Love were such pariahs on LA's Sunset Strip in the 1960s that a rival musician contemptuously rechristened them Hate. This song, named after the stretch which housed the Whisky a Go Go club, is upbeat yet uneasy, as if sensing the madness waiting around the corner. Charles Manson, madness incarnate, later inspired Revolution Blues, Neil Young's lunatic's-eye view of LA's cloistered millionaire hippies (himself included).
And Manson makes a cameo appearance in NWA's Straight Outta Compton, a scorching battle cry that placed an unremarkable LA suburb at the centre of the hip-hop universe. If California is a place of promises made and betrayed, then Hollywood is its spiritual capital. John Lydon looms over it like a cackling wraith on Leftfield's Open Up, updating Public Enemy's cry of "burn Hollywood burn", while Dionne Warwick is the disappointed starlet heading home in Bacharach David's poignant Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
: "Weeks turn into years and quickly pass/ All the stars there never were are parking cars and pumping gas." And so we heard north. In Unfair, Stockton-based Pavement chart their divided state, from Mount Shasta and Santa Rosa down to Lake Tahoe and Bakersfield, protesting that "the south takes what the north delivers".
Up in San Francisco Bay, a heartsick Otis Redding ends his 2,000-mile trek because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where he runs out of continent.
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