Many Southern California music fans experienced their first tastes of live music at the Inglewood Forum. Everybody from Elvis to Nirvana made regular stops at the famed venue, back before they built Staples Center for the Lakers and a Baptist church took over the historic Forum structure.
Madison Square Garden Co. recently took over the Forum and redesigned it specifically for concerts. Now, the renovated concert hall is ready for show business again with a series of January Eagles concerts. And as a gimmick, the building temporarily sports the largest vinyl record atop its roof. Such a stunt would be meaningless, if not entirely unnoticeable at Staples Center. However, the Forum sits directly beneath the flight path of nearby Los Angeles International Airport, which handles approximately 1,700 flights a day.
Appropriately, the platter chosen for this special occasion is the Eagles' 1976 multi-platinum album Hotel California. Although this giant jukebox selection makes contextual sense, one must nevertheless question the logic in smacking an outdated recording device on a building being presented as something 'new and improved.' Only fans old enough to remember the Eagles in their country-rock heyday will truly appreciate this nostalgic visual reminder. Then again, just how would anybody visually represent an MP3, anyhow?
For the record, so to speak, this long player is 407 feet in diameter and spins at an extremely safe 17 mph. It took 75 workers to accommodate heaven's DJ. Putting it all into dollars and cents, the Forum's renovation cost a whopping $100 million dollars. This makes it the biggest outdoor entertainment structure in the United States.
Not since the glory days of the Showtime Lakers has so much attention been paid to lowly Inglewood, California, which has never been one of Southern California's most glamorous locales. Will rock & roll glory days return to the Forum, or will the famous venue eventually become extinct, much like the plastic disc atop its roof? Round and round it goes, one supposes, and where it stops, no one knows.
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