The Palomino Club — North Hollywood, California

The Palomino Club at 6907 Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood was the most important country music venue in Los Angeles from the 1960s through the early 1990s — a honky-tonk in the San Fernando Valley that served as the West Coast's answer to the Nashville establishment and the staging ground for the California country-rock movement. In the 1970s it was the regular haunt of Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, and the Byrds alumni who were building country rock into a distinct genre; later it became the launch pad for Dwight Yoakam's career and the neo-traditionalist movement of the 1980s. The booking was catholic enough to include Van Morrison, James Brown, and Patti Smith alongside genuine country acts.

The Palomino was opened in 1949 by Tommy Thomas and became a fixture of the Valley working-class country music scene before its broader cultural significance emerged. By the early 1970s it was the venue where the lines between country, rock, and folk were most productively blurred in California — artists who had been dismissed by Nashville's conservative mainstream found a home there, and the informal, sawdust-on-the-floor atmosphere encouraged the kind of loose, cross-genre collaboration that produced some of the era's most interesting music. Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Waylon Jennings were regulars alongside the rock crossover crowd.

The Palomino closed in 1995 after a period of declining attendance as the country music audience fragmented and the neighbourhood changed. The building at 6907 Lankershim Boulevard still stands — closed and bearing only a vague resemblance to what it was — a ghost of one of California's great music rooms. North Hollywood's NoHo Arts District has developed significantly around it, but the shell of the Palomino remains, recognisable to those who know what to look for.