The best Uber trip ever (one Sunday in October)

Maybe it's Miles Davis, Blue In Green. Maybe it's the sun shining through the glass of the Tesla roof and lighting the interior up in a wash of golden white. Maybe that it's so damn quiet. Maybe it's the wooden church at the top of the hill ahead. Maybe it's my Uber driver telling me that jazz isn't just for Sunday mornings, that it's for ever. We can both agree on that. 

We're heading south from the Hollywood Roosevelt, I'd been in LA for a few days, arriving on the train from New York, we came in at 5am and a fellow traveller and LA native stopped me at the door to the train terminal and told me to call my car first and then go out to meet it when it pulls up. Don't just wander out there trailing your bags behind you, he said. He indicated the still dark morning beyond the smokey glass doors where, palm trees aside, it was hard to make anything out. He wasn't wrong, as my car drove up and I stepped out, the street in front of the station was a mix of shopping carts, junkies and what looked like a set for a particularly testing scene from The Walking Dead. Someone looked up at me from his stupour the way a cat looks at you when you've come across it killing something.

But this wasn't like that, this was an autumnal breeze, October sunshine, me with a fuzzy head from the night before courtesy of the best bar in LA; The Power House where the DJ had played Gang Of Four all night, and I mean only the Gang Of Four. I love the Gang Of Four, but up to a point and that point, as I discovered, is about two and a half hours maximum. I was seated at the bar exchanging glances with the barmaid as we both prayed for the healing sounds of, say, Journey or Van Halen, or maybe that was just me. It was unrelenting and I left with the sound of He'd Send In The Army ( so would have I at that point) chasing me out of the door.

"I love that for you", said my Uber driver. I was telling her how I'd been criss crossing the country and of all the days that I happened to be in LA, the Pittsburgh Steelers - my team - happened to be playing the LA Rams at Sofi Stadium. Hence the Sunday morning drive south and the magical feeling of expectation that only sunshine and the result of an impending game that can make or break the day's mood can bring.

The Sofi Stadium is what you think engineering might look like if you ever think about engineering; a magical edifice of steel and glass glimmering in the midday sun. It looked like the yellow brick road might have lead there. Though that wasn't the biggest surprise of the day, as I stepped from the car, I turned to look left and there was The Forum, once home to the the Lakers, and now an acclaimed arena venue. It's load in ramp, that leads down under the building, is the first time you see the character of the infamous groupie Penny Lane in Almost Famous. The last time I'd walked up that ramp was to grab a golf cart and drive across the hugely expansive car park to take a photo of the digital sign advertising the final, sold out show on Rush's R40 tour in the summer of 2015, it felt suddenly strange to be back there. Less than a week after the Steelers game, I'd be sitting with Geddy Lee in Toronto and telling him how unsettling it felt to be back there. He'd been there the year before as part of the Taylor Hawkins tribute show. He agreed, it was, he said, "Like returning to the scene of the crime."

Like all sports fans, I took it as an omen, an ominous one. Also, the Steelers had been playing like the only thing they had in common as a team was that they happened to be wearing matching jerseys and had only just met for the first time in the dressing room before the game. It's best to be prepared for crushing defeat, especially when the game ticket you snagged is among a hardcore group of Rams fans who, as I took my seat, told me that seat was already taken. Between the prison tattoos and the one fan who was wearing an entire ram's skull pinned to his chest like a battle trophy, I debated my choice of seating and wondered how far the drop was to the field below.

"Hold on", one of them said, eyeing me like I'd just called his mother something awful, "are you London Phil?".

They could have called me English Phil at that point and I'd have answered to it. Then, thankfully, Gabe, who had sold me the ticket, appered out of nowhere clutching a cocktail and slapping my shoulder.

"Everyone!" He said, "This is London Phil!" Everyone raised their beers, they knew.

Both teams were playing like the concept of football was something they'd read about but never actually seen before. Or they'd bet against their own team and were doing their best to throw the game. In one particularly galling passage of play where the Steelers seemed surprised and a little saddened to even have the ball, it went about twenty yards in a juddering spiral and might as well have ended up in the stands for all the impact it had.

"Bollocks!" I muttered, thinking about getting another beer.

"What did you say?" Asked the girl next to me, the Rams logo as a vibrant tattoo on her upper arm. "Is bollocks a bad thing?"

Yeah, I conceded, appropriate for a moment like that when the game's almost too awful to watch.

Which, if you were sitting in the stands that afternoon, under that gleaming blue dome sky, and wondered what the hell that bunch of hardcore Rams fans were shouting each time their team turned over the ball (and it was a lot), then I'm here to tell you, it was bollocks.

For reasons I'm still yet to fathom, we won. And god bless the Rams fans and their good grace, they even gave me a lift back to Hollywood in their party bus. We drank cold beers as the bus moved through the sluggish traffic snaking away from Sofi Stadium. I asked them about living in LA, they wanted to know what London was like; they all had plans to visit. Then someone started playing music, some were singing, we were finally moving onto the freeway and picking up speed, the light turning purple and red in the sky. Any requests, London Phi? I was asked. I thought back to the night before. Got any Journey or Van Halen, I said. And, you know, they had both.