My family moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1969 when I was five years old. The house my parents bought was at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In terms of public schools this meant that I was able to go to schools either in Hollywood or Studio City (the Valley side). After a brief stint at Wonderland Ave. school in then hippie/rock-star/dope-smoking wilds of Laurel Canyon (on the Hollywood side) it was determined that it would be safer and saner for me to attend school on the Valley side. Thus I grew up in the dull and uneventful suburbs of Los Angeles, rather than its colorful counterpart just a few miles away. It was always a great treat for me to be taken to Hollywood, usually by sister and her then-husband in their groovy Fiat convertible. I loved Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Larry Edmunds bookshop–which was filled with film memorabilia which I was already hungry to collect–and CC Browns Ice Cream Parlor.  The verve and nasty energy of the Hollywood side of the hill, the recording studios, the people wearing bell-bottoms. the generally debauched nature of things always thrilled me and it was with great reluctance that I would return to life on the Valley side, to the McDonalds on Ventura Blvd. and Colefax. The above video captures that vibe of Hollywood in the 70s so perfectly that I had a true case of sense-memory while watching; it involved the smell of the Fiat’s exhaust, fumes of pot on the street ( I didn’t know what it was but it sure as hell didn’t smell like the valley), and the gentle sickly sweet odor of the smog that was then worse in L.A. then it is now thanks to carbon emissions laws. The openness and lack of traffic–at least compared to now–also looked as natural as if it were yesterday and I a little kid cruising the streets with my hip, suede wearing long-haired older sister and her groovy Latino actor husband. When they would pick me up after school for these afternoon jaunts, other kids would watch with fascination and envy at how I apparently had the two coolest looking parents they’d ever seen…