Crosby, Stills and Nash are said to have first sung together in Joni Mitchell's living room. The living room was in Laurel Canyon. This detail — if true, and it's repeated widely enough to have at least partial credibility — captures something essential about what the canyon was in the late 1960s: a place where the proximity of creative people to each other produced something that could not have emerged from deliberate planning. Folk and rock musicians lived within walking distance of each other on winding side roads above Hollywood, and what they made together changed American music.
The Tongva people inhabited the Laurel Canyon area for thousands of years before Spanish contact. A spring-fed stream ran year-round, providing the water that made the canyon habitable in a dry landscape. Spanish ranchers grazed sheep on the hillsides in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. American settlers came for water rights after California statehood in 1850.
The canyon's modern character began to take shape in 1907 when Laurel Canyon Boulevard was built, connecting the canyon to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. A real estate developer and an electrical engineer built a trackless trolley — essentially an Oldsmobile bus with its engine replaced by an electric motor — that began passenger service on September 11, 1910, as the first commercial trolley bus operation in the United States. It carried visitors to Lookout Mountain Inn at the summit. By the time Hollywood's film industry established itself in the 1910s, the canyon's remote location and proximity to studios made it an obvious retreat for people who wanted privacy: Clara Bow, Harry Houdini, Ramon Navarro, and Wallace Reid all lived here.
By the mid-1960s, Laurel Canyon had become something unprecedented: a neighborhood where a remarkable concentration of folk and rock musicians lived, collaborated, and argued about the direction of American music. Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas lived here, her house known as a gathering place for all-night sessions attended by musicians and film people. Joni Mitchell lived here; Graham Nash wrote "Our House" (1970) about her place and their relationship. Jim Morrison lived in the canyon during the Doors' peak years. Frank Zappa was here. So were Carole King, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt.
John Mayall recorded Blues from Laurel Canyon (1968) about his time here. John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas wrote "Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)" (1967) about the canyon's particular atmosphere. Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon (1970) drew directly from the neighborhood's characters and scenes. Rock photographer Henry Diltz documented the community; his photographs became album covers and visual records of a musical moment that seemed to concentrate itself, briefly and spectacularly, in these few canyon blocks.
By the late 1970s, Laurel Canyon's counterculture had curdled in the way countercultural enclaves sometimes do — drug distribution networks moving into the spaces where idealism had been. The Wonderland Gang, based at 8763 Wonderland Avenue (a street that was itself named for the canyon's association with fantasy), controlled the local drug trade.
On July 1, 1981, three members and one associate of the Wonderland Gang were beaten to death in what became known as the Wonderland murders or the "Four on the Floor murders." The killings occurred just down the street from the then-home of California Governor Jerry Brown. The address at 8763 Wonderland is said to have been occupied at an earlier time by Paul Revere & the Raiders — the musical history and the criminal history occupying the same physical space, separated only by time. The murders effectively marked the end of Laurel Canyon's counterculture era. The canyon today is a residential neighborhood, expensive and quieter, its music-scene past memorialized in coffee table books and documentaries.
Laurel Canyon runs north-south through the Hollywood Hills at approximately 34.12°N, 118.38°W, connecting Hollywood Boulevard to the south with Mulholland Drive at the crest and Studio City in the San Fernando Valley to the north. The canyon is visible as a narrow green corridor in the Hollywood Hills on west-east approaches to Burbank (KBUR, 7 miles N). Best viewed at 2,500–4,000 ft AGL.