The Laurel Canyon sound has reverberated down the decades

A district in the Hollywood Hills has had a profound influence on popular music

Economist
June 16, 2025

When Chris Hillman, the bass player for The Byrds, was hunting for a room to rent in 1964, he went to the Canyon Country Store. Today the small grocery, tucked away in the hills above Los Angeles, is a shrine to Laurel Canyon and the musicians such as Mr Hillman who lived among the ravine's fragrant eucalyptus trees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Photos of rock bands cover the shop like wallpaper. A bin of firewood for sale bears a sign that Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, would have approved of: "Come on, baby, light my fire."

The young musicians that congregated in Laurel Canyon came to dominate popular music. The likes of Joni Mitchell (pictured), The Mamas & the Papas, Jackson Browne, the Eagles and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) created a counterculture scene that rivalled Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. They helped to establish Los Angeles as the entertainment capital of the world and created a genre-bending sound that is loved and influential half a century on. (Those five artists alone still garner more than 40m monthly listeners on Spotify.)

What drew performers to the canyon? The Troubadour and Whisky a Go Go are clubs in West Hollywood, just down the hill. Folk singers tried out new material at "hootenanny nights" and hoped that record-label suits were sitting in the audience (they were). Young and broke, musicians could spend a night on the strip and then retreat to the kind of rural isolation that appealed to back-to-the-land hippies, where rents were cheap and coyotes prowled among the chaparral. "If the car ran out of gas up there, you simply put it in neutral and coasted all the way down," explains Michael Walker, the author of "Laurel Canyon", a history of the music scene. "And then you put in 20 cents of gas, and that would get you the rest of the way to the Whisky or the Troubadour."

Drugs were everywhere. "All musicians smoke grass. God's herb, I call it," says Henry Diltz, a folk musician and the scene's unofficial photographer. Psychedelics were part of the creative process, too. "Some people took it recreationally," Mr Diltz says of LSD, "but me and my friends took it very seriously."

Laurel Canyon's denizens played with different musical styles. They took the searching lyrics of folk music, added an electric guitar, and fused that with honky-tonk and the soulfulness of the blues. The Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys were all powerful influences; Laurel Canyon musicians practised three and four-part harmonies in their backyards. Ms Mitchell wrote one of her earliest albums, "Ladies of the Canyon" (1970), in the house that she shared with Graham Nash of CSNY. "Ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they'll say Lookout Mountain," she once said. "So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain."

The nebulousness of the Laurel Canyon sound can make it hard to tell which artists are its disciples. But enough stand out for Spotify to create a "Laurel Canyon Legends" playlist, including Carole King and Carly Simon. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac just after the canyon's heyday, but their harmonies evoke that earlier time. Of more modern artists, Phoebe Bridgers, Father John Misty and Tom Petty all fit the mould.

Or consider Haim, a trio of sisters from the Valley, who idolised Ms Mitchell as children. Their devotion to LA's folk scene can be heard on "Hallelujah", an acoustic ballad on their third album, "Women in Music Pt III". The band's latest record, "I quit", released on June 20th, has a harder edge. But one of the tracks, "Take me back", has the upbeat, informal, sometimes twangy, quality of their canyon forebears.

Laurel Canyon lost some of its lustre after the Manson Family murders in 1969. The violence shattered the illusion of a neighbourhood defined by peace and love; Mr Diltz stopped picking up hitch-hikers. As musicians got rich and famous, they moved away. These days the canyon looks much the way it did in the 1960s, but with bigger houses and higher rents. Residents are more likely to hear owls than screaming guitars - except, perhaps, through the speakers at the Canyon Country Store.