Chip Jacobs's Blog

“The Lost Art of Album Release Parties” – Boomer magazine

At late-1970s, album-release parties, you see, the drop of the record needle was our church bell, and today’s tolling was for the band that could do hard-rock no wrong, at least in my fanboy heart.

Before my stereo blasted out Led Zeppelin’s hotly awaited LP, its first in forever, we’d obliged tradition, fortifying ourselves for the music roundtable afterwards with frosted Pop Tarts and thinking-man’s soda, Dr. Pepper. Then we positioned ourselves around the speakers we expected to blow our socks off, me leaning back on my bed, while a pal we’ll tab Carl sat in my worn recliner and another bud, RG, in the pudding-brown bean bag that’d miraculously survived my adolescence so far.

Song after song, seven in all, rang out that summer day in Jimmy Carter’s America. Seven mostly disappointing songs, that left me feeling gloomy and gyped.

“They’re done,” I remember huffing. “A country western song called ‘Hot Dog’? Sappy ballads. All that keyboard. I think I might puke.” Now that the Gods had fallen in a vinyl thunderclap, I fantasized about Frisbee-ing the “Casa-Blanca” style album cover for “In Through the Out Door” off our deck.

Carl, natty in tie-dye and flipflops, shot me a sympathetic glance. I’d been at an album-release party last year when Queen, his Numero Uno group, rolled out the record with “We Will Rock You” and other radio-friendly hits on it, straying from the band’s avant-garde roots. Cross-legged in his clothes-landfill of a room, all of us lightly buzzed from mediocre, junior-year Sinsemilla, Carl hadn’t moped like me now. He acted betrayed, like E tu, Freddie Mercury?

“They all do this,” he said consolingly, sensing my letdown. “These innovative groups forget who they are once the record companies wave a big bag of cash under their noses.”

Click here to read the rest of my essay connected to Later Days

#chipjacobs #laterdays #fiction #comingofage #lifecomingapart #rarebirdbooks #boomer #magazine #albumreleaseparties #ledzeppelin #queen #pinkfloyd #clash #sexpistols #beatles #lateseventies #lordoftheflies #prepschool #brotherhood #debates #classicrock #newwave #punk #growingup #socal #losangeles #rollingstone

The post “The Lost Art of Album Release Parties” – Boomer magazine appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The Liberty and Tragedy of Greatest-Generation Parents

Allow me to rephrase that. He was a man with graying temples and emerging crows-feet invisible on the other dads in our living room for a meeting of “Indian Guides,” a pre-Cub Scout troupe that played on Native American stereotypes and corny getups to promote youth camaraderie. I briefly wondered what this meant, him being a virtual grandfather against a backdrop of late-thirty/forty-somethings, until my curiosity exhausted its half-life. Then, it was back to the night’s agenda: father-son teams threading beads and, black, plastic “bear claws” onto rawhide strings for the least ferocious, battle necklaces mankind has ever produced.

Around ten, transitioning obsessions from action figures (G. I. Joe, Major Matt Mason) to team sports, I asked the 6’1 all-knowing presence in my life to throw the pigskin around. That was an age-gap shocker by itself. My dad didn’t lob spirals like the younger, springy-armed fathers down the block so much as heave noodle-armed balls tricky for my runt arms to catch. Switching to basketball, supposedly his “best” sport as a second-stringer on Caltech’s notoriously crummy squads, I watched him shoot free-throws underhanded.

Underhanded? In the 1970s? Abe Lincoln, to my mind, probably last used that humiliating form.  

Click here for the full essay in Suddenly Seniorhttps://www.suddenlysenior.com/the-liberty-and-tragedy-of-greatest-generation-parents/

#greatestgeneration #olderparents #SuddenlySenior #magazine #chipjacobs #laterdays #babyboomer #genx #novel #fiction #losangeles #pasadena #lacandada #flintridge #prepschool #comingofage #brotherhood #grief #forgiveness #supernatural

The post The Liberty and Tragedy of Greatest-Generation Parents appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The Seeds of “Later Days” and the Ties Binding Our Two Main Characters, Denny & Luke

The resulting narrative reimagines our time together based on where we first met: a rigorous, “Lord of the Flies”-esque prep school near Pasadena, California, rescuing each other, often from self-sabotage, one zany mishap at a time. Life reconnects them and their shattered friendship in YSK, when neither of the estranged pair have exactly lived up to the high expectations yoked around their necks.

The novel, though, is far more than either a coming-of-age tale or a life-coming-apart saga. It’s a valentine to a unique brotherhood suffused with belonging, and also field notes from a revolution, when our historically all-boys transitioned to coed our senior year, redrawing the contours of our old bravado world. It burrows into life in the time of “national malaise” and seriously diverse rock music, when vigilant parenting was optional and teenage partying was mandatory.

Whether it’s knuckle-dragging bullies, crush-worthy teachers, classroom brinksmanship, or a crash-and-burn playoff-game, you’ll live in our shoes (Vans, Adidas, flip-flops), and feel our heartache when it’s time to say goodbye.

Until, that is, a class reunion and a test of friendship so farfetched, so cockamanie, it just might be the lightning bolt out two antiheroes need.

Later Days is available now. https://loom.ly/ajEnKmg

#LaterDays #ChipJacobs #ComingofAgeStories#FallFavorites #TBR #70sVibes #NostalgicReads#NewBooks

The post The Seeds of “Later Days” and the Ties Binding Our Two Main Characters, Denny & Luke appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

In ‘Later Days,’ Chip Jacobs draws on Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge’s past

From Larry Wilson of the Southern California News Group: 

Not a few novels set in Southern California feel local to natives and longtime residents. They try, and sometimes succeed, to capture the feeling of “L.A.” (“The Big Sleep,” “Play It as It Lays”). Other novels are what city editors used to call “local-local” stories – Naomi Hirahara’s “Summer of the Big Bachi” set in Altadena and other Japanese American neighborhoods of the Southland, Kem Nunn’s surf-noir “Huntington Beach.”

But in his second novel set in Pasadena and adjacent La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena author Chip Jacobs goes what newsroom sages called “local-local-local” – there and (almost) only there, deep in the weeds of one particular small part of our neck of the woods.

“Arroyo” of 2019 was a mostly historical, though occasionally time-traveling, novel surrounding the legends past and present created by the 112-year-old, 1,500-foot Colorado Street Bridge – “Suicide Bridge,” as it sometimes was and is known.

“Later Days,” published Sept. 16 by L.A. literary press Rare Bird Books, is of a particular time – the late 1970s and early 1980s – and a particular place, an elite Flintridge prep school transitioning from an all-boys, jock-centric campus to a co-ed one.

#chipjacobs #laterdays #rarebirdbooks #fiction #comingofage #wildboundpr #lordoftheflies #brotherhood #coed #scandal #greatmen #pasadena #losangeles #prepschool #love #grimreaper #richardfeynman #elizabethkublerross #stagesofgrief #arroyo #coyote #supernatural #1970s #Y2K #journalism #cloudcomputing

The post In ‘Later Days,’ Chip Jacobs draws on Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge’s past appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

LA: Prepare for Your Atmospheric Closeup with the PBS/American Experience Documentary …

In the 1970s, I was a child of LA smog. In 1990 as a cub reporter, I was driven to write about the environment. In 2008, I co-authored, with the estimable William J. Kelly, the book, “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. Come next Tuesday (August 26), I’m privileged to be part of a documentary on the subject by PBS’ prestigious “American Experience.” Pangloss Films, the award-winning outfit behind other compelling docs, produced it. Smog, to my mind, was the 20th Century’s maiden climate crisis, and the lessons from those decades inhaling that poisonous gray-brown air has plenty to teach a divided America right now. So, please tune in to “Clearing the Air: The War on Smog” next week. If the entire film is as compelling as the teaser clips, it’s going to be something profound! hashtag#chipjacobs hashtag#williamjkelly hashtag#abramsbooks hashtag#smog hashtag#losangeles hashtag#PBS #americanexperience

 

The post LA: Prepare for Your Atmospheric Closeup with the PBS/American Experience Documentary … appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

As their elite, all-boys prep school turns coed, transfor...

As their elite, all-boys prep school turns coed, transforming from suburban Lord of the Flies to gender-roiled soap-opera, two unlikely friends—Luke Burnett and Denny Drummond—alternate rescuing each other from self-destruction amid troubled home lives. Eager to maximize their era as invincible seniors at Stone Canyon Prep, they and their pals commandeer Bob’s Big Boy, explore the secret world beneath Caltech, stumble into a possibly-supernatural lab animal, and grapple with near-ODs at a playoff game. Just as our heroes manage to graduate, their bond is shattered by a wild gunshot that’ll haunt them for decades.

Twenty years later, Luke is a high-powered journalist with a nosediving career, while Denny, a visionary software engineer, is socked by a terminal diagnosis. Desperate to make amends for that coyote shot, Denny guilts his estranged friend into helping him, all climaxing with a Hail Mary bid to demystify mortality, with an assist from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, while reconnecting with what matters most.

Later Days is a powerful exploration of the ties that bind and break us. Perfect for readers drawn to rollercoaster friendships, forgiveness, and the raw beauty of life skimming its edges to Near-Death Experience. With insight into Pasadena’s buried histories and the psychological baggage of growing up in the shadows of “Great Men” fathers, Jacobs’ second novel is as emotionally resonant as it is intellectually sharp.

The post appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

First Exposure For My Forthcoming Novel, “Later Days,” the follow-up to “Arroyo”

From Larry Wilson, columnist for the Southern California New Group: “I’m still in the middle of “Later Days,” which deals not only with Prep and its jocks, freaks, intellectuals and geeky faculty but with Caltech’s famous underground steam tunnels, where a Nobelist is encountered; besties bound for Stanford and Cal before problems arise; sex, drugs and lots of rock ‘n’ roll. But I jumped ahead to a late chapter, “The Return,” about what it’s like to come back in 2000 to a school now endowed by big-time money, and love it: “Everything’s so freshly unwrapped: the expanded, Ethernet-wired classrooms and two-window snack bar selling salads and BLTs; the space-age gym with digital scoreboard. The twenty-screen computer center. Supposedly, there was a ‘relaxation couch’ in the girls’ room.” And, for a novel that begins with a harrowing bullying incident involving a campus tough and our protagonist, a sign in a walkway: “Our Honor Code Has ZERO Tolerance for Bullies…”

#laterdays #arroyo #novel #literaryfiction #chipjacobs #larrywilson #southerncalifornianewsgroup #scng #pasadenastarnews #prepschool #late1970s #lordoftheflies #genderrevolution #brotherhood #drama #greatmenfathers #lacanada #california #pasadena #friendship #liferollercoaster

The post First Exposure For My Forthcoming Novel, “Later Days,” the follow-up to “Arroyo” appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The Day After

The LA Times, which has always been so generous with praise for our book, weighed in on what California’s environmental struggles with smog mean for the country going forward. Honestly, the commentary here by Shelby Grad reassured me that there’s little we can’t achieve when we work together in goodwill. Is that too hokey for our cynical age?

“…I recently read Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly’s book “Smogtown,” an excellent history of L.A.’s long but surprisingly successful battle against air pollution. It’s hard to imagine living in that world now, where poisonous air kills children, your backyard garden, crops and even motorists who crash due to the blinding smog. But the most enlightening part of the book was its recounting of California’s uphill struggle to get the rest of America to care about smog. L.A. was choking, but to the rest of the country it seemed like a local problem. And the solution — regulating industry — seemed downright un-American. Washington turned its back on us. L.A. went to war with Detroit, which for decades successfully fought efforts to reduce auto emissions. But California finally prevailed, and in the process it began an environmental movement that changed the world for the better.”

Here’s the link to the rest of the piece. Never forget that we get the government — and climate — we deserve!

The post The Day After appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Highway Killers in the Land of Concrete

Growing up in northeast LA County, I knew one set of numbers were so incendiary they were practically fighting words.7-1-0.It was shorthand for the polarizing battle over whether to complete the Long Beach (710) Freeway from its dead-end in the city of Alhambra northward to another freeway, in what would become the longest, fiercest fight of its kind in history. Since the 1960s, tiny South Pasadena mounted an epic defense to prevent the state from carving that 8-lane superhighway near the center of its leafy, Anywhere-USA town. Caltrans, the planet’s most formidable freeway-builder, was equally motivated to unleash its bulldozers, no matter South Pasadena’s contention it’d be its civic death sentence.I lived that grinding draw. In fact, I was nearly killed as a teenager driving the wrong way on a one-way street that’d been configured for the project. As a young reporter for the Pasadena Star News & Los Angeles Times, I covered the searing emotions around the 4.5-mile extension, arguably among the most contested real estate anywhere outside of a war zone. Later, I was almost knifed by a squatter inside an abandoned property that Caltrans owns along the route.Fate tapped me again as the pandemic settled over us in 2020. It was then I embarked on a journey to chronicle the story in a rollicking book. By early 2022, I’d conducted 50+ interviews, mostly via Zoom, including a pair of deathbed interviews. Soon I was entrusted with key figures’ archives, notably from South Pasadena’s original freeway fighter, an incomparable woman from Beaumont, Texas named Alva Lee Arnold. Going in, I’d thought I knew the basics. Boy was I in for an education.It’s an uniquely American tale asking whether a people’s right to self-determination surpasses the broader public need, in this case filling in a “missing link” ribbon of concrete through dense neighborhoods, in 3 different cities, for the sake of an overtaxed, smog-pumping freeway grid. It spotlights a different brand of feminism in Alva Lee’s grassroots resistance, and how much of our souls we sacrifice to the car culture. It uncovers old feuds, political betrayals and cowardice, and freeways as “Jim Crow of the West.” How a village of 25,000 triumphed against astronomical odds, beating not just Caltrans, but also surrounding cities, real estate men, deep-pocketed trade unions and others, is David vs. Goliath that Goliath can barely believe. The 710’s environmental-justice arc staggers too, beginning in the teeth of the deadly smog crisis and culminating at our climate-change reckoning.For all the major events influencing the outcome— bellwether laws, elections, 9-11, Hail Mary injunctions, global commerce, the rise of minority power—this is the story of the People of the 710, and you won’t believe how personal twist and turns affected the trajectory. That I promise. I’m honored to be writing this book and thank everyone for their unstinting patience and belief. I’ll keep you updated.

The post Highway Killers in the Land of Concrete appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The Brown Air Prequel for our Climate Change World

I was a kid who constantly asked “why,” which I’m sure drove my parents to reach for the ear plugs. Among my first “why’s” was why, in 1970s Pasadena, the San Gabriel Mountains directly behind us continually vanished, especially on broiling summer days? Why was that cough-inducing, eye-watering blanket of gray air rolling at us like a foul-tasting fog from a bad horror flick? Why did adults, who proclaimed to have everything under control, allow this to happen? Because, you know, it felt dystopian, not reassuring. Decades later, those why’s inspired a social history, with fellow author Bill Kelly, about this. The scars still linger, too, as this recent L.A. Times column animating numerous scenes from that book, Smogtown, illustrate. Think of our air-pollution saga as a prequel to the clenching grip of climate change. It’s my fervent hope that someday, this incredible story chronicling the modern world’s first major environmental catastrophe reaches a worldwide screen, if only for the next generation to realize that no disaster is too big, too scary to conquer when people say no more! Today, the Pasadena skies are blue.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/s...

The post The Brown Air Prequel for our Climate Change World appeared first on Chip Jacobs .