Coming out of the Art Deco darkness of the Del Mar after the late show I note it is past midnight and Pacific Avenue looks oddly twisted, the street wiggled down to one lane curling snakelike among dense foliage like the old Garden Mall and, amazingly, it is.
Coming out of the Art Deco darkness of the Del Mar after the late show I note it is past midnight and Pacific Avenue looks oddly twisted, the street wiggled down to one lane curling snakelike among dense foliage like the old Garden Mall and, amazingly, it is. There’s no place open and I’d like a beer so I stroll over to Front Street to see who’s playing at the Catalyst. It must be 1973 or so because Oganookie is into its last set and the dancers crammed in front of the bandstand have worked up a sweat and the cowboys and bikers and hippies and grad students are stomping their boots on the boards of the old carriage-house floor. The music is some kind of Boulder Creek bluegrass, blue as the smoke of cannabis leaves grown and burned in these hills, fiddle-guitar-mandolin-bass-and-banjo burning as if the musicians’ fingers are aflame, possessed of some ancient backwoods juju that rocks the big room with primal rhythms that move everyone, even the bouncers and bartenders who rule the place with the force of their studly cool, and the busgirls collecting the dregs of the downed pints. This is old Santa Cruz, what’s going on, have I fallen into a time warp where stoned golden ages are hallucinated, or is the past not past, as Faulkner said, or all ages contemporaneous, per that blowhard Pound? Poets are everywhere, as they were then, reading at Zachary’s every chance they get or printing broadsides in Westside garages or running off their latest works on Xerox machines and scattering them about town, shamelessly promoting Romance. This was before tiny devices made hooking up so casually electronic, when you had to seduce your sex object by serenading her until she swooned into your arms against her sisters’ advice. Those were the days, or so they seem from this distance, under the influence of senior discounts, reimagining your twenties in some surf-crashed redwooded Left Bank or Montparnasse of the mind. The time is real, is now; it is you who have passed.
