Amplified Journeys
Is where ‘the creatures meet… up on Love Street’. Jim may have met his maker in a Parisian bathtub, of all places, but its his barrel-chested growl that continues to echo through LA’s rolling canyons.
Has anyone ever nailed a headier mix of blues, Bacchanalia and sense of time and place than The Doors’ LA Woman? It even kicks off with what sounds like a V8 revving into the night…
Perhaps an obvious starting point for our latest Amplified Journey, in the company of audio experts Harman Kardon, but sometimes obvious is best.
Try to compile the perfect Los Angeles play-list and you’ll need the most powerful MP3 player you can lay your hands on: this vast city sprawls out for miles in every direction, across all sorts of epic scenery; and its musical legacy is equally awe-inspiring.
Some argue that the perfect weather and laid-back West Coast attitude have bequeathed an endless succession of somnambulant soft-rockers, and that Detroit and New York, to name but two, rock with a much harder authenticity and intensity. But map out LAs musical history and theres no shortage of tall tales, as we re about to discover.
If you love cars and music, theres surely no better city in the world than this. Surf the endless list of rock radio stations, and LA has a knack of burnishing even the most well-worn FM classic Steely Dan might have begun life as songwriters-for-hire in New York’s Brill Building, but their expertly played jazz-funk and acerbic lyrics will simply never sound better than against a shimmering Pacific Coast back-drop.
Then theres our own Led Zeppelin, who infamously re-named the Hyatt hotel on Sunset the Riot House, yet in Going To California wrote a surprisingly bucolic hymn to a place that couldn’t have been further from Robert Plants workaday Midlands roots.
Its playing on the Harman Kardon sound system, as we point our Range Rover Sport in the direction of Topanga Canyon. With a 550W output, no fewer than 14 speakers and Logic 7 surround sound, one of Zeppelins more powerful anthems – this was a band who could make a pop song sound like the theme for an invading army – might be more appropriate, yet the sound is so awesomely clear Jimmy Page himself could be sitting in the front seat.
Why Topanga? Well that other great guitar hero Neil Young escaped to its picturesque glades in the late 1960s, searching for some peace away from LA’s rampant hedonism. He recorded After The Gold Rush here, and often played in a tiny club venue called the Topanga Corral, along with the likes of Canned Heat, Emmylou Harris, Spirit and Little Feat.
Sadly, the Corral is long gone, as we discover when we chance upon a local whose house we bizarrely enter by climbing through an old railway cargo car that straddles one of the canyons ridges.
He’s lived there since the late Sixties and reckons that lawyers and studio execs have replaced the musicians and artists who put Topanga on the map back in the day. But as the roll-call of legends includes Woody Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, Big Joe Turner, Jim Morrison and John Densmore, and The Eagles’ Bernie Leadon, the legend is intact.
And you can see why: it’s barely a 20-minute drive to Santa Monica yet this is a leaf)’, atmospheric paradise. Great roads too; the Range Rover Sport handles the loops and corners with aplomb. I push for Van Morrison on the Harman Kardon system – another Topanga resident, for a time – but we setde on Buffalo Springfield, rock’s original and most turbulent super-group.
Even closer to the heart of the city is Laurel Canyon, probably the most famous LA musical outpost of them all. Perched high above Sunset Boulevard, and separating West Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley, this was a phenomenal creative and counter-cultural hub in the Sixties and Seventies.
Frank Zappa, Jackson Browne, The Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Love and many more all played and partied up here; Zappa lived in a log cabin on the corner of Laurel Canyon Road and Lookout Mountain Road, just across from a house rumoured to have been occupied by Harry Houdini (complete with a network of underground caves). Old Hollywood – Mary Astor, Errol Flynn, Robert Mitchum – mixed with pop culture’s new emissaries in Laurel Canyon: various Monkecs, Doors, Byrds, Stones, Eagles, and currently Chili Peppers.
A dense series of roads spear off the main – and rather busy – thoroughfare, while houses, including some eye-popping modernist ones, almost tumble into one another. We find Doors’ and Elektra Records mainstay Paul Rothschild’s old place on Ridpath Drive, scene of many serious parties; it’s a bit of an emotional moment for me, but the current owner has never heard of Rothschild.
No Amplified Journey of LA would be complete without seeing Capitol Records’ HQ on Hollywooc &: Vine: it’s such a landmark it had a scene to itself in the recent blockbuster ‘The Day After Tomorrow (the DVD of which is amazing in the Range Rover Sport – Logic 7 handles the surround sound effects so well, its almost like you’re at the cinema).
Then we pay tribute to the spot where Doug Weston’s influential Troubadour Club started so many careers, before doffing our caps to the Whisky a Go-Go and Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset, home to generations of IA musicians and venues that have witnessed the journey through folk, soft-rock, and on to the sleazy, amphetamine-fuelled hard stuff of Guns ‘n’ Roses, the archetypal modern LA rock band.
Signed to David Gcffens label, the archetypal LA music biz impresario. One last thing: for inspiration, visit Amoeba Records on Hollywood & Vine. Its the world’s best record shop…
Source: TopGear