to a screening after a Troubadour show. I had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I sneaked it in under my coat and sat it on my lap and recorded the whole soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night, ‘cause I wanted to also hear the dialogue with the songs. I went back and saw it a second time.  

    “It was around then I first met Gene Clark. I was at the Troubadour one night when they had tables near the bar. And there was my friend David Crosby and Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, with another guy. ‘Hey Tad. Meet our new friend Gene Clark. He just moved here from St. Louis and we’re going to start a group and call it the Beefeaters.’ I went, ‘Oh man, that’s great.’ I was Tad at the time, and changed my name, like Jim later did to Roger, from our belief in Subud. 

    “They loved the Beatles, and McGuinn would get up on stage at the Troubadour hoot nights and do Beatles songs solo on a Rickenbacker. I sent my girlfriend Alexa in Hawaii a letter about the MFQ in Hollywood and the new Beefeaters group.

   “In 1965 I was living in Laurel Canyon. I went to Gold Star studio in June 1966 when Buffalo Springfield was doing their debut album. I had recorded there before with the MFQ and Phil Spector. I was in the room in July when Buffalo Springfield cut ‘Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.’ I met their dog Clancy in the parking lot. 

     “For their Buffalo Springfield Again back cover, Stephen called me one day and said, ‘Hey. I’d like you to write out this list of names that inspired us in your calligraphy handwriting. People we want to thank.’  I’m in there as Tad Diltz, my old name. 

  “Then the Monterey International Pop Festival happened in 1967.  As a photographer John (Phillips) asked me to do it. I never thought I was doing something historic. My job was to hang out and take photos of everybody doing what they did because I enjoyed doing it. And it got me around observing me and watching. I was used to hanging out with my friends and just documenting all the things that went on around them. And John Phillips knew that, too. Phillips was full of life and a great idea guy, very good natured. In 1966 and ’67 I had photographed Love-Ins in Los Angeles, and people just walking around. Shooting random shots of people who looked good and asking them ‘Can I take your picture?’  

     “I saw Ravi at the Monterey International Pop Festival. George Harrison’s devotion to Ravi was heartwarming. We were all discovering India. Ravi’s records were always played in Laurel Canyon with lots of incense curling in the air. And it was sort of psychedelic. And then we were reading Autobiography of a Yogi. And so we were all things India, a place that was looming, a very deep and interesting and informative world. 

    “Ravi Shankar was our hero. All you ever heard in Laurel Canyon before the festival in the afternoon was his music and incense burning. It was just the soundtrack to our lives. To really see him was great. That was very special. At Monterey everyone was in a trance. Not just the audience, but the others artists, in the crowd, like Michael Bloomfield and Hendrix, were really getting into it, too.  

    “Micky Dolenz was really into Ravi. At the time of Monterey we were into the Indian philosophy of revering the land and he wore his Indian headdress. I was closest to Micky in the Monkees from shooting the TV show. Micky was a very centered person and not a guy where it went to his head and changed him into something else. He’s a true image. Micky is a true artist. He loved doing what he did. He put his attention into things. People thought The Monkees weren’t a real band, but they proved them wrong. In ’67 I went on a summer tour with the Monkees. Micky was my neighbor in Laurel Canyon and it was great to see him at Monterey. 

       “Ravi at the time was the soundtrack of Laurel Canyon. And there is a relationship between the banjo and the sitar. They have drone strings, like a bagpipe. There is one note that plays over and over again, which is banjo. It’s the fifth string. It was in mountain modal music. And it was kind of head trippy, you know.  

    “At the Love-Ins in L.A. there were several hundred hippies meeting in the park having a very pleasant Sunday. People were smoking pot there. In January of 1967 in San Francisco they had the Be-In. And, this was the era of peace and love. And I mean it wasn’t just a word, you really felt that. People were smoking a little grass, which makes you just relax, and just enjoy life, and everyone becomes your brother. Pre-all the bad stuff, just a bunch of gentle hippies gathering to hear the greatest music in the land. 

   “I just remember being in warm crowds of fellow musicians, not a lot of record company people or promo men, I think they were all huddled together themselves over on the side somewhere. 

    “At Monterey some of the big boys introduced cocaine, and that was too bad, because that was part of the downfall of that whole wonderful scene. You know, backstage the musicians were eating and the ones schmoozing around together and sitting at tables introducing themselves, ‘Hey man, I’m so and so,’ just getting to know each other. 

    “I loved the Mamas and Papas. Michelle Phillips was very sweet as far as I could see. The camera loved her, a beautiful young girl. The ideal flower child. She had energy. 

     “Mama Cass was a force of energy. She really was an earth mother and a great spirit at that time. Mama Cass was very intelligent, very funny, and she was very hip, and those three things together were amazing. And she was warm and open and wanted everybody to be friends. She and the group had the first money, big success. Many people came through and stay at her house. You could go up there anytime and not know who would be there, you know. But that’s the way the sixties were. People hung out for the afternoon, and then all go off somewhere else to a club. I loved the Mamas and Papas. 

    “I knew the Byrds as fellow musicians. I was with the MFQ, did some sessions with Phil Spector, and I played on Bob Lind’s ‘Elusive Butterfly’ that Jack Nitzsche arranged. I didn’t see the Byrds play a lot in 1965 and 1966, except once in ‘66 in downtown L.A. because I was working with the MFQ.

     “I knew that Al Kooper has said that during the Byrds’ Monterey set you could see the group breaking up on stage and there was a lot of tension between McGuinn and Crosby. Roger was really steamed when David sat in with the Springfield. It was a different sort of Byrds set from what I’d seen over the two years before. To stand there and watch McGuinn play that Rickenbacker 12-string was mesmerizing. It just put me into a place, and the harmonies, those were the songs we heard everyday driving down Sunset Strip on the radio. So, to me it was magic. 

     “I do know at Monterey there was tension in that group. Crosby was rubbing McGuinn and Chris Hillman the wrong way somehow. Well, Crosby is a Leo, the royal sign. He’s like a young crown prince of rock ‘n’ roll. He’s a great harmony singer and wrote some fantastic tunes. And Crosby has kind of a naughty boy thing. Holding up the guitar at Monterey with an STP sticker and doing his rap about the Kennedy assassination. 

   “In 1968 I went to the Miami Pop Festival. Marvin Gaye blew my mind there, in the daytime. The ‘love crowd’ wasn’t in Miami. They were Florida kids and college students, not the ‘Love- In’ crowd of California. I did see the impact of Monterey at Woodstock. But at Monterey there was a lot of hanging out and people and the artists being together. 

    “At Woodstock the groups flew in on helicopters, and didn’t stay and hangout. And, the groups like Canned Heart, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix were younger and kinda fresher at Monterey. There was a lot of love at Monterey, and people performing for their peers. Some of the vibe of the Renaissance Fair of the San Fernando Valley and Agora area, carried into Monterey. The Renaissance Fair was Shakespeare mixed with the L.A. hippie scene, all these booths and lots of foods to eat and wares to buy. They had that at Monterey as well. At Monterey it was a closed venue, a contained little group in an outdoor festival, with bleachers on the side and at Woodstock the massive sea of faces went on forever. It was a huge hoard of people for all the eye to see.     

       “I knew Stills, Crosby and Nash in their former groups. One day Gary Burden called me. ‘Come on over. We’re gonna take some publicity pictures of Crosby, Stills and Nash.’ We both knew them socially very well. We drove around West Hollywood and took photos in an old antique clothing store. Some photos in Gary’s garage. And then Graham said, ‘a couple of blocks from here I saw this little house that looks kind of nice.’ 

     “We went there and took some publicity pictures, really. Then we got that great shot of them on the couch. By the way, they had not yet named themselves Crosby, Stills and Nash yet. Would it be Stills, Nash and Crosby? And then they figured out Crosby, Stills and Nash right about the time we got the slides back. We had a slide show. ‘Well that looks great, if we call it Crosby, Stills and Nash.’ They are sitting Nash, Stills and Crosby. It would be so simple to go back and put them in order and shoot them the right way. 

    “However, when we got there a couple of days later, the house was gone. It was a vacant lot. We decided to stick with the album cover, although there was talk about flipping it. If you did that they would be in the right order. I remember my comment, ‘Don’t do that. People’s faces are not symmetrical.’ You can tell if one of the pictures is backwards.   

    “The debut Crosby, Stills and Nash album along with The Doors’ Morrison Hotel are the pictures I get asked to sign the most. I do them with a brown sharpie and do it on the back. 

    “As far as shooting musicians live, I prefer being to one side of the stage so the microphone is not in front of the person on stage. And you pick one side or another depending on which way the guitar looks the best. And you sort of get a side front ¾ view from either way. I like to have a nice telephoto lens so I can get them waist up and guitar up. And that fills the frame generally in a vertical way.  

   “It never occurred to me back in the ‘60s and ‘70s when I was really shooting all these things that it would ever be an archive and that it would be a piece of social history. That’s what it has turned out to be. And that was a total accident. The thought never occurred to me.   

    “The 12-inch album cover was an art form. It became a real art form. It was the perfect size to hold in your hand while you heard the record and stared at it, read the back and also looked at the pictures. Now, it’s really too small to do that. So nobody sits there and stares at the CD cover. 

     “Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell and Cass Elliot were telegenic as well as James Taylor and Jackson Browne. The Doors were interesting and weren’t a guitar band. They came from a different place. It was that keyboard thing. They didn’t have a bass. Ray Manzarek played bass on a keyboard with his left hand. It was a little more classical and jazz-oriented. And then you had Jim Morrison singing those words with that baritone voice. It was poetic and more like a beatnik thing. It was different. And Jim wrote all those deep lyrics. I took photos of them at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968 when they did a concert. 

     “Jim lived in Laurel Canyon. So did Robby Krieger and John Densmore. We were all friends in the area. I knew him as a musician just as I was first really taking photos. I did one day with the Doors in downtown L.A. for Morrison Hotel and got that picture. Then two days later they needed some black and white publicity pictures and we walked around the beach in Venice. 

      “I photographed things that were around me. And that was part of the society and our generation. I would take a photo. Or I would see my friends rolling a joint or smoking a joint. I would take their picture not smoking a joint. I would take their picture eating a hot dog. Whatever they were doing or playing a guitar. In Laurel Canyon, 1966 and ’67, they had marijuana called Ice Bag, which was a light green. 

    “With the medical marijuana dispensaries around town, it obviously helps some people who have different kind of pains, or those in chemotherapy, they need it to help them eat.  It helps many different conditions. I think it’s great those people can smoke cannabis right now. God’s herb fortifies the immersion of the artistic journey. It stops the jabbering that is going on. Marijuana makes you a better human being. And a better human being cares about where they live, cares about the planet. 

    “My thought on cannabis and ongoing legalization is that it’s a wonderful tool and gives you another point of view, opens up your mind, a ‘stop and smell the roses thing.’ Since it enhances your senses, it certainly puts you in the world of colors and sounds. It should definitely be legal,” he advocates. “First of all, to me, it is God’s herb.  Before I called it God’s herb I used to refer to it as grass. Now I think of it as God’s herb. It’s a flower and I think that maybe it was put here for a reason and we got it all wrong. In these days, the medical reasons are coming out left and right.   

      “I am very encouraged by the current media coverage in the papers, cover stories in TIME magazine and National Geographic, and especially CNN, with Dr. Sanjay Gupta and his medicinal reporting in his Weed 3: The Marijuana Revolution. I’ve seen some of the fear factor taken out in the media. TV reporters are now investigating and researching the use of herb for medicinal application for seizures after parents had their kids trying all sorts of other drugs. Then they try a little THC and bang! The seizures stop. It’s happened pretty quickly. The outlaw aspect has been removed but people should respect it and use it in a wise sort of way. 

     “I met Lenny Bruce in 1964, ’65, when we played some gigs together. And he said, ‘it would be legal one day because he knew too many law school students smoking it.’  

    “I remember at The Trip night club in 1965 on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. David Crosby, who was then in The Byrds, would walk through The Trip, wearing his Borsalino hat, with a whole box of Bambu rolling papers and handing them left and right to crowd. And you couldn’t find or buy those things then. That was so cool. It was hard to get. There weren’t head shops. This was a wonderful thing. David Crosby was declarative about God’s herb. He was the Prince of pot. 

      “It’s funny. Micky Dolenz used to say, ‘Whenever they legalize pot it’s not gonna be the same anymore.’ I take his point because it was a thing that we did together. We were brothers in doing this in a communal gathering, which was illegal, as far as society was concerned, but we knew to be such a wonderful thing and it was something we share. 

    “Sort of like the American Indians passing the peace pipe and feeling a kinship and brotherhood. This was a special secret thing, a sense of community. It’s a wonderful tool if you just learn to use it in a respectful and restrained way. 

     “Smoking a little bit of grass makes me want to take pictures. It makes me start seeing things. As far as smoking and creativity, making music or framing and taking photos, I think smoking God’s herb kind of turns off the chatter and tapes playing in your head, you know. It makes you just relax and puts you in the moment to enjoy. I never foresaw dispensaries, vapes and pipes and the many different glass and edible items. 

      “One day I had a photo gallery exhibition with 100 photos of mine on the wall. Somebody said, ‘Did you ever smoke pot with any of these people?’ I looked around the room and I replied, “You know what? Every single one of them except for Mike Nesmith and Donnie Osmond.’ (laughs). 

    “I smoked pot with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. I was doing some publicity pictures of the Doors at the beach in Venice as we walked along. Somebody had just sprayed the word POT really big on a wall and we had a giggle, and took some pictures by it.  

    “I started taking photos and never thought one day I’ll have an archive of history. I think it’s great people can see, purchase and own signed limited editions of musicians. Portrait and concert shots. Wonderful days of peace, love and brotherhood. I’m glad I have this body of work that reflects those things. The fun of framing something up and pushing the button and capturing things that were lovely moments to me. 

    “My theory about the music of Laurel Canyon was that it was the flowering and the renaissance of the singer/songwriter. I think it had a lot to do with that change that it came from folk music. And then they started putting their own lyrics into it. And, smoking grass had a hell of a lot to do with it. Smoking grass had everything to do with the whole ‘60s thing. Long hair, hippies, peace and love, because that’s the way it makes you feel. And love beads and the music. Smoking a little grass makes you very thoughtful and increases your feeling and focus on things. You start thinking about trying to put thoughts into words and songs.  

Roger McGuinn:  

   “When I recorded the vocal on ‘Mr. Tambourine Man” I was trying to place it between Dylan and John Lennon.  

   “Chris Hillman and I knocked that off ‘So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ in very late 1966 at his house in Laurel Canyon. It really wasn’t about the Monkees. We were looking at a teen magazine, and noticing the big turnover in the rock business, and kinda chuckling about it, you know, a guy was on the cover that we’d never seen before and we knew he was gonna be gone next issue. A funny little song. People didn’t know how to take it. We just meant it as a satire. We got along well and we wrote well. 

    “Actually, (David) Crosby and I wrote well too for a while together when we were writing, and so did Gene (Clark) and I. We had some good times writing songs. Chris Hillman played us ‘Have You Seen Her Face’ in the studio and we cut it. We weren’t into making demos back then. Demos came along in the ‘80s. (laughs). Chris Hillman is a very gifted musician. The way he transitioned from mandolin to bass was amazing in a very short. I don’t know if he was completely influenced by (Paul) McCartney but he had this melodic thing, I guess more from being a lead player. He incorporated a lot of leads into his bass playing. 

     “David is an incredible singer for harmonies and he’s written some wonderful songs as well. I also really appreciated his rhythm guitar work. I thought he had a great command of the rhythm part of it and also finding interesting chords and progressions

     “We sang together well. I give the credit to Crosby. He was brilliant at devising these harmony parts that were not strict third, fourth or fifth improvisational combination of the three. That’s what makes the Byrds’ harmonies. Most people think its three-part harmony, and its two-part harmony. Very seldom was there a third part on our harmonies.    

    “I was driving my Porsche up La Cienega Blvd. and got around to Sunset, and Jim Dickson, our former producer and manager, he had been

fired by the Byrds, shortly before that, he still liked us, or some of us, and he pulled up in his Porsche, and signaled for me to roll my window down. “Hey Jim. You ought to record Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages.’ I said, ‘OK. Thanks.’ 

    “The light changed, I drove back up into Laurel Canyon, and pulled out the Dylan album that had ‘My Back Pages’ and learned it. I then took it to the studio and showed it to the guys. And Crosby hated it because he was mostly upset because he wasn’t getting his own songs on the album, and the reason why he left the band. There was a riff in the band, and he wasn’t getting as many as some of us. 

    “So anyway, I liked ‘My Back Pages’ and don’t remember any resistance from anybody else in the band, just David. And it was a hit and a good tune. I’m real happy with it. It was Dickson’s suggestion and I hadn’t thought of it as a song for the Byrds’ repertoire. I liked the wisdom of the song and it’s a very insightful song on the thing that happens when you think you’re so knowledgeable and wise when you’re real young. And then when you get a little older you realize what you didn’t know. Dylan’s stuff is brilliant. I coined the term that he was the ‘Shakespeare of Our Time.’ It was like knowing Shakespeare here. Dylan was carrying on Kerouac and Ginsberg. The baton had been passed. I remember Ginsberg said ‘I think we’re in good hands.’

   “We did Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom’ at the Monterey international Pop Festival in June 1967. I loved the imagery. You can’t pin it down as a peace song, or whatever, but it’s got overtones of that. It’s brilliant. I just identified with it and could relate to it. I love ‘All I Really Want To Do.’ It’s kind of a simple little love song, you know, but it’s got a really sarcastic whimsical attitude. He doesn’t want to be hassled. He just wants to be friends. We changed the arrangement from the 3/4 time to a 4/4 time. We became his ‘unofficial, official’ band for his stuff. I remember when Sonny & Cher got the hit with ‘All I Really Want To Do,’ Dylan went, ‘On man, you let me down…’ Normally, a writer would be happy to get a hit with his own songs. Who cares who did it? He was on our side. 

    “Gary Usher got the tune “Goin’ Back” to the Byrds and brought it to us in the studio and played it for us as a demo. I didn’t know of Carole King, even though I had worked in the Brill Building earlier on. And, I had never heard of the Goffin/King songwriting team. But I loved the tune and thought it was really good. Gary explained that these were ‘Tin Pan Alley’ writers who had just kind of taken a sabbatical and come back and revamped their style to be more contemporary, like we were doing. So it really fit well I thought. We learned it and put a kind of dreamy quality into it. 

.    “I had a lot of history with a lot of people at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. I was also on the Board of Directors and involved in it. It was a real wonderful thing that they did. And Derek Taylor was our publicity guy who worked with the Beatles. 

    “I really loved Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.  We were rehearsing and Gram [Parsons] came in, and there was a keyboard of some kind and I asked Gram if he could play any ‘McCoy Tyner’ because I wanted to continue in the vein of ‘Eight Miles High’ jazz fusion with a (John) Coltrane kind of thing. And he sat down and played a little ‘Floyd Cramer’ style piano and I thought ‘this guy’s got talent. We can work with him.’ That was my original thought. 

     “Not knowing that he had another agenda, and that Chris and he were like kinda in cahoots and going to sway the whole thing into country music. But I really liked country music having come up in folk I always considered country music, especially the Hank Williams and the traditional country music that Gram was into a part of folk music, so it wasn’t alien to me. And I started harmonizing with Gram, and he and I had a good blend. I was getting into it. It was fun. He and I had a lot of fun for a long time up until he left. Chris and I made a pact that we would never have any more partners and that he and I would be the only partners. And that everyone else would be workman for hire. That was our understanding. 

     “When Sweetheart of the Rodeo was released some people were heartbroken. There wasn’t a sense of despair, some were disappointed because they didn’t hear the Rickenbacker but those people didn’t show up to the gigs. The people we got were into it and they liked it. There was a fan base that was gonna go along with us no matter what we did. I remember meeting Peter Buck later saying, ‘Well its country, but its good country!’ There were people liking the album right off, and some people were put off by it but they liked it later. After, how long has it been now?  

    “It takes faith and perseverance. I’m a happy guy. It’s only recently over the last decade that I realized the impact this record has had on people, especially after meeting Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar. What is amazing to me is the whole sub culture that formed out of basically Sweetheart of The Rodeo. 

     “I was a fan of country music and we were dabbling in country rock before Gram came in. And even ‘Mr. Spaceman’ has a country beat to it. I mean, it’s a silly sci-fi song but it’s got a country, Buck Owens approach kind of song. We were dabbling in that and something we did for fun, and the only difference when Gram came along is that we decided to do an entire album of it and do nothing but that. That was the difference. And I think it was because Chris had an ally. That’s what he feels. He found an ally in Gram. And the two of them kind of swung it over to that at the time. 

      “When we did Sweetheart of the Rodeo there was unity. We used to play poker every day. I mean we were buddies who would sit around, drink beer and play poker. And when we were off in L.A. we’d ride motorcycles together. I mean, we were having a good time. It wasn’t like there was this weird animosity. There was very little of that going on. It was a friendly band, maybe too much fun. We enjoyed it. ‘Lazy Days’ is a cool song Gram wrote. They’re all good songs and we have to give Gram credit for bringing a lot of them to the sessions. Gram brought in a batch of songs. ‘Hickory Wind,’ William Bell’s ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water,’ and The Louvin Brothers’ ‘The Christian Life.’  

     “We all got along great with the musicians in Nashville and stayed at this Ramada Inn and played poker all day until the sessions at night, and had a ball. We were country boys. We got into it. I mean we had cowboy hats and boots.  I loved it, a very enjoyable experience. We were just role- playing, even Gram.  He wasn’t that kind of kid. He was a folkie. He was a preppie. Basically Gram got turned on to Elvis (Presley) when he was 10 years old, and that changed his life and he wanted to be a rock star, which he eventually became. And then he got into country, he got into Buck Owens and he got into Waylon and Willie. 

    “I think what he really wanted to do was get rid of me and get a steel guitar player.  Let’s form the Burrito Brothers and call it the Byrds basically. I didn’t want that to happen. I had put too much into the Byrds. 

Chris Hillman: 

 “The music of the Byrds is melody and lyric. One thing I’ve said before, and what our manager Jim Dickson drilled into our heads, the greatest advice we ever got, and he said, ‘Go for substance in the songs and go for depth. You want to make records you can listen to in forty years that you will be proud to listen to.’ He was right.      

   “Here we were. Rejecting ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ Mind you, I was the bass player and not a pivotal member. I was the kid who played the bass and a member of the band. Initially all five of us didn’t like what we heard on the Bob Dylan demo with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. We were lucky. And Bob had written it like a country song. And Dickson said, ‘Listen to the lyrics.’ And then it finally got through to us and credit to McGuinn, mainly Jim arranged into a danceable beat. The Byrds do Dylan. It was a natural fit after ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was successful. Roger (then Jim) almost found his voice through Bob Dylan, in a way, literally voice through Bob Dylan in a sense. 

    “I’m not a big fan of the Wrecking Crew’s track of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ It’s way too slick for me. Yes, we probably could have cut it. I don’t know if we would have had the success. And I understand completely from a business sense why Columbia and Terry brought in good session guys to cut a good track. Let’s hedge our bets here and let’s get this thing and get it as best we can. That’s fine, but not my favorite Byrds record. Whatever that means.             

    “Recording at Columbia studio. I remember that Columbia was a union room. The engineers had shirts and ties on. Mandatory breaks every three hours. Record producer Terry (Melcher) was a good guy. I didn’t really get to know him. I was shy. Columbia was comfortable to record in there. Terry was good. I liked him. I will say this, and on the Byrds albums I was not mixed back. Sometimes it worked. And I do have to say all five of us were learning how to play. Once again, coming out of the folk thing and plugging in. And we were all learning. Roger was the most seasoned musician, and we all sort of worked off of Roger. He had impeccable time. Great sense of time. His style and that minimalist thing of playing that was so good. He played the melody.        

   “And then we start doing some Dylan stuff. ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ Great song. ‘All I Really Want To Do.’ At Monterey we included Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ I didn’t realize how beautiful that lyric was until years later. ‘Chimes of Freedom’ is a killer. It’s just one of Dylan’s beautiful songs. And he was just peaking then.  

    “‘Bells of Rhymney’ is my all-time favorite Byrds’ song. What song best describes the Byrds? I would say that, because of the vocals on it.

The harmony, because of the way we approached the song and we had turned into a band. We had turned into a band with our own style. 

     “We went from doing Bob Dylan material and then we take ‘Bells Of  Rhymney’ and it’s our own signature rendition of it. It’s not like Pete Seeger’s at all. It’s our own thing. And Michael Clarke, who was a lazy drummer but when he was on he was great. And he’s playing these cymbals. A great experience. I just love that cut. 

    “The Younger Than Yesterday album. I started really writing songs after Crosby and I were on a Hugh Masekela session that Hugh was doing with this South African gal Letta Umbulu. A wonderful singer. All the musicians were South African with the exception of Big Black. I played bass on a demo session. Such warm loving people. And David was a good rhythm guitarist.  A pianist Cecil Bernard was very inspirational. I went home and wrote ‘Time Between Us.’ And ‘Have You Seen Her Face’ influenced by a blind date Crosby had set me up with along with other young ladies.        

    “The Byrds on Turn! Turn! Turn! album with ‘Satisfied Mind,’ which really was a Porter Wagner hit, and I think we had heard Hamilton Camp do it, but it’s such a great song. And then, I still think ‘Time Between’ was our country rock song of the time. That’s when we started doing that stuff. When we had Clarence White come in and played on Younger Than Yesterday. I’m not taking credit for any of that. Rick Nelson deserves credit in the country rock thing, too. Big credit. Way beyond anybody else. But you know how this business works.               

       “Gary Usher was an incredibly gifted producer to work with. Especially at the very end, and it was just McGuinn and I trying to finish Notorious Byrds Brothers. And Gary worked with us as another band member. Good ideas. Gary Usher brought us the Goffin and King ‘Goin’ Back.’ I don’t have a problem with that record.  That was Gary bringing in a song that fit us like a glove. It was perfect and its Roger and I singing lead. It’s a little too pretty but it’s OK. 

   “The original concept in 1969 of the Flying Burrito Brothers was as plain as day. Here we are. We wanted to do country stuff. And the first two years with Gram was very good, very productive and on the same page. I think if I was to look back and say, ‘Well, I’f only…’and I don’t go there, but if I did, and it was a question presented to me. He was far more confident. He was a charismatic figure. He was an interesting man at the time. I’m not saying he was a great singer. He wasn’t. He was a good singer on a couple of tracks, probably on the first album.            

    “I knew Gram and I will always cherish a couple of years when we really worked together. We were sloppy. The Flying Burrito Brothers with Gram. I just had come out of a band that recorded ‘Eight Miles High’ that went from doing Bob Dylan songs to being able to do a song like that, to doing something that musical, and to be on a par with the Who or the Beatles. The point is we became a really tight good band. And I’m in the Burritos, and I’m looking at it not from a sterile place of it should be perfectly tight, but it wasn’t. 

    “We didn’t put any time into it. And I must say, and I’m not padding myself on the back, when Gram left and Bernie (Leadon) and I took that band and we tightened it up and we made it a good band. And when Bernie left we lasted another six or eight months. It became a musical band then. Did it have the magic that Gram offered? Not really. I still was learning how to sing. And Gram was an interesting guy. He had that thing. And I don’t know what the attraction is that other than he died in such a mysterious way. Yes, he did some good songs. He had a bunch of good songs. Two songs, ‘Hot Burrito #1’ and ‘Hot Burrito #2’ are Chris Etheridge songs. Chris brought those in and Gram helped finish them. ‘She.’ Great song. Etheridge. And with all due respect to Gram, he was a good collaborator. 

    “After 1967 Monterey, what was a cottage industry and starting to develop into a profitable industry and then started to draw in…The ethics took a bit of a slide, not that they were always there, but what was a little cottage industry that was really run by music people, Jerry Wexler, the Chess Brothers, Ahmet [Ertegun], and Mo Ostin, and the people who loved music. And 1967 Monterey all of a sudden the business started to really expand. The gates opened, the flood gates opened. And FM radio, and Tom Donahue was the FM guy and he brought that to the forefront I think. You are looking at a profitable situation and we had the golden area of the recording industry and that the artists had more artistic freedom. They were signed, and kept around for 2 or 3 albums. It wasn’t platinum out of the box or you are out of the label. It was still this little tiny business that kept growing and growing. 

   “However, after Monterey and I always say 1968, the next year is when everything changed, politically and socially, every which way in our society. Yes, Monterey did open up the record business. I was learning as I went along. I got quite an education. Everyone started to get a little smarter. 

    “I got to know Paul Butterfield little bit. I remember doing a music festival with him in 1969 in Palm Springs, with the Burrito Brothers. I remember walking with Paul to the promoter’s tent with Butterfield, and he’s got his brief case with a 38 Colt piece in it, and I said to myself ‘this guy really did work on the south side of Chicago.’ Oh…Here we are in the peace and love bull shit and here he’s got his 38 loaded to go and collect his money!’ This guy is real. A real blues guy!         

     “After the Monterey International Pop Festival we did the Philadelphia Folk Festival with the Burrito Brothers. I didn’t do Woodstock, and I remember Gram Parsons and I were sharing a house in the San Fernando Valley on De Soto Avenue, and Woodstock was on the news, the situation there. We were laughing, and I said, ‘That’s no Monterey!’ And it wasn’t! Isle of Weight came along, and the Burritos were on that Festival Express in Canada in 1970. But we were only on for a couple of shows after we let Gram go. Bernie and I were rockin’ there.

   “What holds up that era were melodies. When you heard a new song on the radio the melody will catch you right away. You might hear a couple of lyrics then when you hear the lyrics if they’re strong and really saying something, yes, we do have songs that are sort of very catchy songs, but didn’t last long, like a fast food meal. It was good when you ate it but wasn’t good later. That was it. The Beach Boys. Melody, melody, melody. Even though ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ lyrics fit the melody. It worked. It swung. That era… 

   “When I do shows, I have people who come to see me play. Either they’re my age or they are young kids. Twenty to twenty five, twenty six who are enamored by the Beach Boys, Beatles, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. I think that’s as big part of it and it was real and so honest. Of course, I’m preaching to the choir and telling you things you already know. But the record companies were run by music people, people who loved music. It was not a corporate monster. And they’d sign you and you’d be on the label for three or four albums, you know. 

    “I first heard Buffalo Springfield before anyone else when Barry Friedman called me to come over to his house and listen to this band. I go listen to them, got ‘em a job at the Whisky, a year before Monterey. They were good live. They were better live than they were on record, right. And the Byrds were better on record than we were live.  

    “The sixties were wonderful. I look back at the sixties and it’s amusing to me. I don’t hold any grudges about people. I have no animosity toward anyone I worked with. But I look back and almost have a chuckle. People are obsessing over that period, still to this day. Yes, youthful idealism. You have ti be that way when you’re that age. Yes we want one great world and it’s lovely. The human condition does not allow for that. OK. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have those wonderful things when you are a young person. 

Micky Dolenz:  

  “I also used to frequent a place called the Omnibus, a coffee house. It was in the early ‘60s, this was probably the closest thing to a cusp between the beatniks and the hippie area, on Cahuenga or Las Palmas. I remember clearly it was my first foray into post teenage life, the adult world. I’m going to a junior college in the San Fernando Valley, age 18 or 19, well after Circus Boy. No drinking, and only coffee. This was bikers, and beatniks. No paisley, no bell bottoms, people in black. And still snapping their fingers and reading poetry. I had no idea what the music was about. I was doing Monday night jams at the Red Velvet. 

    “A little while afterwards, at the time, a lot of the San Francisco groups, 1966, ’67, ’68 all came down to Hollywood and recorded in the same studios The Monkees used, with some of the same engineers. Sometimes they were on the same record labels as us. Also, before I even did the TV pilot for The Monkees in 1965, and the series started to air in 1966, I was at RCA studios every night watching the Wrecking Crew and the studio musicians, play with the singers and songwriters, on Mamas and Papas sessions, the Association songs, the Beach Boys songs. And these same musicians were playing on our songs. I was a singer, I sang. I can’t express how important it was then, and now, to have songwriters. Before The Monkees I had recorded a couple of singles with the Wrecking Crew as a solo artist a year before I went on The Monkees audition

    “I remember people talking about the Monterey International Pop Festival happening, but it was almost a spur of the moment thing. We were looking for a great opening act at the time as we had a tour planned. I had seen Jimi Hendrix earlier as a backup guitarist for John Hammond, Jr. in New York. He was a sideman in 1966. Someone told me I had to go to this club to see this guitarist who played with his teeth. I didn’t know his name. John Hammond was pretty incredible. 

    “Then, at Monterey, I’m sitting and Jimi, Noel (Redding) and Mitch (Mitchell) come on stage, Jimi had gone to England, and Chas Chander out a band together for him. The Jimi Hendrix Experience. By the way, does that mean they were manufactured? Half of Jimi Hendrix’s set at Monterey were cover versions, too.   

    “Jimi walks out on stage, and I recognize him, because he’s playing guitar with his teeth. ‘Hey! That’s the guy who plays guitar with his teeth.’  

    “I suggested him for our tour because he was very theatrical. And, the Monkees were theater. You know, let’s not forget that The Monkees were a TV show about a band, an imaginary band that lived in this beach house, and had these imaginary adventures. 

    “It was theater. It was probably the closest thing to musical theater in television. It was about this band that wanted to be famous, wanted to be the Beatles, and it represented in that sense all those garage bands around the country and the world. On The Monkees show the group was never famous, it was all about the struggle for success that made it so endearing I think to the public, anyway. I saw Jimi at Monterey, told our producers, who got in touch with Chas Chandler and then Jimi’s booking agent. Everyone thought it was a great idea. 

     “I was studying drums at that time and working. Ravi Shankar was the most moving, spiritual experience and it allowed you to get into the pulse and the rhythm and into the deepest meditation. It was two hours of uninterrupted meditation in the afternoon. It was just being in the presence of those musicians ((Ustad Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty) and experiencing a form of music. The Beatles had sort of introduced it to us, but we had never heard Ravi Shankar do a concert. But this was something new to the entire audience. It was as close to a kind of ‘born again’ experience that anybody could have had in that audience.   

   “At Monterey during that time, it was all one sort of zeitgeist and the community then was quite small and local, it was only really California and New York that had any real to speak of hippie community, because it was the counter culture, and there was only a couple places in the country you could get away with it without being arrested. 

   “In fact, one of the most important things, I think The Monkees show contributed to the culture was the idea that you could have longhair and wear bell bottoms and you weren’t committing crimes against nature. At the time the only time you saw people with longhair on television they were being arrested, or treated a second class citizens. The people at Monterey, before and after, at my house were all the same people. Jim Morrison was up at the house all the time. I did some basement recordings with John Lennon. I had the first Moog synthesizer in town that I got from Paul Beaver.     

    “The culture difference between San Francisco and L.A. still exists to some degree. At the time of Monterey I think I made a donation to The Oracle alternative newspaper in San Francisco. I do remember making a huge contribution, a lot of money at the time, to some Indians in Seattle, or in Alaska, who were put in jail because of a fishing rights dispute. They sent me a beautiful painting after that. I gave them thousands and thousands to bail them out. I wasn’t deeply invested into that counter culture as others might have been. At the time, there were some people who got what The Monkees were all about, like Frank Zappa, my friend Harry Nilsson, and John Lennon. 

    “Before the hippies there were the beatniks, really. And the commercial pop environment came from that. I’ve often thought The Monkees were hit pop music. Dr. Timothy Leary said in that book, Politics of Ecstasy, ‘The Monkees brought long hair into the living room.’ And I think that may be the legacy. It made it OK to be a hippie, have long hair, and wear bellbottoms. It did not mean you were a criminal, a dope smoking fiend commie pervert. That’s what happened. A kid says, ‘Hey mom, The Monkees have long hair and wear paisley bell bottoms.’   

    “I remember Ringo once, years later, telling me how the music business has changed so much. ‘You know, all you had to do in the old days was show up with your drums and you were in the band.’ And, that’s true. And there were others who honestly didn’t get it. Rolling Stain magazine to this day still doesn’t get it.”  

Mark Volman: 

   “As far as the vocals and particularly the background vocals on the recordings of the Turtles, the basic overall philosophy of the vocal sound of the Turtles—and this goes back to the four of us:  Chuck Portz, Jim Pons, Howard [Kaylan] and myself, and then narrowed down to the three of us, Jim, Howard and I—was that it was necessary to have complementary voices. One of the things that we learned going as far back as Westchester High School was that the second tenor parts, which basically brought the melody, were important for the sound quality of the group. That was left to Howard and I. A lot of times when we would do a record, before Jim Pons became such an integral part of the singing, the backgrounds were done by me, Howard and Al Nichol. Jim Pons brought a lot to the table.  

    “Howard knew my strengths were in the quality of my voice. My voice got much more familiar to the Flo & Eddie fans, going back to the early Flo & Eddie records. I think there was always something about how we put together first and second tenor, a baritone and bass. I think there was a lot of thought in those background parts, a natural thing. As we became more and more in charge of our records and in arrangements the stuff that we brought became more and more obvious. We were pretty much the shit in terms of production of the sound. 

    “But, you know, Howard understood that we had the songs and a friendly voice when we made records in the sixties. We had records and a

familiar lead singer from song to song on the radio. That was very valuable. A familiar sound. Howard Kaylan of the Turtles or Micky Dolenz of the Monkees. We understood how important Howard was as a lead singer.        

 ‘“Elenore’ was written by Howard in a hotel room in Chicago as they [White Whale Records] wanted another ‘Happy Together.’ We sat down and shaped that song into the record that would eventually come out. Check out the second chorus. Chip Douglas produced it. 

      “Chip Douglas was now our producer. ‘The Story of Rock and Roll’ might be one of the greatest productions we have ever done and a powerful arrangement. Unbelievable. That whole high voice thing that we would eventually use on T-Rex records like ‘Bang a Gong (Get It On)’ and even with Zappa and Flo & Eddie. 

     “‘The Story of Rock & Roll’ was the best recording we ever made. Put it on. We were creating Flo & Eddie with that recording, the songwriting and production. It also showcased for the first time the way sharing our vocals. Howard always had that control and that was the way it worked. You can argue that Howard is one of the best singers of that era. Or any era. Still. A great singer.     

Howard Kaylan: 

“The only agenda I had as a singer, in the early days, to be as much “Colin Blunstone” oriented as a possibly could. That was my mission. It was to emulate that guy with his soft and loud minor major series of hits with the Zombies.

    “In the Turtles, I knew ‘Happy Together’ was going to be a big hit. We honed and developed it over months on the road. Wonderful fate. It was a luxury and it’s appreciated. I’ve never had the luxury to take something on the road for eight months and work it, re-work it and just fine tune it. And certainly when we came back from an early tour was the demo of ‘She’d Rather Be With Me.’ I was really disappointed. There were no other choices in a stack of acetates with that one on the top. The only record we ever received was the new [Gary] Bonner and [Alan] Gordon, ‘She’d Rather Be With Me’ song, and we were now the new Koppleman-Rubin (music publishers). And you better be careful what you wish for. We wanted to be the new Lovin’ Spoonful and have everything written for us and just sort of presented to us on a silver platter, so we could be those good time guys from the west coast, like the Spoons had been for the east coast. 

     “I did see the Buffalo Springfield at the Whisky a Go Go. The band rehearsed in the house that Mark and I shared in Laurel Canyon on Lookout Mountain. Richie and Stephen slept on our floor. I moved out after a failed drug bust–didn’t know if the house was being watched. Paranoid. Richie moved into my room and the group practiced and wrote there. We all knew well before they played show number 1 that they would be stars. The Atco deal guaranteed it. In the canyon, we were used to our friends becoming stars.    

   “I was at the Freak Out! recording sessions with Frank Zappa. I saw the determination but I didn’t know the product. At the time it’s not

like I was aware until after the release of the record what a genius this guy was. I still just thought he was a freak. I was living in Laurel Canyon at the time. I might have gotten the album at Wallichs Music City. I get it and we all love the album. 

     “The next time I get to see Frank was at the Garrick Theater in New York. Maybe late ’66. Or early ’67. Releasing a new record and leaving L.A. was a real big deal to us. 

    “After leaving The Caravan of Stars, we wound up in 1966 when ‘You Baby’ was about to come out going to play The Phone Booth. The Young Rascals had a hit record, ‘Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,’ and they were the house band there. 

    “Frank Zappa then has a residency at The Garrick Theater and it doesn’t start until late at night. Plus, The Turtles would finish at 10:30 or 11:00 PM every night at The Phone Booth and then we’d go to the Village and we see Zappa.  We end up friendly enough with Frank and go every night. And it’s a mind-boggling experience to us. Not just going to the show but going to Frank’s apartment afterwards. 

    “Back in that era in 1966 and ’67, before ‘Happy Togther’ hit, and we were still L.A. street people working in the same clubs and stuff, there was enough of a camaraderie there. Not only though our knowing him, but also through Herb Cohen and going to the Zappa Log Cabin.

  “I loved Frank and the records. He was singing about growing up. I was trying to sing about growing up, too. It wasn’t that far apart. When people say ‘I don’t understand how you guys ever became guys in the Mothers. How did you ever get to know Zappa in the first place?’ And I say to them, ‘man, we were all trying to get the same gigs on Sunset Boulevard.’ And largely that’s true. 

 “Nobody made distinctions in that canyon of dreams back then as to what type of music you were doing. If you were Lester Chambers and you were living in that canyon Joni Mitchell didn’t question what kind of music you were doing. Nobody did. Everybody was in there for themselves. To make their music shine for a minute while the bright stars were already living there. We didn’t want to change things. We wanted so badly to be a part of it that finding our place was so important. I’m not sure as Turtles we ever found our place but as Mothers we sort of busted out of our comfort zone a little bit. I think the Turtles were comfortable for us. 

    “Well for me, it wasn’t so much we did on stage it was his demeanor off stage that made him paternal to me. On stage he was a band leader and we were guys for hire. The fact that we got away with improve only meant we were smart enough to know when to get out of a bit in time for the music to come in. That’s what Frank respected. You could go off book as long as you got right back. No beats were lost and something was added. If you added something to the routine it was always appreciated and repeated if you could on a nightly basis or made to be part of the folk lore in some way. If it was not appreciated, Frank would let you know right on stage in no uncertain terms that this was not the time nor the place for that kind of thing. And later you would discuss it with him. It wouldn’t be a slap on the hand parent kind of talk. It would be very familial, more brotherly than paternal, but something that I never had before, which was an older figure that I respected respecting me back. The only other older figures in my life had been agents and managers who pretty much lied to me.       

Danny Hutton: 

“I was aware of Laurel Canyon, being a native of L.A., and went to Notre Dame High School. The photographer Earl Leaf used to come into a restaurant in East Hollywood I washed dishes in. I was a Hollywood kid by the age of 12. I remember Fred Astaire walking in to Wallach’s Music City and I was listening to demonstration albums in their booths. Dot Records was next door. I went to Pandora’s Box and saw Preston Epps.

“The first time I met Van Dyke Parks was when I was an A&R guy for Hanna-Barbera Music. Maybe 1963. I was at the Troubadour one night and went to a party and Van Dyke looked like a 13-year old boy and was lecturing to everybody. Van Dyke was on The Les Crane (TV) Show in 1965. Van Dyke was a thinker. Van Dyke lived on Happy Lane and the house right across from him is the oldest home in the area, an adobe house that used to be a bordello and gambling house. In the 1940s Laurel Canyon had a lot of hunting lodges.”

“In 1964 I was living in Laurel Canyon. My neighbor was Jack Nicholson, who was a writer. Not an actor then. I remember him taking me and June Fairchild out to Peter Fonda’s house in the Malibu Colony. Jack would come over to my pad after he had an acting lesson. The first time I saw Micky Dolenz was at the Red Velvet after Circus Boy ended and the Knickerbockers were the house band. I auditioned for The Monkees. I knew Bob Rafelson from Jack Nicholson. So I went down there but never made it into the office.

    “Laurel Canyon is still innocent. What I learned from Brian Wilson was how good a hit has to sound. “I had my record ‘Funny How Love Can Be,’ which followed ‘Roses and Rainbows.’ I cut it on Sunset with the Wrecking Crew. Earl Palmer on drums. I did the American Bandstand TV show with The Lovin’ Spoonful. I met them and they invited me to their sessions and some of them were done at RCA. They also worked a bit at Gold Star. Dave Hassinger, the engineer at RCA, then takes me into a room. ‘I just cut this a while ago. Check it out.’ And plays me the master tape of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction.’ Between that, and being with Brian Wilson when he cut ‘God Only Knows,’ I am listening to the clarity and how present the sounds were. 

      “All the New York people then started to invade.  And the New York people like Tim Hardin were hostile. The aggressive New Yorkers starting to come into the canyon. 

“Plus, what destroys so many groups is that their first album comes out and all of a sudden the songwriter of the group pulls up in a Ferrari. ‘Oh I got my royalty check!’ After the band hits then all the people that aren’t needed made jobs for themselves. ‘I’ll be the assistant.’ The entourages start and then the dealers move in. Then it all gets magnified.

   “There was a real innocence in Laurel Canyon 1964, ’65. The guy from Dot Records in Hollywood, Randy Wood, wore a suit, like the old A&R guys from the 1940s with the big bands. You dressed a certain way and had three hour-sessions. That was the early transition. Then it started getting serious

   “I came to Laurel Canyon in 1964 and I’m still here. Musicians, record label people, producers come here because it’s full of life and change.    

“Here it started in the ‘20s with the hunting lodges and then they started building and building and people renting out guest houses to some actor or actress or assistant film editor lives, so everyone hangs and have kids that go to the country store, so you get a community. So you have people that rent and are here for a couple of years. 

  When I perform with Three Dog Night I’m doing interviews to promote shows around the US And I’m always asked, ‘So, where are you right now?’ And I reply, ‘I’m in Los Angeles in the hills in Laurel Canyon.’ ‘Oh man!’ And I’m usually always able to say, ‘it’s about 70 degrees in January.’ Everybody who talks to me has this thing about Laurel Canyon. 

“It is a mythical place to a lot of people. There’s no sidewalks in Laurel Canyon. There are few. When you come up Laurel Canyon in a way you’re not invited. We don’t necessarily want you walking in the neighborhood. (laughs). But we want to visit between each other.

   “I first met Reg Dwight (Elton John) in 1969 in England when I was looking for songs for Three Dog Night. So I phoned Dick James Music and Reg Dwight came up to my room and had some demos, which I still have. Reg or Elton, I really liked him. He was so sweet and sincere. 

   “I invited him to a small club where we are doing a show. The bouncer came up and said ‘Did you invite somebody because I don’t have him on the list.’ He’d come with Bernie Taupin. They were downstairs in the bar and I went down and he was humming something. I said, ‘You’re a great singer.’ And Elton said, ‘Nah. I’m a songwriter, not a singer.’ Maybe he was working me.   

      “Later on I couldn’t get him on the list for our show at the Marquee Club so we brought him in as our roadie. Reg knew my resume. We were a hot, hot band. 

    “I heard ‘Lady Samantha’ and brought it to the group. Our producer, Gabriel Mekler, had all three of us sing it and had Chuck [Negron] do the lead vocal. I liked the song. We also did ‘Your Song.’ And then I got a 3-page handwritten letter from Elton thanking me for helping him and Bernie out.   

   “Elton then phoned from London and said ‘I’m coming to town. He arrived and the first place I took him to eat was Billy James’ Black Rabbit Inn. Then I brought him up to the house. I phoned Van Dyke Parks to come up. And Elton played the piano at my home on Lookout Mountain.      

Michelle Phillips: 

   “The Guy Webster photos of the Mamas and the Papas work in black and white and in color. First of all, we were a very unusual looking group. And it didn’t have to be. Remember the name of the first album: If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. If you believe your eyes you’re gonna look at that picture. And it doesn’t matter if it’s in color. It’s fine in black and white. Because everyone is looking at this very overweight beautiful woman who sang like a bird, and then there was this tall thin blonde with long hair, and this beautiful Denny and this tall guy with a mink hat on. It was something that you just didn’t look away from. You were gonna look at that picture and try to dissect who these people were. We were always very animated, too. So it wasn’t a static pose. The pictures of the group all the way show that we were going through so much. We were always kind of living our drama and seen in many of those photographs. 

“Why does our music still resonate and have influence? I’ll tell you what I think. I think that we put a lot of energy into making the material great. John Phillips was such a perfectionist. And so was Lou Adler. That was a big romance. John and Lou were perfectly suited for each other. They bounced off each other. They really appreciated each other’s gifts. John and I had never heard ourselves sing with anything more than one guitar when we went to audition for Lou Adler. So when Lou put together Hal Blaine, Joe Osborn, Larry Knechtel, and engineer Bones Howe, when we heard ourselves with a band it was amazing! It just inspired us more and more. And you know, I think we were very lucky that we picked a lot of good material. 

   “When John gave you a part you had to learn these incredibly difficult parts. He would say things like, ‘You’ll thank me for this someday.’

And he would keep us in the studio doing take after take until it was perfect. And we would already be complaining an hour before we finished. ‘But that’s the perfect take, John! It’s not going to get any better than that.’ ‘Yes it is.’ And there was just so much material.

    “As far as the Mamas and the Papas always connecting. Years ago I came home one day and turned on the television and a special from Vietnam was being broadcast. The camera panned across this audience of soldiers and marines who were fighting in Vietnam. And there is such a look on their faces, this is like 1966, ’67, just right in the middle of this horrendous war, and you can see it just etched on their faces. And the camera pans across them and there is this huge banner that says California Dreamin’. And, that just shook me to my core. It became a destination anthem. I’m the co-writer of that song. And there are still millions of people that hear the music of Los Angeles and it represents their youth that was so tumultuous and so frightening and to so many of their friends and relatives. 

  

 “And in a way Mamas and Papas music is comforting to them. You know what I mean? They can go back into their childhood and say, ‘That was the music of my era.’ And, ‘California Dreamin’’ has surpassed any kind of era. And I think ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ has done the same thing. 

    “I think the Mamas and the Papas were kind of like a bubble. It was wonderful when that bubble was floating. And then the bubble popped. And that was the Mamas and the Papas. When you think about it we were only together for two and a half years.    

   “I think Monterey Pop is a really wonderful film. I saw it two years ago on the big screen in Hollywood for the first time since it came out. You get to see what the festival was really like, and how beautiful everyone felt in 1967 on June 16th, 17th and 18th were all bright sunny days. You see other festivals and they are rolling in the mud. Monterey Pop is so representative of the time. People actually did paint flowers on their faces, put big teepees up, a time of arts and crafts.     

Guy Webster:  

    “The Byrds came to me from Terry Melcher, who was producing them for Columbia Records. I went to the recording sessions for the Turn!

Turn! Turn! over on Sunset and Gower.  I didn’t think of them as folk singers, more like rock crossovers. I loved their artistry and sound of the guitars. They came over and I did the session on my big 4×5 Sinar camera. I had them sitting on the ground before this backdrop I’d made. I was getting hip to what would happen to my cover photos; you’d leave space for graphics. I didn’t want my picture to be crunched so I gave them a full bleed with space for the words ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ up on top. So I let the blues just sort of drag down to them. It was like they were almost on strings if you look at the photo carefully. 

    “I was thrilled with it. And it got nominated for a Grammy. I also did some photos of them for publicity and they were dressed for an Edwardian portrait. David Crosby was brilliant but difficult. He’s an Ojai kid. His father was in films. He had a chip on his shoulder. Michael Clarke was so sweet and nice. Chris Hillman – pure musician. We stayed friends. I loved Roger McGuinn’s guitar work and Gene Clark’s voice.  

     “I shot The Turtles’ Happy Together album.  It was a mistake, the worst cover I ever shot. I wasn’t happy because they gave me no time, I had to shoot it outside, and the sunlight was wrong. I had everyone there; Peggy Lipton, my mother and father, my first wife, and all my friends. The band have their arms around each other, happy as clams.  And my family and friends are all sullen, seated in the bleachers. I didn’t get the effect I was looking for and wouldn’t you know it, ‘Happy Together’ became a sensation. I just don’t like it as a work of art but the label had final say and they went with it. 

     “Jac Holzman, who owned Elektra Records, called me on the telephone and said, ‘I have a group I want you to photograph.’ ‘OK.’ ‘Well, they are out at the Whisky a Go Go.’ ‘Alright. I’ll listen to them.’ I didn’t know who they were. I saw them and I liked them, but I was listening to a lot of stuff back in those days. So we had them scheduled to come into my studio, which at that time was located at my parent’s house, in the back. Because even though I was shooting all outdoors stuff at the time, when I wanted to shoot indoors, I had a small studio there. And I wanted to do them in the studio so I could get some very intimate pictures of them. 

     “And in walked Jim Morrison. And he said, ‘Guy.’ ‘How do you know me?’ ‘Guy, we went to school together.’ ‘Oh my God. Jim!’ We were at UCLA together in the philosophy department and we used to read Nietzsche together. And I went, ‘Shit. I didn’t know you were a singer or a poet.’ I was shocked.

     “Here’s the deal on Jim taking his shirt off for the session. Once we realized that we were in school together and that I was already famous with my album covers, I said, ‘Look Jim. You’re wearing this shirt and it’s embarrassing because it has ribbons on it. I know it’s a hippie shirt but you can buy it in Venice Beach and you can buy it anywhere.’ And it would have dated him. ‘I’m gonna take your shirt off. You’ll be alright. Trust me. And I’m gonna make you look like Jesus Christ.’ And that’s what it was. And they went with it. 

    “I designed the cover and put the other three guys as his eyes and part of his brain. But I made Jim the star on purpose ’cause I knew it could sell the album. Jac liked it and put that on the cover. He always let me do what I wanted for the cover. 

    “I loved the band live. Oh my God. I later knew that Jim was singing and he had been in class with me. But I was listening to Ray Manzarek’s organ. That was brilliant and that’s what impressed me more than anything. Man, this guy could smoke that keyboard and he was a white guy with little glasses. So I was really impressed.    

      “Love was on Elektra Records.  Jac Holzman, the label’s president, called me. ‘I’ll do the back cover for you.’  For their album Da Capo, I made a collage on a large print and photographed the collage. I worked all day in the dark room.  That’s done on one exposure, taking all the different single pictures of each of them, placing them on an outline, where they would go. It took me eight hours to get that print. I’d get it once and then one band member would be just out of synch. And I’d have to do it again. 

     “I shot the band in the studio at my house. I was only interested in lead singer, Arthur Lee. The others I didn’t know about. But I liked that they were a mixed race band.  I was part of a generation that thought the world was going to change and we were the ones that would make it happen. Musicians were going to lead the charge. 

Johnny Echols:

  “Arthur [Lee] started coming to my gigs before he started playing. Because he was a conga player and I would take him around to gigs I played with Henry Vestine and Larry Taylor, before they had Canned Heat. We had a group that played frat parties when we were like age 15. Arthur would hang out and come around. So, he kind of trusted that I knew what I was doing. And one of the things that I learned from Adolph Jacobs was that you’re always supposed to make the singer shine. So what you do is leave room for the singer to express himself and always, always play to the music and not to yourself. If I wanted to I could cut loose on songs and do, you know, a lot of flourishes and stuff that were superfluous really to the music. I chose to try and make the song the king, and the songwriter. The vocalist should shine rather than the other way around.       

    “If you listen to some of the first songs we did they are rather pedestrian songs. But they were not pushing the envelope. And that happened later after some experimenting and all of that. But the pushing of the envelope happened later. 

    “Actually, I was not all that enamored with Arthur’s voice for a long, long time. In the beginning the type of music we were doing was not really the kind of music that his voice would shine on. So later on when we started doing his songs and he was writing songs especially for himself. Because he wanted to be a songwriter and have other people do his music. So later on Arthur started to progress. I asked him and all of a sudden he leaps light years ahead of where he was as far as his songwriting was concerned. And he didn’t know how or why and neither did I but I noticed it. And he was pushing me ‘cause I had to kind of push the envelope a bit with my guitar playing in order to catch up and in order to make the music that we were doing work. 

   “I also then started realizing even more now important guitars and amps were to sound. I met Don Peake at Wallichs Music City in Hollywood and he takes us down the street to his house on Rossmore and he had this 1959 Fender Bassman Amp. He played this thing for us and I noticed the sound of this and Don hooked us up with that sound, because the over driven harmonics and the tubes, that amplifier was probably one of the first ones that really had that blues sound. And so Don hooked me up with that and I went and got one like that. Then I got a Stratosphere guitar. There was this guy out in Hawthorne who was a country music player. I had the Stratosphere but at that time it only had a mandolin neck on it. 

    “And then I went off to Carvin Guitars, I had their catalog, and got a neck made out there, so I was able to put a 12-string neck on the 6 string and that started me using it. Guys like Joe Maphis and people like that, now he had used them but they didn’t use 12 strings, they were using mandolin and a 6 string. That was the country sound. So I think I was probably one of the first people who did marry a 12 string neck to the 6 string neck. 

    “I had more options and could play and go between the necks. I could play 12 string parts and then go onto 6 string parts and not have to continue to pick up one instrument and put down another ‘cause I could always keep it in tune. ‘Cause I’m playing then both together. 

    “In 1964, ’65, we were playing out in Montebello at this place called The Beverly Bowl and we started to develop a large following. And there was a friend across the street, Alan Collins, he had a club up in Hollywood, a gay bar, it was the Brave New World. He said he wanted to switch it over to straight people and asked if we could come there and play. So the first couple of nights we’re there nothin’ but guys there and so, we’re thinking, ‘fuck, we gotta get the hell out of here.’ (laughs). And we would go up to Ben Frank’s restaurant on Sunset and by then we were called the Grass Roots. 

  “Love had contract offers from MCA (Decca), we were thinking of signing with them, and Columbia, and we chose not too because of the simple reason that Elektra Records was the only company that would let us own our publishing. We learned that from Little Richard. ‘Do not let them take your music publishing.’ So I insisted. 

   “My role with Arthur and Bryan was basically an ombudsmen to kind of keep these two personalities happening. So I knew that from the very start, because they would have been at loggerheads all the time, because they liked the same chicks, if you listen to some of the songs. That is rock ‘n’ roll. That’s tight, of course, but there was always that strong tension between the two of them and I was always stuck there in the middle kind of keeping the peace but also drawing the best out of them that I could. Because otherwise, you know, Bryan was very much a show tune kind of guy and I knew we could not release show tunes so we had to do a lot of work on his songs to meld then into something that was acceptable to an audience that we were developing. 

   “Bryan’s ‘Come Softly to Me’ blew my mind. Absolutely. We started putting a jazzy beat to it because Bryan’s songs were very much show tunes and so we had to do a lot, you know, kind of tinkering with the songs to get them to fit in the mold that we were trying to create for Love. Yea, it was conscious and thought out in advance and the way the group looked the makeup of the group. It was never accidental. We decided what kind of group we wanted, what kind of music we decided and what kind of instrumentalists we wanted. We wanted a strong, strong rhythm player, which was Don Conka, who played the hell out of the drums and Kenny Forssi was a very deft bass player. But he didn’t have that heavy low down low bass that you heard on rhythm and blues. He had a really soft touch but it was perfect for the music. He knew what he was doing and we could write it down. We could write charts and everybody could read the charts and play the music and knew what we were doing. And so we thought out what kind of group we wanted.  

   “I knew we were not doing disposable pop music, because that was the thing about musicians then. There was this kind of this competition to do the best that you could do. It wasn’t just for the money. We wanted to work, get paid, but we also wanted to actually push the envelope. We wanted to play music and we were listening to people that were serious musicians. And we wanted play rock music and do it as serious music like the Beatles were doing. It wasn’t just a C to A minor to F to G. They were playing chords that actually flowed with the music. And that’s what we were trying to do, a different chord structure. Stuff that actually fit the songs and also to try and have an effect on how it was recorded. A lot of time we would get in trouble with the engineer because I would insist in doing it live the way it was supposed to sound and not let them fix it later. 

     “‘Cause they never did. And that’s why ‘7 and 7 Is’ took forever to do. I had all the treble turned up on my guitar and plus I have this vibrato and I have to have the drummer has to play in time with the vibrato. And that was the problem with poor Snoopy. Because he could not keep up with it ‘cause it was like he was playing with a clock track, which, of course, nobody had played with a click track back then. They didn’t exist. But he had to keep up with this vibrato and if he lagged behind even a little bit than the song was off. So that was pre-conceived. We knew what we were doing. We knew why. Kenny Forssi was probably the first one that used a pedal. We had gotten that from Thomas Instruments out in the Valley. They gave me one of the first wah-wah pedals which I didn’t use. 

   “We did some shows, even gigged in Arizona, not the best sound systems or having to use the house PA. There was another reason about why we didn’t play out. It’s a down reason but the thing was if we had been an all-black group we would have perfectly been fine going through the south and mid-west playing. 

    “On the album Da Capo I took a lead vocal on ‘Revelation.’ I would do that on a lot of songs. And a lot of songs that you listen to and you think are doubled, if you ask me like on ‘My Little Red Book,’ you are hearing both Arthur and I sing. So several songs were like that. It just kind of evolved. I was more comfortable in taking the role in leading the band and making sure everybody was playing right and making Arthur sound the best that he could. So that was kind of my role as like musical director. It morphed into that. But as more it just did it. It wasn’t something that was planned. But Arthur seemed to be more and more comfortable talking to the audience, doing the lead thing and I was more comfortable in just leading the band. And that’s how it worked. 

  “With Forever Changes we started with kind of an idea after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers. And we decided that we wanted to do something that had horns and strings and we knew from the very start how this album was going to be. And what we were going to do and that we were going to try to make this what we would consider our magnum opus. This was gonna be the thing that defined us. And it was either we were gonna take off and just go all the way or something was gonna have to happen. We were going to really leave the three minute pop song format. We were getting bored of the three minute rock tune and wanted to push it. 

   “We liked the Beatles from the time Billy Preston came back from Europe and knew about them. I had played with Billy before Love and he was a good friend and I met them in 1965. They sent us backstage passes for the Hollywood Bowl show. I went with a fantastic jazz musician Michael Boliver. 

   “It was loud. And we saw this fantastic thing that we had not expected. At that time there was this thing happening with the audience and the musician but never like this. I mean, this was over the top. And that was the point and I had to tell Arthur about it. ‘This is where we want to go, man.’ We wanted to leave the chitlin’ circuit and whatever that’s gonna be behind. And we want to move to this circuit. ‘Cause this is where the money’s at and this is where all the happenings are. ‘Cause they can play the kind of music they want, out of respect, be revered, loved and have this huge audience. That was where we wanted to go. We knew with Sgt Pepper’s there was a whole new sonic thing going on. Absolutely. 

   “The material and concepts of an outline of it were written before we went into the studio. Arthur was not very much of a guitar player. He could play a few chords and basically would sing the songs to me and basically play the outline of them and then I would get together with Kenny mostly and we would work out some structure for the song. Bryan had a way, a kind of a counter point that he would do with his finger picking that would work against what we were playing. We would always have the rehearsals with Kenny and me first and then Michael Stuart. 

    “Lyrically Arthur was writing some absolutely phenomenal lyrics. I was knocked on my ass.  Hell yes it did! Because I am expecting the pedestrian the same old stuff that I’d heard before. Then I started reading these lyrics and looking at them. And this isn’t Arthur I know. A dude that I’d fought with and wrestled around the ground with. This was a poet. And I am listening to this poetry and it was absolutely shocking. Because it just came out of no fuckin’ where and still to this day, and it was only for this brief period of time that it was just profound. After that it was, you know, good and but it was not extraordinary. The writing for that brief moment of time was just extraordinary. And I don’t understand it. I’ve asked him over and over and he did not understand. Because he did not realize how fuckin’ profound they were. He didn’t know. 

   “Forever Changes could only happen in the city of L.A. And could only happen at that particular point in time, and only in L.A. Because you did have that cosmopolitan freedom, you know, that you didn’t have people necessarily put into little categories and boxes. You were able to go anywhere. In the L.A. area you could be able to hear blues one night and go hear rock and go hear experimental or avant garde jazz, or whatever. So you were right in the same area you are exposed to all these different cultures, and also on the radio. If you listened to the radio then the DJ’s were playing Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, they were playing Dick Dale and Frank Sinatra. All on the same radio station. So you were exposed to whole different genres. 

       “And John Fleck and Michael Stewart were different players. Michael is one of the finest drummers on this planet. And he just knew exactly what to play. He’s a percussionist but a deft percussionist. He’s not one playing all over the solo. (Don) Conka was one of the finest drummers I’ve ever known but he could not have played Forever Changes because he did not have the light touch Michael Stewart had. And John Fleckenstein, too. And Kenny Forssi a phenomenal bassist. 

  “My theory on why Forever Changes is so popular and in the top ten of all time, the magic of the record is that it is unexpected. It just came all of a sudden there is the atom bomb. You are dealing with regular TNT explosions and all of a sudden you’ve got an atomic bomb. It just pushed the envelope so far outside of the mainstream that it took a while. Now if it had been released in the last few years it would have done a whole, whole lot better commercially ‘cause people are ready for that. But back then people were just kind of stunned. All of a sudden you go from here to there and then stunning Arthur lyrics. Everything was just different. The way the horns were done. The way the jazz was blended in with folk music, was blended in with kind of show tunes and rock ‘n’ roll. 

     “It was all put together. But also because the times we were living in. We had civil rights movement. We had the Vietnam War all of this turmoil and out of the turmoil there’s a rose landed in all of this shit. There are assassinations. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in Wilshire Boulevard. So there we got a rose coming out of all this shit and it is blooming. And it is kind of permeating the air with sweetness. 

Nurit Wilde:  

        “I lived in Canada from 1961-1965, and went to the Ontario College of Art. I worked as a waitress at the 5th Peg, and the Purple Onion. The started doing lights at the 5th Peg. There was a big art and music scene in Ontario.

      “I came to Hollywood at the end of 1965. I was on the scene working at the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go doing lights and sound. I met Barry Friedman, I was a little transient when I first got here and needed a place to stay. He had this great house in West Hollywood with a big Saint Bernard. There was a bath tub and shower in the living room. Barry was working for Doug Weston at The Troubadour. Earlier he had done publicity for KRLA DJ Bob Eubanks and the 1964 Beatles concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Barry had worked in a circus and was still doing a little bit of fire-eating. Barry always had various musicians around, like the Kaleidoscope. I was crashing at Barry’s place and then Dickie Davis, another person whose couch I flopped on. 

   “I did see a bunch of the first Whisky a Go Go Buffalo Springfield shows. There were a lot of girls dancing in front of the stage always flirting with the musicians, you know. Around Neil there was always an air of ‘who is this guy? What is he doing vibe?’ But he’s always kind of had that from the earliest time I knew him. He was shy. Remember: Neil and I came from Canada. A country that was behind the U.S. and especially Hollywood in the social world.

   “Neil and I started hanging out. We would sit around. Musicians would jam. I was really good at rolling joints I just wasn’t into smoking them. None of the musicians would be discussing politics. Not at all. Even the girls around didn’t have any concept of politics. It just seemed to me that the music scene, for the most part was real onto itself. To me everyone wasn’t political, although Stephen’s song ‘For What It’s Worth’ was political.   

   “Richie Furay was always a kind and nice guy.  He wasn’t show business. He was a terrific singer. I never got close to Dewey (Martin). He was another Canadian but there was something rough about him. I went to his wedding and took pictures. I liked Bruce (Palmer).    

         “Neil and I went clothes shopping, once with Stephen Stills and Felix (Cavaliere).  I heard all the songs that were earmarked for their debut LP. I loved their music. I went to Gold Star. But good tension between Stephen and Neil. I think it was the competiveness. They continued that not only on stage with their guitar work, even though they were very different players, but they competed to hear whose song would be a single. They were both great writers and great musicians. And the music was the magic. I saw Buffalo Springfield at the Hollywood Bowl. Charlie got us tickets. I was up at the Greene & Stone office a lot. I met the Poor and Bob Lind. I’d see Buffalo Springfield all over Southern California. We hung out at a slot car race track around a gig and I saw them at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.  

    “Neil and I hung out a bit back in Hollywood when he lived in Laurel Canyon. It was a little bachelor pad. It had one room. When you walked in it had a kitchen bar, a room with a bed and some furniture on the property of Kyo. Neil and I decided one day we would take some photos and try to make him look like a movie idol. (laughs). We were just kids, you know. They weren’t really posed. He sat on the bed and there was a nice natural light coming in through the window. I had a Pentax camera at that point. And Neil was wearing a poncho and had a guitar in his hand and was kind of strumming, thinking and looking. Maybe he was posing but I didn’t see it as a pose. I just sat there until I thought I had a good look. We hung out and laughed for two or three hours.        

    “I also went to some of the sessions for Buffalo Springfield Again at Sunset Sound. I took my camera. Neil had changed a bit. He wasn’t kind of sloppy looking as he used to be. He had his teeth fixed or something. I have a picture of him with a big smile with all his old teeth showing, because really didn’t have good teeth. It’s a different Neil at Sunset Sound primarily in the sense that he was now sitting at the control board instead of Charlie. (laughs). He was wearing a sweater. Jack Nitzsche was around. They had a thing going on. They would be at the side of the studio conferring.     

    “I lived at Peter Tork’s house and Stephen would hang out a lot. And Stephen had bought Peter’s house.

    “I always wondered about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as a band. I knew them. I went out briefly with David when he was in the Byrds. Green swede cape with his haircut like Prince Valliant. He was thinner then, too. A little pudgy. I liked him. I was attracted to him. 

    “I met Graham Nash at Cass Elliott’s house. Lovely man. In 1969 Crosby, Stills and Nash make this great album. And I thought ‘what in God’s name are they doing, you know, now bringing Neil in?’ I had seen a lot of tension in Buffalo Springfield. But maybe it helped the creative juices. To me the only way it made sense for Neil to join that band and because of his previous tension with Stephen, I think they were good foils for each other.       

      “That L.A. and Hollywood music scene in the mid to late sixties was such a great nurturing scene for real musicians. And someone like Neil, who was very talented, deserves to be where he is today.   

     “John Phillips was charming and very persuasive. He really was a guy who enjoyed power. Aggressive, but the word is power. So, he enjoyed that role of offering a venue to acts for Monterey. And people really responded to that. 

   “Michelle Phillips worked very hard on the Monterey festival. I wouldn’t say we had a camaraderie. She had her place as one of the Mamas

and Papas. She and I had a history because of John. She was good and always a nice person. She did not have an attitude. I always thought she was really down to earth. She wasn’t intoxicated in her own fame. I always liked her and always thought she was a right on kind of person. She never seemed to take advantage of her position. Not that I saw.   

    “I then went to the festival and did not realize it was going to be some sort of seminal event at all. Not at the time, different music scenes of Hollywood and San Francisco. They had their scene up there and really held disdain for the Hollywood crowd. It was overt. And I had stayed up in San Francisco at the Jefferson Airplane’s house on Fulton Street. I knew Paul Kantner and years later the daughter he had with Grace, China, moved next door to me when I lived in West Hollywood and we became friends again. That was funny. 

    “It wasn’t that the San Francisco people were bad rapping the people in Hollywood and L.A. but, you know, just in the way they said things and the tone. The way they put Hollywood and music of Hollywood together with show biz, as opposed to pure music. Like the purists versus the commercial musicians. They all signed record deals and ended up coming down to Hollywood to record. I think there was a little envy there certainly for the commercial side. But there was always competition it seemed to me, among the groups themselves and not so much in Hollywood as in San Francisco. Like in Hollywood I always felt the musicians loved to share their music with each other and always boosting each other. And what I noticed, and even though I didn’t have much experience up there in San Francisco, is that they were a little more competitive with each other up there in San Francisco. There wasn’t as much good will. 

   “It is amazing to me that people today are so enamored with the sixties. And constantly want to know what it was like and what went on. When you are living it you don’t realize, you know, that it’s a particularly special time, although the music was very special.  

Richie Furay: The best time for Buffalo Springfield? As far as I’m concerned, it was right at the beginning when we were the house band at the Whisky (May-June 1966), with the five original guys–Steve and Neil, Bruce, Dewey and me—there was an undeniable magic.  Whether or not we were the best musicians didn’t matter; we had magic, and we all knew it.  We had replacements later on when Bruce had his immigration troubles–and Jimmy Messina was the only one who came close–but that original group was our best. 

     “Look, walking in to Gold Star studio. I’m a young kid from Ohio. And to go in that studio, with all the history, and hear our music coming through those speakers, even though it’s a four track, was bigger than life.   

     “Ahmet Ertegun also encouraged us to learn the board. So we’d go in and we would record ‘em like some of the vocals were going to be done. Ahmet had heart and soul for the band. ‘Make these demos. Do whatever you need to do to make the product.’ Because of him the band got launched a lot quicker then maybe it could have. He definitely saw something in this band right away.

    “Everything happened so fast. We were young. We were new. When we did a six week house band stint at The Whisky we thought we had no competition. It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? Five young guys who brought five different elements together. When we put out stuff together, it was like ‘here’s what I want to contribute to your song, Stephen and Neil.’  We took elements of folk, blues, and country and we established our own sound. We were pioneers, and I see that.  

   “People make bands a part of their life. We were always comfortable singing someone else’s song early on. The first album and some of the second, you can hear the cohesiveness was a group effort, there was not the possessiveness of ‘this is my song, ‘this is my baby, ‘I’m singing it because I wrote it.’  Early on there was this ‘what does this sound like with you singing?’ I know we tried ‘Mr. Soul’ with everybody singing and it sounded best with Neil. The individual members brought their own take on what was being presented to the song. We liked The Beatles with John and Paul singing harmony. Stephen and I did a lot of that unison singing. That we picked up from The Beatles but then there was a lot of experimentation. 

    “As far as Buffalo Springfield’s catalog, why it still reaches people, I guess it has to be the songs. Buffalo Springfield was very eclectic. I mean, we reached into so many genres.   Look, the original five members of Buffalo Springfield couldn’t be replaced.  There were nine people out of the Springfield in two years. Jimmy Messina came in late in the game and did a fine job. I worked with him on Last Time Around. 

    “I think we’re one of the most popular, mysterious American bands. The mystique has lasted for some reason.  Two years, a monster anthem hit of the ‘60s, but no one really knew us. Neil has gone on to become an icon, Stephen has made enormous contributions, CS&N, and look at me into Poco, which I believe opened the doors for the contemporary country rock sound. Our legacy speaks for itself. 

Graham Nash: 

  “You know, kid, the truth is there’s a part of me that really believes none of this would have happened without Rodney Bingenheimer. Incredible music has been made from that moment. In 1966 Rodney told me about a Mamas and Papas recording session when we met at a Liberty Records label gathering for the Hollies.  

     “I only went with Rodney to see Michelle.  But Michelle, Denny (Doherty) and John (Phillips) were doing an overdub in the studio, and Cass was outside the studio. I started talking to Cass

    “So then in the hallway down there at United Western studio Cass said, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ “Well, I don’t think we’re doing much.” We were staying in Hollywood at the Knickerbocker Hotel. And she picked me up around noon in her convertible Porsche. I said, ‘where we going?’ ‘We’ll be there in five minutes. Don’t worry.’ And drove me up to Laurel Canyon and I met Crosby. And once again, my life has never been the same. 

    “It not lost on me that you can be in the Laurel Canyon from Hollywood in 5 minutes. Not like in England where it’s 90 minutes that’s to get to the nearest bus stop. So I was in heaven. I was free. My first wife and I were getting divorced. I had already separated from Rose. I was a free man. And I must tell you that I took to the Laurel Canyon scene like a duck to water. It was just amazing to me that these bunch of people would be living in this kind of very rural area. 

    “I just felt so free. And more importantly, I felt appreciated. And that goes a long way with me. If you know what it is I can do and you appreciate that, I feel a lot better about things. And it seemed to be the Hollies’ reputation in the Laurel Canyon scene was a big one. 

        “I gotta tell you, I spent the first ten years in America kind of trying to separate myself from the Hollies. You know. In all truth, it was a great band. The Hollies were a great band. Unbelievable. Bobby Elliot is a fantastic drummer.  

   “A lot of people used to say to me, “you’re leaving the bloody Hollies? Are you fuckin’ crazy? All those hit records, money and that stuff.” They had not heard what I had heard. 

   “Coming to Los Angeles after leaving the Hollies was a geographic re-birth. I think so. I remember the first time I ever came to Los Angeles. It was paid for by Cass. And it went like this. The Epic Records contract with the Hollies was coming up and completed. Cass knew this and she figured that Lou Adler, through his Ode label would want to meet with us. So, Cass paid for first class tickets for all the Hollies to come to Los Angeles. I get out of the plane, walk down the ramp, leave the United Airlines terminal and climb the nearest palm tree. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m never going back.’ 

      “I just decided for some reason, whatever consciousness is running this planet wanted me to be in Los Angeles. And I was gonna take full

advantage. And I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, you know, what my future would entail. But I trusted myself, because my parents always told me and taught me to trust myself.  I discovered Henry Diltz through Cass and the Lovin’ Spoonful through Cass. 

    “So pursuing this new musical project I was in heaven. I’m a musician, first and foremost. I’m a believer in beauty. I’m a believer in the fact that truth and justice will prevail in the end. I’m a believer in all that. I never expect anything. I had friends whose fathers went away to work and would come home and the fuckin’ house was gone. 

    “So, English people probably eat everything on their plate because they never knew when the next meal was gonna come. Years previously food rationing was just a drag. I never starved. I went hungry often, but I never starved. But it was basically bangers and mash. Cheap stuff. A cup of tea would really go a long way to calm you down. 

   “The music always kept me going. I don’t know what I would have done. And I don’t know where the fuck I would be if it hadn’t been for my love of music. And thank God, my mother and father appreciated my passion, appreciated the fact that I would give up everything to be able to play music. And they supported me in that. The Hollies passed on ‘Teach Your Children,’ ‘Lady Of The Island,’ ‘Marrakesh Express’ and ‘The Sleep Song.’   

     “What happened was that I’d written this song ‘King Midas In Reverse,’ probably one of my earliest, real songs. You know, I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about what I think about my life and how fragile it all is. And although we made a great record of that song, it kind of failed by their standards. 

    “I mean every Hollies song that we made kind of went into the Top Ten. ‘King Midas’ didn’t. And at that point they started to lose their faith in the direction that I personally wanted to take the band. They did an album of Bob Dylan covers, Hollies Sing Dylan.  My voice is on ‘“Blowin’ In The Wind.’ It’s one of the reasons I knew that my time with the Hollies was up. I mean, totally Las Vegas.  

     “When I joined David and Steven I didn’t talk about my time with the Hollies. It’s almost like you don‘t talk to your new lover about your past lover. You just don‘t do it if you’re smart. My relationship with the Hollies was pretty sour after I left, obviously. They felt that I deserted them. I personally felt very bad about leaving my friend Allan Clarke behind. 

   ‘“Marrakesh Express’ I wrote in 1966 and it was intended for the Hollies and they did the first version of it. I’m in England. I’ve been reading about William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg with Peter Orlofsky and they’re having a great time. ‘Boy, that’s sounds like a great idea. I’m going.’ So, I grab my wife, Rose, and a dear friend of ours, Joanne, a friend of Rose’s, and we went to Morocco. And took the train down from Casablanca down to Marrekesh. 

    “All my pores were open. I was just soaking in this atmosphere, soaking in this train. I was in first class with Rose and Joanne and a couple of older American ladies that had blue hair. I was carrying all these tunes in my pocket just waiting for the right moment. Waiting for the appreciation. 

    “Ashley Kosak was Donovan’s manager, and Donovan was the one who taught me to fingerpick. And it was Donovan that first really gave me my first inkling that I could be an independent artist. I was still in the Hollies, of course, and both Ashley and Donovan encouraged me to keep writing and make a record myself. 

     “Laurel Canyon informed myself and Donovan psychologically, spiritually and musically.  One of the first people, apart from Donovan and Ashley was Crosby. In a way, and I’ve said this before, he saved my ass. He saved my life. 

    “When I was in the Hollies and writing ‘Teach Your Children’ and ‘Marrekesh Express’ and they didn’t want to deal with them, you know, it made me question myself, and that’s the worst thing you can do to an artist. And so Crosby is looking at me with that impish smile, ‘They’re fucked, man. Don’t even listen to what they are saying. They’re  totally fucked. I love those songs.’ 

   “I was completely free. And it was an amazing to me. Very often I’ve said I’m one of the luckiest men in the world. I know a lot of people think that way about their life, but it’s really true to me. I’m really an incredibly lucky man. I must have done something right somewhere. I don’t know what the fuck it is kid. But I must have done something. It’s an incredible story, isn’t it?   

  “I think that my time with the Hollies was done. And I knew that instinctively. That was a little tense. I left them on December 8, 1968. On December 10th I was in Los Angeles with David (Crosby) and Stephen (Stills). I end up at Cass Elliot’s house. Cass’ house was kind of a central point for a huge amount of very bright and very colorful people. Basically, I was hanging out with David and Stephen and Cass. 

   “I didn’t know many people. I knew Henry Diltz, since he took photos of the Hollies in 1966. In terms of friends, I only really had David, Stephen and Cass and Elliot (Roberts) probably.

    “December 1968 as I said before, I was with the Hollies and by December 10th I was in Los Angeles with David and Stephen. We went to New York to Sag Harber to our friend’s John Sebastian’s place and John was being recorded and produced by Paul Rothchild at the time. 

   “In fact, John was almost going to be a member. We sang with him. We were in New York and Paul Rothchild was in New York. We had already blown Paul’s mind. Because he was a great record producer and he could really hear a hit. He had heard one after another of great songs. So he says, ‘Come on. Let’s go into the Record Plant in New York.’ 

    “I will never be able to repay David for what he did when the Hollies were refusing my material and I was incredibly depressed about it. He really saved my life. By supporting me. By appreciating the music that they didn’t want to record. I mean, Crosby has been there for me at the very beginning. 

    “When I first came to America I didn’t bring any money. It was months before my money from my bank account and the Hollies made it through all the financial scenes of being transferred to a different country. I borrowed $80,000 from Crosby and he never batted an eyelid. It was a big ego blow for David to be thrown out of the Byrds. What did he do? He went and bought a boat and started living on it in Florida. His life was pretty cool.   

    “I felt pretty good about being the only Brit in a group with two Americans.  Because, you know, I have a decent sense of humor and I have a decent understanding of how the universe works. And I was faced by these two, and they really were Americans. Crosby was so fucking American. American attitudes. American ego. And Stephen was the same. I must say, I was completely bold over. I admire Stephen and love him dearly, but Crosby is a different animal on this planet. And I recognized it from the very first moment I ever met him. Which of course was through Cass. I was with two real Yanks. Absolutely. I was with two Americans of doom.  

    “I felt fantastic. I know that because of the British invasion and what British music was doing to the American scene, and how admired British groups were by American groups, I felt pretty confident in myself. You know, I happen to believe, and this is not ego talking, I’m pretty good at what I do.     

    “You gotta understand. David, Stephen and I came from harmony bands. I mean, we were harmony freaks. So although, as I’ve said before, CS&N never had any claim on any of the notes that we sang. It’s just when that sound happened it was instantly recognized by me, David and Stephen as something stunning. 

    “We had [managers] Geffen and Roberts, because they were sharks. I loved Elliot. He was an incredibly funny man. You know, he should have been a standup comedian. He really should have. With any balls he should have. He loved the music. Don’t forget, he was already managing Neil and he was already managing Joan. So we knew that he had incredible taste. 

   “When David (Crosby) was producing Joni’s first record, obviously he was one of Elliot’s best friends. And so, it made sense that Elliot, who managed Joni, managed Neil, was best friends with David, knew Stephen, it was obvious that he would be our manager. Then we needed business acumen that wasn’t there in Elliot at that point. 

    “When they both said to us ‘Listen. Do what you do. Leave the rest to us. We know how to do this. We know what this means. We know how to position this. We know how to promote this. Do what you do and leave the fuckin’ shit to us.’ And that was fine with us.              

  “When I first went in to Wally Heider’s studio on Cahuenga to record with engineer Bill Halverson, I thought. It was small, it was funky. I never met Bill Halverson. We got in Crosby’s Volkswagen van and drove up to the studio and brought our guitars and amps out and started to make the records. 

    “We knew that we had fabulous songs. I would never play anybody a song if I didn’t feel two things: One that it got past me. And two and I would hope that it would be interesting for you to hear. So I have those two criteria whenever I’m writing. First of all it has to get past me. I have to figure out whether the song has to resonate, has a reason for existing, and after that, do I want to put this on to somebody else? And the answer to those two questions is yes then you’ll get to hear the song. Cass sings on ‘Pre-Road Dawns.’ We found a spot for her to join on us a vocal. 

     “Even though we were together right then. And, at some point, this record took off like we knew it was going to do, that we would have to go on the road. And that made me kind of sad. Because I know what the road is. And it can be a lonely place. And so ‘Pre-Road Dawns’ was me feeling down about having to go on the road. We recorded it and then Stephen said, ‘You know, why don’t we put in roaches and midnight coaches?’ And this is Stephen, which is really unusual because he was not a smoker at all. Crosby and I were the only smokers. He helped me with that chorus. That’s where Cass came in.  

    “When I first heard ‘You Don’t Have To Cry,’ a Stephen Stills song. That’s the brilliance of Stephen Stills, man. When I first heard the ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ I couldn’t believe it. As a songwriter and as a performer I could not believe this song. It was stunning in its composition. It went this way, and then it went that way, then it sped up, then it slowed down and then it peaked. I couldn’t wait to record it. 

     “It’s not lost on me that I am coming from Laurel Canyon into Hollywood to record. And sometimes I would walk from Joni’s house to the studio. I was in heaven. I was a musician making music with incredible people with a bunch of incredible songs and the freedom to keep everybody out of the studio that would fuck it up. 

     “The neighborhood was Micky and Samantha Dolenz. They were close. Henry Diltz, his archive is a history of those times. David Blue, he was crashing at Elliot Robert’s house, two houses up from Joan. We would go to the little Italian restaurant at the Laurel Canyon Country Store. We’d go to Art’s Delicatessen, to Canter’s Deli, Joni would cook dinner. We’d go to Greenblatt’s Deli. Musso & Frank Grill. 

       “Joni loved Crosby, Stills and Nash as much as we did. She was the very first person on this planet to hear that sound. Just me. We did go and sing for Cass but the very first time was in Joni’s living room. We knew that we had these songs to do. That if we got as live as possible, and as immediate as possible the very essence of the song down, and the expression is there and the emotion was there, and the slight retards and the slight speeding ups that you need within a piece of music sometimes, once we had that essence down, and we looked at it, and then added more voices to that, and then maybe added a guitar or something it took on a life of its own. 

     “This album kind of made itself. We had the songs. We had the energy. We were happy as fuck. All of us, Stephen was going out with Judy (Collins). I was with Joni, and David was with Christine. (Hinton). How better could life be?  And Crosby had a lot to do with the best herb. (laughs). 

    “I must tell you that Stephen Stills was an incredibly impressive musician at that point. He played everything. He was an amazing musician and generous. And one of the things that we loved was that there were no rules. And there have never been any rules. And there will never be any rules in CS&N. It doesn’t matter who sings, maybe we switch in the chorus, ‘you sing the high part and I’ll sing the low part.’ 

    “There were never any rules. And so when Stephen said on ‘Forty Nine Bye Byes’ and putting his guitar backwards. I sat that and watched him and going ‘How the fuck does he remember the chords backwards?’ So that when you then flip the tape back to play the real way that his guitar, not only would be backwards with this incredible sound, but would change with every chord change. It was an amazing thing to see Stephen do that. To see Stephen do the guitars on ‘Marrekesh Express.’ I’d never seen anybody do anything like that. 

   “Living in Laurel Canyon. There’s no way to describe it. My life was unbelievable on every level. Not only as a musician, but as a lover as a friend, as a songwriter. My life was unbelievable at that point. I would be going and recording ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ with David and Stephen and then bringing tapes home and playing them for Joan. And having her absolutely get it. 

   “I mean we would do normal stuff. But what was happening is that with Joni writing so much and me writing so much, and with Joni recording and me recording we didn’t get a lot of time to socialize a lot. But people would come by the studio like Henry Diltz, who had an open invitation to come by at any point, you know.  

    “No formal rehearsals before we went into the studio. Our rehearsals consisted of private going through the tune, and then saying, ‘Fuck, let’s go to (Peter) Fonda’s house. Fuck. Let’s go to Paul Rothchild’s house. Let’s go to Alan Pariser’s house. Let’s go and sing them this shit!’ Eventually we could sing that entire album on a couple of acoustic guitars and blow people’s fuckin’ minds.  

    “When we finished the album we realized that we would have to go out and play live. We knew it was going to be a hit when we walked out of the studio and gave the two-track to Ahmet Ertegun. And I have a photograph of David and Stephen outside the studio with Ahmet at that very moment. We knew it was going to be a smash. We just knew. Ahmet got it immediately. He listened to that music and said, ‘Ah fuck…I want.’ So they worked it out between Geffen and Ahmet. I was on Epic, Columbia wanted Poco, and there was a trade and we all ended up with Ahmet, for which we were incredibly glad. 

   “But we realized we would have to go out and play live. OK. So, we’re talking about this. And, Stephen says, ‘Man, I really need to spark off somebody. You and David are pretty good rhythm guitar players but man, I wish we had another…Somebody, maybe an organ player that I can jam with and solo.’ We talked with Stevie Winwood. We talked with Van Dyke Parks. We needed somebody just to keep Stephen on his game and competitive and on fire. 

    “And I think basically that Stephen and Ahmet came up with the idea of or maybe it was Ahmet to Stephen, was getting Neil on board. I was the only one reluctant to bring Neil into the band. And the reason was that we had spent the last few months making this incredible record and developing this beautiful harmonic sound, right. But Neil wanted to be more than a musician for the road show. I can’t commit this. I know who Neil is. 

    “One of my favorite songs is ‘Expecting to Fly’ from Buffalo Springfield that he did with Jack Nitzsche. Listen to it. So I knew who Neil was and I loved this fucking song. I was a big fan of the Buffalo Springfield. How could you not? I listened to Buffalo Springfield. ‘On The Way Home.’ That’s a great one. ‘For What It’s Worth.’ 

    “But I said I can’t commit to this until I meet Neil. I gotta sit down with this cat. I wanna know who he is. I wanna know if I can go on the road with him. I wanna know if I want him to be a part of my life. And, that made sense to them. So, at a coffee shop on Bleeker Street in New York I went and had breakfast with Neil. After that breakfast I would have made him the President of Canada. He was incredibly funny. He had an incredibly dry sense of humor. He always had a bunch of songs that I loved, ‘Expecting to Fly’ being the primary example. And at the end of that breakfast and walked down to the Village Gate where we were rehearsing and I said, ‘OK.’ 

    “It was obvious that this man was as serious as a heart attack about his music. It was obvious by hanging out with him that he was destined for great things. And it was obvious by hanging out with him that he could put a fire under Stephen that we needed. 

    “We used to start acoustic on the debut tour. We would begin with ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ and blow their minds. What would happen is that the curtains would open and there would be a line of Martins, and the drums and the bass. And then we’d say, ‘We’d like to introduce you to our friend, Neil Young.’ And the place would go fuckin’ bananas, right. We rehearsed for the first tour on the Warner Bros set of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They in Burbank So, it was pretty obvious from the sounds I was listening and the way that Neil was affecting Stephen that this would be a really great thing. 

    “Summer 1969 we did Woodstock. And getting together of a half a million people that thought the same way that we did.  Hanging out backstage in John Sebastian’s tent and of course John breaking out his best stash. And realizing that nobody there has ever seen our band. They loved the record and they were all going, ‘well, you know, fuckin’ show us.’ ‘Shit or get off.’  I could never figure out why Neil didn’t want to be in the Woodstock movie. 

John Densmore:  

 “I shared a house with Robby [Krieger] on Lookout Mountain Ave. I had cruised Laurel Canyon many times previously over the years looking for a place because it was the coolest spot in Hollywood. We knew that Frank Zappa was there having jam sessions that we went, me and Robby. Frank didn’t get that. That was interesting. He didn’t smoke or drink. He was wild enough to not need it. (laughs). He sort of wanted to produce us. Terry Melcher wanted to produce us. We were the house band at the Whisky A Go Go and everyone was trying to figure out what to do with ‘Light My Fire,’ because it was so long. I went to Pandora’s Box. It wasn’t much of a club. Saw the Seeds and liked them very much.  ‘Mr. Farmer.’ A little earlier I went to the Crescendo Club and saw Count Basie. I saw Sonny Payne. The pocket. Forget it. Fatter than shit. I saw Chico Hamilton at the Lighthouse and stole one of his cymbal things that I used in ‘The End.’ 

     “I lived on Utica before I had my own house on Appian Way where I’d see Carole King on walks and was very friendly. She was married to Charlie Larkey. They were working with Lou Adler then and his Ode Records label. 

  “TM was definitely Summer of Love. For some damn reason in 1965…Well, Robby and I went because LSD was legal and we were quite interested in our nervous systems, and knew we had to do this TM thing slowly. We go over there and I meet this little guy, Maharishi, and the ‘Love Vibe’ is very palpable. This is 30 people in a room. Then, a year or two later, I read that the Beatles are onto TM and our little secret is being spread worldwide. Great. I still meditate. The whole Eastern Indian thing, Ravi Shankar, via George Harrison and the Beatles saturated everything with paisley bedspreads sound wise. ‘

‘The End’ was a raga tune. Robby and I went to Ravi Shankar’s Kinnara School of Indian Music. When you’re students at the Kinnara School of Music, you get to sit on stage with the master at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Later Robby and I go see Ravi play at the Hollywood Bowl, and George is on stage. Ravi didn’t teach at the school, but he’d drop in and give a little lecture on Sublimating Your Sexual Drive Into Your Instrument. Harrison was doing it in England. Later, George Harrison came to one of our recording sessions for The Soft Parade. You hear the Indian thing in techno stuff now. That came in and it was deep and it’s still around. We need the East.  

    “Ray Manzarek had a previous relationship with World Pacific Records in 1965 when he was on the label with Rick and the Ravens and recorded for Dick Bock who owned the label, and released Ravi Shankar albums in the U.S. We got a couple hours of free studio time at World Pacific recording studios, and that’s when we got to make a demo in 1965. 

     “On the way into the studio Ravi Shankar is leaving with Alla Rakha, my idol, who I didn’t know was going to be my idol yet, was on the way out with these little tabla drums, which I soon find out by studying at the Kinnara School, are the most sophisticated drums in the world. I’m in awe of them. It’s the East! And, I’m just a surfer. Not literally, but from West L.A. 

    “In May of 1966 the Doors were at the London Fog and I would go right up the street to the Whisky and hear Love play. Arthur Lee told Jac

Holzman of Elektra Records about us when we played the Whisky. That was an incredible sweet gesture, ya know. Forever Changes is a fuckin’ masterpiece. That’s all I can fuckin’ say, and it began in 1967. The first two albums they did in 1966 and ’67 blew my mind. Here’s this racially mixed group, not playing funk, playing electric folk. Ridiculous, with real tight pants! What! 

    “So Robby and I are in the Lookout Mountain house, a block down from Appian Way, and that’s where Jim walked up and wrote ‘People Are Strange’ on a matchbook.  ‘Love Street’ is about the Laurel Canyon store. I love the melody. I thought it should have been a single and I know it’s kind of light to the dark Doors, but I just love the melody. Melody is paramount for me. I’m a drummer.   

     “Anyway, when I lived on Utica, 1967, Neil Young was my next door neighbor. I can remember when Neil said, ‘come on over. I want to play you something.’ And he plays me ‘Expecting To Fly…’ before he moved to a house in Topanga Canyon. I have very fond memories of those times with him. 

     “I later I bought a house where Carole King lived and the actor I heard James Coburn was just down the street playing his gongs. Jim [Morrison] and Pamela were in the Canyon later.  I don’t know any city that has that much nature, and deer scat within 10 minutes of the metropolis. That’s the soul of the canyon. It was this tranquil place and Hollywood right underneath. 

    “The Summer of love, 1967, we were naïve, but felt, ‘we’re changing the world.’ There were long hairs in every city, not in the Midwest so much, and thought we were taking over. And, actually, it was just seeds being planted which are blooming and will bloom a hundred years from now:  Civil rights, feminism, peace movement, ecology, Native American rights, all that was planted.  

       “It’s like when I saw Hendrix in 1967 at the Whisky just after the Monterey International Pop Festival. God! We knew somebody was coming. A giant! It was just…I don’t have the words…He was like Coltrane on guitar, playing it upside down, without changing the strings. Forget it. I saw Coltrane many times. I was a jazz snob until I heard the mop tops music and I went, ‘They’re cute.’ And then I got into rock ‘n’ roll. I saw every jazz great who ever came to town the first half of the 1960s. Les McCann at the Renaissance Club. Cannonball Adderly at Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse. Bill Evans five or six times at Shelley’s Manne Hole. I shook his hand. 

     “I noticed with Elvin Jones and John Coltrane there was communication. So, I thought, ‘I’m gonna keep the beat. That’s our job as drummers. But, I’m gonna try and talk to Jim during the music.’ Like, ‘When the Music’s Over.’ That’s Elvin. I knew I wasn’t playing jazz. 

     “I wasn’t thinking cinematic, but certainly Ray and Jim coming out of the UCLA Film School were cinematic dudes. That’s for sure. I mean, I hear the world. Filmmakers see it. 

     “We took the album photo of the Doors’ Waiting For The Sun in Laurel Canyon. It was at the top of the Canyon overlooking the city, and there weren’t as many houses, so it was a little more rural. Jim was great. This was early. Young, energetic, curious, smart guy who knew nothing about music and was real interested in how it all worked. He was cool. We used to go to Ah Fong’s a Chinese restaurant right near Sunset and Laurel Canyon. It was your typical Chinese restaurant and they would bark at you. Our 11:00 A.M. egg fried rice. You know, we wrote the first two Doors’ albums before we made any records. 

    “Sunset Sound studio where we did our first two albums had a real echo chamber like the famous echo chamber at Capitol and it had a pocket that was fat, just a warm fat echo chamber. You can’t buy that kind of shit. 

  “Producer Paul Rothchild was tough but taught us so much. And mid-period, Waiting For The Son and The Soft Parade, he had me doing a s drum sound to tap on each drum and I’d have to do it for a fuckin’ hour. And I was exhausted. We did a 100 takes for ‘The Unknown Soldier.’  Elektra was a good studio. 

   “By the time we started working with Bruce Botnick for L.A. Woman at the Doors’ Workshop and in 15-20 minutes, ‘Great. Let’s go. You’ve made a lot of records and you know what a good drum sound is. I don’t have to flog you like Paul used to do.’ We did L.A. Woman there and it was more live. And Jim was in the bathroom which was our vocal booth. We did no more than a couple of takes on everything, just pure passion and no perfection. Strip it down to the bare raw roots.  

     “I moved out of Laurel Canyon. Maybe it was the 1971 earthquake. My wife at the time was from Texas, ‘Man this earthquake shit. You don’t know when it’s coming. At least we get a warning with hurricanes.’ ‘On honey…Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing. All my life I’ve been rocking and rolling.’ 

    “In 1971 I’m sleeping on Appian Way and this thing hits. I look out over the city and see various pockets of flashes since the electrical was going out. I thought we were being bombed. ‘It’s World War III, man. Somebody is bombing.’ Paranoia. My house was on stilts up there.  

Ray Manzarek: 

    “At UCLA director Josef Von Sternberg was the guy who really kind of gave a real sense of darkness to the Doors, not that we wouldn’t have been there anyway. But having Von Sternberg seeing the deep psychology of his movies, and the pace at which he paced his films, really influenced Doors’ songs and Doors’ music. The film school is always there. Our song structure was based on the cinema. Loud. Soft. Gentle. Violent. A Doors’ song is again, aural, and oral cinema. We always tried to make pictures in your mind. Your mind ear. You hear pictures with the music itself. 

     “First of all, the left hand created that hypnotic Doors’ sound. For instance, during the ‘Light My Fire’ solo section, it’s an A-minor triad to a b-minor triad that just repeats like (John) Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things.’ The same sorta modal chord structure that Coltrane used in ‘My Favorite Things.’ Left-handed I’m playing the same thing over and over. The right hand is just playing filigrees, comping behind Robby Krieger, punctuating with chords, punctuating with single notes playing with Robby Krieger. When I’m soloing I’m playing anything I want to play. And that bass line just keeps on going. It never varies and it never stops. Over and over like tribal drumming or Howlin’ Wolf playing one of his songs without any chord changes. On and on and on. The same pattern. Now, if I were to have added a live bass player to play that the guy after about 2 or 3 minutes playing the same two triad…I’ve had guys say to me, ‘I can’t do this Ray…’     

   “The same three notes over and over. And off he goes, man. So I think the secret to the Doors hypnotic sound comes out of the left hand keyboard bass. Meanwhile the right hand thinks its Johann Sebastian Bach. 

    “A fifth person, another physical element on stage, would have made it not a diamond. It would have taken away the diamond with Morrison at the point. As we faced the audience Morrison is at the point, (John) Densmore is at the point, behind Robby and I, who are point left and point right, a four-sided diamond, the purity of the diamond shape rather than some kind of pentagram star thing. And a fifth element would have confused it. Another guy playing would have made a more confusing bottom. 

    “Producer Paul Rothchild and engineer/producer Bruce Botnick are Door number 4 and Door number 6. There’s four Doors in the band and two Doors in the control room. So, they were always there, always twisting the knobs and really on top of it, a couple of high IQ very intelligent guys. We couldn’t have done it without them. 

   “I never lived in Laurel Canyon but in Venice with my wife Dorothy. The sun and the beach and the light and the sand it was all there. I lived with our father in the sky, the sun our mother, the ocean and the sand. Whenever we went to Laurel Canyon it was to visit someone like Paul Rothchild. John and Robby lived in Laurel Canyon. And Jim and Pam were overlooking the Canyon store. 

     “When Dorothy and I got married Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson were with us and we went down to City Hall to get married. And the bridesmaid was Pam and the best man was Jim. And we had our celebratory luncheon on Olvera Street where we had enchiladas and margaritas. And the next night we played the Shrine Auditorium with the Grateful Dead. Psychedelic, man. 

    “Laurel Canyon was the natural place. In L.A. there were two places. One was the beach, where we were conceived and Laurel Canyon was the more mature forest place where you were in touch with the earth and the sky. Mainly the earth and the trees. The vegetation of Laurel Canyon was very conducive to songwriting. The Doors were always part of nature. It was always an intense, closed in locked in the four Doors entering that unified space that they occupied of creativity. It didn’t matter where we were. We could be in a Hollywood recording studio or Laurel Canyon, or the beach. It always had to do with the music and the submersion in the music. After you played your music you stepped outside and you were with nature. It was always great. Laurel Canyon was a great place to join my fellows. 

    “Our third album Waiting For The Sun. We loved that title. That’s what we’re all doing. That’s what everybody is doing. Everyone is waiting for that sun of enlightenment. That blasting searing sun. The purity of the sunlight to be purified. To leave our closed circle bodies and expand into the light. And we have a song working on the song, time to go into the recording studio, and the one song that hasn’t jelled is Waiting For The Sun. It was not right. Well let’s call the album Waiting For The Sun anyways. 

     “That’s how it happened. Songs were like that. Not how long they would take. You had to put them in the oven and bake them in the collective oven mind of the Doors. And some of them came out virtually. That song is right. That song is the way it should be. Others took longer. Waiting For The Sun was a song that had a long gestation. But the baby was certainly worth the wait. 

    “By the third album, Waiting For The Sun, Paul Rothchild was becoming a real Laurel Canyon connoisseur of veteran potent herb that was being crossbred by the Northern California growers. All those guys up in Humbolt County. For recording sessions, Rothchild had two types of marijuana: Work dope and also playback dope, which was a little stronger for listening later, one of the benefits of being a known rock ‘n’ roll band.    

   “But don’t forget that’s late 1967, and the potheads were aware. That’s what was so great about marijuana opening the doors of perception along of course with LSD. Marijuana makes you aware that you are on a planet. It’s God’s good green earth and you’ve got to take care of God’s good clean earth. The pot heads were the first mass ecological movement. And I hope they continue on and continue it into future because it’s our obligation to save the planet.      

    “We were working in the future space. The Doors on their third album were in the future. And many things have come to pass that Jim Morrison wrote about.  

    “The Soft Parade. Well, we had done out horns and strings experimentation. We had had a great time. I had a great time. Critically it was our least acclaimed album. However, it has stood the test of time and there are many great songs on there. So, you know what? We’ve done that experimentation. Let’s go back to the blues. Let’s get dark and funky. 

    “Morrison Hotel. Let’s go downtown for the album cover. We went to the Hard Rock Café on skid row with Henry Diltz. And we went to a

flophouse called The Morrison Hotel. Rooms A sign read $2.50 and up. It was definitely supposed to be a funky album and you can see that on the inside photo and the front and back cover. 

      “Album covers were always important. We were involved heavily in that process. You could never just turn it over to the record company. Everything that the Doors turned out had to be stamped by the Doors. We approve of this.  It was a barrelhouse album and barrelhouse singing. He’s smoking cigarettes. ‘Jesus Christ, Jim. Do you have to smoke cigarettes and drink booze?’ He didn’t say it but it was like, ‘This is what a blues man does.’ Oh fuck. That’s right. You’re an old blues man.’ He says that in one of his lines. ‘I’ve been singing the blues since the world began.’ And Rick and the Ravens was a surf and blues band from the South Bay. The album was definitely blues, Raymond Chandler, downtown Los Angeles, Dalton Trumbo, John Fante, City of Night, and John Rechy. 

     “L’America’ is on Morrison Hotel. It was written for the director Michaelangelo Antonioni for his film Zabreskie Point. And we played it for him at the rehearsal studio and backed him up against the wall with the volume. We played it the way we normally play and too loud for this elderly Italian gentleman. I could see him pressed up against the door trying to get out of the place. We finish the song, he slides the door open and steps outside and it was almost like he was saying, ‘Goodbye boys. Goodbye Hollywood.’ And then he goes with Pink Floyd. It was all too much for him. He just couldn’t do it. 

     “On L.A. Woman we played the songs in the studio so Paul Rothchild could hear what the songs were. First at the rehearsal studio and then over to Elektra. I think we went back to Sunset Sound, too. We were bored. He was bored. We played badly. And Paul said, ‘you know what guys? There’s nothing here I can do. I’m done. You’re gonna have to do it yourselves.’ And he walked out the door. 

     “We looked at each other and said, ‘Shit. Bummer.’ And Bruce Botnick said, ‘Hey, I’ll do it! I’ll be the producer.’ John Densmore said, ‘We’ll co-produce with you.’ Bruce said, ‘That’s a deal. Let’s all do it together.’ And then Jim said, ‘Can we record at our rehearsal studio?’ And we all said, ‘Hey, we play great at our rehearsal studio. Let’s do it. Can it be done?’  And Bruce said, ‘Of course I can do it there. I’ll set the board up and a studio upstairs. You guys record downstairs. That’s where we make the album and it will be virtually live. ‘Yea!’ And we got excited like that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland ‘Let’s put on a show!’  

    “The only thing with Bruce that was really different than working with Paul was that we didn’t do as many takes. We knew when we had it. The thing about Rothchild ‘he was a slave driver.’ That’s not really true. We did do a lot of takes on ‘Unknown Soldier’ and that drove Robby crazy.  Botnick brings in a guy to play bass Jerry Scheff who is going to be playing with Elvis Presley. ‘I got Elvis Presley’s bass player.’ ‘Shit, man.’ He came in, a very cool guy who is playing with Elvis Presley.  

    “L.A. Woman I think it’s the same Doors but a continual growth, continual evolution of the Doors, the continual revolution of The Doors. ‘The track L.A. Woman’ is just a fast L.A. kick arse freeway driving song in the key of A with barely any chord changes at all. And it just goes. It’s like Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg heading from L.A. up to Bakersfield on the 5 Freeway. Let’s go, man. 

    “Robby was a different sort of lyric writer. You know, Robby might be the secret weapon of the Doors, we get this great guitar player who plays bottleneck, and all of a sudden he comes in and plays ‘Light My Fire,’ the first song he ever co-wrote with Jim.  And then Robby wrote ‘Love Me, Two Times,’ ‘Love Her Madly.’ ‘Touch Me.’ Lots of Doors’ hit singles. Another guy with a high IQ. 

     Robby Krieger:      

      “As far as the Doors at the Hollywood Bowl, it was amazing to be asked to play the Bowl. Growing up in Los Angeles and playing the Bowl must be like playing baseball in New York and playing Yankee stadium.  We were really psyched! So much so that we actually rehearsed!  [first time ever just for a gig] and we decided to capture the whole thing on film  [and 8 track tape] normally, we would just wing it at gigs…We might discuss what to start with, 2 or three songs and then just go with the flow. 

   “Looking back, the rehearsal may have been a mistake. I think it may have made things a bit unspontaneous, not a good thing when the Doors were supposed to be so wild and free, never knowing what might happen next…..Also the fact that Jim was peaking on acid was not in line with such a tightly controlled show. Luckily, the footage from the Bowl looks great and we fixed up the missing songs, so we now have the complete show. 

  “Henry Diltz always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Henry Diltz has been present at incredible moments and has captured the essence of the so-called ‘California sound.’  

    “When we started The Soft Parade it was after the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. The Soft Parade was recorded in West Hollywood at Elektra Sound Records on La Cienega Boulevard, produced by Paul Rothchild, who brought in arranger Paul Harris to do the string and horn overdubs. 

    “I never liked the idea myself of strings and horns. It was an experiment. But once we decided to do it, we did it. In fact, we knew going in that the arrangements made for the songs were actually tailored to have strings and horns. I would work with Paul Harris ’cause I knew very little about orchestration. I would give him ideas for a horn line here and there and hope for the best. But he really did most of the work. 

   “Paul Rothchild was great. He was just what we needed. A very strong personality and real smart, which Jim looked up to. And he knew a lot about recording, you know, which we knew nothing about. There are very few guys that Jim would look up to, actually. And the same with us. He would make us do 50 takes. Bruce Botnick, our engineer for all the albums and the producer of L.A. Woman, is a little bit overlooked. He is a perfectionist. So is Paul. Bruce is the guy who actually turned the knobs, and you can’t argue with the sound he got. He was very young but had produced the Supremes and a lot of stuff. 

    “It was a blast to have Curtis Amy in the studio. That was the most fun part. You got to meet all these great musicians and hang out. They were our heroes. Like on ‘Touch Me,’ Curtis took the solo. That was the first time that happened. It served the song. That was another example of egos not getting in the way for the sake of the song. Leroy Vinnegar was on our Waiting for the Sun album. In fact, he played on ‘Spanish Caravan,’ which was pretty silly ’cause it wasn’t his type of forte. 

    “The only reason we wanted a stand-up bassist was that it was right for the sound and Leroy was a good reader, and it was a written part. Probably any guy could have done it. Doug Lubahn and Harvey Brooks were the bass players on The Soft Parade. Leroy was a bit taken back when he saw what we wanted to do. ‘This isn’t really my thing.’ ‘Come on, Leroy, you can do it.’ [Laughs.] Onstage we didn’t have a bass player, just the three musicians. Ray covered it. There were a couple of other groups who did that, the Seeds and Lonnie Mack. I loved Lonnie. He played on ‘Roadhouse Blues.’ 

      “I came in with some songs, and it was not like I had not done that before, like ‘Love Me Two Times.’ It was more like coming up with stuff on my own. Jim was getting more and more hard to work with as far as songwriting goes. It wasn’t the Jim who was writing ‘You’re Lost Little Girl.’

   “I had never written anything political and I heard this song by Leadbelly called “Fannin Street” about a street in New Orleans. And he had this line in there, ‘Follow me down.’ I really liked that line. 

 “‘Touch Me” was originally called “Hit Me, Babe” and Jim thought people might take it literally on that. [Laughs.] 

   “I remember seeing Otis Redding at the Whisky. I was standing right in front of the stage for the whole show. I never heard of Otis Redding before and I was amazed at the energy that he created onstage. I would stand right there on the dance floor, stage right. I wrote the song ‘Runnin’ Blue’ but when Jim Morrison started to sing it, he just came up with that Otis dead gone part right on the spot. Seemed to fit pretty good, so we left it in. I guess the horn parts reminded him of Otis. That was different. It was a crazy little song that I had and when I sang it to the guys they really liked how I sang it. ‘You sound a little like Bob Dylan. Maybe you should sing that song.’ And then Jim added the part about Otis Redding. 

    “That’s an example of how Jim would make my songs better. We had an ethic that we wanted to make the song better. Jim was amazing in that way. Possibly the least ego-bound songwriter I have ever worked with, no question. He was always open to discussion and for things I told him to sing. He wasn’t really a musician, but usually what would happen is that he would come up with something better. 

   “Jim and I had a telepathic relationship. It was a perfect combo. That’s how you make a great group. You have three, four or five guys who come together and have that perfect intuitive relationship and stuff comes out. 

   “When we did the first Doors album Jim was totally unexperienced in the studio as far as recording his vocals. He had a year with his voice playing live every night. He had never done anything in the studio. And I think by the time The Soft Parade came around his voice had matured a lot as far as low notes and range. Stuff like that. I don’t think he could have sung ‘Touch Me’ nearly as good if that was on our first album. 

   ‘“Do It’ started off with a lick that I had and we needed words for it. And I didn’t have anything. And so we would go to Jim’s poetry book. A lot of times that’s what happened. Like with ‘Peace Frog.’

    “‘Wishful Sinful’ is definitely one of my favorites on the album. The orchestration is really good. I love the chords and stuff I came up with on that song. I wish I knew how I did it. [Laughs.]  ‘Wild Child’ is one of my favorites because it’s live. That one didn’t need strings or horns. The title song ‘The Soft Parade’ was quite a work. It was actually three songs in one.

     “We didn’t tour The Soft Parade album. We only did it twice. It was another step for the Doors to try something different. The reason I didn’t like it was that I felt we were kind of doing the album for somebody else. But I definitely like how it came out, you know. A couple of years later we tried remixing some stuff without the strings and horns, but it didn’t quite work. We had actually tailored the arrangements to horns and strings, and to put that out again would be a lot of work, or alter the arrangements.     

Jim Ladd: 

       “The Doors wrote extraordinary songs that speak to people in a way that pop music does not. The Doors get inside of you. The Beatles get inside of you in a way pop music doesn’t. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter.’ The difference with these guys is that they have a way of writing a song that became popular but at the same time it’s talking about breaking on through to the other side. ‘Not To Touch the Earth.’ ‘Ship of Fools’ from Morrison Hotel which talks about the human race dying out. This is stuff that is still applicable today. 

    “A kid hearing The Doors’ ‘Peace Frog’ in 2010 for the first time is going to hear it different than I did because the Vietnam War is not raging or the 1968 Democratic Convention with people being beaten up in the streets. However, they are going to hear it in the context of their world. I can’t presume to know what that means. Today I can play that song in the context of today and make it work. So it is still relevant to me because even though it was written back then I can put it together with something new. 

    “The only thing today’s kids are missing is context. I have to keep in mind that the song says something to me but it may say something completely different to someone in the audience. So all I can do it is play it in a way that says something to me and then how it is interpreted by them in the context of the set it may be different. If I put the songs together correctly people should recognize, ‘OK. Morrison is saying something in ‘Five To One.’ That’s why you have to listen to the lyrics when you listen to my radio show. 

   “Years ago the recordings of ‘Helter Skelter,’ ‘Peace Frog’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ were warnings and they are reality now. Sometimes the particular or current issue drama will change but the human condition that causes them is the same. The thing that caused war in Vietnam or war in Iraq is war.   

     “In summer of 1971 I announced the death of Jim Morrison. I was at my parents when I got the word. So I went on the air and we were mourning his death when the story broke. 

     Bernie Leadon:    

    “I lived on Fountain down below Sunset, and then moved to Topanga Canyon as soon as I could, by 1969. I moved to L.A. in Aug. 1967. [Don] Henley and [Glenn] Frey shared an apartment over off Cahuenga, just below Hollywood Bowl, when I got to know them well in 1971. Randy Meisner had a place in the San Fernando Valley, around Studio City. 

    “At Studio Instrumental Rehearsal the Jackson Five were in the next room, and racks of their costumes were in the hallway. This day was when Glenn and Don were trying out me and Randy. I clicked, and that was that. ‘You guys want to be a band?’ 

   “They were not a team yet. Henley only wrote half a song on the first album, with me- ‘Witchy Woman.’  Frey proclaimed Don and I a songwriting team. Henley’s first complete song was ‘Desperado,’ which I still find amazing. He had taken English and composition in college. Damn good song. 

    “I was in the Flying Burrito Brothers with Gram Parsons. ‘My Man’ was about him- He died the week after I did an overdub session for him down at Capitol L.A. studios. I flew to London to start the 3rd Eagles album, and we found out about Gram dying right after we woke up from jet lag in London. I was really bummed out, as Clarence White had also died recently, and I had gone to his funeral with Gram, and we had sung ‘Farther Along’ at the gravesite. Now Gram was gone. So I started the song there. 

     “Those sessions in London with Glyn Johns didn’t result in much- only two complete recordings (but one was the Eagles first #1- ‘Best of My Love’). I finished it in the studio in L.A. after we changed producers to Bill Szymczyk. Henley suggested a line in the second verse ‘Hickory Wind’ reference. ‘Bitter Creek’ was the name of an associate of the Dalton Gang, which the ‘Desperado’ album was mostly about. Glenn Frey suggested I write a song about that guy, and so that was the beginning of that song. 

   John Mayall: 

   “The influence of Laurel Canyon…It was one of those rare locales which was in the heart of Hollywood, yet if you just went up the hill into the Canyon you could get all the peace and quiet of country. So from your house you could look down on the whole of Los Angeles and it’s a unique locale. And that really appealed to a lot of musicians who moved there. It got all of the charm of the country but you are only down the hill from the heart of Hollywood.   All the best if the peaceful country life. All you heard were birds and back to nature. It was only five minutes down the hill to the heart of Hollywood. It was quite a unique situation, if you are up in the Hollywood Hills and look down and see the whole metropolis laid out there before you. More than anything, it was the stark contrast of peace and quiet and the bustle of a major city.   

   “As soon as I got there the temperature was seventy degrees, which was pretty rare for England in the summertime.  ‘This is heaven.’ It was one of the main factors. I decided to move there in the summer of 1968. It was set in my mind to move there because I felt I belonged there more than in England. I mean, England was family and everything. Which can’t be repeated, but the main thing was the climate, and my whole life I’d been brought up on American culture through novels and particularly music. So it just felt right. That’s how it all began. 

    “The connection was getting there in the first place. It began with Frank Zappa. I met him in 1967 in Scandinavia, when he and the Mothers of Invention were playing there and we were in Copenhagen at the same time. So that’s where I met that crowd. ‘If you come to America, look me up.’ So I did. And the other connection was with Canned Heat and Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite, who I also met when they toured Europe. There was a blues heritage in town. I saw Canned Heat at The Ash Grove. That’s where I first got to know Larry ‘The Mole’ Taylor and ‘The Bear.’ And I later recorded with Larry.  

    “I stayed at Zappa’s cabin for the first part if my three week vacation. I never really left Hollywood and Laurel Canyon. It became the confirmation for me. That’s where I wanted to move eventually. 

   “The feeling when you listen to the song ‘2401’ is the vibe you hear. For me it was a very eccentric household, really. Frank and Gail Zappa, at the center, were the grounding factor there. The sanest people on the planet. I think Frank really encouraged that, and he kind of collected oddballs and information about America and its culture. 

    “And the other connection was with Canned Heat and Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite, who I also met when they toured Europe. There was a blues heritage in town. I saw Canned Heat at The Ash Grove. That’s where I first got to know Larry ‘The Mole’ Taylor and ‘The Bear.’ And I later recorded with Larry.   

   “The Bear’s house was totally amazing. I stayed up there a couple of nights. Canned Heat had just hit the big time and Bob shared a house with their managers, Skip Taylor and John Hartman. It was a huge house and was divided into their own sections. Bob had the large living room, and the whole wall was lined with 78’s. He was the big DJ. ‘Listen to this one!’ He was the one person I didn’t have to educate about JB Lenoir. He had everybody covered. 

    “As for the Blues From Laurel Canyon album, it was an action-packed vacation. No problem going back home and putting it all together to record. ‘This happened. That’s a song.’ The stories lead right into each other and that’s the way I chose to actually construct the LP, by having it all in different keys. There were links that would change the key so it smoothly flowed one into each other.

    “There was a lot of walking traffic rather than cars. Cars were somebody else, but the heart of Hollywood was the people on the streets. 

    “The Whisky was a venue we played when we first came to America in 1968. Elmer Valentine, who owned the Whisky, in fact, lived up in Laurel Canyon on Grandview Drive where I eventually lived. He did some house-hunting for me; found two houses that were up for sale before they kind of went on the market. So he was the connection for me. When we got the first booking at the Whisky, we were set for three days, but because of the demand for tickets for the show, he extended it an extra week.

Don Randi: 

   “I lived up on Nichols Canyon. Jack and I lived three minutes from each other and Neil Young was next door in Laurel Canyon.          

   “Jack Nitzsche called me to play keyboard on some dates in 1967 at Sunset Sound. I picked out the piano for the studio. (laughs). A guy who had a store on Beverly Blvd. When I walked into Sunset Sound I didn’t realize it was for Buffalo Springfield.  I thought it was for a Neil Young (solo) album, ‘cause that is what he was supposed to be breaking away from and going on his own. Hal Blaine and Jim Horn are on the track. I played piano and organ. When Jack and Neil asked me to play on the end part of ‘Broken Arrow’ they were both waiving me on to keep playing. I kept lookin’ up at them, ‘are you ever gonna tell me to stop?’     

    “Jack really enjoyed working with Neil. This goes as well to ‘Expecting to Fly.’ Russ Titelman, Carole Kaye and Jim Gordon are on it.  I did piano and harpsichord. I had some little head chart arrangement to work from and another of the tunes might have been sketched. It was pretty wide open with the chord changes. And all you had to do was hear Neil sing it with an acoustic guitar and you sat there, ‘Oh my goodness.’ He was so talented. And Jack enjoyed Neil and to be with him because Neil was so talented. Jack and Neil were a team and had a mutual admiration society. And they liked each other. Recording with them was easy. Neil wrote cinematically and Jack arranged his own records cinematically. He did movie scores as early as 1965.   

      “I was real busy with session work in those days. In one week I did 26 sessions. I’m on Love’s Forever Changes and Neil was around a bit on that album. And I would love to have said how big Neil was gonna get. I don’t think he realized it. But I loved Neil’s music. Goodness gracious. This guy’s writing…I thought everybody and their mother was gonna try and start doing his songs. I knew he was a songwriter. Some of the tunes were movies. They were scripts. 

    “We loved Musso & Frank’s Grill on Hollywood Boulevard and Johnny’s Steak House. That was my savior. I didn’t have a fuckin dime and I could go and have a three dollar meal in there with a Bone-In Ribeye, you know. We went to Aldo’s, great hamburgers. Sonny and Cher dug that place. Canter’s Delicatessen, once in a while, a coffee shop called Huff’s, Taco Rama, and Pink’s Hot Dogs on La Brea Ave. Another stop was The Dog House on Hollywood Blvd. where you sat on stools on the street and can’t forget The Brown Derby.     

     “Chris Darrow reminded me of The Burrito King on Sunset Boulevard at Alvarado. The Flying Saucer had the best French Dip sandwiches in town near Wilshire. There was Young China, two doors down from radio station KFWB for fantastic Chinese on Hollywood Blvd. with the best Won Ton soup. The Italian restaurant Miceli’s was on Las Palmas. 

    “Dennis Wilson loved Ah Fong’s restaurant, delicious Chinese-American food.  Gene Norman owned the Marquis restaurant on Sunset Strip, along with his Crescendo and Interlude clubs. I liked the Villa Capri. Mickey Cohen was there on a regular basis. I saw him at Sherry’s as well. There was Hal’s Nest, and The Speak, where all drinks were 39 cents. Phil Spector and I went to The Cock’n Bull. The trout was incredible.      

    “The record company promo men all went to an Italian spot named Martoni’s. Label owners  like Verve Records’ Norman Granz enjoyed the Pacific Dining Car. Barney Kessel and his wife B.J. Baker requested their New York steaks cooked medium at Diamond Jim’s in Hollywood. 

      “Neil Young, Jack Nitzsche and I would go out to places like the Gaiety Delicatessen. Once in a while Harry Nilsson would come to our table. He was still working at the Crocker Citizen bank as a teller or had a job there. At the time he might have made a record. We all went to the Hollywood Ranch Market. Are you kidding? The tater tots and the chicken gizzards! Even in the late fifties they had a donut machine there! (laughs). I saw Lucille Ball one late night in a full fur mink coat. She gave me the biggest smile. Jack, Neil, Denny Bruce and I also liked to eat at the House of Pancakes on La Cienega. They just closed Hamburger Hamlet! What the fuck is going on? 

Text Quotes Copyright 2020 Harvey Kubernik 

   (Harvey Kubernik is the author of 18 books, including Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon and Turn Up The Radio! Rock,  Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972.     

   Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Kubernik’s The Story of The Band From Big Pink to the Last Waltz. Kubernik is currently writing and assembling a 2021 book on Jimi Hendrix for the same publisher. 

   Otherworld Cottage Industries during July 2020 will publish Harvey’s 500-page book Docs That Rock, Docs That Matter: Conversations with the Greatest Rock Documentarians of Our Time. Kubernik interviews with D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Murray Lerner, Morgan Neville, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Andrew Loog Oldham, Curtis Hanson, Dick Clark, Allan Arkush, and David Leaf, among others.      

    In 2019 and 2020 Kubernik served as Consultant on a new 2-part documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time. Alison Ellwood is the director who helmed the History of the Eagles.

    Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time will have a world premiere on television network EPIX will broadcast it on Sunday, May 31st at 10 p.m., and conclude the following Sunday, June 7th at 10 p.m.  

    In 2008 Harvey penned the liner notes to the deluxe 2-CD edition of Carole King’s Tapestry.    

   Kubernik was the Consulting Producer on the 2010 singer-songwriter documentary, Troubadours, (http://www.thetroubadoursmovie.com), directed by Morgan Neville which examined the careers of Carole King and James Taylor. Kubernik contributed two feature essays, about the singer-songwriter genre and Carole King’s Tapestry album, now online at the American Masters home page on the PBS- TV website (http://www.pbs.org/americanmasters). 

    During 2014, the Los Angeles-based Grammy Museum requested Harvey Kubernik, Henry Diltz and Gary Strobl to develop the California Dreamin’: The Sounds of Laurel Canyon, 1965-1977 exhibition of the Laurel Canyon music scene. Harvey, Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, Gail Zappa, Joel Larson of the Grass Roots and Danny Hutton, of Three Dog Night chaired a panel discussion on the region.    

      In 2014 Kubernik and author Jan Alan Henderson were feature interviews for London, England-based BBC Radio 4 and their radio documentary California Dreaming, Laurel Canyon, produced by Andy Parfitt.  

     Lenny Waronker, Graham Nash, Gary Burden, and Dwight Yoakam and Harvey Kubernik discussed the history of Laurel Canyon in 2015 on the David Dye-hosted NPR radio program World Café.  

Palazzo Editions arranged Harvey Kubernik’s music and recording study illustrated history book, Neil Young, Heart of Gold  in November, 2015,published  by Hal Leonard (US), Omnibus Press (UK), Monte Publishing (Canada) and Hardie Grant (Australia), that coincided with Young’s 70th birthday.  A German edition was also published for May, 2016. 

In July of 2017, Harvey Kubernik appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio as part of their distinguished Author Series discussing his book 1967 A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love. 

Harvey and brother Kenneth Kubernik co-authored the highly regarded A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival, published in 2011 by Santa Monica Press.

Harvey  and Kenneth Kubernik also wrote the text and biographical portrait for legendary photographer Guy Webster’s first book of music, movie and television photos for Insight Editions; Big Shots: Rock Legends & Hollywood Icons: Through the lens of Guy Webster, published October 21, 2014, with an Introduction by Brian Wilson. 

     Harvey Kubernik’s The Doors Summer’s Gone was published by Otherworld Cottage Industries in February 2018.  It was nominated for the 2019 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. 

    Kubernik’s writings are in several book anthologies, most notably The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats and Drinking with Bukowski. He was the project coordinator of the recording set The Jack Kerouac Collection.  

     In 2006 Harvey spoke at the special hearings initiated by The Library of Congress that were held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.  

      Kubernik’s 1995 interview, Berry Gordy: A Conversation With Mr. Motown appears in The Pop, Rock & Soul Reader edited by David Brackett published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. Brackett is a Professor of Musicology in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Canada.  Harvey joined a distinguished lineup which includes LeRoi Jones, Johnny Otis, Ellen Willis, Nat Hentoff, Jerry Wexler, Jim Delehant, Ralph J. Gleason, Greil Marcus, and Cameron Crowe.    

    Kubernik’s 1996 interview with poet/author Allen Ginsberg was published in Conversations With Allen Ginsberg, edited by David Stephen Calonne for the University Press of Mississippi in their 2019 Literary Conversations Series).