2019 Updates

Join us at the Virginia for a concert for our friend Bob Nutt, advocate for all Rock & Roll musicians, & founder of Champaign-Urbana's Blytham Ltd. Booking Agency. Pumping electricity into the local rock scene, Bob promoted dozens of bands (REO Speedwagon, One Eyed Jacks, Finchley Boys), filling festivals, college quads, and bars across the Midwest. Grateful musicians are coming home to plug-in, remembering their visionary, offbeat, and staunch champion. Profits will go to CU at Home, a ministry with our community's most vulnerable neighbors, providing transitional housing, education, advocacy, and companionship at the Phoenix Drop-In Center.
This concert is underwritten by Champaign's First Presbyterian Church.

BOB NUTT/BLYTHAM LTD TRIBUTE CONCERT SAT, SEPT 28, 2019, 7PM Virginia Theater

Tickets: $15/$25 On-Sale: Fri, July 19, 2019

Once Upon
    A Sunset Strip...

If you hung out on "The Strip" in the sixties, then you know exactly what the "Hollywood Hangover" is. If you were not there, then you probably wish you had been, so here is where you'll find information about the people who lived in the grandest part of the world during the greatest era of them all. 

What I have read and seen so far about that period, would have given me the wrong impression, had I not lived there myself.  The Jim Morrison movie for instance, was disturbing--the way we were portrayed.  It was misleading. Whose impression was THAT?!  ...and oh so negative!  That's not the way I remember it, folks. 

I don't remember anything bad about the sixties. The bad stuff was minimal; and it's not something I ever want to zero in on like so many other writers have done.  Every movie, every documentary--all negative or sleazy.  We weren't angels, but we weren't offensive pigs, either. Our young people are being deprived of the truth, because they have been given a warped notion of what went on. I was there, and it was wonderful! 

This web site is generating feedback and gathering stories through the contacts made here. More and more people are emerging  who once frequented Sunset Strip.  I encourage those people to visit once in a while and leave their accounts of that unbelievable time and place.  It's the only feasible gathering that we can have these days.

There were thousands of us in that small Hollywood community, but we all knew each other; we all went to the same places to eat, shop, work and party.  All of us have incredible stories to exchange with each other while the rest of the world looks over our shoulders..Some things never change, do they?

The Hollywood crowd played a distinct role in historical road-paving in the 1960's. We were first at everything! Our intense behavior and radical thinking created a deluge of brain waves that washed across the nation drenching millions of other young minds in our electrifying incredible music...Still is! 

"People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties."  
(Bob Dylan, 1992)

So who were these mad mortal forces?  I'm sure of one thing. We were a distinct rare breed and there will never be another group like us... Youth, and fearlessness, brazen curiosity, dreams and aspirations-- these things are certain in every generation, but in the 60's, on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, these passions were magnified in the lights, the money, the music and the drugs; amplified in a noble velocity--honorable and glorious, on a day to day basis.  Our feet never touched the ground!  Living in suspension several feet above the earth was normal to us.  Mind-blowing incredible events happened every day.  

The worst part of the sixties? The seventies!  That's when the bad turn of events began. That's when we started losing people.  What happens when the intensity and magnitude is gone from your life?  What do you do? How do you fill up the gaping holes?  How do you go back to Kansas or Illinois and adjust to Midwestern mediocrity after the brilliance of yesterday?  

Some have called that period an aftermath. I've always considered it to be much more relentless than that-- a painfully long and depressing time in my life. It was the biggest, baddest hangover I have ever had!  Later on, I learned of the hundreds of other people that endured a similar existence. Many people lost their lives trying to deal with it. It was THAT devastating! That was, and STILL IS...
  The Great Hollywood Hangover.

"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: WOW--What a ride!"

     Hammond's Historical Habitat   

  Sixties Posters     Maps

     Soosi's Page     Joe Cocker Drunk On Tape

 Domenic Priore's Personal Blog

 Raggi's Ramblings

Tulsa Time  Early Sixties

under The Great Hollywood Hangover listed as a GROUP!!!