Fashion Island: A Peculiar Place to Get a Piece of the Rock

It seems you can hardly go anywhere these days without seeing a 40-foot neon Stratocaster guitar jutting at a priapic angle over some piece of real estate. It just means yet another Hard Rock Cafe has landed somewhere, and at the chain’s rate of expansion, the garish guitars will soon be as ubiquitous as the Golden Arches.

But seeing one perched over the parking lot of Newport’s Fashion Island could hardly seem stranger to me than if there also were a proportionately oversized Jimi Hendrix playing the thing, his Afro blending with the clouds while his booted feet stomped on neighboring shops and office buildings as if they were his unfortunate fuzz tones and wah wah pedals.

The first time I ever went to Fashion Island was a chill, overcast September day in 1968. I was 13 and with my parents, who were looking to buy a house in the area. This was a depressing enough prospect. It meant leaving friends, school--all for a tony town we seemed ill-suited for, since at the time my folks struck me as being kind of like the Flintstones on vodka, right down to my dad’s penchant for howling “Yabba dabba doo!” while pounding the dining table at 2 a.m. in accompaniment to his one infernal Dixieland album.

This particular concern proved unfounded, since when we did finally move to Newport all of our new neighbors turned out not to be rich Thurston Howell IIIs but, rather, folks as upwardly addled as we. Indeed, I’d swear the house behind us had the Rubbles living in it.

My more immediate worry that September day was that I had tickets to see Hendrix at the Hollywood Bowl that night, and my folks were staggeringly unaware of how much more important that was than buying a house or checking out the splendors of the shopping center. And even though Hollywood wasn’t all that distant, as the afternoon ticked by, the newly opened Fashion Island seemed like it was worlds removed. It was like a drafty mausoleum, like a new Cadillac with the windows rolled up, like an empty glass of milk. It was the antithesis of rock and roll, and it made me shiver.

I eventually, though barely, made it up to the Hendrix show, and it was indeed the polar opposite. (A sign of those trusting times: The tickets had been forgotten in my mom’s purse back in Newport. She just called the box office to explain and they let me in.)

Along with being one of this century’s musical geniuses and something of a visionary messenger, Hendrix also had the ability to dress in clothes that would make you or I look like Auntie Mame, while he’d somehow look immeasurably cool in them. This particular evening he was wearing turquoise velvet bell-bottoms, a gold-brocaded vest and a gaucho hat, if you’d care to try the look out at your next board meeting.

He also sounded like he was using his over-amped Strat to crush everything that had come before him and reform it into new, chaotic solar systems. It seemed the weather even changed at the Bowl. At any rate, it wasn’t cold enough to prevent a score of people from diving into the half-moon pond that then lay between the stage and the audience. Girls were getting topless, a profoundly religious moment for a 13-year-old with binoculars.

A curious tug of war ensued: Police onstage were pulling folks out of the pond to do whatever it is police do with wet people, while Hendrix’s roadies were frantically trying to push them back in because the puddle they made was inching ever closer to Hendrix and his 100-watt Marshall stacks.

Meanwhile, down at Fashion Island, life went on apace. During one of his songs at the Bowl, Hendrix had wrenched his tremelo arm until he had a feedback windstorm howling through his amps. Above that he’d shouted, “Awww, there ain’t no life nowhere,” which, triple negative aside, struck me as an apt slogan for the shopping center--which many of us local kids dubbed Fascist Island--on future visits.

That’s not to say I don’t have other musical memories of the place. One summer between high school and college, a friend and I worked as janitors at the Robinson’s store there. It was still dark outside when we’d start vacuuming every morning, and each janitor would basically have a floor to himself. Only a few eerie emergency lamps would be turned on, so you’d be there all alone with your eyes still heavy with sleep granules and nothing but an industrial Hoover to fend off the mannequins and deep shadows.

They may have been skimpy with the lighting, but the Musak would inexplicably often be running, which would just make things seem four times as creepy. Above the whine of the vacuum cleaner you’d hear some leeched-dead, insipid, string-smooched version of a rock song you’d previously loved, and--while an executive somewhere was probably thinking, “Music makes a happy, productive worker”--you’d be trying to vacuum yourself up into the bag to get away from the dreck.

Over the years Fashion Island has been sufficiently face-lifted that it now seems like one big youth trend zone. Even the janitors probably sport the latest styles and body piercings. While a 40-foot Stratocaster at the center once might have seemed an outrage to Fashion Island’s staid sensibilities, now it’s only a confirmation of how things have changed.

If that’s a victory, it’s an ambivalent one, because it may be that rock has changed more than the shopping center has. The Hard Rock’s grand opening bash Sunday left me with very mixed feelings.

On the positive side, they had the Neville Brothers, a group that embodies the independence, ideals and melting pot of cultures that made early rock so reflective of this country’s greatest strengths. They put on a passionate show sparked with messages of brotherhood and calls to activism. It appeared to touch people, though there also were those in the audience who looked like their biggest concern for the future was avoiding door dings on their 500 SLs.

On the other hand, there’s the Hard Rock itself. It seems to be a great business, and certainly has a record of philanthropy. But to me the place also has the mausoleum feel of the old Fashion Island. To me it represents the calcification of rock into a smug, secure quantity. I should love the joint, as I’ve been collecting guitars and rock items for most of my life, and the Hard Rock is a trove of both. But the guitars are mute and mounted, the trophies stuck behind glass, and the only music it brought to my mind was Pete Townshend’s sadly pervasive commentary: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”