Greetings from Laurel Canyon!
This week it’s fucking hot as shit in LA. The desert front has been pushing 100 degrees for 5 days now! (Meanwhile I hear the weather in London sucks!) Funny how the change of the seasons can make me “thin skinned”and dreamy for long ago, “sunnier” times. This week I reach for melting wax that made me think of heatwaves past.
Certainly the summer of 1985 comes to mind. It was my first summer in LA and the plan was it to be my last. I was young, just out of college, and free. I had just negotiated a partnership with Power Tools’ DJ Matt Dike—Google him he’s a legend. As I recall, the goal was to sleep with as many chicks as possible, party all night, and make as much bread out of my slice of the small but fun LA club scene. My daydream then was to hit my parents for a plane ticket and European rail pass, head to Spain, run with the bulls, and become an artist in Barcelona.
Some shit like that. You see, we didn’t have the internet then. This was still the era that predates even a phone answering machine. We only had Hemingway, Jim Morrison, Easy Rider, and Matt’s roommate, painter Jean Michelle Basquiat, to reference. I wasn’t pissed off that I had missed the ’60s, but I knew my beloved punk had faded. If there was gonna be a party, I was gonna have to throw it myself.
My greatest surprise was the weather!
That summer in LA was much cooler than I had ever anticipated. That was until September rolled around and in came the one of these classic LA fall heatwaves. The heat was very much the same way it is today. Power Tools’ five bucks a head take afforded us absolutely no AC. Still I was young and cool. I’d gladly trade my air conditioner to be thirty heat waves down the road.
At the end of the day, here’s what this September’s heatwave brought to this Idelic mix. Dream on Idelic, dream on.
The Idelic Hit of the Week:
Kate Crash & the UFO Club – Play It Hard!
