New LA Rock Tours Join Crime Tours
It Would Be a Crime to Miss Sunset Strip's New Rock Music Trip
Offbeat Los Angeles tour company Esotouric adds rock music, architecture and literary tours to tours like Raymond Chandler's LA, the Black Dahlia and Halloween Horrors
Esotouric tours of Los Angeles are different. It works with the 1947project, a team that spent a year documenting the year 1947 in LA's history. It was a year that the team saw as pivotal, and not just because it was the year of the famous Black Dahlia murder case, which attracted the attention of Raymond Chandler and other crime writers.
The Real Black Dahlia tour and Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles are just two of the fascinating true crime and crime fiction tours of LA that are on offer from the combined Esotouric and 1947project teams, on board the 'Crime Bus'. Others include Halloween Horrors, Pasadena Confidential and Weird West Adams. The titles alone tell you where they're coming from – and where they're going.
For 2007 Esotouric has added some new tour themes, for a different look behind the scenes of Los Angeles life. Riot on Sunset Strip is a Hollywood tour that contains extensive material from the new book by Domenic Priore, Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock'n'Roll's Last Stand In Hollywood (Jawbone Press, 2007), and shares its strong 1960s focus. Riot on Sunset Strip has a foreword by one of LA's rock legends, Arthur Lee of Love.
Sunset Strip nightclubs hosted the likes of Love, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield (with Neil Young and Stephen Stills), Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, The Turtles, The Mamas & The Papas, and more. The Strip was also a hotbed for garage punk bands like The Standells, Seeds, Music Machine, Electric Prunes, Leaves, and The Bobby Fuller 4. Folk-rock and psychedelia were born there, and it was a favorite hangout and inspiration for The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Them, Velvet Underground and Yardbirds. The tour takes in all these names, and takes guests to LA's rock shrines.
The architectural tour, which debuts in fall 2007, focuses on the work of Reyner Banham. Banham was a prolific architectural critic best known for his books Theory and Design in the First Machine Age and Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. He was also a distinguished professor and Esotouric guides Richard Schave, Nathan Marsak and Kim Cooper all studied under him as undergraduates at UCSC. They are launching 'Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles' in tribute to their late professor, who they say showed them their native Southern California through fresh eyes.
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles: In a Lonely Place, is a 'must do' for fans of Chandler, Philip Marlowe, crime writing, noir novels and movies alike. It's a 5-hour tour of those mean streets, taking in LA's downtown, Hollywood and surrounding areas: Musso & Frank, Union Station, the Hotel Van Nuys, Paramount Studio’s gates, and much, much more.
For further details of the tours, dates and prices, visit the Esotouric website.
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To find out about the 1947project, click here.
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To read more about the book Riot on Sunset Strip click here.
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Also read about Esotouric's Rock and Roll Music History tour.
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Read about Esotouric's Los Angeles bus tour with James Ellroy in person.
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