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12:46 · 1,757 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- California's status as the place to make it was set in 1849 by the largest gold rush on record, which pulled hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars into the state.
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- Earthquakes, the gold rush aftermath, a new oil industry, wartime manufacturing and the arrival of motion pictures together drove a century of population growth.
▶ 00:02:28
- The Beach Boys sold escapism during a genuinely frightening period, the early Cold War, and gave the rest of the country a bright spot by building a direct line from anywhere in America to a southern California beach.
▶ 00:03:28
- Pet Sounds is the turn, moving the California sound toward lost idealism and more complex writing rather than more surf.
▶ 00:04:21
- Laurel Canyon worked because of its geography, isolated and quiet but close to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip, so musicians could live, get high and write together in one place.
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- The sound that came out of it, folk technique with gritty electric guitar and poetic writing, is how the California sound came to mean protest music.
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- Altamont on 6 December 1969 was meant to be Woodstock West and ended in four deaths after bad planning, fights involving the Hells Angels working security, and spiked drugs.
▶ 00:06:22
- The Manson murders that summer, including Sharon Tate, closed the decade's optimism alongside Altamont.
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- The song's opening move is to call the state the best example of western civilisation and then name what dreaming of that myth does to people, which is where its coined word comes from.
▶ 00:08:31
- The bleakest point in the argument is that even if the physical place vanished, Hollywood as an idea is embedded deeply enough in the culture that the damage holds.
▶ 00:09:50