The Dream Bowl

Once I told someone that I had been in a house band at a dance hall. They asked “what’s a dance hall?” I remember two in the Bay Area in the 1950’s, the Garden of Allah on the Niles-Alvarado Road in southern Alameda County, and The Dream Bowl, on state highway 29 between Vallejo and Napa.

Buck Owens died shortly after performing a show, at age 76, on March 25, 2006. I assume Johnny Cash had been disabled for a while before his death at age 71 on September 12, 2003. They had a lot more in common than appearing at the Dream Bowl, but being at the Dream Bowl is having a lot in common. Johnny Cash mentioned the place at a show he and June Carter did in Marin County on October 16, 1993. I was surprised he remembered the Dream Bowl. It was a small stop on a big tour in 1959. Black Jack Wayne and the Roving Gamblers was the house band. Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two (Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant) were the featured performers the one and only night I ever went to the Dream Bowl. After Buck Owens passed away, though, other people came out with recollections of the Dream Bowl. Buck Owens appeared there a few times, according to what they said. Well it makes sense. Johnny Rodriguez the Texan appears mainly in Texas - why shouldn't Buck Owens the Californian appear in California? As far as I can tell, the building is still there. Over the years it had housed a furniture store, and I suppose other businesses. An environmental monitoring company is there now. A little north of Napa is the California Veterans' Retirement Home in Yountville. My sister lived there for twenty years. Every time we visited her, it was my custom to point out the Dream Bowl as we passed by.

The Dream Bowl was still in business in 1969. The Grateful Dead had a gig there in February that year. You can find lots of material on the internet about that night, including recordings of the show.

Music

My father was an entertainer. My mother put me up in front of people when I was 3 to entertain them by singing. She said that on VJ Day, August 1945, I stood on the roof of our apartment building in the Bronx and sang “Don’t Fence Me In.” I don’t remember that, but I do remember playing rhythm guitar for a house band called the Melody Playboys at the Diamond Horseshoe dance hall in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1962 when I was in the Army. I also remember singing the same Johnny Cash song, “Big River,” several times at parties and informal gatherings. My sister played French horn in several orchestras in the Bay Area when she was young. We were at a Gilbert and Sullivan thingie one evening when she said she used to know a lot of people in the pits in plays all over the City. So with this kind of background, would I encourage the kids to be minstrels or chemists or models or auto mechanics or what? All, actually. The kids have done all these things.

I like music. I like the classics and operas my father liked. I like the country and western songs that were popular when I was in middle school and high school in the 1950’s. I like Celtic stuff. I love bagpipes and drums. I like the Asian harp, the koto and its variations. I like rap, reggae, rock and punk when people are putting interesting variations into constricted forms. The guitar player for my daughter’s angry grrrrl band once did a beautiful chord progression amounting to a melody in some number that sounded like young girls screaming while loud machinery was drowning them out.

A lot of punk was purposefully making fun of music. When I was a kid the big band Spike Jones and His City Slickers played songs with sirens, gunshots, gargling, washboards, cowbells and other comical stuff. But the band was good. They knew how to play standard big band music, which they did, while running around gargling and shooting. The punk band Schlong, with my #1 son on guitar and keyboards, put out a CD “Punk Side Story” which was the soundtrack for “West Side Story” in punk style. My daughter screams “There’s a Place for Us” and “I Feel Pretty.” A lead “singer” belched loudly and followed it with “the most beautiful sound I ever heard…” leading into the song “Maria.” They also covered Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” on a 7-inch vinyl record they titled “Tumors.” They had to do it really fast to get it to fit. They had to know the originals well in order to arrange them as they did.

Their heyday was more than fifteen years ago. They have occasional reunions, which they say are better attended than their gigs in the early 1990’s.

My daughter’s boyfriend is learning a lot of new stuff on the guitar. Me, I practice to try to remember what I learned fifty years ago.