In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon’s golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from “California Dreamin’” to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” to “It’s Too Late,” selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture.

In Laurel Canyon, journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boom’s leading musical lights–including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills & Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few-who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed. It was Brigadoon meets the Brill building, and the reverberations from the unprecedented music being made–and the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle it created –profoundly shaped the attitudes and expectations of an entire generation.

In new interviews with Graham Nash, the Byrds’ Chris Hillman, the Turtles’ Mark Volman, Gail Zappa, the groupie legend Pamela Des Barres and other insiders, Walker traces Laurel Canyon’s transformation from a counterculural paradise in the Sixties, when a song written on a redwooddeck could enter pop culture’s permanent collection within weeks, to the dark decadence of the Seventies, when fame, fortune, sex, cocaine, and,finally, sadistic murder, finally shook the flowers out of everyone’s hair.

Laurel Canyon is the story of how an indelible swath of popular culture was created by a handful of history’s most willful and talented young adults, and how a canyon in the middle of one of the world’s most unsparing urban landscapes played a part. And why, in the end, they made such beautiful music together.