byrdsongs, xxix

On the thirty-first floor, a gold plated door, won't keep out the lord's burning rain... You don't have to be a country music lover to recognize Sin City as a moment of true inspiration. Think of it as Hollywood Babylon meets Hank Williams meets Raymond Chandler, with Sneaky Pete's pedal steel, languid and weepy, making the music feel as if it's pickled in a large jar of 'ludes. I must confess that the sedated LA cowboy thing – the lonely yet virile drifter, anesthetized against the horrors of napalm and Nixon, wandering the abandoned streets between Clark and Hilldale, taking up residence at the Ash Grove or the Troubadour, and maybe even joining a freaky cult out in Canoga Park – there’s times when I find it all very appealing even though it represents the death of something I cherish so deeply.  I associate the drifter with the wolf king of LA, and with taking flight in the Astrodome, and with the Gary Lockwood character in Model Shop.  But I’m sure the malaise I romanticize only looks good in retrospect. The hazy hangover was probably a bummer at the time, even before the Manson Family and Altamont threw the collapse of the California dream into such sharp relief.  The time from JFK’s election to the Summer of Love, the very peak of human civilization (at least if you were white, he hastens to add), happened in the wink of an eye but also over several million light years. I can only imagine how disenchanting it must’ve been to have lived it and then still have it be fairly large in the rearview mirror, taunting a whole generation with its broken promises and its fading aftertaste of that split second of ecstasy...

I’m starting to sound like Jackson Browne.  What can I say?  I’m a dreamer, and a romantic, given to fits of pointless nostalgia.  There’s not a week that goes by where I don’t think how great it would have been to have experienced LA in the 60s.  But Sin City give me pause. Is it a song that's supposed to make LA seem attractive, a city of mystery, of celebratory decadence, of infinite potentiality? Or does it paint a picture of hell on earth, the ghastly fires of which will only be extinguished when the whole place finally slides into the Pacific?