Rock: Los Angeles 1970s Overview

Los Angeles had been an important music-business city since the 1930s. The city’s movie industry, the favourable climate, the influx of European émigrés and Southern blacks during World War II, and the founding of Capitol Records in 1942 all contributed to the city’s growth as a music centre. But it was only in the 1970s that Los Angeles took New York City’s place as pop music’s capital. While New York City was troubled by economic collapse and rising crime, encumbered by obsolete studio work practices, and uncomfortable with the studied informality of post-hippie America, Los Angeles crested on California’s new fashionability and economic buoyancy—based in part on the Cold War strength of the aerospace industry. A willingness to abandon the past, an easygoing outlook, the early rumblings of the personal development movement, and a new wave of young entrepreneurs all combined to foster the development of new musical styles.

Taking their cue from the new approach to recording developed by the Beatles while making Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Los Angeles-based musicians reveled in the freedom of creating their music in the studio. This was the heyday of singer-songwriters (many of whom gravitated to Asylum Records), of country rock artists, and of disco (particularly that produced by Casablanca Records). What nearly all of them shared was the belief in the power of positive hedonism, which would dissipate in the early 1980s in response to AIDS and economic recession.