Google: In a quarter mile you will arrive at your destination
Mary: Right over there is the world famous Cadillac Ranch.
I just checked it out. I've never been here before.
Last time I drove route 66 I was in a hurry. And I had envisioned that it was
going to be right on the road, but it isn't. So I cruised
right past it. This time I found it and when I got out there to
the field, almost everyone I met there today told me that
Cadillac Ranch was on their bucket list, and that's why they
were here. Well, not the French people. The French people said,
"liste de choses à faire." I think that's how you say it.
some people think the whole place is just a junk heap. Other
people hold it up as the American Stonehenge. It probably
looks pretty different today than it does in pictures you've
seen because it's always looking different every day - evolves
continuously because of this.
The artist-slash-architects who built it were members of a
collaborative called Ant Farm. It was formed in 1968 by Doug
Michels and Chip Lord. Hudson Marquez join them later, Michels
said they wanted to be an architecture group that was more
like a rock band. And I think they succeeded pretty much with
that. Unlike other architecture firms they didn't sit around
waiting for somebody to hire them to design a building.
Ant Farm designed their own projects and then went looking for people
who would finance the projects. There's a really terrific
documentary on Ant Farm called "Space, Land and Time." You can
watch it on Kanopy for free if you have any public library card
and I really recommend it because these guys are
fascinating. For one thing, they were strong advocates of nomadic
life, they viewed all you know, these builds - Van, truck, bus
homes that were out there - they viewed all that as a type of
architecture. They actually designed a series of stopping
points for what they referred to as media nomads, all across the
country, and they called it the Truckstop Network. The network
consisted of these mini cities that provided food, fuel,
mechanics, connections, communication. Remember, this is
the 1970s, OK? So not only was there no internet then, the most
modern video camera that existed was the Sony Portapak, a massive
black and white reel to reel thing, but they built a media
van complete with a bubble window on the top to shoot
videos out of. They were like YouTubers before - decades
before there even was YouTube. Seriously, check out the
documentary. Everything these guys did was infused with humor
and intelligence, whether it was recreating the Zapruder film,
making inflatable buildings out of parachutes or burying cars
nose down in the dirt.
The ranch was built on property belonging to a guy named Stanley
Marsh 3, not the third - 3. His father and grandfather were both
Stanley's but he went by 3 because he felt the Roman
numerals were pretentious. I don't know, I kind of think the
3 is kind of pretentious myself. Sort of like when Prince changed
his name to that symbol. To me, it really signifies a strong
need to stand out from the crowd. And there is no doubt
that Stanley Marsh 3 had that need. When the Ant Farm guys
were looking for patrons, Stanley was a great fit because
Stanley was a pretty artsy guy, though he wasn't so much an
artist as someone who made art happen. His granddaddy, the
first Stanley Marsh, amassed a fortune in oil and helium, and
he passed it down to his son Stanley Marsh II, who passed it
on to his son, Stanley Marsh 3.
Stanley: My daddy was rich and my mommy was good lookin.'
Mary: Stanley attended the Wharton School of Business and
in 1967, he came back after his father's death to oversee the
family's investments, and he had some success on his own. But the
real business of Stanley's life was art. His financial status
gave him the freedom to be as eccentric and flamboyant as he
wanted, so he took that permission and ran with it.
Stanley: We've got guests ! There's nothing worse than
camels spit to ruin a good Stetson.
Mary: Stanley was known for ruffling a few feathers with his
antics, or performance art depending on how you look at it,
and also for a bunch of faux road signs all over town with
non sequitur statements on them. They were made by his Dynamite
Museum group. He also commissioned work from other
artists. A lot of people in town were delighted with the signs. A
lot of people weren't.
Marsh wanted to work with Ant Farm but he rejected their first proposal because it wasn't Amarillo
based. When the Cadillac Ranch concept came up, he said yes,
and they got to work. The cars were bought locally, and it took
just four days to dig ten holes with a backhoe, drive nine cars
into them and drop the tenth, which was a nonworking car, in
with a crane. On day five, they had an opening. There really
wasn't any publicity, maybe a little bit in Amarillo, but not
elsewhere. But the spot really wasn't that well known until in
1975.
Charles Kuralt: Will you look over there? That looks for all
the world like 10 Cadillacs nose down in a wheat field.
Mary: One of my heroes, Charles Kuralt, brought his popular CBS
news segment "On The Road" to the ranch. Stanley Marsh 3 was
there to greet him.
Stanley: I tell them it's for an Elvis Presley movie, or it's for Evil Knievel to jump over.
Or maybe it's the caddy cult and it's the new mother church for a home religion. I tell them whatever strikes my fancy.
Mary: Even with the press that was beginning to percolate, the crowds and the graffiti didn't
really start in earnest until after Bruce Springsteen's hit song of the same name came out
in 1980. Then it just became a free for all.
Letting people graffiti, the cars wasn't really part of the
plan, but they embraced it - for the most part. It turned the
ranch into an interactive piece which is very Ant Farm. But
Hudson Marquez, in an interview, calls the people who come "pigs"
so there's got to be some pain involved for them seeing
something so elegant that they built, become a skeletal wreck.
But Stanley thought it was meant to be that way. He said that
important things shouldn't be important for long or they'll
hog up all the headlines. He said they have to change to make
room for new headlines. Speaking of headlines, now we come to the
hard part. The headlines Stanley himself got toward the end of
his life.
Newscaster: He was under indictment on 14 charges
including sexual assault of a child, sexual performance by a
child, and indecency with a child.
Mary: Are the allegations true? It's hard to say. But they've
become his legacy. It's hard for people to mention him and the
Cadillac Ranch without these allegations. Most of people who
worked with him closely over the years say that they don't
believe it. But the Amarillo police about multiple criminal
charges against him after a search warrant at his office so
must have turned up some kind of corroborating evidence. There will
never be a criminal trial though because Stanley died in 2014.
The ranch is not universally beloved, especially not in its
current stage. And once Stanley Marsh was accused there were
actually calls to bulldoze it. But Stanley is just one wheel on
the caddy so to speak. It brings up all kinds of questions,
questions that I've found myself asking before in these times
that we live in, you know: does does art have a life of its own,
beyond the flaws and the humanness of its creator? I
think it does. But then there's another question. Is this still
art? I'm gonna let you answer that one for yourself.
So what was the intention behind Cadillac Ranch? What does it all
mean?
Stanley: We were having fun. We didn't have any deeper serious
motive. We were having fun working hard.
Mary: The creators seem to say that it means nothing, that they
just thought it was a funny idea to pay homage to the rise and
fall of the Cadillac tailfin.
Hudson Marquez: Nobody gets to that it's the rise and fall of
the tailfin. You know?But they don't need to get that part of
it to get the joke. Which is the 10 cars out here.
Mary: But they're not just cars, they're Cadillacs. It had to be
Cadillacs. Caddies were aspirational. It's what you
moved up to from your Dodge and your Ford, and the rise and fall
of those fins, that's the rise and fall of that innocent
American yearning, that belief that a car could buy you freedom
because that's what it's about.
Doug Michels: It was all about freedom.
Mary: Doug Michels, who started Ant Farm, fell to his death
while climbing to a whale watch vantage point in Australia in
2003. He was 59. So he's gone, Stanley's gone. But the ranch is
still going, the legacy lives on. It's sullied, and it's
picked over and it's painted. But it's, it's a legacy. And
that's probably the biggest mystery around it. Why? Why do
people bucket list Cadillac Ranch? All over America, I've
found places where people write or carved their names. And it's
usually because they're looking for some kind of permanence, you
know, some lasting reminder that they were here. But people
travel thousands of miles to put their name in this most
temporary place. It's gonna be gone in a day, it might be gone
in an hour. What is the strange appeal of the Cadillac Ranch?
Stanley: It is greater than the World Trade Center. It is better
than the Tower of Babel.
Why it's endured all of these years and why people come to see
it, I don't know. If I knew how to do it, I'd top it. And I
don't know how to do it.
Mary: This guy, one of the bucket list guys, insisted that
I paint my name. He even gave me the paint. He said he'd shoot
video for me so that I can use it on YouTube. So I did. I
painted my name. And I though maybe I'd end the video with
that. But what I got back was a picture of his palm. He had the
phone facing the wrong way. And somehow that just seems perfect.
It's like my name got painted over almost before I even
painted it. Well, I know I was there. You know I was there. I
was there, at the famous Cadillac Ranch.