Uncle Frank’s Cabin
I dropped by 2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard yesterday. It’s the site of the legendary log cabin where Frank Zappa presided over a bizarre rock and roll salon for a few frantic months in the spring and summer of 1968.
The cabin’s tenants, guests and hangers-on included the GTOs groupie clique; the blues titan John Mayall (who wrote the song “2401″ about the place), Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix and other Sixties luminaries, plus various and sundry members and roadies associated with the Mothers of Invention, Zappa’s band. The original Alice Cooper band was signed to Zappa’s Straight Records at the cabin following what was purported to have been a 7 a.m. audition.
As Frank’s widow, Gail Zappa, told me:
“The place was huge and vaultlike and cavernous. It was so dark. I think the oldest eucaluptus tree in Southern California overshadowed the whole property. There was no floor in the kitchen, just this sort of platform in one corner that had the stove sitting on it. It was infested constantly with bus groups of rock and roll bands looking for a place to crash—they would just show up at all hours of the day and night…There were no locks on any of the doors. It was insanity.”
The property has been for sale for some time—it includes a 1926-vintage cottage built around the trunk of a towering confier and three acres of woods, caves, splashing waterfalls and an atresian spring.
The Zappa cabin burned on Halloween night, 1981. Here’s about where it would have stood:
Built as a roadhouse complete with basement bowling alley, the cabin was later the home of cowboy and silent movie star Tom Mix, who supposedly buried his “Wonder Horse,” Tony, underneath the alley. By the time Gail Zappa rented the place in ‘68, it was serving as an all-purpose crash-pad-cum-performance-space for Carl Franzoni and his brother, who wrote the Fraternity of Man’s burnout classic “Don’t Bogart That Joint” downstairs.
Upstairs was an 80-foot-long living room, dominated by a fireplace of feudal proportions where the Franzonis staged rock and roll dance parties that prefigured by two years the club scene about to explode on the Sunset Strip.
While I was at 2401 I ran into some fellow canyonites who were having a party and playing a mix tape inspired by my book. Here they are on the deck of the aforementioned “Bird House”:
And here are some random shots from the property. It’s traced with trails set out in hand-carved stone. Art Weeks (in the blue shirt, above) was nice enough to send along his shapshot of the shroud-of-Turin-like fresco from a cave near the arch, below. Note the hangman’s noose, bottom.
It’s yours for $2,685,000 (reduced!) through Sotheby’s International Realty’s Nadio Villarreal.