A FRENCH COMPENDIUM

LOVE STREET

 

 

 

I'd sucked up as much of Los Angeles as I possibly could during my brief stay and once that had all been digested and processed, I felt that I certainly had a greater understanding of the Lizard King. 

 

LA is of course, so many things all rolled into one and the fascination that Jim had for the place would have been insatiable. This conclusion I was not able to make until the same streets and boulevards had been walked, the same joints frequented…different joints smoked.

 

Everyone I met, by chance or arrangement, were friendly folk; helpful, interesting and interested in me and my going’s on. There were times when I was very heavily involved with the business which had taken me to LA in the first instance and these were intense, draining and often even fractious moments.

 

On other occasions, desirous of hide-aways or observation points to revel in the anonymity of it all, I discovered that one could be left alone. Secondly, one could be left alone and be perfectly happy. I also assumed therefore, that one could presumably equally be so alone as to be suicidal, but these are the characteristics of most of the worlds great cities.

 

Being relatively innocuous or under-stated was a great place to start, especially if not indigenous to the desert or surrounds. Uber drivers were fascinated by accent and then even more so once vocation, or purpose for being in the City of Lights, had been established.

 

On the whole, I found Los Angeles to be most endearing, apart from the coffee. I was always surprised that when working in New Zealand, a small back water in the South Pacific, the quality in terms of coffee making itself, was of a very high standard. It came as some relief then, after ten days, to discover an espresso machine at the Country Store in Laurel Canyon. 

 

And from the table on the deck of that same establishment, a retro cafe and grocery store once frequented by rock stars, sitting in the morning sun which filled the valley, enjoying said coffee, I was staring right across the valley at #8021 Rothwell Trail, the former home of Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson, a dwelling absolutely saturated in Doors history.

 

The bungalow, built in 1922, sits nestled in the canyon hills behind Sunset Boulevard. The ‘house on Love Street’, which it is more commonly referred to as, was the home of the LK during the writing and recording of the Waiting for the Sun album in 1968. Legend has it that Jim would run up and down the staircases, reciting poetry and singing at the top of his lungs at all hours of the night. 

 

It’s difficult to believe, yet of some considerable relief to know, that amid the heat of pure LA chaos, one can literally turn right at the western end of Hollywood Boulevard and escape. Ironically, it’s like going through a door, a time portal even. Almost a wardrobe into a secret world.

 

And once one is winding up through the cypress and eucalyptus trees that line the bumpy, snaking roads off Laurel Canyon Boulevard, it’s as if one has entered another world. 

 

Somewhere along the five minute drive between the Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon, the neon and noise of teeming urban life gets switched off. Elliot Mintz describes it as the distance between two galaxies. He believes they were two separate worlds with their own differing mentality. 

 

While Sunset Strip madness, Hollywood and crowded side-walks are literally only a short hitch away, it’s hills and trees which become omnipresent in the ravine, still with estates of grandeur, but far less of them.

 

The store has an inscription on the counter which reads; ‘there’s a store where the creatures meet’, which not only is a line of Jim’s from ‘Love Street’, but an historical encapsulation of unexpurgated  life in Laurel Canyon during the late 1960’s. 

 

For it was indeed the store where the creatures met, as general in every capacity as it was fifty years ago. At the time, the Canyon was home to some of the most beastly of critters on the music scene, who had started drifting into the gullies during the mid-60’s. 

 

Mama Cass Elliott, Peter Tork of the Monkee’s, David Crosby of the Byrds, Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, John Mayall, Carole King and Dusty Springfield. 

 

This strange bohemian Netherland was more than somewhat of a musical mecca! The jangle of Rickenbacker’s seemingly still drifted on the breeze and resonated melodically though the valleys. Was it Joni’s silky voice and Grahams incredible harmonies that appeared faintly audible through the leaves on those eucalypts?

 

I pondered all this as I delighted in each small draught of my flat white. At the time I believed ‘ooze’ was the correct locution. Sitting in peace in such a place, looking at the house on Love Street beside the Laurel Canyon Cleaners & Laundry, it was as if acid and psychedelia were still ‘oozing’ from the hills.

 

While a lot of misconceptions remain regarding the Canyon, with books and documentaries having romantically mythologised this trippy, woodsy gorge, residents of (or associated with) Laurel Canyon wrote some of the greatest of all American popular music of the late 1960’s and early ’70’s.