Los Angeles in the 1970s

David Kukoff, David Kukoff

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781942600718
• eBook ISBN:
  9781942600947
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

With the tragic and bloody ending to the optimistic 1960s in Los Angeles's fabled hills, the 1970s became a defining decade in the city. Marked by the Manson murders, rampant inflation, and recession, the decade seemed to usher in a gritty and unsightly reality. The city of glitz and glamour overnight became the city of smog and traffic, a cultural and environmental wasteland. Los Angeles in the 1970s was a complex and complicated city with local cultural touchstones that rarely made it near the silver screen. In Los Angeles in the 1970s, LA natives, transplants, and escapees talk about their personal lives intersecting with the city during a decade of struggle. From The Doors' John Densmore seeing the titular L.A. Woman on a billboard on Sunset, to Deanne Stillman's twisting path from Ohioan to New Yorker to finally finding her true home as an Angeleno, to Chip Jacobs' thrilling retelling of the "snake in the mailbox" attempted murder, to Anthony Davis recounting his time as "Notre Dame Killer" and USC football hero, these are stories of the real Los Angeles--families trying to survive the closing of factories, teens cruising Van Nuys Boulevard, the Chicano Moratorium that killed three protestors, the making of a porn legend. Los Angeles in the 1970s is a love letter to the sprawling and complicated fabric of a Los Angeles often forgotten and mostly overlooked. Welcome to the Gold Mine.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• L.A. Woman Redux
• What Needed Screwing Got Screwed
• Venice Bohemia: From Abbot Kinney to the Z-Boys
• Snake vs. Wolf
• March 1974
• From the Desert to the Sea: First Encounters with Los Angeles
• Hamburgers, Hemorrhages, and Haute Cuisine
• The Making of a (Tennis) Player
• Ritam Bhara Pragya
• “Me? I’ve Got a Pilot.”
• Shitty Lead Guitarist Takes California by Storm
• Merging Worlds: Los Angeles, 1979
• I was an Illegal…
• Bright Lights, B-City
• Last Button on the Left: The Late, Great Z Channel
• Heart of Dorkness: How Dr. Demento Saved my Bony, White Ass
• For Now
• Borrowing Sugar
• It was Fun While it Lasted: Scientology, est, High Times, and Higher Learning at Uni High
• Cruising Van Nuys Boulevard
• The Notre Dame Killer
• The Day Three Chicanos Died
• Snapshots: Seventies Performance Art in LA
• Running for City Council in the 1970s
• Just an Ordinary Girl
• Johnny Wadd: Origins
• The Snake and Bake Murder
• A Few, Mostly True, Things About LA
• When Reality was a Joke: the Making of Albert Brooks’ Real Life (1979)