FST revisits the “Music of Laurel Canyon” era with the band Buffalo Rome

In the mid-1960s, the Hollywood neighborhood of Laurel Canyon became the unexpected birthplace of a distinctive sound developed by a wide range of singers and groups who created an enduring array of hit songs.

Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, the Mamas and the Papas, Jackson Browne and many others wrote and recorded songs with personal lyrics about everything from relationships to the Vietnam War.

These artists’ songs are at the heart of the new cabaret show “The Music of Laurel Canyon,” which opens June 18 at Florida Studio Theater’s Court Cabaret. This is the second production in the theater’s three-show summer cabaret series.

FST revisits the “Music of Laurel Canyon” era with the band Buffalo Rome

It features the band Buffalo Rome, who have been performing their own music and covering some of these folk, pop and rock hits for almost 20 years.

The group’s founder, singer-songwriter Michael Visconti, said he was contacted by a friend at the Casa Manana Theater in Fort Worth, Texas, about creating cabaret shows, and together they had the idea of Laurel Canyon. The show opened in 2022 and will return to Casa Manana next May.

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Visconti shares the stage with longtime band member Mark Schaffel and Kevin Douglas, who played with the band in Fort Worth. (Douglas will join the Sarasota production about halfway through its run. For the first few weeks, Broadway veteran Miles Aubrey will replace him.)

Change of direction for a long-standing group

Nashville-based Buffalo Rome became known for its tight three-part harmonies, which Visconti said fit well with the sound of Laurel Canyon’s music.

“Our nickname became Crosby, Stills and Nashville,” Visconti said. “As a singer-songwriter you always want to create your own original stuff and it felt like a step backwards to do covers, but this cabaret format gives us the opportunity to tell stories, the framework of background of the songs, the context behind them. . It’s almost like a VH-1 “Behind the Music.” And people seem to respond to it.

The group performs songs such as “Turn, Turn, Turn”, “California Dreamin'”, “Monday, Monday”, “Take it Easy”, “Heart of Gold”, “Desperado”, “Take it to the Limit” and “Love the one you’re with.”

These are songs that emerged in an era of socially conscious young people. “It was a time of protests against the Vietnam War, of youth rebellion, of counterculture,” Schaffel said.

Even though times change, the songs retain their relevance and power.

“The first song we do, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn,’ has a line in it that says, ‘There’s a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.’ It resonates as much today as it did then,” Aubry said. “Even though we consider it retro, it’s still very current. Relationships don’t change. We are still faced with war and peace.

And it’s not a stretch to compare one of Taylor Swift’s breakup songs to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Stephen Stills’ song about his breakup with singer Judy Collins.

So why did Laurel Canyon become this epicenter?

“It was in Los Angeles, above the Sunset Strip, where the Troubadour was, where a lot of these bands hung out,” Visconti said. “There were cottages there where you could live very cheaply and people would sort of congregate. It’s like the West Bank of Paris, a kind of Renaissance.”

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