"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" - BACKGROUND FROM DON HENLEY
The song is loosely based on a recently published book (actually, I wrote the song before I read the book), "The Death of Satan
(How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil)," written by Andrew Delbanco. Delbanco's book is steeped in what he calls
"theological nostalgia," a condition marked by undisguised yearning for the moral certainties once provided by the devil, whom
Delbanco declares dead. We, as a culture, are experiencing a "crisis of incompetence before evil." So long as violence crashes
down around us and whimpers of pain reach our ears, we cannot help but agree that everyone "wants to live in a world in which
evil can still be recognized, have meaning and require a response." Today, we are far from living in such a world. We live in a
perpetual condition of "reticence."
Delbanco claims that our sense of evil must be "renewed, not restored." Once upon a time, we knew a devil who had a name and a place to hang his hat,
but all that is out of date. Now, we have no adequate name for evil, and we don't know where to locate it.
The language of evil, Delbanco notes, is littered with what George Orwell called "dead metaphors" -- like sin -- most of them killed off by the scientific spirit of
the 20th Century. The old words point to a supernatural force that our secular culture teaches us to dismiss along with the tooth fairy, while the new words,
"dysfunctional," "anti-social behavior" and other similarly sterile euphemisms are drained of moral content. Face to face with evil, we are reduced to
"inarticulate dread" -- "we feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express."
We feel it, if we're honest in ourselves; we own up to a seed of bad that might flower some day into wickedness. But not everybody looks inside. "We live in
the most brutal century in human history," Delbanco writes, "but instead of stepping forward to take the credit, [the devil] has rendered himself invisible." He
blends in with the crowd and weaves himself into the fabric of the system, so that he is at once ubiquitous and elusive. Evicted from hell, Satan takes
dominion everywhere: in each of us, in all of us collectively and, most conveniently, in all our best enemies. He is not dead so much as dispersed.
Delbanco faithfully records the relentless advance of Enlightenment rationalism in the 18th Century, of liberal individualism in the 19th Century. He keeps an
eye, all the while, on the devil's doings, Satan's eager resurgence during the Revolutionary War, his gloating triumph at the outbreak of the Civil War. With
the rosy dawn of the 20th Century, Delbanco notes, America experienced its "great age of scapegoating," marked by paroxysms of bigotry, racism,
misogyny and xenophobia.
He explains this orgy of hate as a form of cultural panic, "a lunge for something graspable, for a clear scheme of value, in a world that had become spiritually
incomprehensible." Lunge extends into plunge -- right through the abyss of the Holocaust -- and we land at last smack-dab in the "culture of irony," which is
where we sit, like Job, in dust and ashes.
Postmodernism takes a particularly hard slap ("it is a way of thinking about the self that is incompatible with personal responsibility"), as does the radical
relativism that robs us of solid ground for making value judgments. Lamenting our rootless state, Delbanco quotes Richard Rorty's appropriately ungainly
phrase: "We are now definitively without a "criterion of wrongness."
THE STORY LINE
While all of the foregoing may sound extremely dark and serious, I want you to know that there is some humor and lightheartedness in the song. The
following is an overview of the lyrics: The devil appears to a young man (writer, agent, whatever) who is driving his shiny, new BMW through the San
Fernando Valley. Satan is quite frustrated because things have gotten so bad that even he is confounded. The weather, for instance, is so hot that it reminds
him of his own dwelling place below and causes him to sweat through his fine seersucker suit. He realizes that the entire culture has lost its moral compass
and that there is no longer any distinction between good and evil. Therefore, the devil's job has become obsolete. He waxes nostalgic about the good ol'
days when he hung out in Hollywood with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley and alludes to the movie studio system of the 1930's, Louis B.
Mayer (one of the "dieties") and the historic Garden of Allah apartment hotel. The "casting out" or failure (in Hollywood) and ultimate demise of many of
these great writers is a metaphor for Satan's banishment from Heaven by a god who thought him insubordinate and a bit too "creative." Realizing that the
late 20th century no longer holds a place for him, the devil decides to have one last hurrah by appearing as an expert witness at a local trial, which could be
the O.J. Simpson trial or perhaps a metaphor for the Nuremberg trials. The crux of the devil's monologue is that evidence or "data" can be manipulated by
either side to produce the desired result -- once again blurring the lines between right and wrong. The devil sarcastically repeats the credo of the modern age
which is not necessarily "doing the right thing," but rather "winning" at any cost.
THE ORIGINAL GARDEN OF ALLAH
A 3 1/2-acre hotel complex of Spanish-style bungalows that once stood at 8150 Sunset Boulevard, the Garden of Allah was built on the former estate of
Russian silent-film actress/producer Alla Nazimova, a former concert violinist who abandoned music for the stage and screen. Known for her bizarre, highly
stylized movie roles, Nazimova created a sanctuary along similar lines for her celebrity visitors, who included Errol Flynn, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo,
Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Leopold Stokowski. Nazimova was financially ruined in the Great Depression and died a year after
her last movie, "Since You Went Away" (1944); following her death, a local bank assumed control of her retreat and, in the 50's, demolished it to build
offices. During its three-decade heyday, the Garden of Allah was the site of robberies, orgies, drunken rages, tense honeymoons, bloody brawls divorces,
suicides, and murder.
