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Michael Walker, Laurel Canyon (Faber & Faber)

A breezy summer page-turner that recalls those halcyon days when L.A. was the epicenter of the music industry and the counterculture, with the famed “woodsy” tumbleweed-and-eucalyptus-strewn thoroughfare from Hollywood to the Valley as its focal point. A journalist for the N.Y. Times and L.A. Times, Walker doesn’t add much to the legend, focusing as he does on sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, charting the demise of the ’60s “peace and love and marijuana/LSD” in a torrent of cocaine-induced ’70s paranoia and the hedonistic nihilism of punk, disco and freebase.

Witnesses include usual suspects like hippie photographer Henry Diltz, resident groupie muse Pamela Des Barres, wacky entrepreneur Kim Fowley, one-time Turtle Mark Volman and latter-day band-aid Morgana Welch, all of whose anecdotes seem rather arbitrary, if colorful. Walker does manage to capture the era, but his explanations of its inevitable demise — a combination of Charles Manson, Altamont, Woodstock and, finally, the Wonderland Ave./John Holmes massacre — is rather by-the-numbers.

In the end, a handful of people got very rich and then very fucked-up, and many others didn’t survive to tell about it. This book is testament to the fascination that period still holds, even if it seems as exotic to today’s generation as the Roaring ’20s jazz age did to boomers back then.

Taking the Jesus Pill @King King (6555 Hollywood Blvd., every Wednesday through Aug. 2, except July 12)

Rock 'n' roll has always had quasi-religious overtones, especially the brand of southern-fried country/R&B/gospel popularized by the South’s favorite son, Elvis Presley. This multimedia “southern gothic rock opera,” combining found film clips, paintings, a rock band and a two-act play about lust, sin redemption and drinking, is the brainchild of Birmingham, AL-born musician Charlie Terrell, who released several albums in the ’90s on Warner Bros. and Pointblank/Virgin, and his wife, executive producer Polly Parsons, the only daughter of Gram Parsons, another southerner whose music combined a deep religious streak with roots-soaked country-blues and soul.

It’s a simple boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl to her crazed preacher father, boy-regains-girl only to discover she’s his sister, complete with snake-handling, fervent sermons that borrow from John Lennon’s “God,” impossibly sexy dancers and the requisite fire-and-brimstone. Terrell serves as the top-hatted, bearded Satanic figure in shades, coolly commenting on the action with his crack Mojo Monkeys Band, performing songs that define the major characters such as “Johnny 3:16” and the Tom Waits jungle boogie of “Chicken-Shit Tina.”

Article Author: Roy Trakin

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