The Log Cabin

Located at 2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The Log Cabin was home to the Zappa's from May to September 1968.

It was originally built as the Laurel Tavern in 1913 and had a 2,000+ square-foot formal dining room, guest rooms, and a bowling alley in the basement level. Gail Zappa described it as “huge and vault-like and cavernous". The Tavern had been turned into a home by the silent-era film star Tom Mix. It had beed extended with what was known as The Tree House by the architect Robert Byrd in the 1920s.

When we returned to California in 1968, we moved into a large log cabin, once owned by old-time cowboy star Tom Mix, at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Drive.

The living room was seventy-five by thirty feet, with a huge fireplace. Close to a dozen people, mostly employees, lived there. The rent was seven hundred dollars a month.

Cal Schenkel had his own little art department in one wing of the house. In the basement was a one-lane bowling alley and enough space for the band to rehearse. It had two walk-in safes -- like bank vaults -- and a subbasement which had probably been a wine cellar. It was rustic and decrepit; it really looked like an old-time log cabin, with rough-hewn wood, bristling with splinters. - -The Real Frank Zappa Book

The Log Cabin was destroyed in a fire around 1970.

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  The Log Cabin

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  Zappa at The Log Cabin

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  Captain Beefheart and Mick Jagger at The Log Cabin.

Pictures by Cal Schenkel.

"Frank Zappa's house in the canyon, which I visited several times, looked exactly like a troll's kingdom. Fuzzy haired women lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippie rock music. Never a druggie, Frank openly made fun of the very counter-culture he was helping to sustain." — Grace Slick, Somebody to Love? (1998 Autobiography ISBN 044652302X)