I have been to a lot of wonderful places and done a lot of wonderful things in my life.
I’ve walked on the Great Wall of China, I swam on the beaches of French Polynesia and I stood on the sidelines of Mile High Stadium after dark on a November Sunday afternoon.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours at Blue Heaven and I made eight consecutive pars and shot 37 for nine holes on a golf course.
I am coming up on 30 years with an amazing woman. I love her, and the really amazing part is that she loves me.
Nicole is the person who introduced me to the Hollywood Bowl, and every trip I made there during our 18 years together was with her. The irony is that I remember very little about actual concerts we saw at the Bowl.
I think the last time we went, we saw a repertory show of acts from Stax-Volt and the Memphis Sound. I remember two of them were Booker T and the MGs and William Bell.
We went to one Fourth of July show. I think the classical part of it was Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” and the rest was a half hour or so of James Taylor performing. The only other time I saw Taylor was in 1974, when I was at a Carly Simon concert and Taylor came out to sing “Mockingbird” with his then-wife.
I miss the Bowl a lot, just as I miss so many things about California. One of the real ironies of missing the Bowl is that I have seen amazing concerts in my lifetime, from the famous ’74 Bob Dylan Tour with The Band to Paul McCartney in 2014 in Atlanta to Brian Wilson a year later in St. Petersburg.
None of them were memorable for the venue. In fact, the only other venue as special to me in a different way was the Cellar Door in Georgetown, where I saw Linda Ronstadt twice, Harry Chapin and Phil Ochs among others. But the Door was a tiny indoor venue, so tiny in fact that when I saw Rita Coolidge there, I could have reached out from my front row seat and made contact with her.
It still wasn’t the Bowl, though.
Nothing else could be.