If you are looking for a place to escape from the house where you have been trapped for more than two months in lockdown, then “Laurel Canyon” might be.
The two-part document, aired May 31 and June 7 on Epix, takes you back to the magic period in the 60s, when the Laurel Canyon area in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles is music utopia for everyone from Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell to David Crosby and Neil Young.
Yup, it’s back when there is free love, not social distance.
Directed by Alison Elwood (“American Jihad”), this series captures the free spark of times when we need to remember most of the ways people are connected.
“It was not a scene at the time. It was just a better place to live – above the haze,” Crosby recalled moving there as a member of The Byrds.
“It’s like living in the countryside, but you’re in a big city,” said The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn about the beautiful setting.
Joni Mitchell and Cass Elliot.Henry Diltz
Henry Diltz from Modern Folk Quartet remembers moving to a studio in Laurel Canyon. At night, he said, “it was very quiet, except for the owl.”
“We used to call it Oz,” said Love guitarist Johnny Echols, who told a touching story about taking his instrument for the first time: “The vibrations only tickled my soul. It is a love relationship that continues to this day. “
And about how the band got its name, Echols just said, “We just like music.”
But one of the most telling and timely moments came when Echols remembered getting advice from Little Richard, a stone pioneer who died on May 9 and who had lived in the Laurel Canyon area. When Richard unlocks the keys for “Lucille,” Echols remembers traveling with him to England.
“We met these four people,” he said. “They used to follow Richard around … sycophants as far as I could see. Then in Los Angeles, I was invited to see the Beatles. I don’t believe that. The little people who run after Richard are the biggest things in the world.”
After the classic The Eagles “Take It Easy” introduces the second episode, LA DJ Jim Ladd tells how it was not easy at all because the Vietnam War and the civil rights war at home continued. “The whole social order of the country is in turmoil,” said Ladd, who at that time had “hair down the middle of my back.”
Ladd said that the hippies of Laurel Canyon did not always receive the love they spread in their peaceful place. “They are people who hate us,” he said. “They don’t like hippies.”
But Browne landed exactly why Laurel Canyon was a hippie paradise. “‘Hippies’ are like young people who are just growing up, just opening, just blooming, someone getting hip,” he said. “There’s a way to live your life in the open, be a freak and not regret who you are.”
