The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

I saw the vortex and steered the two-tonne steel automobile into a lugubrious cruise around the outer edge. The car is Kyle’s problem now, but back in the mid-nineties for 500 bucks we bought a 1963 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors, the colour of a faded band-aid and covered with lovely dents and rust. There was no better way to get around Los Angeles. And it made a good second home when I couldn’t face the Magic Hotel in Old Hollywood anymore. I loved that place.

I’d been expecting the vortex of death to suck me in for a few days, so I saw it coming near an exit ramp to Pasadena and just missed crashing into a fiery shit-storm by inches. I knew it was time to leave the city for good.

It was Aristotle who pointed out that there are really only a limited number of decent plots to make a good play (or movie). Most of them require a death or murder to create a strong drama. In the entertainment capital, so much time and attention is given to death and murder in television and film that on hot days the place buzzes like a plague of locusts. People there are as obsessed with it as they are about sex and glamour. What good Hollywood picture doesn’t have a murder or at least a handgun in it? The whole valley itself can’t naturally support human life. Most of the time it’s a desert fire-trap. On the right day from the hills, it really looks like hell.

It’s no drooling wonder that West Coast gangsta rap works like an ambulance chase, on the lookout for the next victim to make money on. Murder sells. From Iceberg Slim, who wrote about his tough life as a pimp in the fifties, to Ice T, who claims him as an influence, LA was never really about The Beach Boys and Fun With Archie. It’s a scary-ass place when you see it with its pants down.

The Lincoln took us to Malibu where I fell in love with a tattooed punk who worked at a nudist colony. We played in the sand. But she felt nothing for anyone after her brother had been shot at close range in Venice. The Lincoln took us past Marilyn Monroe’s ashes, and past the house where Charles Manson became an overnight sensation. We played mix-tapes through four broken speakers. Easy listening and Mexican border music.

Arthur Lyman, Los Gavilanes, Tijuana Brass

They had me on the casting couch, I’m ashamed to say. The Lincoln took us to Burbank studios for auditions with young shameless grovelling actors, clawing, upstaging and out-shouting one another for the roles. “You in the back, we can’t see or hear you…” I stood up on the casting couch and showed them a glimpse of my vortex. No call back. Another movie about young Americans who drive across the country killing people. No thanks.

Kalifornia, True Romance, Pulp Fiction… I stopped going to the pictures for years after that summer. Aristotle didn’t mention mixing tragedy with sneering irony, stringing together coolisms and sexed-up vampire sluts, as being the best formula for good drama. The list of plots didn’t include popping your brother just because you’re too stupid to know better. That’s a modern American plot.

The Lincoln drove us happy stoners to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burbank next.

Martin Denny, Yma Sumac, Los Lobos

There, are buried many of the famous: Walt Disney, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart… and it’s such a cemetery as would challenge the puke reflex of even the most cynical man.

Forest Lawn is a theme park for the dead. One can be buried in Graceland, an Elvis-themed plot, or Babyland, which is for babies, in the shape of a heart. One can hear Tchaikovsky playing softly over one’s grave for all eternity. And one can be buried under a replica of Michelangelo’s David, or under Homer or Zeus. Some people even get married in one of the many themed fake antique chapels. Ronald Reagan was married in the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather. Tourists and mourners ride around together in happy little golf carts. Read The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh for full effect.

The Lincoln took us through the village of homeless in their tarpaulin shelters in Downtown LA and down to Babe and Ricky’s blues bar in South Central. The once glittering strip where early R&B, jump, jive, rock’n’roll and all America’s best black music thrived and prospered under flashing lights is now a buzzard’s lunch. It’s derelict and deadly for a small white bluesman to go near. No effort made to preserve it. Fucked over and forgotten.

Etta James, Louis Jordan, James Brown, Marlena Shaw

And on and on past abandoned Art Deco hotels, forgotten cinemas and ballrooms, vacant lots and bodies. But when the Lincoln returned home for the last time to the Magic Hotel on Franklin, the vortex yawned and sucked me into the lobby where the carpet had turned red and detectives coolly asked me if I knew how George the night clerk had been shot dead for no apparent reason.

The hotel staff had been like a reluctant family to me for a long time. The next day, the Lincoln took us to the funeral. The service was in Turkish. Catholic. George was buried in a Forest Lawn Memorial Park. I couldn’t hear his wife and children grieving over the sound of the eight-lane freeway by George’s head. Borderland. One can be buried by a freeway for a fraction of the price. Men in yellow hard hats bulldozed the earth in on top of him.

After near-death on an exit ramp, some riots and mudslides, the work dried up and I left town. The car’s engine seized up shortly after. Kyle has assumed responsibility for keeping it alive. Apparently he’s revived it now and it’s calling me back to what makes America and all of us so afraid of death. Los Angeles de Muertos.

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