Bob Bell - Letter From America - Hitching to Berkeley July 1980
July 1980 Berkeley, LA and back again
The bus pulled into Berkeley, that storied town on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, around noon. I decided to go on to LA and get a new passport. Jan got off and we made arrangements to meet again in a few days when I returned. She would be staying in San Francisco for a couple of weeks before returning to Washington.
The old Gray Rabbit rumbled out of the Bay Area, out over the Altamont Pass, and hit Interstate 5, rolling south to LA, past endless fields of fruit and nut trees, artichokes, lettuce, broccoli, cabbages, onions, future meals laid out in long straight rows in enormous fields. This area, the San Joachim Valley, is America’s market garden, irrigated by water from the Sacramento Delta, running all the way down there along vast concrete canals, bringing vitality to the semi-desert.
Some fields were lined with rows of bent backs, Mexicans picking strawberries, blueberries, lettuce, weeding and hoeing. Tractors hauling giant sprayers worked between lines of fruit trees, the spray iridescent in the sun, rainbows appearing and disappearing in seconds, and forever onward the bus plunged south, and the fields were momentarily replaced by truck stops and rest areas, and then they too were behind us, and so the fields rushed on by, forever shortening the journey and bringing LA closer, closer, closer.
The road began to climb, steep steep grades, over what is called The Grapevine which is named after a small community that sits pretty much at the northern foot of the grade, and that community is named in turn after the wild grapes that originally grew in the ravines close by. The road snakes uphill for miles, brown sun-scorched hills either side, trucks crawling in low gear on the nearside lane, grinding and groaning up and up. Cars and pickups, unencumbered by such heavy loads, zip by, hares to the tortoise trucks and we hit the top and looked south, and woo-wee, we're over the crest, closing in on LA, and in front of us the Los Padres National Forest to the west and Angeles National Forest to the east, and on to San Fernando, Burbank, signs for Pasadena, and then LA, where the bus pulled into an empty lot, and we staggered out, tired and stiff from lying down for hours and hours and hours. From Seattle to LA in one jump, over eleven hundred miles with just a few stops for food, fuel and frolics. It was evening, and a group of passengers invited me to their apartment to spend the night, a welcome invitation for a very weary traveller.
The next few days went by in a blur. I slept on the beach in Venice, had my bag stolen while I slept, but it had simply been emptied a few yards away, and then abandoned - even a desperate thief way down on his luck had turned up his nose at my pitiful and ragged belongings.
I tracked down the address for the British Embassy and spent literally hours and hours walking there. Los Angeles is a huge sprawling city, and it turned out some blocks, and in particular, the one upon which the embassy was situated, followed no numerical sense. Just at the point where I thought I could only be a block or two away, there was a seismic and inexplicable shift in the numbering, and I had to walk a further two hours. Found the place eventually, explained my predicament, and was told to return in a couple of days to pick up a replacement. More walking and more walking and more walking. LA is a lonely town for the pedestrian - the automobile rules big time.
I was more than happy to get my papers in order and finally split, catching the Gray Rabbit back up to San Francisco, where I landed in Berkeley once more, spending the night in woods above the university, a night made memorable by being awoken by the sound of water splashing next to my face. It was a bum pissing, not aware in the darkness that I was just beneath him. He jumped back and screamed when I shouted, terrified at the dramatic break in the silence, shocked to realise he was not alone, and then fell over his tongue trying to apologise. It was all really very funny, and I didn’t care - he had missed me after all. Mumbling one more apology, he stumbled off into the dark, and I slept until dawn.
I met up with Jan in San Francisco the next day, and we spent the day seeing the sights and hit a big party in town that evening, and the following day she left to return to Washington. We made plans for me to follow her up there in a few day's time.
Before I had left England, I had stayed with my friend Martin Hesp, a great writer friend and bon vivant and his artist girlfriend Sue, in what had once been a schoolhouse in Treborough, Somerset, way up on the Brendon Hills. Martin and Sue had been to San Francisco sometime before, and gave me the address of a friend of theirs, telling me to look this guy up if I got out there. Guy’s name was Dan, he was a musician and he lived in Marin, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco. Dan and his wife Robin had been expecting me, and graciously put me up for a few days, showing me around the area. They had recently experienced some late-season rainstorms, and several of the steep hills bordering the narrow roads had shed some of their earthen skins, resulting in numerous landslides here and there. To someone like myself, who had grown up in surroundings that had been inhabited by countless generations spending lifetimes building infrastructures such as stone walls, bridges, paths, everything out here on the west coast seemed very temporary, very new and altogether quite insecure.
Dan and Robin told me of a great record store in the nearest town, Mill Valley, and showed me the bus to catch to get there. I left early in the morning and arrived at Village Music right after they opened. It was a record store that surpassed all record stores I had previously known, even such great emporiums as Rock On in Camden Town in London. The walls were plastered with vintage posters from the 40’s through the 60’s, promoting concerts and club dates by blues, jazz and country legends. Ernest Tubb and Floyd Tillman next to Joe Liggins and Roy Milton, Gene Vincent and The Collins Kids next to Guitar Slim and Jack McVea. Dozens and dozens of them, like gods peering down from the heavens.
This place sold used records as well as new, and it had a room just for 78’s. I was in paradise, pure, pure paradise. To an English record collector, there is nothing quite like looking at the original American label as opposed to the English pressing on a UK label. I gazed upon Specialtys, Moderns, Imperials, Aladdins, Gothams, Kings, Queens, Recorded in Hollywoods …. Oh dear Lord, heaven indeed. And the prices. 25 cents, 50 cents, some a dollar or two.
A fever came over me. In a dream state, I methodically went through the entire four walls of shelving, pulling a Joe Liggins here, a Four Deuces there, here a John Lee Hooker, now a Tiny Bradshaw, then Ivory Joe Hunter - oh look, a Roy Milton on a red Specialty label, never seen that colour or design before - must be really early. And so the day went on.
Insert ’The Train Kept A- Rollin''
Hours later, towards the end of the afternoon, I carried my haul to the cashier, paid up and walked outside to the bus stop, which as luck would have it, was right outside the entrance to the store. It took two journeys to carry all the records out of the store to the bus stop. 78’s are one of the heaviest substances known to man, each one weighs about 6 or 7 ounces. A couple of hundred weigh around one hundred pounds. I stood there, blinking in the sun, boxes of records at my feet. Slowly and inexorably the import of what I had done dawned upon me. I, Bob Bell, was hitch-hiking around the USA. And what had I just done? I had bought more stuff than I could possibly carry, more stuff than I could possibly lug along the road, more stuff than I could ever ask a willing motorist to put in his or her trunk. I had been possessed by an irresistible and undeniable record collecting frenzy, no two ways about it. Just the sight and feel of those desirable and precious labels, so tempting, so tantalizing, so alluring and intriguing had exerted a strange and overwhelming, overpowering and oh so potent allure. It was as if during the entire episode I had relinquished all thought of rationale, all manner of common sense, all idea of practicality. I had behaved as a man possessed, the demons had gotten hold of me. I had watched this all happen as if to someone else, as if I was really floating a few feet above this Bob Bell, watching him grabbing this record and that one, and yet, as if in a dream, was powerless to intervene and point out the madness of it all.
And now it was done. Six large boxes of 78’s lay at my feet. A bus pulled up, and I struggled aboard with my precious and stupid cargo.
