I wake up in an Airbnb near Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Oxnard Street in the San Fernando Valley. The sound of small bare feet on the wooden floor thunders in the back of my brain. Kids are crying and mom is feeding twin babies in another room. I stare through the closed blinds that my homeowner has carefully installed to create total darkness during the day and stand in awe of the soft California light that sneaks in. It’s a light of the senses.
Who hasn’t resigned themselves to Los Angeles being a lost place? It was, and remains, a complex amalgam of villages and cultures, bad timing and the ghosts of the American night, lost too soon. It gave us a truly American art form, begun by DW Griffith, the master of silent film composition who died in 1948 living alone at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood.
Apart from the changing skyline and ugly gentrification, the city is the same as it was when I lived there. The nostalgia that wasn’t mine but somehow occupied my mind, the obsession with pop stars that came and went, all come back to life, all become ghosts. John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Ramon Navarro and Sexy Sadie, Dennis Wilson, KROQ, Arthur Lee, Joan Didion, Judy Sill, John Fante, Wanda Coleman, Gene Clark, my ex-father-in-law, and so many others. The traces, the glitter, the tragedy, have become the frenetic noise that defines this city for me, building a world full of false confidence that never rests, with one foot already in the basement. All the tragedies are larger than life.
LA is painful. I once found a yellowed photograph between the pages of an old book. The yellowed Kodachrome showed a young, lonely-looking woman in a floral dress, half-smiling, and the backside of the Hollywood Reservoir, a crying child at the bottom. But her presence was vague, like a mistake, because something unseen, a deeper sadness, or real joy, was trying to take her place. It was beyond beautiful. Its simplicity encapsulated in me a beautiful longing for Los Angeles. The snapshot stirred in my mind, and I kept it until I lost it.
As the sun sinks into the California haze and the world unfolds in liquified light, the tallest palm trees on earth become watchful ghosts as the light dims. The physiological settings switch. The world, camouflaged with creeping figs, propped up cement, and raw humanity, is elevated to romantic heights, and all our hungers come alive in a comfortable, cool, dazzling haze of light. We dreamed and fought in it, even in the foothills of the Hollywood Hills where I lived so many years ago.
Memories of Los Angeles haunt me.
I attended my first punk rock club show at Club 88 when I was 15, using a ratty ID I ordered from an ad in the back cover of Creem Magazine. I’d been in town for a bike race, and had won a few Southern California races, but I was hooked on punk rock. I was blown away by the sight of dozens of people who were into the same records and ideas as me.
The Simple Tones and The Crowd, fierce, fun bands from the beach, helped shape the trajectory of my life. Soon the police came to check IDs and I was dropped off with two obscure friends, one of whom gave me a ride to a motel in Sunset, where I was hanging out with fellow bike racer Alexi Grewal, who laughed at me and couldn’t believe I’d gone to a punk rock show.
I was in love with everything.
A few years later, I was literally starving in downtown Los Angeles. All of our band members, girlfriends, roadies and all, lived in a rehearsal space that had just one practice room. No one in the band owned a car. One light bulb overhead. No human smells were off limits. One bathroom down the hall. Across the hall, a bad metal band was rehearsing day and night, the noise generating countless bouts of depression, anxiety, and empty bottles of Colt 45 malt liquor. Watching my cycling buddy Alexi win gold in the Olympic road race on a tiny TV, I was consumed with teenage grief.
A few years later, I started driving really fast. In the days before email, I worked delivering movie scripts, often to stars’ homes, and I got paid per delivery, so I had to drive really fast. I’d sprint through parking lanes at 60 miles per hour and hope there wasn’t a car there. I once met my childhood “Kung Fu” idol, David Carradine, who met me at the front door naked, still in his bathrobe.
With Gentlemen Afterdark (later Beat Angels), I played countless shows in venues all over the city, and at one point worked as a band booker for Madame Wong’s West in Santa Monica, booking countless unknown bands on two stages every night during its waning days. The famous Shanghai-born owner, Esther Wong, would yell at me every day, so scared I was afraid to meet her or even pick up the phone: “Don’t book the King Bees! Their music keeps the flies away!”
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(Brian Smith/Contributor)
Say hello to the sea.
There have been a few times when dreams have become LA-sized realities.
We were recording at A&M Studios (Charlie Chaplin’s old studio) and we had a demo deal with A&M Records, but then the label head, Jimmy Iovine, who was also Springsteen and Lennon’s producer, told us our music was great at A&M, and then he left the label to start Interscope Records. After that, we did a demo for Columbia Records with the Beat Angels, and did some drunken showcases at the Whiskey, the Roxy, and the Troubadour. Nothing happened. We got a music publishing deal, a nice check, and even visited Alice Cooper at Sony Studios, where he had just recorded a song I co-wrote for his ’94 album “Last Temptation.”
A few years later, I had the honor of doing a reading of “Spent Saints” at Book Soup and The Rainbow Bar and Grill. When we first started dating, my wife was living in Los Angeles. That changed everything and saved me.
Clark Germain and his lovely wife Tina met with us for a few hours in the hypnotic hanging gardens of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Clark is an old friend from my teenage years racing bikes and I’ve kept in touch with him off and on over the years. He grew up on punk rock in LA as a kid. It turns out he has a great ear. He won both an Emmy and a Grammy for his work on records and scores after being nominated several times. He’s worked with everyone and traveled all over the world to engineer and mix albums. His lovely home studio is in Laurel Canyon, just around the corner from the address of the ’81 Wonderland murders.
At one point, Clark, perceptive and insightful, shakes his head at an old man’s conversation about beautiful things disappearing from before us — books, movies, cities, songs — and then, speaking from the vantage point of a talented and celebrated mixer and engineer, he says, “It’s just amazing how much time, effort and artistry can go into creating things that no longer have any value.”
The next day, Memorial Day weekend traffic is relentless, the sidewalks are crowded, and bacteria in the water at the wobbly Santa Monica Pier is a problem. In my old life, I would never have been out on a day like this. Two of my kids, Ricky and Reese, frolic in the warm sand and salt air at the water’s edge, weaving between couples and families toting folding chairs and marveling at the seaweed and seagulls. My stomach and heart swell. To me, this is all so worth it, and none of it is guaranteed. Just behind us, on a bluff overlooking the ocean, stands the magnificent Deco Georgian Hotel, a beautiful building by any standard, saved from demolition. I first fell in love with the hotel because it once housed a famous speakeasy where Fatty Arbuckle cooled off after being booted from screen idolhood.
We have a big family, so to stay in Los Angeles for three days we needed two cars, each loaded with luggage. So the next morning, in the midst of a hectic family whirlwind, we packed our belongings into both cars and headed to Tucson in the camper. As we drove down the 101, I thought about how I didn’t want my children’s Los Angeles to be like mine. My dad didn’t like Los Angeles that much. Everyone had Los Angeles all to themselves.