Mining for Gold

It’s the holidays, so I’m making subscriber posts free for the rest of the year. But please subscribe because my only other source of income is telling strangers about times I’ve met Bruce Dern, a job which currently, and I know it’s tough out there, pays zero dollars a week. And anyway all those stories take place in Los Feliz, which makes me think he just lives around there.

This observation was probably first made the weekend after humans achieved behavioral modernity, but music is like food. It’s so obviously fundamental to life that it’s usually routine. Not something you think about at all. But sometimes, at certain hours in certain weather, it’s magic. So your relationship with it is constantly evolving. And the circumstances necessary for it to become magic are highly context dependent, and they’re constantly evolving too. You can speculate about when magic is likely to happen, but you’ll never know. There are days when Albert Ayler and John Zorn are almost too normal, and there are days when Chuck Berry will kill you dead in two seconds. 

I always try to jot down the moments when the magic happens, so I can be in the right place if it happens again. Try to figure out who was responsible, the ingredients they used, the way they prepared it, how they served it. The whole process matters.

This year, somebody died who was part of that process. He made magic happen and it changed me. You don’t know him unless you lived in San Diego before I was born. His name was Paul Kamanski. He wrote the song “Hollywood Hills” for the Beat Farmers. 

If you asked me for my favorite songs, I have a list of well-manicured, educated answers that would make you stop reading after this sentence. But if you asked me to shut up about pre-war folk, I’d say Hollywood Hills is my favorite song ever.

Dunno why. It’s in a tradition with The Byrds, Neil Young and Tom Petty, and it’s a heartland rock anthem, whatever that means, but I just sat through most of a John Cougar Mellencamp show and nothing happened, so that’s not why. 

Shit, the answer is personal. Damn it. I’ll get it over with quick. I went to school in Malibu because other people said I should. I hated it there. Never even went to the beach even though I could see it from my window. Christianity plus starfucking – what could go wrong? (Me, it turns out.)

I had a 2000 Ford Explorer that always had $2,000 worth of medical problems. When I was visiting my grandparents in Bakersfield one weekend, I was there most weekends, it broke down. Head gasket. So my uncle had to drive me back to school. I was washed up. Society was officially 86ing me for not having enough money. I hated everything and wanted to quit.

There’s this part of the Grapevine where, after an hour of driving through subtle variations of the color brown, Los Angeles County starts to announce itself. It’s bigger than you. It glitters. Flirts a little, but not too much. You still have to get past Castaic. 

I don’t remember if I was in one of the cool promo cars my uncle occasionally got to drive, but he was doing like 130 when we hit the top of the hill and I was just a ball of motion sickness. Then Hollywood Hills came on and I felt alive. It’s not a party song and it’s not subversively optimistic; it’s kind of a drag. I didn’t feel happy or like I was the star of my own movie. But I suddenly felt like everything happening to me was normal. That the contract I signed when I opened my eyes for the first time said I just have to hold on whether I like it or not, it’s right there in the contract.

As we started to go downhill, breaking the freeway speed limit by at least one freeway speed limit, this song felt like what I imagined doing cocaine felt like “when cocaine was still good.” Just a full body experience. Everything heightened. Everything significant even though it wasn’t. It said life is basically about getting your ass kicked, and it helped me be alright with the ass-kickings. 

The Beat Farmers never had a national footprint. They’re one of the last local bands, really. There should be a Kmart discount sticker on all their records that says you had to be there. But the LP with this song is like an archaeological discovery. Something that might be at the antique mall for a dollar, something that looks like nothing. But it’s as good as anything Tom Petty was up to at the time. You don’t need the connection I have with this song to appreciate that. It’s just one of those albums that says you can still discover things. It’s called The Pursuit of Happiness.