Here’s what the stalwarts at WNEW in New York freaking City—now reconstituted as an HD radio and online entity hewing to the rock roots of the legendary WNEW-FM—recently had to say about LAUREL CANYON…

Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood by Michael Walker…The California singer/songwriter sound of the late 60s and 70s came largely from residents of a single Los Angeles neighborhood–Laurel Canyon, where such luminaries as Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, Joni Mitchell, the Turtles, Jackson Browne, and various Eagles lived. Walker, who lives in Laurel Canyon today, describes how this critical mass of like-minded creative people came together, and why the whole scene eventually fell apart.

Makes me pine for the days when I myself lived in New York—my old ‘hoods, down by 20th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan, and, later, Smith and Warren Streets in Brooklyn, have since evolved into their own little Laurel Canyon-like hotbeds of creativity and coolness.

Minus the coyotes, but they’re probably on their way…

Listen to WNEW online here.

Now that Warner Bros. is folding its “specialty” division along with 31 jobs, Warner Independent’s tres-classy logo, a snazzy and inventive derivative of the parent studio’s classic shield, sadly leaves us as well. Behold:

It’s an outstanding example of how to tap the equity of a parent brand (the “W” from the “WB” ) while creating a fresh identity with the simplest of strokes: notch the middle fork of the “W” to create the “i” in Independent then reinforce the connection with a splash of scarlet. Too bad it was for naught.

Presumably, the logo will live on in DVD packaging and in the title cards of Warner Independent films already released, which include George Clooney’s Academy Award-nomination magnet “Good Night, and Good Luck” and the documentary “March of the Penguins.”

I’ll be bringing the LAUREL CANYON multimedia extravaganza to the Google’s Irvine, California HQ at 11 a.m. May 20.

Googlers who toil at the company’s mothership in Mountain View and in Santa Monica and other satellites can join the fun via real-time vid-conference.

For those of youse not employed by Google, check in with YouTube after the gig where my presentation will be posted in its entirety for all the world to behold.

Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell’s romance and cohabitation in Mitchell’s bungalow in Laurel Canyon, through the songs “Our House” and “Ladies of the Canyon,” swiftly passed into legend for a generation which liked to think of itself at all times as young, talented, attractive and in love.

The times encouraged—demanded?—nothing less, and Nash and Mitchell were the king and queen of the countercultural prom. A lot of action centered on Mitchell’s house. As Nash told me in LAUREL CANYON:

“It was a small house. And it was a thing of who got to the piano first. She was in the middle of a record and was writing daily; and I was in the middle of record with David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] and I was writing daily, and it just got to be nuts….”

Their neighbor and friend Henry Diltz shot the photo, above, from the jump seat of a Cadillac limousine ferrying them—along with Crosby, Stills and album-cover designer Gary Burden—to Big Bear Lake, California, where the inside sleeve of the first CS&N album was photographed by Diltz.

Mitchell wrote throughout the trip on a pad of parchment paper; Diltz, curious, later blew up one of his photos and discovered she was penning the lyrics to “Willy,” her mash note to Nash cloaked in his nickname in CS&N, included on her landmark Ladies of the Canyon album, which Nash produced.

Click here to listen to my interview with Nash about his relationship with Mitchell. And check out Henry’s Galley to purchase a fine-art print of the photo above and hundreds of other of Diltz’s rock and roll photos from the ’60s and beyond.

Check out Tim O’Shea’s interview with me about LAUREL CANYON plus Mischa Barton’s reading habits and why it was satisfying to start a rock fight between L.A. and San Francisco in the pages of the New York Times.

The German-language edition of LAUREL CANYON (”the legendary valley of rock and roll,” auf Deutsch) powers on: publisher Rogner & Bernhard tells me they’re going to a second printing to keep up with demand.

Meanwhile, the good reviews continue to roll in, the latest from Hersfelder Zeitung (founded in 1705, the sixth oldest newspaper in the world! Damn!)

The New York Times Book Review’s Paper Cuts blog this week features me and my Laurel Canyon playlist in its groovy “Living with Music” column. Check it out…

This is the official web presence of LAUREL CANYON: THE INSIDE STORY OF ROCK AND ROLL’s LEGENDARY NEIGHBORHOOD, by MICHAEL WALKER, published by Faber & Faber/Farrar Straus and Giroux.

The hardcover edition of LAUREL CANYON has spent five and a half months on the Los Angeles Times Book Review’s nonfiction bestseller list and was a finalist for the Southern California Booksellers Association’s Book Award. The paperback edition debuted at No. 5 on the Times bestseller list in June and hit No. 4 in August.

LAUREL CANYON tells the true story of the remarkable events that transpired in Laurel Canyon, a eucalyptus-scented retreat located above the Sunset Strip in L.A., during the 1960s and 1970s.

“…charts the highs and lows of a celebrated part of music history”–Renee Montagne, co-host, National Public Radio ‘Morning Edition’

Laurel Canyon was where Crosby Stills & Nash sang together for the first time (in Mama Cass Elliot’s living room; or was it Joni Mitchell’s?); where Mitchell wrote her masterpiece “Ladies of the Canyon” and Nash the CSNY classic “Our House”; where Frank Zappa held court in a log cabin and Jackson Browne slept in the laundry room of a benefactor; and where Byrds, Turtles, Animals, Steppenwolves and Doors reset the thermostat of pop culture wordwide.

You’ll find all that and much more in the pages of LAUREL CANYON.

“A winding, inviting…portrait of a bohemian quarter that played a prominent role in the foundation of rock music…”–New York Times Book Review

In the meantime, I invite you to explore the website where you’ll find my impressions about daily life here in the canyon, where I’ve lived for the past 10 years, as well as untold hours of supplemental material from my research, including my recorded interviews with Graham Nash, Chris Hillman and others (click the AUDIO INTERVIEWS button in the column to the right), plus all manner of digressions into topics that I find amusing. Hope you enjoy!…MICHAEL WALKER

Michael Walker has written about popular culture for the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Men’s Vogue and other national publications. He lives in Laurel Canyon.

BUY LAUREL CANYON

LAUREL CANYON is sold at Borders and Barnes and Noble stores and at leading independent bookstores here and in the U.K. You can purchase the book worldwide online through Barnes and Noble, Amazon and also through the independent Southern California booksellers Book Soup, Vroman’s and Diesel Malibu.

The German-language edition has just been published by Rogner & Bernhard, on sale throughout Germany and online.

REVIEWS of LAUREL CANYON

New York Times–”A winding, inviting…portrait of a bohemian quarter that played a prominent role in the foundation of rock music.”

Salon–“…Walker, who has written about pop culture for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, has created an exhaustively researched and richly anecdotal book that will fascinate both rock aficionados and cultural historians…”

Rolling Stone–”Michael Walker’s book operates off the intriguing premise that there was something psycho-geographically special about [Laurel Canyon] that helped create the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash. His historical framing devices add depth, whether he’s writing about the liberated “ladies of the canyon” of the Sixties upsetting social conventions, or the fact that Ulysses S. Grant and Pope Leo XIII were both “partisans of a cocaine-laced wine called Vin Mariani”…

Los Angeles Times Book Review–“Overdue…By the end of Walker’s wistful narrative you begin to wish that the old log cabin at Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain would rise again, Brigadoon-like, in this dire era of American Idol and Clear Channel.”

TimeOut New York–”Walker is a dogged fact-finder, and the details he assembles here about various members of the L.A. rock royalty constitute essential reading for music fans who’ve always wondered how true to life Our House was, or why Zappa abstained from drugs while making records seemingly designed to soundtrack the act of getting stoned.”

The Age, Australia’s national newspaper “….a fast and wild ride, strewn with A-list celebrity anecdotes and affectionate contextualising of some of the great rock records of the ’60s and ’70s.”

Music Connection–”Journalist Michael Walker’s new book is loaded with anecdotes, insights and observations rendered in crystalline prose that, in just under 250 pages, presents a history of what is perhaps Los Angeles’ most renowned music neighborhood…”

Harp Magazine–”Walker, who resides in the Canyon, evokes the magic of the place wonderfully, particularly the mythic birth of CSN. The inclusion of figures like Frank Zappa and the Mothers, who’ve often been left out of histories of the time, serves to prove that the scene was not just filled with peaceful, easy, harmony-happy country-rock bands.”

Buffalo News–”…likely the definitive account of this locale and its impact on pop music and culture. Walker lives in the heart of the canyon, but doesn’t allow his residency to sway his writing…That’s why even if one could care less about Jackson Browne or the insufferable Eagles, ‘Laurel Canyon’ is a fun, dishy read…”

Cameron Crowe, Oscar-winning writer and director, Almost Famous–”Laurel Canyon is hilarious and true and bittersweet. Michael Walker catches the mood in the air, and gets it right the interviews are wonderful its a beautifully-written document of that time and place when the personalities were as big as those stony dreams that fueled some of the greatest masterpieces in rock.”

Stephen Gaines, author of the New York Times bestseller Philistines at the Hedgerow–”Laurel Canyon captures all the magic and lyricism of an almost mythological geographical spot in the history of pop music. The book lovingly limns the story of a more melodious time in rock and roll where the great talents of the 60s and 70s cloistered together in a sort of enchanted valley populated by an all-star cast of characters, including Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Mama Cass and Brian Wilson.”

The reprobates at the Canyon Country Store in the heart of Laurel Canyon are forever looking for an excuse to throw a bash on their front porch—and I’m only too willing to give them one.

Therefore…

Join me from 2 to 5 p.m. this Saturday, April 5 for for a combo book-signing, shindig and all-around get-down.

Tommy, the owner, promises a crowd approaching the size of the annual Photo Day, plus celebrities canyon-centric and otherwise, live music and traditional refreshments.

LAUREL CANYON, which just shipped its third printing in paperback, will be available for purchase, as will Jermaine Roger’s limited-edition art poster of the book’s quickly-becoming-iconic cover artwork.

Hope to see you there!

Canyon Country Store, 2108 Laurel Canyon Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90046 (323) 654-8091

From Daily Variety…

Twentieth Century Fox has acquired rights to “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime,” an article in the March edition of Men’s Vogue about daredevil cargo pilots.

Michael Walker, who wrote the article, will pen the script. Jason Blum of Blumhouse Prods. will produce.

Studio’s intention is to use these cargo pilots — called “freight dogs” — as the centerpiece for an action thriller. Real freight dogs, whose job is sometimes dangerous, haul everything from exotic animals and cars to videogames all over the world.

“Freight dogs are the last link to the globetrotting, hell-for-leather pilots Tom Wolfe wrote about in ‘The Right Stuff,’ except that instead of fighter jets they pilot old 747s filled with ‘Grand Theft Auto’ CDs or Formula One racecars,” Walker said.

Walker previously wrote the book “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”

National Public Radio special correspondent/legend Susan Stamberg’s interview with me about my Men’s Vogue freight dogs story airs tomorrow, Saturday March 29, on “Weekend Edition.”

The segment includes righteous field audio from my fiasco piloting the DC-8 simulator in Miami and will air about 20-25 minutes into the second hour—exactly when varies by city and time zone. Make it easy on yourself and just listen to the whole damned show; or listen to it anytime on NPR’s website after it airs.

And be sure to visit mensvogue.com to read the story online, right now.

It’s kinda cool the way the segment was put together when Susan is in Washington and I’m in L.A.

They parked me in a soundproof booth at NPR’s Culver City studios in front of an awesome Neumann U87 Ai microphone, above, and slapped some headphones on me; Susan was hooked up to a similar rig in D.C., and away we went. The sound quality was astonishing, like we were sitting in the same room, not 3,000 miles apart.

There’s a big analog clockface (on the computer monitor) that ticks relentlessly while you talk. Before they established the hookup between coasts somebody in Washington kept asking over my headphones, “L.A., are you there?”

Very Cold War, but good Cold War. Or something.

And, yeah, I need to get out of the atelier more.

Former Laurel Canyonite William Kuhn writes with his memories of the weird-ass super-secret Atomic Energy Commission citadel in the heart of Laurel Canyon where footage from nuke testing was processed in the Fifties and Sixties…

I went to Wonderland Ave. elementary school
and took the bus by that place daily. I don’t ever
remember the fence being electrified but I do remember
a guard in a small shack at the upper (outdoor)
parking lot. I don’t remember exactly when it closed
but it could’ve been in 1969…

It stayed vacant for many years until Dehl Berti (the
actor) bought it and started to fix it up. I don’t
remember what year that was. He never got it
completed. I think Dehl sold it around 1980. A friend
of mine actually became the caretaker of the facility
and I spent many hours exploring the insides.

It had been converted into three separate living areas
with bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms. Dehl had also
started work on the swimming pool that you can see
from current Google maps pics…

My friend used the movie theatre as a recording
studio. We also had a few parties on the sound stage.
There was a room that had a safe-like door on it. It
was extremely thick and had a dial combination on the
outside. Once inside it was obviously used as an
editing and storage area. We actually removed the door
from its hinges for fear of being locked inside.

We did find a LOT of old aluminum civil defense
containers full of crackers in the indoor garage. They
were expired as of 1963. I opened a can and the
crackers seemed to be fresh. I didn’t eat any, no
thanks.

That place had a very weird feeling to it…My
exploring was done when the place was in disarray. A
lot of the rooms didn’t have lights so we had
flashlights with us all the time.

Freaky! Thanks to William for sharing…

A heads-up that I’ll be appearing at the Laurel Canyon Country Store on Saturday, April 5, from 1-5 p.m.

I’ll be signing books—you can pick up a copy day-of, or any damned time, as the store tears through a case or so a month and replenishes the stock as faithfully as the Stoli and Belvedere.

Also, this would be an auspicious moment to purchase Jermaine Rogers’ limited edition, hand-silkscreened poster version of the cover (above, right), also on sale at the Canyon Store.

The poster is printed on heavy art stock and signed and numbered by Jermaine. The dimensions are 25 X 17 inches—not too big, not too small. Price: $50.

Jermaine’s work is collected worldwide and seldom comes on the market—this is a rare chance to buy one of his creations outside of the galleries.

Laurel Canyon Country Store, 2108 Laurel Canyon Blvd., L.A 90046 323-654-8091.

Check out the March issue of MEN’S VOGUE for my rockin’ feature about Freight Dogs—buccaneering cargo pilots like Seth Brady, above, who fly the world in the dead of night, through hurricanes if necessary, to keep the global economy humming.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Freight dog” embodies everything a cargo pilot is certain that he is—an intrepid, independent, ferociously competent, downtrodden-but-proud-of-it pilot—but also what he is not: a fancy-pants flying passengers (or “self-loading freight” in dog patois) for United, American, Virgin, Lufthansa, Air France and the rest.

“We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” says Tony Baca, a 747 cargo captain. “The airline pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole different culture.”

When not piloting “clapped-out” 747s and DC-8s dating to the Nixon Administration, freight dogs cool their jets at hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the Cylcone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong and the legendary Four Floors of Whores in Singapore, which, according to dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth in advertising.

It’s an article of faith among freight dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed “cantina” scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Café adjacent to Miami International Airport that generations of pilots have passed through in a sort of demented finishing school…

Their cargo comprises incomprehensible quantities of the mundane–160,000 pounds of roses, 25,000 wiring harnesses for Chevy Malibus, 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto CDs–but also a full-sized armored truck filled with four tons of Euro banknotes; a pair of experimental Lamborghini Countachs; a Sikorsky 76 for the Sultan of Brunei’s nephew; enough condoms to choke a specially chartered 747 to Rio for Carnival; an MD-11 filled to the gunwales with Victoria’s Secret lingerie; a mysterious ice-chest, insured for $2 million, enroute to the CDC in Atlanta that turned out to contain the first HIV drug cocktail.

Then there is the livestock: whales; thoroughbred racehorses; 13 male rhinos; 200 dairy cattle, 3 infant giraffes; 11 elephants; crocodiles; piglets (which got out and got behind the captain’s rudder pedals); ducklings (ditto); a daily shipment out of Brisbane of live crickets destined as feed for the world’s zoos.; a dog, the only cargo on a 747 freighter deadheading Chicago-Tokyo, who spent part of the flight playing Frisbee-catch in the plane’s cavernous hold with the pilot not flying (and was later photographed, in a meta-homage to freight dogdom, sitting at the captain’s station, paws on the control yoke, gazing wistfully into the sunset).

There’s lots more, including a tender scene where I crash a fully loaded DC-8-63 freighter onto Runway 9 at Miami International Airport—in the simulator, fortunately.

Click here to read the story at mensvogue.com

Whoa. Turns out there’s a power trio in Paris called The Continental Riot House!

Members Vivian Morrison and Delaney Blue webmailed this a.m., to wit:

We just wanted to tell you that we are very fond of your book…

We heard about it after we just found our name for our band: The Continental Riot House (makes you smile, right?). Over here, no-one understands but who cares?

Hope there will be a French translation someday….

Certainement! Le tout en temps utile, mes amis. Restez à l’écoute…

Vivian and Delaney refer, of course, to the legendary hotel on the Sunset Strip where everyone from Led Zeppelin to Lynyrd Skynyrd ran amok in the ’70s. Maybe, soon, CRH themselves, too.

Listen to Continental Riot House here: http://www.myspace.com/thecontinentalriothouse

Liz, one of the signatories of the foxy arts-culture-fashion-whatever website nogoodforme, had this to say about Laurel Canyon and LAUREL CANYON:

Last night before meeting some cats for Valentine’s drinks I went to Laurel Canyon Country Store to buy a turkey-and-avocado sandwich and a bottle of wine. The Canyon Store’s not anywhere near my house, but…I’m all obsessy about Laurel Canyon lately.

It’s mostly ’cause I read Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood…it’s made me do things like develop deeply anachronistic crushes on Graham Nash and Netflix Woodstock and purchase severely battered/vandalized copies of Neil Young’s biography from the bookstand dude at the farmers market. Oh, and every time I go clothes-shopping now I try to find shirts that somehow involve macrame. Life feels different, in a good way.

Anyway, the book is so grand and really dream-come-true for anyone who’s a total rock dork and mega-infatuated with anything pertaining to Southern California pop history and/or the 1970s…

Now sometimes I get sad because I don’t reside in Laurel Canyon and it’s unlikely that I’ll end up moving there anytime soon, but generally I’m okay with living vicariously through Michael Walker’s lovely blog (lotsa neat photos of Canyon inhabitants and goings-on, including but not limited to coyote sightings and wildfires) and occasionally dropping by the Canyon Store on my way to bars or the movies.

Yeah! I would also recommend hanging out at the Canyon Store on a hot night in August, maybe an hour before closing, with the wind blowing through the front doors and the overhead fans twirling like propellers.

Narrow your depth of field just a little, and you’d swear it was the summer of ‘73…even if, or especially if, you hadn’t been born yet.

The canyon coyotes are going batshit again—a pack of them erupted into yips, yaps and aaaOOOHs in a swale near the altelier around midnight last night.

My guess is they’re celebrating a surge in the small-critter population, their dietary mainstay, thanks to this winter’s soddenness after last year’s unprecedented drought.

Or maybe they’re just booty-calling—this is the prime of coyote mating season, which runs through March.

Happy Valentine’s Day, dogs.

Berlin-based public radio network RBB’s KulturRadio awards the German-language edition of LAUREL CANYON five “C’s”, its highest ranking, above. (Those C’s look more like the K’s from KulturRadio’s logo to me, but maybe something got lost in translation.)

Whatever. Five C’s—which denote “great”—suit me just fine and are a far sight better than the alternatives: “acceptable” (three C’s), “ambivalent” (two) and “failed (one).

Well. Jermaine Rogers’ ’60s concert style art poster of his groovy LAUREL CANYON cover sold out in two hours this afternoon.

Mournful that you didn’t get your dibs in fast enuf?

Take heart: Mr. Musichead Gallery in L.A. has an extremely limited supply: same image, same colors, same size, hand-silkscreened on dun-colored stock which lends the poster an intriguing aged patina—like it’s been hanging in some opium den or other since 1966.

Contact the gallery at the link above for details—including custom framing.

You’ve begged, pleaded, cajoled, schemed.

Now, at long last, Jermaine Rogers has created a full-on, tripped-out, suitable-for-framing, limited-edition art poster of his bitchin’ cover for LAUREL CANYON.

It’s available direct from his website, which notes…

In 2006, Jermaine created the cover artwork from the best-selling book ‘Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story Of Rock-N-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood’ by Michael Walker. The book is now well into its seventh printing.

The cover art struck a nerve with very many readers and lovers of rock-and-roll history and culture worldwide, and after many requests Jermaine is finally releasing an art print edition of the cover imagery.

This silk-screened piece is printed on 100 lb. white gallery stock and measures approx. 25 x 17 inches. This edition is limited to only 150 signed/numbered pieces, a portion of which is already unavailable. The remaining balance of the edition will be offered to the public at $50.00 per print (ONE PER BUYER.)

I’ve seen these babies up close etc. and, ladies and gentlemen, they are freaking gorgeous. The colors are the same as the original, above, but as Jermaine points out “look like they’ve been plugged into the wall”—the hippie-chick cover girl is suffused with fluorescing ink that renders her bodaciously 3-D.

Put this beauty under a black light at your own risk.