Waiting for the Sunp: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sounds of Los Angeles by Barney Hoskyns

From the Publisher

Here is the entire history of pop Los Angeles in all its splendor and excess. The shadow land of expectation; the dazzling white-hot spotlight. No city in the western world exerts such a fascination as the damned paradise of Los Angeles. Barney Hoskyns has spent the better half of a decade researching this definitive account of a dysfunctional artistic community. From the days of the thriving jazz clubs in the forties to the menace of West Coast gangsta rap in the nineties, the sound of this bleached, irrigated dreamscape is here in all its warped glory. Hoskyns journeys through fifty years of music history to unravel its unrealities. The result is a riveting account of, as he writes, "the peculiarly California interplay between light and darkness, good and evil." He explores the two-faced nature of Orpheus' brain-children: innocence and sin, fantasy and reality. California, even in its most profound sense, conjures up fantasy: vast geographical distances, sun, smog, and hedonism all conveniently huddled on the Pacific Coast. But underneath all this suntan lotion and the sizzling backyard barbies lies a nervous creative energy and downright weirdness that manufactures and promotes the fantasy in musical forms catering to heartland America. The music of Southern California has kept us all waiting for the sun.

Publishers Weekly

Hoskyns (From a Whisper to a Scream) proposes that Los Angeles is a city embodying with particular clarity both the brightest and darkest parts of American culture. Yet this aura of "irresistible... disjuncture" has provided a fertile ground for musical creativity. Here, Hoskyns traces the evolution of L.A.'s popular music scene from the 1940s through the 1990s with the intent of demonstrating how the city's unique atmosphere has informed the work of artists ranging from Nat King Cole and Charlie Parker to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to Jane's Addiction and NWA. The penetrating sociocultural analysis of Hoskyns's introductory chapter loses steam, however, as Hoskyns focuses on the relationships between various artists and music industry executives. Even so, the author constructs a comprehensive and critically astute history of the major developments and players in the Southern California music business. Hoskyns is particularly perceptive about the racial politics of music culture and those musical and cultural moments of dynamic transition when new genres of popular music emerge. The numerous photos and pithy quotes from other observers of the L.A. scene make for enjoyable and informative reading. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Los Angeles is often held up a perfect example of the American dream gone bada sprawling urban symbol of everything that is garish, shallow, and self-centered in our popular culture. While many Americans are loath to confess any interest in the city at all, it has proven mesmerizing to British writers. Here Hoskyns (Across the Great Divide, LJ 9/1/93) has produced an enjoyable overview of the city's musical history. Beginning with the R&B club scene that thrived on Central Avenue in the 1940s, Hoskyns chronicles the rise of such artists as the Beach Boys, Phil Spector, and the Doors, providing interesting (and often gossipy) details about the musicians and their record deals, recording sessions, and chart performances. He also covers the emergence of country rock and the Seventies punk scene, concluding with a brief overview of West Coast rap. Though the appendix listing popular songs with L.A. themes is unnecessary, the book, overall, includes a wealth of detailed information. Recommended for popular music collections. (Index not seen.)Rick Anderson, Penacook, N.H.

Kirkus Reviews

A caustic, gossipy, refreshingly idiosyncratic history of the music business in Los Angeles.

Having interviewed many of the major players, British author Hoskyns (Across the Great Divide: The Band and America, 1993) ambitiously aims to make sense of the careers of every notable musician ever to spend time in L.A., in the context of the city's ethnic and geographical cultures, the L.A.-based record companies' differing sensibilities, the cultural currents their records both spawned and reflected, and especially the pattern of monstrous self-indulgence that seemingly few L.A. musicians have evaded. The pre-rock era is covered fairly perfunctorily, but Hoskyns begins to shine with early '60s tales of hack songwriters, calculating record companies, and motley unaffiliated hustlers all angling to produce a Top 40 hit. Hoskyns notes that there's as much image manipulation in pop as in the movies. The Beach Boys created the myth of southern California as endless beach party, but, in Hoskyns's typically pithy characterization, leader Brian Wilson was "an all-American misfit . . . a gawky, introspective geek" who'd never surfed. The all-white Hollywood hit-makers could afford to be oblivious to the Watts riots, even as they came to represent the "counterculture." A countrified pop mafia (David Crosby, Cass Elliott, Neil Young, etc.) based in L.A.'s outer canyons grew up in the late '60s, but the hippie idealism of life away from Hollywood had a dark flip side, exemplified by the Manson Family and a series of self-destructions from drugs. Hoskyns acerbically registers the irony that the staggeringly successful mellow L.A. pop of the '70s—by such artists as the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Fleetwood Mac—was created in a milieu ruled by two supremely unmellow forces: cocaine and workaholic mogul David Geffen.

Though occasionally marred by mean spirits, this is an unusually lively, provocative study.

What People Are Saying

Jon Savage
epic tragicomedy." --Stephen M.H. Braitman, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The entire history of pop Los Angeles in all its splendor and excess: a dark drive deep into the city of the night.
—Jon Savage, author of England's Dreaming

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents