Domenic Priore is the author of Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood (revised edition out in September 2015), Pacific Ocean Park: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles' Space Age Nautical Pleasure Pier (with Christopher Merritt), Beatsville (with Martin McIntosh), Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion From the Bohemian Surf Boom (with Brian Chidester) and Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece. This fall will see the release of Priore's tenth book, a collaboration with '60s girl group and Shindig! singer Donna Loren on the Rare Bird Lit imprint. He wrote the booklet notes for The Beach Boys: Smile Sessions box set (Capitol) as well as the DVD booklet for The Decline of Western Civilization Collection (Shout! Factory). Priore was the primary writer for the two-part AMC documentary series Hollywood Rocks The Movies, hosted by Ringo Starr and David Bowie.
Beyond the scope of these center-of-attention structures was Sunset Boulevard itself, which winds romantically through the Hollywood Hills in a manner where curves seem to bend with the texture of the architecture. After passing the majestic Ciro’s on a modest, regal incline, subtle things began to consume one’s sensory awareness, such as the left curve at the (Modernist) Trousdale Apartments, sweeping downhill through the area where the Sea Witch, Dino’s Lodge, Fred C. Dobbs’ coffeehouse, the Playboy Club, the Trip and Ben Frank’s melded into the ’20s colonial structures of the Sunset Plaza. The panorama from the corner of Sunset and La Cienega faces Southwest over the incline, creating a mystical turn of the wheel as it overlooks the most angular vista in the region.
What spread out before you were endless streams of twinkling lights, from Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig homes in the hills above, to the far-reaching residential horizon below. This hiway veranda funneled into neon club marquees ahead, with the ocean peeking through in the distance. Sky-reaching movie-premiere klieg lights (somewhere in the distance) often accentuated the view. These combined with the houselights to flesh out a dazzling array like pixie dust from Tinkerbell’s wand.
Much like the club in The Jetsons, Sunset Strip of the mid-’60s truly felt as if one could be floating in outer space, while still having a foot on the ground in a “city of the stars.” The whole Space Age motif had been set up and was in place. To step out onto the street in this atmosphere, buzzing from an intimate performance by the Byrds, Them, Love, the Velvet Underground or any of the bands playing regularly on the Strip, and to be surrounded by foot traffic hipping you to an equally compelling show witnessed just down the street was shared euphoria.
L.S.D.-25 was available and legal until October 6, 1966…Lysergic Acid Diethylamide accompanied many a trip to these cubes, bubbles and aeronautically designed take-off pads. The musicians inside provided wide-angle delivery of navigational planes. Though acid was around, unprecedented surrealism existed in the allied arts prevalent on Sunset Strip, precluding that L.S.D. wasn’t necessary to feel sky high.
Mid-’60s Sunset Strip represented a most successful application of the Space Age Pop motif grafted onto urban Modernism, Art Deco and 20th Century curvilinear street layout. The survey, engineering and roadway alignment itself dramatically complements the contour of the hills and their scenic merit. Like the panoramic sound in the middle break of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” the Futurama utopia aspect reached a pinnacle with its jangling fusion of Space Age design and a full culmination of Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Bauhaus and Modernism in the early stages of the proto-Psychedelic movement. These diverse elements at work in the sound, art and architecture of ’60s L.A. encompassed all the loose ends of science and physics like Einstein’s unified field theory.
Pop art made the future seem present. The ethereal, otherworldly outer space experiences on the Strip made real the dreams first presented at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. That vision of the future, which seemed all-important during the depression, had come to life… the future concept was now, in operation and Pop in the setting of ’50s and ’60s Los Angeles.
A drive to the Strip’s central plexus at La Cienega brought about a singular vision that you couldn’t drive past and not notice, coming or going: Dino’s Lodge. It sat smack-dab in the middle of the Sea Witch, Fred C. Dobbs’, the Playboy Club, the Trip and Ben Frank’s. Nothing made you feel that you were in the center of the dream known as Hollywood more than witnessing Dean Martin’s lackadaisical mug flashing in alternating red and white neon, emblazoned over the most crowded area of Sunset Strip.
A person became suspended in that futuristic dream at its animated zenith. It was as if some elusive, illicit thrill was upon you. If anyplace was swingin’, this was it. The exterior of Dino’s Lodge had been foretold as the Holy Grail since its use in 77 Sunset Strip, a destination where one could explode in rapture upon arrival. Such was the imagery and effect of the signage at Dino’s Lodge, a precipice of forbidden ecstasy that incredible live music in the surrounding area intensified.
Early Crawdaddy! journalist Sandy Pearlman understood the draw of this beacon; “If you’re a human being, a real human being, not a punkoid or a subhuman, the first place you’d head for upon hitting the Strip would be Dino’s, better known as 77 Sunset Strip. Better known as Great. Your roots are there. My roots are there.”
The energy of dancing and nightlife could not be contained after a wild show, as Eve Babitz explained: “When L.S.D. was the rage, everyone would leave the Strip at 2:00 a.m. when the clubs closed and go to Canter’s en masse so blasted out of their heads that if you asked someone what time it was they backed away, wide-eyed, as though you’d presented them with a philosophical impossibility.”
--from "Riot on Sunset Strip - Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand on Hollywood"
"I selected this text for several reasons, and one of them very ironic and current. If you were to drive down Sunset Boulevard right this minute you'll see the entire two blocks I'm describing completely torn down, and new high-rise structures going up in their place. I guess it had to go away, after all, the Dino's Lodge building had been stucco'd over and a floor had built on top of the original building frame. Sea Witch, you could see where the original entrance stairs were but nothing remained... the club closed in 1967, Dino's closing in the '70s. A lot of my work, such as the 2014 book with Christopher Merritt Pacific Ocean Park: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles' Space Age Nautical Pleasure Pier has a preservationist feeling to it, while giving off the full colorful history and fun of it all. With my own Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood, there's also that thing of the sociological movement young people were getting involved in, the political, and protest aspects. Kids are doing this in a media center where things can be heard. This part of the book is the section that talks about how the animation industry in Hollywood during the '60s took a lot of cues from that movement, and popular culture itself was manufacturing social consciousness as a product."
"Later, of course, that whole trip was illuminated at end of the Mad Men television series. But this exposure to a new way doesn't come out of nothing, the appropriation actually came out of some magic, laced with a bit of science. I did try to capture a feeling that I had the very first time I drove down Sunset Strip on a Saturday night in 1966 (with my uncle, mom and brother) and saw all those kids on the street, and heard all that music coming out of the walls of those clubs. Socially conscious Byrds, Zappa & the Mothers, Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Chambers Brothers, Brenton Wood, Mamas & Papas, Stone Poneys, Sonny & Cher, Standells, Seeds, Music Machine, Bobby Fuller Four, Thee Midniters, Electric Prunes, Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band-type music. That's what was really shaking up the town. You had all that in L.A. clubs during 1965 and 1966."
Domenic Priore
August 2015
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