Out of the Slot – The 2024 Inland Empire Nostalgia Tour: Lifelong Friendships Bonded by Music

Let’s take a drive through the old town
Back past the place where we met
Some things are hard to remember
Some things you’ll never forget

Let’s take a walk down your old street
Who lives in your house today?
Let’s see if we can remember
All of the vows that we made

~Chris Isaak, 1989

Indulge me in one more “travel log” post, dear readers, before we return to our regularly scheduled programming; although this is my second post in a row that isn’t really about slot cars (a first for thunderjetheaven.com), there’s no denying there’s an indelible connection between my recent travels and the diorama world I’ve created with my slot cars and die-casts, which I blog about here. That world is (as I state almost constantly) set in the time and place of my upbringing, the southern California of the mid 1980’s. While it had its problems and issues even then-it wasn’t paradise, I’d never go that far-it was a pretty decent time and place to grow up.

Anyone living in the USA today could doubtless recite a litany of the issues CA now has, which have made it both the laughing stock of the country, and an ominous portent of what is to come if the same insanity in politics and policy are pursued elsewhere. This may make you wonder, what was it like going back there after all this time?

Well, in some ways it seems better than I was fearing. In some ways it seemed worse. Maybe that’s just par for the course as things change and time marches on. I saw the evidence of decay firsthand, but I also saw the prosperity that’s still there. More than anything, though, what I felt-and what I miss even more than I realized until I was in the thick of it-was the energy and creativity of the music scene in SoCal. It is unrivaled anywhere in the country with the possible exception of NYC (and given that choice of hells, I’d choose the one with the better weather) and you can feel it all around you once you put yourself in the middle of “the scene.” I will admit-and it galls me somewhat to do so-that this aspect of my return to my native land affected me more than I was prepared for. This impromptu video that I shot during a break in the action while on site at NO VALUES might drive this point home, as you can hear my voice break slightly at the end…

It is the music that binds us

And if time’s elimination
Then we got nothing to lose
Please repeat the message
It’s the music that we choose

~ Gorillaz

I have some friends in CA who have done very well for themselves, and some others who haven’t. But regardless of how old we get or where we are in life, we are bonded by our love of music. My friend Leo finally mixed his own album, an album composed of songs that I remember being there to witness the creation of back in the 90’s with several bandmates, a couple who are still around and that we hung out with, and a couple of others that are long gone. It was an amazing trip through memory lane listening to it again: the songs I remember them playing live at gigs, the rough demo versions I originally heard, and new material that was recorded after I left as the new millennium was about to break. And there was the big gig that I’ve already blogged about previously, and all the feral fun and flashbacks it contained. It was exciting, and it was emotional; even more so than I was expecting. It re-enforced that the friendships we forged in music in the crucible of our youthful angst have withstood the test of time and will endure…just like the music we heard at that show.

In the days following “No Values” there was time for reminiscing and nostalgia as I rode with a couple of my friends around the “Inland Empire.” We took it all in: Upland, Pomona, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Alta Loma. Some stuff is still there but a lot of it is gone. In 2003, the 210 freeway was finally extended eastward through the neighborhood I grew up in, so that there is now a freeway on-ramp 3 blocks away from what was my front door: nothing changes a neighborhood’s character more than that, and although the area looks surprisingly good, it feels different. I guess it should after a quarter of a century. As the dividing lines of a stratified society strengthen, the neighborhood I was raised in would now require millions to buy a house there; and yet, down the street only a few miles, old town Pomona is filled with empty store fronts and vandalized buildings, no doubt occupied by the legions of the homeless that have taken over every working class neighborhood in the state.

A microcosmic example of this is Rhino Records, which has now relocated from its spot in Claremont where it was stationed since 1975 to a strip mall in nearby Montclair, which, despite the antimetabole names, is nowhere near as toney. Rhino was forced to vacate Claremont after 50 years due to rent increases they could no longer afford, so that college town lost its cultural nexus. In a way that’s tragic. In another way, it serves them right. Such is life in CA now: either you’re a millionaire, or you’re on your own: no prisoners taken, no survivors. And people, that’s no way to live.

As I have oft writ in these pages, Colorado is now undergoing the same stratification as California, and for the same reasons. Which is why, shortly after I returned, I had a visit from one of my friends who lives in Fayetteville AR, and we discussed some of the details of what life might be like for me if I were to join him there. Relocating at my advanced age is scary, but my mom and dad did it…multiple times, in fact. Arkansas is a long way from the music scene in LA, but it seems that places like it are where those of us who didn’t join the “investor class” are going to have to go for any semblance of a whole and sensible life as society’s collapse accelerates.

What California has become isn’t the promise of our liberal upbringing; it isn’t the world we thought we were working for. Seeing what happened there changes your perspective, and causes you to re-evaluate what is important. There is a part of me that will never leave those dive bars and gig venues throughout LA and OC I spent so many drunk and angsty nights in. Yet, even in spite of all the fun I had and all the teary eyed moments this trip back brought to the fore, I had to experience firsthand that the old saying is true: you can’t go home again. The SoCal of my youth is gone; there is still an energy there unlike any other, but the age of possibilities has been dispatched by the money men who have found a way to wring every penny out of every aspect of life until there’s nothing left for people who work for a living. I live with the conviction that it shouldn’t be that way tempered with the knowledge that it is that way. That’s why this excitement of my recent trip is going to be filed away with the youthful days when I lived there, just like the reconstruction of that time and place that I’ve strove to create in 1:64 scale in my basement: it is all but a memory.