Not too long ago, the Hollywood sign was crumbling. Up in the hills, beside a lit-up cross, it began to disintegrate as each of its children died. It has since been refurbished, although it remains slightly askew, almost as if the letters were dropped at random and just happened to form the word H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D. It was repaired solely for a third generation — kids who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, whose parents were divorced, who didn’t know their fathers. It became their sign. Now they could say with pride that nothing happens in L.A. They could spit out those syllables, informing you that downtown Los Angeles is all “eyes and teeth,” that Watts has over-spilled, and that there’s only one good place left: an amphetamine oasis where glamour still rides shotgun, where deserted movie mansions shimmer in the California sun, stucco sanctuaries which now shelter managers and guitarists and producers and Mick Jagger and Alice Cooper. “Just Hollywood they’ll tell you with a smile. “That’s all need to know.”

The waitresses in the Rainbow, L.A.’s rock-trash eatery, are the modern version of the girl at Schwab’s lunch counter. Take Linda, quietly desperate Linda. “She’ll fuck anything with a cock and a British accent.” Linda stands at the door: cool, slim, sort of blonde, with a touch of huskiness in her voice and shielded eyes that breathe mystery. The manager is tall, handsome, not quite Gary Cooper but leading-man material nevertheless. The bartender is Oriental, not so much inscrutable as slimly chic — the new look of Hollywood.

Upstairs is Over the Rainbow, private membership, ten dollars a month. They say that when it began it was the place, but it didn’t last long. The places never last long. Yet Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, still hoists a glass there now and then, crowded into the bar by “pimps, girls who are into money (not sex), hairdressers, coke dealers, and slime, darling, slime.”

A few minutes before two, the lights in the Rainbow come on, and the glamour pales a bit. The little brother of a famous rock star drifts out. His acne shows in the light. The waitresses begin to look

quickly side to side. Who knows what rock stars lurk in the shadows of the side booths? Ritchie Blackmore, lead guitarist of Deep Purple, left an hour ago. The local rock punks, pitched forward on their

Granny-Takes-a-Trip triple platforms, carefully puff their hair up, stand shakily, and head for the parking lot. The Hollywood rock mafia hold onto their tables till a functionary comes over and asks them to

please leave. The conversations continue out the back door, where boys and girls alike check the plates on limos in the parking lot. “Star 4″ is Keith Moon’s. It’s the one with the phone. A ‘75 Caddy draws

attention, but when a tall Hendrix look-alike folds himself into it, the kids back away. “Where did he get the money to rent a limo?” one girl asks, her lip curled into a perfect half-moon of distaste.
Parties are being planned, and liaisons finalized. Boys compare notes on local venereal epidemics, then drift into the 9000 building across the street, where their Jags and Mercedeses wait, silently

crouched for one last cruise of the Strip.
The lucky ones get to go to the Record Plant, where, with more luck, a good session will be happening and maybe someone will have some blow. Other lucky ones hook their dates around their elbows and

head away, ignoring pleas to “help us find the party.” The unlucky ones wait till the last minute, hoping the door to Over the Rainbow will open, and the star of their dreams will walk out into their arms. A

small Mexican girl darts through the parking lot, kissing one boy, hugging another, acting like she’s testing bath water, trying to find the perfect blend of hot and cold, guitar player and singer.
The desperate ones head for Denny’s, open twenty-four hours a day, serving the best dog food in Tinseltown. Denny’s, where the bright lights melt make-up with no respect for the care with which it was

applied. Where tough boys stand in the parking lots, and girls finger the butcher knives they’ve begun carrying in their purses. Rainbow regulars dart in and out, just checking. This is the wrong end of

Sunset for them — too close to their roots at Rodney’s English Disco or the Hollywood Free¬way, north to the Valley, where they’ll have to return, eventually, for soon it will be Monday, and that means time

for junior high.
Hitching home and praying the stitches in her tightly-seamed, velvet hot pants will hold, a small, dark-haired slightly round girl suddenly steps out into the road, looks quickly both ways and crosses.

She walks with purpose even though there seems to be nowhere to go. The town is dead. Every once in a while, a low-rider, slumping behind the wheel of a ‘64 Plymouth with purple fake-fur dash, cruises by,

beeping at her and scaring her just a little She doesn’t scare as easily now that she’s not a kid any more. She’s walked this part of the street many times. She’s fifteen, her name is Lisa, and she’s heading

for the Hyatt House for one last look. She won the Groupie-of-the-Year contest just a few weeks back, but that didn’t get her a ride in a limo tonight. It’s cold, but the Hyatt is only around the bend, just

past The Source, a Todd Rundgren billboard, and the tacky massage parlor. The lobby will be warm. Maybe someone will have checked in.
Breakfast is served twenty-four hours a day in the coffee shop of the Hyatt. Sundays, around three P.M., the rockers begin to slither back. In one corner, Sky Saxon, onetime member of The Seeds, a

legendary punk-excess band, eats alone. Across the room, Tommy, a rainbow-coiffed boogie boy, sits waiting, hoping a band will walk through the door to rescue him from rock ‘n’ roll oblivion. One table seems

reserved for two local prostitutes. Even in a town where sixteen-year-old freebie-chic is the going sexual guideline, the ladies of the afternoon run a swinging business.
Desiree and Lisa walk in, sitting at a table of local rock kids. Desiree was 1974’s other Groupie-of-the-Year. She’s almost perky, cutely blond with an infectious smile. At Rodney’s the night before,

she’d danced only with girls and kept her coat on. Now she wears a smart green pants suit that, she explains, was bought for her by a couple of guys with thousands of dollars in cash in the trunk of their

car. Desiree is pushing seventeen. She’s seen her friends quit the scene for teenaged boyfriends, guitar players “back East,” junk, or fatigue. Now she’s queen of the scene. Along with Lisa, whose reputation

stretches the length of the Strip. “She gives the best head in town,” a starving guitarist says with a smile meant to convey he’s been there already. A girl in a long, silver Jaguar confides, “She’s been

raped a few times, hitching home from the Hyatt.’ Street rumor also has it that her mother has occasionally been seen on the scene as well, in the company of a sound man from a best-selling British rock

band.
The two girls sit in the Hyatt and talk about other girls on the scene. Their talk is filled with insults and jabs. “It’s all part of the scene,” an old-timer explains. “They form pairs and gang up on

each other. One day they’ll be doing scenes together; the next they’ll be calling each other cunts.” Every girl has a gory tale or two about the venereal epidemics begun by someone at the next table. So the

real stars, the Jaggers and Coopers and Beach Boys, hide in the hills, fearful of the clap, scared of scabies, afraid that cute little thing at the next table will turn their mighty organs into blistered

battlefields of bacterial eruption.
Rock ‘n’ roll came to Hollywood early in its life. The Beach Boys won national prominence immediately, and their surfer friends Jan and Dean, along with manager Lou Adler, also became Hollywood heavies.

These were the California chauvinists, and the kids loved it. Adler would eventually stay, building his management empire through the creation of Dunhill Records, guiding The Mamas and the Papas through the

folk-rock boom, backing the Monterey Festival, creating Ode Records — and in 1974, bringing England’s transsexual rock comedy, The Rocky Horror Show, to Hollywood at the tail end of the glitter era.
The only challenge to Adler’s pop dominance in those very young days came from songsmith Burt Bacharach, who, with Dionne Warwick as his mouthpiece, brought California’s Tin Pan Alley to the world. The

ultimate hit from that collaboration, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” told the story of Hollywood’s failures, working in parking lots, beaten.
Both Bacharach and Adler, however, were “good” rock ‘n roll. Surf music was the positive side of the black, negative, baaad music being made by Chuck Berry. Surf music instilled complacency, while, on

the East Coast, folk music was moving swiftly from its traditional, goody-goody style to a heightened, Guthrie-type consciousness of a new spiritual depression. Dylan, Phil Ochs, even Peter, Paul, and Mary

were bad in the same way that Berry and Haley were, but no one knew, because they played acoustic guitars. Only when a Los Angeles group, the Byrds, began to play Dylan songs electrically did rock once again

turn bad. As Sonny and Cher and “Mr. Tambourine Man” hit the charts, youthful energy began to stir the Strip. It had been begun by the Beatles and the Stones, and finally, two years later, had a home-grown

exponent.
Though Bacharach was lost in the shuffle, Adler found his feet with four lovely young folkies, The Mamas and the Papas, and an ex-New Christy Minstrel, Barry McGuire, whose “Eve of Destruction” brought

protest to the top of the pops. Meanwhile, another cultural first was being manifested. The ar¬rival of British pop in America had plucked a hidden chord in teen-age, female America. By 1965, groupies (girls

who “laid it on the line” for rock ‘n’ roll stars, either in bed or as “the closest of friends”) were an integral part of the scene. The phenomenon preceded the word, but by the time the Byrds had reached

national fame and their Whiskey-a-Go-Go gigs had gained legendary stature, groupies were for real. Jim McGuinn, leader of the Byrds, became a groupie dream, what with his granny glasses, twelve-string

guitar, and soft-spoken cool. And groupies were only part of it. Rock fans had gone from cute to rabid.
In the fall of 1966, Hollywood’s rock scene made headlines when curfewed teen-agers rioted up and down Sunset Strip. Teen protest was for real, and rock was its anthem. But the scene was already

shifting. Adler made a bid for myth status with the Monterey Pop Festival. This was the last gasp of L.A.chic. San Francisco was already happening, and the City of the Angels, even with superstar groups like

The Doors and Buffalo Springfield set to burst, had to play West Coast second fiddle in media prominence. Hippies happened, and theirs was a different kind of cool. Not until the seventies did Hollywood

start to happen again on a national scale.
Kim Fowley saw it all. His first hit song, “Alley-Oop,” was written during the infancy of rock. And Kim, at that point, was already a grown man. “This town is filled with dog-slime,” he says over breakfast

at the Hyatt House. “And I can say that. I’ve been in Hollywood since 1946.” He’s a legend, and rightfully so. It’s been said that he is Hollywood. In the last year alone, his songs have been recorded by

Helen Reddy, Steppenwolf, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He helped put together the sound track for American Graffiti. Since rock ‘n’ roll began, he’s had seventeen separate record deals. Fans

bootleg his records in Paris. And along with Rodney Bingenheimer (owner and image of Rodney’s English Disco), Fowley is one of the few public personalities to have made it from 1965 to 1975 relatively

unscathed, still respected by the weenieboppers, and still able to make, and analyze, the scene.
“Hollywood is dead,” he says, “because it was once the show-business capital of the world, and now it’s obsolete. It’s just another town in America. You can glorify the greed and grotesquery of the

slobs who think they’re stars, because that’s all there is to talk about — failures trying to be stylish.
“America’s always been cheated out of a ruling class to look up to, so we have movie stars. The slime of America has to worship something. Hollywood is a state of mind, just like decadence. Even way

back in the twenties and thirties, M-G-M was in Culver City, and Warner Brothers was in Burbank. The stars never lived in Hollywood. They lived in Bel Air and Beverly Hills. Hollywood was, and is, all the

failures and the imitators of the failures. The movies and records always break somewhere else. There’s nothing fresh or vital about it — it’s just convenient. The Doors were unique in that they came from

here. In another era, this scene was vital. Now it’s over. As an honest songwriter, I have to see the battle lines. I’m writing songs about these apes, and their stink nauseates me.”
He must be taking a lot of Dramamine. Fowley is there, all the time, attending even the most nauseating events. When recent hit-makers Bachman-Turner Overdrive played a concert in Long Beach, Fowley was

backstage with, according to Rainbow gossip, half the bisexual-chic population of Hollywood. Halloween night, he was in Rodney’s, talking to tall, skinny, blond girls and judging a David Bowie look-alike

contest (during which he made the eventual winner cry by saying to the throng around the disk jockey’s booth, “If you think this kid is bisexual, say ‘yeah’ — and if you think he’s a piece of shit, say

‘boo.”). Sundays, Fowley often holds court at the Hyatt, and otherwise he’s prowling the bar at the Whiskey, taunting waitresses at the Rainbow, selling his songs, or managing a young rock band, The

Runaways — and apparently having a good time doing it all.
This afternoon at the Hyatt, though, he offers a “geographical desecration” of Hollywood that has his tablemates in hysterics. He explains how one can walk from one end of the Hollywood scene to the

other, through “areas only pertinent to grease and shit.”
A Fowley-led tour of Hollywood would begin at the Troubadour, that funky music showcase which, in recent months, has been visited by such rock eminences as John Lennon (who was thrown out for heckling

the Smothers Brothers) and Bob Dylan (who sat unnoticed through a set by progressive country legend Willie Nelson). “The Troubadour caters to ancient hangers-on, groupies, and organic bores whose one big

pastime is waiting for the Buffalo Springfield to re-form,” Fowley says with a caustic smile. Many of the women who sit at the Troub’s separate bar, he continues, are “women who married cute guys who gave

them saggy tits and ugly babies. They all sit at the bar waiting for recycled country-rock stars to walk in. They talk about the old days while, inside, the latest tasteful asexual, bastardized folk acts

parade their wares to prepaid music-business audiences.”
Fowley’s analysis may seem harsh, but the Troub does cater mostly to an older crowd, and the young girls speak of it as a graveyard. Anyone who’s into that kind of music, they patiently explain, is

really a drag. But the Troub is a center of the scene for people who’ve been making it for a few years. It’s music-business territory, and the little kids are not expected to be comfortable there. The liquor

laws are enforced, and, in Hollywood, that cuts a lot of people out. The Troub is not for sex, it’s for music — and the people who make music their business like that fine.
The next stop on Fowley’s tour of the Strip is only meant for a peek. Gazzari’s according to Fowley, is “mutant Hollywood,” filled with beehive hairdos and beer-bar music. It’s a pickup joint where a

rocker is more than likely to get beaten up. For heavier action, one must head for the mouth of the Strip — the Rainbow and its sister, Over the Rainbow. “Upstairs is discotheque dog meat on a dance floor the

size of dime,” says Fowley. “Older rock stars get coked up and wined up and stumble into young Superflies and Godfathers because they want to get beaten up. Downstairs is a lesser of two evils.”
The Rainbow Bar and Grill is a moderately priced restaurant, originally established by various rich heavies in the Los Angeles music scene. They wanted a hangout with nice atmosphere, decent food, and

their friends. It didn’t last long. Though the rock magnates assumed they were powerful enough to keep the place to themselves, they didn’t reckon with the utter democracy that is rock ‘n’ roll. How could

they keep out the burnt-out creep who, seven years ago, had a number-one retord? How could they avoid the striving sixteen-year-old guitarist? Could they wish away the presence of rock critics? Rock

photographers? Thirty-year-old groupies? Sixteen-year-old groupies who walked in on the arm of a star? And, of course just plain kids, in their very best, swap-meet, thirties rags, leaking Mom’s and Dad’s

money out of their too-small pockets, were there, too. They got to see their idols stinking drunk, insulting waitresses, wearing Tampaxes on their heads, acting like normal people. The ownership changed, but

the rock scene stayed. One scene-maker described the Rainbow as “in’-crowd grease.” Some of the biggies got scared away. Most of them keep on coming.
“The Rainbow crowd consists of graduates of Rodney’s pretending to be older than they are, screaming gay elephants, and little boys loud-mouthing their rap that ‘”My band’s gonna be big¬ger than the

Beatles,” Fowley says. ‘That’s the kind of human dreck you meet there. I’ve gotten laid only twice in the Rainbow, but that’s because I don’t stick my cock in cancer.” Many people would disagree, simply

because everyone comes to the Rainbow to talk, be seen, snort Parmesan cheese in the bathroom, get head in the back booths, promote, demote, or just listen.
The Whiskey is the next stop on the Strip. It remains one of the best gigs in town for bands, with its raised stage, large dance floor, and bar, even though. Fowley claims “it’s on its last cultural

legs.” The sexual tension in the room runs high, and the crowd is diverse. Whenever a good young band plays there (the Byrds, the Mothers, and the Hollywood Stars have all done it in their time), the scene

is hot, combining whatever’s best about all the others. No one tries to put the Whiskey down, be¬cause whether you want to hear music, get high, laid, or famous, it’s a good place to be.
Visitors to Hollywood are faced with an array of hotels to hit. Jagger stays at the Beverly Wilshire. Rock bands and writers who want people to know they are both trendy and successful stay at the

Beverly Hills. The Chateau Marmont often houses those who are either un¬pretentious or financially unprepared for the big time. But the action, for what it’s worth, is at the Continental Hyatt House, just

across Sunset from Lyle Tuttle’s Tattoo Parlor. It’s the Hyatt where girls prowl the halls till the wee hours, knocking on doors, listening for British accents. It’s the Hyatt where rich bands rent whole

floors and frighten those below them with screams and moans filtering through the air vents. It’s the Hyatt where a girl once rode the elevator all night, naked and tied to a chair, because no one knew what

to do with her. And it’s the Hyatt where, according to Fowley, “teen-age women with forty-year-old looks in their eyes make fools of themselves as they introduce men to sex objects. I have nothing but

contempt for those gar¬bage cans. It’s just a shame that an innovator in music has to eat his dinner with those pieces of shit dripping their pus all over the floor. They’ve contaminated the very beauty of

entertainment and elegance with their unstylish ways.”
Much love has been made in the star-filled beds of the Hyatt. Many girls have died slow deaths, listening through the doors to their boyfriends heavy-breathing with someone else. It can be the peak or

the pits. It’s center ring at the rock ‘n’ roll circus, and no one knows what will happen next.
The last stop on the pre-two A.M. tour of Hollywood night life is usually one of two places. “The new, emerging slimery,” Fowley instructs, “is Charley’s, which is for the Mexicans and blacks of

Hollywood, and which is turning into a miniature Newark. They aren’t let in anywhere else, so they play pinball there and then go to Poinsettia Playground and have chain fights.”
If you’re white or black or Mexican, under eighteen, and in love with yourself through rock ‘n’ roll, your last stop before the bars close is the legendary Rodney’s. Mr. Rodney Bingenheimer has been

around. The blond-haired, snaggle-toothed pop boy used to come from the suburbs to Rolling Stone concerts in 1965 with an entourage. Whatever’s happened since, Rodney was there, organizing, watching, and

taking part. Today, he’s the king of a waning glitter scene. Odds are he’ll soon find something else to do, but for the moment his English Disco is where you’ll find him.
It’s also where you’ll find half the sweet little rock ‘n rollers of Hollywood. The average age is about sixteen. Pro¬laimed sexuality is bi-. Dress is as skimpy as possible. Only beer is served, but

none of the kids drink it. They’re in training for the big time. The lucky ones follow in the footsteps of the early kings and queens — the Sable Stars and the Lori Lightnings, who found pop-star boyfriends

or made it up the street to the Rainbow. There, they’re kids — the little ones whom the stars and not-so-stars take advantage of. But at Rodney’s, they are stars themselves. Big fish in a very small pond, but

does that matter when you’re thirteen and the manager of a very famous group is sitting in the VIP booth, stroking your Bowie haircut with one hand and your still-plump thigh with the other, looking deep

into your dewy, oh-so-carefully done Mary Quant eyes, and promising you a record contract or a Cadillac or the world if you’ll only munch on his thing for a while? It’s so glamorous you could die, and even

though stars don’t come in to Rodney’s as often as they did last year, it still happens.
They dance the night away, sneaking out to the parking lot for a quick joint, popping downs like candy, fixing their make-up in the toilets out back. They wish they could be David Bowie. They wish they

could fuck David Bowie. They talk in whispers of stroking that beautifully alabaster body. The girls who have graduated, who sit in the Rainbow and sip other people’s beer, who know the corridors of the

Hyatt blindfolded, put it down, but they’ve just grown out of it. When you’re sixteen, all the kids in Rodney’s look young as they dance to the hottest British pop records with their images in the mirrored

walls, cheer the Lou Reed songs that pour out of the speakers, and feel it’s about them when La Bowie cries, “Rebel, rebel, how could they know? Hot tramp, I love you so.”
Fowley on Rodney’s: “His clientele is tragic to behold. Their gay posturing is almost as ugly as Lassie with her hair removed. But Rodney’s is where the closet cases go to take their first wobbly steps

on dry land, out of the abyss of their own desecrated home lives. Boys who are repressed by their loser parents come there and wear homosexual garb and dance to records from England and stand in the urinals

and gossip. The girls have no necks, no tits, big guts, and huge, lopsided shoulders. They don’t know whether to sock hop or cut their own throats. The culture at Rodney’s was hit by future shock. Stars only

walk in there by mistake. I love Rodney. I hate his clientele.”
Once the bars close at-two, the Strip is deserted. The parking lot at the Rainbow keeps going for a while as the little ones look for rides and the big ones try to figure out whom they’ll take home.

Money talks, but only to the extent that it promises sex or drugs. The limos and Rollses roar out of the lot as those left behind watch, imagining where the rich ones or the lucky ones are going. There are

parties in the hills where girls sit in closets, giving head to all comers. There are private orgies in the whirlpool-bath room of a recording studio. The stars go home alone as often as the rest, but the

rest don’t want to believe it.
Those who stay awake and on the scene head for Denny’s, where, Kim Fowley explains, “black men over thirty come to beat up teen-age boys, and the girls have cat fights with each other while trying to

figure out how to get back to the suburbs.” The streets are empty, save for a speeding rented limousine, a ubiquitous cop, and an occasional hitchhiker. The tour is over. If you don’t know where you’re going

now, it’s time to go to sleep.
Yet behind closed doors, all around the city, the night goes on. In a house in Marina del Rey, a party thrown by a dentist is beginning to thin out. Lisa stopped in for a while but left, feeling

outclassed or outmaneuvered by the actresses and stewardesses. As more people leave, the action shifts to the bedrooms where cocaine, previously absent from the party, has begun to flow. People are running

around the house naked now, lying in clusters on beds in every bedroom. It will go on until eight in the morning, when the last stragglers will head out for breakfast. “It was not a Hollywood party,” someone

will say later that day.
Outside the Record Plant recording studio, three girls stand in the cold. “I wanna go in. It’s fucking cold,” the tall blonde whimpers. “The fuckin’ engineer doesn’t want us in the session,” a short, dark-

haired girl snaps back. ‘‘There’s about sixty girls in there already.”
“Well, tell him we got coke,” the blonde counters, and within minutes they slip into the band’s session, where the engineer is going crazy and people keep slipping into the studio to give the musicians

some “help,” and couples drift in and out to see the new apartments being built for sleepy stars.
By five A.M., it’s obvious that the session is a session. People begin spilling out to their cars, ignoring the guy bleeding by the snack machines who’s just cracked up his Porsche. Lori needs a ride to

West Hollywood, where she lives with her mom, who won’t take phone messages. She’s been cutting classes at junior high too much lately, and her mom doesn’t like it. After convincing at least six guys that

she was theirs that night, Lori, who was once found tied up and naked in a closet of the Hyatt House, sleeps alone.
In the Hyatt House, three girls prowl the halls, knocking on doors, pleading to be let in. But it’s too late, and they are sent on their way. “After getting the clap a few times,” Fowley says, “these young

musicians realize this isn’t the ultimate. It’s only rarely you meet a new piece of garbage with a new wobble.”
The night finally ends as the sun comes up, the burning cross in the Hollywood Hills ceases to shine, and the sign that says HOLLYWOOD can be seen once again.
“Hollywood is just another small town in America with a whore, a judge, a queer, an asshole, and little Tommy who gets hit by a car in third grade,” Fowley concludes. “You can document people’s dreams, but

there’s really nothing here. They’ll end up dead, in prison, or middle class. The flower children disappeared, and new creeps have taken their place. In the twenties, the young sat at the feet of F. Scott

Fitzgerald at the Garden of Allah, just down the street. By the forties, it was Robert Benchley. Now it’s Jimmy Page. What does rock ‘n’ roll have to do with it? Not one fucking thing!”
Up in Laurel Canyon, in a small stucco house, psychic miles from Sunset Strip, a boy and girl toss in their sleep. The girl is fifteen and thinks she’s in love with the drummer by her side. She’s

imagining what it will be like touring the world with him, getting her picture in magazines as his lady. She reaches over and toys with his body, wondering how long it will keep her fascinated. Then she

thinks that maybe, one day, someone really important will take an interest in her boy — someone like Mick Jagger or Jimmy Page. What a thought.
The drummer wakes up as he feels her cold hand against his belly. He snorted a bit too much smack before bed, and he disappointed her. But she was just a bed partner for the night. She was good; she

gave great head, even if that didn’t help tonight. He wonders how he’ll get rid of her in the morning without having to drive her back to the Valley. He’ll be able to find her at Rodney’s whenever he wants.

He stops thinking about her as he contemplates, for the thousandth time, what it will be like to be a star.
Monday morning is business time in Hollywood, but no one wants to work. Offices fill slowly. No one does much work before the two-hour lunch break. It’s a lazy day in the city of dreams. The last

sensation, glitter, is fading fast. People are listening to old favorites again, buying only familiar records and concert tickets in a tight economy. But the money is still flowing. In a depression,

entertainment is the only industry that keeps making money. And eventually, the next big thing will come along — something that will motivate the kids, sell records, cause new clubs to open, inspire movies and

plays and maybe, if it’s clean this time, even a television series. Heroes are hard to find,
For now, the executives can sit back and wait. Out on the street, nothing is happening that they can see, package, and sell. Hollywood just waits, on a warm, sunny, quiet Monday afternoon, for the next

dream to come along.
“Last year,” Kim Fowley says “all the Rodney’s girls were questioning bisexuality. This year, they all carry knives.”

©1975, 2010 by Michael Gross, Idée Fixe Ltd. All Rights Reserved