Still Hazy After All These Years

Every year--sometimes it’s July and sometimes it’s August, you never know until the last moment--the people of Laurel Canyon come down from the hills to get their picture taken in front of the Canyon Country Store. They come from the Kirkwood Bowl and Lookout Mountain, from Grandview and Colecrest and Ridpath and Jewett and Yucca and Willow Glen and Wonderland.

There’s undoubtedly a good reason for this tradition, which involves a lot of drinking of Red Bull while the photographer, on a teetering ladder across Laurel Canyon Boulevard, waits for a break in the traffic, but nobody remembers what it is. Most Canyon-esque, nobody cares. As soon as the picture is taken--and everyone conspires to delay this moment as long as possible--the subjects melt back into the hills.

There’s something affirming about this ritual, as organic and inevitable as the waxy yellow flowers that bloom every winter and fill the canyon with jasmine musk. It’s as if, once a year, the “creatures,” as Jim Morrison immortalized them in the Doors’ “Love Street,” are driven to renew their neighborhood vows. Or something. (Morrison is said to have lived in a house cater-corner from the Canyon Store, though it must be remembered that alleged Morrison domiciles are to Los Angeles what bars that Hemingway drank in are to Key West.)

I’ve lived in Laurel Canyon since moving to L.A. from New York 10 years ago, and keep meaning to ask Tommy Bina, the genial Iranian expat who’s owned the Canyon Store since 1982, how Picture Day got started. I never get around to it. This, too, is very Canyon-esque. Hazy existentialism, tempered by a work ethic necessary to afford the real estate, is a way of life here.

A while ago--I can’t remember exactly when, of course--little gravity-defying towers made from hunks of the canyon’s granite walls began appearing to the north and south of the Canyon Store. They just seemed to materialize, like crop circles. Later, word got around that Ed LaDou, chef and owner of Caioti, the former restaurant below the store, had put them up as a freelance beautification project. Really? Cool.

The director and writer Lisa Cholodenko tackled some of this vibe in her recent movie, “Laurel Canyon.” The film is ostensibly about a ‘70s-centric record producer, played by Frances McDormand, who manages to take care of business while smoking herb by the bong load, but spaces out on details such as a promise to vacate her canyon house for her son and his fiancee (see “very Canyon-esque”).

McDormand’s character, of course, is a metaphor for Laurel Canyon itself. Cholodenko grew up in Encino and commuted with the rest of the Valley through the canyon, intrigued by “that kind of irreverent, Land of the Lost thing that people get into up there in the middle of a high-pressure, functioning city,” she says. “That you can actually tuck yourself away in a canyon in the middle of Los Angeles--that’s extraordinary.” Cholodenko characterizes the canyon, quite accurately, as “kind of lazy and kind of dirty and kind of earthy and sort of reckless.”

Laurel Canyon, with approximately 6,500 dwellers, mulishly resists attempts to modernize, sometimes--as in the case of the four-lane freeway the city once proposed to ram through to the Valley--thankfully so. On the other hand, until very recently cell phone reception was on par with Apollo astronauts broadcasting from the dark side of the moon, and guardrails along some of the canyon’s most vertiginous lanes (hello, Colecrest Drive!) are nonexistent or folksy white-painted wooden numbers that couldn’t stop a skateboard. The social contract allows wide latitude in matters such as, say, keeping your unbalanced German shepherd outdoors where it can bark at phantom rivals for 14 hours straight, which actually happened one New Year’s Eve.

Not everyone in the canyon goes for this level of laissez faire. Somebody once spray-painted SHUT YOUR DAMN DOG UP! in huge red letters across the fence of a house on Lookout Mountain--but I doubt it did any good. Complaining is equated with whining and is usually ignored. Weary of being blasted out of bed by a driver who insisted on honking her way around the corner below my house, I got up early one morning, flagged her down and asked her very politely to cool it. She stared at me, lowered her sunglasses and snapped: “That’s one of the disadvantages of living on a blind corner.” Then she drove off. (I eventually prevailed by dropping a note in her mailbox that implied the entire neighborhood was ready to mutiny, which it probably was, though true to form nobody had said anything.)

Part of the canyon’s jagged charm comes from its multifariousness, seen in houses that range from moldering hunting cabins built in the ‘20s to 10,000-square-foot piles with feudal overtones. As Cholodenko observes: “There’s no uniformity to the architecture or the landscape”--or the residents. My neighbors have included a retired Broadway hoofer, a major record label president, the British blues legend John Mayall and several actresses, one of whom seduced a carpenter working on my garage, then had sex with him with all the windows open in the middle of the afternoon.

Which is not to say Laurel Canyon is the Delta house of Los Angeles--the rural trappings and deep quiet, at least late at night, are astonishing when you consider the Sunset Strip is three minutes away. But there is definitely a live-and-let-live esprit that has informed the canyon’s culture for decades and attracted blithe spirits who go on to fame and, occasionally, infamy.

Laurel Canyon’s role in the L.A. singer-songwriter juggernaut of the ‘70s, for example, is now so fully mythologized that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should open a patchouli-scented Canyon Store replica peopled with wax figures of the principals. (The former owner of the alleged Morrison domicile did his bit by installing a totem pole with hand-carved likenesses of Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, et al, that ran through all three floors of the house.)

In that spirit, it’s instructive to contemplate Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies of the Canyon,” the 1970 album and song that fixed in amber Laurel Canyon’s lifestyle bona fides for future generations to ponder. Today, Mitchell’s canyon ladies--Trina, with her “wampum beads” (“What are wampum beads?” asks Cholodenko, with some irritation), and Estrella, she of the “gypsy shawls” and “songs like tiny hammers”--are alive and well, though they’re as likely to drive Range Rovers. This last detail is more apropos of 1970 and the aspirations of the era’s poet-rock stars than one might imagine.

Ron Stone, Mitchell’s former manager, points out that Laurel Canyon was then “a low-end neighborhood. Most of the houses were rentals.” The canyon’s storied “community,” like artist quartiers everywhere, was ultimately a staging ground. “Anybody who made money left,” Stone says. After “Ladies of the Canyon,” Mitchell ditched her bungalow on Lookout Mountain--where she lived with Graham Nash long enough for him to write “Our House”--and moved to Bel-Air.

The sheer concentration of so many musicians who would, in a stunningly short time, amass a body of work that would endure into the next millennium is heady only in hindsight, Stone says. “We didn’t think anything of it.” Still, even a partial manifest of Laurel Canyon’s then-artists in residence is formidable: Carole King, Frank Zappa, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Jackson Browne, John Mayall, Jimmy Webb, Tim Hardin, John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, Cass Elliott, Leonard Cohen, Nico, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, Judy Collins, Robby Krieger, John Densmore, Roger McGuinn, plus transient Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Zeppelins, Eagles, Animals and Steppenwolves. As Jackson Browne would reflect: “There was amazing tribal life. There were houses supported by record companies, groups living with an account at the health food store.”

The canyon’s intramural couplings, musically and sexually, led to some indisputably great music. Much of this centered on Frank Zappa’s compound at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain, a log cabin formerly owned by Tom Mix. (There was a bowling alley in the basement and caves that supposedly led to a mysterious estate across Laurel Canyon known then, now and probably forever as the “Houdini house,” even though it’s almost certain that Houdini never lived there.)

Ridpath Drive, a mews off Kirkwood Drive, was another hotbed. In Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman’s memoir, “Follow the Music,” the label’s house engineer, John Haeny, mapped a typical synergy: “My Laurel Canyon house was on Ridpath. . . . At the Ridpath house I introduced Judy [Collins] to Stephen Stills, and that resulted in their romance, and their romance resulted in Stephen writing ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.’ Carole King was in and out of Ridpath. . . . Neil Young was around. I was at some friend’s house with David Crosby and somebody had brought a tape in of a young girl that nobody knew much about, except Judy had discovered her as a songwriter, and it was Joni Mitchell.” And so on.

Browne recalled: “We would catch a ride to Peter Tork’s house on Willow Glen. Peter had been a dishwasher at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and now he was a TV star, a Monkee. Sometimes you would walk in and there would be 12 girls in the pool, naked. One time Jimi Hendrix was up there jamming with Buddy Miles in the pool house, and Peter’s girlfriend was playing the drums, naked.” And so forth.

There was much generational fraternization that must have seemed transcendent at the time, like the night everyone conspired to open their windows and drop the needle on the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” at precisely the same moment. (Given the psychotropic refreshments favored by the participants, this would have been quite an accomplishment.)

“One night it was a full moon, we’re all sitting around in various states of decomposure,” recalled one of Holzman’s correspondents. “And a voice is heard echoing over the canyon, ‘This is God speaking. I have a message for you.’ It turned out it was Barry McGuire, the ‘Eve Of Destruction’ guy, who had set up this huge sound system--I think at the Mamas and Papas house up at the top of Lookout--and blasted this diatribe to the stoned minions below.”

Stone has a clear memory of driving his Alfa Romeo up Laurel Canyon Boulevard shortly after “Sgt. Pepper” was released and hearing song after song from the album wafting down from the cabins and bungalows all the way home. “It was a magical time,” he says. It didn’t last, of course. By the time Zappa’s cabin burned on Halloween, 1981--Zappa having fled for saner reaches of the canyon years earlier--”any notion of community had passed,” Stone says.

Fires--house and brush, intentional and accidental--have always shaped the canyon. Before the area was annexed to the city in 1910, Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a graded dirt road that doglegged to the summit of Lookout Mountain, where a tourist hotel was built at the pinnacle and a trolley installed to lure day trippers with a 270-degree view of the nascent city. The hotel burned in 1918. The Canyon Store opened in 1919 and burned in 1929 (the surviving brick foundations form the walls of Pace, which replaced Caioti).

A large swath of Willow Glen went up in 1959. The Kirkwood Bowl fire of 1979 took out 23 houses, including John Mayall’s trilevel on Grandview Drive. (Mayall felt strongly enough about the neighborhood to have recorded “Laurel Canyon Home” in 1968, and he rebuilt on the same spot before packing it in for Woodland Hills in the mid-’90s.) An acquaintance who lived on Grandview at the time of the fire said that for months afterward, skate rats would appear nightly to ‘board in the foundations and swimming pools of the ruined mansions, blissed on herb and the million-dollar views sparkling below.

Strange and terrible things happen in Southern California all the time, but a lot of them seem to happen in Laurel Canyon. Just up the street from my house is the former residence of Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, who had the misfortune of being house guests of Sharon Tate in 1969 when the Manson family stopped by. Tiburcio Vasquez, the “Mexican Robin Hood” who went on an extended crime spree during California’s first decades of statehood, was said to stash his swag in the caves in what would become the Zappa/Mix compound. There are ghosts, say true believers, behind every eucalyptus, ghosts in the mansion where producer Rick Rubin and the Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” during five weeks in 1991. Opening in July is the film “Wonderland,” a fictionalized account of the infamous 1981 cocaine murders, which stars Christina Applegate, who was raised not far from the scene of the crime on Lookout Mountain.

Nothing quite so gruesome has befallen the canyon in the years I’ve lived here. There have been moments, though. One afternoon, a helicopter and police cruisers converged on a house, where, according to canyon lore, the homeowner had taken umbrage with a kitty cat trespassing on his escarpment and had shot it. With a shotgun. His quarry, an albino shorthair, dragged himself over hill and dale and collapsed on the doorstep of his owner, who was said to be an executive something-or-other to the city’s then-mayor. After hanging up with the vet, she apparently speed-dialed hizzoner, and soon thereafter the tattoo of chopper blades bludgeoned the canyon walls while a brace of black-and-whites converged on the wretched man’s redoubt. The shorthair died from his wounds after lingering for a week or so. Shotgun Man’s karmic punishment? His pleasure dome was defiled by a hideous trophy house built next door during the boom.

On a clear day, Grandview Drive affords a truly awesome view of the city--a rare case in Los Angeles of truth in advertising--and was thus the preferred spot to take in the Rodney King riots. On the worst day of the insurrection, half the neighborhood, it seemed, wandered over to the empty lot across the road from Mayall’s house. Two men in monogrammed dress shirts, Mercedes-Benzes at port arms, surveyed the columns of rioters moving up Hollywood Boulevard, with “Katzenberg,” “Disney” and “points” drifting from their conversation.

A blond in teensy running shorts and a periwinkle baseball cap bounded up, dragging a Great Dane on a leather lead. Woman and beast beheld the burning metropolis. “Daggers through my HEART!” she suddenly cried. “Look what they’ve done to my city!” This ululation, or maybe his proximity to two Mercedes with virgin rubber, caused the Dane to lunge in the general direction of Hancock Park. “TIGER!” she snapped, lashing him with the leather lead. “DOWN!”

The nexus for all of the above is the canyon store. With its old-timey Coca-Cola sign and twirling overhead fans, it really ought to have been gentrified years ago into a merry market like the Oakville Grocery in Napa Valley, with pesto and aioli on the sandwich board and the sort of staff who could step into a Ralph Lauren ad once they’d finished wiping down the Cuisinart.

Instead it remains deeply idiosyncratic, with no pretensions beyond the addition of an espresso bar. It’s where ashen locals instinctively massed at daybreak the morning of the Northridge earthquake, shopping for reassurance as much as for what they could buy from the upheaval of toppled stock. And where bottles of Johnnie Walker and Ketel One were cinched into sacks amid stunned silence on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.

Celebrities of all stripes treat the store as a sort of demented commissary. I have seen everybody there from Liam Neeson, when he was renting on Lookout Mountain, to Keanu Reeves lurking by the magazine racks. One recent night at Pace, having observed Renee Zellweger en famille and George Clooney hunkered around a table (Clooney paid), I stopped at the store and spotted a bearded Matthew Broderick wandering the aisles. The canyon’s omnipresent Brit faction has its own aisle marked with a miniature Union Jack and stocked with HP sauce, Weetabix, Oxo cubes and other delights from the Empire. This started when David Bowie sheepishly prevailed upon the management to order Cadbury Flake bars, followed by Mick Jagger, who suggested U.K.-style Kit-Kats.

Before his incarceration, Robert Blake, who was trying to quit smoking, kept an open pack of cigarettes behind the register and asked that the staff dole them out to him, one per visit. (Blake later extended privileges to other jonesing smokers.)

Regulars make piecemeal contributions to the decor--Applegate donated an American flag bearing a likeness of the ubiquitous Morrison, which hung over the front doors before shredding during El Nino. The psychedelic Art Nouveau exteriors were painted by film director Spike Stewart in 1968. And it was here that, in a very un-Canyon-esque moment, I got around to asking Tommy Bina about Picture Day.

It turns out that in 1992, when Stewart touched up his paint job on the facade, he concurrently designed a T-shirt for the store, with the proceeds to be applied toward funding animal welfare causes. Somebody got the idea of taking a group photo of T-shirt owners wearing their purchases in front of the store on a suitably festive occasion--say, the Fourth of July. This was done. The T-shirts kept selling, however, so the next year another picture was shot, and the next year, and so on. Ultimately, Bina recalls, “Some people said, ‘I don’t have a T-shirt’ or, ‘I cannot afford to buy one’ or, ‘This is not my style.’ So I said, OK, just come with a regular T-shirt.”

So that’s why everybody comes down to the store every year to get their picture taken?

Bina pauses. “Yes,” he says.

Really? Cool.