Sunset Strip seems to be on it’s uppers these days. Chateau Marmont is boarded up. It is hard to imagine the beautiful people of Los Angeles and environs on the corner of Sunset and Larrabee clamouring to catch a glimpse of Johnny Depp and company outside The Viper Room. The Roxy and the Rainbow persist and don’t seem to have changed in the slightest since we were last here in 1992 but there are no tourists taking photos out front and The Rainbow’s sign now cowers below a 40ft floodlight advert for some useless shit. There is a planning application to upgrade the billboard to a giant LED screen posted on the sidewalk. Nevertheless, a certain type of person still seems to get a kick out of cruising the strip as it gets dark in a vehicle that costs more than a family home in Glasgow—a guy walking his Dalmatian is almost run over on the crosswalk by a Bentley Bentayga. Obscenities are exchanged while the dog looks on unimpressed. There are no other witnesses.

Gary pulls the bus off I-10 to fuel up and the combination of jet lag and the cessation of the comforting sound of our wheels on the asphalt rouses me from my bunk. The sun is rising over the desert and the sky looks like a set designer’s painting. Huge trucks that could be on this road for 2000 miles in a straight line to the Florida coast roll past. There is no sign of human habitation other than the fuel stop and the road. I might as well be on Mars.

There is a beautiful softness to the morning desert light. The Crescent Ballroom is on one of the few downtown blocks not sacrificed to developers and on a Sunday morning the anonymous corporate buildings are deserted. Without any human scale and modelled in the low sun the standard downtown vernacular of steel and glass is a stark collection of glittering, city block sized sculptures.

The Crescent Ballroom is more down to earth; one storey with tables out front and a parking lot at the back. Form follows function: people meet and eat and drink here. Through the bar is a classic, no-frills, black box, rock-and-roll room where music is performed most nights. A bottle of Lagavulin behind the bar catches my eye—someone here knows their whisky. The dressing room is decorated with a fabulous collection of hip Americana.

The nearest place to the hotel to eat is Mel’s Diner. Buddy, Brian and I drift down there in an effort to stay awake and head off the looming jet-lag as much as by a desire for a Mel’s 3-Deck Club Sandwich.

Hollywood has fully mutated into a tourist theme park. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre has been swallowed up by the Ovation Hollywood shopping mall, a piece of instant architecture that covers half a block and insults the street on every conceivable aspect with three-storey-high digital billboards—–I assume there are football pitch sized screens on the roof directed at passing aircraft. The Oscars are in town and there is a covered catwalk the length of an entire block on Hollywood Boulevard guarded by an army of security staff who have nothing to do but stand around the structure trying to look purposeful. Every piece of spare asphalt has a TV truck parked on it. Thankfully we will be in Phoenix with 300 miles of desert between us and Hollywood when the madness unfolds on Sunday night.

And so it goes. Never say never. Back to the interstates again after all these years to do a month of shows.

The driver that picks us up at LAX to deliver us to the hotel at Hollywood and Highland—the centre of very deepest circle of Los Angeles—is a gentle spoken bear of a man named, appropriately enough, Virgil. He swaps his cowboy hat for an ominously Trumpian red baseball cap as he gets into the driving seat but I can’t see the front of it as he drives. Virgil has his phone guide the Econoline via a commodious route through the steam-rollered smorgasbord of Los Angeles culture on freeways that take us past the The Getty and Universal City. Like all real southern gentlemen Virgil engages effortlessly in conversation. I am riding shotgun—in the conversation seat—but just off the plane I haven’t yet got used to tempering my accent for stateside consumption and out of necessity the exchange ends up being pretty much one-way. By the time we pull of the Hollywood freeway I know a lot about Virgil.

In that weird liminal space—11 hours, 9000 meters above an ocean moving at nearly 1000kmh kilometres an hour in an intercontinental ballistic people carrier, after hours of waiting and moving through the non-spaces of airport terminals, now travelling back through the day to arrive not long after leaving, there seems to be nothing to think, nothing to consider except how to stay calm stuck in the same seat for half a day and the sheer implausibility of a 250 tonne airliner with three hundred people on board taking to the skies.

After the overnight drive from Manhattan we have half a day to kill here before the business of the day starts. The presence of a golf cart in a glazed porch lined with famous arrest mug shots of musicians—Elvis Presley, Willy Nelson, Johnny Cash—is unsettling and at a first glance the surrounding streets do not look promising for places to hang out. But a proper reccy from the back lot of the Birchmere makes it apparent that we are in a very cool part of town. We are in a little bit of El Salvador. Everyone speaks Spanish. There is fruit for sale on the street. The convenience stores are stocked pretty much exclusively with Latin American produce and in the bakery on Mount Vernon Avenue the woman behind the counter calls someone from the back to deal with me when I speak to her in English. In El Pulgarcito there are half-a-dozen people in the kitchen prepping the days menu. The streets here are full of life. It all makes me nostalgic for the years Madeline and I spent living in Madrid. This is such a relief from the mind numbing banality of strip mall America and a side of US culture that we are rarely lucky enough to see—the absolute opposite of the middle-class college towns that we usually visit when tours have taken us south of the Mason-Dixon.