Photo Pest: Liberace

Saturday, June 8, 2024

Baby Boomer Memory Lane

Jenny Erpenbeck introduced me to the phrase "flat product," which refers to archival material. Bob Dylan sold a whole shitload of flat product to the Center named after him in Tulsa. It's not far from the Woody Guthrie Center, which I skipped. Different generation.

As I watched dozens of video clips projected on all four walls of the room that introduces visitors to the Center, I got goosebumps. Dylan has been around my entire life, and deservedly famous in a non-celebrity way for most of it. And I'm not even that big a fan, although I do include Blood on the Tracks on my favorite albums list, the kind on which there's not a single bad track.

An upright piano displays the sheet music for "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall," an early allusion to the threat of nuclear war that defined my childhood. Yep, I remember those drills when we had to crouch below our desks. As if!

Imagine the world's most sophisticated scrapbook and you'll have a good idea what awaits you at the Bob Dylan Center. These are some of the 45s you might have found in Dylan's record collection.

Elvis Costello curated the jukebox of Dylan songs, including many of the most memorable covers as well as originals. Has there ever been a more heartfelt refrain than the one he sings in Like A Rolling Stone? It's supposedly about his brief affair with Edie Sedgwick, my favorite female Warhol superstar. They hung out in the Chelsea Hotel long before Taylor Swift was born.

There's also a faux studio where you can mix several of his greatest recordings. I chose "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," from the soundtrack of Pat Garret & Billy the Kid, a Sam Peckinpah film that nods to my Southwestern roots even if Kris Kristofferson was way too old to play one of America's most notorious gunslingers.

You get a sense of Mr. Zimmerman's trend-setting fashion sense, too.

There are some home movies shot at Woodstock, long before the festival. Life with Bob definitely looks like a '60s blast. At least until his hush-hush motorcycle accident. He's definitely a guy who ran from the tabloids.

Of course there are plenty of photos, too. In this one, he's squatting in Times Square. You can see the reflection of the sign for Colony Records in the window behind him. I visited that store, long gone, in college.

Thanks to a brief stint at the National Orchestral Association in the 1980s, I once stood in exactly the same position on the stage at Carnegie Hall. In a bowtie, without a microphone, guitar or stool, but still, looking out at those red velvet seats, even empty, was quite a thrill.

Has there ever been an odder couple in pop culture? This shot was taken back stage at the Letterman show in 1984.

I count myself among those who absolutely believe that Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you don't agree, just try humming along to works by any of the other laureates.

But I really wasn't familiar with his other artistic skills, including this painting which was really about to resonate as I continued my road trip thru the Far West.

The Center houses temporary exhibits on the second floor.

The one I saw highlighted the rise of Dylan's political consciousness. "Blowin' in the Wind" definitely defined the tumultuous 60s for me, although it was the version by Peter, Paul and Mary that I heard first.

Bags of flat product, in this case fan mail, remain unopened.

Before exiting, I asked if the enigmatic Dylan ever had visited. He hadn't. I have just one question: How does it feeeeeeeeeeel?

Jared Leto, David Spade and Adam Goldberg were among the boldface names we spotted during my last visit to Los Angeles. Two decades later, we headed to Forest Lawn, desperate for a celebrity fix, even deceased ones.

En route, we tried to take a peek at the Hollywood Bowl which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. I recall it vividly from the cover of a 78 rpm recording in my parents' LP collection. Here's the entrance.

Believe it or not, the Bowl seats 18,000 people. We couldn't get any closer than this because stagehands were loading in Diana Krall's show. Just across from the parking lot, up a couple of flights of stairs, you'll find a lovely first-come, first-served picnic area where the outdoor concerts can be heard, if not seen.

We also made a quick stop at Ferndell where a young woman I met in Runyon Canyon told me to check out the turtle pond. All the shade made it seem more like Central Park.

I had a list of the graves I hoped to see but the dour woman at the Forest Lawn gates told us we'd have to use Google maps to find them. Fortunately, Bette Davis came right up. She's buried with her mother and sister. They have a great view of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Somehow I expected Bette's final resting place to be more campy than this tasteful mausoleum, although I did love her epitaph: She did it the hard way.

Google maps had no time for Liberace (or Brad Davis or Paul Monette or Richard Pryor); we found his grave quite by accident., another joint burial under a classical statue. I was beginning to detect a pattern, or perhaps a cemetery prohibition against marking your tomb with a little of the personality that made you a star.

Of course there IS Liberace's over-the-top signature. And "SHELTERED LOVE" could be an allusion to the closet he inhabited until HIV killed him in 1986.

At least some pilgrim had the wit to leave behind a modest candelabrum.

Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher died within a day of each other and were buried together here. We stumbled upon them, too. From a distance, I thought the entwined statues might be lesbians, not mother and daughter. Although come to think of it, my mother did come back from the beauty parlor once claiming to have read in a movie magazine (probably the notorious Confidential) that Eddie (Carrie's father) left Debbie for Liz because Debbie, by then married to Harry, a shoe magnate, liked girls. The gossip we retain from a starstruck childhood!