C. County Fairs

Or: A Tribute to the Queen

I wrote my PhD. Dissertation on outdoor live music venues and in the course of my research I found out that there used to be an Amusement Park in the outer Bronx called Freedomland. One time when I was visiting my cousin in Pelham, my Uber driver took me by the site of it, and it’s basically now just a swamp with a housing project (Co-Op City) on it, but in 1964 it was a 200-acre park laid out in the shape of the U.S.A. with a big outdoor performance arena called the Moon Bowl in the middle of it. In the park’s waning days, they got acts from this new Detroit label called Motown to perform at it, because they were cheap. Can you imagine? It cost 35 cents to see Martha and the Vandellas, Little Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Marvin Gay, Smokey Robinson…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. America, you great.

Freedomland went to hell almost before it got started due to financial woes, but I think about it whenever I go to see live music at an amusement park, a bingo parlor, a boardwalk, or most frequently, at a California county fair. This, I should say, is practically my favorite way of seeing music (hence: my dissertation topic). In my day I have had the pleasure of seeing Peter Frampton, Joan Jett, Bow Wow Wow and Bachman Turner Overdrive perform at such (separately, not together, of course) but this year the pickings are slim. I wish that when I went to the San Mateo County Fair this week it had been on the night that Young MC, Coolio and C & C Music Factory were the entertainment, but I accidentally forgot about it. I went on Sunday night, Pride Night, instead, and although I knew who was playing before I went, my evening was made almost before it started when the lady in the little ticket box at the gate told me who it was: “It’s a tribute to The Queen.”

Alas, if only it had been! Sadly, I am that rare person who doesn’t really like Queen, and even if I had, this was a disturbingly bad tribute band. Everything good about Queen was not in evidence, and the lead singer was faking an English accent very, very badly. The audience, it should be said, loved them, but I ended up not watching much - just enough to feel entitled to blog about it - because I couldn’t handle the whole crowd singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” which was clearly going to be the finale. Actually, I would have liked to have seen/heard that but it would have required sticking around through “Fat Bottomed Girls” so – no.

However, there is always plenty to do at a County Fair even without live music: for example, walk through the Midway, which is nothing short of beautiful. The whirling lights and the spinning contraptions; the colors, the shouts, the smells…they make me feel drunk, without actually being so. I read a plaque about Butler Amusements, the operators of this particular midway, and the company calls itself the purveyor of “The Cleanest Show in the West.” It wasn’t meant in a Covid way, either: it said on the plaque that they were trying to provide American audiences with “good clean fun” and I suppose that’s really what they do, isn’t it? Carny rides are not sexy or druggy or violent: rather, they substitute the bodily excitements of those things with some equally physically stimulating but thoroughly harmless version. (I myself would have to be dragged kicking and screaming onto one of those spinning hell machines, but I love to look at them as they operate, and also at the people who are on them.)

Unfortunately, it was a strangely cold night for the Bay Area and I had not brought a jacket. In the end I was forced to repair to the American History Museum, which to its credit was dedicated this year to commemorating black achievement and to the internment of Japanese in the site of a nearby shopping mall in 1942, where I warmed up for a while and pondered the past. Then I attempted to fulfill the two humble goals I had when I arrived: 1. To buy some local jam 2. To pet a small farm animal, and although I was not able to do those things, I did get to have my hair straightened at some shyster’s hair appliance booth and also some eat delicious fried mushrooms.

Anyway, it’s a long walk to the grave and going to the County Fair helped passed the time ‘til I get there. I’ll have to wait for next year to attend an actual tribute to The Queen, but in the meantime, please enjoy my photo essay of my night at the county fair.