It was a bitterly cold day when the four amigos got in a car and drove from New York State to Los Angeles. The cold and the desolate area we lived in, and the bleak future for jobs, led us four – Amos, Dick and Dave and myself – to take a deep breath and leave our hometown and head for sun and fun.
And girls. We can’t forget the girls.
The first week or so in La-La Land was a little scary because none of us had money. We took turns calling home to have some green sent to us by Western Union. We bedded down in a seedy hotel on Wilshire Blvd., debated such things as whether to buy food or liquor with our dwindling funds. Liquor always won.
We eventually paired off with Dick and I going to the beach and Dick and Amos flirting with LA. All three of my amigos are dead – Dick going first in 1962, Amos about 15 or so years ago and Dave a few years after that.
When I think back to those times, and I do quite frequently because they were good times, I get sad that I have no one to share those good–time memories with. We were all young then and full of it. We didn’t want to conquer the world, but we certainly wanted to enjoy the good parts of it.
What prompted me to write this is what happened Sunday. Bobby Blue Bland died. Yeah, I don’t think you know who he was. That’s okay. Bobby Blue Bland was one of the first blues singers I came across – Muddy Waters was the first – and he came to me just days after us four amigos got to LA.
The first time I heard him was that night – about 2 in the morning – that we four drove right down in the core of downtown LA. There was hardly a car or soul around as the four of us passed around the remains of a fifth of whiskey. I don’t remember what brand. It doesn’t matter.
As we drove around the nearly deserted streets of downtown LA, the music coming out of the radio in Dick’s 1954 Mercury was Bobby Blue Bland. I have never heard blues so cool. Bobby Blue Bland still rings in my ears. He was coming to us from a black radio station and the DJ kept playing Bobby Blue Bland over and over again.
And the weird part is that Dolphins of Hollywood sponsored the show. I had visions of Dolphins of Hollywood being a Victoria Secret kind of store, but it was as far from that as possible.
What I didn’t know then was Dolphins of Hollywood – and the name was repeated after every Bobby Blue Bland song was that the broadcast was coming from Dolphins, which was a 24-hour record store. The station – KRKD – was in the store with DJ’s spinning the platters all day and night.
There is a fascinating story on Dolphins of Hollywood at http://dolphinsofhollywood.com/home/about/history/. There you will find that John Dolphin became a legendary black businessman back in those times. According to the story, Dolphin wanted to put his store in Hollywood. The problem: he was the wrong color. Hollywood wouldn’t let blacks own businesses in its city.
So John Dolphin did the next best thing: he took his store to Watts, and we all have heard of Watts by now because of the Watts Riots that happened five years after I left LA in 1960. Dolphin got even with Hollywood by naming his store Dolphin’s of Hollywood.
To get back to my central theme, I instantly fell in love with Bobby Blue Bland and his music. And I fell in love with Dolphins of Hollywood, even though I never came close to stepping in the store.
I think the reason I fell in love with Dolphins of Hollywood is because of the way the DJs would pronounce the name. There was something mysterious and wonderful about it at the same time.
Of course, there is also something about being a small-town boy of 20, being drunk in Los Angeles late in the night and feeling completely free for the first time in my life. I was far from relatives, far from home, far from everyplace, and broke as an empty and very broken piggy bank.
It was warm out that night as we drove through downtown LA, the radio blaring Bobby Blue Bland, four guys laughing and all thinking how cold the friends we left behind were back in our hometown in New York State.
Life could not get better then that. And don’t spoil it by using 2013 terms to describe what we did that night. The world has changed and if my amigos were alive today, they would have settled in and would not be doing what we did that night. But this was 1960; 53 years ago and four young kids had broken loose from our homes and had gone out on our own never to be shackled again by the comfort of our slow-paced hometown that we left behind.
I’m terribly sad, still, that Dick died so young, in a car crash that I somehow knew would happen to him. He stood for everything we were at that moment driving through LA. Dick had been around the world with his dad, working in the Middle East, he had gone to school for short period of times in Montana and Vermont, and was about as carefree and as good a person as one can get.
I miss him, still.
What is even weirder, as I write this Bobby Blue Bland is playing on American Routes. A few minutes ago I randomly went to the show’s archives for June 2005, and lo and behold, I stumbled on a two-hour show featuring Bobby Blue Bland and his songs.
Bobby Blue died Sunday in Memphis, Tenn. at the age of 83. He was our unofficial fifth amigo, and now we are down to one – me.
You be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.