Trip to Mecca

This past spring, I headed out to Los Angeles, California for the first time. This was in fact my first time traveling further west than Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. The purpose of my trip was to visit a friend from high school and also to see all the hype of California...more specifically, Hollywood, LA, Beverly Hills, and Laguna Beach. Before departing for my six hour flight, I remembered to copy down the address of the Elliott Smith Memorial, which I knew was in LA.

I am a huge Elliott Smith fan. For those of you who don't know who Elliott was, you know nothing about music. Just Kidding- but seriously, you need to check him out because he was one of the most talented singer-songwriters who ever lived. More to come on Elliott's life and death (especially about what I believe to have been his MURDER - not suicide). But for now, I would like to recount my trip to Mecca.

Unfortunately, I was making my journey with only one other person who knew who Elliott was, and the rest of the group could not appreciate the importance of this trip. We finally arrived at the memorial around 8pm and it was a little dark and hard to see....BUT, I witnessed the greatness nonetheless. Another unfortunate part of my trip was that the memorial had been defaced not long before, and some of the original signatures and messages on the wall had to be erased. But finally arriving at the wall was amazing. I had planned to write one of my favorite Elliott quotes from Waltz #2. But when I arrived, I saw that " I'm never gonna know you now, but I'm gonna love you anyhow" had been written all over the memorial. While Smith did have fans across the world, he was mostly celebrated as an underground artist, despite his great success. But in Los Angeles, I was shocked to see an Elliott Smith billboard in the middle of the city, seven years after his death. I encourage you to do more research on the greatness that was Elliott Smith but in the meantime, I leave you with this music video that features Elliott's memorial. This is not an official music video, but one created by a fan in memory.

Memorial Address:
4334 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
ps: the memorial is actually a lot smaller than it seems...a little disappointing, but still didn't ruin my journey to Mecca



Pictures of my trip to Mecca

Memorial

Billboard

"L.A./ Things I've never done/ Cars parked in the sun/ Living in the day/But last night i was about to throw it all away."
-- Elliott Smith