Welcome to the Hotel California (part 1)

Posted on 19. Apr, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Writing from the road

We descend through a veil of poisonous brown smog and alight on a runway lined with a fiery explosion of red and orange marigolds. It’s a fitting entry into a city that combines extremes–fantasy and reality, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness–like no other. We have come to Los Angeles to attend Canada Media Marketplace, a two-day tourism conference filled with intense networking sessions, seminar-taking and after-hours partying. I’m also supposed to collect a travel writing award, which means that someone is going to give me a cheque. It’s always easier to look forward to a trip, even when it’s directly into the jaws of a sprawling monster like L.A., when there’s some cash floating in your future.

The venue for the conference is the Beverly Hilton, which, as the hotel’s name suggests, is located in Beverly Hills. Constructed in 1955 by Conrad Hilton, the Beverly Hilton became a glitzy gathering spot for Hollywood celebrities during its heyday in the 1960s. Today, it is sometimes confused with the Beverly Hills Hotel, an even more upscale sanctuary for the rich and famous, known as “the Pink Palace.” This hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, who reportedly has more green than Bill Gates.

It was the Beverly Hills Hotel that was featured on the cover of the Eagles’ chart-topping 1976 album The Hotel California. That grainy and brooding photograph, captured by shooting into the fading light with high-speed Ektachrome film from the top of a cherry picker 20 metres above Sunset Boulevard, helped make the hotel a mythic destination. The title track’s arcane lyrics also spawned various theories about what exactly the Hotel California was supposed to represent. Many claimed the song was a metaphor for drug addiction, some said it was about a mental hospital, others were sure it was about devil worship, and a few insisted it was an account of a real hotel that was run by cannibals. In truth, the song was about the pitfalls of success and the corruption of impressionable rock stars by the decadent Southern California music industry in the early 1970s, when agents and studios controlled artists like puppets. The Hotel California was meant to represent Los Angeles itself.

The release of The Hotel California occurred just shortly before my only other trip to Los Angeles. That low-rent expedition, undertaken with my pal Hugh McEachern, did not include any stops in Beverly Hills. We drove down from Vancouver in Hugh’s battered Cutlass, chugging into the City of Angels during a nasty November rainstorm. Our initial impression of L.A. was far from the stuff of dreams. As cold liquid pelted down we grabbed a burger at a greasy spoon on Hollywood Boulevard and watched through the windows as bedraggled street urchins scurried past, their sneakers squishing across the hand and foot prints of long-dead movie stars.

We stayed at the Tropicana Motor Hotel. During the 1960s, it was owned by Sandy Koufax, the Los Angles Dodgers pitching great, but we chose the Tropicana because we had read that Tom Waits lived there. The gravel-voiced balladeer was one of our favourite recording artists. Because of its proximity to the clubs of West Hollywood, the Tropicana was a popular haunt for musicians. In his book Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits, author Jay Jacobs calls the place a “funky, little fleabag” and a “rock-and-roll landmark.”

As Jacobs writes: “There, music-world banditos rubbed shoulders with groupies, rock-star wannabes, hard-luck cases and drunken salesmen. Record labels put up touring bands at the Tropicana. Andy Warhol filmed his cult film Heat at this atmospheric locale, and Jim Morrison lived there for years during the glory days of the Doors. Van Morrison wrote “T.B. Sheets” and several other songs while staying at the Tropicana. Fred Neil was registered there when he wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’. Big Brother and the Holding Company, Rhinocerous, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Alice Cooper all made the Tropicana their base of operations at one time or another.”

(Tom Waits)

By the time of our arrival in 1978, the Tropicana was playing host to a new, scattershot invasion of up-and-coming musical acts: Blondie, the Dead Boys, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Cramps and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. When we checked in, we asked if any big names were about. The desk clerk informed us that the Ramones had just checked out. “Such nice boys,” she said.

The Tropicana had ugly gold bedspreads, shag carpets and cigarette holes in the furnishings, but it was actually a cut above most of the other places that Hugh and I stayed at during our U.S. journey. In San Francisco, we spent a memorable night at The Windsor Arms, in the city’s Tenderloin district. The hotel clerk was a skinny junkie who kept compulsively scratching himself. He sat perched in a metal cage at the end of a corridor that ran at a sharp angle from the hotel’s front hallway. From this vantage point he could check out new arrivals when they rang the buzzer without running the risk of being shot through the glass in the front door. Even so, the clerk may have been the least unusual thing about the Windsor. There were grizzled winos, transvestites in pantyhose and Doberman Pinschers with studded collars on our floor, and the roach powder was piled like snow drifts in the corners of the room.

During our brief sojourn at the Tropicana, we never did run into Waits, who lived here for nine years, a time in which he claimed he was never provided with clean sheets or towels, but never complained because “he didn’t want to make waves.” The motel’s location was ideal for our purposes. Not only was it right next door to Duke’s Coffee Shop, a diner with cheap but tasty food and an all-day breakfast, it was also within walking distance of all sorts of attractions. We went to the Comedy Club and a saw a stellar cast of rising, young comics including David Letterman, Howie Mandel and Franklin Ajae; took in a scorching concert by Dave Edmunds and his band Rockpile at the Roxy Theatre; and banged down beers at the Whisky A Go Go, the legendary joint where the miniskirted dancer-in-a-cage craze began in 1964, where Jimi Hendrix jammed with Sam & Dave, and where the Doors served as the house band in the summer of 1966, until Jim Morrison’s impromptu performance of the Oedipal section of the “The End,” got them fired.

We also nearly got arrested.

As we strolled down the Sunset Strip one night a police cruiser surged past, made a hard turn up over the curb and skidded to a stop across the sidewalk, directly in our path. Two muscular cops exited with their guns drawn. Spooked, we quickly thrust our arms into the air as though we were in some cowboy film. One of the officers asked to see some I.D.

After scanning our driver’s licenses, he turned to his partner and rolled his eyes. “They’re Canadians,” he said.

His next remark took me by surprise. “You guys speak English?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Ahhh, I thought you might be a couple of those Frenchies,” he replied.

We admitted we were in L.A. on vacation, but the obvious question remained. “So, why did you stop us?”

The cop pointed behind us. “See that stop light. You walked through it when the light was red. You boys got to pay better attention. You don’t want to get hurt on your vacation, do you?”

They gave us back our I.D. and peeled rubber. We were both sure that we hadn’t walked through a red light. But even if we had, it didn’t seem like the sort of infraction that required them to launch into a Dirty Harry routine. “I think it was because those guys on the corner back there asked us if we wanted to score some coke,” said Hugh. “I think maybe the cops were hoping we’d make a run for it.”

That strange scene flickers through my mind as my wife and I drive up an immaculately landscaped driveway to the front of our hotel and a smiling doorman in a tailored beige uniform says, “Welcome to the Beverly Hilton, sir. Do you folks need any help with your bags?”I sensed that there would not be any cops with revolvers demanding to see some I.D. this time around.

(To be continued ….)