This song was written while we (Anne, John and myself) were living in L.A. John may or may not have ben out in the air yet but he was with us just the same. The song title as well as it's "feel" are derived from the place we were living at the time, 1204 Wexham Way - Inglewood California (anything in L.A. county is considered L.A.).
When my friend Lyle and I found ourselves in California, we took up residence in an apartment building in Inglewood (Ingle Watts some people called it). It was on the corner of Century Bvld. and Prarie Avenue (later change to the Avenue of Champions) and thus was directly under the aproach to L.A. International Airport. It was very loud, very smelly and pretty all-around crappy. That site was the spawning ground of another song called Inglewoods but that's another story.
Anyway, Lyle and I moved there from Minnesota in 1971, one month after the girl who would be my wife moved there from New York. That would be Anne, but we didn't meet for another year. After that year, we met and fell in love and got married (at the Dove's of Heaven wedding chappel) and moved to another spot in Inglewood. It was farther away from the airport but right near the San Diego freeway. It was also a house behind a house behind a house (formerly a garage I think, or maybe a tool shed or possibly a foot locker).
Don't get me started about that place, there are too many things to go into here. The up-shot is that this was not the best residence you could imagine and one day we had taken all we could stand and decided to move. Almost the next instant we found the perfect apartment and it was even affordable. Although it was still in Inglewood, it was in such a wonderful neighborhood that we thought we were on another planet; "Ain't no troble, ain't no trouble here".
Recording Notes:
This is a studio recording made in New York city in the summer of 1976 or 1977. It was made at a modest studio at the expense of my "agent?". I had been working with an electric guitar for the first time in my life and went about the process of finding back-up musicians to use on the recording. I found a hard rock group that was willing to work for free and spent some weeks arranging and rehearsing the tunes with them. Since I had been playing solo for most of my career, I had a solo guitarists approach to the instrument. The other musicians didn't really understand (or respect) what I was doing until they heard the final result.
Not too long after the session was done, the agent got me an interview at Columbia Records but nothing came of it in the end and I guess that was the high point of my career.
Listening to the track from the distance of years, I see that the electric guitar style was really pretty unique and still is, I think. Also, the harmonica is nice even though I just pulled it out and played it without any advance mapping out of what I was going to play, since I couldn't rehearse it with the band while I was playing the guitar.
Excuse me while I break my arm patting myself on the back. I guess it's the "I could have been a contender" syndrome.