All the Gold in California

AM radio reminiscing a thousand miles from home

All the gold in California
Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills
In somebody else’s name

So if you’re dreaming about California
It don’t matter at all where you’ve played before
California’s a brand new game

You know that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to see Bachman-Turner Overdrive, demands they skip right to their big hit, and then yells for them to get right to the chorus?

I feel like Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers Band could just sing the above lines, a cappella, for ninety minutes, and everyone in the venue would go home spent and happy. It’s that goddamn good of a chorus.

They start the song with it, and the only downside to that is that when they spend forty-five seconds or so doing not-that-chorus in the song, even they seem to realize they’re just wasting everyone’s time. If you could take a bathroom break and come back in the context of a three-minute pop country song, you would. It’s a great verse! But look what it’s up against!

They bring it around again with that chorus, and those harmonies, and then a sick-ass key change, and you aren’t mad at them for at least gussying up the best chorus in twenty years of slick-ass countrypolitan pop with the token trappings of the rest of a song.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, “All the Gold in California” is a smash hit from 1978 that crossed over from country to pop radio, and then got a new lease on life thanks to TV commercials advertising compilation records. Every Sessions or K-Tel or Heartland Music collection of hot hits of the day had that opening a cappella snippet in their ads, implanting an earworm that would live forever in the impressionable mind of young Keith Bergman.

You should click on the link at the bottom of this piece and listen to the song before you go any further, especially if you’re unfamiliar. But wherever you are and however you’re consuming music, it won’t be as adequate to the task as the way I heard it on the day it re-established itself for life in my aging adult brain. If I could somehow replicate that experience for you, I would.

I was on one of my comedy runs in the mid-2010s, almost as far west as I ever drove in my ratty little Nissan Maxima. I’d lined up gigs in Bismarck and Fargo, two North Dakota cities separated by two hundred miles of not-so-great interstate and the kind of flat empty fields that will actually sap your sanity if you stare out into them too long.

Just a little past the halfway point on I-94 is Jamestown, a town of about 15,000 originally set up as a railroad camp. My friend and fellow comedian JD Provorse grew up there, and he connected me with Jonny B’s Brickhouse, a pizza place downtown. Not only did Jon Beyer, the owner, set up a midweek show for me and JD there, the two of them managed to get me afternoon interviews on the local radio stations – one FM and one AM – that covered the area from their studios tucked away in one corner of the Buffalo Mall.

I got to town and killed time in the parking lot listening to the two stations, marveling at that weird scooped-out AM radio sound that, at least east of the Mississippi, has relegated the band to talk and sports formats. I grew up with music on AM radio, with WJER (The Voice of the Valley) holding down the fort in New Philadelphia, Ohio for lite-rock, school closings, and AP news at the top of the hour. I still remember the signoff of Bob Jacobs, the morning DJ during my childhood, or at least the last line: “and may all your hang-ups be drip-dry.”

Neither DJ had any idea I was coming in, or any idea who I was, but they didn’t seem bothered or surprised when the program director told them to throw me on for some interview time after a break. The FM guy was a pleasant chat, and I think their music format was more of an adult contemporary vibe. He asked some pretty general questions, I think I acquitted myself fairly well, and then he sent me over to the adjoining studio.

KSJB 600-AM broadcasts five thousand watts “over six states and two provinces,” as everyone in the building will tell you whether you ask or not. The afternoon DJ was a radio lifer, an affable older dude who looked like he’d be just as happy fixing a tractor as manning the board. The AM station’s format is classic country, and I was already enamored after my brief listen in the car, so I went in hot, enthused about that AM sound rolling over the prairie and those songs I grew up hearing in my grandma’s Dodge Dart.

I don’t know if a single person in the Jamestown area actually came to our show because of my radio promo, but I felt ten feet tall after doing those little interviews and thinking about truckers and farmers hundreds of miles away at least potentially hearing my voice. I kept it on 600 AM for the rest of my day in Jamestown, which included a flat tire, a meal stop, and an attempted nap in the hotel parking lot before I could check in.

I don’t remember at what point in the day I heard “All the Gold in California,” but I know those harmonies sent a chill right up my spine. I was just starting to work out on the west coast, getting gigs I had to fly to, making connections and trying out my silly midwestern material as far from home as it could get. Brand new game, I all but muttered aloud to the hidden camera that wasn’t there. Damn right, fellow entertainer Larry Gatlin. Damn right.

Now that I’m off the road, of course, there’s even more of a patina of wistfulness about the song. I’m not gonna fly into Oakland again and navigate the BART around the bay to the other end of the horseshoe in Sunnyvale to do a weekend in a tiny club full of middle management tech geeks. I doubt I’ll have occasion to rent a car at LAX and drive up the 5 to the 101 for a harrowing late-night trip through the redwoods to Eureka. Even if I make good on my threat to haul ass out of flyover country in my lifetime, I’d be more likely to settle in Oregon or Washington.

But “All the Gold in California” is always gonna pierce my heart, a through-line from the weird little kid with the transistor radio on 2^nd Street to the ambitious fortysomething taking a helluva swing for the fences, strung out in his rickety capsule in the middle of the middle of nowhere, riding into town to get drunk with the pizza shop guy and tell some tall tales at the saloon for his supper. I didn’t get where I thought I was gonna, but I got to places I’d never have been otherwise. I’m glad I’m home right now, but I’m glad I went, too.

Tryin’ to be a hero
Windin’ up a zero
Can scar a man forever
Right down to his soul

Livin’ on the spotlight
Can kill a man outright
’cause everything that glitters
Is not gold