Friday September 30, 2005

I have very fond memories of the weeks and weeks I spent in college pouring over microfiche L.A. Times articles about the Chavez Ravine scandal. At the time, I was working on a kind of silly, but fun project comparing the paper’s coverage of Chavez Ravine with their coverage of Fernando Valenzuela just a little over twenty years later. Back then, it felt like it was a story that was going to be completely forgotten. Then photographer Don Normark released his incredible book of photography documenting what the “La Loma” neighborhood actually looked like before it was razed to make way for an apartment complex that was never built and eventually scrapped in favor of Dodger Stadium.

It’s been months and months since Ry Cooder’s latest album, Chavez Ravine came out, but I just picked it up. It’s got that fantastic live sound Cooder does so well of musicians – gasp – actually playing in a room together. But more than anything, through stories about UFO’s, Pachuco hipsters, and boxers, the record gives a voice and sound to a neighborhood long gone and nearly forgotten. I’m growing increasingly bored with Nic Harcourt’s interview style, but his session with Cooder yielded some great background info on the album. Particularly about the Cuban origins of the song “Chinito, Chinito” which details what happened when Mexicans and Chinese immigrants lived side by side in downtown L.A. (Let’s just say, they did not always get along). One of the standout voices on the record, the great Lalo Guerrero, died just months before the record was released.

All of which got me thinking about the sounds we leave behind when we pass. Sometimes they are a treasure, as Barrett Golding demonstrates in this story about John Lennon and WFMU notes in this post about Jean Shepherd. Sometimes they end up on a broken record like the one I found in an alley today.

The record, “Jerry Masucci Presents…Symphony Sid’s Last Radio Broadcast,” was about twenty feet away from this pile.

Which certainly provided endless hours of entertainment for whoever once sat in this chair.