Drifting Hearts [The Great Migration]

Back in the summer of 1910, I used to hang out with Tom Mix at the saddle shop down at Sunset and Cahuenga. I think there’s a Popeyes or something or other there now. But that was once where they used to pick up cowboys for gun operas as they called ’em back then. We’d all be leaned up against the store wall or sitting cross-legged like old Coyote Face. Mix and I’d been runnin’ together that summer. Hadn’t had much luck but one day some fellas from the Selig Polyscope Company picked him outta our line up and put him in Ranch Life in the Great Southwest and the rest is history for him. He died in a car crash back in ’40 at sixty years old.

Before his big break though, we’d been tramping all over Hollywood Boulevard, drinking, dancing, dice, cock fights, a whore house in Pinyon Canyon. We both dreamed of makin’ it in The Gun Operas, movie stars. But then his big ship came in and mine seemed to just keep drifting off shore, barely in sight. But once you have your first real awe shucks moment in life you’re never quite the same.

Hollyweird, LA, The Valley, Las Vegas, where ever you call home in this Bermuda Triangle of Excess and moral deprevity of the southwestern desert, we all come out here in all sorts of shapes and sizes and with all sorts of different kinds of substances in our bodies. But for each twenty-something, Juicy-wearing bombshell, sipping her latte through a straw as she struggles to unlock the BMW her father has sent her off in, and for every spiky haired, fist pumping, club going, Red Bull drinking, Diesel Jean and Tshirt wearing ruffian of the strip, the bright lights and endless nights have caught another eye. The giant neon signs at the end of your adolescent desert have always been flashing the words, WIN, GIRLS, MONEY, CELEBRITY! But what’s the real “situation” if you will? What drives a delirium of stage smoke, multi-colored candy drinks, ecstasy, and barfing? Something’s broken. Nobody’s perfect.

Here, nomatter who you are, nomatter how many successes or how few you’ve encountered at this oasis of dreams, you’ve had something broken. And you’re forever changed. And more often than not, just when we’ve found a cure for whatever our ailment might be, the flickering lights have already provided us with a new one, a new face, a new necessity, drug, lover, role, jackpot. And so we are left to drift…..like our streamlined golden path hit an open field as far as the eye can see, that’s LA County. Think about all that when you listen to this song:

Download THE GREAT MIGRATION at iTunes, or click HERE to buy the CD from Amazon.

featured image credit: Julio Ignacio Olivares Soto