As a kid, Newhall resident David Weston would ride his bike from his home in the old Bonelli tract of Saugus all the way to Newhall to spend the afternoon in the “Sit and Scratch” movie theater to watch movies, serials and newsreels. That was in the 1950s.
Today, Weston, 78, plays big-band music there, though the former movie theater is now home to the American Legion Hall — that tiny light-brown structure next to the Old Town Newhall Library.
“That’s the weird thing,” Weston said during an interview from a booth in the Salt Creek Grille bar. “Here, how many years later, I have a band in that venue.”
The “Sit and Scratch” theater wasn’t the official name of the place, but, according to Weston, that’s what he and everyone in town called it at the time, perhaps because “they had mohair seats in that thing.” The woolen fabric, he said, would poke through your clothes and make you itch. But that didn’t stop people from going. The first movie that scared him was 1954’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and, of course, he saw it there.
The seats in the place are long gone, as is the raked floor, but Weston still finds good times under that roof with the Flight 584 Big Band, playing saxophone as one of the five sax players, eight brass players and four-person rhythm section (guitar, piano, bass and drums) in the group. That’s where the 5, 8 and 4 come from in the “Flight 584 Big Band” name.
Weston has had a passion for big-band music for as far back as he can remember. Despite growing up in 1950s America when rock ‘n’ roll was just beginning, it’s the sound of a talented and locked-in 17-piece big band that to this day keeps him playing and keeps him enjoying every second of it.
According to John Mitchell, the leader of the Flight 584 Big Band, big-band swing music is a sound that people appreciate just as they appreciate classical music.
“We still listen to Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and all those people. We listen to it because it’s so good,” he said. “The music is swinging. It gets people to really enjoy it. I like to say, ‘If it doesn’t swing, it doesn’t matter.’”
Weston got into music when he was a Saugus Elementary School fifth-grader.
“They wouldn’t let me in the fourth grade because I was flunking, and that (playing music) was the only thing I ever wanted to do,” he said. “So, I passed the fourth grade.”
Weston’s grandparents exposed him to music early on. His grandmother played piano — and he was exposed to that piano in the house — and his grandfather played violin, harmonica and other hand instruments. As a boy, he loved hearing the music coming out of the devices his grandparents were playing, and in grammar school, when he found out there was a small band he could join, Weston was all about it.
“Now, I knew there was a saxophone in the attic at my grandparents’ house,” he said. “So, I knew I could get a saxophone. But I didn’t know I could play it. I picked it up, and I could play it.”
Seeing his eagerness to really learn the instrument, Weston’s grandfather paid for him to take saxophone lessons at C&D Music on Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.
By the sixth grade, Weston became a founding member of the Clodhoppers, referring to it as a “Saturday band that was a bunch of kids my age” from C&D. He said they played concert-band music like marches and orchestral arrangements.
A few years later, the Brooklyn Dodgers came to Los Angeles. Before moving into Dodger Stadium, during the construction of the ballpark, the Dodgers played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Weston and C&D’s senior band — the San Fernando Valley Youth Band, which he promoted to — played there for Dodger baseball games.
“We were the house band for them for three or four years, and I never liked baseball,” he said. “All those guys were there, I never got an autograph, and I kicked myself. People were going out and getting autographs, and I never did.”
By the time he got to his senior year in high school, Weston had become part of a rock ’n’ roll band called the String Twisters. He couldn’t ignore the new sound playing on the radio, wanting to play like the surf bands of the day, like Dick Dale and the Beach Boys. Dressed like the Beach Boys, the String Twisters played their own brand of surf music, mostly instrumentals, and they would be recognized for their talent and showmanship.
The group would go on to win a battle-of-the-bands contest, and as a result, they received a record deal and, that summer, an opportunity to play at the now-extinct Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica. When Weston was at the park in the summer of ’63, it was the place to be. At the time, he said he and the rest of the group felt they’d “made it.”
“I was making three times the money my dad was making,” Weston said. “I was being paid from 10 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night — union scale.”
Weston’s father had been the manager of the Newhall Ice Co., which is still in Newhall today. While young Weston had no intentions of ever taking work there — at the “ice plant,” as he called it — he did pick up some knowledge that would help him later in life.
In the fall of ’63, Weston attended Los Angeles Valley Junior College and played rock ’n’ roll, but he also played clarinet in the concert band there and baritone sax in the award-winning “A” jazz band. Then, as 1964 was winding down, he got drafted for Vietnam.
“They drafted everybody in Newhall,” he said.
He joined the Navy Reserve with the Seabees. To get in, however, or to at least be a “utilities man,” which he thought would be the best way to avoid being on a ship (he said he had nothing in common with the guys on the ships), he had to answer a series of questions that not anyone would know.
“They asked, ‘What’s a king valve?’ That’s the only thing I knew about the ice plant. That’s where they put the refrigerant in. I, out of 500 people, was the only one that knew the answer. So, I got into the Seabee Reserve.”
While with the Seabees, Weston learned about air compressors, plumbing, water treatment, sewage disposal and firing boilers. And while he initially didn’t see any music in his immediate future, he would be given three months before he’d have to ship off to Vietnam. So, during that time, he played clarinet with the Seabees.
Weston eventually went to Vietnam — to Da Nang — where he was stationed for a year as a “second-class utilities man,” he said, “working in an ice plant, purifying water, and helping to build a water treatment plant.”
When he came home from the war in October 1969, he went on a blind date that would ultimately lead to marriage in 1974, a union he still enjoys today.
But well before he could tie the knot, he had to find a way to support himself, and he didn’t believe music would do that. So, he utilized the skills he picked up in the war, taking jobs with Los Angeles Water and Power, and then with California State Water Resources.
During his time with the latter agency, the G.I. Bill paid for him to go back to school. And with an associate of science degree, he would qualify to make more money at work. In school, he played clarinet in the concert band, but certainly not because he thought it would reignite his music career.
“I did it,” he said, “because I just liked playing.”
Around that same time, in 1976, Weston and his wife welcomed their daughter into the world. And his wife would start a cosmetics business called Senna Cosmetics Inc. that he would help her build.
When the couple’s son was born seven years after that, Weston would go to work full time with the growing Senna, leaving his work in the water business behind him, as well as any other music ambitions in the rearview mirror.
“He was left out of playing,” Mitchell of the Flight 584 Big Band said. “But as time went on, he found himself wanting to play music again.”
It was in 1996 that Weston’s teenage son started playing trombone at his junior high school. One day, while practicing the march theme from the 1957 film “The Bridge on the River Kwai” in the house, Weston heard the boy struggling to play one particular section. His son never thought to ask his dad.
“He (Weston) never played,” his wife, Eugenia, said. She added that her husband never talked with the kids about playing music, either. He was, she said, very quiet about it all.
At Salt Creek Grille with The Signal, however, Weston was bubbling over with enthusiasm to retell the account. Even his wife seemed to notice.
Weston explained that he approached his son and tried to help out: “I sang it to my son. His quote was, ‘That’s not right, Dad. You don’t know anything about music.’”
Weston then dug out an old clarinet his son didn’t even know about and played the piece of music. While the instrument wasn’t in the right key, his son would learn quickly that his dad was quite the musician after all.
“I could still play,” Weston said. “So then I started playing. I started practicing.”
A week or two later, Weston joined a local concert band. About two years after that, he joined the Harbor College Concert Band and the wind ensemble now known as L.A. Winds.
In 2013, Weston started his current band — what would become the Flight 584 Big Band, though it would take a few different names before the band landed on the final one — and they played every Wednesday night at a restaurant called Viva Rancho Cantina in Burbank.
“We packed the place,” Weston said.
People were loving the big-band music, and many were dancing to it.
“We were lucky because it was a Mexican restaurant,” band leader Mitchell said, “and so, there was food, and there was booze and a bar.”
According to Mitchell, Quincy Jones even showed up one night to listen to the band. It was a great time, he said.
The 2020 pandemic, however, slowed things down, Weston added that when everything opened back up, Viva Rancho Cantina was no longer a venue option. It had a new owner who, as Weston put it, “gutted the stages.”
The band tried to regain those former crowds at the American Legion in Newhall, where the acoustics are better than anywhere Weston said he’s ever played other than Disney Hall, performing about every other month there (their next show is on September 13th). However, they’ve had a tough time filling the place like they once did in Burbank, especially since their business comes mostly from word of mouth.
Nevertheless, Weston said he and his group of musicians play no matter who’s there. Regardless of the size of the crowd, they have a blast.
“When you’re in a good group, and you get 17 people all locked in together, playing the dynamics, playing the rhythms — everything where it’s supposed to be — and you’ve got good soloists, it’s amazing to me,” Weston said. “There are very few bands that do that.”
Weston loves getting into that zone, and he said it’s when the band is so dialed that playing together feels effortless. That’s when, he added, “it just cooks.”
While Weston no longer rides his bike to what used to be the old “Sit and Scratch” building, he does roll into the American Legion each time he plays with the same joy he once had before a day of movies, serials and newsreels, doing what he loves so much. And that’s playing big-band music.
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
