As we brace ourselves for a summer of World Cup action, all eyes will be on the opening ceremonies held across Mexico, Canada and the US, with the biggest of the three parties taking place in Los Angeles on Friday. This week’s playlist takes us on a musical journey to California, tracing its desert highways, ocean vistas and the homes and playgrounds of the rich and famous.
The early Beach Boys records distilled the essence of the teenage California lifestyle with songs about surfin’, cruisin’ and fun “all summer long”. California Girls marked a turning point, with Mike Love’s unsubtle wolf whistle of a lyric about “the cutest girls in the world”, elevated by Brian Wilson’s sophisticated studio technique, hinting at greater glories to come with Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations. The song would inspire the Beatles’s pastiche Back in the USSR as well as Katy Perry’s California Gurls – a shoo-in for her performance at the upcoming ceremony in LA.
There are more lush harmonies – and, yes, a flute solo – to be found on this breakthrough hit for the Mamas & the Papas. Written by the husband and wife team John and Michelle Phillips in the freezing cold of their New York apartment, it mythologises a “safe and warm” LA, many miles away. They would soon quit the East Village folk scene along with Denny Doherty and Mama Cass, making the move across the country to help forge the “California Sound”. Not that relocating west works for everyone: Chappell Roan’s 2023 song California referenced Dreamin’, bemoaning a place where “no leaves are brown. I miss the seasons in Missouri.”
“Everyone’s doing the California shake”. That chorus could be taken to be yet another novelty dance craze, such as the mashed potato, watusi or twist. But this is a song about the destruction wrought by the shifting San Andreas faultline, and “wond’ring if you’re going to survive” an earthquake. Around the same time, Carole King took a more metaphorical approach to tremors with I Feel the Earth Move, which topped the US chart as the flipside to It’s Too Late. Guryan’s song – like the majority of her criminally underrated work – never saw the light of day until its release, in demo form, 30 years later.
The twin tragedies of Altamont and the Manson Family murders threatened to turn the California dream into a nightmare. But for Canadian import Joni Mitchell, the leafy idyll of Laurel Canyon remained a comfort and muse. This second single from her 1971 album Blue finds her spinning stories of travelling across Europe, but yearning to come home. So excited is she about returning to LA, she’s prepared to compromise her counterculture credentials and “even kiss a Sunset pig”. Local law enforcement no doubt provided a warm welcome.
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The country rockers’ Twilight Zone tale about a desert inn where “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” has been described as a barbed attack on the American dream. Serious fans will also tell you that it’s a metaphor for the soul-sucking nature of fame. But given that most of the band had serious drug issues during its recording – and the song itself stretches to over six minutes, nearly half of that being a guitar solo – the real message here appears to be: embrace the excess and see you at the Grammys.
In contrast to its image as a vegan-friendly utopia, California is recast as a fascistic state run on hippie ideals in this debut single from punk’s great agitators. Jello Biafra’s satirical lyrics are written from the perspective of then governor Jerry Brown, as if he had been elected president in 1984. (“Mellow out or you will pay” being his silly if sinister mantra.) Brown’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan, was voted into the White House instead, prompting Biafra to pen We’ve Got a Bigger Problem.
Lana Del Rey would later record the track California for 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, but while that song is more of a “lover come back” plea, West Coast – from 2014’s Ultraviolence – is more evocative of La La Land itself. Reverb-heavy guitars and Dan Auerbach’s murky production conjure the stifling heat and cloying smog, as LDR deadpans about a place where “they love their movies, golden gods and rock‘n’roll groupies”. It’s the aural equivalent of bobbing glassy-eyed in a rooftop pool as you slip slowly into a narcotic fug.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance