Matt Sorum’s 1962 Ford Galaxie is a transplant from Iowa. Like the Grammy-winning drummer, songwriter, and entrepreneur who originally hails from Long Beach, it’s soaking up the good life in Palm Springs, ready to embark on the next ride.

“It doesn’t have seatbelts?”

The words slip out before I can stop them, as Sorum gives the passenger door a strong push. A metallic click in the doorframe calls to mind the lock of a safety bar on an old Coney Island roller coaster.

“Is that legal?”

“Seatbelts were an option back in those days,” Sorum says, shrugging and evading the question in a way you might expect of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame royalty.

His daily driver departs slowly from the light and airy, mountain-view home by architect Charles Du Bois, where Sorum lives with his professional dancer–turned–fashion designer wife, Ace Harper, and their daughter, Lou Ellington, who will be 2 in June. We’re headed to Sorum’s newly finished private music studio, a dark den shrouded like a sleeping bat in an unmarked commercial space off Palm Canyon Drive.

The Galaxie glides along, topless — a sleek, chestnut beast of a road machine. It looks and coasts like the perfect set of throwback wheels for someone who has set aside their sordid past in a tell-all memoir (Double Talkin’ Jive, Rare Bird Books, 2022) and is genuinely thrilled to be penning a kinder, gentler chapter. It’s also instantly recognizable wherever Sorum and Harper go: Bar Cecil, Tropicale, events at the Palm Springs Art Museum. “The cat’s out of the bag,” as they like to say. The rocker parents are bona fide locals now, active in the community and at peace with surrendering their anonymity as poolside part-timers.

En route to the studio, Sorum tosses out a well-researched nugget about almost every property we pass. Sure, he toured the globe as a hit-’em-hard drummer for Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, and The Cult, collecting major awards that fill more than one studio wall and a shelf in his home, but he also happens to relish midcentury cars, homes, and history.

“You know the Kaufmann House? That was Barry Manilow’s,” he points out. “Everyone pulls up and takes pictures. The pink house, that was Jack Benny’s. The one with the piano mailbox is Liberace’s. Did you know Liberace had four houses?”

No. I actually had no idea.

“And the bass player for Jane’s Addiction just moved in over there. See? They’re coming,” he says.

The musicians are coming.

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