Happy birthday to Bob Dylan, who turned 84 on Saturday. (Insert “how does it feeeeel?” joke here.) While he has no tight connection to the Inland Empire, he’s rambled through these parts a few times. When, you ask?
For a Dylan birthday event at the Upland Public Library on May 10 (to beat the rush?), yours truly, a fan since 1979’s “Slow Train Coming,” was asked to give a talk about those IE appearances.
With a six-decade career and incessant touring, including a Hollywood Bowl show just days ago, Dylan has been around the world and back again, performing in towns large and small.
As I informed the library audience, Dylan has performed six concerts in the Inland Empire and rehearsed here at least twice, all from 1964 to 2017. He hasn’t been a rank stranger to us.
Let me share that research here for posterity. In chronological order:
1. Feb. 25, 1964: Dylan performed a solo acoustic show at UC Riverside’s gymnasium. I researched and wrote about that in 2021.
2. Oct. 5, 1993: Almost three decades later, Dylan co-headlined a concert at the then-Blockbuster Pavilion outside San Bernardino with Carlos Santana.
3. Aug. 12, 2009: On a joint tour of minor league ballparks, Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp performed on the same bill at The Diamond in Lake Elsinore. Talk about a curveball. But this must have been the ultimate in Americana.
4. Aug. 19, 2010: A year later, Dylan and Mellencamp played at Ontario’s then-Citizens Business Bank Arena. I was in the audience for my only IE Dylan concert.
5. and 6. Oct. 7 and 14, 2016: In Indio, Dylan opened two successive weekends of Desert Trip, a festival that put him on a bill with the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, the Who and Roger Waters. They were the Cabazon dinosaurs of rock.
7. Oct. 10-11, 2016: Between weekends of Desert Trip, Dylan and his band rehearsed at the Pomona Fox Theater, a 1931 venue downtown, one night and the next morning. The only witnesses were the production crew and, for a half hour, the Fox’s manager, who told me: “I pretended I was at my own private Bob Dylan concert.”
8. October 2017: Sometime this month, Dylan and his band rehearsed at the Riverside Municipal Auditorium, a 1928 theater downtown. An official with Live Nation, the venue’s manager, told the City Council that Oct. 24: “We just had Bob Dylan here for four days.”
Oh, to have been there. Even the thought that Dylan walked the streets of Riverside and Pomona incognito — he’s known to go on solo walks in a hooded sweatshirt while on tour — is quite a picture.
Happy birthday, Bob, and please don’t be a stranger.
IE on TV
Watching over-the-air TV recently, Dennis Sampson of Pomona happened upon two references to Pomona-area colleges, real and fictional, from vintage TV shows.
From “The X-Files,” “an episode which aired earlier this month — ‘Roland’ — mentions Harvey Mudd twice,” Sampson reports. In that first-season episode from 1994, an aerospace engineer whom Agent Mulder is investigating is said to have attended Harvey Mudd College. It’s one of the real-life Claremont Colleges. The rerun aired on Comet, a science fiction and fantasy network on subchannel 9.3.
Meanwhile, on May 18 on Cozi TV, subchannel 4.2, Sampson saw a 1992 “Columbo” TV movie, “No Time to Die,” in which the killer attended fictional “Ramsey College” in Pomona.
That reference may have been the highlight. Sampson admits his attention wandered, and the excellent Columbophile Blog says the episode is “grim,” “dreary” and “terrible.”
Clackety-clack
My May 16 column on the Type Town typewriter display at the Los Angeles County Fair (whose run ends Memorial Day) brought back bad memories for at least two readers.
“I always ran out of white-out tape, or Wite-Out in a bottle, before my papers were done,” laments Earl De Vries of Ontario.
“How I don’t miss typewriters!!!” exclaims Ion Puschila, who teaches history at Garey High in Pomona. “What a pain. The only class I got a D in throughout high school.”
This reminds me that an alcove at the Riverside Art Museum holds a typewriter and paper, ready for use. It’s apparently an object of fascination on school trips. That’s what Drew Oberjuerge, the museum’s executive director, said last year in pointing it out to me.
“Kids love the typewriter,” Oberjuerge said. “They have no idea what it is.”
Overnight sensation
You may have seen the lengthy list of Southern California News Group journalists who won a California Newspaper Publishers Association award for their work in 2024. After a Susan Lucci-like streak of 27 years without an award as columnist, yours truly was at last recognized.
But don’t get excited. In our circulation division, I placed, uh, fifth. Which is last place. And because fifth place ended in a tie, I got only half of last place.
It’s a slow climb to the top, friends.
Briefly
An NPR story May 11 featured the former Millard Sheets Studio at 655 E. Foothill Blvd. in Claremont, built in the 1950s and occupied since the 1980s by Claremont Eye Associates. Eye doctor John McDermott III, whose parents bought the property from the famous artist, grew up in Claremont and saw the Sheets Studio artists at work making mosaics. People have guessed that the carefully preserved building is a Buddhist temple or art gallery, McDermott told reporter Fiona Ng, “and are surprised to see that it’s three ophthalmologists.”
