‘Dtla’ Gary Jules | 2002

THE title is shorthand for downtown Los Angeles and, in this evocative song, it’s a district defined by high friends in low places. “For a specific demographic of people in the mid-1990s, the purpose of going to downtown L.A. was for less than legal purposes,” explained Jules, a singer-songwriter who lived in Hollywood in that decade but was fascinated by downtown’s high-rise affluence and street-level churn of recently arrived immigrants, blue-collar shifts, barflies and junkies.

That latter contingent of the desperate is sketched most memorably in the song with its images of scoring heroin -- “Trapped a dragon west of Chinatown / for fire-eaters up in Hollywood” -- and its description of the first-floor squalor in a city of rarified penthouses.

Hide your money in the other hand

Observations of a regular

Towers floating on a sea of ghosts

it’s always the same, I told you

Riiiiiide ... downtown Los Angeles.

A 1960s-era drum machine gives an almost primitive beat to an otherwise spindly song in the mold of Nick Drake’s old dream tunes; the effect is a sense of reverie but also steady movement -- a Sunday drive down Broadway on bald tires. “That was the goal, to make it seem you were a passenger, maybe in the back seat, looking out the window. The street level and the world that goes up from there. There aren’t a lot of songs about downtown. For me, it was like a lost book that I was lucky enough to find.”

In some towns, when you sing about local landmarks you can expect the crowd to cheer and sing along to the anthem. That doesn’t happen with “Dtla,” Jules said, and it has as much to do with life here as it does with the cadence of the song. “I think one of the reasons there are so many songs about L.A. is that people don’t feel a strong connection to the place the way they do in other places. A lot of people come here, maybe in their 20s, and they leave without cleaning their messes. So when you sing about L.A., it is a submitting to the place. They’re not songs you get up and raise your fist to.”

-- Geoff Boucher