To songwriters, the City of Angels is a little bit heaven and a little bit hell | Canada Voices

Quizzed to name a song about Los Angeles, most people could think of one in a jiffy. You’re possibly thinking of California Dreamin’ right now, just as many Canadians on a cold day might. The Mamas & the Papas hit from 1965 is a wish wrapped in a sweater and a minor key – a melancholy narrator pines to be safe and warm. For the pursuit of dreams, the Pacific Ocean and sunshine, all roads west lead to (and end in) the City of Angels.

California, written and sung in 1971 by the then Laurel Canyon-dwelling Joni Mitchell, is similar to California Dreamin’. Europe is too old, cold and conservative, “Oh, but California,” Mitchell chirps, longing for home.

As beautiful as those odes are, their sentimentality is atypical of the best L.A. songs. The more interesting tunes are satirical in their seeming praise for the city, or at least have a tongue-in-cheek duality to them. The person in Randy Newman’s I Love L.A. hates New York and is gleeful about Los Angeles, for example, but the guy is an idiot. “To him, everything is so great he doesn’t really see things at all,” Newman said in 2021.

What people see today in Los Angeles is horrific. Since Jan. 7, wildfires have devastated significant parts of the city. At least 25 lives have been lost, thousands of homes and structures are destroyed, and families and communities have been displaced.

Fires have ravaged the area before and they will again. Over the years, songwriters have referenced the blazes literally and figuratively – a threat to paradise, a place one bad wind and a spark away from calamity.

“I see your hair is burning, hills are filled with fire,” Jim Morrison waxed poetically – is there any other way to wax? – on the Doors’ L.A. Woman. “If they say I never loved you, you know they are a liar.”

With 2007’s Grey in L.A., Loudon Wainwright III rhymes “chump” with “This whole town’s a dump,” while referencing global warming and hazardous conditions: “And I suppose Laurie David sure knows, all those cars we drive heat up our Earth/ And sea temperatures rise, and those constant blue skies and brush fires can sure curb your mirth.”

David is an environmental activist, film producer and the ex-wife of writer-comedian Larry David (of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame). She is among the celebrities who fled L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood because of wind-driven fires. “It really feels like the apocalypse, not to mince words,” she told Boston’s WBZ-TV en route to Martha’s Vineyard, where she also resides.

Los Angeles is the City of Opposites. “This could be heaven,” as the Eagles put it in Hotel California, “or this could be hell.”

Actor Lana Turner was discovered at a drugstore soda counter in Hollywood and starlet Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family. Neil Young has addressed both sides of the dream. “Don’t you wish that you could be here too?” he asks in L.A., from 1973′s Time Fades Away album. He tells a different story with Revolution Blues, released a year later, apparently sung from Charles Manson’s point of view: “Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.”

The Beach Boys had one notion of the city’s sand and surf; Patti Smith had another. The latter’s Redondo Beach (”pretty little girl, everyone cried”) is about a suicide. Joe Ely’s Letter to L.A. is not exactly a fan letter: ”Your love is like the city, only shines at night.”

Los Angeles Is Burning by the punk band Bad Religion in 2004 references the Santa Ana winds (“So many lives are on the breeze, even the stars are ill at ease”), which currently threaten to intensify the city’s fires. The website Californiaherps.com lists 42 songs that mention the dry, fire-flaming gusts specifically, including 15 in the title itself.

Though singer-songwriter Steve Goodman was a native Chicagoan famous for his 1971 hit City of New Orleans, his final album, released in 1984, was Santa Ana Winds. On the title song, he wishes the dusty breeze would blow his heartbreak away. More than 40 years later, the homes of his two daughters were destroyed by the Eaton fire in the Altadena community. It is feared some of their father’s guitars and original handwritten lyrics were lost.

Steely Dan’s Babylon Sisters – “Drive west on Sunset to the sea” – is a funky number about a man and a younger woman. Sounds like a California dream, right? You just know they’re in a convertible, radio blasting. But the line “Here come those Santa Ana winds again” is a metaphor for a fantasy about to be dashed. It is sung as a sigh.

Even the most joyous L.A. songs only go so far. The beer-buzzed narrator in Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do just wants to have fun. She will, too, but only until “the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.” It’s daybreak, and the party is over.

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