The other day, my wife asked if I’d ever been to the Hollywood Bowl.
Surprised by the question, I said, “Yeah … but it wasn’t to watch a show. I was on the stage.”
The look on her face told me that, for the first time in many years, I actually had a story that I hadn’t already told her.
So I told her, and today (for reasons we’ll get to in a few hundred words), I’m telling you, too.
It was December 1984. I had driven to Los Angeles with two of my closest friends, Jeff Gravitt and Rob Crawford. The trip wasn’t for a happy reason; our good friend Stan Greene — just 25, like the rest of us — was in UCLA Medical Center, dying of leukemia.
I’ll always be glad we made the trip. It gave us a final chance to see Stan, who we lost about a month later. And since he would have been the first to say, “Please don’t spend your entire trip visiting the sick guy in the hospital,” we also squeezed a good amount of adventure into those couple of days. Picture three small-town guys cruising all around Hollywood in a Dodge Charger in 1984, having no clue where they were going or what dangers might be lurking around the corner.
Yep, that was us.
Sometime between visiting Tower Records and accidentally ripping our pants on nails strategically stuck into the chairs at the Whiskey a Go Go, we headed west on Hollywood Boulevard. That’s when I first saw the Hollywood Bowl sign.
“Hey, the gate’s open — let’s just drive on in,” I suggested. Hearing no strong objections, I pulled my Charger up the hill toward the iconic shell. Eventually, thanks to a series of fortuitously unlocked gates, I somehow managed to drive right up to the back of the stage.
Nobody was around. It was as if Wallyworld was closed, but they’d left a key for the Griswolds.
Now, Jeff and I never went anywhere without our guitars and an amplifier in those days. We immediately figured this was probably the best chance we were ever going to get to play the Hollywood Bowl. So Jeff grabbed his orange and purple Rickenbacker 360 out of the trunk, I grabbed my cherry red Gibson SG and a Gretsch tube amp, and the three of us walked onto the stage, staring out at thousands of empty seats and benches.
We plugged in and tuned up and looked at each other. We’re on stage at the Hollywood Bowl. What do we do now?
Easy. Play “Twist and Shout,” just liked the Beatles opened with when they played there in 1964.
So we launched into the song, the racket from our one shared amplifier reverberating around the hillside. And in no time at all, other people started showing up.
Looking up the hill to the left, I first noticed maybe five folks walk in. Then a dozen more. Oddly enough, they started pulling out cameras and taking pictures of us. Finally, after maybe 40 people had assembled, one guy walked in and started talking. He saw us on the stage, did a double take, shrugged and continued his spiel.
He was a tour guide, and the “crowd” was a group of tourists who (unlike us) had actually paid money to see the inside of the place.
They must have thought we were part of the act, because they walked closer to the stage and just kept taking photos. So after launching into “Squeeze Box,” we started posing — a leap here, a windmill there. When one guy yelled “Smash your guitar!” I knew we had ’em eating out of the palm of our hands.
After a few minutes, the group went on its way, and we decided it would probably be a really good idea if we left, too. All I know is, somewhere out there in this cluttered old world, probably in boxes in long-forgotten dusty storage lockers, there must exist hundreds of photos of me, Jeff and Rob onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, and at least one shot of me pretending to smash my guitar.
My point for all of this (and once again, thank you for reaching it) is this: Forty years after my last visit to the Hollywood Bowl, I’m going back. There’s a special Jimmy Buffett tribute concert April 11, and to say it’ll be a star-studded affair would be an understatement. The lineup includes Paul McCartney, the Eagles, Kenny Chesney, Zac Brown, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Johnson, Pitbull, Eric Church, Brandi Carlisle and Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, all united to making his dying wish — “keep the party going” — a reality.
I’ve already bought tickets, and I guess it’ll be interesting to finally see the Bowl from the audience’s point of view.
But I’m bringing a guitar, just in case.
Mike Wolcott is the editor of the Enterprise-Record. He can be reached at mwolcott@chicoer.com.
