by David Hirst
These days, you have to book weeks in advance to get a table at Pappy and Harriet’s. The food, I am told, is still sensational, especially the ribs, and the bands never fail to attract. The town is now a happening music scene. When Paul McCartney played there recently, three thousand people turned up in the hope of scoring one of the three hundred tickets available to see him. Boulder House, now transformed into a hip Airbnb, was featured in the LA Weekly’s ‘Best in LA’, extolled as a fixture amongst young weekend warriors ‘in need of serious relaxing and otherworldly exploration’. The New York Times recently ran an article about Pioneertown wanting to be the new Wild West.
But they aren’t making any more Old Wests. Not authentic ones. The Old West is dead and buried. The ghosts of Buzz and Ed Gibson, David, John Edwards, Pappy, Horseshoe Freddy, Frances and John, Fleet, and too many others to mention, walk the land, marking the changes. These were easygoing people who didn’t object to progress. They just didn’t want it in their backyard. The Blade Runner, gone now, too, to meet his maker, is no doubt disgusted by a bunch of wild men carousing out there amongst the coyotes in a most ungodlike fashion.
The desert looks on and watches. It has all the time in the world. Earthquakes, alien landings, one-thousand-year droughts, fires, human mayhem, and crazy military activity — it has seen it all. Nothing surprises it anymore. Nothing ever did.
