The Legendary Tropicana Motor Inn
Courtesy of The Wild West The Tropicana Motel By Bob Bishop From West Hollywood’s History westhollywoodhistory.org
Free color TV and direct dial phones at the Tropicana Motor Hotel during the late 70s. A popular hangout for the Ramones, Blondie, the Runaways, Tom Waits & Rickie Lee Jones. This is where Rickie wrote “Chuck E’s In Love” & where the original Duke’s coffee shop was located. Long gone. Replaced with a Ramada.
Baseball pitching great Sandy Koufax was looking to supplement his Los Angeles Dodgers salary when he bought the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1962. The motor lodge, with low weekly rates and kitchenettes in all 74 rooms, was built from the get-go as short- and long-term housing for those who couldn’t afford apartments.
The clientele at the time consisted mostly of musicians, mystics, and B-list television character actors. Koufax wanted to bring in new business and added his name to the marquee, banking on his fame to draw better-heeled guests. The rich and famous, though, didn’t patronize “Sandy Koufax’s Tropicana Motel” as he had hoped.
It was timing and location-location-location instead that combined to deliver new business in the form of sex-and-drugs-and-rock-n-roll. The motel’s most enthusiastic clients were the working rock bands that found it inexpensive and close to the Troubadour in particular as well as other West Hollywood clubs just as the 1960s rock revolution was taking off. These new guests especially noticed that the Tropicana was “possessed of a benign seaminess that was close to their hearts,” the words of the Los Angeles Times gave additional insight into the goings-on at the motel in a 2014 article that reported, “William S. Burroughs, the cult figure and beat author who wrote ‘Naked Lunch’, occasionally was spotted at pool-side. Singer-songwriter Ricki Lee Jones is said to have spent more than one night curled up in a lawn chair. underground movies were filmed at the Tropicana: “Heat” (1972), a parody of Sunset Boulevard starring Joe Dallesandro and written by Paul Morrissey.
My dear friend Patrice Burk’s family-owned Dukes that was attached to The Tropicana
Former residents and guests comprise the who’s who of rock music. Morrison lived at the Tropicana for three years during his glory days with The Doors. The group recorded its last album with Morrison, “L.A. Woman,” at its studio right across Santa Monica Boulevard from the motel.
Gravel-voiced singer Tom Waits, once described as “minstrel-in-chief” of America’s urban underbelly, resided in one of the motel’s bungalows for nine years. Working from a Steinway upright piano in a far corner of his bungalow’s kitchen, Waits delivered his fourth album in 1976, “Small Change,” which the Los Angeles Times deemed “The tour de force that established his reputation as an outright original.
Van Morrison wrote “T.B. Sheets” and several other songs while staying at the Tropicana. Big Brother and the Holding Company, Rhinoceros, Bob Marley, and the Wailers, and Alice Cooper all made the Tropicana their Hollywood base of operation at one time or another. A pre-Fleetwood Mac Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham holed up at the Tropicana when they came to Hollywood and got their first recording contract; their debut album, “Buckingham-Nicks,” was released in 1973.
Joan Jett lived at the Tropicana as a little girl and was a regular guest as an adult. Punk and new wave acts like The Dickies, The Dead Boys, The Ramones, and Blondie all stayed there when they were in town. Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers lived there too.
There is a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the courtyard,” William Burroughs wrote in Rolling Stone in 1980. “On the patio are rusty metal tables, deck chairs, palms, and banana trees: a rundown Raymond Chandler set from the 1950s. One expects to find a dead man floating in the pool one morning.”
The last guests of sorts to check in were those on a wrecking crew that reported for work in October 1987 to demolish what had become a shrine to youth and hedonism. Today the very sterile and boring 178-unit Ramada Plaza West Hollywood Hotel and Suites stands in the spot where “a piece of pop history Iris Berry had started writing a book for Henry Rollins publishing company but sadly it was never released I am urging her to release it on Punk Hostage Publishing. It would sell out immediately