Traveling Blues

 

 

Have you found a way to cope with the big changes to your life style these past two years? Maybe life sent you through changes totally apart from our little viral COVID companion and the bug remains the least of your worries. To all of you going through those various big stages of living vastly different lives apart from COVID, I hope you’re finding shelter and relief from the storms.  For the rest of us, possibly life is no worse/no better just a trifle weirder and very different from a yesterday in the late summer of 2019.

 

I find several things I truly miss from the 2019 and earlier world, but the ability to travel fairly unfettered and worry free winds its way to near the top of my list. Here in my rust bucket years I don’t travel all that much. Those glory days of plane/train/car adventures and city hopping over the continent reside as fabulous memories of my crazy youth and sanity challenged business self.  I lived through 9/11/2001, which made for some huge changes in the way we traveled by air, but COVID just blew up the roads, rails, tarmacs, piers and every inn and hotel worldwide for the past  two years. Now two years after the first virus onslaught, with many restrictions being lifted in the face of mounting economic challenges, travel remains very tenuous and treacherous for most people.

 

As a kid I traveled quite a deal with my parents on trips that were both for business reasons with my dad or just the family vacations with my mom where lengthy journeys in the car or by train were the norm. Those travels along with the summer weekend trips to Breckenridge ( see a few posts ago) and the family cabin to escape the heat of Bakersfield set the tone. The family business was the automobile.

 

 

My grandfather started the business in 1934 after being an executive at Bakersfield Garage for many years prior.  He had moved to Bakersfield from Seattle by way of Oregon, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early 20^th century. He settled in Bakersfield around 1912. He was a force of nature that my dad idolized. He departed the world after a brief illness a few days after my 10^th birthday in 1961, family life forever changed. I’ve kept some photos and old keepsakes. As I’ve gotten older I’m not as sure that history matters as much as I thought for many years of my life, but the pictures do sharpen the memories even if they fog the eyes. 

 

These are a few shots of Thrasher Motors from the late 1930s, postwar 1940s and mid-1950s. I can assure you there was nothing like riding in a new DeSoto speeding in the suicide lane along Highway 99 clocking 80mph in 1957 with my grandfather and family troupe heading to Disneyland for the first time from Bakersfield to Anaheim and the land of orange trees everywhere. 

So, I’ve had a driving passion to get behind the wheel and go for most of my life. In the mid 1960s, as my dad worked to clear off the loans of sold cars from the Thrasher Motors books, several cars ended up in our driveway as repossessions which had to be sold. Those vehicles with manual transmissions were easy prey for me to roll down, pop the clutch and take off with my friends for joy rides over the town while my parents were working. Turns out, as I learned on some of our last rides together when I returned to Bakersfield back in 2003,  this was pretty much what my dad had done off the Thrasher Motors lot at 26^th & Chester during the Great Depression before he got his driver's license. 

 

 My sister, also, gets a nod as an acorn that fell close to the car tree, since she became a cross country truck driver for over 15 years after many pursuits in agriculture and then trying the farm thing that just never worked out.  I ended up with Margi’s little AMC Gremlin when she went to school in New Zealand as an exchange student in 1974. My first couple of cars had been slant-six Chryslers, a Valiant and a Dart. And between the two of those cars I travelled thoroughly to Southern California and throughout Los Angeles and Orange County for concert trips and visits. Spent lots miles to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo where family and friends were living and a couple of trips to San Francisco to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins living in Corte Madera. The Gremlin got me through my final years in college at UC Berkeley where I received my degree and married the beautiful woman, Kathleen, I live with today.

We had a wild car trip in the Gremlin to meet her parents in a little town north of Chicago where they lived, Harvard, IL. We took Highway 58 to Highway 40 to Las Vegas and Highway 15 to Highway 80 to Chicago and the trip out took 4 days.  Kathleen’s dad repainted the Gremlin and discovered the car had been a accident, which my sister and parents had no clue about. The key was a little racing stripe factory decal on one side and a slick replication with paint on the other side. My future dad-in-law being the expert car-body man checked some other indicators to show the fixes done and marveled at the lack of rust on a car 7 years on the roads. The trip back was on Highway 90 and through Idaho to meet my grandmother in Pocatello, ID. It was awesome summer and great road trip. 

 

Various cars came and went over the years. I remember the first new car I owned was a little Mazda GLC my parents gifted Kath & I prior to the birth of our first son, Patrick. Great Little Car, which lasted many years. The folks also had given us their 1966 wide-track Pontiac Star Chief Executive in 1978, but sadly I was hit driving in Berkeley when a woman ran a stop sign on Cedar and the car was never the same. I sold it for a song a few years down the road to a fellow Tower employee, Phil, who needed some wheels badly.

 

In 1991 I bought the best car I’ve ever owned. It was a silver 1992 model Mazda 929. I put on close to a 160,000 highway miles in the 90s before selling it in 2000 for another really terrific vehicle, a Toyota Celica, which I owned until moving back to Sacramento in 2013. So many miles on I-5, I-80, The 101, Highway 99, Highway 41, Highway 46, Highway 50, Highway 92, Highway 198, Highway 395, Highway 58, Highway 37, The 10, The 40, Sepulveda Boulevard, The El Camino Real and on and on it has gone.  The beauty about California is that in a couple of hours you can find yourself in a different world with a different climate and a complete change of scenery.  I understand there are issues in the state and it is an expensive place to live with too many people for a lot of people to handle but…………..there is no greater place to live for me.  I’m hopeful the road will open up this year and some trips to cool places here in the west await me and my ride.

 

Thanks for stopping by.

February-Short Month Long On Memories

 Another post looking forward from another past.

 

I closed my last post musing on the downward trends of ownership which might hopefully signal a new beginning of investiture in our world. Humorous, in some respects, because although every day seems to suggest a new beginning and closure from yesterday we know the lines of space and distance measured against our idea of time equates to something altogether different. We travel on our little planet through space 584 million miles in the time it takes to orbit one complete revolution around the sun. Happy Birthday, Abe! Things always in motion with change always present, and yet we perceive little changing from our usual vantage points.

Consider. Are you viewing the Winter Olympics from China this February on the big bold Comcast collection of networks? Kathy watches some, mostly with the sound off while reading a book on her tablet. I’ve never been a huge Winter Olympics fan, really not a fan at any level for the event. My ankles did not hold up for skiing or skating, and there you have it, very little interest. I do hate all the political posturing bullshit surrounding major athletic events like the Olympics over the years. The NBC coverage is nationalistic crap. Withdrawing national athletes from competition only hurts the athletes, not the nation states.  Total viewership is down by around 50% from the Winter Olympic games of 4 years ago. Seems drastic, until you realize total television viewership of the major networks on either broadcast or cable is off by the same amount.

 

As the Kingston Trio might ask today, “Where have all the eyeballs gone? Gone to satellite phones and webs, everyone.” I’m actually surprised real human beings are out there competing in these sports, but I guess there must be enough advertising/slush fund dollars to keep the greedy providers happy and feed the sports shoe/apparel monsters.  It seems like a lot of the young idle wealthy cavorting on surfaces they own during the regular winter months. Average people on the planet simply can’t afford the gear or the travel expenses for such stuff anymore. Hell, they can hardly afford the rent on their crummy living quarters these days. Although, there is abundant talent it seems. Nathan Chen appears to be from another planet.

Gone are the days it seems when on a February 9 day in 1964 60% of all televisions watched 4 long haired young men for a few minutes during a variety show. Amazingly, 16 days later there was a heavyweight fight the world watched and listened to between Sonny Liston and the huge betting underdog (8-1), Cassius Clay, which would be considered in every way as historic as the Beatles performance.  No one knew 2 days after the biggest upset in heavyweight boxing that the winner would suddenly change his name, and adopt Islam as his religion.

Want to know why the Boomer Generation is a tad schizophrenic?  The Beatles & Muhammed Ali introduced themselves two weeks apart to the world stage 58 revolutions of earthly solar orbits and roughly 30 billion miles ago.  This was, of course, a mere 3 months on our calendars after the President of the United States has been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. 

 

When my mind travels back to those days, sparked by possibly a song on my pc or a video flying on the monitor  which spurs a memory, and then another, I’ll usually just take the command module and start to fly on a jazz-like improvisation on my pc music interface with tracks that come to mind. I become the memory DJ, “We are what we play” (apologies to David Bowie). This month I’ve rediscovered this old blog site to ruminate on, with different recorded images from the mental wave lengths.

The Beatles galvanized and inspired so many people around the world during the 1960s. On a positive side so many young people my age suddenly became music enthusiasts, collectors and players.  The friends I moved through the decade with were all big music buffs.  A couple of us learned to play and we would jam frequently together. Even during these down two years, I’ve still found the time on a couple of occasions to get together with my best friend and haul out the guitars & play for each the old tunes we’ve worked on.

My first real guitar was a gift to me from my parents in 1965. The guitar was a red Fender Musicmaster II and I remember getting it and a Beatles album, Beatles 65, at about the same time. I recall Tell Me Why from the Something New US album (Hard Day’s Night film) was the first song I learned while taking lessons at Parlier’s Music Store in East Bakersfield where my parents had made the purchase.  The first few songs that initial year I learned while getting tutored across town were Tired of Waiting by the Kinks, Heart Full of Soul by The Yardbirds and The Last Time by the Rolling Stones. The songs were fun, but the best lessons I got from Jeff at Parlier’s all centered on chords and their progressions in major and minor keys along with the various positions on the guitar’s fret board where these chords could be played or worked off of.

 

I still play a bunch of the tunes I learned in those first few years when I was plunking on my little red Fender with my Champ amp. Twist & Shout, Bad Boy, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, Play With Fire, All Day and All Of The Night, Wild Thing, For What It’s Worth, Murder In My Heart For The Judge, Born on The Bayou, Satisfaction, House of The Rising Sun,  and many more have been etched into the brain permanently it appears.

                                                 

Over the years as musical tastes changed while styles ebbed and flowed, the gear I played on went through a variety of alterations. In the sixties with many performers utilizing 12-string guitars I made my first big purchase when I picked up an acoustic Yamaha 12-string guitar. I kept it with me until my move back to Sacramento in early 2014, when I just didn’t have the space for it any longer and was too addled to sell it. I’ve no idea where it ended up. I never got the Mama’s & Papa’s rhythm groove or the Byrds majestic sound on it but for chord fun it was a treasure. There were a lot of terrific songs from that period like We Five’s You Were On My Mind, Sad Little Girl and every other Beau Brummels hit with Green, Green by The New Christy Minstrels along with the Rooftop Singers Walk Right In as biggies. Loved the Rolling Stones Tell Me and how marvelous all those string sounded, but Steve Miller’s open to his great song Baby’s House was my favorite from that era. 

 

As the 1970s ushered its cosmic way into my musical consciousness with better production values, more radio with widening selections of artists being played and more venues to see the acts I followed, I got lucky and found a perfect electric guitar for me. One of my best friends was moving and a bit short of cash in the early 1970s. He had acquired a fabulous guitar from another close friend of ours who had done some dramatic work on the instrument after he bought it. He strip-sanded the white blond enamel off and brought the original maple back to life, naked.

The guitar was a 1970 Fender Telecaster. CBS had recently acquired Fender (they bought the New York Yankees during this spree of too much money and no brains period in the mid 1960s to early 1970s) and for purists this resulted in producing inferior Fender guitar instruments. I won’t  wade into that shit stream, but I will say the Telecaster (Fender model CBS owned period much chastised) I purchased from my good friend for 200 bucks (& I still own after all these years) has been one of the 5 best investments I’ve made in my life.

 

 

At around this point in time (as I started moving into my late 20s) jobs, marriage, kids, and life began to intervene on rock and guitar worship. I had my 12 string Yamaha and Telecaster and a Mosrite Amp with a variety recording equipment from Teac & Akai reel to reel tape decks to JVC cassette decks etc, that I visited when I could, but found time to play very difficult to manage, and subsequently did not play for long stretches.  

 

 One of the best occasions for me to play way back when occurred when I was the assistant manager at the Tower Records store in Mountain View. The floors got done once a month on Wednesdays after the store closed at midnight. For quite a few of those very early Thursday mornings in 1982 3 crazed Tower employees would hang in the receiving room area with drums, a bass and a guitar and jam for several hours while the floors were cleaned and buffed. I cannot remember the name of the young man who played bass. He was tall, bright and could play. The drummer was a Tower legend and friend, Rick Cespedes, whose brother Howard is a professional musician who regularly tours with various big bands. Howard, still a dear friend, was at this time touring as a sax man on a cruise line.  Anyway, I still recall these moments and what fun times playing to the floor crew. LOL.

 

When I moved to the Tower Records/Video corporate offices in West Sacramento in 1987 to oversee video product duties it was beginning to feel like I’d found my place and space. Over the next 16 years during the odd spare moments I added guitars and gadgets. A couple of guitars were extraordinarily kind gift gestures from very good friends (Robert & Al and Robert) in the video business. A Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul custom modeled after the 1960 design. I bought a signed (Roger Waters) Stratocaster at a silent auction for a benefit honoring my dearly departed friend Chris who had just retired in the very late 1990s from his illness. Miss you much, Chris, especially around Super Bowl times, but I’ll always keep the guitar I bought for your benefit night.

Later, in the 1990s I got a Gibson Dobro with the magic metal resonator because of my fondness for Mark Knopfler. For all these strings came the CryBaby wah-wah pedal along with a DigiTEch foot pedal gizmo to add unique sounds to my efforts. The capper was a Casio WK-1800 keyboard/percussion instrument that gives me a backing ensemble when I want to stretch out on some lead scales.   

 

Miraculously, I still have many of these instruments and accessories which had to make so many moves between Sacramento & Bakersfield and back to Sacramento since I thought I was settled. You never know.  They’ve been life savers for me. Friends I gravitate to, hold on to and communicate through all the turmoil and COVID.

Thanks for stopping by and letting me share some looks back on the long and trying road.