California Dreamin'

How Lou Adler Built L.A. Rock

By: Michaelangelo Matos

From an acclaimed music journalist, the gripping story of Los Angeles rock from its fifties beginnings to its eighties prime, told through its most influential pacesetter: Lou Adler.

From the fifties through the eighties, Lou 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. 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. 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 to 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 brought 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.