Big fun at my talk the other night at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, the restored movie palace where, for good or ill, the “movie premiere” was invented.

No kleig lights for my gig but a nice crowd, plus the goofy atmospherics of the Egyptian’s hieroglypics (I think this one translates as “Go ahead, kill the screenwriter—I can do it with a look…”)

Books for sale courtesy of the nice people at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip…

Dynamic signage, abetted by iconographic Henry Diltz photos of canyon principals like Frank Zappa…

Henry—below, right, seen in this special NightVision ™ candid from the audience—joined me for the latter stages of the talk and lent the sheen of reality to my second-hand ramblings about What It All Meant, Henry having been a musician himself and an acquaintance of damned near everybody in the canyon back in the day.

All in all, a pleasant Saturday night in the summer, in the city. Thanks to Martin Lewis, Jane Ayer and everyone at American Cinematheque for making it possible.

Meanwhile, be sure to stop by the Egyptian for the remainder of this summer’s Mods & Rockers festival, including on Aug. 17 an ultra-rare screening of “Baby Snakes,” an early multimedia spectacular centered on a 1977 Frank Zappa concert in New York with one of his best road bands.

Frank’s widow, Gail Zappa—who is restoring the entire Zappa film archives—will make a rare apperance after the movie for a discussion.

Those of you who’ve visited the Mods & Rockers Festival at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood have no doubt noticed hanging in the lobby the collection of photos by Henry Diltz, Laurel Canyon’s court photographer back in the day who figures prominently in LAUREL CANYON both for his keen observations and amazing photos—such as this classic of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young rehearsing at Stephen Stills’s house for their historic performance at the Woodstock festival in 1969.

Henry will be joining me tonight in the latter stages of my talk at the Egyptian’s Steven Spielberg Theater to share his impressions of the canyon and generally lend the joint some class.

The talk will be from 6 to 7 p.m., followed by a booksigning, with copies of LAUREL CANYON available for purchase courtesy of Book Soup. See you there!

Just a reminder I’ll be giving a talk about Laurel Canyon (the place) and Laurel Canyon (the book) Saturday from 6 to 7 p.m. at The Egyptian Theater as part of the 2006 Mods & Rockers Film Festival. Afterwards I hope you’ll join me for a reception and booksigning.

And be sure to stick around for the festival’s bitchin’ double-feature, starting at 7:30: “The Girls on the Beach” (the Beach Boys sing “Little Honda”) and “Beach Party” from 1963, founding work in the beach movie canon and featuring the renowned thespians Annette Funicello (above, in case you were wondering), Frankie Avalon plus Dick Dale and the Del-Tones.

LAUREL CANYON and yers truly are featured tonight on KCET’s ‘Life and Times’ in an excellent segment by Saul Gonzalez—shot entirely on location in Laurel Canyon, by the way.

The show airs at 6:30 p.m., repeating at 1 a.m. The audio will be availabe on the show’s website tomorrow.

Seattle’s Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, Sept. 2-4 at the Seattle Center, has nailed down its final lineup, everybody from Blondie and Steve Miller to the New Pornographers and A Tribe Called Quest to the author of LAUREL CANYON and this bitchin’ website.

I’ll be appearing Sunday, Sept. 3 at the civilized rock ‘n roll hour of 8 p.m. with rock-crit legend Ben Fong-Torres, which theoretically leaves you time to absorb whatever edification we impart and still catch Kayne West’s 9:30 set on the main stage.

I was honored to be invited to appear at this year’s Mods & Rockers Film Festival, bending minds and tympania now through Aug. 31 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and the Aero Theater in Santa Monica.

I’ll be giving a talk about LAUREL CANYON and all that it implies in the Egyptian’s Steven Spielberg Theater on Saturday, Aug. 5, from 6 to 7 p.m., followed by reception-booksigning in the Egyptian’s hyroglyphics-strewn forecourt. The fine folks from Book Soup will be on hand, should the urge to purchase an autographed copy of LAUREL CANYON suddenly overwhelm you.

While you’re at it, stick around for that night’s double-bill: “The Girls on the Beach” (1965, featuring the Beach Boys and the Crickets, presumably sans Buddy Holly) and “Beach Party” (1963, with Annette Funicello and Dick Dale as a bongo player).

The lobby of the Egyptian will meanwhile be brightened by a special exhibit of photographs by Henry Diltz. As those of you who’ve read LAUREL CANYON know, Henry’s photos are featured extensively in the book as are his recollections of hanging out with all the canyon cognoscenti while shooting their album covers. See a preview of Henry’s work here.

Finally, do not miss one of the performances of Mods & Rockers founder Martin Lewis’s legendary “Great Exploitations!”—a one-man show recapitulating Martin’s 30-odd years in the record business in England, America and beyond. The next one is July 22, 6 p.m., in the Steven Spielberg Theater.

For those in L.A., there’ll be a blowout the afternoon of the Fourth of July on the plaza outside Pace with live music and the usual holiday refreshments and distractions.

I’ll be there from three to five, signing books at the Canyon Store, 2108 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, 323-654-8091.

See you there!

Just got back from my interview with Marc Maron, where we had a lively chat about drugs, Charles Manson, Frank Zappa’s cabin, drugs, David Crosby…you get the drift. We can be thankful Laurel Canyon inspires such uplifting topics.

Anyway, it was a good talk; the show airs in L.A. at 11 tonight on Air America’s affilate KTLK, 1150 A.M.

For those of you beyond the reach of Southern California, you can stream the show live anywere at all at:

http://www.ktlk.com/pages/streaming.html

For those reading this now, log off the damned Web, fire up your TV and watch the segment about LAUREL CANYON (the book) and Laurel Canyon (the place), airing now on KCET-LA’s “Life and Times” show.

Fair warning that LAUREL CANYON and I will be featured tonight in a segment about the canyon’s rock and roll legacy on KCET’s “Life & Times,” at 6:30 p.m. PST, hosted by Saul Gonzalez.

Later, I’ll be a guest on Air America’s “The Marc Maron Show,” airing at 10 p.m. PST on KTLK A.M. 1150.

Hope you can tune in to one or both. It’s your choice…

I once worked for a Midwestern concert promoter who booked acts like Aerosmith before his indictment and so permanently associate “tour” with “Jack-and-Stoli backstage bar & buffet” and “vacant-eyed young women in halter tops.”

Neither was in evidence at my two-day whirlwind through the Bay Area promoting LAUREL CANYON, at least at the bookstores; there were instead 7:30 a.m. wakeup calls for the 8 a.m. drive-time interviews and plenty of bottled water (which come to think of it is what a lot of rock tours are like today).

There were also the gracious and stalwart independent bookstore owners who doll up their stores and put your book and mug shot in the window and stay open late in the wan hope of selling a few extra copies while providing their customers and the community with a way to interact with the culture at large. Or something. Whatever it is, these guys deserve your business, so give it to them.

They also go out of their way to make “authors” such as myself feel like bigshots; at The BookSmith in the Haight, they give you a packet of author “trading cards” as a lovely parting gift:

The guys at the Depot Bookstore and Cafe in Mill Valley pull down the promotional poster for your gig and present it to you afterward, rolled up, like a diploma:

But most impressive are the readers who foresake drinks and dinner and hie themselves into neighborhoods where there is never enough parking at 7 p.m. to listen to you read badly from your book then stumble through pretentious, tortured responses to questions like “Why did you write the book?” when “I dunno, I needed the money” is the truth. Then they hang around afterward, buy your book, let you sign it, and hang around some more.

It’s an uplifting experience, trust me; especially if you’ve been shoveling coal into the publishing furnace for a decade or so at magazines and newspapers as a semianonymous drone.

So thanks again to everybody who participated in my tour, and I’ll see you on the road again soon.

Back from my Bay Area tour for LAUREL CANYON and it was, to coin a phrase, a blast.

Blast furnace, maybe, given the unusual heat in SF proper, but, what the hey, it’s only rock and roll. And it was the summer solstice.

Met many fine people in the Haight and in Mill Valley at my readings; at the latter the ambient temps were around 95 F at 7 p.m. sans air conditioning but everybody refused to yield and we had a great time.

Sorry for the lack of posts these past few days, but broadband was a scarce commodity.

Anyway, I’m back at the atelier and will be drilling out new info you can use and abuse shortly.

Thanks in the meantime for hanging out at LAURELCANYONTHEBOOK.COM…

Just a reminder that I’ll be reading from LAUREL CANYON and signing books at San Francisco’s The Booksmith, this Tuesday, June 20 at 7 p.m. and at the Depot Bookstore and Cafe in Mill Valley on Wednesday, June 21, at 7 p.m.

See you there!

Andrew Dunn and Chris Wilson, two very nice guys from the BBC—that’s Andrew on the left; Chris to the right fixating on the video monitor—visited the atelier a couple days ago to interview me for a documentary they’re producing about the L.A. music scene in the ’60s and ’70s. A big part of the scene, of course, was Laurel Canyon, and so it fell to me to reflect on the happenings therein.

Chris asked excellent questions; hopefully they’ll be able to stitch something coherent together from my ramblings. Besides which we had to keep stopping because a police helicopter decided to plant itself in a shallow orbit over Lookout Mountain for what seemed like a minor eternity—the Man, watchful as ever.

Anyway, their as-yet untitled documentary will air this fall in the U.K; it’ll make its way to the States at some point, they assure me.

It’s an important piece of work, historically and culturally, and these guys are doing it right.

OK, I seem to be on a jag here with these Headlines, Headlines, but…

Wanted to give notice that my live interview about LAUREL CANYON with KWMR in Marin County is coming up at 7 p.m., PST.

Locals can hear the broadcast on 90.5 FM Point Reyes and 89.3 FM Bolinas.

KWMR will stream the program live to outlanders in L.A. and beyond over the mighty World Wide Web at http://www.kwmr.org.

Nice review of LAUREL CANYON on Americana UK.

Meanwhile…

I’ll be appearing tomorrow night as the fog rolls into Marin County on KWMR-FM/Pacifica radio’s fetchingly alliterative “The Roots and Routes of Rock n’ Roll” with host Jeff Morrison.

Gather ’round at 7 p.m. on 90.5 FM.

An early warning that I’ll be evacuating the canyon and parachuting into the Bay Area for some readings and a round of media whoredom next week.

First up, Tuesday, June 20 at 7 p.m., a reading and book-signing at The Booksmith, the Haight’s esteemed indie bookstore . . .

Next, Wednesday, June 21 at 7 p.m., I’ll be at the uber-charming Depot Bookstore & Cafe in Mill Valley, doing an encore read ‘n sign . . .

At both events, we can get into the whole L.A./Laurel Canyon vs. S.F./Haight-Ashbury mashup, in re: which city was “more influential” as a Sixties folk-and-rock-and-roll nexus; did John Phillips and Lou Adler “commercialize” and therefore ruin the Monterey Pop Festival?; and the inevitable Who Really Invented Folk Rock, the Beau Brummels or the Byrds? Tons of fun.

I have a soft spot for the Bay Area in that San Francisco was the first bonafide big city I visited after graduating from callow youthdom into clueless early adulthood. A bunch of my musician pals from college moved West which gave me an incentive to save my dishwashing money and score an Apex fare to California from time to time to hang out with them as they slid into insolvency.

Years later, somewhat less clueless and sliding toward insolvency myself, I was dispatched to Mill Valley by the L.A. Times to write my impressions about the town. Here was the lede from my story:

“My indelible memory of Mill Valley . . . is of a blazing blue Monday near the end of the disco era, when a friend took me on his rounds arm-twisting club owners to book his act. The Bay Area that day glistened with flawless postcard imagery warranted to render a 22-year-old Midwestern rube such as myself speechless. As we motored past Mill Valley’s timbered city hall, I beheld, at high noon on the front lawn, a ringer for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi massaging the back of a stunning, shirtless young woman with a nut-brown tan. The effect of such a tableau on a barely post-collegiate hayseed cannot be overstated. Man, I remember thinking but (I hope) not actually saying, this is GREAT . . . .”

Native Californians vastly underestimate the primacy that the very idea of California, as defined in San Francisco, Mill Valley, Tiburon, Sausalito, and Laurel and Topanga canyons in the late ’60s and early ’70s, had and for all I know continues to have on outlanders.

John Phillips met Michelle Gilliam, his second of four wives, while on tour in California with a faltering folk outfit that would later become the Mamas and the Papas. The memory inspired him to write, during a dismal winter in New York, the shimmering ’60s anthem “California Dreamin’”. That song, and the golden imagery from the other, untold musicians writing about California at the time, no doubt subconsciously nudged myself and thousands more out of our complacent landlocked hideaways and into the world.

If you missed last weekend’s blowout at the Canyon Store, we’re going to do it again tomorrow, Saturday, starting at 1 p.m. Stop by if you’re in the ‘hood or visiting L.A.; it’s a five-minute drive—or hitchhike, if you’re feeling retro—from the Sunset Strip. Canyon Country Store, 2891 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Los Angeles, 323-654-8091.

Last weekend’s bash was a truly great afternoon, as I got to meet so many canyonites past, present and aspirant, including one couple who’d bought their house on Lookout Mountain in the late Forties and lived next door to the Mamas and the Papas in the mid-Sixties. Somehow, they survived the experience with their sense of humor intact.

Yet another blowout for LAUREL CANYON, this time on the terraces of the Canyon Country Store and downstairs at Pace yesterday.

Canyonites and Angelenos off all ages jammed the joint for an afternoon of jawboning, wine-tasting and rocking out to Canyon Store fixture Brad’s mighty band, below.

Thanks to Sally Stevens for the picture above of canyon habituees in their habitat, and to the Canyon Store and Pace for their hospitality and to everyone for coming around!

My reading last night at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip was…well, when the stalwart Book Soup staffers—who have, sorry, Brooklyn Heights, Tribeca, Soho and SoMa, really seen it all—finally shut the doors and let out a figurative holy shit!, it was clear we’d achieved a sliver of what my book is all about.

First off, we had an SRO crowd. I’d laid in a case of Paso Robles chardonnay in emulation of Andy Prieboy’s “Jazz Crowd” (”Is there any more white wine?/How the fuck should we know?…”) The far-more-attuned-to-the-zeitgeist Book Soup staff supplied Texas fifths of Jack and Smirnoff. (All that was lacking for a true R&R experience were some Slim Jims and a few grams of coke.) Final tally: before I’d even started reading the Jack was toast (though the bottle was pretty well gone at the start of the night); when it was all over, the crowd had sucked down, max, maybe four bottles of chardonnay. Next time, I’m stocking the bar with shooters of Jagermeister.

All of which might make my reading—my first, by the way—sound like backstage at a Blue Oyster Cult concert. But it was actually very pleasant. Those who could sit, did. During the Q and A, people politely raised their hands.

On the other hand, there was this dude who’d wandered in off the Strip dressed and coiffed precisely as Jimi Hendrix, circa 1967. He flashed the peace sign at me repeatedly as I read and generally unnerved the standees in the rear. He eventually weaved forward during the Q and A, loudly proclaimed my unmitigated greatness—for which I sincerely thanked him—and generally kept the proceedings on edge.

Nevertheless, he clearly had a supportive attitude toward our collective endeavor. Plus, he kept flashing that peace sign, which was nice to see in this age of anything but. Bottom line? I say: Dude, thanks for stopping by.

In the audience were fellow canyonites Joe, David, Stuart, Peter, and Mary of Almor, purveyor of the aforementioned chardonnay; also LAUREL CANYON interviewees Michael James Jackson and Jim Roup; the righteous authors Hilary de Vries, Lindsay Graves, Steve Pond and David Rensin; plus Jon Regardie of L.A.’s Downtown News, Emmy-winning casting director Susan Bluestein and singer-songwriter Alex Davis.

A gent in a Slash/T-Rex tophat representing L.A. record producer-legend Kim Fowley was in attendance; and rounding out an already diverse audience was none other than O’Dean, Motley Crue’s singer before Vince Neil.

As you can imagine it was quite an evening—thanks again to Book Soup for precision coordination and for not freaking out.

By Libby Molyneaux
Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Who is plastering those posters for Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock & Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood on Laurel Canyon Boulevard? Could it be author Michael Walker, who lives in the area? Walker’s book aims to tell the definitive story of all those bands living in all those cutesy, woody houses in the ’60s — the Byrds; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Yanni (okay, Yanni came later, but he did live up the street from me in Laurel Canyon). Walker signs and reads — with lots of debauched drug tales, we hope. Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood; Thurs., May 18, 7 p.m.; free. (310) 659-3110.