Oil Slicks and Hot Licks
Rockin’ in the Rockies with Stephen Stills
The tortuous path to this portrait of Stephen Stills high up in the Colorado Rockies initially led downhill a year earlier and a thousand miles away.
Lookout Mountain Avenue — not really an avenue per se — is a steep and narrow lane that snakes up and down the west side of leafy Laurel Canyon, a rustic residential enclave in the bosom of the Hollywood Hills. Before there was Silicon Valley, this was Vinyl Valley. Looking back at the LA music scene of the late sixties and early seventies, it’s fanciful to think of this place as a haven for rock-n-roll bands the way we think about tech startups today. Managers were the CEOs. Record producers were the VCs. Bands frequently proffered a garage origin story, and a demo tape was the equivalent of a PowerPoint deck. The pitch to record companies went something like: We’re the Beach Boys of Country Folk.
My friend Donnie Dacus was a guitarist and singer I’d first heard rehearsing in a garage. He was eager to show me the Laurel Canyon house he’d just rented in 1974, five doors down from the Eagles. I was a rock photographer eager to show off my new Mercedes-Benz. Donnie had recently begun collaborating with Stills, co-writing and recording songs.
