Five Odes to the Decadence of Los Angeles

If Los Angeles didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it. 

Imagine a sunny seaside Shangri-La of fit, tan, go-getters forever chasing a mechanical rabbit while onlookers curse or cheer, according to their fortunes. An arid, soulless oasis of wealth and fame that feasts on youthful vitality and boundless ambition, Los Angeles is sort of a human casino that spits out disillusioned losers at many times the pace of smiling winners. But human nature’s such that we find it hard to resist a fateful, life-defining roll of the dice for a chance to win big. 

“Hotel California,” The Eagles (1975)

One reason the Eagles were able to write so definitively about the decadence and self-destruction of the Los Angeles lifestyle was they’d dived so deeply into it. If Hotel California had a real-life counterpart it was the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is one of the places the band frequented. 

“We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest,” Don Henley told Rolling Stone. “Hotel California was our interpretation of the high life in L.A.”

They all had experienced the drive into the city at night for the first time, horizon aglow from the city a hundred miles away. That became the inspiration for the opening lines, as penned by Henley and Glenn Frey. Frey has compared it to John Fowles’ book The Magus, about a despondent young man tragically drawn into a rich recluse’s weird, decadent world. 

Like most songs about California, there are references to the expensive brand-laden experience (Her mind is Tiffany-twisted / she got the Mercedes Benz) and shallow hangers-on (pretty pretty boys she calls friends). Naturally, it’s the allure of sex and drugs (Mirrors on the ceiling / Pink Champagne on Ice) that baits the self-destructive trap (we are all just prisoners of our own device).

“Sex and Dying in High Society,” X (1980)

While the song isn’t overtly connected to Los Angeles, it is from the album Los Angeles, it’s from one of the quintessential LA bands, and it sketches a scene of “sugar daddy” decadence that’s ripe for the area. The scene is set with a woman of expensive (Turkish cigarettes), rich people (your Pekingese) tastes who will do anything to maintain that lifestyle. So she marries someone as old as her father for his money. 

He’s a joke (Every time you look at him / You could almost fall asleep), and there’s even the implication she’s considering killing him (that one’s just got to go). Living in this way is killing her inside, so she gets the maid to burn her back with a curling iron. In the end, her pain replaces love, which may seem like a helluva price to pay for nice stuff, but you’ve probably never owned a Hermes bag.

“Angeles,” Elliott Smith (1997)

One of Smith’s prettiest songs, “Angeles” is from Smith’s third and final independent album, Either/Or, which takes its name from a text by philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on the aesthetic and ethical case for moral behavior. 

In this song, Smith is weighing the virtues of signing to a major label when it’s been the worst decision many past acts have made. Go on, lose the gamble that’s the history of the trade, he sings, referring both to how the pursuit of major label success usually ends badly and the music business’ long history of artist exploitation. Smith curses his brewing ambition: Don’t start me trying now! 

There’s a dark seductiveness to the agent pursuing Smith. He flatters (I’ve seen your picture on a
hundred-dollar bill) and over-promises (I can make you satisfied in everything you do), before offering things he can’t even imagine (your secret wishes now could right now be coming true). No one would be surprised to hear this guy’s brother is in the same business, only for people’s souls.

“Los Angeles, I’m Yours,” The Decemberists (2003)

Portland, Oregon’s The Decemberists wrote this song about singer/guitarist Colin Meloy’s love/hate affair with Los Angeles. “The city had a kind of numbing effect on me as if I was suddenly underwater,” Meloy told Do L.A.. “But of course, there was something always so alluring about the city.”

Meloy cracks on Los Angeles’ lack of soul (its hollowness will haunt you), its high fashion and base provocation (Ladies, pleasant and demure / Hollow-cheek’d and sure / I can see your undies) which he contrasts with the sea’s refuse (an ocean’s garbled vomit on your shore). 

Meloy references a bridge and tunnel crowd that would make more sense in New York, presumably to characterize how much Los Angeles is populated by transplants and out-of-towners. Meloy gets very early 20th century in his prose (What a rush of ripe elan! / Languor on divans / Dalliant and dainty) as a way of contrasting the high culture the occurs beside the sorry spectacle. 

“’Los Angeles, I’m Yours’ is my effort to … write using this really robust language or intricate language and balancing that with gross body humor, essentially,” Meloy told NPR.

He acknowledges like a warning disclaimer that the city’s a calamitous den of iniquity and tears, that has left him wretched, retching on all fours. Despite (or more darkly, because of) this, he lays at Los Angeles’ feet, pledging his allegiance. 

“Desperadoes Under the Eaves,” Warren Zevon (1976)

This is an autobiographical story of dissolution that acts as a parallel commentary on the state’s precarious moral and physical state. When Zevon mentions the likelihood that California will fall into the Pacific, citing mystics and statistics, he’s also setting it up as a sort of modern day Gomorrah, destroyed in the Bible for its wickedness. When he sings how the sun looks angry through the trees, it doubles as a biblical reference for a recovering Catholic like Zevon. Sure enough there’s a reference to the thieves crucified next to Jesus, and finally Heaven help the one who leaves. 

That line has a double meaning based on the story behind the song. In the late ’60s Zevon was a budding alcoholic who for a while bounced from one hotel to another, finally winding up at the fleabag dive known as the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel. Each night he stepped over junkies passed out in front of his door, and finally left by calling his friend, one of the founding Beach Boys, David Marks. His friend pulled up the car to the back and Zevon escaped out a bathroom window, literally sneaking out beneath the eaves.

In the song’s closing verse, Zevon’s trying to clean up his act and find a girl who can understand him, all the while living with a sense of guilt over what he’s done (don’t the sun look angry at me). In a poetic moment, Zevon harmonizes with Beach Boy Carl Wilson on the line, Look away down Gower, far away, a reference to the street that housed the first movie studios, where the dream began—a dream that like his own is colored by its bad behavior.

Zevon was offered his first big deal by David Geffen’s Asylum Records on the condition he record “Desperado Under the Eaves” for them.

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