![]() Along the way, he’s bankrolled their appearances at private performances in town. He loves hanging out with musicians - including some of the great names of an era: Patti Smith, John Kay of Steppenwolf fame, Eric Burdon, Alan Parsons, Steve Miller, and Graham Nash - swapping stories, inhaling their ether. The light of his Big Wow has never dimmed. ![]() He estimates he’s flipped about 2,500 houses over the years, earning the right to sit at the table with legendary Los Angeles real estate operator tough guys known as “The 40 Thieves.”īut as tough as Earl Minnis may be, he remains a big kid when it comes to music and the people who make it. He made his bones in a tough business, flipping houses he bought at distress sales held on courthouse steps. Open, direct, impetuous, decisive, expansive, tender, and enthusiastic. And that now includes Minnis.Įarl Minnis is a genuinely tough guy. So thank you, José or Giuseppe or whatever you want to call yourself all these years later.Īnd many thanks to all the people along the way who’ve kept Lobero’s dream so alive for so long. Along the way, he changed his first name from Giuseppe to José to better blend in with the dominant Spanish-speaking Santa Barbara of the time.Īt 150 years old, and still going strong, the Lobero remains Santa Barbara’s single most magically intimate - and affordable - venue for an astonishingly wide array of musical genres. Ultimately, Lobero committed suicide rather than endure financial ruin, the result of bad investments. The Lobero Theatre was dreamed, schemed, built, nurtured, and ultimately lost by José Lobero, an Italian immigrant - not to mention musical visionary, saloon owner, and by all historical accounts a genuinely wild-assed trombone virtuoso. And, fortunately for Santa Barbara, he loves the Lobero Theatre. Minnis especially loves rock music rooted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “I was born on Sunset Strip,” he says with a laugh. He loves it with the excitement of a kid. ![]() He loves it absolutely, ecstatically, studiously, religiously, obsessively, compulsively, and extravagantly. But what he loves - not merely likes - more than anything else is music. Fortunately for Santa Barbarans, Minnis knows how to use that money. Minnis, who sports shorts no matter the weather, is a real estate mogul who has made a lot of money. Making all this happen is Earl Minnis, a man few of his fellow Santa Barbarans have ever heard of. Joining the free block party in front of the theater on Canon Perdido Street will be Santa Barbara’s ever-ubiquitous Spencer Barnitz and Glen Phillips, as famous today for just being Glen Phillips as he ever was for being part of Toad the Wet Sprocket. On Saturday, May 20, Chubby Checker, still going strong at 81 years old, will be in Santa Barbara, twisting away to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Lobero Theatre. The song would top the charts, not just in 1960, when “The Twist” first hit the airwaves, but two years later when it came back for a sonic rebound, an unprecedented achievement to this day. But that was before we began bombing Hanoi. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was also said to cut a mean rug. National magazines ran photos of America’s glamorous First Lady, a 31-year-old Jackie Kennedy, doing a mean Twist at White House parties. What has happened to our concepts of beauty, decency, and morality?”įortunately, not everyone was similarly troubled. Eisenhower shortly before leaving the White House, “but it does represent some kind of change in our standards. “I have no objection to the Twist as such,” intoned the staid and stalwart Dwight D. For the first time, adults - not just teenagers already mesmerized by Elvis - found themselves sucked onto the dance floor by the insinuating grooves of R&B, then regarded not just as “race music” but also as something dangerously lascivious. This discovery occurred in the summer of 1960.īy that time, Evans had changed his name to Chubby Checker, and his hit song - “The Twist” - had spawned a dance craze that would span not just the globe but the whole generational divide. It would be a cherubically plump, fresh-faced 17-year-old African American singer named Ernest Evans who helped White Americans, by electrifying its youth and awakening its elders to the fact that they’d been endowed by their creator with both hips and ass, not to mention the inalienable joy that comes from shaking both. Albert Einstein was 26 when he “discovered” his general theory of relativity, still unfathomable to most people 118 years later. ![]() Sir Isaac Newton was just 23 when he discovered the law of gravity to which none of us, no matter how airborne, are immune.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |