The Legends of Laurel Canyon

the music icons who called la's laurel canyon home jimi hendrix there's nobody like jimmy playing the guitar like that the doors jim morrison was one of the people that was always part of our little clique the monkeys i'm told i had a great time now tina molive has the inside stories ion la presents the legend of laurel canyon hi everyone i'm ion la's tina malabay now it's fitting that the first time that i ever heard about the music legends of laurel canyon was when i was doing a story here at the houdini estate because what happened in laurel canyon in the mid 60s and into the early part of the 70s was truly magical now there's no way i could tell all of her tales in one hour or spotlight every band and musician who spent time here so tonight i'm going to share some of my favorite stories that i've learned over the past year about a very special place during a very important time in music history once upon a time there was this place called laurel canyon and if you had been fortunate enough in the mid to late 60s to have lived there you would have found yourself among the most magical of people in 1965 half of the population of what we call the western world was under the age of 25. you have a revolution and evolution in consciousness when you have a condition like that you know we were the new generation we were the hippies you know we all felt like brothers and sisters and there was love was in the air and peace and lots of wonderful music happening laurel canyon was the epitome of the summer of love i mean people girls and boys hitchhiked up and down the road we saw the possibility of the way we could live there was no separation between races or gay straight whatever it was all love and the whole canyon was thick with it all the hit people moved there because it was right by the sunset strip but it was in the forest at the same time so you could have both a city country and city town and country effect i think initially musicians kind of congregated here is because it was inexpensive to live you had all of these people from like the doors the birds buffalo springfield i lived across the street from mark wollman of the turtles jackson brown right up the hill from mickey dolans and and joni mitchell and frank zappa it never never occurred to me that you know 20 30 years later this would be a you know a part of a history my neighbors were linda ronstadt john male cass elliot the guys from three dog night the band love crosby stills nash you know there were some girls too of course i paid attention to the boys what was the vibe like when you were living there with all these people oh i'm told i had a great time you know it just seemed normal to us at the time but looking back it was unbelievable and from this open-minded forest a quick thumb ride down the hill would put you right in the heart of la's music universe sunset strip was where you went to parade but we were all trying to play the same clubs at night we were all trying to get gigs just so the band could eat either at the whiskey or bitolitos or pandora's box the whiskey gogo was amazing place then you could see the best acts in the world at the time we we played the whiskey a go-go with some band called led zeppelin and nobody had ever heard of either one of us you know we were just two local bands at the whiskey of gogo in the midst of the strip's exploding nightlife a group of free-form dancers led by the eccentric carl franzoni and sculptor vito pelecas known simply as la's freaks elevated the club scene and are considered by many the creators of the hippie subculture he ended up having disciples of like 35 different people his his wife owned a clothing store and she made all of these hippie clothes and that was the whole start of the hippie thing that happened they started going to clubs and dancing and it was insane people started coming to the clubs to to look at the dance floor to see all of these strange incredibly dressed uh half-naked hippie girls and guys doing this insane dancing and that was that was the whole start it was during this time that another big change was about to take place fueled by four long-haired musicians from across the pond the beatles really acting and they were the impetus for for the change in music when the beatles played ed sullivan first of all all the folk groups saw that performance and saw that joyful music and said you know what are we singing about ox drivers for when we could be doing that joyful and they wrote their own music and played electric instruments so all the folk groups went out electrified our instruments and so did everybody and you had the buffalo springfield and the birds and these new kind of electric folk rock groups in 1964 the laurel canyon-based group the birds were made up of david crosby michael clark gene clark chris hillman and roger mcguinn and their new folk rock sound was the talk of the town when we saw the birds play at zeros it just kind of really knocked us out seeing them and and they had what was called the sherwood forest crowd these were the freaks the hippies vito and and carl franzoni and and those people so they were there and then and they brought the crowds and just came basically the gawk at them the birds also had their share of young gawking groupies including a teenaged pamela miller now pamela debar who would later become a member of the girl band the gto's i found out they all lived in laurel canyon and of course got all their addresses and would hitchhike to their homes and just sit out in front of them i was in love with chris hellman of the bass player and i finally got the nerve to go knock on his door in those days you could just knock on people's doors you know and just be cute and pretty and they'd invite you in that's what happened to me a lot in laurel canyon it wasn't long before the rest of the country would become enamored with the birds as well and in 1965 their take on a bob dylan song launched them into the worldwide spotlight i mean i remember when the birds finally had their big hit with mr tambourine man it was like yeah great i mean our good friends and finally they're on the radio i can't believe it you know and then one by one each person started getting played when the legends of laurel canyon returns members of the critically acclaimed band love reveal what kept them from worldwide fame and the 1966 sunset strip revolt that inspired a buffalo springfield anthem and later people said it didn't happen but it definitely happened a long time jim morrison controversy is put to rest in 1965 the influence of the beatles was palpable in the laurel canyon music scene everybody started writing their own music which is way different because frank sinatra never wrote any songs elvis presley never wrote any song but these guys did and it started with the beatles and bob dylan that was a huge sea change in the music business you know they used to have singers and songwriters and now you had singer-songwriters where are you walking up seeing you walking have you been there before we lived on lookout mountain we also lived on kirkwood maybe half mile up these two identical houses and we had both houses and we lived there for quite some time i think we placed something like a hundred dollars a month or something for each house which is incredible the whole area was inspiring i think because there there was kind of a friendly rivalry where everybody wanted to do the very best that they could not for the money it was just about the music you know and just about creating something and pushing the envelope founded by arthur lee and johnny echols along with band members brian mclean ken forsey albon snoopy fisterer and michael stewart ware the band love was groundbreaking in many ways including being one of the first racially mixed bands we couldn't play lots of places in this country like in the south which had huge rock audience but being that we were a racially mixed group we couldn't play them because of this many of love's album covers featured drawings of the group rather than their actual pictures the places in the south if you look at what was happening people were being lynched and dogs and put on them for trying to vote so seeing a bunch of hippies from california coming there they just weren't into that so the red states were basically off limits to us but in l.a love was all the rage arthur was always rather flamboyant you know he liked to be the center of the tensions but arthur was basically a poet he would see things he would see just the absurdities in life and would be able to put it down and words that you know made sense and like the line for everyone who thinks that life is just a game do you like the part you're playing that's a beautiful line though hugely popular on the west coast love never achieved the worldwide success many believe they deserved we were having problems with our record company we've been offered a really fantastic deal to leave and go with mca which was a much larger record company than electro was at the time and they just were not going to let us go and so we came up with the dumbest idea we could we thought if we hooked them up with the doors they'll let us go so we hooked them up with the doors and instead of letting us go they kind of used the money that they would have used to promote us for the doors so basically we shot ourselves in the foot but in the love documentary love story arthur lee candidly reveals another reason for their lack of success his unwillingness to tour outside of california i had a good thing going on the west coast and actually to tell you the truth i was afraid to go somewhere else because i didn't know how i would be received i was just out 19 years old man well 20 years old i didn't know i didn't know it's all the same it's nothing to be afraid of we lost arthur lee to leukemia in 2006. love's groundbreaking album forever changes is listed in rolling stone's 500 greatest albums of all time coming in at an impressive number 40 ahead of meet the beatles and bob marley legend at the buffalo springfield our first song was nowadays clancy can't even sing clancy was a little puppy that one of them had named after the buffalo springfield steamroller company the laurel canyon folk rock band consisting of dewey martin richie pereira bruce palmer neil young and steven stills would gain worldwide attention with a song about protests and unrest on the sunset strip it was just honestly an avalanche of kids from all over the world that came to sunset strip and they basically would close the street down on the weekends you couldn't drive on sunset strip it was just like a love in down there from crescent heights to dohini was just full of people walking to the merchants i think they looked like halloween everybody was dressed up with hippie clothes hanging in coffee shops with very little money you know hogging tables and they complained to the city council and the cops started parking a big bus asking everybody for id and arresting all kinds of underage kids it was not unusual to go down to sunset boulevard and see 500 kids with their arms against the wall being frisked basically it was open season on hippies the mounting tensions of a 10 pm curfew combined with police harassment and the closing of the popular nightclub pandora's box culminated in a november 12 1966 protest that turned violent i remember sitting by the pool once and steven stills came by and he says i want you to i want to play this new song i'm working on and he played for what it's worth on the guitar just sitting by the pool something happened in here what it is ain't exactly clear that was the anthem because it really did speak to what was going on on the street you know and it really was the hippies against the police which was ridiculous really why not just let everybody was very peaceful you know why not let people have a good time and be happy in august of 67 the los angeles city council claimed the streets at the intersection of sunset and crescent heights needed to be realigned and pandora's box was demolished the headlines in the la times read hippies pout politicians cheer buffalo springfield would disband about a year later still ahead on the legends of laurel canyon the female attention that he got was like nothing i had ever seen in my life plus and i'm like that's the guy that plays a guitar with his teeth how jimmy james became jimi hendrix and later i could smell the peanut butter in his mustache from at least four feet away just behind the canyon country store on rothdale trail is one of laurel canyon's most famous pads known as the jim morrison love street house while living here with longtime girlfriend pamela corson morrison would pen lyrics to the dora's albums waiting for the sun and most of the soft parade including the song love street about the house and the neighborhood the lyrics i see you live on love street there's this store where the creatures meet is a reference to the canyon country store just outside their window world famous groupie pamela debar has a special memory of the house we caught up with her on one of her rock and roll tours of laurel canyon i used to stay with a friend of mine who lived right next door up here and i heard the doors music being played and i said who in the world has has this pre-release doors album you know so i would tip down all these steep stairs and i peeked in the door and it was jim singing along to the end it was pretty hot i actually walked into the house and proceeded to do a back bend so good i had just learned how to do a back bend so i was very very proud of it and i looked up and pam was looking down at me and she said get the bleep out of my house the female attention that he got was like nothing i had ever seen in my life as much as he wanted to be in the public eye and to be a rock star he hated it he was trying to you know to be taken seriously as an artist as a musician rather than a sex object and i kept telling you dude it's all part of it and if you didn't look the way you look more than likely they wouldn't listen to you so it's all part of the package but he never understood that he was overwhelmed by all the attention which i think is what led him to drink and that led to legendary fights between jim and pam the neighborhood would all hear it people at the canyon store would see it what they particularly see would be pam throwing jim's clothes out the window his record collection if it was a really bad fight his book collection which was very important to him on new year's weekend of 2012 an arson fire destroyed much of the house which is currently being rebuilt but the left street house is no stranger to fires and one in particular is a widely debated subject then photographer bobby klein was jim and pam's neighbor they were in love they went up it was very tender and when gym was straight it was it was beautiful there's always been this big controversy about this one scene in the oliver stone film where where jim puts pam in the closet and lights up lights on fire and many people have said it never happened no it happened because pam pam came to my house right after and we were one one house separate from each other jim was accusing her of sleeping with some playboy around town and uh he was pretty uh messed up he got really really angry threw in a closet lit the closet on fire and um it happened she came to my house afterwards freaked out so you actually so you went down and you actually saw that the the closet had been on fire around the edges it was all it was all smoke yeah there was a lot of kind people said it didn't happen but it definitely happened sadly the normally quiet and reserved poet would face many personal demons in his very short life i could see it was a bit too much it was a bit uncomfortable because at the very heart and core of who jim was he was a truly a gentle soul very and very sweet and also very kind when i first met him he was jimmy james and we were playing at the california club and he was playing with the eisley brothers the first day i met him if he was playing my guitar i walk in and there's a strange man playing my axe and that's not something that musicians do to each other you don't pick up a guy's axe you know he said well she looked so lonely sitting there i thought i'd come and introduce myself and so that was so cute that i laughed and we became friends right then jimi hendrix was very quiet people say what was he like he was like a little boy very shy very shy you'd read it as insecure except the moment he stepped onto the stage it was magic when we knew him back in the day he wasn't very good he was just kind of a journeyman guitar player like so many others were and then he started adding effects of wawa pedal and other things that um were not initially made for the title when everybody thought nobody wants to play that one and uh but he saw something different and was able to actually utilize the sounds of it i looked at it as a piece of crap and he saw it as you know a tool so i have to give him all the props because he deserves them i'm the one that did suggest that he opened for us i'd seen him actually in new york originally as a side man and then months later i'm at monterey pop festival and all of a sudden the jimi hendrix experience walks out and i and i'm like that's the guy that plays a guitar with his teeth i recommend to producers because we were looking for an opening act at the time he was uh the opening act for our first tour it was it was it was strange strange i mean nobody knew who he was and the music of course are very different and when hendrix hit the stage we want davey we want the monk peter mickey and they were booing and oh and you know anybody can get hurt by that and he threw the guitar down and left the stage because he left the tour do you remember the moment where you you heard him and you thought wow he's not just a regular guitar player anymore i came to the whiskey and he was playing there and i didn't know we didn't know it was the same jimmy james this was you know jimi hendrix and we didn't know him that was the arthur and i went in oh man that's the dude from the california club and he's playing and he has all of these people that just you know wrapped attention and thought wow where the hell did he get this from you know i just you know he went from here to here and just you know matter of a few months and you know i asked him about it and he just would shed it man that's that was his answer he just practiced i don't know the stars lined up for him and he was supposed to be jimi hendrix up next that was the thing that was going on in the middle 60s the monkey auditions the door opened and in walks peter totally naked and an intimate look at mama cass her struggle and her triumph really give people hope now you might not believe it but during the 60s two of the most notorious party houses in laurel canyon actually belong to members of the monkeys peter tork and just up this street mickey dolan's house look at these little boyish innocent faces that you guys have who knows what we were going crazy in the game you know compared to what goes on these days right right it actually was very innocent and naive you know that was the thing that was going on in the in the 60s and then the middle 60s the monkey auditions you know that was a buzz in the air everybody was going down and then very famously you know they they auditioned stephen stills this would have been before the buffalo springfield but he he had a tooth a kind of a snaggle tooth and they said well your tooth isn't right and he said well let me send my roommate down and that was peter tork of the four monkeys two of them were true musicians one was mike nesmoth who wrote and sang and peter tork the other two were more of showbiz people you know davey jones playing the artful dodger plays in england musicals and mickey donalds had been in circus boy those were the two seasoned entertainers in the book canyon of dreams the magic and music of laurel canyon author harvey kubernick's inclusion of the monkeys was initially met with some resistance when i did the canyon book there were some discussions about why are you giving so much coverage to these people i said you can't ignore that the monkeys were on the radio from late 66 to 1970 or whatever it was constantly forget the tv show the songs are just so good the monkeys was not a group it was a television show about a group in fact very similar to glee but all the members of that cast can actually sing and they can dance and they can act and make them perform well that's what the monkeys want to see it exposed me to the songwriters behind the music there's a guy named neil diamond has he wrote i'm a believer in boysen heart you know who wrote some of the biggest hits and another laurel canyon icon as well this is carol king she'll be writing some songs for you and it was just her and a little grand piano and an old wool and sack tape recorder but it was peter and mickey's homes that were the talk of laurel canyon yeah he had a a real commune jimi hendrix lived there for oh yeah didn't he yeah peter had a very different lifestyle his was his was very bohemian mickey's former wife and still close friend samantha dolans remembers all too well and peter looks naked well i only barely went there it was a bit bit too much you know public there i mean they were all running around naked but my hippies were all lovely though but it was more from a yoga sense you know and a sort of hey it's just that's natural sense you know hey it's a body big deal one time there's a cocktail party on the road and in walks peter totally naked it was from that sense of hey i'm a child of god i'm not ashamed of my body be natural i was born and raised in l.a so i knew laurel canyon like the back of my hands the place i moved into looked like you're in the middle of the rocky mountains it was an old cabin a disney animator was built so it would it would start out on a friday night as a you know a little cocktail party with some food and monday morning people would still be you know wandering around the garden naked you know falling into the pool this is a perfect example of why mickey says he doesn't remember but there was a night mickey recalls very well when singer songwriter friends john lennon and harry nilsson were hanging out at his place all of a sudden somebody called and said brian wilson's coming over and he hadn't been out of his house for years remember months this was during the period of time when beach boy brian wilson became reclusive after suffering a nervous breakdown sure enough limo pulls up and brian gets out with his bathrobe still on and his flip-flops and comes in and sits in this in in my little recording studio and with john and harry and a bunch of people and he started playing this beach boy like um kind of thing you know there's nothing down to no california sunderland the beach and then and everybody's playing along and they're looking at each other and finally john says all right brian go to the bridge they're basement tapes i still have them and they still have yes when was the last time you listened to some of these tapes here's a couple of those tapes that i was mentioning to you and um i just got them transferred haven't even listened recently but this one it says up here brian wilson harry which would have been harry nielsen and keith moon at some party in my basement and this one is just says john and harry had with john lennon and harry nielsen oh i just i haven't listened to these in for 40 years and i have no idea a bunch of rubbish party will you give us a call just as the monkeys were forming two folk groups out of new york were disbanding the journeyman featuring john phillips and the mugwomps which included denny doherty and a force of nature named mama cass elliott the musically brilliant john phillips decided he would create a new trio with denny and his beautiful new wife michelle phillips but cass elliott was determined to make it a quartet no matter how much john protested it's true that john did not want my mom in the group john john had a certain uh visual in his in his brain of what this should look like but he had this really beautiful wife and i think that he really wanted that type of a look and my mother didn't necessarily fit that mold was it a little discriminatory possibly so cass headed west to la and wound up in an unusual place is it true that she actually for a time lived beneath the canyon store yes before she formally moved to laurel canyon and later on woodrow wilson she was a tenant to the laurel canyon store current country store owner tommy bena took me downstairs to show me mama casa's old apartment which is now used for storage okay so this is the room this is the room she used to leave this is something and you said there's a secret passage right yeah you want to see the signature this was a passage you see those steps yeah there was a secret passage was going to parking lot so when she was leaving and coming nobody would see her it wasn't long before john phillips moved to la and finally let cass join the group and the mamas and the papas were born is my mom's home was really the center of a lot of happenings in laurel canyon she was famous for putting people together she was very friendly very funny very hip and witty and she would meet these guys and say well hey let me i'll introduce you to my friends you know so she met eric clapton when he was with cream didn't know a soul in l.a and he's very shy and she said well come to my house tomorrow afternoon i'll have some friends over and we'll have a little barbecue in the backyard among cass's friends that day was david crosby who brought along a singer he had just found in florida joni mitchell she invited mickey dolans to come and mickey brought his camera 16 millimeter camera throughout this whole afternoon i was photographing this stuff going on mickey was filming away so years later i thought oh mickey you must have some great shots probably there's pictures of me photographing eric clapton and jodie mitchell and he said no not really well and if you look at the footage now it's just ridiculous it's flowers and the dog and beer cans and the ashtray and i'm like you know eric move and i got i got all this 60 millimeter footage of like rack focus from the flower to the cigarettes sadly there's no footage of the actual icons from this historic day at cass eliot's house thanks mickey even though she had to really really really work hard to make people accept her for who she was they did right and i think that her struggle and her triumph really really give people hope do you recall the moment when you found out that that you lost your mom i do i was my mom was in london when she passed away and she just completed a two-week engagement at the palladium and um she had sent me to live with my grandmother for the summer i remember coming home early from camp and my grandmother sitting me down at the table and said telling me that my mom was was gone that she was never coming home i remember it being very difficult to accept and believe because she traveled so much for work that there was a part of my brain that you know tried to convince myself that it was just another trip and that she was gonna come home i then asked owen a very difficult question if she would put to rest the cruel myth of her mother's death it's okay because i feel like since i've really been out there talking about it the accuracy of the google hit yeah has actually changed a little bit um and and you don't when you google mama cass elliott or cass elliot you don't always come up now with that she died of a ham sandwich what you come up with more than often is she had a heart attack the real story is that she stayed up for like you know 36 hours and went to a bunch of parties and celebrated this you know milestone where she had actually for the first time been billed as cass elliot and not as mama cass and that was something that was hugely important to her that she have an identity outside of just being a mama although she loved being a mama on many levels she wanted to have people know her for her in the fickle world of music it wasn't unusual for bands to break up and its members to regroup with other musicians but in 1968 two very special relationships formed and they would make a lot of beautiful music together the crosby stills and nash blend had been brewing for a while stephen put together the buffalo springfield and then of course david crosby was in the birds but fighting within the groups caused stills to leave and crosby to be kicked out so the two decided to form their own short-lived group the frozen noses it was during this time that crosby on a trip to florida discovered a fair-haired canadian folk singer named joni mitchell so impressed by her musical brilliance he brought her back to la and over to mama cass's house with angel hair and ice cream castles and joanie sat there under a tree playing her entire first album they were just recording it at that time no one knew her no one had heard of her joni was a triple threat an angelic voice a poetic writer and a uniquely accomplished guitar player and joanie plays in a particular way where she tunes the guitar to a chord and then she just frets straight across and it's the strumming and eric clapton was fascinated by that just staring at her fingers you know and and we were all just mesmerized by these beautiful joni moving songs the neighborhood and crosby and still singing together as a duo mama cass made a connection that would make music history in more ways than one mama cass knew they needed another voice even if they didn't and she also knew that graham nash was not very happy in the hollies nash had much success with the british pop group the hollys but was frustrated that they wouldn't record any of the songs he wrote she she got graham nash to come over to david crosby's house one day and meet david and then stephen and they famously sang together the first song they sang together they knew these people at the time all had their own cult followings and since everybody loved the birds the hollies and the buffalo springfield why don't we all investigate this together and it was a match made in harmony heaven almost you know stephen is a capricorn and they're pretty stubborn and tenacious like crosby is a leo it's kind of the royal song the young prince you know and they pissed each other off you know graham is certainly the guy that holds it all together he's the gentleman in the middle along the way another buffalo springfield member neil young would also become part of the group sometimes yeah i mean and then stephen and neal famously were always having a fight and neil was always leaving the group at the end of the day when your crosby still smashed and you're making that kind of music and that kind of harmony that triumphs over all the petty things the little tiny things that they don't that bug you about the other guy just prior to crosby stills and nash forming another relationship blossomed between graham nash and joni mitchell those two people found each other they're both such wonderful sweet souls and such great artists both of them graham and joanie exceptional people and they found each other and it was very sweet and very beautiful it seemed it seemed perfect it seemed like just like it ought to be you know i do remember hanging with graham when you lived with joanie down the street they were literally i could almost see their house from mine it's a very very fine house it was a lovely little very fine house with a cat in the thing and the firehouse is a very very very fine house with two cats in the yard life used to be so hot now everything is the relationship wouldn't last the song willy on mitchell's ladies of the canyon album and nash's song simple man both speak of the relationship's demise though this group of relationships came with tumultuous times and heartbreak joni mitchell crosby stills nash and young have given us some of the most beautiful music of all time when the legends of laurel canyon continues he was actually the guy that every single musician looked up to and said this guy is an absolute genius laurel canyon was home to many music icons who would leave their marks on the world but there was one in particular who was unlike any other and the impression he left on everyone he touched was truly unforgettable you know when when frank zappa first came out everybody thought he was a clown everybody thought he was sort of the court jester of rock and roll until you really started listening to freak out and you started listening to we're only in it for the money or absolutely free and you realize that he was not just that he was the maestro he was actually the guy that every single musician looked up to and said this guy is an absolute genius we learned quite a bit from him he was older than us by in a few years but he was wiser even than his years you know with show he was also very mysterious and enigmatic and if you could make him laugh it was like the sun came out all over the world you know he would just he would beat his knee and you if you could crack him up it made your day because you wanted to impress him because he was so impressive what do you do for i have a money and roll band and right by his side his female counterpart gail that's the couple that took a lot of hits for a lot of people they were both on the front line defining society through behavior clothing being independent starting labels reissuing people i admired that marriage from a distance because even mark vowman tells me gail helped make frank happen and i know she's still the custodian of his music estate oh that's true yeah well and still she's the mama lion of rock and roll what do you do for money i have a rock and roll band all right so the first time that you encountered frank what was what was the experience like for you well what was it like for me there are moments in your life and especially when you're young where the universe speaks to you directly and there is no ignoring it and this was one of those times for me because i was introduced to frank and he i could smell the peanut butter in his mustache from at least four feet away okay so i'm like oh this is i don't know what this means but here he comes and he walked over to me and didn't stop walking and i thought well i'm not gonna back up and he put the briefcase down between my feet and said you're cute that's it i was i think that the term is in love i don't know how else to describe it they were married one week before daughter moon unit zappa was born for a very long four months the zappas lived at the infamous log cabin at the corner of laurel canyon and lookout mountain across from the houdini estate ridiculous part is yes everybody lived there the members of the band the artists who did the album covers um frank's secretary and people that just showed up from time to time but you were always amazed to be sitting there and all of a sudden who would walk in the door be john lennon mick jagger or ryan wilson or l.a philharmonic you never knew who was going to be there it was four months of hell trying to raise a child by the way but other than that it was interesting because you know some of the people that showed up and also horrifying because of some of the people that showed up i think we perhaps inspired some of the people who liked what we do to get a little bit looser and a little bit more devious and as i said before about progress not being possible without some sort of deviation made a few deviants some of those deviants included zappa's band the mothers of invention alice cooper and the all-girl band the gto's and what frank really loved doing was capturing a moment in time with the gtos he wanted to to save you know these teenage girls and their wacky experiences forever so he thought we should write our lives into song and he would do a record with us so that's what we did the great thing about frank was he would make fun of politics and he would make fun of the establishment but he would make just as much fun of the hippies and make just as much fun of of rock bands so everybody was fair target for frank i'm not intent on shaking them up well i perceive what i do is a special type of entertainment for a specialized audience if you're accustomed to ordinary rock and roll then maybe what we do makes you think that it's shaking them up because most of the rock and roll has no information content in it the basic function of it is to provide wallpaper to your lifestyle and our music is different from that but above all else frank zappa is considered by many one of the greatest composers of our time he might have incidentally been a musician and a great guitar player ultimately and certainly you know a wit and all of these other things that he's proved to be but first and foremost he was a composer and there's no way that he could do anything but right music and contrary to those who may judge a book by its cover this band leader had no tolerance for drug use he just felt that you know you can't perform very well on drugs and his music required some very precise adherence to what's on the page if you were in the mothers of invention you were the best player in l.a because he would only take the best players because you would have to be in order to sit and read frank's music do you still talk to him i don't know that i talk to him as much as he talks to me first of all i see him in my children every day that i see my children he's there he's present for me and as far as him telling me things you'd be amazed the number of interviews that i've done where if somebody pressed a point that i just thought was vile they'd go home and find out they didn't have it on tape you know it's just it's crazy but he's rescued me so many times in my life since he's been gone so when you drive around this area does it does it feel good to you does it bring back memories yes it does it's strange but the vibe is still here you see the place and then you remember all of the different people that lived here all of the music that came from here and so it lives inside of your heart we had it it was there what you imagined you could live and anybody who you speak with who were part of that experience at that time in that place had a taste of what the whole world could be like i can see similar things that were happening in los angeles happening again in other parts of the world there's a laurel canyon in somebody's soul everywhere in the world today those of us that experience and survive it's our responsibility to teach them and to teach peace and to teach about loving other human beings as equal in the 60s artists believe they could change the world with their music and for a short period of time in a very special place called laurel canyon they did for more on today's show go to abc7.com iola i'm tina malevay see you next time my you

Channel: stargate121

Views: 483,156

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Id: RRJD5fBD9UY

Length: 46min 14sec (2774 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2015