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“There’s something happening here”: The 10 most famous venues of Los Angeles’ counterculture
It’s hard not to picture the 1960s counterculture without Los Angeles’ sunny backdrop.
While San Francisco served as the flower power generation’s spiritual capital, LA was where the business was. Before long, the day’s budding artists, bohemians, dealers, and wayward hippy stragglers all found themselves pulled into the City of Angels’ creative bubble and platform for alternative lifestyles that just didn’t translate with the same carefree liberation as over in the chillier East Coast.
Such a heritage still does much heavy lifting across Greater LA. Just as punk’s reverberations from the Bowery adorn the city’s tourist branding in Manhattan, West Hollywood and the Laurel Canyon area feel inescapably rooted in the rock and pop underground of yore, despite the corporatising death grip of gentrification upending such spaces in earnest in the 2020s doldrums.
Pangs of sadness are certainly felt when perusing the countercultural joints, bars, and hangouts of the late 1960s, but keeping the memory alive may prove essential in evoking some kind of similar musical plume that scored LA so feverishly 60 years ago. Join us as we cruise LA’s old streets and check out the clubs still going strong, and the long-lost glories that form their own unique characters among LA’s countercultural stamp on the time when a generation truly thought they could change the world.
