Hyacinth House — Robby Krieger's Home, Benedict Canyon

"Hyacinth House" — the penultimate track on the Doors' L.A. Woman album (1971) — refers specifically to Robby Krieger's home in Benedict Canyon, the leafy, winding canyon neighbourhood north of Beverly Hills. Morrison wrote the song there, and despite the track's relatively light, jazzy feel compared to the rest of the album, his paranoia surfaces in the lyrics: "I think that somebody's near / I'm sure that someone is following me" and "I need someone, yeah, who doesn't need me." The domestic calm of a bandmate's canyon house provides the setting for Morrison's most naked admission of vulnerability on the record.

Benedict Canyon in the late 1960s was a preferred address for musicians and film people who wanted the prestige of proximity to Hollywood without the intensity of being directly on it. The Manson murders took place nearby at Cielo Drive — a fact the article's author notes gives "Motel, money, murder, madness" in the title track additional weight. The canyon's winding roads and the sense of dark, close vegetation at night gave the neighbourhood a slightly sinister atmosphere that suited Morrison's late-period anxieties.

Krieger's Benedict Canyon house is a private residence. "Hyacinth House" is not among the Doors' most celebrated songs but it is among their most autobiographically specific — a rare moment of Morrison addressing his bandmate's domestic space directly, and in doing so revealing something about the gap between Krieger's relatively settled life and his own increasingly unmoored existence. It was one of the last songs he wrote in Los Angeles before leaving for Paris in March 1971.