WOEBOT

Scholarship goes out the window I'm afraid now (cue horror-film hysterical laughter), we've entered the realm of divine conjecture. My argument is that all of the below records in one way or another were a reaction to the hi-falutin, white-bred, folk'n'country vibes of the Laurel Canyon sound of the 1970s.

Black Music

Bobby was always hanging out in LA. He appeared un-named on Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin On", in fact Sly's "Stand" would be amongst this line-up, hip as Stone was to the white groups of the day being a radio DJ'n'all, but "There's a Riot Going On" was about turning away from his carefully-engineered cross-over appeal. Womack on the other hand was probably up for having cross-over hits, and in the 1980s he eventually got them. I'm sure it's for quite uncynical reasons that there's a hefty dose of country to this lovely record, after all right there were other black singers like Stoney Edwards working within country (see Peter Guralnick's "Lost Highway").

There's something about the folky mellifluousness of singer-songwriter Withers's work that marks it as Canyon-esque to me. That and the temper of his artistic ambition, and this especially on +Justments: arty, conscious and self-consciously individual. Added to which, of course, he worked out of LA.

David Axelrod's LSD-inspired suites based around William Blake's writings are maybe more correctly seen as the natural extension of the late sixities psychedelic impulse as perfectly embodied in the LA music of "Eight Miles High" and "Smile". His Electric Prunes record "Release of an Oath" must have hipped him to the potential of the rock cross-over. Perhaps it's fairer to say that these classic records are simply "in-tune" with Laurel Canyon. Lush and mellow.

Nina covers Randy Newman's "Baltimore" on this Creed Taylor production, surely a pretty remarkably strange choice for a cover? The weirdness is further compounded by her choice of clipped reggae styings in which to render it. Such I guess was the magnetic power emanating from the insular Canyon folk. It's a standard reality effect isn't it? Ignore other people and they're bound to concentrate on you. I reckon the end of Laurel Canyon's near-autistic ignorance of outside music comes symbolically with Joni's "Mingus" LP (though Kirk Degiorgio tells me Joni and David Crosby appeared on a Paul Horn LP five years earlier...) I always think the absurd cod reggae and funk on Led Zepellin's "Houses of the Holy" is the equivalent moment, it's as though the artists somehow lose their nerve.

The Meter's 'Cabbage Alley"(1972) isn't one of their greatest records but was the fruit of their signing to the peerless Reprise, the greatest LA records of the era couched in the "Burbank" sound. It sports a pretty unlikey Neil Young cover "Birds" that marks it out as trying to cash-in in. Eventually Warners got their own black music division, this according to Hoskyns was set up in 1975 who hired Blue Thumb's Bob Krasnow to run it.

"Stillness" is a self-consciously mellow, rural record, check out the cover! It also features a version of Buffalo Springfield's "For What it's worth".

Charles Wright, whose widow once emailed me at WOEBOT, had the same sort of mellowly progressive thing going that Bill Withers did on +Justments. Again on Warners. Before we leave this section I'd like to remark that you just can't imagine a Hip-Hop act today openly being influenced by contemporary Rock music can you? (cue about a thousand dissenting emails) On the other hand Urban music has such a hold over the music scene that even Indie Ghetto scenesters like The Arctic Monkeys claim Kanye West as an inspiration (I believe Mark K-punk had a well-founded spiel about this a while back)

Odyshape

Proto New-waver Zevon never quite fitted the mould. Too edgy. I suspect his life would have been simpler if he'd done mellow properly like his mentor Jackson Browne. There must have been lots of records that didn't quite make it to the attention of David Geffen, by people a pehaps a little too freaky, Linda Perhacs springs to mind, when it would have suited them fine to be superstars like The Eagles.

Zappa obviously relished not fitting the mould and I'm afraid that's one of the reasons why I will always eventually despise him. The idea in life isn't to deliberately do the opposite of what other people do, that just preserves the status quo doesn't it? The idea is do your own thing. The root of Zappa's anti- stance could be traced back to "We're only in it for the money", one of the most wretched records ever. I reckon if all the other people in Laurel Canyon where he lived were making long-form, groovy, jazz-rock then Zappa would have been making easy-listening, folky, confessional records. That said "Hot Rats" is often very excellent.

McGarrigle sisters. One of these ladies is Rufus Wainwright's mum. I love this record but it's not dour enough to be a Laurel Canyon female confessional, the band swings to hard and (horrible to say) the girls are too buck teethed to be Carly Si-men.

Steely Dan are practically the exception to the rule when it comes to LA rock absorbing the music around it. There's apparently a Horace Silver riff on "Rikki" and the record features crack Jazz-funk session musicians Wilton Felder, Jerome Richardson and Chuck Rainey (even if as Kirk DeG points out they feature "on almost every rock/pop album recorded in LA in that period anyway") There's an excellent book about the History of Los Angeles's music which takes in everything from its hot 1940s Jazz scene to The Germs and Fear, but I'm buggered if I can remember what it's called.

Freaks

Bosh. Well if he was perhaps afraid to really cut loose himself at least Zappa knew what truly distinctive music sounded like. There three records form some kind of unholy triumvirate and you could write a book on each of them. My conjecture is that all of these artists hammed it up a bit to distinguish themselves from the popular kids. Beefheart had a troubled relationship with commercial music didn't he, quite often pandering to the market in a really brazen way, and I don't think one can subtract that from the man? Buckley I reckon fell in with the freaks because he thought he'd stretch his career out a bit (holds up hands) not that I'm denying the music ya get me. As for Wild Man Fischer, and this is from 1968 while the other two are from 1970, well maybe he was nuts actually.....

Thousands of miles away unbeknownst to them...

Brazil's Novos Baianos were desperate to be hanging out in a little commune in Topanga I reckon.

Ijahman Levy? Devout Rastafarian music? Close your eyes and it's yummy AM soft-rock.

Perhaps Klaus and the boys were deliberately trying to make some kind of nihilistic version of the Cali sound with "Flowers must Die" ? On the other hand they may have just been unable to muster the sunshine vibes.

Whales

Not all the casualties of 1960s counter-culture ended up in the music business. Some ran ice cream parlours, some became the first wave of organic farmers and some became marine biologists. These two records are in the very image of the Laurel Canyon sound. Think about it. As bloated as Mama Cass or pudgy David Crosby, as larger than life as Joni and Neil, moaning their own songs of loneliness into the deepest blue, hanging in communes, cruising up and down the Big Sur coastline; these whales even had their own record deal for two whole elpees.

Limeys

If California represents the geographical conclusion of the American dream of the west, then the Moon must be the theoretical extension of the frontier myth. By using Daniel Lanois's steel guitar playing on Apollo, resulting in tracks which resemble nothing so much as David Crosby's "Laughing", Eno was making that thought explicit. I always remember seeing a documentary with one astronaut taking his copy of CSN's "Wooden Ships" into orbit and playing it as they circled the earth.

Going to California.