WHEN Jim Morrisson's "bloody red sun of Phantastic LA" finally sets or when the San Andreas fault fulfils its potential by collapsing the whole dysfunctional mess into the Pacific, we will have a precious document to remember the life and musical chimes of one of the most influential and fascinating cities in the Western world. Barney Hoskyns's over, under and sideways view of Los Angeles's contribution to popular culture, and most particularly modern music, is a revelatory text that picks you up right from the first sentence and doesn't let you down again until you have scoured the bibliography for further reading.
While Chandler's Philip Marlowe may have described the city as having "no more personality than a paper cup", there are "personalities" aplenty between these pages - ranging from Doris Day to Charles Manson - and enough background material, anecdotal asides and informed opinions to humourously ease your ride through the last fifty years of LA's pivotal position in the mad, bad and dangerous world of the music machine.
Weaving together the twin images of the picture-postcard, "two girls for every boy" sunshine paradise and the disturbing dystopia of noir LA, Hoskyns (a music journalist of some renown) explores the reasons why such an unlikely chain of musical relationships should unfold in a city which, according to popular legend, has more gyms than public libraries.
Hoskyns kicks off with a look at the thriving jazz club scene of the 1940s and the 1950s, and rewrites the prominent black musicians of the time into the area's musical history. Hoskyns handles the race issue very well, first delving back to show how LA's early, prototypical WASP settlers believed, somewhat bizarrely, that the power of California's sunshine would "reinvigorate the racial energies of the Anglo-Saxons" and that one day LA would be "the Aryan capital of the world", and later shows how black music and musicians were edited out of official texts, right up until the explosion of gangsta rap at the turn of this decade which smashed the implicit notion of California uber Alles.
Up through the 1950s - and we're in the grips of any amount of vacuous "fun in the sun" teen anthems - where born-again virgins like Doris Day bought into the Californian myth and delivered pretty little platitudes to the first generation of teenagers. Into the next decade, and the noir begins to settle as the post-Kennedy, Vietnam generation start to "rebel" in a half-hearted hippy sort of way and begin to experiment with mind-altering drugs. There appeared to be a collective "mellowing out" (to use the vernacular) in the 1970s which is best exemplified by the predominant group of the period - the mild, inoffensive, FM radio-friendly fluff of Fleetwood Mac - who incidentally are one of Bill Clinton's favourite bands.
The punk revolution, which owed more to the activities of Richard Hell in New York than Johnny Rotten in London, kick-started the culture as an avalanche of hard-core punk bands ran riot on Sunset Strip and though they had precious little to protest about (anarchy in LA? - not when the surf's up) they still saw fit to vent their rage at growing up in a bland Republican paradise. Seminal bands like Black Flag, The Germs (one of whose members went on to join Nirvana and is now with the Foo Fighters) and the Circle Jerks may not have impinged much on European musical sensibilities but they are the direct forefathers of massively successful neo-punk bands like Green Day and Offspring.
This is an excellent read, as near to definitive as you could wish, and shot through with the sort of humour that is so often absent from retrospective, historical texts. One small thing: throughout the book, Hoskyns punctuates his musings on music with choice quotes on general LA life from. writers familiar with the city, such as Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood and Bertolt Brecht. He's done it with the musicians, no reason why he now can't do it with the writers. {CORRECTION} 96061200132
