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>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.
When John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas sang the August 1967 hit "Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)," he might have had Pamela Des Barres in mind. For Des Barres, then an eighteen-year-old budding groupie, the wooded Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon was "the door to paradise." "I lived in the valley, and you'd hitchhike through the canyon to get to Hollywood," says Des Barres, who went on to write the definitive backstage memoir I'm With the Band. "All the California rock stars lived up there, and you could hear music from every window. Parties everywhere. You just never knew what was going to happen."
Members of all the key L.A. rock bands - the Byrds, the Mamasand the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Doors - found a rural refuge in the canyon, which was five minutes from the Sunset Strip, the heart of Hollywood nightlife. Musicians gathered in one another's houses, living an upscale version of the hippie dream: "Sometimes I would wake up to find Denny Doherty and David Crosby swimming in my pool, with a half-empty gallon of wine floating in the pool that they would take occasional hits from," says Monkees member Peter Tork, whose mansion in Studio City, on the north side of Laurel Canyon, was a major gathering place. Adds Byrds leader Roger McGuinn, who had moved into the canyon in the early Sixties, when it was an enclave of folkies and beatniks, "We were all into privacy. You wanted to be able to do things without people looking over your shoulder."
"Mama" Cass Elliott's cozy canyon house functioned as a sort of rock salon; she played host to locals and visitors such as Eric Clapton and Graham Nash, then in the Hollies. "There was something happening in '67 and '68 in Los Angeles," Nash has said. "A lot of walking over to people's houses with a new song. We'd be smoking heavily and talking, and a lot of incredible music was being made." Elliott introduced Nash to former Byrd David Crosby and former Buffalo Springfield leader Stephen Stills; the trio joined forces in 1968 as Crosby, Stills and Nash, defining the Laurel Canyon sound.
>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.