HOLLYWOOD HANGOVER:
Neon Nightlife Neverland
Bringing Yesterday's Future Back to the Present
With Memories of the Sixties Sunset Scene
Let the head-bashing begin!1965-1968
Whisky a GoGo, The Trip, The Troubadour, The Hullabaloo, Pandora's Box, Sea Witch, The Factory, Ciro's, etc.
the Byrds, Love, the Leaves, Buffalo Springfield, the Seeds and the Doors
The Strip grew and reinvented itself, building on its own mythic aura, decade after decade, from the supper clubs of the '40s to the nightclubs of the '50s to the rock clubs of the '60s and Punk in the 70s and 80s.
This purest metaphor of L.A. was a mile of shameless sex and eccentric self-invention and rampaging capitalism.
Let the head-bashing begin!1965-1968
Whisky a GoGo, The Trip, The Troubadour, The Hullabaloo, Pandora's Box, Sea Witch, The Factory, Ciro's, etc.
the Byrds, Love, the Leaves, Buffalo Springfield, the Seeds and the Doors
The Strip grew and reinvented itself, building on its own mythic aura, decade after decade, from the supper clubs of the '40s to the nightclubs of the '50s to the rock clubs of the '60s and Punk in the 70s and 80s.
This purest metaphor of L.A. was a mile of shameless sex and eccentric self-invention and rampaging capitalism.
Whole KRLA BEAT PDF COLLECTION - http://krlabeat.sakionline.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi
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Sculptor and dancer Vito Paulekas was the L.A. freak scene guru in the early sixties. Vito had a group of dancers
(that included Carl Franzoni) that danced & freaked out at the early Mothers' concerts.
(that included Carl Franzoni) that danced & freaked out at the early Mothers' concerts.
FANS, to FOLKIES to FREAKS
WE ARE THE PORCH-PEOPLE: 1965 Lots of English groups had plans to visit the Los Angeles area in early January 1965 for various TV or film appearances. KRLA which operated on the grounds of The Huntington Hotel in Pasadena became ground zero for promotions and fans. The Beat's report on The Beatles appears to have been written in December 1964 but held over for publication in the new year. Among expected visitors were The Hullabaloos (from Hull, hence the name), who were to appear on the "Ed Sullivan" variety show in late December. The Hullabaloos never did make it to the show but Ed was busy booking others, such as The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Cilla Black, all of whom appeared on the show in the early months of 1965. The British Invasion was still going strong. Photos for this week include a selection of pictures from past issues of the KRLA Beat. Notable is a rare look at the Beatles' August 1964 press conference at the Cinnamon Cinder nightclub, owned by deejay Bob Eubanks. PDF size 2.7 MB. 4 pages. Vol. 0 No. 0.
FOLK SCENE: Conceived by and opened in September 1960, by Pasadena businessman Willard Chilcott, THE ICE HOUSE has brought the finest in live entertainment to the San Gabriel Valley for over 42 years. During that time, over three million people have "discovered" the stars of today and tomorrow in our intimate showroom. In the 1960s, Folk music was in its prime, and The Ice House was America's top folk club with acts coming from all over the country to play and sing. Pasadena needed some music and comedy and The Ice House quickly became "the" place to go. The club combined music and comedy and gave audiences a consistently good time at reasonable prices. Notable acts included Kenny Rodgers, Linda Ronstadt, The Association, Seals and Crofts, Stephen Bishop, Jennifer Warnes, and hundreds more.
Hotel California
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WILD IN THE STREETS
Warming Up for the 'Summer of Love'
Warming Up for the 'Summer of Love'
LA TEENAGE REBELLION: In the spring of 1961, Southern California suddenly erupted from the valleys to the beaches in angry generational conflict. There were 11 so called 'teen riots' in six months--three of them, including Griffith Park in May, Zuma Beach in June and Alhambra in October, involved thousands of youth. If largely forgotten today, at the time these confrontations generated worldwide headlines and national controversy. Despite the disparate sociological and geographical characteristics of the individual events, civic and law enforcement leaders conflated them as a single sustained outburst, an unprecedented insurrection against adult authority. And, following the causal chain back to El Cajon Boulevard the summer before, some of the country's leading anti-Communists once again discerned a conspiratorial pattern in youthful defiance. As Los Angeles' acting chief of police warned the nation, 'The eruption of violence and disorder directed at society's symbols of authority could be more devastating to America's hopes for the future than rockets and the 100-megaton bomb'.
REBELS WITHOUT A CLUE: Symbols of authority could be more devastating to America's hopes for the future than rockets and the 100-megaton bomb'.16 The first explosion occurred--according to subversive schedule?--on 1 May. Although national news was dominated by the huge 'Splash Day' riot in Galveston, Texas, where 800 youth were arrested, Los Angeles County sheriffs had to mount an amphibious landing to save the island resort of Avalon from its own teenage hordes. The city's third annual 'Buccaneer Ball' celebration was disrupted by hundreds of rowdy high school and college students who 'littered streets with beer cans and wine bottles, climbed over cars, trampled flower planters, ripped fire hoses and extinguishers from hotel walls and sprayed corridors'. Panicky local authorities called in deputies from the mainland who eventually arrested 57 of the 'mob'. The next weekend in Long Beach, in a fracas variously described in the local press as a 'riot' or 'near riot', 400 youths, 'all in bathing suits, swarmed out of the Bayshore Recreation Area...they halted cars on Bayshore Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, tussled with drivers, yanked out ignition keys and flung water-filled balloons'. When the police arrived, they too were jeered and bombarded with water balloons. Later, in sentencing one of the participants, a flustered municipal judge complained, 'I wish we had a whipping post. The youth of this country has absolutely no respect for authority. I just don't understand it'.
GRIFFITH PARK RIOT: The more significant Memorial Day (30 May) riot in Griffith Park was a direct, if unplanned, challenge by black youth to de facto segregation in Los Angeles public spaces. Although after the event the local Hearst paper, the Examiner, would sermonize that 'there is no segregation in the use of public facilities...[and] there is no Negro group of comparable size anywhere in the world, including the continent of Africa, which has available and unopposed the opportunities of the half million colored citizens of this region', this was nonsense.19 Faced with a radical shortage of parks and recreational facilities in south central Los Angeles, black residents, like Chicanos from the equally ghettoised Eastside, were systematically harassed by police when they attempted to freely enjoy Los Angeles's famed outdoor amenities. Only a small portion of the county beaches, for example, were integrated, and older folk recalled with bitterness how black residents had been burnt out of their homes by the Ku Klux Klan in several beach communities during the 1920s. Likewise Griffith Park, the city's largest public space, had an ugly history of racial exclusion which black youth had recently begun to challenge.
A major focus of contestation was the park's famed merry go round--a natural magnet to teenagers of all races. Blaming 'the publicity coming out of the South in connection with the Freedom Rides', Los Angeles police chief William Parker would later insinuate a black conspiracy to take over the merry go round area. 'We have been aware', he told the press, 'of a potential problem...for some time...[because] that part of the park has been pre-empted by Negroes for the last year'.20 On Memorial Day there was palpable tension as blacks arrived to find the LAPD deployed throughout the park. The riot erupted around 4pm when the carousel operator accused a teenager of boarding without paying. When the youth denied the allegation and refused to leave, he was wrestled to the ground by white police officers with billy clubs. The sight of the youth being violently pulled off the merry go round enraged the several thousand black picnickers in the vicinity. A teenage crowd followed the officers, surrounded the squad car and demanded the release of the prisoner. When he bolted from the car, all hell broke loose. One officer opened fire. The crowd replied with bottles. Five police were injured and forced to seek refuge in a park office. As LAPD reinforcements arrived with their sirens screaming, black teenagers shouted back, 'This is not Alabama'.
There were many cameras in the park that afternoon and images of the Griffith Park melee were soon reproduced around the world by the wire services. 'Aftermath of "Freedom Rides"?' was the caption that accompanied a sensational photograph in US News & World Report of hundreds of black youth rushing a policeman as he manhandled the original arrestee.22 There was a brief premonition in the media that as the freedom movement came northward into those ghettos of 'incomparable opportunity' (sic), non-violence might be left behind. Indeed Griffith Park symbolised the emergence of an audacious 'new breed', as James Brown would call them, ready to fight the police, if need be, to claim their civil rights. It was the first skirmish on the road to the Watts Rebellion four years later.
Yet while chief Parker was still fuming over 'Negro hoodlums', Gidget and 25,000 of her beach blanket friends were pelting sheriff's deputies and highway patrolmen with sand-packed beer cans. The weekend after the Griffith Park battle, Los Angeles' most popular rock and roll station invited listeners to a 'grunion derby' at Zuma Beach, near Malibu. KRLA expected about 2,000 to arrive on Saturday night--'instead 25,000, a conservative estimate, showed up'.23 County Parks and Recreation officials prevented the sponsors from erecting a planned dance floor and bandstand, so the huge crowd was left to organise its own amusements. At midnight, the official beach closing time, sheriffs ordered the revellers to leave. The response was a fierce fusillade of beer cans and bottles. Fifty additional patrol cars had to be called in before the crowd dispersed.24 Although KRLA disputed the hair raising accounts of mayhem and near rape promulgated by county officials, the general perception was that the deputies had narrowly prevented 'an uncontrolled riot of frightening proportions'. 'Only by great good fortune,' claimed the Los Angeles Examiner, 'the fracas did not result in fatalities'.
ROSEMEAD RIOTS: By any measure it was a busy night for the Los Angeles County sheriff's department. Some of the deputies speeding towards Zuma Beach were diverted instead to quell a second 'riot' in the blue collar San Gabriel Valley suburb of Rosemead. Several hundred teenagers--perhaps inflamed by radio reports about the Zuma melee--had gathered at the corner of Garvey and River Avenues and were reportedly stoning passing cars. Sheriffs arrested 47 juveniles on charges of rioting, battery and curfew violation. Meanwhile police in the south east industrial suburb of Bell were breaking up a street fight involving some 300 teenagers outside a wedding reception. Sheriff Peter Pitchess was at a loss to identify a root cause for these white riots. He could only observe that defiance of authority 'had moved beyond the point where blame can be placed solely on juveniles or adults, minority or majority groups'.
SAN GABRIEL RIOT: The next weekend (11 June) several deputies were slightly injured when they came to the aid of San Gabriel police attempting to enforce an archaic law against Sunday dancing at a local wedding celebration. Fifty officers battled with more than 300 teenagers and young adults outside a rented hall in Del Mar Avenue. At one point a policeman fired a warning shot in the air. Several of the rioters were charged with 'lynching' after they rescued a 17 year old from police custody. As temperatures of all kinds soared in July, the Los Angeles Times, conflating traditional street gangs and car clubs, worried that mobile teenage hoodlums now owned the streets.29 In response Sheriff Pitchess announced that his elite Special Enforcement Detail would be deployed to help regular deputies stringently enforce 10pm juvenile curfew ordinances throughout Los Angeles County. Local police departments followed suit in a massive regional crackdown on drive-ins, cruising strips, beach parking lots, and other nocturnal nodes of teenage culture.30
The law enforcement mobilisation seemed to work. After the lurid headlines of the early summer, Southern California survived without commotion a notorious Labour Day weekend that was celebrated across the east with fire hoses, police dogs and teargas. As headlines screamed 'Youth Mobs Riot In Five States; Hundreds Jailed', high school and college students ended the summer with major riots in Clermont (Indiana), Lake George (New York), Wildwood (New Jersey), Ocean City (Maryland), Falmouth and Hyannis (Massachusetts), and Hampton Beach (New Hampshire).31 But the Los Angeles area remained quiet...for a few days.
ALHAMBRA RIOT: October 61 - While some of their parents, on the advice of Leadabrand and Smith, were shopping for geiger counters, hundreds of carloads of teenagers were converging as they always did after Friday night football games (in this case 7 October) on their favorite Valley Boulevard drive-ins. Around midnight insults were exchanged beween the gloating victors (Monrovia High) and badly humiliated losers (Alhambra High), and the ensuing scuffle quickly grew into a 'whirlwind of fistfights that spread over a five block area', blocking traffic for four miles, east and west, along Valley Boulevard. From its mobile transmitter a local radio station broadcast a vivid blow by blow account of the donnybrook, which police claimed 'drew hundreds of others to the scene, all of them itching to join in the brawling'. While attempting to arrest a powerfully built youth whom they accused of 'mob raising', Alhambra police were themselves overwhelmed and roughed up. 'They were pushing and shoving,' reported the watch commander, 'attempting to grab guns from officers' holsters, jerking off their hats, jumping on their backs and trying to knock them to the ground.' Alhambra's desperate '999' (code for riot) appeal was answered by more than 100 police and sheriffs from other jurisdictions. They blockaded access to Valley Boulevard and ordered the estimated 1,000 to 1,200 rioters--including Chicano as well as white youth--to disperse. The common response was, 'Go to hell.' After an hour of further melee 31 young adults and 60 juveniles were in custody. It was officially characterised as 'one of the worst examples of civil disobedience' in Los Angeles County since the 1943 'Zoot suit' riots.
REBELS WITHOUT A CLUE: Symbols of authority could be more devastating to America's hopes for the future than rockets and the 100-megaton bomb'.16 The first explosion occurred--according to subversive schedule?--on 1 May. Although national news was dominated by the huge 'Splash Day' riot in Galveston, Texas, where 800 youth were arrested, Los Angeles County sheriffs had to mount an amphibious landing to save the island resort of Avalon from its own teenage hordes. The city's third annual 'Buccaneer Ball' celebration was disrupted by hundreds of rowdy high school and college students who 'littered streets with beer cans and wine bottles, climbed over cars, trampled flower planters, ripped fire hoses and extinguishers from hotel walls and sprayed corridors'. Panicky local authorities called in deputies from the mainland who eventually arrested 57 of the 'mob'. The next weekend in Long Beach, in a fracas variously described in the local press as a 'riot' or 'near riot', 400 youths, 'all in bathing suits, swarmed out of the Bayshore Recreation Area...they halted cars on Bayshore Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, tussled with drivers, yanked out ignition keys and flung water-filled balloons'. When the police arrived, they too were jeered and bombarded with water balloons. Later, in sentencing one of the participants, a flustered municipal judge complained, 'I wish we had a whipping post. The youth of this country has absolutely no respect for authority. I just don't understand it'.
GRIFFITH PARK RIOT: The more significant Memorial Day (30 May) riot in Griffith Park was a direct, if unplanned, challenge by black youth to de facto segregation in Los Angeles public spaces. Although after the event the local Hearst paper, the Examiner, would sermonize that 'there is no segregation in the use of public facilities...[and] there is no Negro group of comparable size anywhere in the world, including the continent of Africa, which has available and unopposed the opportunities of the half million colored citizens of this region', this was nonsense.19 Faced with a radical shortage of parks and recreational facilities in south central Los Angeles, black residents, like Chicanos from the equally ghettoised Eastside, were systematically harassed by police when they attempted to freely enjoy Los Angeles's famed outdoor amenities. Only a small portion of the county beaches, for example, were integrated, and older folk recalled with bitterness how black residents had been burnt out of their homes by the Ku Klux Klan in several beach communities during the 1920s. Likewise Griffith Park, the city's largest public space, had an ugly history of racial exclusion which black youth had recently begun to challenge.
A major focus of contestation was the park's famed merry go round--a natural magnet to teenagers of all races. Blaming 'the publicity coming out of the South in connection with the Freedom Rides', Los Angeles police chief William Parker would later insinuate a black conspiracy to take over the merry go round area. 'We have been aware', he told the press, 'of a potential problem...for some time...[because] that part of the park has been pre-empted by Negroes for the last year'.20 On Memorial Day there was palpable tension as blacks arrived to find the LAPD deployed throughout the park. The riot erupted around 4pm when the carousel operator accused a teenager of boarding without paying. When the youth denied the allegation and refused to leave, he was wrestled to the ground by white police officers with billy clubs. The sight of the youth being violently pulled off the merry go round enraged the several thousand black picnickers in the vicinity. A teenage crowd followed the officers, surrounded the squad car and demanded the release of the prisoner. When he bolted from the car, all hell broke loose. One officer opened fire. The crowd replied with bottles. Five police were injured and forced to seek refuge in a park office. As LAPD reinforcements arrived with their sirens screaming, black teenagers shouted back, 'This is not Alabama'.
There were many cameras in the park that afternoon and images of the Griffith Park melee were soon reproduced around the world by the wire services. 'Aftermath of "Freedom Rides"?' was the caption that accompanied a sensational photograph in US News & World Report of hundreds of black youth rushing a policeman as he manhandled the original arrestee.22 There was a brief premonition in the media that as the freedom movement came northward into those ghettos of 'incomparable opportunity' (sic), non-violence might be left behind. Indeed Griffith Park symbolised the emergence of an audacious 'new breed', as James Brown would call them, ready to fight the police, if need be, to claim their civil rights. It was the first skirmish on the road to the Watts Rebellion four years later.
Yet while chief Parker was still fuming over 'Negro hoodlums', Gidget and 25,000 of her beach blanket friends were pelting sheriff's deputies and highway patrolmen with sand-packed beer cans. The weekend after the Griffith Park battle, Los Angeles' most popular rock and roll station invited listeners to a 'grunion derby' at Zuma Beach, near Malibu. KRLA expected about 2,000 to arrive on Saturday night--'instead 25,000, a conservative estimate, showed up'.23 County Parks and Recreation officials prevented the sponsors from erecting a planned dance floor and bandstand, so the huge crowd was left to organise its own amusements. At midnight, the official beach closing time, sheriffs ordered the revellers to leave. The response was a fierce fusillade of beer cans and bottles. Fifty additional patrol cars had to be called in before the crowd dispersed.24 Although KRLA disputed the hair raising accounts of mayhem and near rape promulgated by county officials, the general perception was that the deputies had narrowly prevented 'an uncontrolled riot of frightening proportions'. 'Only by great good fortune,' claimed the Los Angeles Examiner, 'the fracas did not result in fatalities'.
ROSEMEAD RIOTS: By any measure it was a busy night for the Los Angeles County sheriff's department. Some of the deputies speeding towards Zuma Beach were diverted instead to quell a second 'riot' in the blue collar San Gabriel Valley suburb of Rosemead. Several hundred teenagers--perhaps inflamed by radio reports about the Zuma melee--had gathered at the corner of Garvey and River Avenues and were reportedly stoning passing cars. Sheriffs arrested 47 juveniles on charges of rioting, battery and curfew violation. Meanwhile police in the south east industrial suburb of Bell were breaking up a street fight involving some 300 teenagers outside a wedding reception. Sheriff Peter Pitchess was at a loss to identify a root cause for these white riots. He could only observe that defiance of authority 'had moved beyond the point where blame can be placed solely on juveniles or adults, minority or majority groups'.
SAN GABRIEL RIOT: The next weekend (11 June) several deputies were slightly injured when they came to the aid of San Gabriel police attempting to enforce an archaic law against Sunday dancing at a local wedding celebration. Fifty officers battled with more than 300 teenagers and young adults outside a rented hall in Del Mar Avenue. At one point a policeman fired a warning shot in the air. Several of the rioters were charged with 'lynching' after they rescued a 17 year old from police custody. As temperatures of all kinds soared in July, the Los Angeles Times, conflating traditional street gangs and car clubs, worried that mobile teenage hoodlums now owned the streets.29 In response Sheriff Pitchess announced that his elite Special Enforcement Detail would be deployed to help regular deputies stringently enforce 10pm juvenile curfew ordinances throughout Los Angeles County. Local police departments followed suit in a massive regional crackdown on drive-ins, cruising strips, beach parking lots, and other nocturnal nodes of teenage culture.30
The law enforcement mobilisation seemed to work. After the lurid headlines of the early summer, Southern California survived without commotion a notorious Labour Day weekend that was celebrated across the east with fire hoses, police dogs and teargas. As headlines screamed 'Youth Mobs Riot In Five States; Hundreds Jailed', high school and college students ended the summer with major riots in Clermont (Indiana), Lake George (New York), Wildwood (New Jersey), Ocean City (Maryland), Falmouth and Hyannis (Massachusetts), and Hampton Beach (New Hampshire).31 But the Los Angeles area remained quiet...for a few days.
ALHAMBRA RIOT: October 61 - While some of their parents, on the advice of Leadabrand and Smith, were shopping for geiger counters, hundreds of carloads of teenagers were converging as they always did after Friday night football games (in this case 7 October) on their favorite Valley Boulevard drive-ins. Around midnight insults were exchanged beween the gloating victors (Monrovia High) and badly humiliated losers (Alhambra High), and the ensuing scuffle quickly grew into a 'whirlwind of fistfights that spread over a five block area', blocking traffic for four miles, east and west, along Valley Boulevard. From its mobile transmitter a local radio station broadcast a vivid blow by blow account of the donnybrook, which police claimed 'drew hundreds of others to the scene, all of them itching to join in the brawling'. While attempting to arrest a powerfully built youth whom they accused of 'mob raising', Alhambra police were themselves overwhelmed and roughed up. 'They were pushing and shoving,' reported the watch commander, 'attempting to grab guns from officers' holsters, jerking off their hats, jumping on their backs and trying to knock them to the ground.' Alhambra's desperate '999' (code for riot) appeal was answered by more than 100 police and sheriffs from other jurisdictions. They blockaded access to Valley Boulevard and ordered the estimated 1,000 to 1,200 rioters--including Chicano as well as white youth--to disperse. The common response was, 'Go to hell.' After an hour of further melee 31 young adults and 60 juveniles were in custody. It was officially characterised as 'one of the worst examples of civil disobedience' in Los Angeles County since the 1943 'Zoot suit' riots.
FROM SUNSET SANCTUARY TO BATTLEGROUND
The story of Sunset nightlife preceeds the 60s, but Hollywood entertainers abandoned the strip for a lively mobbed up Vegas scene, leaving their rock and roll children to take over where they had left off. At some point in the mid 1960s, the kids started hanging around on Sunset Strip, which at the time was still home to many of the restaurants that once boasted famous Hollywood patrons. To curtail the invading counterculture, the city imposed a strict curfew, and cops clashed with longhairs in a series of small riots that galvanized the hippies rather than dispersed them.
The skirmishes inspired Buffalo Springfield to write "For What It's Worth" and Four-Leaf Productions to bankroll the teensploitation flick Riot on Sunset Strip, featuring a theme song by local group the Standells. It begins mundanely enough: "I'm going down to the Strip tonight, I'm not on a stay-home trip tonight," sings drummer Dick Dodd over Tony Valentino's snarling guitar lick. But the song's hard beat is more of a billy-club swing than a hip shake, and the lyrics become increasingly serious, as he laments the Strip has become "just a place for black-and-white cars to race. It's causin' a riot!" More pointed and angry than the square film that bears it title, the song depicts Los Angeles as a tensed city on the brink of chaos and violence, and the Standells could just as well have been singing about Watts or any of the race riots that made the curfew clashes seem polite and placid by comparison.
In 1965 the County reluctantly acceded to club-owners' and record companies' pleas and created a tiered licensing system that allowed 18-to-21-year-olds inside clubs where alcohol was served, while creating special liquor-less music venues for younger 15-to-18-year-olds. The youth club scene promptly exploded. From the moment the Byrds debuted at Ciro’s on March 26th 1965 — with Bob Dylan joining them on stage — through the demonstrations of November 1966, Sunset Strip nightclubs introduced the Doors, Buffalo Springfield the Mothers of Invention, and so many more.
This legendary Battle of the Strip, 1966–1968, was only the most celebrated episode in the struggle of teenagers of all colours during the 1960s and 1970s to create their own realm of freedom and carnivalesque sociality within the Southern California night. There were other memorable contests with business and police over Griffith Park 'love-ins', beach parties, interracial concerts, counter-cultural neighbourhoods (like Venice Beach), 'head' shopping districts (like L.A.'s Haight-Ashbury on Fairfax), cruising strips (Whittier, Hollywood, and Van Nuys boulevards), street-racing locales, and the myriad local hangouts where kids quietly or brazenly defied parents, police, and curfews.
The skirmishes inspired Buffalo Springfield to write "For What It's Worth" and Four-Leaf Productions to bankroll the teensploitation flick Riot on Sunset Strip, featuring a theme song by local group the Standells. It begins mundanely enough: "I'm going down to the Strip tonight, I'm not on a stay-home trip tonight," sings drummer Dick Dodd over Tony Valentino's snarling guitar lick. But the song's hard beat is more of a billy-club swing than a hip shake, and the lyrics become increasingly serious, as he laments the Strip has become "just a place for black-and-white cars to race. It's causin' a riot!" More pointed and angry than the square film that bears it title, the song depicts Los Angeles as a tensed city on the brink of chaos and violence, and the Standells could just as well have been singing about Watts or any of the race riots that made the curfew clashes seem polite and placid by comparison.
In 1965 the County reluctantly acceded to club-owners' and record companies' pleas and created a tiered licensing system that allowed 18-to-21-year-olds inside clubs where alcohol was served, while creating special liquor-less music venues for younger 15-to-18-year-olds. The youth club scene promptly exploded. From the moment the Byrds debuted at Ciro’s on March 26th 1965 — with Bob Dylan joining them on stage — through the demonstrations of November 1966, Sunset Strip nightclubs introduced the Doors, Buffalo Springfield the Mothers of Invention, and so many more.
This legendary Battle of the Strip, 1966–1968, was only the most celebrated episode in the struggle of teenagers of all colours during the 1960s and 1970s to create their own realm of freedom and carnivalesque sociality within the Southern California night. There were other memorable contests with business and police over Griffith Park 'love-ins', beach parties, interracial concerts, counter-cultural neighbourhoods (like Venice Beach), 'head' shopping districts (like L.A.'s Haight-Ashbury on Fairfax), cruising strips (Whittier, Hollywood, and Van Nuys boulevards), street-racing locales, and the myriad local hangouts where kids quietly or brazenly defied parents, police, and curfews.
THE HIPPIE RIOTS:
Riot on Sunset Strip - "For What It's Worth"
The Sunset Strip curfew riots, also known as the "hippie riots," were a series of clashes that took place between police and young people on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California, beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing through the early 1970s. “Riot on the Sunset Strip” is a masterwork of the teen exploitation genre. Released in 1967, the film was made within six weeks. Imagine what it must have been like to be hanging out in Los Angeles - the Sunset Strip during the mid 1960's. Forget about the movie stars, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood – L.A. was a hot bed for Pop music, art, and culture. The scene appeared in an almost over night fashion. The landing of "The Beatles", "The Rolling Stones" and the British Invasion certainly made all of this a reality. But as quickly as it appeared it soon vanished with the riots of 1966 and the gravitating of the scene to San Francisco and the "Summer of Love".
One such riot in the summer of 1966 provided the basis for the teen exploitation film, Riot on Sunset Strip — as well as for the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth", which is often mistakenly labelled an antiwar protest song, "Plastic People" by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention from their second album Absolutely Free, and The Monkees song "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, from their fourth album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Gangsters, nightclubs and rock 'n' roll make up much of the Sunset Strip's colorful history -- along with a little-remembered tussle in 1966 that became known as "the Sunset Strip riots." The melee erupted as young rock fans were protesting efforts to enforce a 10 p.m. curfew and to close nightclubs that catered to them -- including Pandora's Box, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards.
The confrontation with police also inspired musician Stephen Stills to write "For What It's Worth," released two months later by Stills and the band he was in, Buffalo Springfield. "Riot is a ridiculous name," he said in an interview. "It was a funeral for Pandora's Box. But it looked like a revolution." The club, painted purple and gold, was perched on a triangular traffic island in the middle of the Strip. It drew a crowd of mostly clean-cut teenagers and twentysomethings wearing pullover sweaters and miniskirts. Ensuing traffic jams annoyed residents and business owners, who pressured the city and county to get rid of the kids, the clubs and the congestion. It's unclear from Times files whether Pandora's Box or other clubs had been closed by the time the protests began. But young rock fans interpreted efforts to enforce curfew and loitering laws as an infringement on their civil rights.
On Nov. 12, 1966, fliers were distributed along the Strip inviting people to demonstrate. Hours before the protest, "One of L.A's rock 'n' roll radio stations made an announcement that there would be a rally at Pandora's Box and cautioned people to tread carefully," wrote Domenic Priore, author of the 2007 book "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood." As many as 1,000 people turned out, along with such celebrities as Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda. "[Nicholson] just showed up to see what was happening," said lifelong Sunset Strip denizen and Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker. Wanamaker played drums in a band called Mike and the Mad Men, which sometimes performed at Pandora's Box, and was there that night as an observer.
"Everyone called them hippies just because some had long hair," Wanamaker said. "But they weren't the flower-power types from San Francisco, just rock 'n' roll fans, mostly students." The event began peacefully. Protesters sat on the Strip blocking traffic, holding hands and singing. Trouble began when a car full of off-duty Marines got into a fender-bender. The Marines got out of their car and at least one punched the driver of the other car, The Times reported. Fighting spread. Police and sheriffs' deputies closed off part of the Strip and ordered everyone to leave, but some protesters ran amok.
They rocked a city bus until passengers and the driver got out. Then they knocked out the windows, dented the roof with an uprooted street sign and let the air out of the tires. One youth tried unsuccessfully to drop lighted matches into the fuel tank, The Times reported. He was booked for attempted arson. Protesters hurled rocks and bottles and smashed storefront windows and car windshields. Fonda, son of actor Henry Fonda, was handcuffed. But when he said he was merely filming the melee, he was released without charges. The unrest continued the next night and off and on throughout November and December. Some clubs shut down within weeks. "These kids weren't looking for trouble; they were simply going out to see their favorite bands and hang out with friends," Priore wrote.
Demonstrators carried signs that read, "We're Your Children! Don't Destroy Us" and "Ban the Billyclub." Mayor Sam Yorty showed up and invited the protesters to City Hall. Los Angeles County Supervisor Ernest Debs called the youths "misguided hoodlums." Sonny and Cher, who got their start on the Strip as Caesar and Cleo, made an appearance in front of Pandora's Box in December. The ensuing publicity got them kicked off the Rose Parade float they were supposed to ride two weeks later. The float sponsor, the City of Monterey Park, figured this was not the image it wanted to show the world. "I admit at first we were somewhat hurt, shocked and a little upset," Sonny Bono said at a news conference after the duo was bumped. "They never even gave us the courtesy of notifying us personally. I heard it on the news."
Bono denied being part of the protest. "[The demonstrators] saw I was there and I told them to be peaceful, that's all," he said. On Christmas Day, Pandora's Box reopened for one night only, according to Priore. There, Stills first publicly performed "For What It's Worth." The Los Angeles City Council condemned Pandora's Box, claiming that it had to be demolished to realign the streets. On Aug. 3, 1967, a wrecking ball turned Pandora's into rubble. "Hippies Pout, Politicians Cheer," The Times reported. No sign of the triangle occupied by Pandora's remains today; it was eliminated by the street rerouting. As for Stills' song, many fans saw it as an antiwar anthem, but he says that was only part of the equation. "It was really four different things intertwined, including the war and the absurdity of what was happening on the Strip," he said in the interview. "But I knew I had to skedaddle and headed back to Topanga, where I wrote my song in about 15 minutes. For me, there was no riot. It was basically a cop dance." http://articles.latimes.com/2007/aug/05/local/me-then5/2
1967 riots on the Strip; the culminating protest in 1968. So what follows is an alloy of research and memory. It is also the first, small installment in a projected history of L.A.'s countercultures and protestors, tentatively titled Setting the Night on Fire.
A MOMENT IN ROCK-AND-ROLL DREAMTIME: Saturday night on Sunset Strip in early December 1967. Along that famed twelve blocks of unincorporated Los Angeles County between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the neon firmament blazes new names like the Byrds, the Doors, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, and Buffalo Springfield. But the real spectacle is out on the street: 2,000 demonstrators peacefully snaking their way west along Sunset into the county Strip then circling back to their starting point at Pandora's Box Coffeehouse (8180 Sunset) just inside the Los Angeles city limits. On one side of the boundary are several hundred riot-helmeted sheriff's deputies; on the other side, an equal number of Los Angeles police, fidgeting nervously with their nightsticks as if they were confronting angry strikers or an unruly mob instead of friendly 15-year-olds with long hair and acne.
The demonstrators — relentlessly caricatured as 'Striplings', 'teeny boppers', and even 'hoodlums' by hostile cops and their allies in the daily press — are a cross-section of white teenage Southern California. Movie brats from the gilded hills above the Strip mingle with autoworkers' daughters from Van Nuys and truck drivers' sons from Pomona. There are some college students and a few uncomfortable crew-cut servicemen, but most are high-school age, 15 to 18, and, thus, technically liable to arrest after 10 p.m. when dual county and city juvenile curfews take effect. Kids carry hand-lettered signs that read "Stop Blue Fascism!," "Abolish the Curfew," and "Free the Strip."
The demonstration has been called (but scarcely organized) by RAMCON (the Right of Assembly and Movement Committee), headquartered in the Fifth Estate Coffeehouse (8226 Sunset). The coffee house's manager, Al Mitchell, acts as the adult spokesman for the high-school students and teenage runaways who cluster around the Fifth Estate and Pandora's Box, a block away. This is the fifth in a series of weekend demonstrations — perhaps more accurately 'happenings' — that have protested a year-long campaign by sheriffs and police to clear the Strip of 'loitering' teenagers. In response to complaints from local restaurateurs and landowners, the cops trawl nightly after the early curfew, searching for under-18s. They target primarily the longhaired kids in beads, granny glasses, and tie-dyed shirts.
It became the custom to humiliate curfew-violaters with insults and obscene jokes, pull their long hair, brace them against squad cars, and even choke them with billy clubs, before hauling them down to the West Hollywood Sheriffs or Hollywood Police stations where they are held until their angry parents pick them up. This evening (10 December), however, has so far passed off peacefully, with more smiles exchanged than insults or blows. The high point was the appearance of Sonny and Cher, dressed like high-fashion Inuit in huge fleece parkas, waving support to adoring kids. (Later, after photographs have appeared on front pages across the world, the city of Monterey Park will ban Sonny and Cher from their Rose Parade float for this gesture of solidarity with "rioting teenyboppers.")
The Strip grew and reinvented itself, building on its own mythic aura, decade after decade, from the supper clubs of the '40s to the nightclubs of the '50s to the rock clubs of the '60s. The purest metaphor of L.A., it was a mile of sex and self-invention and rampaging capitalism.
SUNSET STRIP AS MEMORY LANE
By S.L. Duff (1988 - Music Connection) During the course of banging out club data, issue 'pon issue, I have had the opportunity to come in contact with some pretty interesting characters. Among my favorites is Coconut Teaszer booker Len Fagan. Oftentimes, when I call him to get news about the Teaszer, or he calls me with something he's genuinely excited about (y'see, Len is one of the few bookers to go out of his way to make my job a little easier), we end up shootin' the proverbial shit about this and that. Local bands, the club scene, music in general---all come into our conversation.
After rapping with him for a few months, I discovered that Len is no Johnny-come-lately to the L.A. club scene; in fact, his experiences on the ever-changing circuit date back to the sixties, when Fagan was a rabid rock fan and an inspiring drummer who logged time in several locally prominent bands. I found his memory for details, names, and incidents to be impeccable, and in most cases better than my recollection of last week. Len also remembers the geographical layout of the late sixties/early seventies club scene, so I asked him what he thought of hopping in a vehicle "cruisin' Sunset" with yours truly, my trusty Panasonic interview recorder, and the Club Data staff driver, letting his recollections roll onto tape as we drove by the old haunts. He loved the idea, and we finally got around to taking the ride on July 16th. The following are some of the highlights of our trip, and though a lot of Len's recollections lie on the cutting floor due to space limitations, this should nonetheless give you some idea of the excitement of those times.
This right here (the Aquarius Theater) was originally the Hullabaloo Club and before that in the 50s, The Moulin Rouge. The hip thing about it was, you could be 15-and-a-half and get in. They'd have everything from lame bands like the Lollipop Shop right up through The Doors. Love used to play here, then they'd play another concert in the Valley the same night. After the Hullabaloo, it changed to the Aquarius Theater. New owners took it over and it became a much hipper place; their posters were round instead of square. When it was the Hullabaloo, on weekends after hours from 1:00 am until sunrise, they'd have new bands get up. You wouldn't get paid, but they'd have a marathon of bands get up, and it was a big deal to get on that show. The Allman Brothers played there when they were the Hourglass.|
(We pull up in front of the current Gaslight.) This, for me, is where it all started. The first place I ever came to myself---and I was living in the Valley at the time---was right here to see Love. It was the summer of '65. I couldn't even get in the club---I used to sit here (on the sidewalk) and listen. Love would play the whole night, and it was completely packed. A few years later, the Iron Butterfly moved in and slept in this room (pointing upstairs over the entrance). They moved up here from San Diego, auditioned, and the club loved 'em and let 'em live in the room upstairs. They played here for months and would pack this place. It was called Bido Lido's back then. I saw the Seeds here, when the first album came out, before "Pushin' Too Hard" was a hit. The Doors played here, so did Spirit. ......I could go on and on. Look how tiny it is! A band's gig here would usually be for a week straight, and if you were incredible, they'd hold you over.
I was in a group called the Rainmakers; we had a week-long gig here, and after the second or third night, our guitar player got sick and couldn't do it. I had met Vincent Furnier outside the club here, and he was a real nice guy. At the last minute, I called up Vince, and his band the Nazz filled in for us. (Furnier and the Nazz would both later change their names to Alice Cooper.) The big break for them was, they met the booker of the Cheetah Club down in Venice, who fell in love with them, and that's where they took up residency, and then they met (manager) Shep Gordon. Bido Lido's went out of business around the end of '67, early '68.
The club we're coming to now was called the Brave New World. Bido Lido's and Brave New World were the smaller East Hollywood clubs where the bands would kinda start out. We would usually park at one of the clubs, and on any given night, walk between one and the next. The Brave New World was owned by a guy named Alan as I remember. Alan was also in the ......I don't know how to say it.....the "X-rated girl" industry. He had something to do with naked women----remember, I'm young at the time! The club was a members only club, so to speak---that's how they got around some kind of licensing trip. If they knew you weren't a cop, they'd let you in. This is where Love first played---probably late '64---right up there at 1644 and 1642 Cherokee. The Stones were in town recording at RCA, and they went here to check out a group called the Bees---that was a big night. The Mothers played here before they were called the Mothers of Invention; if I remember, they spelled the name "Muthers." Instead of a marquee, they had a flag on a flagpole with the band's name.
We're now in front of the Lingerie, which I first remember being the Red Velvet. They had a lot of black and soul groups. The Knickerbockers were the band that came out of here. This was a place that had your short-haired people, your lamer crowd.
Down there, at Santa Monica and Highland, was a club that not many people are goin' to remember; it was in a big old warehouse. It was a gay club, mainly for lesbians, and a lot of the bigger bands would take gigs here, right next to the Bekins warehouse. The gig would start around 11 or 12 at night, and we'd take those gigs, 'cause they paid well. The Knack (a sixties teenybop band signed to a singles deal with---surprise---Capitol) and the Sons of Adam, who were a monster band, used to play there. Don't even remember the name of the place. They finally shut them down and they moved into the Valley on Ventura Boulevard.
Here, at 7563 Sunset, was Ooh Poo Pah Do's, which had live music; that was in '72. And then Rodney (Bingenheimer) took it over and made it a disco, with English beer and English records. That was '73 or '74, and it was big for a couple of years.
Here, between Stanley and Curson, was a big club called The Experience. They had food here and ice-cream. This club was famous as a jam hangout---musicians who were in town playing bigger concerts elsewhere would come here after their shows or on the nights they were off to jam. I've been hoping to make the Teaszer conducive to impromptu jams, but it seems musicians today just aren't into jamming. A shame. Hendrix jammed here all the time. There were always famous celebrities in the audience. There was a big picture of Hendrix (on the exterior front wall of the club), and his mouth was the front door---you'd walk in through his mouth!
The big summer for The Experience was '69; it was probably here for a year-and-a-half, two years, maybe. I remember jamming here with some of the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Blues Magoos played here on their way down; Alice Cooper played here on their way up---got booed off the stage.
(Sitting in the parking lot of the Teaszer at Crescent Heights.) The hippies hangout was right around here---it started from here down to Gazzarri’s. Pandora's Box was right where that middle island was (in the middle of the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset). That wasn't a real prestigious place to play. It was right on the beginning of the Strip, it was a purple building, and it was right there in the middle---a pretty weird location. You could be underage and still get in there. To be honest with you, I didn't hang out there at all---I may have been in that club once. There was something about it that, in my mind, wasn't hip.
We're at the Comedy Store now, which was first called Ciro's. The Byrds used to play here---this is where they really took off. Bob Dylan came in here after hearing about the Byrds playing his material electrically and gave his endorsement to them, which was a big boost to them making it. Before that, Ciro's was a big hangout for Bogie and all that in the Forties. They later changed the name from Ciro's to It's Boss. Ciro's was over 21; at It's Boss, you could be fifteen-and-a-half. Ciro's was definitely a big, big prestige club. It was open at least to '73 '74, but it was mainly a force in the late Sixties. (As a cop pulls up to give out parking tickets, we quietly pull away.)
Speaking of cops, back in '64, '65, '66, when we used to drive down the street or the Strip, I used to smoke non-filter cigarettes. You had to be careful to have the brand on your mouthside; the cops were so lame that if they caught you with a cigarette with no filter and no name on it, they assumes you were smoking pot. This was when acid was still legal, by the way.
One such riot in the summer of 1966 provided the basis for the teen exploitation film, Riot on Sunset Strip — as well as for the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth", which is often mistakenly labelled an antiwar protest song, "Plastic People" by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention from their second album Absolutely Free, and The Monkees song "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, from their fourth album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Gangsters, nightclubs and rock 'n' roll make up much of the Sunset Strip's colorful history -- along with a little-remembered tussle in 1966 that became known as "the Sunset Strip riots." The melee erupted as young rock fans were protesting efforts to enforce a 10 p.m. curfew and to close nightclubs that catered to them -- including Pandora's Box, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards.
The confrontation with police also inspired musician Stephen Stills to write "For What It's Worth," released two months later by Stills and the band he was in, Buffalo Springfield. "Riot is a ridiculous name," he said in an interview. "It was a funeral for Pandora's Box. But it looked like a revolution." The club, painted purple and gold, was perched on a triangular traffic island in the middle of the Strip. It drew a crowd of mostly clean-cut teenagers and twentysomethings wearing pullover sweaters and miniskirts. Ensuing traffic jams annoyed residents and business owners, who pressured the city and county to get rid of the kids, the clubs and the congestion. It's unclear from Times files whether Pandora's Box or other clubs had been closed by the time the protests began. But young rock fans interpreted efforts to enforce curfew and loitering laws as an infringement on their civil rights.
On Nov. 12, 1966, fliers were distributed along the Strip inviting people to demonstrate. Hours before the protest, "One of L.A's rock 'n' roll radio stations made an announcement that there would be a rally at Pandora's Box and cautioned people to tread carefully," wrote Domenic Priore, author of the 2007 book "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood." As many as 1,000 people turned out, along with such celebrities as Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda. "[Nicholson] just showed up to see what was happening," said lifelong Sunset Strip denizen and Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker. Wanamaker played drums in a band called Mike and the Mad Men, which sometimes performed at Pandora's Box, and was there that night as an observer.
"Everyone called them hippies just because some had long hair," Wanamaker said. "But they weren't the flower-power types from San Francisco, just rock 'n' roll fans, mostly students." The event began peacefully. Protesters sat on the Strip blocking traffic, holding hands and singing. Trouble began when a car full of off-duty Marines got into a fender-bender. The Marines got out of their car and at least one punched the driver of the other car, The Times reported. Fighting spread. Police and sheriffs' deputies closed off part of the Strip and ordered everyone to leave, but some protesters ran amok.
They rocked a city bus until passengers and the driver got out. Then they knocked out the windows, dented the roof with an uprooted street sign and let the air out of the tires. One youth tried unsuccessfully to drop lighted matches into the fuel tank, The Times reported. He was booked for attempted arson. Protesters hurled rocks and bottles and smashed storefront windows and car windshields. Fonda, son of actor Henry Fonda, was handcuffed. But when he said he was merely filming the melee, he was released without charges. The unrest continued the next night and off and on throughout November and December. Some clubs shut down within weeks. "These kids weren't looking for trouble; they were simply going out to see their favorite bands and hang out with friends," Priore wrote.
Demonstrators carried signs that read, "We're Your Children! Don't Destroy Us" and "Ban the Billyclub." Mayor Sam Yorty showed up and invited the protesters to City Hall. Los Angeles County Supervisor Ernest Debs called the youths "misguided hoodlums." Sonny and Cher, who got their start on the Strip as Caesar and Cleo, made an appearance in front of Pandora's Box in December. The ensuing publicity got them kicked off the Rose Parade float they were supposed to ride two weeks later. The float sponsor, the City of Monterey Park, figured this was not the image it wanted to show the world. "I admit at first we were somewhat hurt, shocked and a little upset," Sonny Bono said at a news conference after the duo was bumped. "They never even gave us the courtesy of notifying us personally. I heard it on the news."
Bono denied being part of the protest. "[The demonstrators] saw I was there and I told them to be peaceful, that's all," he said. On Christmas Day, Pandora's Box reopened for one night only, according to Priore. There, Stills first publicly performed "For What It's Worth." The Los Angeles City Council condemned Pandora's Box, claiming that it had to be demolished to realign the streets. On Aug. 3, 1967, a wrecking ball turned Pandora's into rubble. "Hippies Pout, Politicians Cheer," The Times reported. No sign of the triangle occupied by Pandora's remains today; it was eliminated by the street rerouting. As for Stills' song, many fans saw it as an antiwar anthem, but he says that was only part of the equation. "It was really four different things intertwined, including the war and the absurdity of what was happening on the Strip," he said in the interview. "But I knew I had to skedaddle and headed back to Topanga, where I wrote my song in about 15 minutes. For me, there was no riot. It was basically a cop dance." http://articles.latimes.com/2007/aug/05/local/me-then5/2
1967 riots on the Strip; the culminating protest in 1968. So what follows is an alloy of research and memory. It is also the first, small installment in a projected history of L.A.'s countercultures and protestors, tentatively titled Setting the Night on Fire.
A MOMENT IN ROCK-AND-ROLL DREAMTIME: Saturday night on Sunset Strip in early December 1967. Along that famed twelve blocks of unincorporated Los Angeles County between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the neon firmament blazes new names like the Byrds, the Doors, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, and Buffalo Springfield. But the real spectacle is out on the street: 2,000 demonstrators peacefully snaking their way west along Sunset into the county Strip then circling back to their starting point at Pandora's Box Coffeehouse (8180 Sunset) just inside the Los Angeles city limits. On one side of the boundary are several hundred riot-helmeted sheriff's deputies; on the other side, an equal number of Los Angeles police, fidgeting nervously with their nightsticks as if they were confronting angry strikers or an unruly mob instead of friendly 15-year-olds with long hair and acne.
The demonstrators — relentlessly caricatured as 'Striplings', 'teeny boppers', and even 'hoodlums' by hostile cops and their allies in the daily press — are a cross-section of white teenage Southern California. Movie brats from the gilded hills above the Strip mingle with autoworkers' daughters from Van Nuys and truck drivers' sons from Pomona. There are some college students and a few uncomfortable crew-cut servicemen, but most are high-school age, 15 to 18, and, thus, technically liable to arrest after 10 p.m. when dual county and city juvenile curfews take effect. Kids carry hand-lettered signs that read "Stop Blue Fascism!," "Abolish the Curfew," and "Free the Strip."
The demonstration has been called (but scarcely organized) by RAMCON (the Right of Assembly and Movement Committee), headquartered in the Fifth Estate Coffeehouse (8226 Sunset). The coffee house's manager, Al Mitchell, acts as the adult spokesman for the high-school students and teenage runaways who cluster around the Fifth Estate and Pandora's Box, a block away. This is the fifth in a series of weekend demonstrations — perhaps more accurately 'happenings' — that have protested a year-long campaign by sheriffs and police to clear the Strip of 'loitering' teenagers. In response to complaints from local restaurateurs and landowners, the cops trawl nightly after the early curfew, searching for under-18s. They target primarily the longhaired kids in beads, granny glasses, and tie-dyed shirts.
It became the custom to humiliate curfew-violaters with insults and obscene jokes, pull their long hair, brace them against squad cars, and even choke them with billy clubs, before hauling them down to the West Hollywood Sheriffs or Hollywood Police stations where they are held until their angry parents pick them up. This evening (10 December), however, has so far passed off peacefully, with more smiles exchanged than insults or blows. The high point was the appearance of Sonny and Cher, dressed like high-fashion Inuit in huge fleece parkas, waving support to adoring kids. (Later, after photographs have appeared on front pages across the world, the city of Monterey Park will ban Sonny and Cher from their Rose Parade float for this gesture of solidarity with "rioting teenyboppers.")
The Strip grew and reinvented itself, building on its own mythic aura, decade after decade, from the supper clubs of the '40s to the nightclubs of the '50s to the rock clubs of the '60s. The purest metaphor of L.A., it was a mile of sex and self-invention and rampaging capitalism.
SUNSET STRIP AS MEMORY LANE
By S.L. Duff (1988 - Music Connection) During the course of banging out club data, issue 'pon issue, I have had the opportunity to come in contact with some pretty interesting characters. Among my favorites is Coconut Teaszer booker Len Fagan. Oftentimes, when I call him to get news about the Teaszer, or he calls me with something he's genuinely excited about (y'see, Len is one of the few bookers to go out of his way to make my job a little easier), we end up shootin' the proverbial shit about this and that. Local bands, the club scene, music in general---all come into our conversation.
After rapping with him for a few months, I discovered that Len is no Johnny-come-lately to the L.A. club scene; in fact, his experiences on the ever-changing circuit date back to the sixties, when Fagan was a rabid rock fan and an inspiring drummer who logged time in several locally prominent bands. I found his memory for details, names, and incidents to be impeccable, and in most cases better than my recollection of last week. Len also remembers the geographical layout of the late sixties/early seventies club scene, so I asked him what he thought of hopping in a vehicle "cruisin' Sunset" with yours truly, my trusty Panasonic interview recorder, and the Club Data staff driver, letting his recollections roll onto tape as we drove by the old haunts. He loved the idea, and we finally got around to taking the ride on July 16th. The following are some of the highlights of our trip, and though a lot of Len's recollections lie on the cutting floor due to space limitations, this should nonetheless give you some idea of the excitement of those times.
This right here (the Aquarius Theater) was originally the Hullabaloo Club and before that in the 50s, The Moulin Rouge. The hip thing about it was, you could be 15-and-a-half and get in. They'd have everything from lame bands like the Lollipop Shop right up through The Doors. Love used to play here, then they'd play another concert in the Valley the same night. After the Hullabaloo, it changed to the Aquarius Theater. New owners took it over and it became a much hipper place; their posters were round instead of square. When it was the Hullabaloo, on weekends after hours from 1:00 am until sunrise, they'd have new bands get up. You wouldn't get paid, but they'd have a marathon of bands get up, and it was a big deal to get on that show. The Allman Brothers played there when they were the Hourglass.|
(We pull up in front of the current Gaslight.) This, for me, is where it all started. The first place I ever came to myself---and I was living in the Valley at the time---was right here to see Love. It was the summer of '65. I couldn't even get in the club---I used to sit here (on the sidewalk) and listen. Love would play the whole night, and it was completely packed. A few years later, the Iron Butterfly moved in and slept in this room (pointing upstairs over the entrance). They moved up here from San Diego, auditioned, and the club loved 'em and let 'em live in the room upstairs. They played here for months and would pack this place. It was called Bido Lido's back then. I saw the Seeds here, when the first album came out, before "Pushin' Too Hard" was a hit. The Doors played here, so did Spirit. ......I could go on and on. Look how tiny it is! A band's gig here would usually be for a week straight, and if you were incredible, they'd hold you over.
I was in a group called the Rainmakers; we had a week-long gig here, and after the second or third night, our guitar player got sick and couldn't do it. I had met Vincent Furnier outside the club here, and he was a real nice guy. At the last minute, I called up Vince, and his band the Nazz filled in for us. (Furnier and the Nazz would both later change their names to Alice Cooper.) The big break for them was, they met the booker of the Cheetah Club down in Venice, who fell in love with them, and that's where they took up residency, and then they met (manager) Shep Gordon. Bido Lido's went out of business around the end of '67, early '68.
The club we're coming to now was called the Brave New World. Bido Lido's and Brave New World were the smaller East Hollywood clubs where the bands would kinda start out. We would usually park at one of the clubs, and on any given night, walk between one and the next. The Brave New World was owned by a guy named Alan as I remember. Alan was also in the ......I don't know how to say it.....the "X-rated girl" industry. He had something to do with naked women----remember, I'm young at the time! The club was a members only club, so to speak---that's how they got around some kind of licensing trip. If they knew you weren't a cop, they'd let you in. This is where Love first played---probably late '64---right up there at 1644 and 1642 Cherokee. The Stones were in town recording at RCA, and they went here to check out a group called the Bees---that was a big night. The Mothers played here before they were called the Mothers of Invention; if I remember, they spelled the name "Muthers." Instead of a marquee, they had a flag on a flagpole with the band's name.
We're now in front of the Lingerie, which I first remember being the Red Velvet. They had a lot of black and soul groups. The Knickerbockers were the band that came out of here. This was a place that had your short-haired people, your lamer crowd.
Down there, at Santa Monica and Highland, was a club that not many people are goin' to remember; it was in a big old warehouse. It was a gay club, mainly for lesbians, and a lot of the bigger bands would take gigs here, right next to the Bekins warehouse. The gig would start around 11 or 12 at night, and we'd take those gigs, 'cause they paid well. The Knack (a sixties teenybop band signed to a singles deal with---surprise---Capitol) and the Sons of Adam, who were a monster band, used to play there. Don't even remember the name of the place. They finally shut them down and they moved into the Valley on Ventura Boulevard.
Here, at 7563 Sunset, was Ooh Poo Pah Do's, which had live music; that was in '72. And then Rodney (Bingenheimer) took it over and made it a disco, with English beer and English records. That was '73 or '74, and it was big for a couple of years.
Here, between Stanley and Curson, was a big club called The Experience. They had food here and ice-cream. This club was famous as a jam hangout---musicians who were in town playing bigger concerts elsewhere would come here after their shows or on the nights they were off to jam. I've been hoping to make the Teaszer conducive to impromptu jams, but it seems musicians today just aren't into jamming. A shame. Hendrix jammed here all the time. There were always famous celebrities in the audience. There was a big picture of Hendrix (on the exterior front wall of the club), and his mouth was the front door---you'd walk in through his mouth!
The big summer for The Experience was '69; it was probably here for a year-and-a-half, two years, maybe. I remember jamming here with some of the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Blues Magoos played here on their way down; Alice Cooper played here on their way up---got booed off the stage.
(Sitting in the parking lot of the Teaszer at Crescent Heights.) The hippies hangout was right around here---it started from here down to Gazzarri’s. Pandora's Box was right where that middle island was (in the middle of the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset). That wasn't a real prestigious place to play. It was right on the beginning of the Strip, it was a purple building, and it was right there in the middle---a pretty weird location. You could be underage and still get in there. To be honest with you, I didn't hang out there at all---I may have been in that club once. There was something about it that, in my mind, wasn't hip.
We're at the Comedy Store now, which was first called Ciro's. The Byrds used to play here---this is where they really took off. Bob Dylan came in here after hearing about the Byrds playing his material electrically and gave his endorsement to them, which was a big boost to them making it. Before that, Ciro's was a big hangout for Bogie and all that in the Forties. They later changed the name from Ciro's to It's Boss. Ciro's was over 21; at It's Boss, you could be fifteen-and-a-half. Ciro's was definitely a big, big prestige club. It was open at least to '73 '74, but it was mainly a force in the late Sixties. (As a cop pulls up to give out parking tickets, we quietly pull away.)
Speaking of cops, back in '64, '65, '66, when we used to drive down the street or the Strip, I used to smoke non-filter cigarettes. You had to be careful to have the brand on your mouthside; the cops were so lame that if they caught you with a cigarette with no filter and no name on it, they assumes you were smoking pot. This was when acid was still legal, by the way.
Right over here, at 8516, there was a tiny club called the Sea Witch. The capacity in that club was maybe 60 people. The thing about the Sea Witch that was neat was it was designed all out of raw wood and was supposed to look like a ship. That was another place on the Strip to play---always crowded. That was about '64 to '67. There's the Playboy Building. On the far end of the Playboy Building there used to be a marquee, and that was a club called the Trip. I remember driving by and seeing on the marquee---I'll never forget this---"Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable with the Velvet Underground and Nico"---on the goddamn marquee. Now what the heck is that, right? I had no idea.
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The white banana album had just come out, and the Velvet Underground moved into town, played there for at least a week or so, and rented a big castle up here in the hills, and they were very, very strange people. What was I, 18 at the time? To me it was scary. The Lovin' Spoonful played at the Trip when they were at their biggest. The Byrds used to play at the Trip. That was '65 through '67, I think, when the Trip was at its biggest. Over 21 club. The Central used to be Filthy McNasty's, where it was kind of a lame trip. It was here as far back as I can remember.
We are now at Clark and Sunset, the world-famous friggin' Whisky A-Go-Go. This is it. When I first came here, the building was red, and there were little awnings up there all over the windows, and it looked like a French discotheque. Mario used to stand there, forever---always a fixture. The first time I was in the Whisky, I was hanging out right here; it was raining. It was either Moby Grape or Janis Joplin---somebody like that was playing inside---and I didn't have the money, and I was huddled here listening. And Mario was over there and he yelled at me, "What's the matter, don't you have any money?" I go no. He goes "Get inside." That was Mario for ya. Great guy. People say Bill Gazzari was the godfather of rock, but I think Mario was the godfather. He watched us all grow up here. I remember nights I'd come here, he'd grab me and say, "You look like shit. What are you on? You haven't eaten in a week!" Drag me over to the bar and say, "Give him a hamburger ---and you sit down and eat it!" The best. Nobody does that---who does that anymore?
Where Duke's is now was a little club called the London Fog. The Doors played here; wasn't open very long. It quickly became an upscale bar called Sneaky Pete's.
Here (at 8923 Sunset) was the Galaxy. They had a flat marquee and an upstairs infamous for sexual promiscuity. A lot of good bands played here. Here, in between Clark and Hilldale, people were openly selling grass and acid. Love, on the Forever Changes album, have a song called, "Between Clark and Hilldale." This one block was the throbbing heart of it all. When I first started coming into town, there was a Gazzarri’s here, and another one down on La Cienega that wasn't quite as hip. This place always had the Gazzarri’s girls, the dancing trip.
The Roxy they opened around '72, '73, and the Rainbow opened around that same time. The Rainbow was supposed to be a place for the business people in the industry to come and take meetings. Because the musicians knew the industry people were going to be here, the musicians would hang out, and because the musicians were here, the groupies would come, and because the groupies were here, the wanna-be musicians would come. It just became a scene and it's never stopped.....
As we left the Strip, Len talked about the Fifth Estate and the Stratford on Sunset, as well as the Beach House and the Cheetah, both out on the Venice Pier. We drove past the Troubadour, an old venue called the Factory, and finally the Starwood, which was PJ's in the Sixties and is now yet another mini-mall. "Everything that you see bands do now, has been done before," Len told me. "Back then, someone would come along with something original. But it really was a different scene back then. You could always find a jam session at a club or some band's communal house---24 hours a day." Ya shoulda been there.
Every rock band in the world was on the Strip, and not just the flash in the pans, either, but the groups everyone knew were going to last forever--bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, Chad and Jeremy, and Peter and Gordon. (Sonny and Cher, who began playing clubs on the Strip as Caesar and Cleo, hung out there until it got them kicked out of the Rose Parade when their sponsors figured this was not the image they wanted their float to present the world.)
And the clubs! On any night you could find the Turtles harmonizing "Happy Together" at the Tiger's Tail, the Doors getting thrown off the stage at the London Fog, Buffalo Springfield singing that something was happening here inside Gazzarri's. You could knock on the back door at Ciro's and have Roger McGuinn of the Byrds invite you in; and if you had a joint in your purse, the question was, What are you doing later? The Dorsey Girls would start at Beado Lido's, where you could usually find this furry freak named Frank Zappa playing . . . well, what would you call it? . . . noise . . . and then move on to Pandora's Box at Crescent Heights, and then on to the Stratford and the Sea Witch, the Whisky and the Trip; finally ending the grand circuit inside of Ben Frank's for French fries, where the Dorsey Girls stayed until they were kicked out, at which point they'd drive down to the International House of Pancakes and get kicked out of there, and eventually drag themselves into Canter's at 4 in the morning, where they'd wait for the rising sun to scare them back into their little ranch-style dens.
1960-70s:
We are now at Clark and Sunset, the world-famous friggin' Whisky A-Go-Go. This is it. When I first came here, the building was red, and there were little awnings up there all over the windows, and it looked like a French discotheque. Mario used to stand there, forever---always a fixture. The first time I was in the Whisky, I was hanging out right here; it was raining. It was either Moby Grape or Janis Joplin---somebody like that was playing inside---and I didn't have the money, and I was huddled here listening. And Mario was over there and he yelled at me, "What's the matter, don't you have any money?" I go no. He goes "Get inside." That was Mario for ya. Great guy. People say Bill Gazzari was the godfather of rock, but I think Mario was the godfather. He watched us all grow up here. I remember nights I'd come here, he'd grab me and say, "You look like shit. What are you on? You haven't eaten in a week!" Drag me over to the bar and say, "Give him a hamburger ---and you sit down and eat it!" The best. Nobody does that---who does that anymore?
Where Duke's is now was a little club called the London Fog. The Doors played here; wasn't open very long. It quickly became an upscale bar called Sneaky Pete's.
Here (at 8923 Sunset) was the Galaxy. They had a flat marquee and an upstairs infamous for sexual promiscuity. A lot of good bands played here. Here, in between Clark and Hilldale, people were openly selling grass and acid. Love, on the Forever Changes album, have a song called, "Between Clark and Hilldale." This one block was the throbbing heart of it all. When I first started coming into town, there was a Gazzarri’s here, and another one down on La Cienega that wasn't quite as hip. This place always had the Gazzarri’s girls, the dancing trip.
The Roxy they opened around '72, '73, and the Rainbow opened around that same time. The Rainbow was supposed to be a place for the business people in the industry to come and take meetings. Because the musicians knew the industry people were going to be here, the musicians would hang out, and because the musicians were here, the groupies would come, and because the groupies were here, the wanna-be musicians would come. It just became a scene and it's never stopped.....
As we left the Strip, Len talked about the Fifth Estate and the Stratford on Sunset, as well as the Beach House and the Cheetah, both out on the Venice Pier. We drove past the Troubadour, an old venue called the Factory, and finally the Starwood, which was PJ's in the Sixties and is now yet another mini-mall. "Everything that you see bands do now, has been done before," Len told me. "Back then, someone would come along with something original. But it really was a different scene back then. You could always find a jam session at a club or some band's communal house---24 hours a day." Ya shoulda been there.
Every rock band in the world was on the Strip, and not just the flash in the pans, either, but the groups everyone knew were going to last forever--bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, Chad and Jeremy, and Peter and Gordon. (Sonny and Cher, who began playing clubs on the Strip as Caesar and Cleo, hung out there until it got them kicked out of the Rose Parade when their sponsors figured this was not the image they wanted their float to present the world.)
And the clubs! On any night you could find the Turtles harmonizing "Happy Together" at the Tiger's Tail, the Doors getting thrown off the stage at the London Fog, Buffalo Springfield singing that something was happening here inside Gazzarri's. You could knock on the back door at Ciro's and have Roger McGuinn of the Byrds invite you in; and if you had a joint in your purse, the question was, What are you doing later? The Dorsey Girls would start at Beado Lido's, where you could usually find this furry freak named Frank Zappa playing . . . well, what would you call it? . . . noise . . . and then move on to Pandora's Box at Crescent Heights, and then on to the Stratford and the Sea Witch, the Whisky and the Trip; finally ending the grand circuit inside of Ben Frank's for French fries, where the Dorsey Girls stayed until they were kicked out, at which point they'd drive down to the International House of Pancakes and get kicked out of there, and eventually drag themselves into Canter's at 4 in the morning, where they'd wait for the rising sun to scare them back into their little ranch-style dens.
1960-70s:
- Key Club sits on the site that was once Gazzarri's, a renowned Sunset Strip venue that gave bands like the Doors and Van Halen their starts.
- Whisky A Go-Go was opened in the 1960s by a former Chicago cop named Elmer Valentine. He modeled the discotheque after a club he had seen in Paris, and suspended the 1st female DJ in a glass cage above the dance floor. Go-Go girls were born when he put women in mini-skirts and short white boots in cages around the club. Johnny River's was the live act when it first opened, and Jim Morrison and the Doors became the house band in 1966. The Who, the Kinks, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Jimi Hendrix all also played at the Whisky.
- Hugh Hefner opened his Playboy Club at 8560 Sunset Blvd. in the mid-1960s on the Strip. The club took up the first 4 floors of the ten story building and was known to have a line around the corner on several nights of the week. Hefner lived on the top floor in true James Bond style with a round bed and moving wall that revealed a fully stocked bar. Mario Maglieri came out from Chicago in 1964 to help launch the Playboy Club, but he soon left to become a partner at the nightclub Whisky A Go-Go.
- There used to be a small rock club called Pandora’s Box on the southwest corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights. In 1966, it was the scene of many confrontations and protests between teens and police when authorities imposed a 10 p.m. curfew for those under 18. The goal was to help deter the growing crowds of youngsters from spilling out of the club and into the Strip’s traffic. Los Angeles officials bulldozed Pandora's Box when the problems continued, which led to the 1967 release of a teen-exploitation movie Riot on the Strip.
- August 68 Newport Pop Festival held at the Orange County Fairgrounds, Costa Mesa, California. Some of the acts who appeared over the two days were Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, Tiny Tim, Sonny & Cher, Alice Cooper and the Byrds.
REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS: Revising the 1960s In Southern California the wild summers of 1960 and 1961 were a prelude to a series of famous youth insurrections: the Watts riot of 1965, the so called 'hippie riots' on Sunset Strip between 1966 and 1970, and the Eastside high school 'blow-outs' of 1968-1969. Although the street racing mania subsided considerably by 1964, adolescent challenges to police control of the night and street became elaborately institutionalised in the renowned 'cruising' subcultures of Van Nuys Boulevard (white valley kids), the Sunset Strip ('hippies'), Whittier Boulevard (Chicano Eastsiders), and, much later, Crenshaw Boulevard (black kids). Yet in what sense did early 1960s teenage insubordination directly nurture or condition the politicised outbursts after 1964? And to what extent did these racially segmented youth rebellions share any common ethos or sensibility?
The most dramatic genealogy is the spiralling progression of protest and consciousness that links the Griffith Park riot of Memorial Day 1961 to the Los Angeles (Watts) riot of August 1965. An extraordinary story remains to be told. Frustrated with their inability to integrate or access the larger city, black youth in Los Angeles and elsewhere began to fight spontaneously for substantive control over community space--a thrust that would later become enshrined in the Black Panther Party's program for 'self determination'. Although historians are at last producing fine accounts of the ordinary heroes and grassroots activism of the Southern civil rights movement, we still know little about the generational cultural revolution in Northern black communities, or the patterns of defiance that link coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the near-revolutionary uprisings of the later 1960s. The real engine room of the 1960s--both politically and culturally--was not the college campus but the urban ghetto, and the transformation of young transplanted Southerners into a militant 'new breed' was the decisive event.
The social trajectory of the white riots, and their possible contribution to the later appeal of the new left, is of course far less clear. Indeed most historians of the 1960s ignore the wave of teen unrest at the beginning of the decade which created so much anxiety amongst police chiefs and professional anti-Communists. The few who do acknowledge a premonitory upheaval typically focus on the Newport Jazz riot of 1959 or evoke 'affluent adolescents' who 'flirted with the harmless part of the culture of delinquency'. But the hotrod and beach riots in Southern California for the most part involved a far different social stratum of youth than Ivy League college kids at Newport or the typical spring break crowd of yesterday and today. The published addresses of arrestees confirm the contemporary perception that the teenagers and young adults who fought the police on El Cajon Boulevard in 1960 or Valley Boulevard in 1961 were from working class neighbourhoods and suburbs. Likewise the riotous crowd at Zuma Beach was most likely dominated by kids from monotonous San Fernando Valley subdivisions and flatland LA neighbourhoods, not by Malibu movie spawn.
My own recollection of the time was of almost unbearable, claustrophobic tension between the perception of teenage lands of Cockaigne and the reality of growing up blue collar. My friends and I were mesmerised by beatniks, surfers, easy riders and other free spirits who seemed to live an endless summer of libidinal adventure without the constraints of after-school jobs, the draft, and pre-programmed futures in the same ruts as our fathers and mothers. The foretaste of utopia on high school Friday nights made prospective lifetimes of punching Monday morning time clocks even less endurable. We seethed in jealousy against everyone who lived at a beach, spent their nights in a coffee house, or went to an elite university. Todd Gitlin is correct to assert that the 'marketplace sold adolescent society its banners', but not all who were seduced by the vision could participate in it.41 With the mirage of unattainable cornucopia in the distance, it became all the more urgent to wrest as much freedom, exhilaration and sheer mileage from the night as possible.
I am claiming, in other words, that the white teen riots of the early 1960s were largely driven by the hidden injuries of class colliding with an overweening ideology of affluence--an affluence, that is, that we reinterpreted with the help of beatniks and surfers as the possiblity of free time and space beyond the programme of Fordist society. This reinterpretation was a radical seed, made all the more compelling by nuclear showdowns and Cold War apocalypticism. This quest for freedom, however inarticulate and inchoate, gave a dignity and historical purpose to our small rebellions, and, in conflict with the suburban police state, generated a powerful revulsion against arbitrary authority. Indeed anti-authoritarianism, trending towards a new romanticism of revolt and disobedience, was the vital cultural substate of the 1960s. And it was inevitable that the most courageous and intransigent anti-authoritarians--black ghetto youth--would become potent models for everyone else.
In the end the paranoid belief of Fred Schwartz and Chief Parker that white youth rebellion was somehow instigated by sit-ins and 'Freedom Rides' proved to be a self fulfilling prophecy. For example, in the long struggle against curfews and crowd control on the Sunset Strip in the late 1960s (parodied in teen exploitation film Riot on the Sunset Strip), white youth increasingly were persuaded that their resistance to a violent sheriff's department was a second front to the battle being waged by the Black Panther Party in south central Los Angeles. The culminating showdown between thousands of white kids and the sheriffs in 1969 was mobilised by a psychedelic leaflet demanding, 'Free the Strip! Free Huey!' The battle over the urban night had joined forces with the revolution.
The most dramatic genealogy is the spiralling progression of protest and consciousness that links the Griffith Park riot of Memorial Day 1961 to the Los Angeles (Watts) riot of August 1965. An extraordinary story remains to be told. Frustrated with their inability to integrate or access the larger city, black youth in Los Angeles and elsewhere began to fight spontaneously for substantive control over community space--a thrust that would later become enshrined in the Black Panther Party's program for 'self determination'. Although historians are at last producing fine accounts of the ordinary heroes and grassroots activism of the Southern civil rights movement, we still know little about the generational cultural revolution in Northern black communities, or the patterns of defiance that link coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the near-revolutionary uprisings of the later 1960s. The real engine room of the 1960s--both politically and culturally--was not the college campus but the urban ghetto, and the transformation of young transplanted Southerners into a militant 'new breed' was the decisive event.
The social trajectory of the white riots, and their possible contribution to the later appeal of the new left, is of course far less clear. Indeed most historians of the 1960s ignore the wave of teen unrest at the beginning of the decade which created so much anxiety amongst police chiefs and professional anti-Communists. The few who do acknowledge a premonitory upheaval typically focus on the Newport Jazz riot of 1959 or evoke 'affluent adolescents' who 'flirted with the harmless part of the culture of delinquency'. But the hotrod and beach riots in Southern California for the most part involved a far different social stratum of youth than Ivy League college kids at Newport or the typical spring break crowd of yesterday and today. The published addresses of arrestees confirm the contemporary perception that the teenagers and young adults who fought the police on El Cajon Boulevard in 1960 or Valley Boulevard in 1961 were from working class neighbourhoods and suburbs. Likewise the riotous crowd at Zuma Beach was most likely dominated by kids from monotonous San Fernando Valley subdivisions and flatland LA neighbourhoods, not by Malibu movie spawn.
My own recollection of the time was of almost unbearable, claustrophobic tension between the perception of teenage lands of Cockaigne and the reality of growing up blue collar. My friends and I were mesmerised by beatniks, surfers, easy riders and other free spirits who seemed to live an endless summer of libidinal adventure without the constraints of after-school jobs, the draft, and pre-programmed futures in the same ruts as our fathers and mothers. The foretaste of utopia on high school Friday nights made prospective lifetimes of punching Monday morning time clocks even less endurable. We seethed in jealousy against everyone who lived at a beach, spent their nights in a coffee house, or went to an elite university. Todd Gitlin is correct to assert that the 'marketplace sold adolescent society its banners', but not all who were seduced by the vision could participate in it.41 With the mirage of unattainable cornucopia in the distance, it became all the more urgent to wrest as much freedom, exhilaration and sheer mileage from the night as possible.
I am claiming, in other words, that the white teen riots of the early 1960s were largely driven by the hidden injuries of class colliding with an overweening ideology of affluence--an affluence, that is, that we reinterpreted with the help of beatniks and surfers as the possiblity of free time and space beyond the programme of Fordist society. This reinterpretation was a radical seed, made all the more compelling by nuclear showdowns and Cold War apocalypticism. This quest for freedom, however inarticulate and inchoate, gave a dignity and historical purpose to our small rebellions, and, in conflict with the suburban police state, generated a powerful revulsion against arbitrary authority. Indeed anti-authoritarianism, trending towards a new romanticism of revolt and disobedience, was the vital cultural substate of the 1960s. And it was inevitable that the most courageous and intransigent anti-authoritarians--black ghetto youth--would become potent models for everyone else.
In the end the paranoid belief of Fred Schwartz and Chief Parker that white youth rebellion was somehow instigated by sit-ins and 'Freedom Rides' proved to be a self fulfilling prophecy. For example, in the long struggle against curfews and crowd control on the Sunset Strip in the late 1960s (parodied in teen exploitation film Riot on the Sunset Strip), white youth increasingly were persuaded that their resistance to a violent sheriff's department was a second front to the battle being waged by the Black Panther Party in south central Los Angeles. The culminating showdown between thousands of white kids and the sheriffs in 1969 was mobilised by a psychedelic leaflet demanding, 'Free the Strip! Free Huey!' The battle over the urban night had joined forces with the revolution.
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Doors Performances at Hulabaloo
June 8, 1967 - The Doors are set to leave for San Francisco and then New York, when 2 last minute, unadvertised shows are added at The Hullabaloo, Hollywood, CA.
Happenin’ Magazine Reviews the Doors at Hullabaloo:
At the Hullabaloo, an excited, superpacked crowd waited restlessly for the Doors. This show, their last before going east, had been put together at the last minute and had hardly been advertised. Manzarek himself hadn't known about it, and that's why there was the tensed delay as people tried to locate him.
Outside, however, enough people to fill the house another two times waited in a long, thick, impatient line.
Morrison, however, appeared little concerned. He had gotten together with a freaky girl in dark, bizarre clothing, and was now lurking about with her backstage.
Finally, the revolving stage turned toward the screaming audience with The Doors on it, already beginning to play their music. Morrison slouched at the microphone. Instamatic flashcubes strobing and silhouetting him. And when the stage stopped moving, and The Doors faced the audience full on, and Morrison began singing, girls began screaming louder and rushed, pushing and pressing toward the stage. Guys whistled. Flashcubes strobing from all over. Morrison singing and screaming with the music, soon raping the microphone stand between his legs.
Then, by honest accident, Morrison tripped because of the mike and fell hard on the stage. But it happened with a musical climax, and it looked like this was how it was supposed to have happened. Girls screamed; rushed, pressing harder against the stage. Camera flashlights continued to strobe the intense scene wildly. Morrison got up, angry, picked up the mike stand, and began wildly swinging and throwing it about, hard. Destroying it. The girls right up front were in very real danger of being accidentally but seriously hurt. And their faces showed the terror. But something else also showed. It looked as if they were having a frenzied orgasm. Going insane with unbelievably wicked delight.
[The Doors At The Hullabaloo by Hank Zevallos, Happening magazine]
June 8, 1967 - The Doors are set to leave for San Francisco and then New York, when 2 last minute, unadvertised shows are added at The Hullabaloo, Hollywood, CA.
Happenin’ Magazine Reviews the Doors at Hullabaloo:
At the Hullabaloo, an excited, superpacked crowd waited restlessly for the Doors. This show, their last before going east, had been put together at the last minute and had hardly been advertised. Manzarek himself hadn't known about it, and that's why there was the tensed delay as people tried to locate him.
Outside, however, enough people to fill the house another two times waited in a long, thick, impatient line.
Morrison, however, appeared little concerned. He had gotten together with a freaky girl in dark, bizarre clothing, and was now lurking about with her backstage.
Finally, the revolving stage turned toward the screaming audience with The Doors on it, already beginning to play their music. Morrison slouched at the microphone. Instamatic flashcubes strobing and silhouetting him. And when the stage stopped moving, and The Doors faced the audience full on, and Morrison began singing, girls began screaming louder and rushed, pushing and pressing toward the stage. Guys whistled. Flashcubes strobing from all over. Morrison singing and screaming with the music, soon raping the microphone stand between his legs.
Then, by honest accident, Morrison tripped because of the mike and fell hard on the stage. But it happened with a musical climax, and it looked like this was how it was supposed to have happened. Girls screamed; rushed, pressing harder against the stage. Camera flashlights continued to strobe the intense scene wildly. Morrison got up, angry, picked up the mike stand, and began wildly swinging and throwing it about, hard. Destroying it. The girls right up front were in very real danger of being accidentally but seriously hurt. And their faces showed the terror. But something else also showed. It looked as if they were having a frenzied orgasm. Going insane with unbelievably wicked delight.
[The Doors At The Hullabaloo by Hank Zevallos, Happening magazine]
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The Doors performed at L.A.'s Shrine Auditorium in December of 1967 with openers The Iron Butterfly and Sweetwater.
Playboy
Hugh Hefner had come out to the Strip in 1960 to open a new Playboy Club after the incredible success of the Chicago club, and he remembers a boulevard that had already laid the groundwork for Playboy. On any night he could have dinner at a hep place like Dean Martin's Dino's Lodge with some of his swinging friends--great guys like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Tony Bennett and Mel Torme--and then go out and see girls strip at the Largo (which would later become the Roxy).
Hefner opened his Playboy Club--at the time he thought of it as his own Casablanca--and today it's almost impossible to describe how popular that club was. "I think we were the only adult club on the Strip in the 1960s," Hefner says, pajama-clad at midday in his Holmby Hills mansion. "We were definitely the most successful." In a 10-story building, the club took up the first four floors--and still there were lines around the block weekend nights. Hefner lived on the top floor, inside a penthouse that was very James Bond, very top secret. You could push a button, and an entire wall would slide away to reveal the bar. He even had a round bed up there, all the accouterments that every Rat Pack pretender only dreamed of; and yet here it was, happening in Hefner's club and inside Hefner's bedroom on the Sunset Strip, the primal DNA strands of mid-century American Male masculinity.
By 1968, Hefner would beam those DNA codes all over America on his show "Playboy After Dark," taped down at the CBS studios on Fairfax Avenue. Every night after the show, there was a party upstairs in Hefner's penthouse, the likes of which those poor lonely saps downstairs at the bar, swilling their 007 martinis, could only dream of. Mario Maglieri came out from Chicago in 1964 to help launch the Playboy Club, but he soon left to become a partner at a new nightclub called the Whisky a Go Go. Maglieri was from Old Chicago, and suddenly on the stage of this new club he's running are all these Brits with names like Eric Clapton and John Mayall and Paul Butterfield, playing electric guitars. "Geez, I thought these guys were nuts!" he says today. They were even banging tambourines; the last time Maglieri had seen a tambourine was back in Chicago when a beggar asked him for change.
Hefner opened his Playboy Club--at the time he thought of it as his own Casablanca--and today it's almost impossible to describe how popular that club was. "I think we were the only adult club on the Strip in the 1960s," Hefner says, pajama-clad at midday in his Holmby Hills mansion. "We were definitely the most successful." In a 10-story building, the club took up the first four floors--and still there were lines around the block weekend nights. Hefner lived on the top floor, inside a penthouse that was very James Bond, very top secret. You could push a button, and an entire wall would slide away to reveal the bar. He even had a round bed up there, all the accouterments that every Rat Pack pretender only dreamed of; and yet here it was, happening in Hefner's club and inside Hefner's bedroom on the Sunset Strip, the primal DNA strands of mid-century American Male masculinity.
By 1968, Hefner would beam those DNA codes all over America on his show "Playboy After Dark," taped down at the CBS studios on Fairfax Avenue. Every night after the show, there was a party upstairs in Hefner's penthouse, the likes of which those poor lonely saps downstairs at the bar, swilling their 007 martinis, could only dream of. Mario Maglieri came out from Chicago in 1964 to help launch the Playboy Club, but he soon left to become a partner at a new nightclub called the Whisky a Go Go. Maglieri was from Old Chicago, and suddenly on the stage of this new club he's running are all these Brits with names like Eric Clapton and John Mayall and Paul Butterfield, playing electric guitars. "Geez, I thought these guys were nuts!" he says today. They were even banging tambourines; the last time Maglieri had seen a tambourine was back in Chicago when a beggar asked him for change.
MONDO HOLLYWOOD: http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/mondo_hollywood/
Riot Nights on Sunset Strip
Mike Davis
From shortly before the Watts rebellion in August 1965 until late October 1966, I was the Los Angeles regional organizer for Students for a Democratic Society [SDS]. My assignments from the national office in Chicago were to build a core of draft resistance in the city (I had burnt my own draft card the previous March and was waiting to see whether or not I would be prosecuted) and to assist two eloquent and charismatic local SDSers — Margaret Thorpe at University of Southern California and Patty Lee Parmalee at University of California Irvine — in raising hell on local campuses. The most hell was generated by a group of wonderful 16- and 17-year-old SDS kids from Palisades High School. Hanging out with them, we soon became participants in some of the events described below (although with a crew-cut and a phobia about recreational drugs, I was hardly a representative 'teenybopper'). I left L.A. in 1967 to briefly work for SDS in Texas, returning to Southern California late in the year to begin real life as an apprentice butcher in San Diego and later as a truck driver in East L.A. I missed the 1967 riots on the Strip, but was on the scene for the culminating protest in 1968. So what follows is an alloy of research and memory. It is also the first, small installment in a projected history of L.A.'s countercultures and protestors, tentatively titled Setting the Night on Fire. A1 "There's somethin' happening here"
The demonstrators — relentlessly caricatured as 'Striplings', 'teeny boppers', and even 'hoodlums' by hostile cops and their allies in the daily press — are a cross-section of white teenage Southern California. Movie brats from the gilded hills above the Strip mingle with autoworkers' daughters from Van Nuys and truck drivers' sons from Pomona. There are some college students and a few uncomfortable crew-cut servicemen, but most are high-school age, 15 to 18, and, thus, technically liable to arrest after 10 p.m. when dual county and city juvenile curfews take effect. Kids carry hand-lettered signs that read "Stop Blue Fascism!," "Abolish the Curfew," and "Free the Strip." 2
The demonstration has been called (but scarcely organized) by RAMCON (the Right of Assembly and Movement Committee), headquartered in the Fifth Estate Coffeehouse (8226 Sunset). The coffee house's manager, Al Mitchell, acts as the adult spokesman for the high-school students and teenage runaways who cluster around the Fifth Estate and Pandora's Box, a block away. This is the fifth in a series of weekend demonstrations — perhaps more accurately 'happenings' — that have protested a year-long campaign by sheriffs and police to clear the Strip of 'loitering' teenagers. In response to complaints from local restaurateurs and landowners, the cops trawl nightly after the early curfew, searching for under-18s. They target primarily the longhaired kids in beads, granny glasses, and tie-dyed shirts.
3 It has become the custom to humiliate curfew-violaters with insults and obscene jokes, pull their long hair, brace them against squad cars, and even choke them with billy clubs, before hauling them down to the West Hollywood Sheriffs or Hollywood Police stations where they will be held until their angry parents pick them up. This evening (10 December), however, has so far passed off peacefully, with more smiles exchanged than insults or blows. The high point was the appearance of Sonny and Cher, dressed like high-fashion Inuit in huge fleece parkas, waving support to adoring kids. (Later, after photographs have appeared on front pages across the world, the city of Monterey Park will ban Sonny and Cher from their Rose Parade float for this gesture of solidarity with "rioting teenyboppers.")1
4 By midnight the demonstration has returned to Pandora's and a happy Al Mitchell has officially declared the protest over. As the crowd begins to disperse, LAPD officers enter Pandora's to check IDs. Eason Monroe, head of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU], complains that the police are acting illegally: Pandora's doesn't serve alcohol and the curfew ordinance exempts teenagers inside licensed businesses. The response of the cops is to handcuff and arrest Monroe. When Michael Vossi, a PR agent for the Beach Boys, who is acting as a legal observer from an entertainment industry support group, speaks up in Monroe's defense, he is pummelled by another officer. The few hundred remaining demonstrators outside Pandora's shout at the police to leave their adult supporters alone. Riot-equipped police reinforcements converge from all sides.
5 Paul Jay Robbins, another adult supporter from CAFF (Community Action for Facts and Freedom Committee) whose members are a veritable Who's Who of the liberal pop culture scene, will a few days later in the Los Angeles Free Press (lovingly known as the Freep to its devotees) describe the unprovoked fury of the LAPD's attack on panic-stricken and fleeing protestors. After Robbins himself is hit by a police baton, he watches in horror as police flail away at a helpless teenager.
I saw a kid holding a sign in both hands jerk forward as though struck from behind. He fell into the path of the officers and four or five of them immediately began bludgeoning him with clubs held in one hand. I stood transfixed watching him as the officers continued beating him while he attempted to alternately protect himself and crawl forward. Finally he slumped against a wall as the officer continued to beat him. Before I was spun around and set reeling forward again, I saw him picked up, belly-down, by the officers and carried away. Later legal representatives of CAFF measured a trail of blood 75 yards long leading from this spot to the point where he was placed in a car. Where is he now?2
6 The night's peaceful demonstration had been wantonly turned into another of those police 'massacres' for which Los Angeles is becoming justly notorious. The two daily newspapers — the Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times and the Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner — as usual characterize the unwarranted police aggression as a teenybopper-inspired 'riot'. Al Mitchell and the other adult supporters, meanwhile, are so appalled by the LAPD violence that they call off next weekend's planned demonstration out of fear that the police may yet kill or seriously injure one of the kids.3 After two months of political debate, litigation, and frustrating negotiations, the protests will resume massively in February 1967 and continue episodically through the autumn of 1968. Thousands of kids will be arrested for curfew violations and American International Pictures will immortalize the 'riots' in a camp film with a famous soundtrack.4 7
MOMENT IN ROCK-AND-ROLL DREAMTIME: Saturday night on Sunset Strip in early December 1967. Along that famed twelve blocks of unincorporated Los Angeles County between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the neon firmament blazes new names like the Byrds, the Doors, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, and Buffalo Springfield. But the real spectacle is out on the street: 2,000 demonstrators peacefully snaking their way west along Sunset into the county Strip then circling back to their starting point at Pandora's Box Coffeehouse (8180 Sunset) just inside the Los Angeles city limits. On one side of the boundary are several hundred riot-helmeted sheriff's deputies; on the other side, an equal number of Los Angeles police, fidgeting nervously with their nightsticks as if they were confronting angry strikers or an unruly mob instead of friendly 15-year-olds with long hair and acne.
"Battle lines being drawn"
This legendary Battle of the Strip, 1966–1968, was only the most celebrated episode in the struggle of teenagers of all colours during the 1960s and 1970s to create their own realm of freedom and carnivalesque sociality within the Southern California night. There were other memorable contestations with business and police over Griffith Park 'love-ins', beach parties, interracial concerts, counter-cultural neighbourhoods (like Venice Beach), 'head' shopping districts (like L.A.'s Haight-Ashbury on Fairfax), cruising strips (Whittier, Hollywood, and Van Nuys boulevards), street-racing locales, and the myriad local hangouts where kids quietly or brazenly defied parents, police, and curfews.5 8
Of course such battles were not a new story (Los Angeles had passed its first juvenile curfew in the 1880s), nor unique to Southern California. But postwar California motorized youth rebellion. A culture of cars, high-speed freeways, centrifugal sprawl, and featureless suburbs generated a vast ennui amongst bored but mobile teenagers. Any hint of excitement on a weekend evening might draw kids from anywhere in the hundred-odd-mile radius of local AM radio. Thus when one rock station incautiously advertised a party at Malibu Beach in 1961, nearly 20,000 teenagers showed up and then rioted when sheriffs ordered them to leave. Nor is it surprising that once the Strip 'riots' were celebrated in song (by Stephen Stills in 1966), as well as in Time and Life, that the 8000 and 9000 blocks of Sunset Boulevard would become an even more powerful magnet to alienated kids from the valleys and flatlands. Indeed, decades later, to claim that you had been busted on the Strip in '66 or '67 was the Southern California equivalent of boasting that you had been at Woodstock, at the Creation. 9
But why the Strip? The parents of many Southern California teenagers in 1966 had their own lustrous memories of a night — returning from a Pacific War in 1943 or after college graduation in 1951 — when they had dined, danced, and rubbed shoulders with celebrity in one of the famed Sunset Boulevard nightclubs, such as Ciro's, Mocambo, or the Trocadero. The Strip, one of those strange 'county holes' in the Los Angeles urban fabric, was for a generation the major centre of movie colony nightlife, and thus the epicentre of tabloid scandal and romance. It was also a city-state run by famed gamblers and their gangster allies in league with a corrupt Sheriff's Department. During its most glamorous years, from 1939 to 1954, the Strip's informal mayor was the indestructible Mickey Cohen, prince of gamblers and king of survivors. Operating from a haberdashery on the 8800 block of Sunset, Cohen defied all odds by emerging unscathed from an incredible series of Mob ambushes and bombings that took the lives of half a dozen of his bodyguards. 10
By the late 1950s, however, Cohen was cooling his heels in the pen and the Strip was in steep decline. Las Vegas, thanks to Bugsy Siegel, had usurped the lucrative symbiosis of movie stars and mobsters that the Strip had pioneered, and hijacked its star chefs and famous entertainers. Yet precisely as urban decay was taking a huge bite out of its golden mile, the popular television show 77 Sunset Strip was generating a new mythology. Ed 'Cookie' Byrnes — the program's Elvis-like co-star who played a parking-lot jockey who was also a part-time sleuth — briefly became the biggest youth celebrity in the country. The Strip was portrayed as a dazzling nocturnal crossroads for a handsome Corvette-and-surfboard set. 11
In fact, the Strip, like the larger (west and east) Hollywood community, was in transition between its golden age and two competing strategies for reusing vacant nightclub and entertainment space. The 'Times Square' option was to reopen clubs with topless or, later, nude dancers. The Bodyshop was the exemplar of successful neo-burlesque. The other option was to cater to juvenile audiences with rock music. Music producers and PR people, especially, liked the idea of a geographically centralized youth club scene to talent-scout new bands and develop those already under contract. The success of 77 Sunset Strip, moreover, established a national cachet and name recognition for groups weaned on the Strip. In 1965 the County reluctantly acceded to club-owners' and record companies' pleas and created a tiered licensing system that allowed 18-to-21-year-olds inside clubs where alcohol was served, while creating special liquor-less music venues for younger 15-to-18-year-olds. The youth club scene promptly exploded. 12
For older teenagers and young adults the premier clubs were the Whiskey, Gazzarri's, and the Galaxy. The newly baptized teenyboppers favoured It's Boss (formerly the renowned Ciros), The Trip (formerly Crescendo), and Sea Witch, as well as cheap, atmospheric coffee houses like Pandora's (owned by former tennis star Bill Tilden) and the Fifth Estate (bankrolled by teen magazine mogul Robert Peterson). As the clubs inexorably hiked their cover charges, younger and poorer kids preferred simply to be part of the colourful street scene, wandering in groups down Sunset or hovering near club entrances for a glimpse of Jim Morrison or Neil Young. As the nightly teen crowds grew larger, however, the Strip's upscale restaurant owners and their wealthy adult clientele began to protest about the lack of parking and the increasing sidewalk congestion. Beverly Hills matrons and Century City lawyers recoiled from contact with the beatified throngs. 13
"Moreover, at this point," wrote Edgar Friedenberg and Anthony Bernhard in a later account of the riots, "the good behavior of the 'teeny boppers' had become a problem." Because the kids were generally "not hostile, aggressive nor disorderly," there was no obvious pretext for driving them off the Strip. Eventually, the Sunset Strip Chamber of Commerce and the Sunset Plaza Association, representing landlords and restaurant owners, cajoled the Sheriff's Department to stringently enforce a youth curfew. During the 1940s, when teenage 'B-girls' were a national scandal, both the city and county had adopted parallel curfew regulations that forbade anyone under 18 from loitering in public after 10 p.m. "Loitering," Friedenberg and Bernhard noted, "is defined as 'to idle, to lag, to stand idly by or to walk, drive, or ride about aimlessly and without purpose' — a definition that may well make the entire solar system illegal."6 14 "Young people speaking their minds"
During the summer of 1966, the sheriffs on the Strip, soon joined by the LAPD in the adjacent Hollywood and Fairfax districts, escalated their pressure on the under-18s. Curfew arrests soared into the thousands, with 300 hauled away from the sidewalks outside Canter's Restaurant on Fairfax on a single July evening. "It was just like shooting ducks in a duck pond," boasted one deputy. When the city's largest newspaper needed a dramatic image for a story about the teenage hordes, the deputies obligingly arrested ten kids and stood them handcuffed in a line "for the direct accommodation of the Los Angeles Times."7 "Throughout the spring and summer," reported Renata Adler in a later New Yorker article, "licenses permitting minors to be served anything at all were revoked at one place after another: several of these places reluctantly went adult and topless — a change that seemed to cause the authorities no distress." Indeed, it was widely rumoured that the kids were being cleared off the Strip to make way for the return of Mob-connected sex entertainment and "for more serious, less conspicuous forms of vice than lingering after curfew."8 15
Shortly after Halloween, a couple of angry teenagers decided it was time to organize a formal protest against the arbitrary arrests and police abuse of kids on the Strip. They printed a flyer — "Protest Police Mistreatment of Youth on Sunset Blvd. — No More Shackling of 14 and 15 year olds" — calling for a demonstration on Saturday night, 12 November. It was at this point that Al Mitchell, the leftist ex-merchant sailor and filmmaker who managed the Fifth Estate for Robert Peterson, became their informal sponsor. Cans were soon being circulated around the coffee house to raise money for additional leaflets. Rock stations began to luridly warn that a 'major riot' was brewing, and cautioned kids away from the Strip on the 12th. This was irresistible publicity for a demonstration whose urgency was underlined by the arrest of 80 kids for curfew violations on Friday night. 16
The next evening, according to the Freep, by 9 p.m. more than 3,000 teenagers, flanked by adult curiosity-seekers and hostile servicemen, gathered in front of Pandora's. Aside from a handful of placards hastily painted at the Fifth Estate a few hours before the demonstration, there was no apparent organization or leadership whatever. In the spirit of the times, the protest had been conceived as a spontaneous "happening" and the overwhelming majority of the crowd complied with its peaceful purpose. At one point the police called a fire company to the scene, and some of the kids nervously asked the firefighters whether they were going to hose them. A bemused fire captain replied: "Have a good time and let me go home." The engine left. 17
The overflow of protestors onto Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards created a traffic jam; several bus drivers angrily honked and screamed at the kids. In response, demonstrators climbed up and danced on the roofs of the buses. One youth scrawled "Free the 15 Year Olds!" on a windshield; another broke a window with a fire extinguisher. On the fringe of the crowd there was a brief scuffle between longhaired protestors and some young sailors and Marines. Shortly after 10 p.m., a hundred cops roughly used their nightsticks to clear the sidewalks. Police with drawn revolvers chased kids into Pandora's. Panicky protestors who tried to retreat westward down Sunset collided with a wall of riot-ready sheriffs, and about 50 were arrested.9 18
The LAPD declared a 'tactical alert' the next evening, closing Sunset from Fairfax to Crescent Heights. State Highway Patrol officers and private Pinkerton guards reinforced the sheriffs' side of the line. Thanks to wildly escalating rumours in the station houses, the atmosphere was irrationally tense, and the Freep reported that "many of the officers seemed to be in a state of panic." While Al Mitchell shot footage for his documentary Blue Fascism, 300 or so protestors jeered "Gestapo, Gestapo!" at the police line and then dispersed after they were declared an "unlawful assembly." They vowed to return the following weekend.10 19
On Monday morning, it was the turn of the Establishment to riot. Although a handful of protestors had been involved in the bus incident (total estimated damage: $158), the Herald-Examiner's headline screamed: "Long Hair Nightmare: Juvenile Violence on Sunset Strip." A Times editorial likewise warned of "Anarchy on Sunset Strip," and blamed the teenagers and their "senseless, destructive riot" for a "sorry ending for the boulevard that was once Hollywood's most dazzling area." The Times also gave much space to the melodramatic claims of Captain Charlie Crumly, commander of the LAPD's Hollywood Division, that "left wing groups and outside agitators" had organized the protest. Crumly also asserted that "there are over a thousand hoodlums living like bums in Hollywood, advocating such things as free love, legalized marijuana and abortion."11 20
Los Angeles suddenly seemed like an embattled patriarchy. Hollywood councilman Paul Lamport demanded a full-scale investigation into Crumly's charges of a subversive plot, while his county counterpart, Supervisor Ernest Debs, ranted that "whatever it takes is going to be done. We're going to be tough. We're not going to surrender that area or any area to beatniks or wild-eyed kids." The Sunset Plaza Association, representing Strip restaurant owners, called for a city crackdown on such "kid hangouts" as Pandora's and the Fifth Estate that offered sanctuary to protesting teenagers across the county/city border.12 21
Only the Freep challenged the daily press's characterization of the previous weekend's police disturbance as a 'teenybopper riot'. "To the editorial writers of the Times, sitting in their bald majesty on First Street, entirely isolated from the events, unable to properly evaluate or analyze them, it is only possible to say: 'You are stupid old men who make reckless and irresponsible statements that can only make a bad situation worse'." According to the Freep, the kids were actually caught in the middle of an economic conflict between the Sunset Strip Chamber of Commerce with its ties to the adult-entertainment industry, on one hand, and the Sunset Strip Association, representing the youth venues, on the other. "The police, in effect, have been cooperating with one very wealthy group of property owners on the Strip against a less powerful group of businessmen."13 22
The lopsidedness of the battle was further demonstrated when the Los Angeles City Council unanimously acceded to the Sunset Plaza Association's request and voted to use eminent domain to demolish Pandora's Box. At the same time, Sheriff Peter Pitchess and Supervisor Debs lobbied the County Public Welfare Commission to prevent the renewal of the permits allowing Strip clubs to admit under-21s. When the Commission baulked, the supervisors themselves rescinded the offending ordinance and effectively banned teenagers from the clubs.14 Suddenly, Los Angeles' celebrated rock renaissance itself was under threat, and this quickly galvanized the younger generation of music producers and agents into unexpected solidarity with the next wave of protests on the Strip. 23 "There's a man with a gun over there"
Although the second weekend of protests (18–20 November 1966) again pitted thousands of flower children against huge phalanxes of police and sheriffs, the still leaderless protestors broadcast enough seductive warmth, as well as carnival-like mirth, to take the grim edge off the evening. As they marched down the Strip, they handed out flowers and blew bubbles and kisses. The cops seemed disarmed by the happy mood, although at 10 p.m. a sheriffs' sound truck began warning under-18s to clear the street or be arrested. Hundreds of kids resolutely faced off a cordon of deputies, police, and Navy Shore Patrol around the Crescent Heights and Sunset triangle. Although several score of curfew violaters were ultimately arrested, there were no baton charges, and the crowd, still in surprisingly good humour, dispersed by 2 a.m. There were widespread rumours, however, that the business interests were upset with the evening's outcome, and that the sheriffs were under pressure to use more aggressive tactics the next weekend. 24
To forestall the expected violence against their fans, a group of concerned celebrities and music-industry executives went into a huddle the following Friday. The meeting was called by Jim Dickson, the manager of the Byrds, who took fulltime leave to organize the awkwardly titled CAFF. Its initial membership included Dickson's partner Ed Ticker, the ubiquitous Al Mitchell, Whiskey's co-owner Elmer Valentine, Sonny and Cher manager Brian Stone, television star Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island fame, millionaire sportsman and Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow (a member of the Sheriffs' Aero Squadron), and Beach Boy Enterprises' Michael Vossi and David Anderle. The meagre political clout of the club owners was now dramatically augmented by support from the top bands and music-industry leaders. CAFF decided to mobilize its members and friends to attend the next evening's demonstration as legal observers in yellow armbands. A group of sympathetic Hollywood ministers and the local chapter of the ACLU also promised to turn out to support the right of peaceful protest.15 25
Freep's Brian Carr. "There was no plan or purpose evident in the beatings or the subsequent arrests. It seemed the handiest people, with no regard given to age, sex or social position were clubbed, punched and/or arrested."16 The immensely popular Bob Denver, a one-time mailman and former teacher before roles as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963) and Gilligan (1964–1967) launched his stardom, was left almost speechless by the scene. "Unbelievable ... just unbelievable," Denvermumbled as deputies spat on a woman in his group, then charged down the street to baton some harmless teens. Peter Fonda, who was filming outside the Fifth Estate with actor Brandon de Wilde, was arrested with 27 others, mainly adults, as they watched the LAPD's emulation of the sheriffs. "Man, the kids have had it," Fonda later told reporters.17 26
Meanwhile inside the lobby of the West Hollywood Sheriffs station, Brian Stone — who was already a legend for creating Sonny and Cher as well as Buffalo Springfield — was arrested for refusing to produce identification upon demand. His business partner, Charlie Green, was in turn busted for protesting Stone's arrest. Before the night was over, the sheriffs and LAPD together had made enemies of one of the most powerful, if unconventional, industries in Los Angeles. As the Mamas and the Papas later explained to reporters, even millionaire rock stars could no longer "drive down the street with any feeling of safety from harassment."18 27
The even more promiscuous police violence at the 10 December protest (described at the beginning of this essay) solidified CAFF's apprehension that 'blue fascism' posed a direct threat to Los Angeles' billion-dollar rock culture. As the city council and board of supervisors forged ahead with their plans to bulldoze Pandora's and gut the Strip club scene, CAFF joined with the club owners and the ACLU in an ultimately successful legal defense of the status quo ante. If the Los Angeles Times red-baited the longhaired protestors as dupes of the "the leftwing W.E.B. DuBois Clubs," AM stations fought back with a dramatic recording of a defiant teenager saying "it's our constitutional guarantee to walk unmolested on Sunset Strip" as he was being bundled into a sheriff's car.19 And within a few weeks, tens of millions of teenagers across the world were listening to the haunting words — "Stop, children, what's that sound?" — of Stephen Stills's Strip battle anthem, "For What It's Worth." 28
Al Mitchell and CAFF, supported by the Freep, suspended demonstrations over the Christmas holiday while they held 'peace talks' with country officials. Verbal progress on that end, however, was undercut by what was widely seen as an escalation of police pressure on youth and adult counter-cultures throughout the Los Angeles area. In mid-December, for example, Pasadena Police raided the popular Catacombs art gallery and arrested 100 young people on a variety of drug charges, many of them utterly bogus. Then, on New Year's Eve, the LAPD vice-squad rampaged through the gay bars in the Silverlake district, roughing up and arresting scores of patrons.20 29 The LAPD also increased its illegal harassment of the Freep's salesforce. Despite a city ordinance authorizing their right to sell papers from the curb to passing cars, Freep vendors were systematically ticketed and frequently arrested, especially on the Strip and in front of Pandora's. Since local television and the two dailies had blacked out images of police brutality, the Freep, together with a few rock stations and the local Pacifica franchise (KPFK-FM), were truly the alternative media. Persecution, moreover, only made the Freep vendors into heroes and boosted the paid circulation of the paper above 65,000.21 30 "I think it's time ... "
The 'phony war' on the Strip lasted until the end of February when Al Mitchell announced that "we must go on to the streets again police and sheriff's deputies have again and again violated the terms of a 'truce' RAMCOM and other concerned groups negotiated on 16 December with the Los Angeles Crime and Delinquency Commission." Indeed, Captain Victor Resau of the West Hollywood Sheriffs humiliated the Commission when he publically renounced the truce or any other constraint on the vigorous enforcement of the curfew law. The County's earlier attempt to outlaw teenagers from rock clubs by ordinance had been ruled unconstitutional, so sheriffs and police were once more under terrific pressure from property-owners to use brute force to drive the kids off the Strip. Mitchell was particularly outraged at repeated raids on the Fifth Estate and other alcohol-free coffee houses. Some 80,000 leaflets calling for a demonstration on Saturday night, 11 February 1967, saturated the clubs and made their way clandestinely through every high school in the county. 31
For the first time there was strategic planning to broaden the base of the protests to incorporate the grievances of gays and people of colour. As the Freep noted, "one of the most interesting and pace-setting reactions to the call to demonstrate came early this week from homosexual organizations who are currently up in arms about New Years Eve's police raids on a number of Silver Lake area gay bars."Two leading gay groups, PRIDE and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, endorsed the 11 February demonstration and added plans for their own simultaneous march along Sunset in Silver Lake. Mitchell's loosely knit RAMCOM group also plotted actions in Watts, East L.A., and Pacoima in the hope that angry Black and Chicano youth would be drawn to participate. The self-concept of the Strip movement was shifting from an amorphous 'happening' to an all-embracing coalition of outcast and police-persecuted street cultures.22 32
A crude attempt was made to frame the movement's principal adult leader. Ten days before the scheduled demonstrations, Mitchell — a veteran of harassment for such offenses as allowing singing in the Fifth Estate and obscene anti-police graffiti in its lavatories — was arrested (but not booked) on suspicion of 150 counts of statutory rape. The fortyish leftist, whom the Times had caricatured as the "muezzin of the teenboppers," was now unmasked as a sinister sex criminal preying on his teenager followers — or so it was claimed on radio and television news. In fact, Mitchell's 17-year-old accuser quickly confessed that her allegations were lies told in anger after she had been thrown out of the Fifth Estate for drug use. The Freep pondered why Mitchell had been so brazenly arrested and demonized in the media before the LAPD had even checked out the teenager's preposterous story.23 33
In any event, the hubbub around Mitchell did not deter more than 3,000 teenagers, along with unprecedented numbers of college students and adults, from once again assembling in front of Pandora's on Saturday night. For the first time, there was an organized rally — with speeches by Mitchell, civil liberties lawyer Marvin Chan, and ACLU counsel Phil Croner — as well as an ingenious tactical plan. Every hour new contingents of protestors were sent west on the county Strip where sheriffs deputies, impassive for the most part, allowed them to march without harassment. The demonstrators, carrying signs that read "Stop Beating the Flower Children" and "Stop Blue Fascism," were both exuberant and disciplined: vivid refutation of the hoary myth of "wild-eyed, drug crazed rioters."24 34
Meanwhile 500 protestors in front of the Black Cat Bar at the corner of Sunset and Hyperion were urged by speakers to make "a unified community stand in Silver Lake against brutality." In L.A. history, this was the less dramatic counterpart to the Village's Stonewall Riot, the birthdate of an activist gay rights movement. Unfortunately the other protest venues were unhistoric flops. Only a desultory crowd turned out in Venice, where most residents had preferred to join the main action on the Strip, and in Pacoima a small group of hapless RAMCOM kids with good intentions but poor communication skills were set upon and beaten by local gang members. The Freep could find no evidence of any protests in either Watts or East L.A.25 35 T
his did not mean, however, that the Strip protests had no impact upon the ghettoes and barrios. Black and Chicano flower children were beginning to integrate the Strip in small numbers, despite frequent racist treatment from club bouncers and, of course, cops; and some Black leaders, both moderate and radical, were rallying to the idea, pushed by Al Mitchell and New Left groups, that there really was new ground for a broad, anti-police-abuse coaliton. In March, after another large protest on the Strip, Georgia legislator and civil rights hero Julian Bond spoke to admiring youth at the Fifth Estate while cops loomed threateningly on the periphery in riot gear.26 From February onwards, moreover, every protest on the Strip self-consciously identified itself with the victims of far more deadly police brutality in Southcentral L.A. Radical groups, especially SDS and the International Socialists, began to play more prominent roles in the protests and actively recruited high-school-age memberships. 36
But many Angelenos had no inkling that mass protests, larger than ever, were continuing on the Strip. In April, the latest addition to the local alternative media, Los Angeles Underground, bannered the huge headline: "STRIP WAR: News Blackout Conceals Struggle, Police Sabotage Truce Agreement." The paper excoriated the Herald-Examiner, but even more the Times, for their refusal to print a word about the huge but now disciplined demonstrations on the Strip.27 The Times, however, did continue its vilification of youth culture ('teenyboppers' had now metamorphosed into 'hippies') with constant stories and editorials of the ilk, "Hippies Blamed for Decline of the Sunset Strip."
Furthermore, the Times warned, the bell-bottomed hordes were now poised to 'invade' and presumably destroy Hollywood as well. Much attention was given to a speech that a local real-estate appraiser, Robert Steel, had made in May 1967, charging that longhaired teens had done more damage than the Watts rioters two years earlier. Steel claimed that the under-18 youth had reduced property values along the Strip by 30 per cent and scared away potential major investors, including a large savings-and-loan company.28 37
The Times, at least, was accurate in pointing out a new hotspot in Hollywood where property owners were squaring off against new youth venues, especially Hullabaloo, a vast rock emporium that sometimes staged a dozen popular bands in all-night marathons. On 28 July 1967, the LAPD, using elaborate decoys and commando tactics, had swept down upon the ticket lines at Hullabaloo and arrested 200 fans for curfew violations, although their IDs were only checked at the station. As usual the incident went unreported in the Times, but it sent shock waves through the music world and revived CAFF-type interest in defending the industry's local fandom. 38
Nineteen sixty-eight was year three of the struggle and the Strip War threatened to become as protracted as the Civil War, with the baby sisters and brothers of the original protestors now on the front line. No one could much recall what a 'beatnik' was, but hippie-phobia was reaching a crescendo, with the Times, as usual, providing a rich diet of innuendo and stereotyping.29 Yet the immense engines of the culture industry were slowly turning the great ship of mainstream taste around. Straight young adults, from secretaries to longshoremen, were quietly letting their hair grow and putting on bell bottoms. The young sailors and Marines who a few years before had waylaid unwary teenyboppers in the Strip's back alleys were now happily trading drugs with their hippie connections. Storeowners and restaurateurs who once had apoplexy at the sight of a madras-clothed teenybopper now couldn't distinguish them from the palm trees. 39
As the mainstream went counter-cultural, much of the counter culture, including its music, moved, however temporarily, to the political left. The LAPD and the sheriffs had to shift deployments to deal with the new specters of the Black Panther Party in Southcentral and high-school unrest on the Eastside. Curfew enforcement on the Strip became a less urgent law-enforcement priority. Although police harassment would continue for another decade or more, the Strip war came to a climax on 28 September 1968, the day after Huey Newton had been sentenced to prison. 40
The protest this time was organized by the new Peace and Freedom Party which gave equal billing to three demands: "Free the Strip. End Police Brutality. Free Huey Newton." Although the Times — what else could one expect? — gave the protest only a few sentences, claiming that there were about 600 participants, I can testify that the number was at least four times larger.30 It was, in fact, one of the most memorable demonstrations of a lifetime, as the same kids, so frequently scorned and physically abused by the deputies, now boldly shoved "F*** the Sheriffs" and "No More Murder of Black People" placards in their faces. 41
For the first time the shoe was on the other foot. The West Hollywood Sheriffs station was surrounded by protestors, besieged by 'revolutionary hippies' no less. In a tense, hour-long confrontation, the kids showed superb courage and good humour. In the end, everyone simply walked off, back into the rock-and-roll night, while some of the girls threw kisses to the thoroughly vexed and defeated sheriffs. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/59/davis.html In the event, amok sheriffs' deputies gave CAFF and some 30 clergy a shocking exhibition of the abuse that the kids had been complaining about all year. "People were viciously clubbed and beaten".
Mike Davis
From shortly before the Watts rebellion in August 1965 until late October 1966, I was the Los Angeles regional organizer for Students for a Democratic Society [SDS]. My assignments from the national office in Chicago were to build a core of draft resistance in the city (I had burnt my own draft card the previous March and was waiting to see whether or not I would be prosecuted) and to assist two eloquent and charismatic local SDSers — Margaret Thorpe at University of Southern California and Patty Lee Parmalee at University of California Irvine — in raising hell on local campuses. The most hell was generated by a group of wonderful 16- and 17-year-old SDS kids from Palisades High School. Hanging out with them, we soon became participants in some of the events described below (although with a crew-cut and a phobia about recreational drugs, I was hardly a representative 'teenybopper'). I left L.A. in 1967 to briefly work for SDS in Texas, returning to Southern California late in the year to begin real life as an apprentice butcher in San Diego and later as a truck driver in East L.A. I missed the 1967 riots on the Strip, but was on the scene for the culminating protest in 1968. So what follows is an alloy of research and memory. It is also the first, small installment in a projected history of L.A.'s countercultures and protestors, tentatively titled Setting the Night on Fire. A1 "There's somethin' happening here"
The demonstrators — relentlessly caricatured as 'Striplings', 'teeny boppers', and even 'hoodlums' by hostile cops and their allies in the daily press — are a cross-section of white teenage Southern California. Movie brats from the gilded hills above the Strip mingle with autoworkers' daughters from Van Nuys and truck drivers' sons from Pomona. There are some college students and a few uncomfortable crew-cut servicemen, but most are high-school age, 15 to 18, and, thus, technically liable to arrest after 10 p.m. when dual county and city juvenile curfews take effect. Kids carry hand-lettered signs that read "Stop Blue Fascism!," "Abolish the Curfew," and "Free the Strip." 2
The demonstration has been called (but scarcely organized) by RAMCON (the Right of Assembly and Movement Committee), headquartered in the Fifth Estate Coffeehouse (8226 Sunset). The coffee house's manager, Al Mitchell, acts as the adult spokesman for the high-school students and teenage runaways who cluster around the Fifth Estate and Pandora's Box, a block away. This is the fifth in a series of weekend demonstrations — perhaps more accurately 'happenings' — that have protested a year-long campaign by sheriffs and police to clear the Strip of 'loitering' teenagers. In response to complaints from local restaurateurs and landowners, the cops trawl nightly after the early curfew, searching for under-18s. They target primarily the longhaired kids in beads, granny glasses, and tie-dyed shirts.
3 It has become the custom to humiliate curfew-violaters with insults and obscene jokes, pull their long hair, brace them against squad cars, and even choke them with billy clubs, before hauling them down to the West Hollywood Sheriffs or Hollywood Police stations where they will be held until their angry parents pick them up. This evening (10 December), however, has so far passed off peacefully, with more smiles exchanged than insults or blows. The high point was the appearance of Sonny and Cher, dressed like high-fashion Inuit in huge fleece parkas, waving support to adoring kids. (Later, after photographs have appeared on front pages across the world, the city of Monterey Park will ban Sonny and Cher from their Rose Parade float for this gesture of solidarity with "rioting teenyboppers.")1
4 By midnight the demonstration has returned to Pandora's and a happy Al Mitchell has officially declared the protest over. As the crowd begins to disperse, LAPD officers enter Pandora's to check IDs. Eason Monroe, head of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU], complains that the police are acting illegally: Pandora's doesn't serve alcohol and the curfew ordinance exempts teenagers inside licensed businesses. The response of the cops is to handcuff and arrest Monroe. When Michael Vossi, a PR agent for the Beach Boys, who is acting as a legal observer from an entertainment industry support group, speaks up in Monroe's defense, he is pummelled by another officer. The few hundred remaining demonstrators outside Pandora's shout at the police to leave their adult supporters alone. Riot-equipped police reinforcements converge from all sides.
5 Paul Jay Robbins, another adult supporter from CAFF (Community Action for Facts and Freedom Committee) whose members are a veritable Who's Who of the liberal pop culture scene, will a few days later in the Los Angeles Free Press (lovingly known as the Freep to its devotees) describe the unprovoked fury of the LAPD's attack on panic-stricken and fleeing protestors. After Robbins himself is hit by a police baton, he watches in horror as police flail away at a helpless teenager.
I saw a kid holding a sign in both hands jerk forward as though struck from behind. He fell into the path of the officers and four or five of them immediately began bludgeoning him with clubs held in one hand. I stood transfixed watching him as the officers continued beating him while he attempted to alternately protect himself and crawl forward. Finally he slumped against a wall as the officer continued to beat him. Before I was spun around and set reeling forward again, I saw him picked up, belly-down, by the officers and carried away. Later legal representatives of CAFF measured a trail of blood 75 yards long leading from this spot to the point where he was placed in a car. Where is he now?2
6 The night's peaceful demonstration had been wantonly turned into another of those police 'massacres' for which Los Angeles is becoming justly notorious. The two daily newspapers — the Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times and the Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner — as usual characterize the unwarranted police aggression as a teenybopper-inspired 'riot'. Al Mitchell and the other adult supporters, meanwhile, are so appalled by the LAPD violence that they call off next weekend's planned demonstration out of fear that the police may yet kill or seriously injure one of the kids.3 After two months of political debate, litigation, and frustrating negotiations, the protests will resume massively in February 1967 and continue episodically through the autumn of 1968. Thousands of kids will be arrested for curfew violations and American International Pictures will immortalize the 'riots' in a camp film with a famous soundtrack.4 7
MOMENT IN ROCK-AND-ROLL DREAMTIME: Saturday night on Sunset Strip in early December 1967. Along that famed twelve blocks of unincorporated Los Angeles County between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the neon firmament blazes new names like the Byrds, the Doors, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, and Buffalo Springfield. But the real spectacle is out on the street: 2,000 demonstrators peacefully snaking their way west along Sunset into the county Strip then circling back to their starting point at Pandora's Box Coffeehouse (8180 Sunset) just inside the Los Angeles city limits. On one side of the boundary are several hundred riot-helmeted sheriff's deputies; on the other side, an equal number of Los Angeles police, fidgeting nervously with their nightsticks as if they were confronting angry strikers or an unruly mob instead of friendly 15-year-olds with long hair and acne.
"Battle lines being drawn"
This legendary Battle of the Strip, 1966–1968, was only the most celebrated episode in the struggle of teenagers of all colours during the 1960s and 1970s to create their own realm of freedom and carnivalesque sociality within the Southern California night. There were other memorable contestations with business and police over Griffith Park 'love-ins', beach parties, interracial concerts, counter-cultural neighbourhoods (like Venice Beach), 'head' shopping districts (like L.A.'s Haight-Ashbury on Fairfax), cruising strips (Whittier, Hollywood, and Van Nuys boulevards), street-racing locales, and the myriad local hangouts where kids quietly or brazenly defied parents, police, and curfews.5 8
Of course such battles were not a new story (Los Angeles had passed its first juvenile curfew in the 1880s), nor unique to Southern California. But postwar California motorized youth rebellion. A culture of cars, high-speed freeways, centrifugal sprawl, and featureless suburbs generated a vast ennui amongst bored but mobile teenagers. Any hint of excitement on a weekend evening might draw kids from anywhere in the hundred-odd-mile radius of local AM radio. Thus when one rock station incautiously advertised a party at Malibu Beach in 1961, nearly 20,000 teenagers showed up and then rioted when sheriffs ordered them to leave. Nor is it surprising that once the Strip 'riots' were celebrated in song (by Stephen Stills in 1966), as well as in Time and Life, that the 8000 and 9000 blocks of Sunset Boulevard would become an even more powerful magnet to alienated kids from the valleys and flatlands. Indeed, decades later, to claim that you had been busted on the Strip in '66 or '67 was the Southern California equivalent of boasting that you had been at Woodstock, at the Creation. 9
But why the Strip? The parents of many Southern California teenagers in 1966 had their own lustrous memories of a night — returning from a Pacific War in 1943 or after college graduation in 1951 — when they had dined, danced, and rubbed shoulders with celebrity in one of the famed Sunset Boulevard nightclubs, such as Ciro's, Mocambo, or the Trocadero. The Strip, one of those strange 'county holes' in the Los Angeles urban fabric, was for a generation the major centre of movie colony nightlife, and thus the epicentre of tabloid scandal and romance. It was also a city-state run by famed gamblers and their gangster allies in league with a corrupt Sheriff's Department. During its most glamorous years, from 1939 to 1954, the Strip's informal mayor was the indestructible Mickey Cohen, prince of gamblers and king of survivors. Operating from a haberdashery on the 8800 block of Sunset, Cohen defied all odds by emerging unscathed from an incredible series of Mob ambushes and bombings that took the lives of half a dozen of his bodyguards. 10
By the late 1950s, however, Cohen was cooling his heels in the pen and the Strip was in steep decline. Las Vegas, thanks to Bugsy Siegel, had usurped the lucrative symbiosis of movie stars and mobsters that the Strip had pioneered, and hijacked its star chefs and famous entertainers. Yet precisely as urban decay was taking a huge bite out of its golden mile, the popular television show 77 Sunset Strip was generating a new mythology. Ed 'Cookie' Byrnes — the program's Elvis-like co-star who played a parking-lot jockey who was also a part-time sleuth — briefly became the biggest youth celebrity in the country. The Strip was portrayed as a dazzling nocturnal crossroads for a handsome Corvette-and-surfboard set. 11
In fact, the Strip, like the larger (west and east) Hollywood community, was in transition between its golden age and two competing strategies for reusing vacant nightclub and entertainment space. The 'Times Square' option was to reopen clubs with topless or, later, nude dancers. The Bodyshop was the exemplar of successful neo-burlesque. The other option was to cater to juvenile audiences with rock music. Music producers and PR people, especially, liked the idea of a geographically centralized youth club scene to talent-scout new bands and develop those already under contract. The success of 77 Sunset Strip, moreover, established a national cachet and name recognition for groups weaned on the Strip. In 1965 the County reluctantly acceded to club-owners' and record companies' pleas and created a tiered licensing system that allowed 18-to-21-year-olds inside clubs where alcohol was served, while creating special liquor-less music venues for younger 15-to-18-year-olds. The youth club scene promptly exploded. 12
For older teenagers and young adults the premier clubs were the Whiskey, Gazzarri's, and the Galaxy. The newly baptized teenyboppers favoured It's Boss (formerly the renowned Ciros), The Trip (formerly Crescendo), and Sea Witch, as well as cheap, atmospheric coffee houses like Pandora's (owned by former tennis star Bill Tilden) and the Fifth Estate (bankrolled by teen magazine mogul Robert Peterson). As the clubs inexorably hiked their cover charges, younger and poorer kids preferred simply to be part of the colourful street scene, wandering in groups down Sunset or hovering near club entrances for a glimpse of Jim Morrison or Neil Young. As the nightly teen crowds grew larger, however, the Strip's upscale restaurant owners and their wealthy adult clientele began to protest about the lack of parking and the increasing sidewalk congestion. Beverly Hills matrons and Century City lawyers recoiled from contact with the beatified throngs. 13
"Moreover, at this point," wrote Edgar Friedenberg and Anthony Bernhard in a later account of the riots, "the good behavior of the 'teeny boppers' had become a problem." Because the kids were generally "not hostile, aggressive nor disorderly," there was no obvious pretext for driving them off the Strip. Eventually, the Sunset Strip Chamber of Commerce and the Sunset Plaza Association, representing landlords and restaurant owners, cajoled the Sheriff's Department to stringently enforce a youth curfew. During the 1940s, when teenage 'B-girls' were a national scandal, both the city and county had adopted parallel curfew regulations that forbade anyone under 18 from loitering in public after 10 p.m. "Loitering," Friedenberg and Bernhard noted, "is defined as 'to idle, to lag, to stand idly by or to walk, drive, or ride about aimlessly and without purpose' — a definition that may well make the entire solar system illegal."6 14 "Young people speaking their minds"
During the summer of 1966, the sheriffs on the Strip, soon joined by the LAPD in the adjacent Hollywood and Fairfax districts, escalated their pressure on the under-18s. Curfew arrests soared into the thousands, with 300 hauled away from the sidewalks outside Canter's Restaurant on Fairfax on a single July evening. "It was just like shooting ducks in a duck pond," boasted one deputy. When the city's largest newspaper needed a dramatic image for a story about the teenage hordes, the deputies obligingly arrested ten kids and stood them handcuffed in a line "for the direct accommodation of the Los Angeles Times."7 "Throughout the spring and summer," reported Renata Adler in a later New Yorker article, "licenses permitting minors to be served anything at all were revoked at one place after another: several of these places reluctantly went adult and topless — a change that seemed to cause the authorities no distress." Indeed, it was widely rumoured that the kids were being cleared off the Strip to make way for the return of Mob-connected sex entertainment and "for more serious, less conspicuous forms of vice than lingering after curfew."8 15
Shortly after Halloween, a couple of angry teenagers decided it was time to organize a formal protest against the arbitrary arrests and police abuse of kids on the Strip. They printed a flyer — "Protest Police Mistreatment of Youth on Sunset Blvd. — No More Shackling of 14 and 15 year olds" — calling for a demonstration on Saturday night, 12 November. It was at this point that Al Mitchell, the leftist ex-merchant sailor and filmmaker who managed the Fifth Estate for Robert Peterson, became their informal sponsor. Cans were soon being circulated around the coffee house to raise money for additional leaflets. Rock stations began to luridly warn that a 'major riot' was brewing, and cautioned kids away from the Strip on the 12th. This was irresistible publicity for a demonstration whose urgency was underlined by the arrest of 80 kids for curfew violations on Friday night. 16
The next evening, according to the Freep, by 9 p.m. more than 3,000 teenagers, flanked by adult curiosity-seekers and hostile servicemen, gathered in front of Pandora's. Aside from a handful of placards hastily painted at the Fifth Estate a few hours before the demonstration, there was no apparent organization or leadership whatever. In the spirit of the times, the protest had been conceived as a spontaneous "happening" and the overwhelming majority of the crowd complied with its peaceful purpose. At one point the police called a fire company to the scene, and some of the kids nervously asked the firefighters whether they were going to hose them. A bemused fire captain replied: "Have a good time and let me go home." The engine left. 17
The overflow of protestors onto Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards created a traffic jam; several bus drivers angrily honked and screamed at the kids. In response, demonstrators climbed up and danced on the roofs of the buses. One youth scrawled "Free the 15 Year Olds!" on a windshield; another broke a window with a fire extinguisher. On the fringe of the crowd there was a brief scuffle between longhaired protestors and some young sailors and Marines. Shortly after 10 p.m., a hundred cops roughly used their nightsticks to clear the sidewalks. Police with drawn revolvers chased kids into Pandora's. Panicky protestors who tried to retreat westward down Sunset collided with a wall of riot-ready sheriffs, and about 50 were arrested.9 18
The LAPD declared a 'tactical alert' the next evening, closing Sunset from Fairfax to Crescent Heights. State Highway Patrol officers and private Pinkerton guards reinforced the sheriffs' side of the line. Thanks to wildly escalating rumours in the station houses, the atmosphere was irrationally tense, and the Freep reported that "many of the officers seemed to be in a state of panic." While Al Mitchell shot footage for his documentary Blue Fascism, 300 or so protestors jeered "Gestapo, Gestapo!" at the police line and then dispersed after they were declared an "unlawful assembly." They vowed to return the following weekend.10 19
On Monday morning, it was the turn of the Establishment to riot. Although a handful of protestors had been involved in the bus incident (total estimated damage: $158), the Herald-Examiner's headline screamed: "Long Hair Nightmare: Juvenile Violence on Sunset Strip." A Times editorial likewise warned of "Anarchy on Sunset Strip," and blamed the teenagers and their "senseless, destructive riot" for a "sorry ending for the boulevard that was once Hollywood's most dazzling area." The Times also gave much space to the melodramatic claims of Captain Charlie Crumly, commander of the LAPD's Hollywood Division, that "left wing groups and outside agitators" had organized the protest. Crumly also asserted that "there are over a thousand hoodlums living like bums in Hollywood, advocating such things as free love, legalized marijuana and abortion."11 20
Los Angeles suddenly seemed like an embattled patriarchy. Hollywood councilman Paul Lamport demanded a full-scale investigation into Crumly's charges of a subversive plot, while his county counterpart, Supervisor Ernest Debs, ranted that "whatever it takes is going to be done. We're going to be tough. We're not going to surrender that area or any area to beatniks or wild-eyed kids." The Sunset Plaza Association, representing Strip restaurant owners, called for a city crackdown on such "kid hangouts" as Pandora's and the Fifth Estate that offered sanctuary to protesting teenagers across the county/city border.12 21
Only the Freep challenged the daily press's characterization of the previous weekend's police disturbance as a 'teenybopper riot'. "To the editorial writers of the Times, sitting in their bald majesty on First Street, entirely isolated from the events, unable to properly evaluate or analyze them, it is only possible to say: 'You are stupid old men who make reckless and irresponsible statements that can only make a bad situation worse'." According to the Freep, the kids were actually caught in the middle of an economic conflict between the Sunset Strip Chamber of Commerce with its ties to the adult-entertainment industry, on one hand, and the Sunset Strip Association, representing the youth venues, on the other. "The police, in effect, have been cooperating with one very wealthy group of property owners on the Strip against a less powerful group of businessmen."13 22
The lopsidedness of the battle was further demonstrated when the Los Angeles City Council unanimously acceded to the Sunset Plaza Association's request and voted to use eminent domain to demolish Pandora's Box. At the same time, Sheriff Peter Pitchess and Supervisor Debs lobbied the County Public Welfare Commission to prevent the renewal of the permits allowing Strip clubs to admit under-21s. When the Commission baulked, the supervisors themselves rescinded the offending ordinance and effectively banned teenagers from the clubs.14 Suddenly, Los Angeles' celebrated rock renaissance itself was under threat, and this quickly galvanized the younger generation of music producers and agents into unexpected solidarity with the next wave of protests on the Strip. 23 "There's a man with a gun over there"
Although the second weekend of protests (18–20 November 1966) again pitted thousands of flower children against huge phalanxes of police and sheriffs, the still leaderless protestors broadcast enough seductive warmth, as well as carnival-like mirth, to take the grim edge off the evening. As they marched down the Strip, they handed out flowers and blew bubbles and kisses. The cops seemed disarmed by the happy mood, although at 10 p.m. a sheriffs' sound truck began warning under-18s to clear the street or be arrested. Hundreds of kids resolutely faced off a cordon of deputies, police, and Navy Shore Patrol around the Crescent Heights and Sunset triangle. Although several score of curfew violaters were ultimately arrested, there were no baton charges, and the crowd, still in surprisingly good humour, dispersed by 2 a.m. There were widespread rumours, however, that the business interests were upset with the evening's outcome, and that the sheriffs were under pressure to use more aggressive tactics the next weekend. 24
To forestall the expected violence against their fans, a group of concerned celebrities and music-industry executives went into a huddle the following Friday. The meeting was called by Jim Dickson, the manager of the Byrds, who took fulltime leave to organize the awkwardly titled CAFF. Its initial membership included Dickson's partner Ed Ticker, the ubiquitous Al Mitchell, Whiskey's co-owner Elmer Valentine, Sonny and Cher manager Brian Stone, television star Bob Denver of Gilligan's Island fame, millionaire sportsman and Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow (a member of the Sheriffs' Aero Squadron), and Beach Boy Enterprises' Michael Vossi and David Anderle. The meagre political clout of the club owners was now dramatically augmented by support from the top bands and music-industry leaders. CAFF decided to mobilize its members and friends to attend the next evening's demonstration as legal observers in yellow armbands. A group of sympathetic Hollywood ministers and the local chapter of the ACLU also promised to turn out to support the right of peaceful protest.15 25
Freep's Brian Carr. "There was no plan or purpose evident in the beatings or the subsequent arrests. It seemed the handiest people, with no regard given to age, sex or social position were clubbed, punched and/or arrested."16 The immensely popular Bob Denver, a one-time mailman and former teacher before roles as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963) and Gilligan (1964–1967) launched his stardom, was left almost speechless by the scene. "Unbelievable ... just unbelievable," Denvermumbled as deputies spat on a woman in his group, then charged down the street to baton some harmless teens. Peter Fonda, who was filming outside the Fifth Estate with actor Brandon de Wilde, was arrested with 27 others, mainly adults, as they watched the LAPD's emulation of the sheriffs. "Man, the kids have had it," Fonda later told reporters.17 26
Meanwhile inside the lobby of the West Hollywood Sheriffs station, Brian Stone — who was already a legend for creating Sonny and Cher as well as Buffalo Springfield — was arrested for refusing to produce identification upon demand. His business partner, Charlie Green, was in turn busted for protesting Stone's arrest. Before the night was over, the sheriffs and LAPD together had made enemies of one of the most powerful, if unconventional, industries in Los Angeles. As the Mamas and the Papas later explained to reporters, even millionaire rock stars could no longer "drive down the street with any feeling of safety from harassment."18 27
The even more promiscuous police violence at the 10 December protest (described at the beginning of this essay) solidified CAFF's apprehension that 'blue fascism' posed a direct threat to Los Angeles' billion-dollar rock culture. As the city council and board of supervisors forged ahead with their plans to bulldoze Pandora's and gut the Strip club scene, CAFF joined with the club owners and the ACLU in an ultimately successful legal defense of the status quo ante. If the Los Angeles Times red-baited the longhaired protestors as dupes of the "the leftwing W.E.B. DuBois Clubs," AM stations fought back with a dramatic recording of a defiant teenager saying "it's our constitutional guarantee to walk unmolested on Sunset Strip" as he was being bundled into a sheriff's car.19 And within a few weeks, tens of millions of teenagers across the world were listening to the haunting words — "Stop, children, what's that sound?" — of Stephen Stills's Strip battle anthem, "For What It's Worth." 28
Al Mitchell and CAFF, supported by the Freep, suspended demonstrations over the Christmas holiday while they held 'peace talks' with country officials. Verbal progress on that end, however, was undercut by what was widely seen as an escalation of police pressure on youth and adult counter-cultures throughout the Los Angeles area. In mid-December, for example, Pasadena Police raided the popular Catacombs art gallery and arrested 100 young people on a variety of drug charges, many of them utterly bogus. Then, on New Year's Eve, the LAPD vice-squad rampaged through the gay bars in the Silverlake district, roughing up and arresting scores of patrons.20 29 The LAPD also increased its illegal harassment of the Freep's salesforce. Despite a city ordinance authorizing their right to sell papers from the curb to passing cars, Freep vendors were systematically ticketed and frequently arrested, especially on the Strip and in front of Pandora's. Since local television and the two dailies had blacked out images of police brutality, the Freep, together with a few rock stations and the local Pacifica franchise (KPFK-FM), were truly the alternative media. Persecution, moreover, only made the Freep vendors into heroes and boosted the paid circulation of the paper above 65,000.21 30 "I think it's time ... "
The 'phony war' on the Strip lasted until the end of February when Al Mitchell announced that "we must go on to the streets again police and sheriff's deputies have again and again violated the terms of a 'truce' RAMCOM and other concerned groups negotiated on 16 December with the Los Angeles Crime and Delinquency Commission." Indeed, Captain Victor Resau of the West Hollywood Sheriffs humiliated the Commission when he publically renounced the truce or any other constraint on the vigorous enforcement of the curfew law. The County's earlier attempt to outlaw teenagers from rock clubs by ordinance had been ruled unconstitutional, so sheriffs and police were once more under terrific pressure from property-owners to use brute force to drive the kids off the Strip. Mitchell was particularly outraged at repeated raids on the Fifth Estate and other alcohol-free coffee houses. Some 80,000 leaflets calling for a demonstration on Saturday night, 11 February 1967, saturated the clubs and made their way clandestinely through every high school in the county. 31
For the first time there was strategic planning to broaden the base of the protests to incorporate the grievances of gays and people of colour. As the Freep noted, "one of the most interesting and pace-setting reactions to the call to demonstrate came early this week from homosexual organizations who are currently up in arms about New Years Eve's police raids on a number of Silver Lake area gay bars."Two leading gay groups, PRIDE and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, endorsed the 11 February demonstration and added plans for their own simultaneous march along Sunset in Silver Lake. Mitchell's loosely knit RAMCOM group also plotted actions in Watts, East L.A., and Pacoima in the hope that angry Black and Chicano youth would be drawn to participate. The self-concept of the Strip movement was shifting from an amorphous 'happening' to an all-embracing coalition of outcast and police-persecuted street cultures.22 32
A crude attempt was made to frame the movement's principal adult leader. Ten days before the scheduled demonstrations, Mitchell — a veteran of harassment for such offenses as allowing singing in the Fifth Estate and obscene anti-police graffiti in its lavatories — was arrested (but not booked) on suspicion of 150 counts of statutory rape. The fortyish leftist, whom the Times had caricatured as the "muezzin of the teenboppers," was now unmasked as a sinister sex criminal preying on his teenager followers — or so it was claimed on radio and television news. In fact, Mitchell's 17-year-old accuser quickly confessed that her allegations were lies told in anger after she had been thrown out of the Fifth Estate for drug use. The Freep pondered why Mitchell had been so brazenly arrested and demonized in the media before the LAPD had even checked out the teenager's preposterous story.23 33
In any event, the hubbub around Mitchell did not deter more than 3,000 teenagers, along with unprecedented numbers of college students and adults, from once again assembling in front of Pandora's on Saturday night. For the first time, there was an organized rally — with speeches by Mitchell, civil liberties lawyer Marvin Chan, and ACLU counsel Phil Croner — as well as an ingenious tactical plan. Every hour new contingents of protestors were sent west on the county Strip where sheriffs deputies, impassive for the most part, allowed them to march without harassment. The demonstrators, carrying signs that read "Stop Beating the Flower Children" and "Stop Blue Fascism," were both exuberant and disciplined: vivid refutation of the hoary myth of "wild-eyed, drug crazed rioters."24 34
Meanwhile 500 protestors in front of the Black Cat Bar at the corner of Sunset and Hyperion were urged by speakers to make "a unified community stand in Silver Lake against brutality." In L.A. history, this was the less dramatic counterpart to the Village's Stonewall Riot, the birthdate of an activist gay rights movement. Unfortunately the other protest venues were unhistoric flops. Only a desultory crowd turned out in Venice, where most residents had preferred to join the main action on the Strip, and in Pacoima a small group of hapless RAMCOM kids with good intentions but poor communication skills were set upon and beaten by local gang members. The Freep could find no evidence of any protests in either Watts or East L.A.25 35 T
his did not mean, however, that the Strip protests had no impact upon the ghettoes and barrios. Black and Chicano flower children were beginning to integrate the Strip in small numbers, despite frequent racist treatment from club bouncers and, of course, cops; and some Black leaders, both moderate and radical, were rallying to the idea, pushed by Al Mitchell and New Left groups, that there really was new ground for a broad, anti-police-abuse coaliton. In March, after another large protest on the Strip, Georgia legislator and civil rights hero Julian Bond spoke to admiring youth at the Fifth Estate while cops loomed threateningly on the periphery in riot gear.26 From February onwards, moreover, every protest on the Strip self-consciously identified itself with the victims of far more deadly police brutality in Southcentral L.A. Radical groups, especially SDS and the International Socialists, began to play more prominent roles in the protests and actively recruited high-school-age memberships. 36
But many Angelenos had no inkling that mass protests, larger than ever, were continuing on the Strip. In April, the latest addition to the local alternative media, Los Angeles Underground, bannered the huge headline: "STRIP WAR: News Blackout Conceals Struggle, Police Sabotage Truce Agreement." The paper excoriated the Herald-Examiner, but even more the Times, for their refusal to print a word about the huge but now disciplined demonstrations on the Strip.27 The Times, however, did continue its vilification of youth culture ('teenyboppers' had now metamorphosed into 'hippies') with constant stories and editorials of the ilk, "Hippies Blamed for Decline of the Sunset Strip."
Furthermore, the Times warned, the bell-bottomed hordes were now poised to 'invade' and presumably destroy Hollywood as well. Much attention was given to a speech that a local real-estate appraiser, Robert Steel, had made in May 1967, charging that longhaired teens had done more damage than the Watts rioters two years earlier. Steel claimed that the under-18 youth had reduced property values along the Strip by 30 per cent and scared away potential major investors, including a large savings-and-loan company.28 37
The Times, at least, was accurate in pointing out a new hotspot in Hollywood where property owners were squaring off against new youth venues, especially Hullabaloo, a vast rock emporium that sometimes staged a dozen popular bands in all-night marathons. On 28 July 1967, the LAPD, using elaborate decoys and commando tactics, had swept down upon the ticket lines at Hullabaloo and arrested 200 fans for curfew violations, although their IDs were only checked at the station. As usual the incident went unreported in the Times, but it sent shock waves through the music world and revived CAFF-type interest in defending the industry's local fandom. 38
Nineteen sixty-eight was year three of the struggle and the Strip War threatened to become as protracted as the Civil War, with the baby sisters and brothers of the original protestors now on the front line. No one could much recall what a 'beatnik' was, but hippie-phobia was reaching a crescendo, with the Times, as usual, providing a rich diet of innuendo and stereotyping.29 Yet the immense engines of the culture industry were slowly turning the great ship of mainstream taste around. Straight young adults, from secretaries to longshoremen, were quietly letting their hair grow and putting on bell bottoms. The young sailors and Marines who a few years before had waylaid unwary teenyboppers in the Strip's back alleys were now happily trading drugs with their hippie connections. Storeowners and restaurateurs who once had apoplexy at the sight of a madras-clothed teenybopper now couldn't distinguish them from the palm trees. 39
As the mainstream went counter-cultural, much of the counter culture, including its music, moved, however temporarily, to the political left. The LAPD and the sheriffs had to shift deployments to deal with the new specters of the Black Panther Party in Southcentral and high-school unrest on the Eastside. Curfew enforcement on the Strip became a less urgent law-enforcement priority. Although police harassment would continue for another decade or more, the Strip war came to a climax on 28 September 1968, the day after Huey Newton had been sentenced to prison. 40
The protest this time was organized by the new Peace and Freedom Party which gave equal billing to three demands: "Free the Strip. End Police Brutality. Free Huey Newton." Although the Times — what else could one expect? — gave the protest only a few sentences, claiming that there were about 600 participants, I can testify that the number was at least four times larger.30 It was, in fact, one of the most memorable demonstrations of a lifetime, as the same kids, so frequently scorned and physically abused by the deputies, now boldly shoved "F*** the Sheriffs" and "No More Murder of Black People" placards in their faces. 41
For the first time the shoe was on the other foot. The West Hollywood Sheriffs station was surrounded by protestors, besieged by 'revolutionary hippies' no less. In a tense, hour-long confrontation, the kids showed superb courage and good humour. In the end, everyone simply walked off, back into the rock-and-roll night, while some of the girls threw kisses to the thoroughly vexed and defeated sheriffs. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/59/davis.html In the event, amok sheriffs' deputies gave CAFF and some 30 clergy a shocking exhibition of the abuse that the kids had been complaining about all year. "People were viciously clubbed and beaten".
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