Topanga Canyon — where After the Gold Rush was made

Topanga Canyon is a narrow canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains between the San Fernando Valley and the Pacific Coast Highway, lined with California oaks, old ranch properties, and the wooden houses of a community that has sustained itself as an artistic enclave since the 1950s. Neil Young moved to Topanga in the early 1970s and recorded After the Gold Rush — his third album, released in 1970, widely considered one of the greatest records in rock history — in a basement studio beneath his house there.

The basement studio at his Topanga house was primitive by design: low ceiling, concrete walls, a small mixing desk, and the musicians who would form the core of his early work crowded into a space that barely accommodated them. The album that emerged — "Tell Me Why," "After the Gold Rush," "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "Southern Man," "Don't Let It Bring You Down," "Birds" — is full of the particular quality of music made in a small room, the instruments pressing against each other, nothing wasted. Young has cited the limitations of the basement as a creative condition rather than a disadvantage.

Topanga today is an unincorporated community that has resisted the development pressure of surrounding Los Angeles geography with the stubborn insularity of a place that knows what it is. The canyon road, the creek, the horses in small paddocks visible from the highway — the character of the community is recognisably descended from the early 1970s landscape that produced After the Gold Rush. Young's specific house is a private property with no public access; the canyon itself is the landmark. The album it produced is the reason people visit.