Standing at the gates of Graceland is a homage, a kind of pilgrimage. But my friend Nick and I weren’t on our way to Memphis. We were on our way to our personal Graceland, a ranch in the hills above Redwood, California. It was the summer of 2015, and on the flight to LA, eight miles high over the endless emptiness of Northern Canada, a lyric of Paul Simon’s kept going through my head:
I’m going to Graceland
For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland
It was the first day of another Kings of Oblivion ‘Tour’. The Kings of Oblivion is not a band, though we did have a short-lived acoustic band in the late 1970s called Scampi and The French Fries. But that band never made it beyond a basement bar nestled between strip clubs and sex shops of London’s Soho. No, the Kings of Oblivion — Nick Russell, Chris Morris, and me — go back to the early 1970s and the green, green pastures of Cambridge University. Three since-separated but inseparable friends from college who still get together sporadically in different locations to talk about and listen to old music and just do stuff. The name comes from The Bewlay Brothers, a Bowie song.
In the early 1970s there was a lot more to the Kings of Oblivion than just talking music. As Bowie writes in the song: “We were so turned on, in the mind warp pavilion.” We tried feebly to emulate Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses. We climbed over the college walls at 5 o’clock one sharp winter morning and walked the frosted fields of Grantchester Meadows to recite poetry as the sun came up. We dressed up in drag — our hair was long enough already — to crash a party at one of the girls’ colleges (incredible as it may seem, Cambridge’s colleges were unisex at that time). We dropped acid lying in the astringent evening grass under a starry starry sky just as Skylab re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, and we (at least we thought) heard a clearly audible whoosh accompanied by the dislocated braying of a very real donkey which, for reasons unclear to us at the time, had found a new home right in the middle of urban Cambridge.
Now the Kings of Oblivion, all three of us, greyer, battered by divorce, and in my case by cancer survived, haggard but not yet beaten, were back again on the well-trodden road of life, all having been saved by new loves. On this trip, Nick and I were on our way to sunny California to cleanse ourselves in the cool, clear water before paying our respects at the gates of our personal Graceland. Chris was due to join us in LA in a few days, as soon as term finished at the London school where he was teaching teenagers to be better people and to love better music than the shit they secretly listened to on their phones in class.
In Paul Simon’s words then, some part of us wanted to see our own Graceland. However, Nick and I wanted the trail to its wooden gates in the California hills to follow Neil’s own trail, the path he himself took around the time the Kings of Oblivion came into being. That’s why we wanted to revisit Neil’s 1966 first. Chris was OK to miss that part. Chris is not a Rustie. He has excellent taste in music, and he digs Neil in a big way, but he is not fanatic like Nick and I am. Back at school in London, Chris and I had been members of the West Coast Appreciation Society, an unlikely club of English public schoolboys, trying desperately to be hippies, but having to wear school uniform during the week. At 15 years old we idolized the Great Society, Love, the Airplane, the Dead, the Doors, early Byrds, Quicksilver, and Buffalo Springfield, and bought US vinyl imports by the dozen with that wonderful matt cover art, the sleeves much thicker than the UK releases. Plus, we hated anything and everything to do with Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the rest of those unsophisticated late 60’s heavyish UK rock bands. For us they were no competition.
So once Nick and I landed in LA, we started the 1966 section of the Kings of Oblivion Tour on our own. We looked for the side road where Neil spent his first nights in LA in Mort 2. We stood in awe in front of the Whisky (and the Roxy) on Sunset, checked out the Springfield house on Fountain and the International House of Pancakes, and even tried to work out which apartment house on Orchard Avenue might have been Commodore Gardens. We wound our way up Laurel Canyon to where Neil’s wooden cabin once stood. And, of course, we drove up to Skyline Trail, high above Topanga Canyon, trying our best not to disturb the latest owners of Neil’s vertically oriented redwood-clad house, while we searched for the tree nearby which he had leaned against on his second album cover.
We had to apply a small measure of chronological license when we jumped briefly to 1975 and traced the path at the end of Sea Level Drive which leads down to the beach at Zuma. Neil’s house is no longer there, but we could sense where it had stood and the horizon it looked out on. There’s some part of me that wanted to see all that too. But why? We sat on the same rocks which Neil must have sat on many times. Perhaps we were thinking weirdly that just a few of his atomic particles had survived the countless high tides and ocean storms, and that we could somehow assume them into our own being just by running our hands over the stone. Perhaps we hoped intuitively to understand what inspired him to do great things, to write and play such amazing music. All are reasons I cannot fully explain. And maybe, as Bowie says in the song, it was just stalking time for the Bewlay Brothers, the Moonboys, the Kings of Oblivion.
By the time Chris arrived we were just about ready to move on, so we did, via Big Sur, Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. There are too many memories to fit in here, including the vision I saw in a crowded, hazy bar in Cayucos. But we were ultimately hell bent on getting to Neil’s Graceland.
Broken Arrow Ranch has always had a mythical quality for me. It is the stuff dreams are made on. Only more recently have I seen pictures of what the main house looks like. It wasn’t at all as I expected. Somehow, I wish I had left it all in my imagination. If it is hidden away, as it is, then I should not need to know what it really looks and feels and sounds like. But of course I do, and I did then. It is my Graceland, and there was that part of me that, if I couldn’t see it, at least I could see the same hills and trees, smell the same scents in the air, feel the same wind, hear the same birds, and maybe even the last eternally fading echoes of “Words.”
Robert Broadfoot and Nick Russell at the gates of their Graceland.
Here again we feared disturbing anybody, so we did not stand at the gate for long. A nice lady stopped as she drove in to ask if she could help us. I am sure she didn’t really have to ask, and I felt a little ashamed at having been caught there. Anyway, I could never have explained the real reason to her in a single sentence, so I mumbled something about a pilgrimage. The real reason has mostly to do with pure undying respect. This slightly goofy Canadian teenager from a broken home with an interesting taste for colourful woolly jumpers, playing for less than peanuts in a windy lakeside bar miles from anywhere really worth being at, this stoned out folk singer rapping a little nervously to a tiny audience who basically had no inkling of what they were witnessing the beginnings of, burnt with a flame so bright that it was unstoppable. And for me, in 1970, lying on the carpet with my head right underneath my schoolfriend Chris Clode’s excellent stereogram cabinet to get the best stereo effect and bass tones available to me at the time, in a house in a dull London suburb literally a stone’s throw from Bowie’s own dull suburban family home, which he had already fled to embark on his own unstoppable journey, the flame jumped via silver spaceships and overhanging trees from simple spinning black vinyl to my beating, yearning teenage heart. The sound of bullwhips crackin’ set me on fire. There was no turning back.
About me:
As the story explains, I first got totally hooked on Neil listening to an import copy of After the Gold Rush in 1970, but of course I knew him already from Déjà Vu. My first live show was one of the legendary Hammersmith Odeon performances in 1976. I don’t know to this day how or why I missed him in 1973 and 1974. I certainly wasn’t studying too hard! No internet I guess. Lots of water under the bridge since then. Today I live in Germany and run the Neil Young Unreleased Facebook group.