Hadley Lee Lightcap

“Hadley Lee Lightcap is ostensibly about Acetone, a largely forgotten, could-have-been rock band from the mid-nineties. Exhaustively researched and lovingly rendered, it’s also a tale of postwar L.A., surf riffs, Chet Baker translated through psychedelia, and the tragedy and strife that produced music that was so beautifully still.”

“21st Century culture is so category-driven that even to call a work of art ‘uncategorizable’ can be its own sort of pigeonholing. But Sam Sweet’s ineffable Hadley, Lee, Lightcap really does cross all sorts of wires. It’s a book about sound that’s actually about place; a meticulously researched piece of nonfiction that carries the piercing emotional weight of a novel; a synesthete’s dream with a patient, documentary gravity. It’s as perfect, and as melancholy, a portrait of Los Angeles as The Long Goodbye, and it’s one of the most affecting books I’ve read in years.”

“For some years now, in his All Night Menu book series, Sam Sweet has excavated the strange, hidden histories of seemingly innocuous settings in L.A. and profiled the characters who once populated them. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never heard of Acetone; by this book’s end, you’ll be caught up in the band’s beautifully moody drift, which Sweet indelibly links to the landscape of their origins.”

“Transcendental, heartbreaking, beautiful. Cast in a west coast dream-haze of light and shadow, HLL is a shimmering, soulful, quietly poetic book about a band that reduces that whole humdrum genre to dust.”

“In this book, Sam Sweet does something remarkable: he shows how L.A.’s innumerable disappointed dreams don’t simply dissolve into the ether, but form the background hum and folklore of each new generation of Angelenos. Through his chronicle of Acetone, a 1990s band that never quite made it, Sweet proves like Jonathan Gold before him that there is no art so perfect as the kind that gets made in the city’s minor neighborhoods, among places and people just far enough outside the blast radius of fame to enjoy its glow without disintegrating in it.”