At the end of ’64, early ’65, the Byrds took their first money and a lot of them moved up to Laurel Canyon. Then everybody else in that folk rock community decided they’d move up there too, because you could smoke dope and get laid and be an asshole with your Porsche convertible out of the prying eyes of the Man.” —Kim Fowley.

Ah, yes…leave it to ol’ teen record mogul Frankenstein-Svengali Kim Fowley to contribute the best lines to this book about the first folk-rock star community.

At first I wasn’t to crazy about the writing here by Michael Walker, partly because a lot of it has already been covered to death (fer Chrissakes, do we need to be told about the Manson slayings again?), but as an overview of a specific scene, it’s pretty well done. It ain’t no Please Kill Me or a We Got the Neutron Bomb, but I guess that’s asking a little too much. The fake blacklight cover illustration is pretty brilliant, there’s cool stuff on the Turtles and any book that has Kim Fowley in it is required reading for everyone.

It begins with the Byrds (even though the Beau Brummels predate their Laurel Canyon residence by a year, but who’s counting?). After the formation of the odious Crosby, Stills and Nash, the book dives head first into the cocaine-fueled ’70s and it’s all downhill from there.

There are some very eye-opening bits to be dug up here if you just stick with it. Like Zappa’s “Log Cabin” pond, which was supposedly built over an underground passageway to Houdini’s house on the other side of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Or how the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” really zapped the Byrds into being. And the realization that Woodstock could’ve easily degenerated into the destruction Altamont would soon witness, but for some inexplicable reason didn’t.

The one thing this book drives home is how cocaine controlled and inevitably destroyed the innocent dreams of a thriving creative era. Pretty fucking tragic…and good for an occasional laugh…the hideous hippie clown prince casualty David Crosby, anyone?

In closing, if you are a fan of the coke-snorting SoCal bong-hitters of the late ’60s and early ’70s, you could do a lot worse than this little book.