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bybyeblackbird · 7 years

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Whew! What an easy year that was, amiright?!

Just kidding. We literally got the shit kicked out of us for over half the year and quite honestly, I couldn’t and we couldn’t have had a better support system to get though it than this damn fandom. We lost a few along the way, we gained a few new people, who were brought in by the injustice they witnessed being committed, and when one of us fell, the others picked them up. That is what I truly, truly love about this fandom. We’re a fucking family and I don’t care how hippy that makes me to say. I have never felt such strong love and support from a group of people in my whole life than what I experienced with you guys this year. From my hiatus before the shit storm, to during and after, you guys sent me the sweetest messages, consistent support, and I promise you it did not go unnoticed. I even saved a bunch of the messages because they gave and give me strength when I was weak this summer.

Last year, I made a list of just things that I did that year and I had a separate ‘retrospective’ for Johnny’s year, but I’m going to combine them this year and highlight everything we and he have done.

DEPP THOUGHTS {Because I was bored and thought it would be fun to write what I thought was going through his mind during certain scenarios}

HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES TOUR {Every single one of his musical wet dreams came true in Summer 2016, when he embarked on a four month world tour with the Hollywood Vampires; the band he created with his musical heroes, Joe Perry and Alice Cooper, and his childhood best friend and band mate, Bruce Witkin. I think I can safely say that every single one of us were so proud of him, and so, so happy for him.}

CAREER AWARDS {In early 2016, Johnny won two prestigious, career spanning awards for his brilliant contributions to the film industry. First, the Desert Palm Achievement Award at the Palm Springs Film Festival. Second, the Maltin Modern Master Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.}

#WEAREWITHYOUJOHNNYDEPP {Together, not only on Tumblr but everywhere, we used this hashtag to show Johnny our support during the toughest time he’s ever faced in the public eye. Along with this, we created a support video comprising of Tumblr bloggers and other Depp fans as well, reminding him of how much he means to so many, and how much support he has. He was sent a version of that and we were thanked for the support.}

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM {I read this incredible novel, the canon origin story of Jack Sparrow, last year, and decided to make a whole lot of edits, complete with quotes, for those who haven’t had the pleasure or opportunity to read it!}

FINDING THE CREATIVITY IN MADNESS: ASU TALK {Johnny graciously agreed to sit down with his friend and hero, Professor Lawrence Krauss, at Arizona State University to discuss how Creativity could be found in Madness. He opened up more than ever about his past, his mental illness, his struggle with addiction and more. He gave so much of himself to us in those two hours and is important to watch for anyone who doesn’t understand Johnny Depp. (Part 2)}

JOHNNY DEPP 53 {We went BIG this year for his birthday and made and delivered to him a vinyl record, comprising of covers and readings of his favourite songs and literature. We even received a thank you back from him! Thank you to everyone who participated in the polls and the ideas and for the incredible support surrounding the project, and especially to Justine, Alysha, Rowan, Annika, Lisa, Alessia, Vera, Emerson, Jordan, Sabrina, Elisa, Stefania, Oriella and Maya for all sending in tracks and participating on the vinyl, and to Gina & Stephen Deuters and Malcolm Connolly for all their help and kindness! :) ♥}

SPARRABETH ARCHIVE {I decided to rip open my heart by going through every Sparrabeth fanfiction I could possibly think of, and that were submitted to me, and organized them all on one blog! (This may be particularly useful now that LIZZIE MAY BRIEFLY RETURN SHSKSHDKAHDUKK)}

Honourable Mentions:

JOHNNY DEPP MASTERPOSTS {I put together a few master posts of various things to do with Johnny: Tattoos, Johnny Depp Recommends (Music, Literature and Film), and the Hollywood Vampires Tour, to name a few!}

GRAMMYS {Our darling baby boy got to live through a moment I’m sure The Kids dreamed about in the 80s starting out in LA - he played the GRAMMYS with some of his childhood musical heroes.}

As last year, I want to also give a huge shout out to a few amazing blogs run by some fantastic human beings. If you’re on this list, it’s because I truly love seeing you on my dash, or you’ve helped give me perspective and hope during the worst year the Depp fandom has ever seen, or you’ve helped me and supported me throughout this year; when I was at my absolute lowest, the messages I got from some of you were what kept me going. If you’re not on this list, it’s probably because I am #TheWorst. I’m excited for a much better year in 2017 with all of you, and Johnny!

@aades // @all2thecontrary // @apirateslifeforme123 // @avondepp // @becauseitisjohnnydepp // @changebelief // @deppdeppishlydepp // @depphead1963 // @depplyinlove // @depplyobsessed // @deppody // @donapirata // @dreamofdepp // @fireflydances // @goldepp // @havithreatendub4 // @johnnydeppismybae // @johnnydeppskank // @johnnysboots // @justwantbackthosetimes // @leannabee // @lovingjdepp // @orionredstarr // @proudtobeadepphead // @sakurafavjd // @scream4johnny // @trickstercaptain // @truestench // @wolfinsheepclothing

#johnny depp #personal #year in review #2016 #PHEW #dumb year #but some good things came from it :)

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gsbrandson · 4 years

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Laurels by the Bay

There was an echo in the canyon, that’s for certain. I believe the year was 1966. Sixty-six was the year where the doors of Capitol records were the entrance to paradise. Not because I could sing or play, but because I could watch and I could record it. Before what you all call the Summer Of Love, there was a lot happening in Los Angeles that really set the tone for the nitty gritty, down and dirty stuff, you know? And I’m happy to say that I was a fixture there. There were films being made in and around our homes, sure. Model Shop being one of the big ones. But no one captured what I did. Everything was stylized so naturally, you see. You can’t cut and retake the pure essence of the canyon. You have to just let it be. You have to let her speak. And she did, through all of us.

I think it was one of the record shops on Sunset that made it all clear for me. I used to sit in the listening room on these modern style chairs that were upholstered with orange leather. The spiraling cord from the KLH stereo to my ears I thought was my connection to heaven. I loved the jazz that birthed rock n roll and the local stuff, of course. Those shops were our beacon of hope and killed our worries for just a moment during the sirens of Vietnam. Those shops are where I first discovered the art of film.

Down the street a ways from Tower Records was a brand new camera shop simply called Camera and Darkroom. And I was the Levi 501 darling of the boulevard. Well, at least one of them. There weren’t any flowers in my hair yet, but that was soon coming. Outside the camera shop they were demoing the brand new Super8 camera by Kodak. I posed and waved for the camera on the street corner and was told to come back in a week to see myself on the screen. They had a reel going in the darkroom on a white sheet. The owner of the shop had filmed his wife creating a flower arrangement in their kitchen. And of his baby boy making a sand castle on the beach on the fourth of July. I couldn’t help but cry as I watched his life on the screen. How beautiful and how precious were his memories. In live action and in color, repeating again and again. I walked through the projection and reached for a flower in the hand of his sundress wife and it hit me. I had to have one to.

It was my newest thrill. I had my own Super8 after saving up two paychecks, getting a loan from my father in Connecticut, and telling my landlord that she would receive the rent a week late, as I was “having an emergency”. I started to shiver and squeal when I loaded the first reel of film. My first few shots were out the window of a taxi down Sunset. I loved how the glow of the neon signs came back after development, and so I walked down the strip and filmed the flickering lights of the Whisky A Go Go and the people passing by and waving at me. That’s how I met Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys and how I received my introduction to the Canyon.

I met Brian post mental breakdown, on one of the few nights he spent out of solitude. He saw me in the street getting a shot of the cars passing by and asked what I was doing. His brothers stood behind him.

“This is a Kodak Super8,” I said. “I’m making movies.”

He invited me up to his house in the canyon and said he had something for me to film. At first, I thought he was coming onto me. But that wasn’t his way. We walked into his living room and it was empty. Apart from a white grand piano and floors covered in three feet of sand. I cannot lie, I was confused. He said, “Sit down, let me explain.” He sat at the piano, Dennis got on drums, and Carl on bass. I started recording. They performed a half buzzed version of In my Room, which I had heard in the record shop a couple of months before. A lot of people believed that God spoke through these boys, as they created the California Myth, especially Brian. And my, my, could he write. The reel from this night is marked with a California surfing edition postage stamp in my archive. I watch it from time to time and pour some Zuma Beach sand that I keep in a bottle by my bed into my hand.

The footage I have of Dennis’ run in with Charles Manson is now the property of the FBI. I handed the reels over after the murder of Sharon Tate and Charlie’s arrest. One reel is of the state of Dennis’ home after the family’s stay in the summer of 1968. Another is of Charlie pulling a knife on Brian and Dennis at Capitol after receiving constructive criticism on his music. He could never handle that. There is one reel that I kept without the officials knowing. It begins as a pan of Malibu beach, the frame finally resting on a meditating Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson. Both shirtless and in shorts, sitting, legs crossed on large rocks by the sea. Their fingers are out in OM. They wear prayer beads around their necks that were made by the girls in the Family. A peaceful sounding scene, yes. But the way Charlie looked back at the camera is something I will never forget. His eyes looked animal, and that sinister, almost demonic smile haunts me to this day. I believed my camera to be cursed after that. I applied holy water on its handle and the Ladies of the Canyon joined hands in a circle and said seven hail Mary’s over its body. The reel is marked with a red X in my archive, and I haven’t watched it since 1975.

I was introduced to the Byrds by I don’t remember who. I used to take a car up to their place in the canyon to film them practicing for the Fifth Dimension Tour. They brought me along to their shows on the beaches and to some of the major cities to film a backstage diary. I made them perform Wild Mountain Thyme over and over again to get the right shot. I got so many close-ups of their dark eyelashes on their cheeks when their eyes were closed. We were all so rosy and sun kissed in California. And so much in love. Not with each other, but with the music. So many girls came around and put flowers in their long messy hair and tailored their blazers for television by hand. My favorite reel of them is their TV appearance and performance of Mr. Spaceman. I was front row, and David kept looking down at me and singing through his smile. They were so nervous before that performance, and so happy. This reel is marked with a backstage photograph, rubber banded around the box. Of the boys in their nicest dressing room yet, and it’s titled with a quote from David, saying “Well boys, I think we’ve made the big time.”

Joni Mitchell sang jazz to me and the music of the world. I was there to watch her switch between mediums. I filmed every brush stroke on canvas and every movement of her gold hair in the sun. She wrote Ladies of the Canyon on a green velvet sofa and in front of a picture window. She watches as I dance with Linda Ronstadt on the rug from Santa Fe. She laughs. And in the morning, she is topless and in jeans. She paces and drinks tea from a daffodil painted cup and saucer. She eats raspberries from a white china bowl. She scratches her head. She smells of the lover’s musk that he gave her just this morning. She keeps smelling her shoulder and writing things down. But she was my flower. She would say to me, “It’s rose day at the market. It’s about a dollar fifty for a bouquet, and about a penny for your thoughts.” These reels are on the top shelf of the archive. They are marked with some of her favorite news clippings about jazz musicians in New Orleans, a poem she wrote for me, and a single dried daffodil.

Young girls were indeed coming to the canyon. Cass Elliot kept a pill bottle of sugar cubes in her kelly green makeup case. They were laced with LSD 25. She sets her hair in the morning and watches the soap operas on NBC. Her closet was full of colorful floral trapeze dresses. Choosing one each morning was her favorite part of the day. All of the boys told her she was a stallion. Strong and majestic, yes, but her false lashes and glamour girl curl set inspired the flowery woman calls of the decade. She was a force to be reckoned with. Could sing the birds out of the trees. And now she had opened her head.

I filmed the Papa’s thin. The doctors said they were almost to the point of no return. A pin dropping, to them, was a clap of thunder. The group had just made their sixth television appearance for the week, and I was in the dressing room filming the prelude to the California full tilt boogie. The surf shops down the coast dedicated their business hours to the ones they loved. We echoed back. That part wasn’t hard for us, my baby. It was the first time the Mama’s and their Papa’s hit the waves. I have footage of the sun-bleached surf boys teaching us the zen motions of applying sex wax to our boards. They had tan skin and bright white teeth, and they always smiled so big for my camera. I’m afraid that Papa John and Denny couldn’t tell where the waves began. They stood there, twenty feet from the water break, staring into the blue. As loud as she could, surfboard under arm, Cass ran up shore and sang “Come on in, the water’s fine.” And at that moment, the boys returned to Earth. To this day, they owe the ending of their bad trip to Mama Cass. I don’t think they dropped acid again after that. This reel is wrapped in the archive with Cass’ paisley handkerchief that she used to sop up her nosebleeds and a single sugar cube laced with LSD 25.

It was the man that I fell in love with at the Dog Bar on the coast that brought me, for the first time, into the home of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Zappa was sitting at a piano, topless and in jeans, prayer beads around his neck. The top of the piano was covered in stacks of sheet music that he had written himself. I wondered almost immediately how many of them would make the final cut of a record and how many hours a day he spent under his desk lamp with his pen. Before saying hello to me, he said, “Come here for a minute, will you tell me if this sounds ugly?” Frank was writing a song about a CIA man lurking around Laurel Canyon, which later I found out was about Brian Wilson’s schizophrenic paranoia. I was setting up my camera in the corner of the music room and before I could reply with a reassuring “No, it doesn’t sound ugly at all,” there she was in the doorway. This moment caught on tape is to this day, one of my favorites. She was the girl from the Tropicana Motel that he had found in a mini skirt and with a bright floral suitcase. She was looking for rock stars and in a way, he was looking for her. Some say she’s the girl Lou Reed wrote Femme Fatale for after traveling to LA with Warhol. But that’s just a rumor, and she liked it that way.

On this day she entered the room wearing a tiffany blue mesh robe with feathers on the trim. She had a golden fringe bang and white boots up to her knees. She knew without looking straight at us once that the camera was rolling. She sits on Frank’s lap as he continues to play and she wraps her arms around his neck. I’ve taken photographs of the screen at this moment when he looks up at her. I have it timed just right. She was not his wife, but she was, most definitely, the love of his life. She notices his eyes all lit up and laughs. She kisses him bigger than usual. Do you want to guess what he says? He says, “Suzy Creamcheese, oh baby, now, what’s got into ya?”

I don’t think I really learned what poetry truly was or really felt it until I found Jim. I found him In the lobby of the Chateau Marmont and I asked him what his sign was with a lollypop in my mouth. He smiled so big as he said Sagittarius. He was such a beautiful angel boy. And I was over the beat poets already. Jim had a way of making you feel like you were floating. I lived next door to him at that hotel, I kid you not. At night I used to hear him singing in the bathroom from the comfort of his clawfoot tub. He wrote Blue Sunday there. He was in love again, in love every five minutes. I set up my camera and filmed the goings on out the French doors and hoped that the tape recorder as close to the wall as I could get it, would pick up his humming. I eventually gathered enough courage to intrude on his bath for the shot. A wild request, I know. But he didn’t mind. I knocked on the door and received a sing song “Come in!” I heard the water splash as he moved. I believed him to be high out of his mind. The stolen flowers in the bath floated perfectly around him. He criss crossed his arms and held his shoulders. Looked at me like a starlet photographing boudoir for her husband. I think you can hear my sigh on the sound tape. He asked for more rosewater in the bath which I obliged. I have what he said next written in red ink on the reel box. He said, “This is the water of yesterday, and the flowers of tomorrow.”

There were laurels by the bay in the summertime. And there was only one time where all of us were together. It was the beginning of a new age. The discotech revolution would follow Jim’s death in 1971. Paris, France has him forever. We could all feel a shift after Woodstock. Many of our friends and the voices of Laurel Canyon would be laid to rest in the next two decades and somehow, on this particular day, we all knew it. We were so proud to be from California, even if honorarily so. We spent our final days of love in the ocean spray and in the sun. I do believe whole heartedly that this time altered our ideas of God. We had all been looking for him since 1960. It was 1970 now and it felt like the moon had at last fallen in line with the sun. We were all flying so high above it all for so long. We had pioneered so much and I don’t think any of us went into the 60s knowing what we could reach.

The reels I have of all of us were shot in God’s country. At Pfeiffer beach and at Big Sur. I still have my admission ticket taped up inside my windshield. This is the footage that I watch the most. It’s the footage that the historians and television stations offer me the most money for. I always decline. I suppose because you can’t put a price on this. These memories are mine. How beautiful and how precious they are. We were all like children climbing through the rocky caves with bare feet and laughing with every wave hit. We were on our beach towels and in large sunglasses, drinking sangria out of a clear mason pitcher and dancing until we were out of breath. We thought the sun could never set on us. The sand was our stage that day. We performed the Ballad of the Bonfire Children, 1969 at nightfall. Our grand finale at the West Coast cabaret. I believe the tourists mistook us for the sirens of the cove or the choir of the sea. “It’s just so hard to leave work at work.” We would all say and laugh. I miss them, all of them. How beautiful they were with their sea salt curls and their tanning oil skin.

You should have heard them harmonize in the footage on the last reel. They brought us back to 1963 when it all really began. All of them stood around the fire and sang Brian’s Surfer Girl. I have a sound cue on the tape of my thumbs up extending from behind the lens. On the sound tape you can hear me count them in. You can hear the crackling fire in the background. And you can hear me blubbering when they sing “So I say from me to you, I can make your dreams come true.” Because they had.

Dennis Wilson would succumb to a shallow water blackout in 1983. I find it so fitting that he ends our era with one line, well, technically two. He walks to the camera and puts his face so close you can see the sand on his cheeks. He was elated and wrinkled just a bit from sun exposure. When you read his lips, you can almost hear him speak. He says, “This is it, we’re signing off.”

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