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It’s hard to resist a muddy 1965-vintage kinescope of the Byrds slogging through “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” on Shindig!, which premiered on ABC deep in the heart of prime time on September 16, 1964. (Note that Gene Clark, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn are singing live, one of show’s hallmarks when lip-synch was already the norm; also, N.B., Democratic National Committee—you’ve found your 2026 midterms election theme song.)

Launched seven months after the Beatles‘ appearances on Ed Sullivan left the TV industry flat-footed when it came to serving the nascent Youthquake, at that moment buying millions of Motown and British Invasion records but having nothing in prime time addressing its cultural obsession, Shindig! filled a gaping niche. Initially quite popular, it ran for just two seasons before ceding to Batman. The show would also serve as the template for MTV, launched two decades later.

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There was nothing remotely like Shindig! on network television: loud, unapologetic, frantically paced, with hip L.A. attitude and an aggressively catholic, multiracial booking policy that ran from the Rolling Stones to Roy Orbison, the Turtles to James Brown.

How cool was Shindig!? The house band—the Shindogs—comprised Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Delaney Bramlett, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle and other L.A. session players, some of whom would later form the core of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends and, later, Derek and the Dominoes. Teri Garr was a Shindig! go-go dancer; the 17-year-old Antonia Christina Basilotta—later Toni Basil, whose frantic hit “Mickey” would play relentlessly on MTV—was assistant choreographer.

American Bandstand this was not—Johnny Cash showed up too hammered to remember the lyrics to "Amen"; Howlin' Wolf sang "Wang Dang Doodle."

In an era when rock and roll in prime time was relegated to five minutes between dancing bears and acrobats on Ed Sullivan and Hollywood Palace, Shindig! was blithely authentic—and popular enough to inspire Hullaballoo, a pale imitation on NBC.

Shindig! was conceived and produced by Jack Good, a headstrong British expat who’d previously created the similar Ready, Steady, Go! for England’s ITV network. Good was show-business shrewd, hiring the Brillcreemed Los Angeles D.J. Jimmy O'Neill as compere to counterbalance the increasingly shaggy musical guests, and insisted that at least one the show's dancers wear fake eyeglasses so that self-conscious teenage girls wouldn't feel left out of the party.

Shindig! was driven from the air not for lack of popularity with its Baby Boomer core constituents but from ABC's dithering that the show was too raw—and racially integrated—for a mass audience.

But in that blink of an eye when it roared out the ABC Television Center in L.A. every Wednesday night, Shindig! gave a generation of young Americans whipsawed by the Kennedy assassination and Beatlemania a tantalizing glimpse of their future as cultural kingmakers

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Post-Beatles American rock and pop largely abandoned the mixed-gender formula that was a mainstay of the folk music revival that preceded the British Invasion: Peter, Paul and Mary, the New Christie Minstrels, Ian and Sylvia (later brutally satirized as Mitch and Mickey in the mockumentary A Mighty Wind).

Even Joni Mitchell (nee Joan Anderson) was in a duo, Chuck and Joni, with her husband Chuck Mitchell, before they divorced and she pitched her tent in Laurel Canyon on her way to solo stardom.

But there were holdouts, among them John Phillips, who in 1965 formed the definitive version of a band whose brief run at the top did much to further the template of the 1960s Los Angeles music scene throughout the world—and did so by re-contextualizing the sound of men’s and women’s voices harmonizing.

That band, of course, is the Mamas and the Papas.

In interviews, Phillips said that he had always loved the sound of men and women singing together; with the Mamas and the Papas, he yanked the tradition out of the earnest realm of pure folk music, of which he and so many of the Laurel Canyon elite had nearly starved trying to emulate, and smudged it liberally with the backbeat and attitude of rock and roll.

The group’s male-female makeup, a throwback to the members’ folkie roots and seen, initially, as a liability, was vindicated by signature hits like “California Dreamin’.” Adding Cass Elliot and her insistent alto, which Phillips initially resisted, made all the difference, amplifying and contextualizing the silky light soprano of his wife Michelle and creating the shimmering four-part harmony that was more than the sum of their individual voices. As Denny Doherty, who sang lead on most of the band’s hits, recalled:

“That’s when Harvey showed up. Harvey was an overtone—a fifth voice that was created when the four of us sang together. It wasn’t folk music anymore . . . it was really and truly rock and roll.”

The band’s formation, loosely chronicled in their final hit, “Creeque Alley,” as well as their signing by Ode Records founder Lou Adler, have since passed into legend.

L.A. record impressario Kim Fowley recalled that Elliot, still not a member of the group, telephoned one day and invited him to “come down and hear the New Journeymen,” as the Phillipses and Doherty were then known.

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After listening to them play “Monday, Monday” and “California Dreamin’” Fowley shopped the trio to producer Nic Venet, who upon seeing the four of them together and ascertaining that Elliot could indeed sing and knew the fourth harmony, refused to audition them for Mirror Records unless she was included. As Fowley told me:

“The first time the four of them sang as a four piece was in [Venet’s] living room. That was on Saturday. Monday morning they were looking to get medicated so they wouldn’t blow it at 3 o’clock at Mirror Records. So they called up [singer-songwriter] Barry Maguire, according to popular legend, to bring some refreshments over to bolster their confidence, and when he heard them sing those songs he called [producer] Lou Adler.

So they all went over in Barry’s car and Lou Alder said, sing , , , You figured, who are they going to meet between Saturday and Monday? Answer: Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was on the ball on that one.”

By the time the Mamas and the Papas played the Monterey Pop festival in 1967 just two years later, which Phillips and Adler had organized, the band, dissipated by drugs and internecine romantic intrigues, was already fraying and broke up in 1968.

But their influence would be vindicated in the ’70s, first by the massive success of ABBA’s harmony-rich, two-men, two-women lineup, identical to that of the Mamas and the Papas, and even more spectacularly after Fleetwood Mac retooled in 1974 by adding Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to the band, which already boasted a superlative female lead vocalist in Christine McVie, and recording the multiplatinum albums Fleetwood Mac and Rumors.

It’s instructive that today the signature hits of the Mamas and the Papas, ABBA and Fleetwood Mac still sound as vital and urgent as they did when they first spun out of Sweden and L.A. more than 50 years ago.

Which is to say, John Phillips was definitely on to something.

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L.A. is infamous for not preserving its commercial cultural landmarks—but for every Garden of Allah, the whimsical retreat on the Sunset Strip whose demolition supposedly inspired Joni Mitchell’s “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” there’s instead what could be charitably called adaptive re-use: the white-painted brick structure that housed Chasen’s, which improbably survived all the way into the ‘90s, was converted to a Bristol Farms supermarket with a sliver of the old supper club preserved behind the salad bar. Preston Sturges’ club The Players on the Sunset Strip has gone through innumerable iterations over the years that have left the original footprint intact, one of which was the inspiration for the SNL sketch that begat the excruciating A Night at the Roxbury. The Comedy Store is the former Ciro’s nightclub swaddled in a matte-black wrapper. And so on.

Opened in 1957 by wily nightclub entrepreneur Doug Weston, the Troubadour moved to its present location in 1961 and has operated continuously ever since. (Weston died in 1999; his name still appears on the original marquee). The list of alumni who were either discovered at the Troubadour or consolidated a career there—often on the brutal Monday “hoot nights” where brave aspirants (Tom Waits was discovered at one of them in 1971) could put their names on the chalkboard and perform for one of toughest houses on the West Coast—include Elton John (whose historic weeklong run there delivered him to stardom), James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Rita Coolidge, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Martin (who transitioned on the Troubadour stage from a weedy joke-spouting banjo player to his sleek persona as the white-suited “wild-and-crazy guy”), J.D. Souther and who knows how many more.

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The Troubadour’s front bar, where one could drink without paying a cover, was a hotbed of sexual conquest and professional and artistic networking: pre-Eagles Don Henley and Glenn Frey, refugees from Texas and Michigan, respectively, first met there and agreed to form a band the same night. It's conceivable that Frey and Henley would have found each other through other channels—the L.A. music scene was still intimate enough for that—but with the Troubadour as midwife the process was speeded exponentially.

Last year, Steve Martin, Alison Brown and Jackson Browne shot a video at the club for the song “Dear Time,” from the album Safe, Sensible and Sane. As Martin told Rolling Stone:

"The Troubadour was the center of a controlled nuclear explosion for so many careers. To play again, with Jackson and Alison, on the stage where so much began for me was indeed a delirious moment."

The Troubadour, along with most independent music venues in the country, today faces challenges wrought by the consolidation of the music industry around increasingly codependent publishers, giant concert promoters and streaming services whose algorithms and business models reinforce the dominance of established artists with huge followings, often at the expense of developing mid- and entry-level players, while the rise of A.I. generated “artists” degrades the traditional relationship between fans and actual musicians. As reported, the National Independent Venue Association’s 2025 “State of Live” study found that 64 percent of independent venues were not profitable in 2024 and that the standard 30-date tour support underwriting of $750–$1,500 per night in buyouts typically results in $5,000 to $15,000 losses after touring costs. For its part, Spotify last month announced it was partnering with the NIVA to provide support for the Troubadour and other independent venues through playlist links to artists and other co-promotion.

All of which is a far cry from the Troubadour’s glory days in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Since relocating the club near the corner of Doheny Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard on the edge of Beverly Hills, Weston had adroitly managed to keep the Troubadour at the forefront of musical trends. In the '60s it had been indispensable in bringing together the first wave of L.A. folkies; in the '70s it became the stage, salon, and saloon for the singing-songwriting young men and women flocking to Laurel Canyon. If the canyon was where everyone in the L.A. music scene lived either in fact or in spirit, the Troubadour was where they played. A fifteen-minute drive or hitchhike from Lookout Mountain and the Kirkwood Bowl, the club provided the stage where canyonites could hone their performances and—thanks to the no-cover-charge front bar next to the playing room—a rendezvous where contacts could be made, romances kindled and ruined, while the Cuervo and Sauza flowed.

“Everyone would end up at the Troubadour at night,” Henry Diltz, court photographer of the canyon and a talented musician himself, told me. "These would be the same people you might bump into in the daytime, but you'd be sure to bump into them at night at the Troubadour." Recalled Henley: “The Troubadour was the first place I went when I got to L.A. The first night I walked in I saw Graham Nash and Neil Young, and Linda Ronstadt was standing there in a little Daisy Mae kind of dress. She was barefoot and scratching her ass. I thought, 'I've made it. I'm here. I'm in heaven.”

From Elton John's star-making appearances until the mid-'70s, when Weston's hubris and draconian booking policies nearly sank it, the Troubadour was the most important popular-music venue in the world. "It went through this real exciting period when it peaked," Paul Body, who worked as a doorman at the club from 1973 to 1980, told me. “All the songwriters played there—J.D. Souther, Warren Zevon, Wendy Waldman, Karla Bonoff, that's how a lot of them got their contracts.”

The rhythms of the club bled into everyone's lives. The Monday night Hoots, a holdover from the folk days, were followed by a six-night stand later to become a point of contention between the performers and Weston. “Tuesday night was opening night,” Colman Andrews, a journalist and author who worked for several record labels, told me. “You'd go over to the Troubadour at eight. The format was always two bands. In those days, God, I remember a double bill of Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, the Incredible String Band opening for Tim Buckley."

The Troubadour's front door opened directly onto Santa Monica Boulevard, and the overflow from the bar would inevitably spill onto the sidewalk. As the evening wore on, a steady stream of patrons coursed between the club and Dan Tana's, an Italian bar and restaurant two doors down and a hangout in its own right. “I remember Harrison Ford used to drink at the bar at Tana's," says Andrews. "Joni Mitchell, David Blue, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon. You'd walk back and forth and drink all night, do a little coke, maybe smoke a little."

By 1973 the Troubadour seemed unstoppable, but Weston was about to fatally overreach. More than six feet tall, with flowing blond hair, Weston cut quite a figure among his fellow music entrepreneurs, who tended to be short, balding, and pugnacious. Which is to say Weston looked like a rock star; now he started acting like one. He kept a private office above the stage where favored guests could join him during the shows and afterward for marathon coke-and-booze sessions. Weston had built his club on the premise of creating a room where musicians would want not only to play but to hang out, and it had succeeded spectacularly. Now he was growing restive as the talent he'd nurtured went on to reap fortunesbut he didn't. "The Troubadour has been a gold mine that’s been mined by everybody else," he groused.

The Troubadour's notorious contract—which stipulated unknowns had to return to play regardless of whether they could fill Dodger Stadium—was meant to give Weston a taste of the bonanza. But it infuriated artists and especially their managers and put the club in a far more vulnerable position than Weston realized. It's hard to imagine a nightclub wielding such power today, but in the early 1970s a hot run at the Troubadour could still deliver a career, so the musicians and labels tithed through gritted teeth.

What Weston hadn't banked on was competition, and in 1973 he got it. A consortium of industry heavyweights that included Lou Adler, president of Ode Records, David Geffen and Elliot Roberts—who years earlier had extricated Joni Mitchell from Weston's return-engagement clause—took over the Largo, a former strip joint next door to the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Boulevard and turned it into the Roxy, a sleek and, more important, larger club that targeted the acts and audience that had been the Troubadour's bread and butter.

The Roxy immediately began siphoning off the Troubadour's business. More devastating, it became the preferred showcase for record labels to break their thoroughbred acts. While Elton John had launched his career at the Troubadour, Bruce Springsteen exploded onto the national scene in a landmark four-night engagement at the Roxy in 1975. “Once the Roxy opened, that was a whole other venue," Brody told me. “It was bigger; it could pay more money. Originally Bob Marley was supposed to play the Troubadour in '75, and he ended up playing the Roxy. Springsteen, the same thing. And that's when it started drying up."

As the Troubadour's fortunes declined and its prestige faded, the musicians who gave the club its specialness drifted away. It took more than a decade for the Troubadour to regain its footing, playing host to acts like Liz Phair and Fiona Apple in the '90s much as it had showcased Bonnie Raitt and Carly Simon in the ‘70s. It must have been gratifying for Weston to see the Troubadour's resurrection. He died, at age seventy-two, in 1999.

“My whole life came alive that night, musically, emotionally...everything,” Elton John recalled of his 1970 stand at the Troubadour, which had been so critical in launching his career and the club's legend. “It was like everything I had been waiting for suddenly happened. I was the fan who had become accepted as a musician.”

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The birth of Crosby, Stills & Nash had multiple midwives—geographic, legal, pharmacological, and serendipitous—before the three principals and their indelible personalities and voices gelled on their debut released on this day in the rock-portentous year of 1969, which somehow comprised both Woodstock and Altamont, Led Zeppelin’s first album and Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last.

As so often in those days, Laurel Canyon provided the locus for their formation; also as in those days, Cass Elliot, nominally of the Mamas and the Papas but whose true talent, besides her peerless harmony voice, was as an irrepressible pot-stirrer and yente, provided the nudge that made their collaboration inevitable.

Stephen Stills had met Elliot in their folkie days in Greenwich Village, “before any of us were anybody,” he recalled. Henry Diltz, playing New York with his band, the Modern Folk Quartet, would run into Stills on the circuit. “Stephen was playing at a little coffeehouse called a basket house—they would pass the basket around, and that would be his only pay,” Diltz told me. “Between sets he would come down to the Village Gate and stand in the wings and watch us. I know we were a huge influence on him because we did four-part harmony, which was very sophisticated.”

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After arriving in Los Angeles, Stills co-founded Buffalo Springfield, which despite recording some of the era’s seminal music, including Stills’s surprise 1967 Top 10 hit that he’d given the afterthought of a title “For What It’s Worth,” and a lineup that included future bandmate Neil Young, broke up in 1968 amid personality clashes and sketchy management, leaving Stills adrift.

Meanwhile, David Crosby—founding member of the Byrds—had ridden the L.A. band’s folk-rock hits like “Turn, Turn, Turn” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” to fame and enough fortune to buy a schooner he set sail upon soon after bandmates Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman fired him, as Crosby himself later acknowledged, “because I was an asshole.” Ron Stone, one of CS&N’s future managers, at the time owner of a used-clothing store next to the Troubadour, told me he and Crosby bonded over killer dope and games of chess. “It was six months after the Byrds chucked him out and he was trying to figure out what was going on.”

As was Graham Nash—like Stills, another member of Elliot’s bicoastal musicians salon whom he’d gotten to know in New York while touring with the Hollies, the British group famed for winsome, harmony-rich hits like “Bus Stop” and “Carrie Anne”—who was reaching the end of his rope with the band. “The Hollies didn’t want to record my songs,” Nash told me. “They thought they were shit—they though I was shit. It was a sad time for me personally, artistically.”

While Nash brooded about his future, Crosby and Stills formed a desultory collaboration and recorded some demos of their compositions as the Frozen Noses, casual evidence that the cocaine scourge that was to devastate the L.A. music scene in the ‘70s was by the late ‘60s already imbedded in Laurel Canyon’s newly minted rock star caste. Like everything else that went down in canyon, Elliot took notice and her matchmaking compulsion kicked in. “David and I were messing around, talking about doing something, and [Cass] comes up to me and says, ‘Do you think you need a third voice?’” Stills recalled. “And I said,’ Yeah.’ She said, ‘Okay, don’t say anything, especially to Crosby. And when I call, come.’”

When Nash, on tour with the Hollies in 1967, checked into the Knickerbocker Hotel in downtown in Los Angeles, Elliot pounced. “Cass called me and said, ‘I’m going to pick you up in ten minutes,’” Nash told me. “So I got ready and was waiting in the lobby of the hotel, and she pulls up in this convertible Porsche.” The next thing Nash knew they were pulling up tp Elliot’s canyon house; waiting there were Stills and Crosby, whom Elliot had pre-positioned unaware her motive was to bring them together with Nash (the three knew one another but had never sung together). After some preliminaries they sang for Nash one of the songs they’d developed as a duo, the Stills composition “You Don’t Have to Cry.”

As Nash told me: “David and Stephen sang it first. I asked them to do in again. I listened very carefully. I asked them to do it one more time. And they looked at each other and went, ‘Well, okay.’ They sang it a third time and I put my harmony in.” It was, by all accounts, an electrifying moment. “When David and Stephen and I were halfway through ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’ we had to stop and started laughing. Each of us had just had terrible experiences with our bands and had left or been thrown out. And all of a sudden we realized we’d have to be a fucking band. Because how could you deny what you were listening to?”

Gary Burden, who would go on to design the cover for Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut and subsequent albums for canyon stalwarts including Joni Mitchell and Steppenwolf, was at Elliot’s that day and confirmed Nash’s account.

“David and Stephen sang their parts and Graham listened and listened again,” Burden told me. “And then suddenly out of nowhere came this razor voice that was, like, perfect. It wasn’t like anything had been missing; it was just that suddenly this thing was elevated beyond belief. It was chilling, man, because nobody had heard anything like that before. Everybody was completely knocked out.”

What was most stupendous to the musicians was Elliot's clairvoyance, that she could have anticipated the now instantly apprehensible alchemy of Stills's raspy tenor mixed with Nash's reedy counterpoint and Crosby's gorgeous, transparent harmony. Individually, their voices, especially Stills's, were distinctive; together they were unforgettable. As Nash would marvel thirty-five years later: "Just think about that. What an incredible thing to first of all envision, and secondly to pull off. It's as if it was already a predetermined future to her, in terms of how she viewed me and David and Stephen. I mean, she knew what we had to do. But how do you know that when we haven't even sung together?”

Released on May 29, 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash—a name chosen expressly to prevent the founders from being replaced by other musicians—was an immediate success, spawning the hits “Marrakesh Express,” a Nash composition the Hollies had rejected, and Stills’s masterpiece “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” about his affair with folksinger Judy Collins. The album would eventually sell more than 4 million copies and prove enormously influential, making commercially plausible harmony-laden bands with folk rock leanings from America to the Eagles and, decades later, Americana outfits like Dawes and My Morning Jacket. Crosby Stills & Nash was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and is ranked No. 161 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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One of the most enduring legends of Laurel Canyon is the so-called Houdini Estate—the restored ruins, actually, of an 11-bedroom villa at the corner of Willow Glen Road and Laurel Canyon Boulevard across the street from the log cabin where Frank Zappa and his extended family held court in the spring and summer of 1968. The cabin burned to the ground in 1981 on Halloween Night; the undeveloped lot was acquired in 2004 by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a partner of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, as a protected open space and wildlife corridor. (For more, see my brief history of the log cabin and its considerable rock and roll bona fides…)

Both properties are suitably mysterious, pocked with caves, natural springs and traced by winding paths with stone-encrusted benches, grottos, fountains and other J.R.R. Tolkien mise-en-scene. Among other apocrypha, there’s supposedly a secret tunnel beneath Laurel Canyon Boulevard that connects the properties—”I never found out if that was true,” Zappa said.

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He wasn’t alone. Everybody in the canyon, it seems, has a version of Houdini-house reality—but the real reality is that Houdini himself probably never lived there.

After driving by the Houdini property hundreds of times and wondering what the story was, I commissioned a piece by writer and photographer Bill Sharpsteen for the Los Angeles Times. Here, in part, is what Bill wrote:

The property’s earliest recorded owner was the Laurel Canyon Land Co., in 1907. Laurel Canyon Boulevard was then a narrow lane often flooded by two streams crossing near the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue. R. J. Walker, who owned a major department store in downtown Los Angeles also held stock in the Laurel Canyon Land Co. Around 1915, he constructed a house at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Willow Glen Road. (At about the same time, he built a guest house across the street next to actor Tom Mix’s log cabin.)

Wanting a more continental look than the canyon’s rustic lodges, the dry-goods mogul went to Europe and imported stone masons, woodworkers, muralists and anyone else who was the best at his craft. They stayed in some cases until 1924, when the completed Mediterranean villa stood on the steep hillside like a hotel—three stories, 11 bedrooms, nine baths and a basement pool. There was a ballroom, a 15-foot stage for musicians and a ballet room–equipped with mirrors and barre—large enough for 10 dancers. For a touch of decadence, he threw in a circular staircase that turned around a marble newel post lit from inside, a huge aviary and murals of European scenes painted on ceiling-high canvases…Walker did specify one practical accessory: a turntable at the top of the narrow driveway. One drove up, parked and spun the car around, conveniently pointing it downhill for the exit.

Somehow, Bill relates, Walker met Houdini. The magician was in town between 1919 and 1920 to act in two movies, The Grim Game and Terror Island, and in fact, the climactic scene of The Grim Game was shot atop nearby Lookout Mountain.

According to Houdini biographer Pat Culliton, Houdini invested in Walker’s Laurel Canyon Land Co. and moved into the boxy four-bedroom guest house next to Tom Mix’s across the street, although it’s not clear which he did first. Culliton claims that an elevator in the guest house descended to a tunnel beneath Laurel Canyon that led to the Walker mansion, so it’s hard not to believe that Houdini didn’t sneak over on occasion.

And those are the slim facts upon which the entire Houdini House folklore rests.

Bill goes on to trace the property’s decline in the ’50s that culminated in the mansion’s partial destruction in the Willow Glen fires of 1959. The city finally bulldozed the place in 1968 but not before it “became a theme park of sorts for ’60s teenagers looking for a supernatural interlude before cruising the Sunset Strip.”

After passing through several owners, the 3.9-acre property was purchased by its current owner, Lexicon founder José Luis Nazar, who meticulously restored the surviving gate house and elaborate grounds and opened the estate to weddings and glammed-up corporate parties while enthusiastically indulging the Houdini legacy.

Whether or not Houdini ever set foot in the estate, the property, Bill writes, “will probably always be known as the Houdini house around Laurel Canyon, where belief in local legends is as tenacious as the wild fennel that grows straight out of the canyon’s granite walls.”

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Tina Turner was a famously robust performer. But the recording of the classic “River Deep-Mountain High” in 1966 tested even her reserves of endurance.

As it happens, many of the outtakes from the sessions were preserved on soundboard recordings that offer a fascinating backstage glimpse not only of the ways and means of producer Phil Spector, renowned for his “Wall of Sound” production on behalf of the Shirelles, but the shambling feel of recording live in the studio on 100 percent analog equipment.

“River Deep-Mountain High,” written by Spector and Brill Building legends Barry Mann and Ellie Greenwich, was meant to broaden Turner’s appeal beyond her work with then-husband Ike Turner, who led their Ike and Tina Turner Revue, and put her in the league of Motown crossover stars like Diana Ross, whose recordings with the Supremes were played on both black R&B radio and mainstream Top 40 stations, which exposed Ross and the entire Motown stable of artists to the vast, lucrative audience of white record buyers.

The sessions for “River Deep” were held at Gold Star studios in Hollywood in March, 1966. As was his custom, Spector laid in no less than 21 musicians for the date, among them key members of L.A.’s famed Wrecking Crew, including bassist Carol Kaye, drummer Earl Palmer and future stars Leon Russell and Glen Campbell. Jack Nitzsche gave the song its rousing arrangement and was present at the session (you can hear Spector on the control room talkback asking Nietzsche, “Jack—do you have a more substantial tambourine?”).

The evening that Turner cut her lead vocal, Spector demanded she record take after take of the uptempo, demanding song into the early hours of the morning. In the darkened vocal booth, Turner—exhausted and disoriented by Spector’s unceasing demands—finally stripped off her shirt and sang in her bra before the producer finally relented.

“I must have sung that 500,000 times,” Turner later said. “I was drenched in sweat.”

These raw outtakes are testament to Spector’s perfectionism. On Take 5, he halts what sounds like a near-flawless performance to chide percussionist Frank Capp for playing his bongos too loudly (9:35 in the recording above). Meanwhile, Turner can be heard in the left channel of the mix, desperately singing the verses and chorus with all her might.

“River Deep-Mountain High” ended up costing a then-astronomical $22,000 to record. But despite the collective talent involved and Turner’s monumental vocal performance, the song was, in the U.S., a flop, stalling at No. 88 on the Billboard Hot 100. Disillusioned that his most ambitious production had failed so spectacularly, Spector effectively left the record business thereafter.

“River Deep-Mountain High” has since been recognized as one of pop music’s masterpieces, ranked at No. 33 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

And it remained a staple in Turner’s live performances over the years, even after she became an international superstar with massive hits like “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which finally gave her the mainstream audience that the grandiose and quirky “River Deep-Mountain High” was supposed to deliver but never did.

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Promoted by a wild posting conceived by freshly engaged managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp that promised “maximum R&B” juxtaposed with a photo of Pete Townshend windmilling his Rickenbacker, the Who begin their now legendary 16-week residency London’s Marquee Club on Nov. 24, 1964. While less than 40 attended the first show, word spread and soon the Marquee was the place to be Tuesday nights for the next four months, as fellow future British invasion bands, among them the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds, gathered momentum while the Beatles, already a sensation in the UK, finally broke in America via “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and the Ed Sullivan show. The Marquee residency led directly to Who’s signing with Decca Records and was a proving ground for early hits like “My Generation” and “I Can’t Explain.”

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Townshend would later center the band’s most ambitious work, Quadrophenia, on those nascent days of the Mod scene in the early sixties, fueled by amphetamines and the so-called Ace Faces, smartly dressed young fans who would be today’s Influencers. As Townshend told me, “These pilled up little mods would come up to me and say: ‘Y-Y-You gotta do more Pete, b-b-b-because it’s right, man…’”

Townshend was already acutely aware of the power that the Who wielded by the sheer volume at which they played and the violence the band’s stagecraft conveyed, notably Keith Moon destroying his drum kit and Townshend’s harpooning his Marshall amps with the neck of whatever guitar he wielded that evening.

“It was such a big jump,” Townshend told me. “It meant people like us could go play really dangerous places because the power of the instruments was conferred back on us. I often think about the fact that we used to challenge audiences with our machismo—you know, we were four weedy guys. Nobody ever attacked me on stage; nobody’s dared. Somebody firing a machine gun, even with no bullets in it, straight at your stomach? I don’t think you’d walk up to them. I think that’s what drew the line. Maybe that’s being oversimplistic. But me and my guitar and my amplifier were omnipotent in a way that me and my bike and my cricket bat were not.”

Despite a string of Top 10 U.K. singles now regarded as classics, the Who suffered from the fiscal vagaries that plagued other early British rock bands, compounded by the expectation that the Who would trash their instruments at the close of every show.

“Suddenly, after less than two years, we were finished, the group was dead,” Townshend told me. “In the background was financial chaos, because we smashed all our equipment. So I actually sat down with our managers at the time and said, ‘Listen, if we make one more last-ditch attempt, what we should do is make it massive. It should be so gross, so pretentious, so dangerous, that we’ll get respect and attention. If it’s good, it will last and if doesn’t, it doesn’t matter.’ Really, what we were dealing with was destitution or some kind of survival for maybe another couple of years. I wasn’t trying to write something that would last 30 years. I just wanted to write something that would save our skins.”

That something was Tommy, released in 1969 and usually credited as the first rock opera, which indeed saved the band and allowed it to carry on as a viable commercial and creative entity, even after tragically losing two of its founding members along the way, for the next six decades.

Last year, Townshend—who at 20 declared in “My Generation” that “hope I die before I get old”—told Rolling Stone he wasn’t considering slowing down.

“I’ve got maybe 10 years left as a creative. So I’m doing all kinds of interesting things, theatrical projects, art projects, book projects…. I’ve done four record productions in the past couple of years. I’ve just done a thing with my friend, Reg Meuross, a song cycle about Woody Guthrie called Fire and Dust. I did an album with the Bookshop band. They write songs about books. I produced an album with a young indie band called the Wild Things.”

And just last week, Primary Wave announced Townshend had signed a reported nine-figure deal with the intellectual property aggregator covering his name and likeness.

“Moving forward with my creative and performative work…at this time of my life when most creatives might be slowing down, is a joy for me,” Townshend said.

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A music journalist, critic, and author of books on John Prine and Jason Molina, Erin Osmon’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Rolling Stone. She won the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Award for album notes in 2023 and several Los Angeles Press Club Southern California Journalism awards. She lives in Nashville. Erin and I spoke at length about her new book, Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America (W.W. Norton & Co.), published April 28th. Following are highlights from our conversation….

What exactly is heartland rock? Does it have to originate in the American midwest to count?

An argument I emphasize in the book is that heartland rock was the last gasp of American greatness in rock and roll. And when I say rock and roll, I mean mainstream rock music written with adult audiences in mind. When we get into the 90s, there’s certainly great rock music—grunge and alternative, et cetera—but that’s all youth culture. So heartland rock is an assertion of American greatness in rock and roll and left-wing progressive populism. I explored it as an ideological geography rather than a literal one. People get hung up on this idea that it has to be from the middle of the country. By most metrics, Bruce Springsteen is the king of the genre and he is from New Jersey, which is decidedly not in the heartland. So I looked at it as an ideological or spiritual geography that sits at the intersection of class and politics. And that helped me set some parameters around who I would include.

The book’s principal characters comprise Springsteen, Tom Petty, from Florida, Bob Seger, from Michigan, and John Mellencamp, from your home state, Indiana. Why those four?

The Mount Rushmore of Heartland Rock, I think, is widely accepted as these four men. Bruce Springsteen sort of inspired this entire wave of artists and sounds and music. But Bob Seger deserves more recognition as being an originator. His importance for creating a bridge between populist rock movements has been overlooked, because he was working for a really long time before he hit. So I think it’s important to recognize that. Tom Petty is from Florida and went to L.A. to make it. But he certainly brought a populist lyrical spirit and themes to the particular kind of rock music that he was making, and he was sort of cooler than these other guys. I view him as sort of the misfit, the stoner little brother. John Mellencamp is someone who could be an incredible mascot for this thing, just by virtue of the fact that he has always lived in Indiana and saying he’s explicitly for and about farmers. against racism and redlining. But it took him a little bit longer to find his voice, and he had the unfortunate origin story with [David Bowie manager] Tony Defries and being saddled with being Johnny Cougar and all of that. So, they’re sort of the center.

You also acknowledge a wider circle of artists, everybody from regional bands that never quite broke nationally, like Cleveland’s Michael Stanley Band, to Bruce Hornsby and, in Canada, Bryan Adams and Tom Cochrane.

I also look at the progenitors, the people they were inspired by all the way back to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to CCR and The Band. Also Bonnie Rait, Jackson Brown, the folks in the mid 70s, and the women who should be considered a part of this more than they are: Melissa Etheridge, even Tracy Chapman. And then I wanted to look at their allies and the idea that heartland rock was a loosely interconnected movement, which I believe it was. If we look at events like Farm Aid or No Nukes, we can see the “core four” [Springsteen, Seger, Mellencamp, and Petty] and their allies coming together under the spirit of resistance or populist alliances.

That’s a pretty big tent.

It is a wide cast of characters. But when you get into the details, you see that these folks were playing on each other’s albums, they were playing shows together, benefits, they were touring together. The Heartbreakers backed Bob Dylan. There were all these points of connection that I think were important to emphasize, because it’s easy to see the core four like these monolithic, untouchable men, but really, they were quite accessible to their peers and the people that they were inspired by.

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You write that heartland rock is characterized by ‘inclusive populism.’

I think populism has been co-opted in a pretty pernicious way. As it was originally intended, it was referring to what today we would call the 99 percent. So it’s a term that was supposed to cut across gender, race, ethnicity, even religion in the United States. I think that was the spirit of this music, too. For better or for worse, it has been remembered as a mostly white movement, a mostly male movement. But I wanted to sort of issue a narrative correction around that as well, in terms of who it was advocating for and who it included.

The book points out that throughout the 1980s, there was strong resistance to the Reagan administration’s policies by a large swath of popular musicians, particularly among the heartland rock crowd. And, just as today, their music was appropriated by right-wing politicians to promote an agenda their songs sometimes explicitly rejected, such as Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”

Reagan was not a dumb guy. It is very plausible that Reagan and his team understood the meaning of the song “Born in the USA,” but they also understood that when they clipped out the chorus and the tremendous emotional response that it elicits in a listener, they could use it for their purposes. And it worked. Same with the American flag image. Like Bruce’s denim-clad ass in front of an American flag on the [Born in the USA] album cover was meant as more of a critique than it was received. I tried to echo that on the cover of my book with the use of the American flag triggering notions of, who does this belong to? And who thinks that they own it? And really, the answer to that question is it belongs to everyone. But unfortunately, that’s not how it is today.

The lyrics of Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” were similarly subverted as shorthand for returning America to conservative values of the 1950s.

That is a song that was explicitly written about redlining and anti-racist sentiment and about the hypocrisies of the American dream and how it’s not a level playing field across populations in this country. The problem is that these songs are so simple, and so they’re easy to glom onto in different ways, and they’re easy to kind of remix in your heart and mind based on your personal biases. Their anthemic qualities and the simplicity of the lyrics and the instrumentation also made them problematic, because it was very easy to co-opt them. Tim Walz attempted to correct that when he was running for vice president and used [Mellencamp’s] “Small Town” at campaign events. But largely because of right wing politicians using these songs on campaigns they’ve been unfortunately aligned with that movement as well, so that was a part of the book, to try to issue a narrative to correct that.

Heartland rock is credited with playing a role in redefining country music.

Mainstream country music has adopted some of the sonics of the genre, and they sort of cherry pick, maybe from the populist lyrics, but it’s not as politically obvious. Even though folks like Luke Combs covered Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and made it a hit on the country music charts. That began happening in the ‘80s with things like Farm Aid and kind of the alliances between country and rock. And certainly a lot of the heartland guys were inspired by country musicians, particularly Bruce Springsteen. If you look at the cover of my book, one of the sly things done was including three Telecasters [country music’s unofficial electric guitar[. And that was sort of to kind of illustrate the connection.

The ascendance of heartland rock in the seventies was paralleled by an overlapping explosion of southern rock: the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker Band and the rest share some of the aesthetics and mainstream popularity of heartland rock, “Sweet Home Alabama” in particular.

To me, Lynyrd Skynyrd doesn’t have the overtly political spirit that the heartland rockers do. I don’t think they were playing any of these big benefits. They weren’t speaking out against Reagan. They certainly weren’t issuing explicit anti-racist sentiment. So to me, they belong in the Southern rock genre, but not the heartland rock genre, because I don’t think they really intersect with the political element enough. Are they related? Are some of the sonics similar? Sure. But I don’t think the messaging really fits. So that’s kind of why I didn’t get too much into the Southern rock thing. But if we look at a different Southern voice, like Bruce Hornsby, he was writing explicitly anti-racist songs and critiques of the kind of the environment he grew up in, in Virginia. So that’s what I was looking for.

It’s interesting what a durable genre heartland rock turned out to be, despite attempts to write it off as dad rock. It certainly proved worthwhile in the aftermath of 9/11, when people turned instinctively to those songs for solace.

Thanks for bringing that up. It was very interesting to me that when we experienced this national tragedy, and it was the most acute national tragedy that we had experienced in a long time, that the call harkened back to the eighties and these particular songs. When people wanted a reminder of American greatness and unity and solidarity, Bruce, Mellencamp, Petty, and these guys were the ones to fill that role. That was a powerful symbol, even as this music became derided as dad rock and was written off as kind of radio slop. And I think that did kind of reenergize this work in the minds of the next generation, because when we get into the 2000s a lot of the indie rock guys and the guys that came out of the underground started embracing these sounds. And they make it cool again, they make it hip. Even if the messaging isn’t as overtly progressive, a lot of the sonics are there, a lot of the name checking is there, correcting the idea that this stuff is just for dads. And so the themes and the sentiment and the spirit of heartland rock now lives in what we call Americana.

It’s hard to ascribe the continuing relevance of these artists to pure nostalgia, given that many of their fans today weren’t even born when this music was created.

Borrowed nostalgia will always appeal to young people. I remember when I was in high school in the 90s, we were all wearing clothes from the ‘70s. And that’s happening now. Before I came to Nashville, I was a professor at USC teaching in the journalism school and all my students were talking about Y2K fashion and music. So borrowed nostalgia will always be kind of a through line for youth. This music, in particular, is ripe for that now because of the conversations we’re having around class struggle. Even though we are really polarized, bifurcated, and separated, there is a backlash to that, and there is a hopefully growing recognition that a lot of these social wedge issues are seeded from the top down. And a lot of them were seeded under Reagan, like disagreements about abortion. That’s another thing I wanted to do with the book: remind the reader of a more explicitly purple time, like when people could come together at Farm Aid—even if you voted for Reagan, you were still invited. Those conversations are relevant to today. I see it popping up among young people. Like I went to see this really hip band in Nashville about a month ago called The Styrofoam Winos, and there was a 22-year-old kid wearing a Lonesome Jubilee T shirt. And I asked him, “Do you like that record? He’s like, “I love this record!” And he’s a little hipster kid in Nashville. So, yeah, mostly because of class struggles and conversation around the 99 percent versus the billionaire class, that is making this music more relevant, other than the fact that a lot it is just objectively good music.

Who’s your heartland rock favorite? Which artist from the genre speaks to you most personally, as the girl who grew up in Evansville, Indiana?

My dad was a Petty guy. He took me to see the Dogs with Wings Tour in 1995. And that really imprinted upon me in a spectacular way. And so I’ve always been a Petty person. He’s always kind of been my guy. But I grew up in the shadow of Mellencamp, literally, and so I struggled with that for a long time. But Melencamp has grown on me in a way that I didn’t expect, and he has emerged as maybe the most fascinating character from that crowd because he is a scholar of the things that he loves. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with him now on the phone and in person for different articles I’ve written. And, I mean, the man could teach a course at Harvard on Tennessee Williams, and you wouldn’t know that because he doesn’t let people see this side of him, but he is a really gifted visual artist who’s been working since the late ‘80s. He’s basically a film scholar. He knows a lot about the periods in theater that he’s interested in. He has great taste in design and books and is just kind of a Renaissance man in this way that you wouldn’t expect because his public persona can be so brash and, I don’t know, caveman: he has a bad temper, he chains smokes, all the things that you would expect. But there’s really a lot more to him than that. He’s really outspoken against Trump and racism in the way that Black communities are disenfranchised in this country. And so to me, he became kind of a hero. He’s not a perfect guy, like, the great men of this country will always disappoint us in some way, but he emerged as someone who was really fascinating. When the Pacers were doing really well last year, and I would see videos of people singing “Hurt So Good” in the streets of Bloomington, Indiana I was like, “That’s my guy.”

Do you see a future for this kind of music, as performed by a new generation of artists? What role could it play, if any, in the next 10 years. Because the next 10 years might be a lot different than the past 10 years.

I think so. If we’re talking about the intersection of music and message, class and politics like the way that these [heartland rock] guys intended. I think people like Stephen Wilson Jr. are carrying on that spirit in a really authentic and appealing way. He actually performed at a book event of mine on Saturday here at the Country Music Hall of Fame. I got to talking to him and he said something really interesting, which is that he grew up in Seymour, Indiana, same hometown as John Mellencamp. And he talked about Mellencamp’s songs and paintings, and the fact that he got to live in one of Mellencamp’s paintings, and that he sees his songs as authentic representations of the place where he grew up, which was really touching to me. That’s kind of how he holds this music, and he’s doing the same thing—a lot of his lyrics are about blue collar workers and people who exist outside of America’s cultural capitals. And he’s combining it with really interesting rock music, with country touches. So I’m compelled by people like him and S.G. Goodman, who’s sort of carrying on the Melissa Etheridge spirit of this thing with a queer perspective. Or Margo Price, she’s certainly speaking to the issues of farming that Mellencamp did. So I think that there is a place for it, but unfortunately, I don’t think this stuff will ever be on the radio again, or whatever the equivalent of the radio is. So there’s just not the opportunity for the commercial scale that existed before.

Okay, last question. You devote several paragraphs to the small-town signifiers of “Jack and Diane,” including Mellencamp’s name-checking a drive-in chain in the second verse. So: Tastee Freez or Dairy Queen?

Well, my first job was at that Dairy Queen across from Harrison High School in Evansville, Indiana when I was 14 years old. So I have to go with Dairy Queen.

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Hard to believe, after hosannas from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the Kennedy Center Honors to the legions of subsequent bands, from Soundgarden to Guns N’ Roses and Greta Van Fleet formed in their image, but Led Zeppelin were definitely not cool at the height of their powers in the 1970s.

At least with a contingent of the mighty Baby Boom generation, of which, ironically, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, born in 1944 and 1946, respectively, and Robert Plant and John Bonham, both born 1948, were all nominally members. These early-born Boomers—who comprised most of the musicians who would lead rock out of the 50s and into the progressive rock of the late 1960s and 1970s—also included prominent members of a newly minted cultural caste: the rock critic. And these critics were not at all happy when a huge, younger wave of late-born Boomers suddenly emerged in the ‘70s and delivered to staggering success and stardom bands that the critics, some of whom wielded considerable influence at the time, considered vulgar arrivistes.

That same dynamic is, alas, alive and thriving, at least as evidenced by the backstory to the New York Times Magazine’s songwriters survey. Published three Sundays ago under the portentous headline “The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters,” the feature was immediately excoriated by musicians and readers for snubbing the likes of living legends like Billy Joel and Jimmy Webb and for the sketchy methodology at arriving at the chosen 30.

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As the cultural critic and historian Ted Gioia, one of the 250 “music insiders” the Times polled for the story, pointed out:

“I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

“There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally—the insiders made the final call.”

The Times published some of the nominations the “insiders” submitted, which diverged significantly from the 30 artists cited in the published story. As Gioia noted, quoting the Times:

“The Times took the verdict of the ‘experts’ and then ‘ran it through a filter.’ The survey was just a ‘starting point.’ The actual top thirty was decided via a ‘conversation’ among its internal team.”

That might have been the end of it. Instead, with backlash to the story exploding online, the Times released a video of the internal team of critics headlined: “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.” As Gioia noted…

“Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic [Jon Caramanica] laughs at a comment from a reader—simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor. This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel.”

Having written for the Times and worked there as an editor, I was shocked not by the condescension Carmanica displayed toward Joel, a perennial punching bag even among critics of Joel’s own generation, but at the contemptuousness he seemed to relish heaping upon a reader for pointing out that Joel’s work was the basis for an entire songwriting curriculum taught at a prestigious music college.

Which brings us to the naked contempt that critics heaped upon Led Zeppelin—and by proxy, its audience—at the moment the band was recording and performing some of its most vital work.

“In 1973, in the collective mind of the critical clique, Led Zeppelin was not only not cool, they were distinctly uncool,” the record executive Danny Goldberg, the band’s press officer in 1973, would later recall. The disapproving critics toiling at Rolling Stone were ten years older than the average Zeppelin fans, whose sheer number and buying power effectively rendered irrelevant whatever reservations self-anointed cultural gatekeepers have about the band.

As Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau, dean of the rock-crit elite and later Bruce Springsteen’s manager, recalled:

“Zeppelin forced a revival of the distinction between popularity and quality. As long as the bands most admired aesthetically were also the bands most successful commercially (Cream, for instance) the distinction was irrelevant. But Zeppelin’s enormous commercial success, in spite of critical opposition, revealed the deep division in what was once thought to be a homogeneous audience.”

Or, as Goldberg observed, “Led Zeppelin was the first big group to make that slice of Baby Boomers feel mortal.” As a nonplussed rock writer bleated to Goldberg at Max’s Kansas City— the Elaine’s for the 1970s New York rock scene—after seeing Zeppelin in concert: “Their audience is so young.”

Led Zeppelin played its first shows in London in October 1968. The response was not encouraging; the few writers that Zeppelin manager Peter Grant could drag to the gigs complained that the playing was too loud, the material too derivative and discursive. Grant, having just toured America with the Jeff Beck Group, knew better. He’d seen the new generation of young American fans in action, not just in cities like New York but in the wretched provincial hamlets of the Midwest where the appetite for earsplitting blues-rock and guitar heroics was palpable.

Grant closed a deal with Atlantic Records for a five-year contract with a $200,000 advance. The Boomer rock-crit elite seized upon the huge sum as a club to beat the band for being a “hype,” in the argot of the day; in an irresistible but probably unwise rejoinder, Grant and Page responded by naming the concern publishing Zeppelin’s songs Superhype Music. It was the beginning of poisonous relations with the rock establishment that would plague the band throughout its career.

Grant meanwhile saw to it that Atlantic plied the emerging American FM rock stations with white-label copies of the album, where it received heavy airplay. The strategy bypassed the self-righteous rock press, forever after muting its influence on record sales. “When rock radio came along, the role of the rock critics was tremendously diminished,” Goldberg recalled. “Zeppelin’s first album was one of the first albums in the United States to break big over the airwaves rather than in the music press.”

Led Zeppelin was released on January 12, 1969. Rolling Stone weighed in with a devastating review that acknowledged Page’s guitar prowess but excoriated him as “a writer of weak, unimaginative songs” and flayed “prissy” Robert Plant for his “howled vocals.” The band and material were deemed “strained,” “unconvincing,” “foppish,” “redundant,” “monotonous,” and “very dull.” The musicians were stunned.

“We had appalling press at the time,” John Paul Jones later recalled. “In our naïveté we thought we’d done a good album, and then this venom comes flying out. After that we were very wary of the press.”

The critical lashings continued through Zeppelin’s next three releases, abating slightly with the untitled fourth album, which contained “Stairway to Heaven.”

In March 1973. Led Zeppelin is about to release their fifth album, Houses of the Holy, and embark on a sold-out tour of America, their ninth in five years. The album is the first to comprise entirely original material and breaks fresh stylistic ground with nods to reggae, raga, funk, even doowop, along with some of Page’s most labyrinthine arrangements. The tour and album are nothing less than the band’s bid for respect—also true stardom. After years of actively spurning the press, they now just as actively court it. It falls to Goldberg to conjure this particular rabbit. He concludes that “other than my closest friends, I knew I would get nowhere with the sixties rock critics. I could not think of anyone in the Max’s clique who would have both the stature and the inclination to transform Led Zeppelin’s image.”

As if on cue, Rolling Stone savages Houses of the Holy—one of 1973’s “dullest and most confusing albums”—and blithely libels Page’s masterpiece (“tripe like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ ”) while suggesting the band might more accurately call itself Limp Blimp.

The band can’t know it, but what waits around the corner is something far larger than cultural parity with the Rolling Stones. Stubbing out joints in high school parking lots across America, Zeppelin’s true constituents are about to get in touch with their kingmaking mojo. They clasp Led Zeppelin, and Houses of the Holy, to their bosom as fiercely as their older brothers and sisters embraced Axis: Bold as Love. The adolescent fantasies of a generation are about to collide with the ambitions and pretensions of a rock band fattened by unprecedented success but starving for respect and unambiguous stardom. It turns out they aren’t the only ones.

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The uneasy marriage of network television’s variety-show aesthetic with rock and roll, as recorded on kinescope and, later, videotape, provides one of the more telling artifacts of 1960s popular culture.

The first go-round, in the 1950s, almost went to rock and roll. Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were presented, at least initially, pretty much as they were—though Ed Sullivan famously dictated that the King be photographed from the waist up, and Steve Allen, striving at every turn to marginalize rock as a fad, put a basset hound onstage for Presley to sing to during “Houn’ Dog.”

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The Beatles, under the tutelage of manager Brian Epstein, were scrupulous in their deference to Sullivan during and after their performance on his tarted-up vaudeville revue in 1964–including deep bows to the audience, soon aped by every Brit invasion band appearing on American TV.

Despite the music they were playing, the lads, be they Beatles, Stones, or the plainly feral Animals, were always buttoned up in Carnaby suits. So it didn’t seem quite so jarring to have rock and roll appear in between baton twirlers and dancing bears and Andy Williams singing “Moon River.”

But once L.A.’s bands began hitting the airwaves and national TV in 1965 and 1966, the suits started staying on their hangers. The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and especially the Mamas and Papas began appearing on the big variety shows dressed pretty much the way they did offstage. Suddenly, facial hair and proto-hippie vestments from Sunset Strip boutiques made themselves known to viewers in places where neither was in evidence.

This 1966 appearance by the Mamas and the Papas on Hullabaloo—NBC’s attempted youthquake cash-in and answer to ABC’s grittier Shindig!—pretty much says it all.

The band, who look as though they’ve just wandered in from Cass’s place in Laurel Canyon after a few bowls of hashish, dutifully lip-synch “California Dreamin’” amid a mise en scene of…bathtubs and plumbing?

This was a reference to the cover photo from the If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears album depicting the band sprawled in a tub; clearly, the set designers had nothing else to go on.

Midway through the song, the Hullabuloo dancers—a four-man, six-woman troupe dressed in cheerleader togs who fruged and ponied along with whomever was playing—pop up from within the tubs and gyrate to the music.

You have to wonder what John Phillips, who two years before was a starving folk musician in New York, was thinking as the dancers writhed and the plumbing loomed. Was it: What the fuck am I doing here? Or was it: We’re really putting one over on these clowns—we’re using them and they don’t even get that we think they’re ridiculous.

Even as the decade wore on and the variety shows seemed ever more out of synch with the times, and the supposed schism between the “straight” and “freak” world deepened, all the big ’60s bands nevertheless continued showing up: on Sullivan, on Hollywood Palace, on the Andy Williams Show—increasingly copping attitude (David Crosby, who got the Byrds banned from Sullivan, is clearly stoned for some of his performances; Michelle Philips scarfed a banana during her “vocals” on another) but nevertheless willing trim their sails for exposure that their posturing would have one believe they no longer needed.

Even the mighty Rolling Stones, who early on sang on a Rice Krispies jingle, caved and changed “night” to “some time” in “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to appease Standards and Practices.

The Doors, in the person of the incorrigible Jim Morrison, blithely agreed to substitute “higher” for their Sullivan performance of “Light My Fire” only to have the Lizard King just as blithely sing the original lyric, a bit of integrity that got the band shitcanned from future Sullivan shows (Crosby’s transgression was merely to have gotten mouthy with a show factotum backstage).

In any event, the republic survived, the Doors’ street cred inched higher and the variety show, its tropes brutally lampooned on NBC’s youth-savvy Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In (which gave the world Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin), finally got the hook.

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. As Levine recounted:

“Wayne says, ‘I want to try someting—I want to double her voice’. And the way to do that is to make a copy of this tape, and then take both tapes and play them simultaneously to get a double voice.”

Levine flatly tells Shanklin that the technique won’t work; the already overloud backing orchestra would be doubled along Fisher’s vocals. But the main stumbling block, he tells the producer, is that “there’s no way you can keep the two tapes in synch.” Shanklin is adamant, so Levine makes a copy of the original, rigs up two tape machines and somehow manages to start them at exactly the same moment. At first they run together flawlessly but as the song enters the chorus they go out synch, resulting in the characteristic whooshing sound that sweeps across the playback.

“And to show you how aware I was of new innovations in sound,” Levine admits, “my comment was ‘See? I told you it wouldn’t work!’ Meanwhile, “[Shanklin] is falling down on the floor”—much as Jimi Hendrix would a decade later when he hears the playback of the phased outro on “Bold as Love”—"‘that’s the greatest thing I ever heard!’”

Levine adds phasing in five places on the recording, probably helping “The Big Hurt” become a hit as it enhances the song’s melancholy lyrics and minor key. Listen to this 1988 interview with Levine and Gold Star’s Stan Ross for more…

Phasing becomes a favored recording technique as rock enters its psychedelic era in the 1960s. Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick treats John Lennon’s vocals on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from Revolver, released in 1966, with a version of the effect.

Phasing also features prominently in the Status Quo’s 1968 hit “Pictures of Matchstick Men…”

Producer Ted Templeman revives the technique on the bridge of the Doobie Brothers’ 1972 hit “Listen to the Music.”

In the video below, Hendrix’s ace recording engineer Eddie Kramer explains how he adds phasing to Axis: Bold as Love’s title track which, played back for Hendrix for the first time, literally floors the guitarist.

“We were experimenting with stereo flanging/phasing and I demonstrated this for the first time to Jimi during a playback of …“Bold as Love,” Kramer recalled. “He collapsed on the floor holding his head in his hands shouting ‘Oh man, how did you do that? I heard that sound in my dreams...play it again...wow, wow. I want that sound on everything man..!!”

All of these innovations are accomplished with purely analog and sometimes—as in the case of Emerick’s experiments with the Beatles—crudely primitive recording equipment. It’s a testament to their sheer creativity and mulish persistence that musicians like Hendrix, the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, collaborating with engineers and producers sympathetic to their obsession with replicating the sounds they hear in their imaginations but cannot produce using recording techniques that had stood unchallenged for decades, are able to achieve such stunning results long before digital recording essentially renders anything possible, with such comparatively trivial effort and energy expended.

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Somewhere in the Sirius XM ether there’s surely a Bob Seger channel playing, at this moment, his 1976 masterpiece “Night Moves.” I’m reminded of this, perhaps the best coming of age rock song (with hat tips to John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland.” which Seger later said partially inspired his own) by way of a freak storm that jerked me awake at 3 a.m. not long ago with thunder that sounded like timed artillery fire.

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What came to mind as the reports bludgeoned the canyon were seven lines of doggerel Seger slipped into the breakdown of “Night Moves.” In the song’s immaculate unfettered telling, Seger spends the first half setting the table for he and his “black-haired beauty’s” adventures “out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy...working on our night moves.” So far so good.

But then, after the second chorus and a build—”felt the lightning/and waited on the thunder”—Seger abruptly slams on the brakes. A couple seconds of silence, an eternity on the Top 40 radio stations that would later embrace the song, then a lonely acoustic guitar strums a single G chord. Seger recites, as a schoolboy would a poem he’s written but secretly doubts…

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered…

Then he shakes it off and gets to the point.

And ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in…

The acoustic guitar aggressively picks up the verse refrain, the band and backing choir re-enter, and the song marches not to a fade, which we’re expecting, but a triumphant landing as Seger declares in his smoky baritone: “I remember, I remember…”

What’s most impressive is how deftly Seger switches “night moves” from passive metaphor to the active voice of noun and verb—”strange how the night moves”— repeating the phrase twice for emphasis before concluding that autumn is, somewhat menacingly, “closing in.” You can imagine Seger putting down his pen and legal pad tattooed with cross-outs, taking a pull on a Marlboro, and muttering to himself: Shit—that’s pretty cool…

“Night Moves” became Seger’s breakthrough after years of thankless roadwork, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and pushing the album of the same name to multiplatinum sales.

Happy birthday.

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Arthur Lee, founder of L.A.’s proto-pyschedelic-pop-rock-whatever Love, always claimed he was the first rock musician to move to Laurel Canyon during the salad days of the 1960s and gets no argument from me.

Lee named-checked the canyon in Love’s gorgeous “You, I’ll Be Following,” from their landmark 1966 debut album Love.

I went to Laurel
Tripped in the canyon
My head is still bent, but now
You I’ll be following….

In the course of conducting interviews for LAUREL CANYON, I spent several hours at Lee’s former house at the very top of the canyon, glimpses of which—along with choice color footage of the Sunset Strip by day and night in the mid-’60s—can be seen in the short film below; Lee’s house also serves as Peter Fonda’s pad in the classic ‘60s psychedelic feature The Trip, where the recently divorced advertising exec played by Fonda drops acid for the first time and, in a paranoid haze, flees the canyon for a nightmarish night on the Strip and beyond.

Lee, who died at 61 in 2006, lived on the backside of the canyon off Blue Heights Drive, one of the most vertiginous and scary roads in L.A.—when I first moved to the canyon the road was still gravel with no guardrails and a precipitous fall hundreds of feet straight down. (A UPS guy told me once that he found a woman sitting in her car on Blue Heights in the middle of the afternoon, frozen with fear, unable to drive another inch and too terrified to back up.)

Lee’s house was a comfortable, spacious affair with a groovy indoor-outdoor swimming pool that divides the residence into halves spanned by a bridge.

It was early winter the day I visited and as afternoon faded to night a thick fog blanketed the house, obscuring the lights of L.A. far below and making it nearly impossible to drive back down the canyon.

The house had the feel of an aerie, better approached on wing—just the place for a visionary to see the sights.

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Hard to imagine—well, not that hard, come to think of it—but Los Angeles’ 1958 Master Plan of Freeways and Expressways included not only a Beverly Hills Freeway but a four-lane monster plowing through the heart of Laurel Canyon using more or less the route of the present Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

The Laurel Canyon Freeway—felicitously named after the leafy canyon it would have destroyed—would have run from LAX up what is now La Cienega Boulevard before following the route of Crescent Heights Boulevard and finally crossing over the Santa Monica Mountains via Laurel Canyon Boulevard into the San Fernando Valley. Which would have made hitchhiking from the Strip over to Studio City a bitch.

Most of these nutty, Robert Moses-like empire-building fantasies came to nothing, of course, and Laurel Canyon was spared. (The only part of the freeway actually built was a truncated section down by LAX—now you can stop wondering why La Cienega suddenly turns into the world’s shortest freeway next time you’re late for a flight.)

Had the freeway actually been built, we’d be forced to confront the fact that “Laurel Canyon” and all that it implies in the Sixties-atmospherics sense of the name would have never existed. (Some would say that this would have been a good thing.)

It’s possible the musicians flocking to L.A. from New York and London in the 1960s would have found each other in another habitat—possibly Topanga Canyon, where Neil Young pitched his flag, or Venice Beach, a haunt of the Beats in the fifties and at the time transitioning to accommodating misfits like the Doors—and the same creative foment as occurred in Laurel Canyon would have ensued.

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But Topanga and Malibu, an hour from Hollywood in much more rugged terrain, lack Laurel Canyon’s five-minute-hitch-to-the-Sunset Strip codependence; the Whisky, Thee Experience, Pandora’s Box, London Fog and Troubadour (on Santa Monica) thrived partly because the musicians and their retinues considered these clubs a public extension of their canyon woodshedding, and everyone went home happy. Late, but happy. Unbelievably stoned and vertiginous, but happy.

Among other travesties, the freeway would have displaced humble structures that in just a few years would be the source of landmark cultural developments, among them…

Pandora’s Box, the whimsical club marooned on a traffic island at the intersection of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and the Sunset Strip, where the Sunset Strip Riots sparked Stephen Stills to write Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 Top 10 hit “For What It’s Worth.”

Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward’s home at mouth of Laurel Canyon just north of the Strip was part gallery, part salon, where in the early 1960s the walls teemed with Hopper’s collection of L.A. pop artists such as Ed Ruscha and the tables were crowded with Hayward’s collection of original Tiffany lamps, and all of hip Hollywood came to play, just before the canyon exploded as a colony for world-beating musicians.

The Canyon Country Store, “lobby of the Laurel Canyon hotel,” immortalized in the Doors’ “Love Street” as the “store where the creatures meet,” nexus for Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to Fleetwood Mac joining Fleetwood Mac after Mick Fleetwood happened to stop by in 1975, and ground zero for untold drug and creative transactions back in the day and plenty of good vibes now.

The Log Cabin, at 2401 Laurel Canyon Blvd, former home of the Bungalow Inn and later domicile of Tom Mix, was briefly home in 1968 to Frank Zappa and his extended biological and artistic family, where the GTO’s groupie clique was formed, Alice Cooper was signed, John Mayall was inspired to write “2401” and the Fraternity of Man their stoner classic “Don’t Bogart Me.” Neighbors included Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Carole King, The Turtle’s Mark Volman, the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, photographer Henry Diltz and untold transient musicians and groupies.

So here’s to what might have not been had the CalTrans concrete freaks had their way. But it sure would have made getting to the damned airport easier…

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