Mellow Gold: Songs, Drugs and Denim in Southern California

Extended sleevenotes to the Back to California CD, including detailed entries on all 20 tracks!

By Barney Hoskyns

THE MOUNTAINOUS geography of the Los Angeles basin creates numerous canyons, picturesque clefts that run north to south most of the way from the California desert to the Pacific Ocean. Some of Southern California's most creative people have lived there, and continue to live there to this day. "There are canyons every 20 or 30 miles at least," says legendary L.A. sideman Chris Darrow. "They've always tended to be havens for artists and musicians and people who had alternative lifestyles."

Most famous of all the L.A. canyons is Laurel, a backwater haven in the midst of the city's mega-sprawl. Beloved of strumming singer-songwriters and denim cowboys alike, Laurel Canyon was – in the words of Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks – "the seat of the beat" in late '60s L.A., the setting of songs such as the Mamas and the Papas' '12.30 (Young Girls are Coming to the Canyon)', Jackie DeShannon's 'Laurel Canyon', and of course Joni Mitchell's immortal 'Ladies of the Canyon'. The canyon was a funky Shangri-La for the laid-back and longhaired, who perched in cabins with awesome views over the L.A. flatlands and the San Fernando Valley.

"Laurel Canyon was almost more mythical than geographical," says J.D. Souther, who moved to L.A. from his native Texas in 1968. "Suddenly you go from huge expanses of flatlands on either side to these twisty, Tolkein-like streets and lanes. There was something mysterious about it that connected this big harsh city to the stars."

The canyon had been placed on the musical map in the early '60s by such movers and shakers as Billy James, Paul Rothchild and Barry Friedman, men whose abodes became hangouts for a new breed of troubadour: singer-songwriters who'd outgrown the folk boom and were writing introspective lyrics about their lives and relationships. Suddenly L.A. was a magnet for all manner of acoustic dreamers: Canadians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, southerners like Souther and Stephen Stills.

"I wasn't the first to move into the canyon, but there weren't too many here then," Billy James told Rolling Stone in 1968. "Arthur Lee lived nearby, and that was about it. It's all happened in the last year or so. If creative artists need to live apart from the community at large, they also have a desire to live among their own kind, and so an artistic community develops."

Laurel Canyon was the perfect setting for sensitive souls such as Young and Mitchell, as well as for native Angelenos like Jackson Browne, a protégé of Billy James'. Here they were in a major music hub, but able to get away from it all on the back porches of their shacks on (and off) Lookout Mountain Avenue, Kirkwood Drive and Willow Glen Road. The canyon became a landscape for singer-songwriters, navel-gazers coming down from the long strange psychedelic trip of 1966/67. Groups were fragmenting, members going solo. When David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash left their respective bands to form the primarily acoustic Crosby, Stills and Nash it signalled a shift away from loud electric rock towards a sound that, in the parlance of the time, was "laid-back".

For some, not even Laurel Canyon was remote enough. Hardcore hippies located paradise further west, close to the Pacific in the Santa Monica Mountains. Accessible from Pacific Ocean Highway, Topanga Canyon was where you went if you really wanted to get it together in the country – to keep chickens and grow your own cucumbers. By 1970 it was home to Neil Young, Taj Mahal, Linda Ronstadt – along with bands such as Spirit and Canned Heat.

"Topanga really was the Wild West," says Joel Bernstein, who moved there in 1971. "Laurel Canyon might have had writers and musicians and painters, but Topanga had some of those people and they were more eccentric and more reclusive. Plus there was a sprinkling of criminal and quasi-criminal characters."

The music made in Laurel and Topanga Canyons grew out of folk, took a left turn into country, and culminated in the stadium-busting success of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt (right, with JD Souther). Exactly how this happened is the subject of my book Hotel California, the story of a group of exceptional artists being elevated to superstar status not just by their talent but by the guile and vision of managers and record executives such as David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, Mo Ostin, Joe Smith, Lenny Waronker, Jac Holzman and David Anderle.

Geffen and Roberts in particular were the starmakers who saw just how big this quiet, "laid-back" music could get. Together they turned Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Browne, Rondstadt and the Eagles into '70s rock gods, shaping their careers initially through Geffen-Roberts Management and subsequently through Asylum Records – the chief rival to the Warner-Reprise stable run by Ostin, Smith and Waronker. "I felt I was functioning as a dam against the river of shit that comes pouring down on artists," says Geffen today. "It was a job that I took very seriously."

Back to California rounds up some of the less feted names in the Reprise/Asylum pantheon: singer-songwriters who rarely cracked the Top 20 but whose music has stood the test of time no less convincingly than that of their more successful peers. Many of them have achieved posthumous cult acclaim they never got to experience while alive: misanthropic sideman/arranger Jack Nitzsche, country rock pioneer Gram Parsons, ex-Byrd Gene Clark, mystic songstress Judee Sill, funky Hollywood maverick Lowell George, acerbic intellectual Warren Zevon. Others – Randy Newman and Rickie Lee Jones, J.D. Souther and Jimmy Webb – enjoy that cult status in the twilight years of their careers.

For the most part, the tracks on this compilation are lost classics, hidden gems from back-catalogue albums that rank among the finest records ever recorded in L.A.. From Judy Collins' proto-country-rock 'Someday Soon' (1968) to Rickie Lee Jones' wistfully nostalgic 'On Saturday Afternoons in 1963' (1979) via Essra Mohawk's feistily feminist 'Full-Fledged Woman' (1974), Back to California paints a fresh picture of the L.A. sound in that remarkable era.

"I'm not in step with any music that's being made right now that I hear," J.D Souther said in 1998 as he lamented the loss of "a context, when Jackson and Bonnie and I would all be going to the studio… and Lowell and Linda and the Eagles and Zevon… a context that was shared to some extent even though within it we were each very individual voices."

It's hard not to mourn the passing of that context, or of the maverick executives who provided platforms for the leading lights of the Southern California scene. Even David Geffen, for some the bête noire of the story, waxes nostalgic for the singer-songwriter era. "It was the greatest ride that one could possibly imagine," he says. "Artistically, financially, fulfilling dreams and aspirations and making friends with incredibly talented people and watching them grow and succeed, it was thrilling. The '80s, which were considerably more successful for me, weren't nearly as magical."

In October 2003 I sat in Lenny Waronker's office and asked him about Randy Newman (right) and Rickie Lee Jones, as well as his latest singer-songwriter protégé Rufus Wainwright. For several years Lenny and Mo Ostin had been trying to keep the Warner-Reprise ethos alive at DreamWorks Records, a company part-bankrolled by none other than David Geffen. It hadn't worked, and DreamWorks was about to be sold off to Universal. If Neil or Joni or Randy or Rickie Lee had been around today, I asked Lenny, would we even have heard their second or third albums?

"I remember having a conversation with Rickie Lee once," he said in response. "She was upset about comparatively low sales and I said, 'This isn't about selling a million records. This is about coming out, getting rave reviews, and selling fifty or sixty thousand albums. And that'll allow us to go to the next one and the next one. And somewhere in there it's gonna blow up.' But now it's so different. The costs of marketing the records are so high, and the way the business has gone, based on the corporatisation of all this stuff, forces you to worry about a report card every three months. The risk-taking isn't the same."

"Lenny was artist-friendly but an artist like me couldn't get started now in the business," Randy Newman told me. "There are few record companies now which would give you the time I was given to develop, to where Sail Away sold respectably, or who give you that long afterwards."

Let us be thankful this music got green-lighted when it did, that we have the great albums by Newman, Young, Mitchell, Browne and friends on our shelves and in our iPods. Chill out, roll 'em easy, and take a trip back to the Los Angeles – the "lower California" – of the late '60s and early '70s.

And hey, don't let the sound of your own wheels make you crazy.

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Track by Track!

1 Arlo Guthrie: 'Coming in to Los Angeles' (1969)
Son of folk hero Woody, Arlo Guthrie was the prototype East Coast folkie turned countrified California import. Signed to Warner-Reprise in 1967, Guthrie struck hippie gold with the draft-dodger classic Alice's Restaurant, inspiration for the Arthur Penn movie of the same name. By the release of his third album, the Lenny-Waronker-produced Running Down the Road, Guthrie was firmly ensconced in the bosom of the Reprise singer-songwriter circle. "Warners was comfortable," says in-house producer Russ Titelman. "It was people who knew about music and had a lot of fun making it. The signings were incredibly hip. Lenny turned Arlo into a pop act, which wasn't easy, and he made hit records with Gordon Lightfoot. It created a certain vibe and a certain perception. In a way – a good way – it was all things to all people." 'Coming In To Los Angeles', graced by the patented Fender picking of the great Clarence White, spoke for the many musicians pouring into the warm California sunshine in the late '60s. "Could we ever feel much finer?" Probably not.

2 Judy Collins: 'Someday Soon' (1968)
Like 'Coming In To Los Angeles', Collins' pining version of Ian Tyson's twangy rodeo ballad was the sound of East Coast folk shading into California country rock. "It was country," Judy wrote, "but more funky than usual country and considered a crossover song." Folk's blue-eyed princess recorded Who Knows Where The Time Goes at Elektra's own L.A. studio. "It was her first album with a band," says its producer David Anderle. "Jim Gordon, the drummer, said it was the first time he'd ever played on a record where the singer sang live with the musicians. It was also the first album where the sleeve had each song broken down with who played on it – people like Stephen Stills, Chris Ethridge, James Burton and Van Dyke Parks." When Collins met Stills at engineer John Haeny's Laurel Canyon pad it was love at first sight – an affair that, in Haeny's words, "didn't last long but produced a lot of heat and fire". Stills' subsequent "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" hymned Collins on the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album.

3 Randy Newman: 'Marie' (1974)
Newman's 1974 album Good Old Boys – a superb song-suite about southern prejudice and Yankee hypocrisy – was in one sense the antithesis of the mellow L.A. rock of the period. It also included what has become the secret favourite of every true Newman fan: this soused love letter from a self-confessed pig of a man, complete with irresistibly soppy Nick DeCaro string arrangement. "The guy means what he's saying," Newman says of 'Marie'. "He does love her. But he can't say it unless he's drunk. It's more interesting to me when it's something like that. There's just more going on." Newman came from a different place to the canyon ladies and gentlemen. "If they had a club, I wasn't in it," he says tersely. Like Carole King, but unlike Joni Mitchell, he was a backroom writer thrust almost accidentally into the spotlight. Yet he shared a label with Mitchell, Young and others, and his caustic humour influenced every singer-songwriter in southern California.

4 Linda Ronstadt: 'You Can Close Your Eyes' (1974)
The sweetheart darling of the Troubadour/Laurel Canyon gang, Ronstadt was also an anomaly in being an interpreter of her peers' songs rather than a writer. This luminous version of James Taylor's beautiful ballad was the last track on her breakthrough album Heart Like a Wheel – a last, contract-fulfilling release for Capitol before she resumed her career on Asylum. The album was the first full fruit of her partnership with English producer Peter Asher, who simplified and polished Ronstadt's fusion of country and California pop-rock, bringing her vast success for the remainder of the '70s. With the success came sexist accusations that Linda was merely a puppet in Asher's hands, the fact that she didn't write her own songs counting against her. Asher himself strongly refutes this. "Anyone who's met Linda for ten seconds will know that I couldn't have been her Svengali," he says. "To me she was everything feminism was about at a time when men still told women what to sing and what to wear."

5 Little Feat: 'Roll Um Easy' (1973)
If he remained proudly out-of-step with the prevailing '70s flavour of California rock, Little Feat's Lowell George was deeply embedded in the Laurel Canyon scene, beloved of everybody from Linda Ronstadt to Jackson Browne. By 1973 Little Feat were a long ways from the country-blues raunch of their early days, having added guitarist Paul Barrère, bassist Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton to forge a sophisti-funk powerhouse built around a potent combo of piano, congas and slide guitar. 'Roll Um Easy', however, returned George to the back porch, stripping Feat's sound down to two guitars – acoustic and electric slide – and two voices. (The dude yelping raggedly behind Lowell is his canyon pal Danny Hutton, then of the hugely successful Three Dog Night.) It's as languidly sensual – as black, frankly – as any music to come out of L.A. in the first half of the '70s. "The Eagles, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt have come to epitomize the L.A. sound and scene," noted local writer Don Snowden. "But Little Feat is perhaps the quintessential L.A. band, far more representative of the city's cultural diversity than the more homogenous styles of their better known compatriots."

6 Gene Clark: 'From a Silver Phial' (1974)
Having survived the debacle of 1973's Byrds reunion, the most enigmatic and most soulful of that group's original members was offered a solo deal the following year by David Geffen. In cahoots with drug buddy (and producer) Thomas Jefferson Kaye, Clark conjured up the masterful, mystical No Other – an expensive folly of an album that exasperated Geffen, sold poorly, and was only later acknowledged as a cult classic. The beguiling 'From a Silver Phial' was one of No Other's shorter tracks but remains a sublime example of Clark's haunting gifts. Contrary to assumptions, the song's title is not an overt cocaine reference. "It's all bullshit about Clark writing the songs in a cocaine haze," says his biographer John Einarson. "He was actually very spiritual and reflective at that point in his life, and enjoying family life in Mendocino."

7 Gram Parsons (with Emmylou Harris): 'A Song for You' (1973)
Parsons' position within the canyon pantheon is complex. As the co-founder with the Byrds' Chris Hillman of the Flying Burrito Brothers, he laid the main paving stones for Californian country rock; as a trust-fund outsider and fucked-up Rolling Stones crony he was ostracized by the incestuous Troubadour community. "Gram had three strikes against him for being rich," says J.D. Souther. "We were all doing day jobs and busting our asses, and he was a trust-fund kid that could do what he wanted." By the time Mo Ostin signed him for the first of two Reprise solo albums, Gram was a physical wreck. GP none the less turned out to be a near-perfect record, and arguably superior to the more celebrated Grievous Angel. On the tremulously pretty 'Song For You', the vocal blend between Parsons and Emmylou Harris – wrapped in a coating of fiddles, dobros, banjos and pedal steels – is nothing short of gorgeous. It's almost as if Emmylou was the vehicle for Gram's resurrection, an angel of mercy hauling him from a slough of despond. "It was like he'd flirted with decadence and sort of rediscovered himself on the back of that," says L.A. writer Bud Scoppa. "Emmy was the incarnation of something very strong and positive, and if anybody understood him it was her." Within a year Parsons was dead.

8 Judee Sill: 'Soldier of the Heart' (1973)
Sill, whose debut album was the first release on Asylum, is only now gaining the acclaim her work has long merited. "That album didn't fly out of retail," says L.A. manager/producer Denny Bruce. "But it made David Geffen seem more artistic to come out with somebody new while he was loading the cannon with Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell and the others." The archetypal flaxen-haired songstress of the early '70s, Sill combined her love of Bach and other classical composers with her taste for the mellow, countrified sound of '70s California, melding them into a unique style she termed "country-cult-baroque". For J.D. Souther, whose affair with Sill inspired her song 'Jesus Was a Crossmaker', there was nobody more important on the L.A. singer-songwriter scene. "She was light years ahead of most of us," Souther says. "Jackson Browne was the furthest along as far as having learned songwriting, but then I met Judee and I thought, 'Fuck, man, she's school for all of us'." From her second album Heart Food comes this piano-based marvel, driven by Jim Gordon's pounding drums and shot through with the febrile religious imagery that characterises many of her best songs.

9 Crazy Horse: 'I Don't Want to Talk About It' (1971)
A timeless ballad for wounded, emotionally inarticulate men, Danny Whitten's greatest song was a big hit for Rod Stewart long after Whitten had died of a drug overdose in 1972. Whitten's band Crazy Horse had grown out of early '60s vocal group Danny & the Memories, who moved from the East Coast to L.A. and metamorphosed into a canyon-dwelling band called the Rockets. "[They were] a ragged outfit," wrote Fred Goodman, "better known for selling pot than for their music." Adopted by Neil Young, the Rockets in turn became Crazy Horse, Young's own personal Rolling Stones, backing him on 1969's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. In 1971, augmented by Nils Lofgren and Jack Nitzsche (the latter also co-producing), the Horse made their eponymous debut album for Reprise. 'I Don't Want to Talk About It' was its standout track, with Whitten singing and Nitzsche pal Ry Cooder supplying keening bottleneck fills. Whitten, one of the first major heroin casualties on the L.A. scene, was already in poor shape. "When I met Danny and shot Crazy Horse in January of 1970," says photographer Joel Bernstein, "Neil had already had guitars ripped off and sold by Danny, without Neil even knowing it." On November 18, 1972, Young sent Whitten packing from his northern California ranch. That night Whitten – who'd already inspired Young's immortal 'The Needle and the Damage Done' – overdosed on a combination of alcohol and the opiate Diazepam.

10 The Souther Hillman Furay Band: 'Border Town' (1974)
Souther Hillman Furay was in essence an attempt by David Geffen to replicate the supergroup triad of Crosby, Stills and Nash. "It seemed like a good idea," Geffen said of the group's formation. "I thought they'd sound great together so I talked them into it." On paper, SHF was a good idea: two proven songwriting talents (J.D. Souther and Richie Furay, formerly of Poco and Buffalo Springfield), one rock-solid musical anchorman (Chris Hillman, ex-Byrds/Burritos/Manassas), augmented by high-calibre players such as drummer Jim Gordon. Geffen saw the band primarily as a vehicle for Souther – "to make me mainstream in the wake of the Eagles' success," in J.D.'s own words – but couldn't have predicted the almost instant antagonism between him and Furay. If the musical fruits of this arranged marriage were predictably lacking in spark, SHF's debut album did include this feisty, Doobie-Brothers-esque parable about Los Angeles – powered once again by the muscular drumming of Jim Gordon. "She came steamin' into border town, a little girl with a big dream," Souther sings. "Now she's covered in pearls and a long white gown, riding in a limousine." It's not quite 'New Kid in Town' but it's classic Souther all the same.

11 Ned Doheny: 'Postcards from Hollywood' (1973)
The scion of a wealthy Los Angeles oil family whose history had been scarred by the 1929 murder of son and heir Edward L. Doheny, Jr., Ned was – like Jackson Browne – part of the failed Elektra Records experiment at Paxton Lodge in 1967/8. "Ned played the guitar great and sang these great songs," says photographer Henry Diltz. "It was very much like the acoustic Jackson Browne, Eagley kind of thing." Five years after Paxton, on Browne's coat-tails, Doheny signed to Asylum and recorded the debut album that featured this mellow L.A. gem – in J.D. Souther's words "a really cool left-turn of a song that we all liked and we all knew how to sing". Doheny recalled the sessions for his Asylum debut as a struggle. "When we neared the end of the project, David Geffen wouldn't pay for any more of the record," he recalls. "I think the reality of just how much Jackson's album had cost was hitting home. I wound up paying the last $25,000 of the costs for my own record. I remixed a couple of tunes on the album, and Glenn Frey and Don Henley sang background on them, but they never saw the light of day. If I'd just done what they told me, I probably would have wound up a lot more successful." Doheny subsequently did taste success: he had a Top 10 hit with the disco-era 'Get It Up For Love' and became a star in Japan, where his white sunkissed version of R&B earned him the soubriquet "Mr California".

12 Essra Mohawk: 'Full-Fledged Woman' (1974)
A missing link, of sorts, between her mentor Laura Nyro and Rickie Lee Jones, the former Sandy Hurwitz and sometime spouse of producer Frazier Mohawk (né Barry Friedman) never got the break her singular talent deserved – not even when she was belatedly signed to Asylum for the follow-up to 1970's lost classic Primordial Lovers. 'Full-Fledged Woman', a virtual anthem for post-hippie chicks coming of age in the feminist '70s, was a standout track on 1974's Essra Mohawk. "I was only 25 at the time," Mohawk wrote, "and therefore had no idea how much more I had to learn. Truth be told, I don't know if I'll ever be a full-fledged woman, but back then I was more of a fledgling woman. Thinking back, the younger I was, the older I felt." Mohawk's unique vocal style, as wayward as it was intuitive, remains as ripe for rediscovery as the work of Judee Sill. "There was all this non-verbal stuff that I used to do, kind of like saxophone notes," she says. "I always thought instrumentally with my voice. I listened to everything with big ears and responded to everything else that was happening in order to keep it aloft."

13 Jack Nitzsche: 'Lower California' (1974)
Nitzsche had been a fixture of the L.A. music scene for 15 years when – following 1972's orchestral St. Giles' Cripplegate – he persuaded Mo Ostin of Warner-Reprise to bankroll sessions for a vocal solo album. An irascible maverick who'd arranged classic Phil Spector hits, hung out with the Rolling Stones, and worked closely with Neil Young, Nitzsche assumed the persona of the West Coast singer-songwriter primarily to help finance a movie by his equally truculent pal Robert Downey, Sr. A near-perfect pastiche of Holland-era Brian Wilson, 'Lower California' is a sly dig at the Hollywood Babylon that Nitzsche (like Downey) had come to despise. Unfortunately the alcoholic Nitzsche was his own worst enemy, cutting off his nose to spite his face by recording a song, 'Little Al', that included the line, "Hey Mo, where you gonna go with that rock in your hip pocket?" Unsurprisingly, Ostin opted not to release the album, which belatedly appeared on the 2001 Rhino Handmade CD Three-Piece Suite. "Sometimes your talent turns around and hits you back in the face," reflected Nitzsche's friend Andrew Loog Oldham. "That's what it did with Jack."

14 J.D. Souther: 'Jesus In 3/4 Time' (1972)
A native of Texas but a typical Southern California import of the late '60s, Souther was the unseen presence behind the country-flavoured singer-songwriter L.A. scene that coalesced around David Geffen's Asylum label. "I always thought J.D. was the pivot of that whole Laurel Canyon scene," the late Derek Taylor opined. "He was a good packager of musicians and everyone liked him." Steeped in the influence of Hank Williams and Tim Hardin, Souther recorded basic tracks for his Asylum debut at Pacific Recorders up in San Mateo. Backing him on this white-gospel waltz was Glenn Frey, whose band the Eagles had some of their biggest hits with songs ('The Best of My Love', 'New Kid in Town') co-written by Souther. The Texan came within a whisker of being an Eagle himself but opted on Geffen's advice to follow the lone-wolf path of labelmate Jackson Browne. "J.D. was somewhat reclusive," says Peter Asher, who produced Souther's follow-up Black Rose. "He liked to keep himself to himself."

15 Nicolette Larson: 'Trouble' (1979)
Best-known for her 1978 hit version of then-boyfriend Neil Young's 'Lotta Love', Montana-born Larson became an integral part of the L.A. music scene in the late '70s, harmonizing with Young himself on Comes a Time and subsequently backing everyone from Linda Ronstadt to the Doobie Brothers. She also released several of her own albums on Warner Brothers. Produced by Doobies mentor Ted Templeman, this live version of a Lowell George classic features piano accompaniment by the inimitable Van Dyke Parks, who can be heard counting the song in. Larson, who married premier session drummer Russ Kunkel in 1990, was a universally adored figure in L.A. Her tragic death from cerebral edema in 1997 inspired a memorial concert starring the cream of southern California talent – Crosby, Stills and Nash, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and many more.

16 Jimmy Webb: 'Crying in My Sleep' (1974)
Unlike most of his introspective contemporaries, Webb had tasted huge commercial success with the MOR-pop hits he'd penned in the '60s for such unhip artists as Richard Harris and the Fifth Dimension. As a result he found it hard to break into the navel-gazing canyon club of the early '70s. "Jimmy achieved a great deal of success," recalled Linda Ronstadt, who later produced Webb's 1993 album Suspending Disbelief. "But he was way, way out of the popular mainstream and was shunned and castigated for what was perceived as his lack of hipness." Webb himself confessed that he felt "deeply envious of people like Joni [Mitchell] and Jackson [Browne], because I couldn't find an identity like that for myself". His cause was none the less taken up by David Geffen, who got him a deal at Reprise and then signed him to Asylum for 1974's superb Land's End. That album, featuring the heartbreaking (and overtly L.A.-set) 'Crying in My Sleep', was almost entirely inspired by an impossible affair with a highly-strung English girl he'd met in London in 1972. "It was a tragic thing from beginning to end," Webb says. "Human beings can become involved in emotional attachments that are too overpowering and too debilitating, and I began a rather rigorous campaign to kill myself." Fortunately he didn't succeed, instead transmuting his pain into masterpieces such as this.

17 Rickie Lee Jones: 'On Saturday Afternoons in 1963' (1979)
Jones had been in Los Angeles since 1973, where she'd settled after a rootless, restless upbringing in Chicago and Phoenix. A born bohemian, she fell in with a new family of outsiders that included Tom Waits and Chuck E. Weiss. After Lowell George fell in love with her song 'Easy Money', a Jones demo tape began to circulate in Los Angeles, eventually finding its way to Lenny Waronker of Warner Brothers. "She came in with massive attitude," Waronker recalled, "to the point where you were kind of intimidated." If the sassy 'Chuck E's In Love' made her an overnight success, Jones' debut album proved that her act wasn't all boho cool. There was torchy intensity in 'Company', and scintillating delicacy in this nostalgic miniature of a song. "Rickie in some ways filled the hole left [at Warners] by Joni Mitchell," says Ron Stone, who later managed her. "What they had in common was their sheer artistry."

18 Warren Zevon: 'The French Inhaler' (1976)
A bridge between the singer-songwriter era and the new age of punk's Angry Young Men, Zevon uncovered the sleaze and dread that lurked in the Hollywood Babylon of the mid-'70s. Produced by Jackson Browne between October 1975 and February 1976, Warren Zevon was markedly different from the music of his Asylum peers, as though a Laurel Canyon version of Elvis Costello had suddenly surfaced in the midst of Asylum's pervasive complacency. "The people who inhabit the commercial context in which Zevon makes his music," wrote Greil Marcus, "aren't merely integrated into the system… they are the system." Zevon explored unglamorous parts of L.A. that Joni Mitchell and the Eagles barely acknowledged. The anti-hero of 'Carmelita' met his dealer downtown on Alvarado Street, while the morose boozer of 'Desperadoes Under the Eaves' was holed up in the shabby Hollywood Hawaiian Motel on Yucca and Grace. In 'The French Inhaler', his most immaculate song, Zevon hung with "these phonies in this Hollywood bar", his bittersweet portrait of the archetypal L.A. rock chick made the more poignant by its sweet Glenn Frey/Don Henley backing vocals.

19 Lowell George: '20 Million Things' (1979)
From the former Feat leader's only solo album, Thanks, I'll Eat It Here, this divine song (co-written with Jacques Levy) ranks alongside 'Willin'' and 'Long Distance Love' as George's greatest ballad. "Lowell signed his solo deal in 1975 to help finance the band through a real skinny summer," recalled Feat drummer Richie Hayward. "He opened up that budget to keep the band around, but he didn't start the solo album till a year or two later. He had some demons he was struggling with. He wasn't writing as prolifically as before." (Among the cover versions on Thanks was Rickie Lee Jones' 'Easy Money', which Lowell had heard Jones sing in a Topanga bar called the Post Office.) The singer had also parted company with Little Feat, weary of the "musical differences" that had divided the band into two camps. "I tried not to use any one from the band," he said of the album. "It's tough to separate myself from the group, but these sessions were really my own. I've been recording off and on since September 1976." Tragically, George's prodigious drug use stopped his career in its tracks not long after the album's release. On June 29, 1979, the 34-year-old – described by his friend and collaborator Martin Kibbee as "the best-kept secret of the '70s mellow mafia"– suffered a fatal heart attack in a Washington D.C. hotel room.

20 David Ackles: 'Oh, California!' (1972)
When Elton John played his landmark shows at L.A.'s Troubadour club in August 1970, cult singer-songwriter Ackles was his support act. The former Reg Dwight was appalled. "I was topping the bill, but that seemed unbelievable to me," he recalled. "There was no way that anyone could have convinced me that I should be above David Ackles, but they explained to me that he was almost unknown there." It was fitting, therefore, that John's songwriting partner Bernie Taupin brought Ackles to London two years later and produced his brilliant American Gothic album with the aid of Nick Drake arranger Robert Kirby. 'Oh, California!', one of the album's standout tracks, was a droll dissection of the Golden State's mythos that sounded like a postscript to Van Dyke Parks' 1968 album Song Cycle. "Lend me a shack and I'll perform ya/All kinds of happy songs to ease your pain," Ackles sang in a particularly withering verse. "Think of all we will gain."

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Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons – a history of the scene that spawned the artists on this compilation – has just been published by Fourth Estate in a new paperback edition. Hoskyns is also the author of Say It One Time for the Brokenhearted: Country Soul in the American South (Bloomsbury), Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los Angeles (Bloomsbury), Across the Great Divide: The Band and America (Pimlico), Glam: Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution (Faber), and Ragged Glories: City Lights, Country Funk, American Music (Pimlico).

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Praise for Hotel California:

"A masterful history of a key period in rock."
Observer Music Monthly

"If you're looking for the ingredients required of a good rock'n'roll story, Hotel California has got the lot."
David Sinclair, The Guardian

"Beneath the music-biz story, there is something poignant in Hotel California about people trying to be happy but succeeding only briefly. Bet you cry when Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell part."
Sebastian Faulks

"One of our finest pop historians reappraises a neglected and often maligned milieu."
Simon Reynolds

"A riveting story, sensitively told."
Anthony DeCurtis, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone

"A revered scribe's comprehensive account of the Golden State's denim-clad, narcissistic heyday."
David Sheppard, Mojo

"Best bits? There are too many to mention."
Nick Coleman, Independent on Sunday

"A tightly coiled and elegiac narrative."
Christopher Silvester, Sunday Times