Holiday in Hollywood

The other day I went to L.A. and in the course of a mere four hours, I had both the worst and the best Lyft conversations of my life. During the ride to the airport from my home, I was forced to hear a driver’s insufferable chatter about the problem with higher education. But on the other end, I got a driver who wanted to talk about the reduction of aura that is caused by our reliance on Spotify’s play-me-more-of-the-same-please algorhythm. 

Kathy McCarty plays "Younger Generation" at the Lovin' Spoonful reunion

It was tempting to deduce that the kind of people who drive Lyfts in LA are just a lot more interesting than the kind that do it in Silicon Valley – the former, Cory, was an aspiring improv comic, while the latter, Van, claimed he had a startup -- but perhaps that’s reading too much into it. Still. It was Cory’s contention that all travel is better when it’s colored by odd, random song choices that seem to come out of nowhere, and to that I heartily agree. 

In addition to hating Spotify, he was against social media, arguing that it had reduced people’s attention spans, made them narcissistic, and created a need for people to pursue inauthentic and desperate experiences. And while I agree with every word of that as well, I also sort of disagree. “The thing is,’ I told him, “I love the ‘me’ I present on social media so much more than I love myself. She is happy and aspirational and self-assured, whereas I am very much not. Curating her experiences on Facebook is a way to remind me that I can be better.”

He seemed unconvinced, but maybe that was because he was younger than me and surrounded by more narcissists. Anyway, it was only a 17-minute ride to my destination, so we didn’t really have time to hash out the truth: instead, when I got out, I settled for thanking him for having made up for my lousy Lyft conversation in San Francisco. “Oh, the universe is very fair, so I’m sure my conversation ruined someone’s else’s ride equally this morning,” he said, laughing, and it’s probably true. At least in L.A., where ridesharing has become such an integral part of the experience of being there, the conversation one has with one’s Lyft driver has replaced the whole thing of random music coloring your world. 

I used to live in LA, one million years ago (i.e. before the internet), but nevertheless, but it’s not a town I know very well. One thing that struck me on this trip was the way that ridesharing more than anything has made L.A. a different place…a place that’s both smaller and bigger; a place where you can walk around now, a place where you can drink. Hence, just a few hours after I got there, I was walking down Hyperion Boulevard, high as a kite, and it felt for a minute like time had stood stock still. We were on our way to a house concert, where my friend was set to play her music, and it reminded me of another house concert I’d been invited to, at which a variety of musicians in the bands that were loosely called the Paisley Underground had played their music all night long. 

That night I remember thinking I had achieved nirvana just by being there, because I had managed to enter into some kind of it’s-like-Paris-in-the-20s zone. And now it was happening again, only this time it was different, because thirty years has turned L.A. into a far more glittering city. That party was in a dumpy bungalow near Venice Beach, while at this one, there were fine wines and amazing food and these enormous couches laid on oriental carpets out in the backyard, and there was a croquet court or something – or possibly it was a graveyard. And yet, as with the other party, we were surrounded by the scent of jacaranda, and thus, the imminent sense that some Raymond Chandler-type character was about to lurch out of the trees and send one of us on an emergency night-flight to Mexico.

Rodney & John, somewhere in the Hollywood Hills

Still, there was no doubt that it was the kind of party that in France in the 19^th century would have been called a salon, and by that I mean, it featured a performance by a puppeteer. There was also a mesmerizing performance by a duo called Rodney and John, and you know that feeling when you think you’re going to watch someone perform, I don’t know, dumb old blues, or a copycat of a Pavement song, and instead you’re confronted with something original and poignant and deep? It’s just the best feeling, to be reeled in like that, reeled and gutted and sunk on a hook of hooks. Later, I was told that one of the members of this duo was an Oscar-nominated actor, and this may well have explained the phenomenon, because their presence in that room had a radiance to it that would be harder to explain if it wasn’t coming from people who already traded successfully in the art of mesmerization. It was enchanting. I was enchanted.  

It was neat seeing that, but I’d come to support my good friend Kathy McCarty, who was also performing. Kathy, who lives in Austin, had a weird dream last summer that she had written a big hit song, and when she woke up she sang it into her i-phone and then she recorded it with some crack musicians she knows for good measure. She has been insisting ever since that she’s going to become a real rock star at long last – because that’s what happened in the dream – and both this performance, and the next night’s (about more later) was in many ways the dream’s fruition. When she sang both it and her other material, she lifted the whole room by the roots of its hair and shook it out like a mop. There was about the entire proceedings a sense of inevitability that is hard to recapture. It felt ordained.

The thing about taking Lyfts everywhere is that anything can happen in them, and on this trip, anything did. The very next night, my friend Heather accidentally hit ‘share’ and the second pick-up was so drunk and skanky that our Lyft driver cancelled the whole ride and stepped on the gas rather than stop for them.  Don’t worry, the next day she spent hours tracking him down on the app in order to pay him, but at that exact moment, we were on the way out of Glendale, having just spent four plus hours at the Alex Theater at a Tribute to and performance by the 60s rock band the Lovin’ Spoonful. 

It was a fundraiser for the Autism Think Tank, and because it featured the performance of 38 songs by the band in question, all performed by different artists, it took a very long time. So many artists! So many songs! So many instruments, and interpretations, and intentions, all at once. It was confusing. Some of the performers, like Mark Eitzel of American Music Club, and my afore-mentioned friend Kathy, really made the material their own. Kathy had been given the hard task of interpreting the song “Younger Generation,” which contains deathless lines like, “Hey Pop, my girlfriend’s only three,” and “She’s got her own videophone and she’s taking LSD,” so it’s an enormous tribute to her genius as an interpreter that at the end of the song nobody burst out laughing.

Other singers did more faithful versions, which is probably just as well, because the thing is, a lot of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s songs that you haven’t heard, you maybe haven’t heard for a reason (though of course tastes, like your results, will vary). But with 38 artists, there was something for everyone. Heather was blown away by Dave Alvin and John Sebastian’s instrumental version of “Night Owl Blues”; I personally enjoyed hearing Mickey Dolenz, formerly of the Monkees, doing “What A Day For A Daydream.” But the highlights were where you’d expect them to be, as when the band (or what’s left of it) played their biggest hit, “Summer In the City.” Christ! (as my mom would say.) That songs makes you think, old-codger like, they sure don’t make songs like they used to! 

But “Summer in the City” is an old, old song…and this is how young I am: I remember listening to it when I was about five, and loving it because I thought that when John Sebastian sang, “Cool cat, gonna find a kitty,” he meant that he was going to go out and find a real kitty – ownership of which was, at that time, the impossible dream of my heart and soul. 

These are the kinds of thoughts that make me think maybe I’ve lived too long. To be five years old and listening to the Lovin' Spoonful on a transistor radio shouldn’t have anything in common with being at the Alex Theater a half century later…but of course it does, of course it tangles up the space-time continuum, of course it does that thing that the Cory had said that Spotify is so incapable of, i.e. providing some unexpected, wholly random jolt of pleasure that will always from here on in color my remembrance of Glendale in February as it takes its unexpected place on the soundtrack of my life.

And of course I love to hear the songs of my youth, lovingly rendered by the musicians of today – although the truth is, what I like to hear is music, qua music, i.e. guitars and bass and drums and violins, because when they are put together in a certain way, whether by Kathy McCarty, by Rodney & John, or by any of the 38 performers at the Alex Theater on Leap Night, what they are is, to paraphrase John Sebastian, magic. The Lovin’ Spoonful tribute at the Alex Theater caught at some of that like gossamer, and then it hung it strand by strand from the heads of everyone inside.