LAT's Southern California Songbook Promo (Rabbit Hole)

In what's probably a worldwide first in web marketing history, an ad in a newspaper actually drove me to the newspaper's website yesterday.   The LAT ran a little "On latimes.com" promo in the calendar section yesterday featuring a small photo of Randy Newman and this copy:

Such a lovely place...  It's L.A. and as Randy Newman sang, "We love it!" We even love to sing about it. Geoff Boucher's Southern California Songbook, at latimes.com/entertainment, chronicles the history of music about our town by the Eagles, Celine Dion, System of a Down, Bad Religion, Rickie Lee Jones and others -- including, of course, Newman. 

Excellent work, 22 year old intern!  Your tossed off cleverness and very-wide-net selection of artists has induced, me, the print-edition-reading rube, to log onto the internet and "engage."  But when I get to the latimes.com website, navigation to Boucher's songbook selections is nowhere to be found.  I'm now so hurt and confused that I could be in the middle of a Celine Dion ditty called "My Bad User Experience Will Go On."

Hey, at least they have a gallery of Miley-Cyrus-inspired notorious nymphets throughout recent history.   Well done, interactive team!  You even had the good taste to include the "Rock the Cradle of Love" video girl at number 7.  Now that was the nymphet of the early '90s.  (Who, by the way, is now a mom and a school teacher in suburban Atlanta.  No tragic Dolores Haze, she.)

Finally, shaking off the distraction of the nymphets gallery, I spend five minutes trying to find the SoCAL song gallery.  I finally get there by searching for "Boucher" and clicking through a couple times. 

The SoCal songbook is actually a great page.  It looks like Boucher's been taxonomizing an L.A. song every month since summer 2006.  He's got essays on Bing Crosby singing "San Fernando Valley," Burt Bacharach on the "Pacific Coast Highway," The Flying Burrito Brothers, Loudon Wainwright, Warren Zevon, Frank Black, The Decemberists, The Handsome Furs ... but not (yet, anyways) Barry White. 

My only complaint is that the paper hasn't gone the extra mile to license each song so I can listen along while I'm reading Boucher's piece.  At any rate, when I set out to create my L.A. '08 mix tape later this year, Boucher's handiwork will provide me with one-stop shopping...

LINK: [Geoff Boucher's SoCal Songbook]