California Dreamin’: How Lou Adler Built L.A. Rock

The gripping story of how Lou Adler made Los Angeles the musical center of the world in the ’60s and ’70s, in music and beyond, written by acclaimed music journalist Michaelangelo Matos

For decades, Lou Adler has been most recognizable as the clotheshorse basketball fan with courtside season tickets to the L.A. Lakers, where he watches the game with his best friend, Jack Nicholson. But from the fifties through the eighties, Adler was the key architect of Los Angeles rock--from the birth of soul to surf music to rock festivals and rock films, no one else had Adler’s reach or his success.

In California Dreamin’, music journalist Michaelangelo Matos introduces readers to the West Coast’s first independent rock producer, a songwriter and consigliere of Sam Cooke who co-wrote the classic ＂Wonderful World＂ in 1960, before running his own label as well as writing and producing its artists. From there, he worked with everyone from surf-music kings Jan & Dean to crooner Johnny Rivers, from hippie supergroup The Mamas & the Papas to trailblazing feminist songwriter Carole King to stoner comedy kings Cheech & Chong. Far from content to stop there, he reconfigured the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, ushering in a new era of rock festivals, and co-founded the Roxy, the Sunset Strip club that would, over the next decades, become a crucible for the emerging punk, new wave, and heavy metal scenes that dominated the Strip. As the seventies rolled into the eighties, Adler set his sights on a brand new frontier, bringing rock films like Monterey Pop, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Up in Smoke, and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, to audiences worldwide.

As unconventional a biography as Adler was in his own creative ventures, California Dreamin’ is the first book to show how Adler became the pacesetter of the rock industry along the West Coast, a master tastemaker walking the razor’s edge between highbrow and lowbrow, redefining the sound of a whole generation in his wake.

MICHAELANGELO MATOS is the author of Can’t Slow Down, The Underground Is Massive, and Sign ’O’ the Times. He contributes regularly to Mix-mag and the New Yorker and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.