Mr Mojo Read Online Free

broken into fractions), but the canyons between LA and the Ventura are where so many wanderers made their home. New wanderers!
    That was the thing about the sixties: everybody was new. No one had been around for a while – no one had been loitering around for five, ten years – no one had been hovering on the edge of the scene, desperate for a flash of fairy dust, as there hadn’t actually
been
a scene. There had been such a flight to California, such a migration, that the state was suddenly full of young people searching for a future. These were not Okies seeking jobs, land or dignity; these were teenagers looking for reinvention. If the dust bowl farmers brought country music to California, the teenage prodigies whodescended on San Francisco and Los Angeles helped build a bucolic haven that soon became the centre of the counter-cultural universe. If London had invented the modern ‘scene’ at the start of the sixties, the second half of the decade belonged to California.
    Everyone here was here for the first time. Here, having escaped the dull ceiling of a sky that stretched all the way from Chicago to New York, the newly arrived smartly dressed denizens of Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon were all afflicted with blind optimism. Now that they were all in California, what was the worst that could happen? And here, as if in the middle of some bizarre Darwinian experiment, this loose amalgamation of outsiders – hellions, even – gradually became less and less like the people they’d left behind, and more and more like . . . well, Californians . . . New Californians!
    Like E. B. White’s new New Yorkers, these recently arrived Los Angelenos were seeking sanctuary or fulfilment or some greater or lesser grail. White said that no one should come to New York to live unless they are willing to be lucky; luck was even more important in LA. Whether they wore tie-dye T-shirts or satin suits festooned with flowers, California’s beautiful people were as one – eager participants in bespoke bacchanalia. Like a line from the Leiber and Stoller song ‘Fools Fall in Love’, they built their castle on wishes with only rainbows for beams.
    During the spring of 1965, people all over America began migrating to Los Angeles, eager to bathe in the soporific glow of the lifestyle revolution and bask in the emerging bohemian culture. The city quickly acquired its own band of freaks, dressed in jerkins, knee-breeches, knitted shawls, Indian beads, old lace dresses and flowered shirts. Musicians, artists, actors, film makers, sculptors, designers, bikers, hedonists, hippies: the synthesis of the West Coast social revolution.
    But unlike San Francisco, where altruism was the order of the day, Los Angeles produced a kind of venal synaesthesia, a sensory overload. As Lawrence Dietz described the scene, writing in
Cheetah
magazine: ‘You go out to Los Angeles from the East, and of course you have heard all of these funny stories about the funny natives, and all of the funny things they’re into, and it takes some time for you to realise that everyone out there is playing this whole new game. Everyone is searching for what you might call self-realisation of one sort or another. In LA everyone is into himself, in one way or another.’
    Some were there by accident, others by design, but all by default. The whole of LA was in a frenzy; a frenzy compounded by heat, fame, drugs and life on the beach. LSD was becoming the sacrament of the city, and it was said that being in LA was like being high all the time. One of the new wave of beatniks who flocked to Los Angeles was a twenty-one-year-old collegestudent called Jim Morrison. He arrived in the spring of 1964 fresh from Florida State University, keen to embroil himself in modern America’s fairy-tale city of light. He journeyed to California – against his parents’ wishes – to reinvent himself. He wasn’t looking to drop out