Monday morning. Time to watch a video of the Lizard King tearing through an absolutely live version of “Light My Fire” courtesy of the elves at YouTube.

Given the decent lighting, elaborate staging (doors, get it? I knew you would) and fancy dissolves and closeups, this would appear to be the band’s infamous perf on the Ed Sullivan show, wherein Jimbo promised a Sullivan lackey that he wouldn’t utter the “higher” lyric but went right ahead and sang it anyway, thereby getting the band banned from future Sullivan appearances, blah blah blah.

It’s worth nothing that even in a sterile TV-studio environ, Morrison could still scare the shit out of everybody—check out his I-forgot-to-take-my-meds psychotic howl at the end of the first chorus; the V.U. meters in the control room must have gone right off the charts. You can almost picture some IATSE geezer rip off his headset and bleat, What’s with this fucking kid?

Great song, great performance. Note that nothing about Morrison’s schtick—from the leathers to the leers—seems at all dated. Take heed, charisma-deficient lead singers of the 21st century.

It’s often assumed pop culture was moving too fast in the mid-’60s for the “straight” world to make sense of happening trends.

Herewith, evidence that mid-’60s prime-time network TV could, wittingly or not, tap the coolest band on the Sunset Strip.

This video snippet from a 1967 episode of the P.I. show “Mannix” features the Buffalo Springfield playing a pretty hot, definitely live version of “Bluebird” in a Whisky-like club called the Lost Dimension while Joe Mannix spars with a Jann Wenner-esque underground-press editor (played by Tom Skerritt!) whom he suspects, correctly, of murder.

Later, as the boys attack a bluesy version of “For What It’s Worth,” Mannix returns to the club and brings the hammer down on the scuzbag editor.

Paranoia strikes deep!

I’ve been flying a lot this summer on behalf of LAUREL CANYON and so proffer some totally off-topic airplane lore because it’s Monday and I feel like it.
For sheer aviation geekdom, it’s hard to beat the cell phone parking lot at LAX. Although other airports have similar facilities, this strikes me as an only-in-L.A. sort of innovation, combining as it does the primacy of wireless communication with the local fetish for green-room-like holding pens for any and all endeavors.

The way it works is: rather than clog Arrivals you pull into a dedicated parking lot on the north side of the LAX complex and wait for your peeps to call when they’re curbside.

The beauty is that said parking lot is located directly beneath the flight path to Runway 24R, so that while you wait gigantic, screaming Boeings and Airbuses (above) drift down to within 100 or so feet of you and your Toyota Pious Prius. Things get downright dramatic during Santa Anas when massive A340s and 777s careen and yaw and scare the shit out of everybody as the autopilot fights to stay on the glideslope.

Plus you can re-create the scene in Easy Rider where Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conclude their coke deal with Phil Spector while seated in a Rolls as a succession of 707s screams just overhead. For all I know it’s the same parking lot.

What the hell, while we’re at it, check out these airplanes-gone-wild videos from around the world:

Awesome video of a Korean Airlines 747 landing at Hong Kong’s now-closed Kai Tak Airport.

Kai Tak was notorious for its harebrained final approach to Runway 13, which consisted of flying toward a checkerboard painted on a mountainside followed by a 47-degree right turn which left almost no time to line up properly with the runway. Consequently, Kai Tak hosted some of the most breathtaking, half-assed landings ever recorded on video.

And plenty of them were, as the rooftop of a nearby parking garage played daily to an overflow crowd of camcorder-wielding plane freaks exulting at each crabbed landing and near disaster.

This near crash of an Alitalia MD-11 was typical:

It’s worth noting that the MD-11, manufactured in the old Douglas facility in Long Beach where the DC-8 was born and the Boeing 717 is winding down production, had (and continues to have, though almost all are now in freighter service) a tendency for the nose to “pitch up” on landings.

Also, hard landings such as this one have resulted in the MD-11’s landing gear failing and the plane flipping over on its back. Judging from the flex of the wings and the white smoke when the wheels hit—not to mention that the airplane’s right main gear is very nearly off the runway—the passengers and crew dodged a bullet.

Crosswind landings can be dodgy, as is made clear by this strangely beautiful footage of Boeing testing its 777 and 747SP aircraft in extreme crosswind conditions on an airstrip in Brazil.

Cue up “They Call the Wind Maria” for the compleat experience . . .

LAUREL CANYON and its telegenics-challenged author are featured today on TurnHere, a new travel website that commissions short films on neighborhoods shot by professional filmmakers.

It’s a refreshing approach to learning about a city from the streets up as seen from the perspective of local artists and writers instead of travel junketeers parachuting in for a few clueless days of expense-account slumming.

L.A. filmmaker and writer Robert Sobul shot and produced the Laurel Canyon film and did a heroic job editing down the two or so hours that we shambled all over the canyon.

We’re not much for nostalgia here at the canyon atelier–the present has become so relentlessly grim that we prefer the vagaries of tomorrowland to treacly reminiscing. Still, it’s hard to resist a muddy 1965-vintage kinescope of the Byrds slogging through “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” on Shindig! courtesy of the elves at YouTube. (N.B., Democratic National Committee: you’ve found your 2008 Presidential election theme song.)

Shindig! was a rock-and-roll variety show launched six months after the Beatles‘ appearances on Ed Sullivan left the TV industry flat-footed. The show was a transparent play for the Youth Market, but it was actually pretty cool; the house band, the Shindogs, featured Tulsa-refugee and sessions ace Leon Russell, and all the big British invasion bands played, as did the Byrds. John Hartmann, at the time an agent at William Morris who would later manage Crosby, Stills & Nash, told me: “Shindig! was the MTV of its day, and I owned Shindig! I signed many artists because I could guarantee Shindig!”

Try to figure out who Roger McGuinn and David Crosby are scoping, since the reaction shots of screaming girls appear to culled from an entirely different performance.