Editor gets a book deal

Michael Walker, a former editor at the L.A. Times Magazine and at Los Angeles, has sold a book on the city's place in 1970s pop music. Lions in the Street: Laurel Canyon and the Golden Age of L.A. Rock, is billed as "a rollicking history of pop music in the 1970s when one funky California town was the center of the music industry - the home town of Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, the Mamas and the Papas, Alice Cooper, Carole King, Frank Zappa, Brian Wilson, Jimmy Webb, Joe Cocker, Crosby Stills and Nash, Jim Morrison, and several heads of music labels." One funky California town? Why do I think Walker didn't write that. Anyway, the publisher will be Faber/Farrar Straus. (Publishers Lunch)