Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Clyde Cadwell I'm used to change.
Throughout the 70's and 80's after a surf session, to start a long night, to remember the game we'd just played, just because the weather was nice and the top was down, we used to go to Delores.
Not the one in Santa Monica adjacent . . . the one on Wilshire, just west of LaCienega. We always went there for Suzy-Q fries with Delores Sauce and a Cherry Lime Rickey. Delores had car hops. You used to honk your horn when you were ready to order or wanted the tray taken away. (See, they had this tray that hooked over your window and propped itself level against your car door.) When the condo's started to encroach they asked you not to honk for a car hop, just to flash your lights. It worked well enough.
Delores was one of two places left in LA with car hops. Tiny Naylor's at La Brea and Sunset had them too, but La Brea and Sunset with all the pimps and hookers, the sleaze of Hollywood, the working girls hanging in the parking lot at the strip club next door made Tiny's a pretty different drive in experience.
It was too far east for all the time stopping anyway.
We liked Delores'. It fit our youth and our love of automobiles. When we got older it was a gentle nostalgia for the times we sat in our tuck and rolled upholstery and dreamed big dreams of waves and love and believed in a future we had no way of understanding. Always with the stereo playing so loud you had to shout the order over the blare.
Delores' drive in is gone now. They put up a 3 story parking lot there.
Tiny Naylor's is gone to. I don't care enough about it to remember what they put up there.
When you come from LA you get used to change. You even like it, even when you don't like what's changed you learn to love that change always happens.
Like I one took my son to see the oldest stone building in LA. Its an Anglican Church in Los Feliz, by Griffith Park. It was built in 1952. It was older than I was
Click images for desktop size: "Blue Dynamic" by Yurock which impressed us both. I always thought of the Anglican Church as Catholic lite, but they did an animal blessing. It got to be a habit to take our dogs there for the blessing. I figure it couldn't hurt and it was a whirl of fun seeing all the other dogs, birds, reptiles, snakes and plain old critters all lined up while the priest said the words, made the signs and then threw holy water in the animals faces.
There was some sort of schism between low and high church things. I don't understand that at all but it meant they no longer blessed the animals.
Change.
Today mark the birthday of Woody Guthrie. He played guitar.
He changed the world. Not many guitar players can say that.
He didn't just change fashions or styles. He helped change the world.
I don't know if he ever played in any clubs. I'm sure he never played any big concert halls. He did some radio shows and he made some records. Mainly he did that to make a few dollars to feed his family.
Where he made the music that mattered was usually playing on the back of a flat bed truck. Most of the time he played solo but sometimes there'd be another guitar picker in the audience, or a guys with a Juice Harp, or maybe even a harmonica. They were always welcome on "stage".
He sang to the coal miners. Men tired from work with black lines etched into their faces from the grit and dust of their 12 hour work days, grime so in grained into their skin that a week soaking in the bath would never remove. He sang to their wives, woman emaciated and gray from fatigue but with eyes filled with sorrow and love for their families. He sang to the miner's kids, kids who never realized how terribly poor they were.
See, back then the coal companies didn't pay their workers. They gave them script. Script was company printed money. It was only good for buying stuff at the company store. At the company store food usually cost 3 times as much as when you bought it in the town stores. They had to live in the tin shacks the company threw up. Shacks with no plumbing and no electricity. They were charged as much as a house payment to live there. They had to live there to work. They had to work to stay alive, for their family to stay alive.
Woody Guthrie would blow into these camps sometimes with a union organizer, sometimes just by himself and he would sit up and put on a show so people could dance and forget the terrible strife of their lives. They could dance, they could sing songs that they were surprised that they could remember. They had a good time.
Guthrie didn't sing many songs about how oppressed they were, about how sad and miserable their lives were. He sang about joy and love.
Click images for desktop size: "Ali Baba" by Maxfield Parrish He sang and played them songs that reminded them they were people, that they were human beings and not gray machines working in some fat man's bigger machine.
He reminded them gently that they were people who owned a big part of the world. He sang to the workers.
He sang his songs to the miners in the east, to the fruit pickers in the west and the share croppers in the south, the melon growers in the south west. He sang for the workers reminding them we are all people and we were put on this planet to laugh as well as cry. To live as well as to work and die.
If he was lucky his pay would be a meager meal the workers all contributed to.
I don't think he was a communist. Riding the rails and hitching rides isn't a very communist thing. And rich guys have a way of branding anybody who thinks that mere human beings have value. They'd have to wouldn't they? I mean, if they have a shred on conscious they have to brand everyone who believes in people with a name that they can despise so they can teach their children how to despise them too.
Guthrie has one famous song almost everybody knows. "This land is your land, this land is my land". It should be the American national anthem. Its a song that sums up America and its truth and dreams best. "This land was made for you and me."
We live today because the world was shaped and changed by the men and women Woody Guthrie gave a song to, a song that they could hum or sing, a song that lifted them from their drudgery and gave them the vision and the hope to see a better life for their children, for you and for me. A song that wasn't a war song but it was the score for battles as important as any war between armies with generals. This was a war for people demanding to be recognized as people.
He must have been an odd parent but he did raise a son who became a pop star. His son took his mega bucks and bought a building and turned it into a free drug rehab clinic. You can see his son their many nights. He sometimes has to sweep up the place. I'd say his son turned out okay.
I don't think its happenstance that Guthrie was born on Bastille day.
I like change. I like Woody Guthrie.
I wish I could change the world for a better with a song. Let people dance their way to freedom . . .