Cass Elliot’s house blazed against the dark Laurel Canyon hills, every light on, every window cracked open to spill music, cigarette smoke, and laughter out into the warm California night. Cars lined the winding road below — battered convertibles beside polished Jaguars, motorcycles leaned carelessly against stone walls like their owners had forgotten they arrived on them at all.

Inside, the party moved with the loose, half-drunken rhythm of something that had been going on for hours already. The living room glowed gold beneath low hanging lamps and dripping candlewax. Ashtrays overflowed onto crowded coffee tables beside half-empty bottles of Chianti, tequila, and cheap beer sweating onto old wood. The entire house smelled like patchouli oil, tobacco smoke, red wine, and somebody’s clove cigarettes burning too sweet near the staircase.

Near the piano, David Crosby sat slouched sideways on the bench beside Stephen Stills, both of them lazily plunking through half-recognizable folk riffs while arguing over chords nobody else seemed qualified to challenge. Every so often the room erupted when Mick Jagger laughed loud enough to cut through the music from somewhere near the bar, one arm draped dramatically around the back of a velvet chair while he entertained a crowd hanging onto every word. Across the room, Joni Mitchell sat curled barefoot on the couch with a cigarette between her fingers listening with an expression that looked equal parts amused and exhausted by all of them.

And somehow, impossibly, America had ended up there too.

Only a year earlier, Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell, and Dan Peek had been rehearsing in cramped London basements — three sons of American Air Force servicemen building harmonies from folk-rock records and whatever homesickness sounded like when set to acoustic guitar. Then Warner Bros. found them. Then “A Horse With No Name,” something Dewey had written, hit American radio like heat rising off pavement. Suddenly they weren’t just another folk trio playing clubs overseas anymore.

Now reporters called them mysterious. Radio DJs called them the next California sound despite the fact they’d formed in England. Industry people suddenly remembered their names long enough to invite them into houses like this.

Dan had already disappeared into conversation somewhere near the kitchen. Dewey lingered out on the balcony with a cigarette and notebook balanced against his knee, half-watching the canyon lights below, half in conversation with Eric Clapton and some young women.