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What’s the high desert and why does it beat the low desert? ♦ What is it about the desert that mesmerizes? ♦ What pissed off Sinatra so much he went nuts with a sledgehammer? ♦ Why did the Pharaohs really build the Sphinx? ♦ How long is the wait list to sleep in a motel room where a semi-famous guy OD’d nearly 50 years ago? ♦ What can you do to screw with people long after you die? ♦ These and other burning questions are answered when Larry returns to his favorite place, the haunted Mojave desert!
Usually, I write some kind of narrative for the images I post. Not this time. The Mojave desert is just too big. If you listen to the episode, these images will speak for themselves. (In a dry rasp, from too much straight tequila and dry, thin air.)
Dinny and MISTER (always MISTER) guard the gateway to the Coachella Valley, a place of desert weirdness.
Question: where the hell did that tree log come from? There’s nothing but sand and rock for many miles. The desert is a riddle and that’s part of its allure.
See these busted headphones? What the fuck are they doing hanging on a barbed-wire topped, chain link fence? I’ll tell you. They answer the riddle of the Sphinx – 5,000 years later and 8,000 miles away. Listen to the episode and you’ll realize how right I am.
Once upon a time, Old Blue Eyes hung his fedora within the above domicile. He thought he was buddies with JFK, whom he helped get elected. But then Jack the Haircut rat-fucked Frank and Frank went apeshit with a sledgehammer. What did Frank bust up? The answer is in the episode.
So you’re blasting through the desert on 2-lane blacktop. You see this collection of rusty reptiles. You’ve been looking for them all your life. You stop and pay any price. Happens all the time.
With tacky Palm Springs barely visible in the rear-view, you head for the better desert – the high desert. Once there, you can look UP at God or DOWN on the unenlightened, madding crowd in the flats. The high desert should have a sign in the sky “RESERVED FOR HIGHER LIFE FORMS.”
A lot of artists live up there in the high desert, and they make some bizarre and cool and awful stuff. Is this a hangover-counter? Would be fun at a target range, no? If they switched out the vertical dowels for rope, it would be a wind chime to make you suicidal.
Is the cool one wearing the shades?
Screw Yelp. I’ll eat and drink at ANY saloon with her on the door. The Dali-esque six-shooter says her tequila will make you hallucinate. Her flesh guns are pretty good, too. Probably a champion arm-wrestler.
They named a town, a state park and an old U2 album after this tree. Well, not this particular tree. Second time it had snowed in a quarter century. Lucky me.
Yup. He’s at the point of the yellow arrow. Lots of joints like Willie Boy’s (I’m glad they got the apostrophe right) in the high desert. Most of them have some type of animal on the roof. Not sure why, but I dig ’em. Desert dreams run big and intense. But few work out.
Driving by this place tripped a wire in my mind. So I Duckduckgo’d it (I DON’T USE COMMIE GOOGLE!). Sure enough, this place is where Country Rock godfather Gram Parsons flamed out in 1973 at the age of 26. I had to go inside…
Who could resist a window like this? Not I.
It’s even better on the inside.
Some called Parsons the “Cosmic Cowboy.” There’s a wait-list to sleep in room #8 where he OD’d. Who would do that? And why?
The obscured words are, I believe, “safe at home.” Was Parsons a baseball fan? I had no tchotcke offerings to leave. Though I did drink a tequila toast to him when I returned to my hotel.
The desert.
It never gets old.
It owns me.
All the images here are mine.
I hope you dig them, and the episode.
Peace.
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