(“an erudite, lefty theorist”), and about the editor of the Venice Free Beachhead, one of the local underground papers (he had “a terrific wife, Anna”).īut virtually none of his personal experience went into the body of the book. He emailed me about the guy who ran the Papa Bach Paperbacks across the street from the Nuart Theatre in West L.A. As we worked on the book, it quickly became clear that he seemed to remember everything and everybody - not just leaders like Angela Davis. He had been an SDS leader and then a Communist Party member and had been part of most of the key events. I wondered how much Mike would write about his own experience of those years. I’m reading the Free Press ‘64-‘66 over the break.” He also had a 12-page outline of a book that sounded wonderful. “I’ve gone through Ramparts, the Berkeley Barb, the LA Oracle, and all 2900 citations to LA in the archive ‘The Sixties: Documents and Personal Narratives via the Alexander St.

“I’ve also read the California Eagle 1960-64, but am still working my way through the Sentinel,” he added, referring to the city’s Black newspapers. “I’ve more or less completely vacuumed the LA Times from 1959 to 1973,” he wrote in an email. He had 133 file folders, three linear feet of clippings and notes. It turned out that he had already done quite a bit of research. He had too many incomplete projects underway, he explained, and wanted to make sure that this one got written. Maybe that’s why, more than six year later, on January 1, 2014, he sent me an email asking of I would co-author that book. I kept asking him how his L.A.-in-the-Sixties book was coming. The article was prefaced by a headnote in which Mike explained that it was “the first small installment in a projected history of L.A.’s countercultures and protesters, Setting the Night on Fire.”īut for years no additional installments appeared. Mike called the battle “the most celebrated episode in the struggle of teenagers of all colors during the 1960s to create their own realm of freedom and carnivalesque sociality within the Southern California night.” But you could read it only in the Spring 2007 issue of the bilingual Canadian scholarly journal Labour/Le Travail. “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip” recounted how thousands of young people fought the police, ostensibly over a curfew. That beginning of an academic article was the first thing anybody saw about Mike Davis’s new project, a movement history of L.A. “A moment in rock-and-roll dreamtime: Saturday night on Sunset Strip in early December 1967.”

Set the night on fire mike davis