This lifelong Californian has long been bemused by California’s status as an unattainable, sun-dappled paradise in 60s culture (depicted and subverted wonderfully on Mad Men.) I get it, the weather is nice, but it’s not a symbolic dreamland, The Mamas & The Papas! It’s full of struggling people like everywhere else. You can hear an implicit yearning for some mythical California in all these songs (or explicit, for Joni Mitchell). Simon & Garfunkel and Buffalo Springfield may be cinema’s go-to flower power signifiers, but every note they sing is like a setting sun.