Pandora's Conclusions

aced my high-tops in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up under a cloud of many illusions, one of which was the idea that Los Angeles was not worth visiting.

As part of this Northern California superiority narrative, the revolution of the 1960s was a San Francisco and Berkeley thing. Nothing of consequence happened in the sun-blasted parking lot that called itself Los Angeles.

I packed my ignorance around for decades, until an editor with a keen sense of history talked me into considering a novel set in the Los Angeles of the ’60s.

Until then, I didn’t know about the massive antiwar protest outside a Century City fundraiser for President Johnson, with dozens of demonstrators clubbed by police and carted off to hospitals.

I didn’t

Local officials ordered a curfew and a crackdown.

Pandora’s Box, a popular club at Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevard, had been scheduled for demolition, and rebels rallied Nov. 12, 1966, in an effort to save it. The Times reported that Sonny and Cher, Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda were among the demonstrators, and that Fonda was carted away in handcuffs.

Pandora’s Box did not survive.

By some accounts, skirmishes on the Strip continued into the early ’70s.

I bring this up now because this past weekend marked the 50th anniversary of what became known as the Sunset Strip curfew riots.

Clubs around town celebrated the music and spirit of the time, with performances by Brenda Holloway, the Shag Rats, the Pandoras, Loons and Love Revisited. A candlelight vigil was held at the empty triangle where Pandora’s Box once sat.

Johnny Echols of Love Revisited — known as Love when it was fronted by Arthur Lee and was one of the hallmark bands that worked the Strip in the ’60s — thinks back generously on those days. He recalled hanging with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and landing at Canter’s Deli for middle-of-the-night meals with fellow