Metro Art has partnered with local community driven radio and arts foundation, dublab, to create this special programming series. Each episode is a multimedia dive into the various intersecting musical histories embedded into the streets, buildings, and neighborhoods of Los Angeles – with each corresponding to a Metro Rail transit corridor that is currently under construction: Regional Connector in Downtown LA, Purple Line Extension along the Wilshire Corridor, and Crenshaw/LAX connecting to Mid-City and Leimert Park. Hear from a spectrum of musicians who defined their respective scenes along with a collaged soundtrack of hand selected music, interviews, archival photos, and a broadcasted livestream of the accompanying geographies as seen from a Metro Bike as visual accompaniment.

EPISODE #2: WILSHIRE BLVD, LA’S EQUATOR

Los Angeles might famously be a bustling metropolis that lacks a well-defined center but there are other ways of honing in on its heart. The city claims a few iconic boulevards that bisect its sprawl, providing laterally-oriented clarity to an otherwise hazy vision. If you were to gather these iconic east-west roadways and crumple them in your palm, the arteries would pulse with the enigmatic spirit of this city.

One such storied spanner is Wilshire Boulevard, and while it lacks the sizzle of a Sunset or a Hollywood Boulevard, its history runs deep. Wilshire travels a singular geography that reflects the city’s ethnic and socio-economic diversity and the thoroughfare’s advanced age positions it to be a holder of many secrets. While Wilshire is not commonly regarded as a great music street, like most of Los Angeles’ authentic treasures, the truth lingers below many layers.

Deep Routes Episode 2, “Wilshire Blvd, LA’s Equator”, narrated by writer and LA cultural historian Sam Sweet of All Night Menu tells the story of Wilshire Boulevard through sound. Sweet guides us across the street’s shapeshifting expanse from MacArthur Park to Koreatown, Miracle Mile into Beverly Hills, on through Westwood and all the way to the sea. Along the journey, he illuminates physical locations that highlight the intersections and fusions of folk, jazz, soul, funk, and hip-hop from the 1950s through the mid-1980s. Sweet revivifies underground electro parties, long since demolished piano bars, the ghosts of grand theatres, swinging scenes enveloped by sinister shadows, and the echoes of famed recording studios—distilling the essence of a street that is commonly traversed but rarely considered from a sonic perspective.

Enjoy this episode of Deep Routes as Sam Sweet shuttles us down Wilshire Boulevard collapsing time and space to reveal a lesser known narrative of Los Angeles music history.

ABOUT SAM SWEET:

Sam Sweet is the author of the acclaimed All Night Menu series, which chronicles lost heroes and subcultures of Los Angeles. His nonfiction novel Hadley Lee Lightcap was chosen as one of Pitchfork’s Best Music Books of 2017. Sweet’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine. To read his latest work and purchase his books, go to allnight-menu.com and samsweet.info.