WARREN BEATH

Louisiana ambush site, 1934

The ambush site, today.

I'm studying the pictures in a book on Bonnie and Clyde, comparing the site today to the way it looked in 1934.

This was pretty cool for someone who has read about Bonnie and Clyde for years. My friend John Beiber and I traveled across the country and spent a night in the Joplin apartment where Bonnie and Clyde shot it out with the laws, killing two Missouri detectives. We had the interesting experience of watching the movie Bonnie and Clyde with its re-enactment of the Joplin shootout, while we were staying in the same apartment portrayed in the movie.

Sure, night was a little creepy-

The red door led to the upstairs rooms. My bedroom in the back and the set of windwos at the right. Beiber slept in the room above the garage door at the right. One detective had lain in front of the garage doors; the second victim was inside the garage.

- there was the garage beneath our feet where the actual shootout took place, and where the two policemen had died on the same concrete. We went down there at night but there were no ghosts that we could see. I stayed in the upstairs bedroom that had been shared by Bonnie and Clyde, while John took the room where Blanch and Buck had slept. The bathtub purportedly is the original.

The apartment is decorated with pictures of the outlaws, and it was neat to sit in the front room and read Blanche’s detailed account of the shootout. I think they were a couple of weeks in the apartment– perhaps their longest sojourn in any one place during their run.

A contemporaneous newspaper picture of the hideout shortly after the gunfight.

The black-and-white was taken by Thom Halls when we visited the Bonnie and Clyde ambush site in 1970. It was a wet day and the clay was red and runny.

The Lombard potty in situ. Note the potty mouth is compressed.

Carole Lombard's plane crashed here in January, 1942. There's a legend that husband Clark Gable hired teams to search for her missing ring.

When I was a kid and we would drive to Las Vegas, I would be fascinated looking at the mountain peaks and wondering which one concealed the wreckage of the Carole Lombard plane crash. I’d read this biography of Clark Gable, and was haunted by the story of the crash on a peak variously called Tabletop Mountain, Truth or Consequences, and several other names. One one trip I saw a piece of molten wreckage from the crash which was on display atop a potbelly stove in the bar at Goodsprings below the mountain range.

Eventually I located the wreckage through an aviation archeologist who was the first person to take me up there. The next few times I went, I had to cast my net wider for a guide– eventually starting a fresh and locating the wreck through the information on the crash investigation report.

Now the location of the wreck is on the internet, and it is a frequent destination for hikers. But at the time of my first visit, I was perhaps one of only a hundred people to have visited the site since 1942.

View from the top.

At the bottom, with friends Rick Deutsch and the wonderful Jim Boone. Happy campers? I had three broken ribs. Rick’s driving over washboard roads on the way back didn’t help! A day I’ll never forget.

I might have broken my back, without it. It was in my backpack when I fell descending the 8,500 foot-level of Mt. Potosi outside Las Vegas. Lombard’s potty took the brunt of my backwards fall against a rock. As it was, I only broke three ribs.

Dillinger in custody-- temporarilyI was fascinated by gangsters in my teenage years, after seeing Bonnie and Clyde (the movie, not the outlaws), and reading Toland's Dillinger Days. I began to dream I was in the backseat of getaway cars, pursued by the laws. When I graduated from high school, I took a drive across the United States looking for landmarks that figured in Depression Era outlaw history. I retraced much of the route in 2006. Little Bohemia Lodge, Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin

This is the cabin outside the Little Bohemia Lodge in upper Wisconsin, where Baby Face Nelson was staying when the FBI launched an ill-fated attempt to destroy the Dillinger gang.  The FBI killed two CCC workers. Nelson killed an FBI agent, possibly the same one who had erroneously killed the CCC workers.

In 1970 I spent a night in the cabin;  I revisited it in 2006, to

The Nelson Cabin at Little Bohemia

Examining Dillinger’s luggage

find it no longer open to guests. At the lunch itself, I had the best lunch I have ever had– a walleye fish sandwich. Part of the lodge was converted into a Dillinger museum, but none of the stuff was there when I visited in 1970. It’s hard to believe someone had the foresight to preserve the windows with bullet holes in them through the years when Dillinger was not a folk-figure.

In the years after the raid, the Nelson cabin was also home to John Dillinger Sr., who gave little talks about his gangster son.

One of my favorite movies, and one of the nice cds in my current rotation. Vampyre is the semi-silent classic by Carl Dreyer, an eerie dream that takes place at indefinite times of day and in dislocated spaces. Dreyer’s intention was to disorient the viewer, and the action drifts through a house with a confounding and unsettling layout. You never know where you are, or what is beyond any other door. At the same time I am fighting a terrific one-click monkey that keeps me ordering cds in a genre I’ve newly discovered– Chill. It’s techno-ambient-trance-hip hop-jazz fusion sort of stuff, run through a muzak carwash. It bumps. The pianos sound like breaking glass under water. Time is disconnected and distended, reverb repeats and relives the concentric ripples of the icy-smokey female vocals.

What the movie and the cd have in common is the distension of time, the slowing down of experience. Both are awash in a relaxed unreality, an etherized dream.

… but Kings don’t mean a thing, on that Street of Dreams.

I have over 100 Sinatra cds, in addition to bootlegs of outtakes, concerts, and studio rehearsals.

This is one of my favorite spots in Bakersfield. Sadly, the Bakersfield Inn is long-gone. I have some pieces of the tile from the swimming pool. The pool can be seen in the Jack Nicholson film Wild Angels. He has a fight with a biker, in the pool. There was no water in the pool. It was a totally dry fight. The view through the arch is also scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Just beyond is a Weinerschnitzel that was featured in Clint Eastwood’s Every Which Way but Loose. I was sorry to see those palm trees go when the demolished the Inn. I got a couple of babies out of the ground that had grown through the rubble, and now they are about twenty feet high in my backyard. I bought some menus from the Inn off of ebay, and also an ashtray, a brochure, and some postcards. Now it is a Foodco parking lot. The one remaining building is a halfway house for teenager’s with substance-abuse problems.

This is my favorite movie of all time. Sure, I’m a Peckinpah buff, but this movie spoke to me the first time I saw it at about age sixteen– and I saw it several times within a few days.

“Nobody loses all the time,” says a frayed and rumpled Warren Oates.

He kills about a hundred people in the movie once this down-at-the-heels pianist gets his mojo working. Maybe that’s why I love it: he’s a loser who becomes someone who literally “can’t miss”.

Isela Vega is the love interest, and her nude scenes fascinated me when I was sixteen.

The soundtrack was beautiful and I searched for a cd for years before I found it.

“Nobody loses all the time….”

This song fascinated me after I heard it on a Doctor John cd. Why? I began to search out different versions. Louis Armstrong had one on a soundtrack. But the ur-version seems to be Jelly Roll Morton’s. The melody is apparently based on a song from the actual Buddy Bolden– a song called “Funky Butt”, which is also the title of an instrumental recorded by Ray Charles.

Buddy Bolden was a legendary New Orleans jazz trumpeter who went insane and died after many years in a sanitarium, without his apparent genius ever being committed to vinyl. He is a mysterious person and the details of his life are precious to jazz buffs; even his final resting place is in dispute. I think it’s only in the last decade that a marker has been placed in the cemetery where purportedly he rests (if you want history and research, don’t read blogs).

“I thought I heard Buddy Bolden shout,
Open up that window, let the bad air out…”

Apparently, it was a song Buddy would improvise in crowded dancehalls, and he would extemporize lyrics about the stench of the room, and the foibles of various members of the audience and the bandmembers.

The definitive version, for me, is the Jelly Roll Morton. Because he sings about long-dead New Orleans characters who seem vivid and poignant. Slowed down from the apparent tempo of Buddy’s original, the melody is haunting and insinuating and intimate. It echos sadly down the empty halls of some tumbledown dancehall. It’s a ghost haunting itself.