An Alaska storm slammed into Southern California this morning, packing steady rains, knotting traffic and making for a dreadful morning commute. The rains are not expected to diminish until Wednesday, forecasters said.

... Despite the rain, Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills was reopened after being closed over the weekend when a rain-drenched hillside began to slide.

Crews installed concrete barriers Sunday to protect against mud and debris flows that could be brought on by the rain.

Bartling said other areas of concern would include the areas of last year's Topanga, Foothill and Harvard fires. Because the burn areas lack ground cover, they are more prone to breaking up and becoming mudslides when soaked.

Sam Padilla, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said all stations near the burn areas are equipped with sandbags if residents need them.

Laurel Canyon gained its greatest fame in the 1960s as a countercultural enclave. When Joni Mitchell sang about "the ladies of the canyon," she was referring to Laurel Canyon. Jim Morrison lived behind the 1919 Canyon Country Store, whose Sister Mary Michael-style painted sign indicates that the area hasn't completely lost its Haight-on-the-Hill ways.

… During Hollywood's glory years, many notables, including Orson Welles and Errol Flynn, lived in the canyon. Urban legend has it that another former resident, Harry Houdini, still haunts the remains of his estate, visible on the right just before Lookout Mountain as you drive north.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, a string of successful rock bands emerged out of Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood of Los Angeles tucked away in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard. From the success of bands like the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, and singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb, Walker proposes Laurel Canyon as rock's answer to Jazz Age Paris. It's a plausible concept, but one he stumbles to elaborate past the length of a magazine feature. The journalist, who lives in Laurel Canyon, delivers strong material on some of the musicians he cites, particularly in early chapters about Crosby, Stills & Nash and Frank Zappa, but offers little about other equally significant acts. Instead, he pads the story with lengthy sections on groupies and the music scene in other parts of the city, the Altamont concert (which was hundreds of miles away) and a digression on the history of cocaine. Furthermore, his enthusiasm for the Laurel Canyon legend leads to shaky critical pronouncements. If "the folk stars of the early 1960s were the first rock stars," for example, then what was Elvis?