“Yup, 2400 Fulton Street. This was the Airplane mansion. This was our office and at one point, we all lived here. It was quite a party pad. We had the Dead, Big Brother, Janice and anybody else in town would come over. We had a pool table in there and we had a recording studio in the basement,” Balin said.

Johnny Cash in front of his lakeside home that later burned down.

We’re not sure there’s a house so singularly identified with a band, The Band, and its iconic, genius collaborator, Bob Dylan, where an album was written and recorded and still celebrated for its dramatic and enduring success.

He doesn’t know how to work a sound board. He doesn’t read music or play any instruments, but Rick Rubin knows what makes a good song and great records. That’s why this producer is called a musical guru and his three-story, 1923 Spanish villa is considered one of the most deeply steeped venues in music history.

After starting Def Jam records with Russell Simmons, Rubin has continued to reinvent the music industry, marrying rap with metal and by bringing artists to record ground-breaking, career-shaping music in his mammoth studio: Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Jakob Dylan, Dixie Chicks, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z. While the guru now prefers to live on the beach at Malibu, his home continues to be a mecca for Grammy-making music.

This is the cradle of the Motown Sound. “Hitsville U.S.A.” — a former photographers’ studio — was Motown’s first headquarters which Motown founder Berry Gordy bought in 1959. What came next was a recording studio where a non-stop creative churn filled the airwaves with a sound that changed radio and the music industry with a stable of uber-talent.
Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross & The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, The Four Tops and The Temptations, who won the recording studio its belated first Grammy in 1972 for “Papa Was A Rolling Stone.

Unlike the homes where music history was made for all the right reasons, Kurt Cobain’s home in Seattle made history for all the wrong reasons. The Nirvana front man who brought grunge music from the rain-slicked Pacific Northwest to a hungry world audience took his life in the greenhouse over the garage of his Denny-Blaine neighborhood home.

While the Eagles have endured decades of miserable interpretations about what the title song of their all-time great recording meant, one element of the song and album reveals itself with some clarity: Since the cover of the album is a picture of the Beverly Hills Hotel, there’s no mistaking that famous landmark as a metaphor for the trappings of American excess, particularly the Los Angeles music scene of the ’70s.

The place is a who’s who in recording history, including the 2012 Grammy favorite Adele, whose song “Rolling in the Deep” was not only recorded at Shangri-La Ranch, but the music video was also filmed there.