Yankovic released “Take Me Down” a year before he recorded his first hit song “My Bologna," while the singer-songwriter was attending California Polytechnic and working as a college DJ. In the late 1970's San Luis Obispo was a quiet tourist destination on the central coast, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. By the time Yankovic matriculated, the Madonna Inn had been welcoming travelers for 20 years, and was well established as an unmistakable landmark on the storied Highway 101.
Named for its owner and creator, the late Alex Madonna, the eponymous Inn has been beloved by travelers for almost seven decades. The maximalist destination is part fairytale—with a midcentury Alpine style that makes frequent use of massive natural stone and leaded glass—and part fantasia of bold rose carpeting, gilt bar stools, fuchsia banquets, and kitschy vintage wallpaper.
The Yahoo Room at the Madonna Inn features a bed made out of a vintage wagon.Tom Meinhold / Getty Images
Some of the distinctive designs, as well as the inn’s famously bold carpeting, came from the imagination of Alice Turney Williams, a San Bernardino native and one of the first women to draw for Walt Disney. She contributed key character designs and background art to Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, and other features. In the 1980s, Phyllis Madonna redesigned the Inn’s whimsical goblets, which come in a range of iridescent iMac hues, to better pair with Williams’ 1970s carpet design.
Other features at the Inn are drawn directly from prominent local landmarks, namely the marble balustrade in the Inn’s dining room, originally part of Hearst Castle, a sprawling Gilded Age retreat in San Simeon built in 1919 by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst with architect Julia Morgan.
The Caveman Room at the Madonna Inn evokes media from Tarzan to Hanna-BarberaGetty Images / Getty Images
But the Inn also became a popular roadside attraction thanks to the women and men’s restrooms that Yankovich references in his song. The former features holographic wallpaper that shimmers in the soft lighting of candle-shaped bulbs in floral chandeliers that would make Louis the XIV envious. The latter has a motion-activated waterfall you can wiz into, thanks to a creative take on a urinal made from natural boulders.
Celebrities including Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Sam Elliot, Clint Eastwood, Davey Jones, and Debbie Harry have all dined at Alex Madonna’s Gold Rush Steak House or booked rooms with names like the “Daisy Mae,” the “Jungle Room,” and “Bridal Falls.” John Wayne was a regular through the 1960s and '70s, thanks to his long-standing friendship with the Madonnas. And actor Benedict Cumberbatch has apparently joined in salsa and line dancing at the Madonna Inn on more than one occasion over the years.
The Madonna Inn in the 1970s, when Weird Al Yankovic was attending Cal PolyHUM Images / Getty Images
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