This piece aired Tuesday, 9.25.07, on NPR member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio.
A recent speaker at Western Illinois University prompted commentator Alison McGaughey to do a little “California dreamin’.”
Sometimes, in weaker moments, I find myself wishing I was someone else. Specifically, Joni Mitchell.
I experienced such a moment just last week when journalist Michael Walker visited the WIU campus in Macomb to deliver a talk on his book, Laurel Canyon: the Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood. His presentation included photos, music, and outtak
es from his interviews with musicians who lived in the California canyon in the 1960’s. In one: Joni looking dreamy as she sits cross-legged in a Laurel Canyon yard, strumming her guitar. In another: with her long blonde locks tucked into a crocheted cap, she tilts her head lovingly toward Graham Nash, fellow Canyon resident and 60’s musician. She was just so darn glamorous. And, oh–also an amazing poet, instrumentalist, and painter.
photo credit: Henry Diltz, via Michael Walker
Walker told the story of how Graham Nash wrote a song about Mitchell and Nash’s love affair and cohabitation in a Laurel Canyon house—you know the one, the “very very very fine house.”
As he described how these and many others came together, harmonizing musically and spiritually, Walker pointed out that in an age before cell phones, e-mail, etc., the young people of Laurel Canyon had to get out of their houses and congregate in order to get in touch with one another. The communal lifestyle allowed for spontaneous music-making sessions. The author said he often wonders why today’s generation of teens and early-twenty-somethings—around 50 or so of whom attended the talk in the University Union Sandburg Theatre—remain interested in a time so long before they were born. A common response, he said, is, “We’ll never have anything like this.”
Walker, a Chicago native, also showed photos of modern-day Laurel Canyon, where he lives today. And while his photos did capture some of today’s young people wearing tie-dye, there wasn’t much about the physical neighborhood itself that spoke of the 60’s and the magical moments of music history that happened there. Which led me to think of another legendary California neighborhood that played a major role in 60’s counterculture.
I visited the famed Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during a family trip to California in early August. As I walked around the neighborhood that I’d read and heard about all my life, it just seemed like lots of shops selling incense and tie-dye, shops not unlike those present in every other college town. I was finding it to be a bit anticlimactic, until my dad happened to notice a homemade sign placed outside a shop. Someone had taped up some snapshots of the houses in which Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Greatful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane had lived, the house numbers written helpfully in ink pen below. I walked down the street excitedly to check out the house where Hendrix had lived. The lower half housed an organic produce market. The upper half, apparently housing an apartment, was un-remarkable— though there was tie-dye tapestry tacked up over the windows in lieu of curtains.
I would’ve expected a plaque sponsored by the tourism bureau at the very least.
But as we pulled away from the famed neighborhood I realized I was thankful— at least the original neighborhood hadn’t been plowed down to house a kind of Hendrix Hard Rock Hotel.
And during the Laurel Canyon presentation, I took comfort in knowing that journalists like Walker are preserving the stories of the Sixties. And keeping younger generations interested in the art and culture of the period—and the fascinating free spirits like Joni Mitchell who once lived there.
Because, apparently, not every young person grows up to be as fascinated by the period.
When I was chatting later in the week with a student who happens to be a journalism major, I asked if he’d enjoyed Walker’s talk.
“Oh, I didn’t go,” he said. “I’m not really into the music from that time. I like a little Steppenwolf, but that’s it.”
Which leads me to believe universities should adopt Walker’s book as required reading—with soundtrack to go along.
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Tags: Rock and/or Roll
