If you take a night drive through the Mojave Desert, you will see the glittering sprawl of Los Angeles appear on the horizon to the west, 90 miles out. It hovers there as an otherworldly dome, mirage-like, beckoning. Technically, its hazy golden glow is a result of light pollution intensified by water vapour and clouds, which reflect the city’s consumption of eight billion watts of power. But a century’s worth of dreamers and small-town escapees know the real reason for the glow. It’s the promise: the promise of palm trees and perpetual sunshine, of being in the movies or on hit records, of achieving the big American Dream.
“The desert is where mirage and myth are created, and so is Hollywood,” Eagles founding member Don Henley tells us. “We are just as susceptible, now, to illusion as the pioneers were – if not more so.”
