HIGHWAY STAR
The ghost of Ritchie Blackmore's guitar laughs over the road home from Coachella
By Cole Coonce
It was after one in the morning last Sunday, and somewhere between Riverside and San Berdoo, graveyard-shift freeway construction had closed all westbound traffic on Interstate 10 except for the slow lane, leaving thousands of purple-haired Radiohead fans bottlenecked in their automobiles for 10 miles or so, back toward Indio-way and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival we were all trying to leave in our rear-view mirrors.
Even from the VIP seats, it had been a long Saturday in the desert, watching 50,000 or so twentysomething indie-rock ravers vomit out Red Bull and ketamine in an audience holding area that resembled a concentration camp somehow tele-transported into the parched playas of North Africa. As the kids danced, whooped, and threw elbows to new-wave nostalgia acts like the Pixies, Stereolab, and Kraftwerk, dust storms towered over the proceedings like the dinosaurs at Cabazon. By the time Kraftwerk and their laptops sang "Auf Wiedersehen," right around midnight, the gypsum dust of the desiccated high desert Empire Polo Field capped my teeth like the Devil forgot his Astro-Glide. Oy. After a day of insanity, I was in no mood to sit in what, essentially, was another parking lot masquerading as a freeway.
"This is bullshit," I muttered, and Tara stirred in the passenger seat as I punched the throttle and gave 'er plenty of rudder. Directly behind me, a big-rig tractor-trailer driver had the same idea - i.e., rip-cording on the silliness of sitting in traffic six hours after sunset - and sucked my draft onto the freeway's off-ramp, his headlights blasting my rear-view mirror like a low-beam Hiroshima.
After my retinas adjusted, I found an AM/PM open on the frontage road and decided it was the right moment to gas up, get caffeinated, and re-think getting back to Los Angeles County. Maybe buttonhook back to Route 60, take that west, then grab the 15 north. Or maybe use surface streets as our own personal express lane, blow by the stalled caravan of cars to our left, and eventually hit the Foothill Freeway in Fontana. I knew if we just stayed off the 10 for a while, eventually I could really lean into it and tickle the speedometer's triple-digit mark all the way home.
At the convenience store, I inquired about the frontage road and Tara did ladylike things in the loo. As I paid the longhaired mustachioed cashier, I got rather existential in a space-time-y kinda style-e and asked the hirsute Riverside rocker-type a question.
"Is it just me, friend, or did you ever have the feeling you were hit by flying debris off of Ritchie Blackmore's broken Fender Stratocaster at Cal Jam 1 and knocked unconscious for 30 years?"
"Brother, it ain't just you," he nodded. "I know just what you mean."
As I left, he began playing pulmonary-mouth guitar, grunting out the opening chords to "Smoke on the Water" through bristling upper-lip hair and a couple of missing teeth.
As I eased onto the frontage road, a freshened-up Tara asked what the mini-market mullet-man and I were talking about.
"Umm, we were trying to reconcile Bertrand Russell's Liar's Paradox with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle."
"You are so full of poo."
She was right, of course. So I told her what we really talked about.
"Who's Ritchie Blackmore, and what's Cal Jam 1?" she asked. Her blissful ignorance of useless pop-culture arcana is one thing I really like about her.
"Ritchie Blackmore was the guitarist for Deep Purple. He smashed a bunch of television cameras with his guitar at this rock festival put on 30 years ago at the old Ontario Motor Speedway."
"Where's Ontario?" Tara asked. She is a Westside girl.
"We passed it on the way out. I'll show it to you in a little while. They bulldozed the speedway 20 years ago. Now, Ontario is just a bunch of methedrine labs in trailer parks, buttressed by some wholesale retail outlets for Liz Claiborne shoes or something."
She raised her eyebrows.
"You're not mad we're not going to stay for Day 2 of this Coachella festival, are you?" she asked as she slowly closed her eyes again.
"What for? So we can watch the singer for the Cure's mascara run in 100-degree heat? On a Jumbotron?"
"So you're saying this Ritchie Blackmore fellow had the right idea 30 years ago?"
"Marshall McLuhan still wants to shake his hand."
I'm not sure she heard me. But I had us home an hour or so later.Published: 05/06/2004
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