Local blues rockers Joan and Gary Gand, of the Gand Band, are honoring music legend and former Palm Springs resident Trini Lopez by helping create a museum.
Since Lopez’s death in 2020 due to COVID-19 complications, the Gands have been honoring the accomplishments of their former neighbor, the folk singer and guitar player behind hits like “If I Had a Hammer” and “Lemon Tree.” Via music, movies, TV and his signature guitar, Lopez made a massive impact on music history, and spent the later part of his life in Palm Springs. He met the Gands in the 2010s and began performing alongside them; they also worked together on a documentary about Lopez’s life, My Name Is Lopez.
After his death, the Gands made sure My Name Is Lopez was completed, and produced The Trini Lopez Immersive Musical shortly after that. Now they’re taking their adoration for Lopez to the next level—by opening the Trini Lopez Museum.
During Modernism Week, the museum will be celebrated with a cocktail party at 4 p.m., Friday, Feb. 14, complete with a free Shag poster for every guest; a chat with the Lopez family and team behind My Name Is Lopez; and a live music performance. The museum will be open with free admission during Modernism Week as well.
Gary Gand showed me around the museum before the grand opening, and told me stories about the dozens of photos, guitars, records and costumes. Attendees will be able to see Lopez’s gold records and a piano gifted from Frank Sinatra, while My Name Is Lopez will be screening in the museum nonstop.
“We own a couple of costumes, but a big batch of them in the back there were from the Lopez family,” Gand said. “When Trini passed away, some of his costumes went to the Grammy Museum and the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, but the family retained the majority of them, so they picked out the nicest ones specifically for this exhibit.”
Gand said he has been working closely with the Lopez estate to fill out the museum.
“Robert Diaz (Lopez’s nephew), who’s my main contact, and his cousin Salvador have been the main keepers of the flame, so I’ve been working with them for the costumes and some of the other things,” he said. “If there’s anybody who came to the premiere of the movie, they saw these 6-foot-high light-up letters that spell out “Trini.” The nephews are going to be bringing those up. … We got some nice donations from some friends. Ronit Levy and Don Tuch donated some of the fan-club ephemera, a Time magazine, posters and things like that. They were very good friends with Trini for a long time, so they had a lot of great stuff. … We also had some donations from Sandy Reese and Will Wiegler. … They donated, for example, this menu that they found from Trini’s restaurant. (People) tried to franchise Trini’s restaurants. I think there were about seven of them in California at the time.”
Most of the items come directly from Lopez’s personal collection.
“We found a lot of this material in Trini’s warehouse,” Gand said. “When he was alive, we would go over to his warehouse and pull out the good stuff for the making of the documentary, My Name Is Lopez. … When he passed away, it was a little bit easier to deal with, because we had already gone through everything and picked out the stuff we liked.”
Some of the items in the museum are gifts from fans that Lopez cherished.
“I’m not going to call him a hoarder, but he had lots of stuff,” Gand said. “He saved lots of stuff, because he had a huge career. Somebody made this collage and sent it to him. This is a painting … and this used to be hanging in his living room. I couldn’t even fit it in my van. When his house got sold, it was still in the house. The real estate agent called me and said, ‘Hey, can you go over and get that thing? Because we never got it out of there.’ He didn’t have a truck big enough to move it, and we live next door, so I went in the house, put the thing on a moving cart, and rolled it down the street. I got it into the garage, and I’ve been hanging on to it ever since, not knowing what I was going to do. … It’s got Trini; it’s got his famous guitar, which we will have on display; it’s got tennis rackets; it’s got golf clubs, because he was an avid athlete and played golf and tennis all over Palm Springs. There’s a hammer; there’s the American flag, a lemon for ‘Lemon Tree,’ and there’s this Rolls-Royce, because he had two Rolls-Royces. I don’t know who that (artist) was, but they really understood Trinity’s whole psyche.”
The plan for a Trini Lopez museum started to come together after his death.
“After he died, and they were selling the house, they had a garage sale. … The family inherited everything, so they were selling it at auction,” Gand said. “I bought one guitar, and then I bought another guitar, and while I was doing that, I thought, ‘If I could just get all of this stuff, I could curate a museum show, and we could tour that.’”
However, the museums where Gand hoped to take the tour were booked up for years due to the COVID-19 backlog, he said.
“I was over at Smoke Tree Ranch having lunch, and Tracy Conrad, who runs Smoke Tree (Ranch), was there, and she also (is president of) the Palm Springs Historical Society. I just off-handily mentioned, ‘I’ve got all this Trini stuff sitting here in Palm Springs in my warehouse. If you could find me a museum space at the Historical Society, we could do a Trini museum.’”
A few months later, Gand said, Conrad let him know she had a space—the former Agua Caliente Cultural Center space in downtown Palm Springs’ Village Green.
Lopez was an accomplished musician who is remembered for his impact on the music industry, but Gand also hopes the museum will allow people to learn more about Lopez’s character, and his place as a Latino legend.
“We have a divide in America right now between what I’m going to call Red America and everybody else,” Gand said. “There’s a whole big focus on immigration, and the country doesn’t understand that the United States was built on the back of minorities, and we were all minorities at one point. … Everybody came here and made America what America is, and we just need a reminder that all these great things happen here because we’ve got this melting pot of all of these different nationalities that make America what it is.”
Gand said Lopez’s life is a perfect, all-American, rags-to-riches story.
“Here’s a guy who went from rags to riches, and then he stayed there. He didn’t end up an alcoholic; he didn’t end up a drug addict. The guy lived to be 83. I mean, that’s hard to do in this industry.”
Gary Gand, on Trini Lopez
“Here’s a guy who started out dirt-poor, living in a ghetto in Texas, and made it to the tip-top, and was an international superstar, in movies, television, and really got to do it all,” Gand said. “Most of the time, when people fixate on rock musicians, it’s (about) all the stuff that they went through—they’ve been in rehab, they overdosed, and you’ve got Kurt Cobain; you’ve got Janis Joplin; you’ve got Jimi Hendrix. That story has been played to death, and we’re trying to show that there’s another story. Here’s a guy who went from rags to riches, and then he stayed there. He didn’t end up an alcoholic; he didn’t end up a drug addict. The guy lived to be 83. I mean, that’s hard to do in this industry. I think he’s really a heroic character, and I would like people to view him as such. … Young people, especially young Latino people, are a big part of the population here, and to understand who the granddad of rock ’n’ roll was—they should be proud of that.”
Gand said working on the museum has allowed them to heal a bit after the loss of their dear friend.
“We miss the guy terribly,” Gand said. “We were his band for 10 years. Other than being married, there’s nothing more intimate than playing music with real musicians—not just jamming in your garage, but getting up onstage and entertaining people. There’s a kind of a group mind meld that happens when you’re onstage. … Making the documentary was really a high point in our lives, and then when he passed away, that was really a low point. This is part of the process of remembering him. … He’s talking to me right now on the documentary. I’m looking at him standing behind me in a costume. I’ve got his guitar over there. I can be here and remember being in his living room. All of the ephemera we have here was stuffed into his house, so whenever we’d go over there, we’d see a lot of it. It’s a chance to just be in Trini=land, and, for a while, forget what’s going on out in the real world.”
The Trini Lopez Museum Cocktail Party will take place at 4 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 14, at the Village Green Heritage Center, at 219 S. Palm Canyon Drive, in Palm Springs. Tickets are $75, and attendees must be 21+. The museum is now open, and will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. through Modernism Week. For party tickets or more information, visit modernismweek.com.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source cvindependent.com ’
