Paying homage to sunny pop of ’60s L.A.
“Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise”
By Joel Selvin
(House of Anansi Press; 320 pages; $28)
Early in “Hollywood Eden,” Nancy Sinatra arrives at her high school driving a pink 1957 Ford Thunderbird. It’s the first of its kind ever made, and, we learn, a birthday present from her very famous father.
The sweet set of wheels is but one of many delicious details carefully strewn throughout music historian Joel Selvin’s latest work, out Tuesday, April 6, which gives readers a frontrow seat to the surf rock craze that ruled Southern California in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
What starts with the early recording sessions of pop duo Jan and Dean in a (now legendary) Bel Air Hills garage later morphs into the moment John Lennon and Paul McCartney first heard “Pet Sounds” in a London hotel room. Thankfully, Selvin — The Chronicle’s former music critic, who also penned “Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day” — has a knack for bringing cohesion to the chaos of rock ’n’ roll history.
In this case, it was a yearbook for the 1958 class of Hollywood’s University High School that got him started.
“Hollywood Eden,” in essence, follows a handful of soontobefamous students who all happened to be classmates with one another. Among them: Jan Berry, Dean Torrence, Nancy Sinatra, Jill Gibson, drummer Sandy Nelson, producer Kim Fowley, musician Bruce Johnston and surfer Kathy Kohner (a.k.a. “Gidget”).
With the exception of Kohner, this pool of talent would soon go from cutting records in Berry’s garage after class, on tape recorders once owned by Howard Hughes, to rewriting the pop charts. In this fascinating ride through the brief, blazing heyday of surf rock madness, Selvin strives to balance the hefty amount of existing work on the subject with his own firsthand research and interviews.
“This is not an unknown topic,” he said. “There have been thousands and thousands and thousands of hours
applied to researching this stuff, so once I’d absorbed the existing research, it was then incumbent on me to go and find the stuff between the cracks — and there was plenty of that.”
Among finds like Sinatra’s Thunderbird or Torrence’s bizarre subsequent involvement in the kidnapping of her brother, Frank Sinatra Jr., tantalizing rabbit holes into the past are not the only motive here. Another part of Selvin’s focus is dedicated to reshaping some of the narratives surrounding members of this unofficial group.
Perhaps best known for her illfated stint with the Mamas and the Papas, Jill Gibson was also Berry’s longtime girlfriend as well an accomplished sculptor and artist. Selvin said Gibson, now living in Penngrove in Sonoma County as a jewelry maker, served as an invaluable source for his book.
“I was really lucky to be able to inveigle her cooperation,” he said. “She’s a widely exhibited sculptor and painter, so she’s very removed from that part of her youth. I really wanted to bring her into the foreground because it was such a boy’s club. It was like archaeology to bring Jill out as a character who was more than ‘just somebody’s girlfriend,’ which this book should make abundantly clear.”
Selvin’s story also serves as an impassioned argument in favor of Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s seminal contributions to pop music. Be it his ability to compose for specific musicians (often the members of his beloved Wrecking Crew) or the ways in which Wilson thought to incorporate the sonics of different recording studios into his songs, “Hollywood Eden” has no shortage of compelling evidence when it comes to Wilson’s artistic brilliance.
It’s also probably the reason Selvin chose to close his book with the 1966 release of “Good Vibrations” — a moment he argues marked the zenith, as well as the end, of the surf rock era.
“It was the apex of years of this musical scene and these musicians at the center of it developing their concepts and their abilities,” Selvin said. “It stands as one of the big achievements of pop music in the 20th century. There’s no question about that. It could be the greatest record ever made.”