It was another night in West Hollywood. Half a block up the hill on Sunset Boulevard, neon glowed and billboards towered and exhaust pipes coughed out the steady roar of 70’s Southern California ozone. In the daylight, you couldn’t see the Hollywood sign through the gray haze it was so thick. At night, the dense smog was left to conceal the detritus left behind as the world of L.A. rushed into modernity.
Just down Alta Loma Road stood the Sunset Marquis Hotel. It wasn’t much as hotels went – it was more of a motel, really, only three stories, a simple horseshoe of rooms surrounding a pool, a few palm trees looming over things for atmosphere. Hundreds of places like it dotted the landscape from San Diego to Santa Barbara, from the ocean all the way east to San Bernadino and into the desert beyond.
The Sunset Marquis was known as the place for rock and roll musicians of every stripe – bands on tour, guitarists between apartments, songwriters who had sold a couple of tunes and had some extra money on hand. All called it home.
On an upper floor, a group of musicians had gathered in Ben Keith’s room. Keith, Neil Young’s long-time steel guitar player, reclined atop a shiny polyester bedspread covering the room’s double bed. He held an acoustic guitar on this night, softly picking a funky figure that sounded like it had emerged from the waters of a swamp in southern Louisiana. On a chair nearby sat Don Everly, of the Everly Brothers, sans his brother Phil on this night, the two having just broken up their act in a bitter split. Nearby was Donnie Fritts. Known primarily as the keyboard player in Kris Kristofferson’s band, Fritts had written hit songs for Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings and Ray Charles. Over by the window overlooking the pool was Geoff Muldaur, a guitarist in Paul Butterfield’s band and close friend of the man standing against the wall by the door, Bob Neuwirth.
Made famous by his appearance as Bob Dylan’s road manager in “Don’t Look Back,” Neuwirth was the reason the musicians were there that night. He was recording an album at a studio nearby. All the musicians were playing on the album and staying at the Sunset Marquis. The room was thick with the smoke of marijuana. There were beers in the refrigerator, and a bottle of Jack Daniels passed from hand to hand as one of them would strum a lick and the others would comment appreciatively or sarcastically or accuse the strummer of having stolen it from a song they named.
Occasionally, someone would start strumming a guitar and a recognizable song would emerge from the smoke and laughter and the voice of Don Everly would take flight above the others, his baritone so smooth and recognizable it sent chills down the spines of even the crusty veterans in the room. Muldaur would pick the song’s lead, and Fritts, who had begun his career as a drummer, would pick up the beat tapping an empty beer can on the side of the dresser, and magic would happen.
Then the last note would disappear into a rising hubbub of voices and guitars and slosh of whiskey and beer, and one of the musicians would say something like, listen to this I’m working on, and start strumming a new lick and sing a lyric no one had heard, and the room would fall silent as the song wandered slowly into existence.
Ten thousand rooms like this one. Ten thousand songs. Ten thousand guitars. Ten thousand voices. Ten thousand scribbled pages.
There were rooms in the Brill Building in New York City. Sometimes the rooms were on stilts on the side of hills in Laurel Canyon. Sometimes the rooms were recording studios in Alabama or Louisiana or Hollywood or Detroit or Philadelphia, or the room could be on a bus or the back of a van on a highway somewhere in the dark of night in Kansas or Oklahoma or Texas.
One night in years to come, a song from one of those rooms would be sung on the stage in the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. The curtain lifted revealing a grand piano and a woman in a floor-length mink coat walked into view from the wings and sat down on the piano bench and her fingers hit the keys and her voice filled the hall:
Looking out on the morning rain
I used to feel so uninspired
And when I knew I had to face another day
Lord, it made me feel so tired
The woman was Aretha Franklin, and she was singing a song by Carole King, who was being honored that night. Aretha’s voice sounded like it was an orchestra, a choir filling the room like it was coming from beneath the floor and from the walls and the ceiling and the seat cushions, like time had stopped and all there was in the world was Aretha Franklin and the genius of the song.
Carole King rose from her seat with a look of pure astonishment on her face. She had not been told that Aretha would sing her song that night. She stood swaying as Aretha worked through the song, bringing from it magic even its writer had never heard. When she finished, Aretha stood up and walked off stage and the room, which included President Obama and his wife Michelle, erupted. Everyone knew they had experienced something that had never happened before and would never happen again. They were there at a moment of creation, as if the earth had opened and a life was born in sound.
Why have I recreated that night in the Sunset Marquis Hotel and that transcendent moment at the Kennedy Center? There are people who want to control our lives, who want to take from us the freedom to create, the freedom to be, the freedom to appreciate art and life and the magic that happens when they are combined, and they are the reason why the Kennedy Center is closed right now, the reason women in states all over the country do not have the right to control their bodies, to be, as Carole King wrote and Aretha Franklin sang, a natural woman.
It has always been difficult to understand where hate comes from, hasn’t it? The urge to repress, to silence, to take rather than to give, the whole thing of no instead of yes. It is the negative space of what didn’t happen, rather than what did. I am writing about something you can’t prove, but you know is true. It’s the why of Trump’s hatefulness of what the Kennedy Center represents. It’s not just that his name isn’t on the building. Wanting to put his name there is not proof of anything, not even of the empty hole that is so obviously within him. It’s his attempt to have been someone he isn’t, to appreciate experiences that he cannot, to have been to a place he’ll never be, to have been in rooms he will never know.
Look at what he has done to the Oval Office. He has turned it into a room that shows us who he is. It was once a room for presidents, a place to exercise power, a place to be not to want. Now it is none of those things. Gold leaf covers empty walls and evidence of an empty man. This is where hate comes from – the negative space of someone who cannot hear or see.
You do not need to have been at the Sunset Marquis or the Kennedy Center to appreciate what happened there. But it’s necessary to be open to it. To close yourself off is what you see when you look at someone such as Mike Johnson or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump. It is not necessary to know a single thing about them, because in a very real sense, there is nothing to know. Emptiness is all there is. It’s on the face of Pete Hegseth, and then he can’t help himself but prove it with words and acts. It’s how you lose a war. It’s why you are obsessed with something like testosterone.
Here it is in art: Stanley Kubrick created “Dr. Strangelove” and gave us on screen the immortal words, “precious bodily fluids.” The politics we are living through is proof, if we didn’t have it yet, that life is art and that art is life. The pain of those who do not know this is the reason we are where we are today. The only way out is to breathe life as natural women and natural men.
And to vote as if your life depends on it come November 3.






