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Originally Posted by Slauson Slim
Weekend before last my wife and I went to LA for a friend's wedding. We stayed in a hotel on the Sunset Strip across from The Comedy Store.
I recognized The Comedy Store building as formerly housing Ciro's nightclub, and also in the '60s It's Boss and Kaleidoscope. And then struck a memory of an evening 52 years ago....
In June, 1966, the night before I went to the USAF - made the memorable 4:30 am trip to the induction center in Downtown LA - my then girlfriend and I went to Ciro's to see the band Love. We shared a booth with a US Marine about my age in dress blues - post-basic on his way to combat training - and his girlfriend.
Bittersweet recollections. I had just turned 18, the end of my being a teenager and my life at home with my family - I went right from high school to the USAF, the uncertainty of my future, I never saw that girlfriend again - she spotted me in Berkeley years later a friend told me, what a great live show Arthur Lee, Johnny Echols and the band put on, and the undercurrent of the Vietnam War. After the show and leaving Ciro's the Marine and I wished each other good luck.
On another note, good to see recollections of relatively recent - well, the '80s - music memories. I played at Madame Wong's SM in 1979, and went to Club Lingerie a couple of times in the mid-'80s. Early '80s LA was also home to the wonderful Paisley Underground scene - Rain Parade, Dream Syndicate, Three O'Clock, Opal - later Mazzy Star, Bangles and others.
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Interesting how small things come together to change lives. My old man as a Missouri farm boy and was inducted as part of the early pre-war drafts in 1941. He recalled he was in a room with a bunch of other farm boys when an Army Sergeant, a Navy CPO, and a Marine Gunny walked in. The induction board guy asked each how many they needed and they sectioned off the room--left went in the Navy, center the Army, and right the Marines. My dad was on the left. A few months later he's in L.A. and meets a hometown cutie. They got married in 42 before he shipped out to the Pacific. Just think, if he'd been sitting a few rows to the right, I might never have been born to find NLA!
(As for me, I was NG and the only thing I had to fight was the traffic to JFTB Los Alamitos).