I struggle to know exactly how to write about or describe Los Angeles. Selfishly, I want to draw some neat conclusion about it, to summarise it in a pithy paragraph or two that I can write down here and give myself a satisfied pat on the back, but after three visits I still have only the faintest idea of what the place is about. What I can do in a couple of paragraphs of at least some marginal degree of pithiness is to report what Ash & I did there, so let’s stick to that.

We spent the days doing some of the generic tourist stuff: we took a tour bus around Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Sunset Strip; we rode a city bus along an unexpectedly circuitous route through the ‘hood and out to Santa Monica, and we traipsed along Hollywood Boulevard and wondered exactly why it’s relevant any more.

In the evenings we geeked out and indulged our private LA flights of fancy. We ate in the 101 Coffee Shop from Swingers, a salubrious little diner whose walls were plastered with photos from the 1970s and where studiedly uninterested hipsters perched on the bar stools to pick at omelettes and apple pies. We drank beer at a streetside table outside Mel’s Diner on Sunset, where, four years earlier, Josh, Dave and I had our holiday bookended perfectly by the appearance of Road Trip‘s Breckin Meyer. Lastly we visited the Viper Room, the music venue owned until recently by Johnny Depp and the scene of River Phoenix’s untimely demise, somehow managing to talk our way around the cover charge on the way in. We got smashed on expensive drinks (taking the shine off our crafty avoidance of the entrance fee) and listened to a succession of really quite good bands. Then, with the hand of history weighing heavy on my shoulder and six bottles of Corona equally heavy on my bladder, I made a lengthy visit in the same toilet where poor old River Phoenix took his last earthly trip to the bog.

In short, we did just what you might expect a couple of Amerophiles to do in la-la-land, and of course, we left as intrigued and nonplussed as when we’d arrived.

On the morning of our last day, we picked up our new ride from Budget in Beverly Hills, slap bang in the 90210 area code. In a fit of unashamed fanboy enthusiasm, I’d hunted down a convertible Mustang from this one particular branch of Budget; nowhere else can you be guaranteed a particular model of car and if you tick the horribly vague ‘convertible’ box on the rental form you’re far more likely to be lumbered with an execrable Chrysler Sebring or a dull-as-dishwater Toyota Solara. I’d been waiting for this since finishing up in Vancouver, and I couldn’t suppress a shiver of anticipation as we walked out to collect our honest-to-God pony car from the rental lot.

We were not disappointed.

It looked pretty fucking good sitting there in dark blue. Despite being a lowly V6 — the original ‘secretary’s car’ — it was still a rear-wheel drive convertible rocking a 4.0 and a 5-speed slushbox, and it was bang on the money for road trippin’. We lowered the top, started her up and rumbled out onto Sunset. Set phasers to cliché!

Unfortunately, reality intruded on our dream cruise as soon as we left the car park. Our last stop in Los Angeles was the Getty Center, up in the Santa Monica mountains. Deanna had suggested that we visit it if we had the chance: “Even if you don’t go to look at any of the art, the architecture is stunning.” Cretins both, neither Ash nor I had any idea what the Getty Centre actually was, but the magic word ‘architecture’ sold me on it straight off the bat. The only problem was getting there.

We were sucked out of the rental lot on Santa Monica Boulevard and plunged straight into the infamous LA traffic without much control over where we were going, buffetted from lane to lane against our will. From the driver’s seat the Mustang was huge and unwieldy, a hulking brute with numb steering and visibility-hampering retro styling. The open top exposed us to the baking morning sun and a honking, distracting sea of hostile drivers. Surely it’ll get better, I thought. I’ll get used to the size of the car and the steering will firm up once we’re on the freeway. When we finally got to that freeway, the 405 that would take us north to the Getty, I put the foot down to propel us up the on-ramp and into the faster moving traffic. The engine revved, the auto box kicked down, and yet we ambled up onto the 405 at more or less the same speed.

Oh dear, I thought.

We arrived at the Getty within about ten minutes and I put my worries about the car to the back of my mind. Set within the rocky confines of a canyon in the Santa Monica mountains, the Getty wasn’t much to look at. It looked exactly like a multi-storey car park, in fact, down into which we were directed by one neatly-dressed attendant after another. After fiddling for a few minutes to get the car’s roof back up, we took a lift back to ground level with a few other visitors, only to be corralled into a queue by yet more smartly attired attendants.

We looked around. We were in a monorail terminal, all marble and steel and fastidiously clean, and surrounded by the neatly trimmed hedges of a sculpture garden. Visitors and staff members alike were all smiling beatifically and seemed content to wait for the train. I was acutely aware that Ash & I were a polite question away from being discovered as unbelievers.

“Have you been to the Getty before? Just my little joke — of course you haven’t. No-one who comes here ever leaves.”

A driverless train arrived after a few minutes; we were shepherded on board, and it left the terminal to travel slowly along a track which rose up over the highway. The view was spectacular.

The monorail slowed to a stop after a few minutes and its doors opened to disgorge us into a stark marble utopia. I was utterly bewildered — what was this place? After all the gentle cajoling into this car park or that tram, the expanse of marble and geometric buildings framed by a cloudless blue sky was overwhelming. We picked up a leaflet and wandered up the stairs to the main plaza as we read it.

After our worries that this might be some sort of Scientologist retreat, or that the monorail had been going to open a hidden set of bomb bay doors and drop us into a hundred foot ravine, it turned out that the Getty Center was just an art gallery. That is, if ‘just’ is not too mean a word for a $1.3 billion edifice which evokes ‘city of the future’ and ‘Blofeld’s lair’ in equal measures. Everything within it was artfully placed: sun-dappled boulders and pebbles in the garden’s stream create a ‘sculpture’ of sound; red and white flowers punctuate the lush greenery; cubist buildings frame incredible views of the city below and mountains above. It was fantastic, in the true sense of the word. And you know what? Deanna was right — we barely even looked at the art.

We reached Chattanooga as it was getting dark and found a room for the night before heading for Nashville. The next morning we asked the hotel receptionist about any notable things to do before we left, and decided to visit the delightfully unhinged Rock City as a result. It begins with a nice (if trite) walk through some curious natural rock formations accompanied by calming music piped through hidden speakers, takes you over a springy suspension bridge to a look-out point from which seven different states are supposedly visible, and finally leads to a fluorescent vision of Lynchian hell. The decision to build an underground grotto filled with fairytale vignettes lit by ultraviolet lamps is not one that I can understand, but it certainly livened up the visit. Take your children only if you feel the need to punish them. We laughed all the way to the car and joined I24 to head all the way to Nashville.

Nashville follows the same the downtown-and-sprawl pattern we saw in most cities, only more so: the city centre is squeezed between the Cumberland River to the south and the railroad to the north, and outside of that it’s rare to see a building of more than a few stories. We crossed the river and threaded our way through downtown Nashville, then crossed the railroad marshalling yard and found a motel just on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. As Ash napped I took a walk to find some guitar shops I’d looked up before we arrived.

What a farce. “Music City USA” has two worthwhile guitar shops: Gruhn Guitars and the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase (i.e. the Gibson banjo factory). Gruhn had some awesome basses. Unfortunately, being a vintage guitar specialist, they sported equally awe-inspiring prices. The Gibson shop, on the other hand, was prepared to knock the odd dollar or six hundred off the advertised prices but had a terrible selection of their own range. (This theme extended to New Orleans, aka the home of jazz, and Memphis, aka the home of rock and roll. New Orleans had a single shop within walking distance of the quarter, and again most of its stock was unattainable vintage perfection or modern basses I just plain didn’t want. Memphis boasted another Gibson factory with an equally limited range, and as far as we could tell, no other guitar shops. Oh well. eBay here I come.)

We tramped along the deserted sidewalks and dashed across the busy roads to Broadway, on the fringes of downtown Nashville. Buskers playing Dobros and wearing ten-gallon hats stood between honky-tonk bars with neon signs in a country and western echo of Beale and Bourbon Streets. After eating some generically glutinous Southern food in a characterless sports bar, we went looking for something a little more authentic. We plumped for Robert’s Western World, recommended by a helpful record shop clerk across the street. I didn’t know what to expect: we could see a band setting up, but the place was dead as yet, so we bought a couple of drinks and sat down to wait.

After a while, a few more (mostly older) couples had drifted in and eventually the band – John England and the Western Swingers – appeared. They were excellent. John introduced the band and off they went, playing what he called “Western Swing” music. Initially I thought “wow, these guys are great musicians,” and as they continued and the audience grew, I found myself completely rapt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an amiable band play live: they swapped places at the mic, bantered among themselves and with the audience and generally came over as the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. The attentive waitress kept us furnished with drinks until they finished a couple of hours later, and for perhaps the first time during the holiday I didn’t begrudge dropping a fat tip into the box for the band as we left the bar.

Ali A wasn’t drinking, so we turned him upside down and poured beer on his head to compensate.

Ally G on the other hand was drinking. He needed no help in that respect.

The evening becomes agreeably fuzzy in my recollection after we left the flat. We visited the Barony and the Phoenix, which I don’t imagine I’ll be visiting again any time soon. It’s rare to see the normally poker-faced barman there so much as crack a smile let alone a frown, and hey: I don’t remember seeing him do either, but then I also don’t really recall Ally dropping the four pints, Jeff and I jovially scuffling in the corner or my solo dance routine beside the jukebox either, so there you go.

Hats were placed on random punters, as per Hat Night procedure.

Later on (once the Phoenix bar staff were really starting to get antsy), an oxymoronically sober Jez shepherded us back to the flat, along with the two young French girls he’d found to take Josh’s vacant room (see below) for a few months. Presumably they’d turned up for a quiet get-to-know-you session with their new flatmates. Quite what they made of the drunken carnage they were greeted with is anyone’s bet.

(I know, I know: any one part of the phrase young French girls in combination with Jez is enough to give me a thrill of sympathetic fear for them.)

The evening ended, after a lengthy and earnest conversation about the intersection of scuba diving and indie music (clues: Scapa Flow and British Sea Power), with me cycling up the road in a foolish and multiply illegal fashion, and receiving a rebuke from a rather testy policeman for my troubles.

A classic Hat Night, and one that shall be (mostly) remembered.

Next day was my birthday, and I felt categorically awful. I crawled to the living room couch in an attempt to get up after fielding enough “Happy Birthday!” phone calls to feel guilty about still being in bed at 2 pm. Gill put on Swingers in response to my grunted instructions (and surprisingly seemed to like it – I’d always seen it as a guy film in the same way that certain films are ‘chick flicks’) and by 5 I was able to function normally again.

I walked up to the Golf in Bruntsfield, where Josh had gathered the great and the good of the Mafia for a final drink before he headed back to York. I was good to see everyone in one place; what with job interviews, theses, work, the band and so on it seems like we’ve all been busy for the last month or so. I hung around long enough to say hello to everyone (and to talk up vests for a while) and headed home for a relatively early night.

I’d hired a car to give Josh a lift home on the Sunday, with the ulterior aim of viewing a few suitably mental hot hatches for the Nürburgring trip while I was down there. I arrived at Enterprise to find out that my booking contained no information about A) what kind of car I wanted (an estate); B) no agreed price (a ludicrously low £51 to match Alamo, negotiated over the phone a week ago) and C) no mention that I wanted a one-way rental.

<sigh>

It was sorted out in the end, and we made the journey in about four hours thanks to some entertaining A-road action. I found out once we arrived that the one car I’d really wanted to view had been sold an hour before we left Edinburgh. A second car turned out to be so old I couldn’t get one-day insurance to drive it, so the automotive side of the trip was pretty much dead in the water.

Deprived of any car-related high jinks we ambled around York for a while, eating lunch, dropping off the hire car and finally coming to rest at Bar 38 on the bank of the Ouze about three. We had a few pints to kill time until I had to catch the train, but neither of us was exactly bursting with energy. It was the first ‘holiday’ I’d had for ages, and I was content to watch the tourist boats and rowers head up and downstream as the sun sank towards the rooftops. We walked to the station for 6 o’ clock, I said goodbye to Josh and wandered into the ticket office, feeling a little melancholy.

At least I was feeling melancholy until it turned out I’d prebooked my ticket for Sunday by mistake and had to stump up £60 for a single back to Edinburgh, only to miss the first train back and end up sitting on the next one in a carriage empty apart from the four people singing karaoke for three bastarding hours and the snacks trolley guy hounding me relentlessly to buy a coffee made of platinum or something, given the astronomical cost of the bloody thing.

Hmph. I must be getting old…

I loved it. Every one else could not have cared less.

Vegas rolled around again on Saturday, this time as a joint birthday outing for Michelle and Ben. Josh and I had a little surprise up our sleeves: we managed to get hold of a couple of surplus RAF dress uniforms and we engineered a slightly later arrival at the Outhouse for pre-club drinks. Despite Devon’s awed dismay (“My God! Those are perfectly ghastly” – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone become Victorian with shock before) the uniforms rocked. Captain Ben’s posh epaulettes and Hitler moustache paled into insignificance beside our authoritarian genius. (Despite being a bit of a lily-livered lefty at heart, I find it hard not to stand upright and have generally better posture when I’m wearing a suit, kilt or uniform. Fire away, psychoanalysts.)

We basked in the warmth of the heaters* in the beer garden, sipping unpronouncable beers while we waited for the club to open. During a lull in the conversation, a distinct clunk noise came from the bar. We looked up to see a damp, sheepish-looking Gordon carrying two depleted pints, and a plate glass door with beer dripping down the inside.

Vegas was busier than normal, and despite doing my best to trot out a few swing moves with Samina, we didn’t really get into the swing (arf arf) of things because of the sheer number of people there. Our Vegas money went ungambled and most of my real money went unspent, so hard was it to get to the roulette table and the bar. Still, I was maneouvred skilfully about the dancefloor by Michelle, who always contrives to make cretins such as myself looked far more accomplished than we actually are.

And my word, the uniforms went down a treat.

I caved at about 2 am; great as the uniforms were, seems they were designed more for hanging around cold airfields, waiting to scramble or something, and I was suffering fairly badly from heat exhaustion. I joined a few other scabs and we cooled off on the walk home.

A good Vegas, if not quite as jaw-droppingly great as last time.

On Sunday I had lunch with Dave, Michelle, Ben et al and wandered down to the old flat to pick up the stuff I’d left there the night before.

Jez and I are hatching a plan for another road trip next year, but this time there’s a point to it, rather than the because-it’s-there reasoning behind the US trip. This point is to enjoy a stately drive to the Nürburgring, enjoy a rather less leisurely drive around it a few times, and not die. To this end I’m trying to find a suitably lunatic little car (205 GTI, Mk1 MR2 or the like) on Autotrader, and Jez has bought GT4 so that we can practice the track on the PS2.**

I tried a couple of laps on Sunday afternoon, and I was afraid for my life. I died three times and wrote the car off a further three. This is possibly the most hare-brained holiday idea I’ve ever helped conceive.

In the afternoon, we jumped in the car to see the Strip in air conditioned comfort, with the daytime temperature outside still at 39°C. Driving slowly along Las Vegas Boulevard, watching through the windscreen glass as masses of tourists filed into and out of replicas of the Parisian and New York skylines, an Egyptian pyramid and Caesar’s imperial palace, felt oddly like a theme park ride. The tourists were the exhibit, and we were the real tourists. I think it might have had as much to do with a reluctance to get too involved in the whole Vegas experience just yet: the visual, aural and financial assault of the interior of a casino, the heat and the crowds meant that diving in with abandon wasn’t really on the cards just yet, at least in my mind.

We headed perpendicularly away from the Strip on West Flamingo Road to check out the Palms, a self-consciously hip and more restrained (at least architecturally) casino that had been recommended to us by all of the cool young things we’d asked about Vegas. Inside it was far more what you might imagine as a traditional casino: tables for roulette, blackjack, craps and poker dominated, with the slots off to one side. Ringed around one edge were entrances to various bars and clubs (most of which looked to be beyond our dressing-up capabilities, but what the hell: you only live once, and we’d already used up our getting-thrown-out-of-bars bad karma in New Orleans) and we decided to come back later that night.

It was a dark and stormy night when we did head out, with lightning flashes every few minutes. We got a cab (no walking tonight – we’d ironed our T-shirts this time) and sauntered in through the main doors, looking as nonchalant as we could muster. We’d decided to pool $60 for gambling – about £11 each, so not exactly extravangant, but $60 sounds better, right? – and wandered among the tables, looking for somewhere less intimidating than the scrums around the craps and blackjack tables.

We chose roulette. We chose poorly.

The one other guy at the table had a stack of a few hundred dollars’ worth of chips, and he placed group bets on maybe nine numbers at a time. We changed our $60 into chips, and the dealer was merciful enough to give us six $10′s instead of a two-chip Swingers-style stack of $50 and $10.

We put a whopping $10 down on ‘Even’ and watched the ball fall into number 27.

“Evens again,” I said.

Odd came up.

“Evens again,” I said. The power of science was on our side.

Odds.

“Screw it,” said Josh and threw down the remaining $30 on ‘Even’.

Odds.

$20 per minute burn rate. We left the table. Gambling is for mugs, kids.

Humbled by roulette and anxious to spend our money on something tangible, we stumped up $10 each to get into ghostbar, a venue so trendy it didn’t need capital letters. We were herded into an elevator with three numbered buttons – 1, 2 and 55 – where the bouncer pressed 55. Stepping out into the bar, it looked like we’d picked the right place:

That, supposedly, is the most powerful man-made beam of light shining from the top of the Luxor casino on the Strip.

We bought a round of Coronas and squeezed a slice of lime down the neck of each bottle then were made to immediately decant the beer, sans lime, into plastic cups as we walked onto the balcony. The view was good, and the clientele were remarkably chatty. This seemed to be a constant throughout the trip: whether Americans are genuinely friendly, or whether it was intrigue at our trip or nationality I’m not sure, but it did make for a good night, and it was a lot easier to strike up a random conversation that it seems to be in an equivalently hip place in Edinburgh.

This openness of the crowd made me suspect that the cooler than thou, imperiously stylish attitude of ghostbar was just a helpful veneer to generate interest. Just like everything else in Vegas, it’s there to make as much money as possible. If that means admitting three dubiously dressed, patchily sunburnt guys without a mitigating entourage of women on a quiet Wednesday night, that’s what they’d do. This seems to be in contrast to some of Edinburgh’s trendier spots, where the prejudicial entry policies are always in effect. More power to Vegas in that case: I had more fun in ghostbar than I’ve ever had in the Opal Lounge, for example.

We got another taxi home, this being our one and only night of luxury, and crashed.

Anyway, the 5-second RF film criticism bonanza:

• The Aviator: Jesus. Three hours of my life I’ll never get back. Too much CGI (would it have been all that hard to just build one or two of the planes? Surely we’re fairly down with 60-year old technology by now?) and over-acting in abundance. There’s only so long I’m willing to sit and watch a rather obvious and clumsy portrayal of someone going slightly mad with OCD.
• Sideways: genius. Like a middle-aged Swingers with wine. Excellent film, from start to finish. Low and high brow humour, acting so good it’s almost imperceptible and a realism that I haven’t seen for ages. Also, Paul Giamatti’s performance, unlike Leonardo di Caprio’s in The Aviator, is eminently Oscar-worthy.
• JFK: come on, you’ve seen this. Three hours actually worth watching, and apart from Costner getting all teary-eyed at the end, well-enough acted. It was almost good enough to make me drop everything and begin a one-man odyssey to bring the real Kennedy killers to justice. Almost. I think I made a cup of tea instead.
• Team America: World Police: also genius, in a jokes-about-cocks way. Takes the piss out of everyone. Puerile nihilism with puppets. And if that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.

That is all.

Towards the end of the session, Mart started to play something Zeppelin-esque – reminiscent of A Whole Lotta Love, but not quite the same – and I played along. Suddenly Doug joined in with an astonishingly good impersonation of John Bonham’s drumming, and we were playing what I’m going to call MonkeyTwo until I can A) come up with a better name, or B) write some vapid lyrics that suggest a suitable title. Chris mentioned once that all you need to know about music is the twelve bar blues, and it turns out that applying this to MonkeyTwo magically produces a ’70s rock tune that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or Kings of Leon album.

Alright, maybe I’m getting a smidgen over-enthused about it.

Anyway, we retired to the pub and got healthily mangled. We got some deep-fried goodness from the Rapido (hell, it could have been any fish and chip shop in Edinburgh for all that I remember) entirely too late to stop the onslaught of beer and I crawled into work on Friday feeling simultaneously chuffed and dreadful.

On Friday night (after an unsurprisingly pointless day at work) the Mafia got decked out in our gangster finery again, this time for Vegas. Aside from the usual lounge lizard/swingers theme, on this particular evening – Friday the 13^th – anyone dressed as the undead got in free. Cue fake bullet wounds, bloody handkerchieves and burst noses. We got there about ten, picking up Kate and Eliza and some of Josh’s Teviot mates on the way. The doorman wasn’t convinced that my stylishly applied, single-bullet-to-the-temple wound counted as making me undead, so he proposed that we toss a coin to see if I could get in free.

I won :)

Naturally, as soon as we got in and had sorted a round, three women (Devon, Eliza and Kate), one after the other, all decided that the time had come for me to just fucking dance, and no two ways about. The following conversation was repeated almost verbatim each time:

“Oh, come on. Dance.”

“I don’t want to! I’m crap! Wait, what are you doing with my beer?”

“Come on.”

“Oh Jesus. Alright then. On your head be it.”

And of course each time I was dragged up, a small, pure evil part of my brain secretly enjoyed itself immensely. So, Devon, Eliza and Kate: <fx: mumbles>thanks</fx>. God, I hate it when someone actually knows me better than I do.

I actually ended up more or less “dancing” the night away with whichever unfortunates happened to be nearby, and was in the last lot of the Mafia to stagger out at 3 am. Bit of a turn up for the books, really, what with the total abandonment of self-respect and being the last out of a club, so something obviously went right (or so very wrong) with the evening.

Kate (not Kate, but the girlfriend of a friend of hers) and Ruth (not my sister, but a different person altogether) came back to the flat with Josh, John, Neil and I and we talked about cars and music until 5 am.

I’ll say that again: cars and music. What a top night.

* Sister Isabel is a Del Shannon song that was covered by Frank Black & Teenage Fanclub a while back. This sort of collaboration yields incontrovertible proof of the existence of a benevolent indie deity, in my opinion.