The book harks back to a golden era, not only for hippies, musicians and artists, or even for America, but for modern man in his entirety: the sixties was a time when consciousness was changing and anything was possible.

Deep in the concealed California canyons above LA, living in A-frames, playing in each others’ lounges, was a clique of singer-songwriters whose creative output had a huge influence on the sixties scene.

The canyon scenes and whiskey-soaked Troubadour gigs are painted in vivid detail by scribe Barney Hoskyns. So too is the debauchery and frequent demise of the talented protagonists, and their exploitation by the often ruthless music industry.

For a fan of the era, with a stout collection of the vinyl, ‘Hotel California’ is probably a dream come true. If you are an outsider who has only heard of major groups like The Eagles, the lists of people, places and productions may make your head spin. This is dense reading, full of quotes and tiny vignettes, and cannot be haphazardly browsed. The two dossiers of pictures are extremely useful, instantly providing readers with a sense of the dress code and characters of the times. The chapter titles deserve mention as well, often named after songs like ‘Go your own way’, and creating yet more texture. It will also help the novice to procure and listen to the CD advertised in the back cover, ‘Back to California’, inspired by this book. Future editions should include a free CD!

A veteran writer of music (he has a dozen books on the topic), Hoskyns’ thumbnail sketches of musicians’ personalities, idiosyncrasies and backgrounds allows the reader to practically sit in on the musicians’ recordings, rivalries and couplings.

The author traces several interesting themes: how country music evolved and changed, how the new soul-baring singer-songwriters became a force to be reckoned with, and interestingly, several prejudices: how female artists struggled to be accepted as equals, how racism was rampant in LA, how being gay was just not acceptable in that era. Intimate insights are given of how recording industry labels like Warner, Reprise, Elektra and Asylum worked with their artists. For example, David Geffen’s label, Asylum, initially offered a unique sanctuary where musicians could exercise some creative control over their final products (Geffen later ‘sold out’, much to the chagrin of his artists).

Hoskyns clearly traces how the dream of the “mythopoetic, imagined, country America” was ruined by the Manson killings, the overdoses of Gram Parsons and Danny Whitten and the incredible cock-up of Altamont festival, which “symbolized the death of the 60s”. By 1975, two things had effectively killed the sixties hippie dream. One was cocaine: “initially a creative catalyst, in the end it will fry you, kill the heart, give you delusions of grandeur as it shuts down your emotional centre”, as Joni Mitchell says. The other was big money: “It wasn’t entertainment any more, it was big business”; artists lost their kinship with the audience, and “once money had accumulated to a certain amount, people had a tendency to go into alternate realities”.

The successful musicians abandoned the canyons for mansions and became like the Hollywood people they had once despised: aloof, self-obsessed, sex-addicted.

Money went to the young stars’ heads and inflated their egos. Judy James quips: “People had been broke and had cared and had sung about it. Now they were older and they had a lot of money. What were they going to sing about?”

Hoskyns says it wasn’t as though LA had a monopoly on drugs, death and disillusion, but it boasted “more than its fair share of people falling from grace and plunging into the spiritual void”.

He sums up with the quote: “In selling their souls for fame and riches, the stars of the 60s and 70s helped create a world where passive consumerism replaced emotional engagement and political commitment. The apathy of twenty-somethings over globalization and Iraq is shocking when one harks back to the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests of the 60s”.

‘Hotel California’ ends with a list of the albums referred to in the book, suggested readings on the similar topics and a host of references, which show most of the material here came from hundreds of first-hand interviews. Hoskyns definitely did his homework.