Like an Adult Musical Summer Camp
It was basically like the best version of an adult musical summer camp that happened to last about a decade. The concentrated flurry of creativity and romantic entanglements that came out of Laurel Canyon has been compared to Paris in the 1920s, the Greenwich Village folk scene, and also the Haight-Ashbury scene during the Summer of Love.
Mama Cass Elliot reclines at home in Laurel Canyon, 1968. Source: amazon.co.uk
There were, indeed, other musicians that lived in the neighborhood at the time, like Love’s Arthur Lee, but there was a signature canyon sound: both folky and introspective. It was an intentional refuge from the darkness and chaos of the times and places around them.