Sunset Sound Recorders may be one of pop music’s most famous studios, but even prestige and decades of hits aren’t enough to spare it from the homelessness crisis that’s plagued Southern California in recent years.
Paul Camarata, president of Sunset Sound, is sounding off about the issues he and his clients, some of the biggest names in music, have experienced outside the historic recording space.
There’s long been an encampment near the business, but issues in and around that area of Hollywood have worsened recently, he said.
“The last four months, it’s just grown in huge dimensions. We’ve always had the problem, but it’s just extremely bad right now,” he said.
Most recently, a break-in on Sunday night resulted in the theft of blank checks, forcing Camarata to close all the studios’ checking accounts, he said.
“The police came, took a report and took some fingerprints, but we both came to the conclusion that it was the homeless, because one, they defecated on a drum set right in the lower level,” Camarata said. “We store a lot of instruments, amplifiers and guitars and basses. A lot of them are clients’. They didn’t steal any of that.”
In response, Sunset Sound will be sealing shut a door and installing razor wire.
While the break-in was the most recent incident, it’s only a symptom of a larger problem. Camarata claimed that a program responsible for cleaning the area each Wednesday was suspended after the most recent municipal elections put Mayor Karen Bass and Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez in office.
While the change may have occurred when Bass took office, the weekly cleaning program is under the purview of the City Council, not Bass, according to the mayor’s office. Soto-Martinez’s office said that Camarata’s claim is incorrect, noting that weekly CARE cleanings continue to take place at the location in partnership with the Department of Sanitation.
Regardless of who is to blame, the encampment is “festering” in dirty conditions instead of getting cleaner, drawing complaints from some of Camarata’s high-profile clients, including Elton John, who recently spent two months working at the studio.
“[John] had to drive in and see [the homeless encampment], so he was made aware of it,” Camarata said. “Then his producer was asking us about it, like ‘Why is it so bad out there?’ You know, because the city allows it.”
Camarata admits in fairness that the issues preceded the recent elections and the councilman currently in office. One incident, which has been erroneously reported as having occurred recently but actually took place before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, involved Taylor Swift meeting a fellow musician at the studio.
After she briefly visited the nearby 7-Eleven, she tried to return to Sunset Sound but was accosted by at least one homeless person, prompting her to tell the other musician, a tenant of the studio, that “she’s never coming back here again.”
While doing what he can with his own property, Camarata said the neighborhood issues need attention from the city, and his requests have fallen on deaf ears, so Camarata decided to follow in the footsteps of Selma Avenue Elementary School and Larchmont Charter School, where parents’ complaints to the media resulted in a cleanup.
“The residents complained and complained and complained and they finally went to the news media, and lo and behold, the city was up there in two days cleaning it up,” he said. “And they’ve kept it clean, and I’m really impressed.”