Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll : WAITING FOR THE SUN: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles.<i> By Barney Hoskyns (St. Martin’s Press: $27.50; 370 pp.)</i>

Perhaps surpassed only by actors in ambition, musicians have long used Los Angeles as a means to an end. L.A. has always been a symbol of success, the city of the hit record, the double platinum smash. This is where you come to get known, get a deal, get a record . . . and, as detailed in Barney Hoskyns’ hilarious, chilling, thoroughly scabrous history of post-war pop music in Los Angeles, this is where you get freaky wild, get horribly used and get dead.

Hoskyns is a Londoner whose previous book, “Across the Great Divide: The Band and America,” detailed his knowledge of and typically British fascination with American popular music. In “Waiting for the Sun,” dry sarcasm and terse, slashing commentary color his fascinating portrait of the California sound and its epic tragicomedy.

He approaches the last 50 years as a series of discrete movements or scenes--Central Avenue jazz of the ‘40s; laid-back country rock of the early ‘70s; beach-town punk of the early ‘80s and gangsta rap of the ‘90s in South-Central--all shackled to a cycle of short, high life and hard failure that reflects Los Angeles’ inability to sustain anything for long. The theme makes for riveting reading, as “Waiting for the Sun” lives up (or down) to its title.

The scandals, murders, con jobs and bummers start early in the book and continue right through to the present. Drugs in all their manifold expressions are a preeminent influence throughout the years, though heroin and cocaine seem to be the main constants no matter what the musical style or era. While highlighting the jazz scene of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, for example, Charlie Parker spent most of his time searching for a fix. He ended up in Camarillo State Hospital for six months after setting fire to his mattress while he was in a stupor.

When the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival proved the commercial potential of the new music of the emerging youth movement, the record company money that rushed in to sign up so many bands was largely spent on speed, heroin and coke. The ridiculous era of heavy metal haircut bands in the ‘80s was fueled by a mixture of sex and heroin.

Along with the mantra of “sex, drugs and rock and roll” was a heavy dose of violence. Independent promoters in the ‘50s used everything it took to push their small record labels and acts, including strong-arm tactics. KRKD broadcast R&B; and doo-wop live from Dolphin’s of Hollywood record store on Central and Vernon avenues, while “mogul” John Dolphin manipulated the playlists to gather steam for the likes of Pee Wee Crayton, Percy Mayfield and Jimmie Witherspoon. Dolphin was shot dead in 1958 by a disgruntled songwriter who wanted his royalties. On the verge of national fame in 1965, transplanted Texan Bobby Fuller (“I Fought the Law”) was found dead in his car in Hollywood, under circumstances that remain mysterious and still subject to speculation.

Then there were the riots. Although he recounts the black rage of the Watts Riots and the teen protests that fueled disturbances on the Sunset Strip, Hoskyns spends relatively little time on social upheavals that shaped the era and its music (nary a mention of A-bomb fears in the ‘50s pushing teen rebels to nihilism; only a paragraph or so on the Vietnam War’s impact on galvanizing youth culture). He’s much more interested in the intimate and lurid stories of rock bands on the loose.

Indeed, Hoskyns reconstructs the orgies that members of Led Zeppelin and their entourage staged at the “Riot House,” the Continental Hyatt, where “the girls got younger and younger and more willing to do anything,” according to aging groupie Pamela Des Barres. At the height of their fame, bands like Zeppelin felt almost invincible. Journalist Nick Kent relates an incident with Zep drummer John Bonham and road manager Richard Cole that symbolized the band’s arrogant behavior: “I once saw them beat a guy senseless for no reason and then drop money on his face.”

Yet this destructive hubris pales before the savage fierceness that was unleashed in the mosh pits of Los Angeles when hard-core bands like Black Flag and the Adolescents played to slamming fans in the early ‘80s. “Punk and violence seemed almost inseparable,” the author says. To be bloodied there, in the crowd, was a badge of honor.

And, of course, there are the stories of individual disasters, the list of overdoses and overindulgences--a long list--with cruel losses like Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley and Dennis Wilson, and more pathetic exits from characters like Jim Morrison and Mama Cass Elliot.

Yet the greatest horror detailed in the book was, in some ways, the greatest catalyst for change in the Los Angeles musical world. Hoskyns suggests that Charles Manson was indirectly responsible for the ascendancy of the mellow singer-songwriter movement of the ‘70s, typified by the likes of Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Carole King and Carly Simon.

According to the author, the revulsion of so many music industry insiders at the Manson atrocities--and at their own complicity in sustaining him for so long at the fringes of the industry (he was constantly hustling for a record contract)--had the effect of forcing a large number of movers and shakers to head for the hills. Specifically, to the canyons of Laurel and Topanga, where introspection ruled the day and “sensitivity” was the new buzzword.

After the Manson murders, it became a time of navel gazing and pretentious self-appraisal in Los Angeles pop music. It was--some might suggest, with tongue in cheek--the greater, more long-lasting Manson crime. Readers can decide that one for themselves.

Hoskyns does a good job of maintaining a sensible narrative through the thicket of overlapping genres, happenings and personalities. But he’ll occasionally throw us a curve, such as remarking on--and then abruptly dropping-any further mention of the city’s thriving bluegrass scene of the early ‘60s.

Inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies creep in the edges. A “woodie” was a car, not a surfboard. The Knickerbockers’ 1964 hit single “Lies” is called “Who-esque,” though the excitement of the time was in how much they sounded like the Beatles. He sets the appearance of Big Brother and the Holding Company at Monterey as happening at “teatime,” when it’s a cinch that few at the event would have had a clue as to what time that was. Lenny Bruce is introduced simply as a “junkie comic”; only much later do we get even the briefest description of his achievements.

Through it all, there is the music and genius of L.A.’s best, which Hoskyns describes with characteristic flair: “ ‘He’s a Rebel’ was the first true blast of the Wall of Sound. . . . It was teen trash raised to the level of heroic art, a cavernous mesh of vibes and pianos, booming drum rolls and fuzzy saxophones, bearing aloft the rich, assured voice of Darlene Love.”

Hoskyns finds much to admire and rhapsodize about despite the smog created by L.A.’s grind-’em-up-and-spew-’em-out machinery. For every shyster like John Dolphin there was a Johnny Otis, “the Greek-born Negrophile,” and an Art Rupe of Specialty Records, helping to turn rhythm ‘n’ blues into rock ‘n’ roll. For every frenzied executive like “coke-crazed” Neil Bogart of Casablanca Records, he writes, there were managers like David Geffen and Elliot Roberts, who “would have done anything for their artists,” in the words of Jackson Browne. “In an industry full of cannibals, they were like the infantry coming over the hill.”

“Waiting for the Sun” boasts prodigious research with voluminous anecdotes and details. There are numerous interviews with the famous, the forgotten and the merely legendary. Yet Hoskyns gives the last word to “perennial Hollywood hustler” Kim Fowley, a man who has seen it all, from joke-teen jive in the ‘60s to punk-teen jive in the ‘90s. Raising a pop-apocalyptic specter above the Babylon cosmos that is Los Angeles, Fowley says: “Satan has a coffin, and he has L.A. in the coffin. And he’s almost finished hammering it shut.”

But never fear. Los Angeles and its music always keep rising from that coffin, vampire-like, to fly free in fantasy. At least until the harsh grit of daylight strews a bit of truth about.