November 30, 2014 |
It’s the strangest thing: when I think about music from LA, I don’t think about sunshine or Hollywood glamour or cocaine cowboys telling the world to take it easy. You certainly can find plenty of LA music that reflects those things, from the guitars on old Byrds singles that somehow sound the way sunlight bouncing off the surface of a swimming pool looks, to the lazy g-funk of 2Pac’s California Love to the late 1970s soft rock so mellow and redolent of the moneyed good life that, years later, a comedian called JD Ryznar mockingly dubbed it yacht rock, and the name stuck: The Doobie Brothers or Loggins & Messina or Toto.
But the LA music I really love is the other kind, the kind that makes me think of darkness, that kind that suggests something sinister is lurking behind the sunny, glamorous facade, the kind that seems infected by the overwhelming weirdness of the city. I like the LA of Lana Del Rey rather than Katy Perry’s California Gurls, of Neil Young’s LA – the “uptight, city in the smog while the ground cracks under you” – rather than the Eagles’ Peaceful Easy Feeling. I like the way the biggest soft-rock album of them all, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, chafes uneasily at its glossy production with its lyrical bitterness. Even in the glossily perfect sound world it creates, things have gone terribly awry.
I like this stuff because that’s the way LA makes me feel whenever I’m there: simultaneously dazzled and slightly uneasy, beset by the creeping, ineffable sense that something’s not quite right. For years, I thought it was just me who felt like that, compounded by the fact that whenever I’ve visited, I’ve been either (a) hysterical with jet lag, or (b) hysterical with jet lag and drunk. Your view of a city is bound to be coloured if your entire time there is spent snapping awake at 3am, conducting interviews in such an advanced state of exhaustion that you feel like your San Pellegrino might have been spiked with a powerful hallucinogen by persons unknown, and falling asleep during the appetizer at dinner. But no, LA seems to make other people feel that way, too, even its permanent residents. You don’t have to dig too deep to build up a portfolio of music from the city that suggests that LA might be to rock and pop what Scandinavia is to TV crime dramas.
The city’s big role in the development of hip-hop was to make it bleaker and meaner than before: gangster rap may have its roots on the east coast, but it came of age in late-1980s LA, the home of Ice-T and NWA, rappers prepared to make records more brutal and visceral and amoral than anyone had previously dared, a trick pulled off again to spectacular effect nearly three decades later by LA’s Odd Future. I can still remember the genuine shock of hearing NWA’s Straight Outta Compton for the first time, aged 17, boggling at the fact that anything could be this relentlessly unpleasant and compelling. In the mid-1970s, meanwhile, LA’s take on glam rock seemed somehow seedier and nastier than anything in London or New York. Decadence was obviously part of the glam deal anywhere in the world, but Los Angeles appeared to take it to a new extreme. The scene was centred on a club filled with quaalude-gobbling underage groupies that was called the English Disco; it was most vividly depicted by Iggy and the Stooges in outbursts of splenetic misogyny called names like She Creatures of Hollywood Hills and Rich Bitch. And LA is the difference between the Sly and the Family Stone that recorded Everyday People and Dance to the Music – optimistic, bright transmissions from the hippie utopia of San Francisco, promising a beautiful future free of race and class distinctions – and the Sly and the Family Stone that made the enervated, paranoid, despairing There’s a Riot Goin’ On, sequestered in a Bel Air mansion where the curtains were always drawn, not knowing whether it was day or night, surrounded by cocaine and guns.
Rewind further still: there was plenty of LSD and free love- and be-ins around the city during the Summer of Love, but the big records Los Angeles produced during 1967 weren’t carefree paeans to wearing flowers in your hair, or relaxing and floating downstream. Love’s revered album Forever Changes is certainly psychedelic, but it’s troubled and crepuscular, filled with intimations of mental illness and woe. The Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth is a twitchy, paranoid response to riots that had taken place on Sunset Strip the preceding year. And most legendary of all, there’s The Beach Boys’ Smile, the deeply unsettling sound of a strange young man going slowly insane while trying to make the greatest album in the history of the world. Brian Wilson had started out hymning California as a mythic kingdom of gilded wholesome youth, where the sun never stopped shining and everyone was beautiful, but the more he was drawn into the orbit of LA’s hip crowd the weirder and unhappier he and his music got. Despite its title and cartoon cover, Smile is a very eerie listen indeed.
All of these records are filled with a sense of dark foreboding. It’s as if they’re convinced something terrible is about to happen – “paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep, it starts when you’re always afraid”, as the Buffalo Springfield put it. As it turned out, they were right: something terrible was about to happen. Maybe only late-1960s LA could have produced a figure like Charles Manson: the drugs that messed with your sense of reality crashing against a city filled with visible extremes of wealth and poverty, success and failure, and all the brooding resentment that can engender. If you were a musician, LA might have seemed like paradise in the late 1960s, when the city’s Laurel Canyon district in particular seems to have been an endless sunlit feast of dope and music and groupies, with Joni Mitchell and The Mamas and the Papas and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all on the guest list. No wonder the music that emerged from there sounded so peaceful and beatific. Here was a reminder that it was anything but, one of those moments when “the ground cracks under you”: a man from the hippy milieu, thwarted in his ambitions to become a rock star, masterminding a series of brutal murders.
The figure of Manson hangs over maybe the greatest chronicler of LA’s darkness, Neil Young – understandably so, given that Manson auditioned for him. The flatly terrifying Revolution Blues of 1974 is about Manson, or at least about someone very like him: “I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.” Even better is the following year’s Tonight’s the Night, the perfect musical summary of Los Angeles’ excess and decay. Described by its author as a “horror record”, it was taped on Sunset Boulevard by musicians who had deliberately relocated to the sleaziest motel they could find and spent the sessions behaving, as Young’s father put it, “like men on a binge at a wake”, audibly trashed on tequila and cocaine. But you don’t need to know the album’s back story – which involves the drug-related deaths of Young’s guitarist and roadie – to understand what the album is about. It sounds like it’s on the verge of falling apart, music made by someone whose dreams are crashing down around them, utterly disillusioned with fame and celebrity. “I was living down there in LA,” said Young. “That’s the time when you start realising, ‘Hey, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.” And the darkness of the city is underneath every note, from the ominous piano part that opens the album, to Tired Eyes’ matter-of-fact depiction of a cocaine deal in Topanga Canyon gone murderously wrong. And that’s what I think of when I think about music from LA: Tonight’s the Night, bleak and dark and strange and sad, an album that couldn’t have been made anywhere else in the world.
Photographer: Maria Ziegelboeck
By Alexis Petridis
