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April 28, 2006
The quote below is by Frank Zappa and it is on the California singer songwriters of the 1970s. It is taken from in Barney Hoskyns, Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons, 1967-1976. Barney Hoskyns is a music journalist and editor of the awesome archival site Rock’s Back Pages.
Zappa says characterises this network as:
"the horrible fake-sensitive type artist/singer/ songwriter/suffering person, posed against a wooden fence provided by the Warner Bros Records art department, graciously rented to all the other record companies who needed it for their version of the same crap."
The West Coast sound is composed of a network of self-regarding troubadours (including Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt and Gram Parsons), squabbling groups (the Byrds, the Eagles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Mamas and the Papas, Fleetwood Mac) and ruthless businessmen (David Geffen, Elliot Roberts), who between them turned California, for a while, into the centre of the pop universe.
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