Songfacts®:

• The "Camarillo" is Camarillo State Hospital in Ventura County, California. Parker was sent there after spending 10 days in jail, charged with indecent exposure, resisting arrest, and suspected arson.
  
  Charlie parker moved to California from New York after cashing in his return ticket for heroin money. During this time junk was hard to come by, and he substituted it with large quantities of alcohol, which greatly altered his behavior for the worse. Parker racked up a string of charges, including indecent exposure, resisting arrest and suspected arson, which led to a 10 day stint in prison. All of these offenses happened on a single unlucky night - July 29, 1946 - when Parker had streaked through a hotel lobby, then set his hotel bed on fire with an unsupervised cigarette.
  
  In Bird Lives, the biography of Parker's Dial Records label boss, Ross Russell (published in 1973), he describes the incident that led to Parker's arrest and rehabilitation. "The very next night after that infamous session [part of the 'Dial sessions' recorded in Los Angeles], Bird got drunk and set his hotel room on fire. He was found wandering in the hall of his hotel and in the street, half naked. He was arrested and was sent to the Psychopathic Ward of the Los Angeles State Jail, booked as insane."
  
  Parker stayed at Camarillo for six months. He wrote "Relaxin' at Camarillo" shortly after his release from the hospital, and his return to New York where his heroin addiction continued.
• It was Dial Records head Ross Russell who titled this jazz instrumental "Relaxin' At Camarillo." Parker wanted to call it "Past Due," and was not pleased with Russell's title.
  
  In Henry Martin's 2020 book Charlie Parker, Composer, he writes: "Parker certainly named some of his pieces and probably approved titles that weren't his, but the only tune whose title particularly disturbed him is 'Relaxin' At Camarillo,' which he wished to be called 'Past Due.'"
  
  It stands to reason that Parker might haven wanted to put the memory of his breakdown and Camarillo behind him. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Jp Thomas - San Francisco, CA
• Charlie parker played alto sax on this track. The other musicians on the track are:
  
  Howard McGhee - trumpet
  Wardell Gray - tenor sax
  Dodo Marmarosa - piano
  Red Callender - bass
  Don Lamond - drums
  Barney Kessell - guitar
• In beat generation novelist Jack Kerouak's book Dharma Bums (published in 1958) he describes Camarillo as a place "where Charlie Parker'd been mad and relaxed back to normal health."
• Parker's trumpet player, Howard McGhee, said that he was assigned to pick up Parker and bring him to the session. When he went by to get him, Parker was in the bathtub, where he had just written 12 bars of "Relaxin' At Camarillo."
  
  In an interview with Phil Schaap, McGhee said: "Man, those 12 bars hung up the rehearsal session. Nobody could play it. We started out trying to play it, but the syncopation comes off the beat. It's syncopated so differently from anything we heard, so we didn't know what was happening - and I transposed it! I fixed it up for the whole band, but nobody could play it but Bird."
• Camarillo was known as the "Country Club" when compared to the other local state mental hospitals of Norwark and Patton.
  
  While in Camarillo, Parker played saxophone in the hospital band, and they performed in a small bandstand on Saturday nights. He also passed time there by tending a lettuce patch. His third wife, Doris Sydnor, moved to California so that she could visit him three times a week. She had to take a job as a waitress to support herself.
• The first version of this song was arranged by the foremost jazz theorist, pianist and composer, George Russell. Russell was the author of The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (published in 1953), a work of biblical importance for jazz musicians and educators that had a far reaching impact on bebop musicians including Miles Davis and Bill Evans in developing a modal style of jazz in the late 1950s.
• Camarillo State Hospital closed in July 1997. The campus of California State University, Channel Islands, has occupied the site since 2002. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Victor - San Diego, CA
• The Beverly Hills Hotel has sometimes been misrecognized as Camarillo State Hospital on the front cover of the Eagles Hotel California album. The two buildings have very similar tower structures and are both in California. However, a closer comparison between them shows that the hospital only has one main tower, while the hotel has two smaller towers to either side of the large central tower. This mistaken identity has given rise to fan interpretations of the lyrics of "Hotel California" as being a metaphor for a mental hospital.