“I don’t think my soundtrack has ever changed”: Eve Babitz’s favourite musicians
With Los Angeles as her central muse, Eve Babitz weaved fiction and memoir into her writings that captured her life’s most hedonistic, existential moments, making her an essential voice of her era’s culture.
Alongside her work as a writer, spanning fiction, nonfiction and every facet in-between, Babitz was also a visual artist, notably designing album covers for the likes of the Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt. Music was perhaps the most immediate of her inspirations, whether that meant compelling her to romance rock stars and music executives alike or simply being an avid fan of her generation’s most brilliant voices.
When asked by Girls At Library what the soundtrack to her 2019 collection I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz – a selection of her essays published in the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire – the writer proclaimed, “I don’t think my soundtrack has ever changed.”
First on her list is Mike Bloomfield, whom she calls “Michael”, an American blues guitarist and composer who is named as one of popular music’s first stars to gain notoriety for his almost entirely instrumental talents, having rarely taken to a microphone before 1969. In her first book, the memoir-fiction hybrid Eve’s Hollywood, which features an infamous and lengthy dedication page listing everyone whom she deemed worthy, she included Bloomfield.
“And to Michael Bloomfield,” she wrote, “And his hot guitar and cool eyes, or vice versa.”
Born in Chicago, Bloomfield played with numerous blues musicians in the city before finding fame of his own. He was a member of Chicago’s Paul Butterfield Blues Band and founded the short-lived band The Electric Flag, while also being an asset for some of the era’s most legendary artists. He had a longstanding collaborative relationship with Janis Joplin, helping her assemble her Kozmic Blues Band and co-writing and composing alongside her.
He played alongside Bob Dylan on his groundbreaking 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, including on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, performing with the singer-songwriter at the Newport Folk Festival that year, and before his passing from an accidental overdose in 1981, he was a prolific session musician and solo artist, with his final album, Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’, released the day his death was announced.
Babitz also names Édith Piaf, the legendary French songstress with a signature mystique and stunning voice that made her a cultural icon – one can picture a young Babitz, born in 1943, growing up listening to the likes of ‘La Vie en Rose’ and, later, ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, the latter in particular being an apt soundtrack for Babitz’s brazen personality.
As to be expected, Jim Morrison makes his way onto Babitz’s list, given that the two were romantically linked for a time and remained friends until Morrison’s death in 1971. While Babitz and The Doors’ ‘LA Woman’ have become synonymous in popular culture, it is only rumoured that she is the inspiration behind the song, though the parallels between Babitz and the mysterious girls of the City of Angels are evident. Babitz, in turn, wrote about Morrison in her Esquire essay, ‘Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood’, written in 1991, and, despite her love for Morrison, was blatantly critical of his band and memory, as it persisted in the wake of Oliver Stone’s biopic of The Doors.
“The Doors were embarrassing, like their name,” she wrote. “I dragged Jim into bed before they’d decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote.” She laments Morrison’s demise as he succumbed to his addictions and severely lost his way, and veiled within her criticism is a genuine mourning for what Morrison could have been.
Babitz continues to list artists who feature in her constant soundtrack: the works of Miles Davis, jazz musician Art Pepper and her godfather, Igor Stravinsky, the latter of whom was a friend of her parents, her father, Sol, being a classical violinist. The sole song that is explicitly named on Babitz’s list is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Magnificat in D, whereas broadly, she lists, “music from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s…” signalling a yearning for the music of her youth.
