Canyon Dreams

Have you ever been curious why some old thought or experience keeps coming back to you for no apparent reason, and then you step into a music or book store and there is an embodiment of it? That happened to me tonight after a week or so of Laurel Canyon coming into conversations several times for no apparent reason after not thinking of the place for years, and then tonight I walked into Dog Eared Books and came across the book Canyon of Dreams. It embodies the amber hued southern California music and film world of the late 1960s and early 1970s that held a fascination to me when I was a pre-teen. How fitting that I'll be back down there in a couple of weeks.

I'm especially pleased to see multiple references to Mama Cass' house which served as the Gertrude Stein salon of the era. There are a lot of references to the long forgotten Nurit Wilde who seems to embody the era more than even the better known of the era. While I am pleased that there is a fair amount of reference to Tim Buckley, I was saddened that Juddee Sill is not mentioned once.

One of my favorite references to that era was k.d. lang's Invincible Summer, an under-rated album that makes my least favorite season seem almost appealing.

And this site has some good history of the canyon.