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Noir valleys
Bob Belden and Steve Wynn

BY JOSH KUN

The smog has cut the sky in half, and from where I stand on the crest of a hillside canyon just west of the Hollywood sign, Los Angeles looks like a big, hot, sleeping monster. It’s 8 a.m. and the sun is already out and mean, but the mushroom cloud of smog keeps the city bathed in a toxic black-and-white pallor. This is LA at its most LA — bright and deadly, sunny and choking, an endless flat horizontal sprawl of grids, intersections, and skyscraper clusters singled out by nature for special treatment.

LA exile Bertolt Brecht once compared LA to hell. But hell was Brecht’s refuge, the kind of hell that got mispackaged as paradise precisely because it could save you from other hells. To live in LA is to be willfully devoured by it, to allow it to consume you. The only way to survive it is to give into it. If you let hope fool you, if you keep mistaking hell for paradise, then it will beat you.

One of the more notorious victims of this fatal Western bargain was Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old who fled Depression-era Massachusetts for the promise of Hollywood fantasy. The movies were a bad check and she ended up a slashed corpse in a vacant lot at the corner of 39th and Norton. Short became known as the Black Dahlia, and her murder remains Los Angeles’s most famous unsolved case.

Bob Belden’s Black Dahlia (Blue Note) provides an orchestrated jazz score for the real-life movie of Short’s life, using lush ’40s-style arrangements of horns and strings to follow her from her arrival in LA to her battle with dreams and degeneration and eventually to her end. Belden cites Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Chinatown and Otto Friedrich’s Hollywood chronicle City of Nets as his influences, but he admits that his main predecessor is the James Ellroy novel that was based on the Short murder, The Black Dahlia. Short was a stand-in for Ellroy’s own mother, who was found dead in a patch of ivy in El Monte, just outside Los Angeles, in 1958.

Yet Belden’s Dahlia sounds little like Ellroy’s novel, which is a mass of piling rants, staccato prose slugs, and vicious social battery (complete with explicit descriptions of Short’s disemboweled body as a graph of gashes, cuts, bruises, and cigarette burns). Belden’s arrangements are sweeping and smooth, almost glossy at times in their reach for tragic and epic heights. In that way, he’s still very much steeped in noir film scores, where the goal was to suggest more than to show, to provide, along with the use of light and shadow, backdrops that signal but never reveal the terror beneath the surface. The music Belden makes has a grace and a hope that Ellroy never musters. In Ellroy, corruption is everywhere. There’s never a sign that things might not smell this bad the next time around.

Ellroy’s depiction finds more of a home on Here Come the Miracles (Down Under), the masterful new double album from former Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn that gives us a city soaked with grime, skank, and growl. Wynn’s Los Angeles is a Byrds- and X-haunted mecca for squinting, imperfect souls who are, as he sings on “Death Valley Rain,” buying time “but got no place to put it” and who have the “Crawling Misanthropic Blues” because they want to be free but they can’t. His fresh starts begin on witness stands, his days are solo cruises in doubt and desolation, and his only nostalgia is for Topanga Canyon in 1969, when freaks “died a little each day.”

He opens the title track with a stunner of an Ellroy moment: “It takes more than faith to get through this maze/The rats got the inside track and they’re not giving way/What can I believe in the face of such disease?/When the forces of evil are free to do as they please?” On “Southern California Line,” when the character Bobby takes a train down from Salinas, the “line” Wynn sings about isn’t just the rail line but the line between life and death — the line between the world Bobby sees streaming outside the train window and the handfuls of pills he needs to take to deal with it.

Wynn ends Miracles on his knees, praying on “There Will Come a Day” that his enemies might lose limbs and suffer from “lingering disease . . . blight and devastation.” Then he gets Travis Bickle on us, praying for the day when all this evil will be washed away, when “the patients will be rewarded and their tormentors will pay.” But he’s in the same boat as Bickle and Ellroy, because when the day does come, he’ll be going down with the rest of us here, patients and tormentors alike.

Issue Date: May 31 - June 7, 2001