“They” say that the famous, legendary, iconic (and oddly triangular) diner seen in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting was a real-life restaurant that existed on the corner of Greenwich Avenue & 7^th Avenue in New York City in the 1940s. It turns out that “they” are most likely mistaken and that this widely-held belief may be little more than an urban legend.

Jeremiah at Vanishing New York has a series of posts this week called Finding Nighthawks. (Part I is here, Part II is here. Part III to be posted tomorrow - update: Part III is here) The re-opening of this mystery was sparked by a series of communications a couple of weeks ago between Jeremiah, myself, and blogger Teri Tynes of Walking Off the Big Apple (who some time ago created & posted an enticing composite image showing the Nighthawks diner sitting like a ghost in its widely-assumed site. This is the image below that made me want to look into it further).

The three of us did some serious geekin’ out for about a week, digging up historic photos and little bits of clues to try to figure out if this diner ever actually existed at all and, if so, where it may have been other than at the site that has (wrongly, we think) made it’s way into popular art history.

I don’t know what exact conclusions Jeremiah will draw in the end, if any, but he’s taken the lead on doing additional research and in putting the various photos and alternate site possibilities out there. We’ll just have to see if this information manages to rock the world of 20^th Century American Art history to it’s very foundations…or not.

Last night I took out an old favorite; Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. It’s a glorious, unrefined, masterful, poetic mess of an album. I’ve been in love with this record since about 5 years after I first bought it as a double LP. At age 19, I just wasn’t ready for it and it took me a few years to warm up to it. At first it struck me as too ramshackle and shrill. It sounded like out-of-tune circus rock with a drunken brass section. His singing on this record has an absurdly comic swagger, with those long, lazy vowel sounds in the phrasing that still stand as the classic Dylan caricature.

All of these reasons why I didn’t like it then are all the same reasons why I love it now.

Blonde on Blonde came out in 1966 and is the final chapter of Dylan’s mid-60s “gone electric” period. After this album, he wrecked his motorcycle and went away for a couple years. This record is not easy on ears that want pitch perfection and polish. It helps to look at it not so much as a rock album but more as a descendant of the bristling mid-50s Chicago blues records that were such an obvious influence on Bob Dylan. To know what folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon had done helps you see where this skinny, afro-haired Jewish kid from Minnesota was trying to go.

There’s just too much to say about this record, and this little entry must remain woefully incomplete in the interest of time. Instead, let me just drop a few of his lines on you:

The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it's not that way
I wasn't born to lose you
from “I Want You”

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
from “Visions of Johanna”

With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row
And your magazine-husband who one day just had to go
And your gentleness now, which you just can't help but show
Who among them do you think would employ you?
from “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”

Ain’t it clear that I just don’t fit
Yes I believe it’s time for us to quit
When we meet again
And are introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world
from “Just Like a Woman”

When Ruthie says come see her
In her honky-tonk lagoon
Where I can watch her waltz for free
'Neath her Panamanian moon
And I say, "Aw come on now
You know you know about my debutante"
And she says, "Your debutante just knows what you need
But I know what you want"
from “Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)”

How does he do it?

Okay, I’m sure pot had a little something to do with it, but this isn’t just some random, psychedelic-60s, word-salad type songwriting (see “I Am the Walrus”). It has a poetic logic to it and it works. It’s also just plain fun, the way rock’n’roll was intended to be. This is one of the records I reach for when I need to be reminded of how it’s done.

It’s been 2-and-a-half years since I’ve written a song. I don’t mind admitting to that because the truth is that I haven’t actually tried to write a song in all that time. First I was busy finishing up The Last Dive in Town (recording, mixing, cover art) and then I was busy learning to be a dad (an ongoing project).

That’s why I’m anxious to announce that I’ve got a bunch of new songs in the works. I have little to no idea what they’re about yet. At this point they’re just chord & melody sketches with nonsense lyrics that I recorded off the top of my head over the past year or so and then promptly forgot about.

When I finally went back over these improvised takes a few weeks ago, I found about 15 different song ideas which I’ve now narrowed down to about 10 that I think could turn into something. Yes, I’m counting chickens before they hatch and surely not all of them are gonna make it, but the melodies are fun and my voice is feeling pretty good so I'm optimistic. Looking foward to having something fresh.

Now, let’s see, I used to know how to do this…

A 52-year-old drive-in burger joint, a landmark of mid-20^th Century Southern California teen cruising culture, in all its space age glass and neon Googie-style glory, gets a new lease on life after suffering years of neglect and the blows of a wrecking ball at the hands of its leaseholder.

Opened in 1958 on Firestone Boulevard near Old River School Road on the west edge of the city of Downey (a quintessential Los Angeles suburb and then-new frontier of middle class optimism in the Beaver Cleaver era), Harvey’s Broiler was born the same year that the first great teen angst anthem “Summertime Blues” was released. Rockabilly star Eddie Cochran lived just about a mile away as the crow flies – or as the T-Bird flies – from Harvey’s and he may or may not have hung out there somewhere between the time his song shot up the charts and the time his life came to an end just two years later. It’s said that all the kids went to Harvey’s so you know he must have.

Well, Eddie should be on the jukebox now as the beleaguered and tenacious Bob’s Big Boy franchise took up the challenge of the city of Downey, local preservationists and vintage car enthusiasts to save, salvage, restore and run the old place on Firestone Boulevard, complete with carhop service that harkens back to its glory days.

My parents went to Harvey’s when they were young and growing up in Downey. By the time I came into this world the name had changed from Harvey’s to Johnie’s and fate would have it that in spite of many, many childhood trips to Downey to see Grandmas and Grandpas throughout the 70s and 80s, I would never set foot in the warm red & cool blue neon glow of Harvey’s/Johnie’s until 2010 after the chubby kid in the red & white overalls rebuilt the place from a heap of broken glass and rusted, twisted metal then climbed up and claimed the perch of the chubby kid in the blue shorts that used to smile down, burger-in-hand, from the gigantic rooftop sign that looms over the bend in the road. (The chubby kid in the blue shorts now hangs out at the parking lot entrance).

At 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning the joint was really jumpin’ with kids, couples and old timers (in our party of five, all of the above were represented) and it felt good to know that just one more little piece of SoCal history was brought back from the brink and will be around for some time to come. 

Bob Dylan digs Johnie's Broiler (video for "Things Have Changed") 

It’s already been a few days, but I can’t let the passing of J.D. Salinger go by without some kind of comment from my little corner of the internet about his signature work.

Catcher in the Rye was just about the only novel among those I had to read in high school that didn’t bore me to death. Unlike the others (Pride & Prejudice, Cry the Beloved Country, Candide, Passage to India or whatever-by-Shakespeare to name a few), Catcher in the Rye spoke to me through the voice of its misfit anti-hero/protagonist, Holden Caulfield, in a language that I could relate to. There was nothing wrong with those other books, I just couldn’t relate to them when I was a teen. Catcher struck me as so fresh and relevant that it was hard to believe I was reading it forty years after its first publication.

I won’t get into any long-winded analysis or personal takes here, even though it’s tempting to do because of the fun I’ve had reading this book over the years. (Holden wouldn’t approve and would denounce me as “a phony” for sure).

For those who haven’t read Catcher in the Rye, I’ll give you the first sentences from page one as a teaser:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all –I’m not saying that– but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.

It’s a sad and dark story for sure, but I read it again a few years ago and found it much funnier than I found it the first time. Last night I read a passage to my wife and we were dying laughing. Well, I was dying laughing and she was mostly laughing at me as I rolled off the couch in tears. It was the part where Holden goes…oh, never mind…you had to be there. (pst! it was the part where he goes to talk to “old Spencer,” his history teacher when he’s failing out of school and Spencer makes Holden sit through a reading of his own miserable paper on the ancient Eqyptians which begins, “The Eqyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons…” Oh, man, that part kills me!)

Go read Catcher in the Rye if you haven’t already. Buy it in paperback from a used bookstore if you can find one…a used bookstore, that is! Holden says that if you download it onto a Kindle or some other electronic device then you’re just a phony Ivy League bastard that doesn’t deserve to know about the madman stuff that happened to him last Christmas!

Tonight I listened to Side Two of The Eagles-Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t even like The Eagles that much, but I was flipping through my little collection of LPs (my big collection of LPs is lost in my parents’ garage somewhere) when I saw that aqua-blue cover with the coyote skull in the sand and I thought, “Well, this will be different.”

When the needle hit the groove of the first track, “One of the These Nights,” and that nice, slick, mid-70s, LA studio-produced, FM-radio, slightly disco-influenced, mellow country rock came on it felt, strangely, very modern to me even though it’s over thirty years old. I’ve been listening to so much really old, old stuff lately (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Dizzie Gillespie, Hoagy Carmichael, Muddy Waters, etc.) that anything recorded after 1968 sounds like the Jetsons by comparison.

But there’s something about The Eagles that really puts me in touch with my California roots. I heard this stuff all over the radio when I was a kid and it puts me right back in the family car on a Friday night, sitting in the back seat with my little sister, while we’re going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant (the Bluebird in Solona Beach, CA) for cheese & sauce-smothered burritos.

As a songwriter, though, what is most jarring about listening to The Eagles’ greatest hits is that it reminds me that once upon a time it was actually cool, and even respectable, to have a hit song on FM radio. Artists in those days didn’t lose street-cred by having well-produced, memorable hit songs that appealed to a mass audience. It’s just what you did if you were a rock band…or a mellow-rock band in this case.

Whenever I hear music from that era and that genre (James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, Poco, etc.) I think “why don’t we write hummable songs with spot-on harmonies and a string section anymore?” and then I remember “Oh yeah, because it would be completely cheesy & lame by today’s standards!”

That was before punk, I guess.

Anyway, Side Two felt so good that I went ahead and listened to Side One as well…though I could do without “Witchy Woman” for sure.

When I was in high school, a favorite hangout for me and my friends was the Bob’s Big Boy on Encinitas Boulevard. Encinitas didn’t have coffeehouses in the 80s and Bob’s was a place where you could go at night and spend a lot of time without spending a lot of money.

There was a waitress there-I’ll call her Simone-who worked nights and who I had a crush on. She was dark-haired, curvy and sarcastic. She looked something like Natalie Wood but without the bubbliness. She had a dry sense of humor and she didn’t smile too much. When she did smile, it came on fast & full like blinds yanked open to the daylight. Then she’d shut it off again just as abruptly in a way that sometimes left you feeling rebuked for thinking that you’d actually pleased her in some way. She messed with my mind”¦but I liked it. I was a 17-year-old kid and she, at the worldly age of 19, was a woman.

I used to go to Bob’s with the guys in my band and we’d ask to sit in her section. We were some lady-killers, I tell ya; three scrawny guys who lived at home with our parents and who were still in high school. Simone was on her own in the world and living with a roommate in downtown Encinitas. She used to tease me by saying things like, “So why don’t you wanna go out with me?” in a way that was more accusatory than it was inviting. The truth is I just didn’t know how to go out with her. My course of action instead was to leave absurdly large tips and then watch from the bushes outside as she collected the money from the table.

One night, in the summer of ”˜85, I was at Bob’s with a few of my friends and Simone was waiting our table. I don’t remember how it came up, but at one point she told me that she’d be getting off her shift at 2:30 in the morning and could I come by and pick her up?

Huh?!!!

She told me that there were these two guys she knew who always showed up after work to go drinking with her but she didn’t want to go with them tonight and she’d rather “hang out” with me instead. The invitation was vague, but it was too compelling to decline.

For the next few hours I was a hero to my friends. Don's gonna “hang out” all night with Simone! They killed time with me by going to a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show up in Carlsbad. Before the movie I found a pay phone and called home to say that I wouldn’t be in until morning. I don’t remember being given permission exactly, but neither do I remember being told that I couldn’t.

After the movie, I drove us back to Bob’s to let my friends off at the other car we’d left there. To my unpleasant surprise, the two guys that Simone had told me about were already there, standing next to a Mustang in the parking lot and waiting for her. These guys weren’t like me. They were older and harder. And they had beer.

They stated their intentions: “We’re gonna party with Simone.”

I was feeling pretty committed at this point and I figured that Simone was just going to have to explain to them when she came out that there’d been a little change of plans. (I wasn’t gonna tell ”˜em that myself!)

I bid my friends farewell and they drove away.

When Simone finally came out she wasn’t firm about her intention to spend the night with me instead of them. After some awkward negotiations, we all agreed that we’d go to the new park up on the hill by Vulcan Ave & D Street and “party” there. I took my car, a ’74 Javelin, and Simone rode with them. Following their Mustang down Encinitas Boulevard, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw that my friends in the other car were following me. They hadn’t gone home after all but instead had stuck around to make sure I didn’t “get thrashed,” as they would later explain. Good to know that if these two dudes tried to dispose of me at least my loyal friends were willing to die for the cause as well.

We parked our cars and walked up a hill to a little semi-circle of cement benches in the park overlooking downtown Encinitas. Still in her brown polyester Big Boy uniform, Simone took a pack of unfiltered Marlboros from her purse while the guys broke out the beer. I didn’t like the taste of beer back then and I wasn’t a smoker, so I declined both. The tension eased as it soon became clear that these guys were pretty harmless. My defenders-in-hiding must have determined that as well because after a while I stopped seeing their car circle by on D Street.

We stayed up there in the dark for quite a while but I don’t remember any of the conversation at all. I probably just listened, mostly, as they drank, smoked and shot the s#!t. In the end, nothing much happened. Bottom line was I didn’t get any time alone with Simone after all.

While it was still dark, we went down to Alberto’s for some Mexican food. Simone’s roommate Judy had joined us somewhere along the way, and when the sky finally started to get light, we all headed down to the beach at D Street. It was there at the beach that a vivid memory was formed out of a seemingly insignificant act. It’s like this little film in my mind of just a few seconds in time: A Bob’s Big Boy uniform discarded on the sand next to me, and this 19-year-old woman in a T-shirt plunging into the ocean alone at dawn.

While it was happening, this moment of watching Simone in the surf while I sat on the sand next to her clothes seemed to fall way short of the great conquest that I’d hoped for that night. Little did I suspect that this scene would stick with me over so many years, not only as one of my favorite memories of growing up in Encinitas, but also as a perfect portrait of Simone; in the moment, on her own, and out of reach.

Postscript

That Bob’s Big Boy is now a Coco’s. Alberto’s is now Filiberto’s”¦and may have even been Roberto’s at the time. I have no idea where Simone is now.]]> http://everettsville.com/blog.html/hangin_with_simone_growing_up_in_encinitas_california__part_ii Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:35:15 -0700 singer/songwriter - Don Everett Pearce - News/Blog