Green On Red: No Free Lunch; Rain Parade: Crashing Dream

I HAVE ALWAYS attempted to give Los Angeles the benefit of the doubt as regards music. All right, so maybe I've never quite gotten over the Dodgers forsaking dingy Brooklyn for California's sun 'n' surf, but not enough to dominate my opinion of the place. The city just isn't very enticing to a person who only occasionally felt Brian Wilson's tug on the heartstrings, somehow considered the early Byrds half-English, always suspected that Jim Morrison could have done better with New York Doors and utterly despised those nauseatingly sensitive singer-songwriters and antiseptic mush-pop studio bands that polluted much of the '70s. Shit, I was the guy who booed Steely Dan when they played Philharmonic Hall!