Looking for Home in a Hilton Ballroom

by Jim Washburn

You can’t go home again. Thomas Wolfe wrote that, same guy who wrote Look Homeward, Angel, which must have been his big joke on angels, since they can’t go there again.

Maybe that’s been the problem since the Big Bang: neither you, God nor angels can get back to that state of timeless nothingness, that little speck that isn’t a speck, the void that’s not a void because there’s nothing to measure it against and no consciousness to perceive it. If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, because there is no forest or any other matter anywhere, plus there is no anywhere anyway, and no emptiness even for it not to exist in, and there’s no one in the non-forest nowhere to hear no tree fall and no time in which for it to happen, does non-existence exist, or are we always just halfway to non-existence, then another half of that? And if the universe is constantly expanding, does that put us ever farther from home?

No wonder we cling to the walls we have, the ones that a slip of papers says we own or don’t, and why we long for the place when it’s gone.

Longing. That’s a lot of life in a nutshell. People trying to get back to the garden, or colonial Christian clarity, or amniotic bliss, or that perfect game you played; that first time in the backseat; the childhood dog you loved so much; that jumbo hot cafeteria peanut butter cookie; that balmy beach breeze day when Sgt. Pepper was on every transistor radio; that old friend who laughed at the same cracked world you did; that first guitar. Everybody wants some. David Lee Roth said that.

We have memories, and sometimes you can almost taste them on your lips, but it’s always bittersweet, because a memory is like Communion. It’s not the flesh of Christ, just a Necco wafer gone bad.

I’ve tried going home, and it’s never as good as the memories. That house you lived in as a kid, once so full of family and small wonders, now looks small and tawdry, all drywall and dull linoleum.

Places I’ve lived:

Honolulu for the first two years of my life. I was born in the same hospital that’s now famous as the birthplace of Donna Schoenkopf, and I was there the day a little Kenyan baby washed ashore in a basket of reeds, a note penned to his kanzu reading, “Please raise me as an American, so I can destroy you.” My only actual memory of Hawaii is of rolling down a steep lawn, terrified the world would never stop spinning.

The Hollywood Hills. Our mailman was black, so I’d ask him if he knew Nat “King” Cole. A fabulous place to be a kid: fires, floods, creepy abandoned houses. You could forge paths through the ivy-laced hills and chance upon topless sunbathers. Our next-door neighbor was a makeup man, and his underlit basement was hung with gruesome monster masks.

La Puente. Following Hollywood, it was like waking up in hell. Run-down, rough, drinking powdered milk, bullies. Most of which scarcely mattered, because the Beatles had come along, which, for a kid like me who even delighted in “The Chicken Delight Twist,” was some magical stuff.

Buena Park: Lived in the Highland Greens condominiums. Big-T golf course onion rings. The still-unfenced Knott’s Berry Farm in walking distance. Life was good. I waxed nostalgic about the town in some long-ago column on this site.

Newport Beach: I felt like we were the Beverly Hillbillies moving in. Newport Beach was for the rich, which we weren’t. But Harbor View Homes was full of over-reachers who, like us, couldn’t afford more than a dirt yard for a long while after we moved in. This was my high school and college years, when basically there was the house, then there was my room, a sanctum where my head was typically between the speakers of my GE Trimline stereo. The window of my upstairs room was filled with a giant poster of Barry Goldwater, but with red auto reflectors where his eyes should be. I think I stole that idea from a Vonnegut book.

Costa Mesa. We just moved from Costa Mesa, to Costa Mesa: 32 years in the old house, and now I drive by and wonder, “Why did I ever stay there?” But it sure felt like home at the time.

I live a few miles from the Newport house, but never feel like seeing it. Property values soared so much there that everybody added on or rebuilt, in a manner like onto the Popes’ tombs in the Vatican, each vying to outdo the other in splendor. No Barry Goldwater posters allowed now.

a styrofoam bear

I’ve been back to most of my old homes, and none felt like home. There have been workplaces where I’ve felt at home, from the ’70s hippie record store I managed to newspaper newsrooms. But you really can’t go back home in your old workplaces, unless your idea of home is a concrete lesson in how dispensable you are. You thought you were a vital cog, but the machine churns on without you.

This past weekend I was part of an effort to get back to another sort of home: the Golden Bear. The Bear was a landmark on the PCH since it had been built as a restaurant in 1929. In 1963 Delbert Kauffman reopened the place as a folk music club and subsequent owners Goerge Nikas and Rick, Chuck and Carole Babiracki kept it going until 1986, by which time it was justifiably beloved by both locals and touring musicians. It was a unique, eccentric, funky old place; a great-sounding room with a magic vibe, and owners who appreciated what a special place it was.

There are music venues where the customers and musicians are treated like raw materials, there to have value extracted from them and then be shuffled out the door. The Bear felt like home.

As a fan and music critic, I’ve seen literally thousands of shows, and a disproportionate number of the great ones were at the Golden Bear. The first show I saw there in 1970 was Spirit, one of my favorite all-time bands, which up til then I’d only seen in convention centers, college gyms, and other sizable venues. At the Bear, I was maybe seven feet from them, close enough to try to get a look at guitarist Randy California’s secret box of echo effects, and for him to gently push my head away. It was a fabulous show, both soulful and experimental, because artists always felt freer to try new stuff at the Bear. (Barry “Dr. Demento” Hansen told me Spirit’s hit, “I Got a Line on You” began as an onstage jam at the Bear.) I started talking guitars with the guy in the row in front of me, and he’s been one of my best friends for nearly 40 years now. It was that sort of place.

Albert King, Muddy Waters, Peter Gabriel, Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman, Stevie Ray Vaughan on his first West Coast jaunt, Los Lobos, the Firesign Theater, Beefheart, Django Reinhardt’s musical partner Stefane Grappelli: those were a few of the magic ones.

Ray Manzarek finds David Lindley doesn't spook so easily

I know a guy who was music nut and a surfer in the ’60s, and his mom would pick him up in the late afternoon in front of the Bear. One day he was there in his wetsuit with his board when a battered Cadillac pulled up and Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker got out. The club was still locked, so they talked with him for a while. To me that would be the perfect snapshot of everything that was right about those times in California: a surfer in a wetsuit hanging out with those two legends.

OC musicians Mark Turnbull and Richard Stekol tried to see Lenny Bruce when he performed at the Bear in 1966. Too young to get in to Bruce’s “adult” show, they listened through a window. A friend saw Charles Bukowski there, and got to talk with him in the alley afterwards, where Bukowski promptly threw up on his shoes. You just don’t get that sort of personal attention at Disney Hall.

The Bear closed in January of 1986, a victim of financial troubles, earthquake codes, and a city intent on making way for the same soulless, profit-driven development that’s ruined so many once-unique towns.

So this year, the town that couldn’t wait to be rid of the place back then wanted to commemorate it now, as part of a year’s worth of activities celebrating Huntington Beach’s centennial. Fair enough. Perceptions and values change, and it’s not the same people running things now as it was back then. The person who spearheaded the Centennial Committee’s Golden Bear Reunion concerts this past weekend, former HB mayor and councilman John Erskine, was one of the guys fighting to keep the Bear open back then.

You can’t go home to a nightclub, either, but it was a noble and special try. Since the Bear and HB’s other nightspots are all long gone, and since the police didn’t even want to hear about a free concert on the beach, the choice of venue pretty much came down to a Hilton ballroom. Nice people there, very good at their jobs, but it’s an expensive venue, not high on funk factor. It’s also very hard to convince talent to play in one. Typically the only time artists play a hotel ballroom is for corporate events, for which they’re paid five times their usual rate, which might be among the reasons why folks like Jackson Browne and Steve Martin were unattainable.

The Bear name still carries goodwill, and after a ton of work talent buyer Ken Phebus was able to get David Lindley, Chris Hillman & Herb Pedersen, Honk, the Dirt Band, the Doors’ Ray Manzarek, Jack Tempchin, Steve Noonan, and Mark Turnbull on the bill. All these acts had a lot of history with the Golden Bear, and the Dirt Band and Honk had practically been the house bands there.

(l-r) Tom Souber, Chris Hillman, Herb Pedersen

Huntington Beach had saved sections of the Bear’s distinctive architectural façade for years in a city yard, but it’s all gone missing. So we had some of it replicated in Styrofoam by Judy Parker, a fabulous artist with Laguna’s Pageant of the Masters.

We’d hoped to have all the Bear’s surviving owners there, but the two oldest were ill and unable to attend. Chuck and Carole Babiracki Kirby were there, with her husband Kevin Kirby, who had been the Bear’s floor manager. Carole and Kevin aren’t the kind to sit back, and fell right into their old roles of making everything work and everyone comfortable. One of my favorite things about the Bear and the reunion was that when you saw the unflappable Kevin Kirby with his clipboard, you knew all was right with the world.

The musicians had a great time swapping stories backstage. They all performed marvelously, especially Hillman & Pedersen and Honk. Close your eyes during their sets and you could pretty well imagine yourself at the Bear. Open your eyes, and it was the Hilton, but that was OK. Those good old days aren’t coming back, but there may be other grand days still before the universe is done expanding.

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