The Palomino rides again … again.
For the second time in a year, a North Hollywood banquet hall has been remade into what it once was: Los Angeles’ premiere country music club, from the early 1950s until 1995.
Taking the stage Tuesday, Oct. 15, in a concert that quickly sold out, is the hot Texas band Midland.
After the success of last year’s Palomino Rides Again, Midland’s label Big Machine approached the Academy of Country Music to ask how the band could play the venue. The academy hooked them up with the Valley Relics Museum, the nonprofit that had staged the fundraiser.
“Places like this are disappearing,” Mark Wystrach, the trio’s lead singer, said in a press release. “So you want to remember, to grab the moments while you still can. We live for hardcore honky-tonks, and to bring that back to a place that’s seen Gary Stewart, Freddy Fender, punk bands, Rick Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel, it’s an honor to connect – even for one night – to that kind of past.”
Valley Relics founder/curator Tony Gelinas said turning Le Monge banquet hall back into a country bar with performance stage and pop-up museum requires a huge amount of work.
For the final touch, the big neon Palomino sign is flatbedded from the museum’s Lake Balboa location to the parking lot beside the North Hollywood building. It stands alongside the tricked-out 1964 Bonneville station wagon that legendary Western costumer Nudie – whose store was just down Lankershim Boulevard — designed for his daughter.
Docent/curator Julie Ann Ream packs up the Palomino memorabilia regularly on display at Lake Balboa, and then has about two hours to arrange it all for the pop-up museum in the banquet hall’s entrance foyer. She mixes the museum’s artifacts with those from her family: She’s the granddaughter of old-time movie cowboy Cactus Mack (real name: Taylor Curtis McPeters), who was a cousin of singing cowboy Rex Allen and Western actor Glenn Strange.
“I bring, from my personal collection, a Nudie-made costume of my Uncle Rex’s and his gunbelt that has his name on it,” said Ream.
Opened in 1949 as a working-class music bar by Western Swing banjo whiz Hank Penny, the Palomino moved more solidly country in the 1950s after brothers Bill and Tommy Thomas took over the place and Silver Lake’s Riverside Rancho got buried under a freeway.
All the major Nashville acts from Johnny Cash to Patsy Cline came through, while rockabillies like Jerry Lee Lewis all but took up permanent residence. Bakersfield Sound luminaries Buck Owens and Merle Haggard found it a home away from home for their bolder, grittier California strain of country in the mid-1960s. At the end of that decade and into the ‘70s, the Palomino became synonymous with L.A.’s burgeoning country rock sound: Gram Parsons’ Flying Burrito Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and future Eagles.
In the ‘80s, the Palomino nurtured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, energetic cowpunks such as Lone Justice and a variety of more rocky bands.
After the death of the Thomas brothers, the club went into decline. Though it continued to host weekly “Barndance” country performances, the lineup on its last night, in 1995, was a trio of blues performers.
When Julie Ann Ream was a teenager, she said, the venue was called the Mule Kick and her grandfather lived a few blocks away. Ream, though, was forbidden from venturing into the rowdy place.
During last year’s event, she said, “ I was 65 years old and I felt like I was 17. It was the biggest thrill of my life.”
“There’s no other place like it, there’s never been any place like it, before or after,” Ream said of the Palomino. “Having the Palomino ride again, at least once a year, is part of California history.”
