San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)

Book review

Former Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin delves into the early years of Hollywood pop.

- By Matt Jaffe

Back when Huey Lewis was still the news, I arrived in the Bay Area, a Midwestern boy on his own desperatel­y seeking to crack the San Francisco code. It was hard out here for a newcomer, so I searched for local insights wherever I could find them.

Among my guides was Joel Selvin, the Chronicle’s pop music writer, whose gig lasted from 1972 to 2009, a veritable boxed set retrospect­ive of a career during the golden age of newspaper rock criticism.

In recent years, Selvin has stayed in the game, with acclaimed books about the Grateful Dead and the 1969 Altamont debacle. As those subjects would suggest, the Berkeleybo­rn Selvin came across as a Bay Area classicist. Long before the mortal combat of online trolling, Selvin took incoming fire in the newspaper’s letters section for his perceived provincial and retrograde tastes. No matter, I kept reading and learning.

When I heard about “Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise,” Selvin’s new book about Southern California pop and the rise of Hollywood as the center for the American recording industry, I was surprised by the choice of topic. Selvin has gone rootsy before, writing an acclaimed 2017 book about producer Bert Berns (songwriter of “Cry Baby” and “Twist and Shout”). But it seemed unlikely that he would focus on Southern California’s preLaurel Canyon scene of Herb Alpert, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys and Phil Spector. Kathy Kohner, the reallife inspiratio­n for Gidget, makes a cameo.

In the acknowledg­ments, Selvin explains: “My first visit to Los Angeles at age ten left me with a lifelong romantic notion of Hollywood in the late Fifties and early Sixties,” before adding, “This story is so thoroughly embedded in Southern California; it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”

Selvin goes deep, drilling down to the musical localism of individual high schools, most notably West L.A.’s University High, where Nancy Sinatra, among many celebrity offspring, attended. The Nelson Riddle Orchestra headlined Uni’s 1958 prom, with appearance­s by Keely Smith and Frank Sinatra himself. Sammy Davis Jr. performed an Elvis impersonat­ion.

The musicians Selvin writes about were the whitest kids you know, privileged and living the California dream. Back then, you and your pals could almost instantane­ously go from singing in the showers after football practice to the Hitsville West studio.

It was an age of innocence, a time of Ampex tape recorders,

groups like Froggy Landers and the Cough Drops, and such novelty hits as “Alley Oop” (of which multiple hijacked versions were released soon after the original). The darkness arrived later, though there were harbingers of what was to come: Jan Berry’s recklessne­ss, Brian Wilson’s obsessiven­ess and the specter of all things Phil Spector.

Selvin describes Spector as a guitarplay­ing “acneriddle­d punk” and as “a short, sullen producer ... reeking of English Leather.” But Selvin also gives him his due, describing the recording of the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel” as “the big bang of Los Angeles music” and detailing what went into the session that birthed Ike and & Tina Turner’s 1966 “River Deep — Mountain High.” The image of an exhausted Tina Turner drenched in sweat after dozens of takes, then stripping down to her bra and asking to lower the studio lights before starting all over again, is unforgetta­ble. A classic now, the song flopped back then, sending Spector spiraling into a tailspin.

In many ways, this is a jukebox musical of a book, less driven by a propulsive narrative than a collection of set pieces. In fact, the best way to appreciate “Hollywood Eden” is to keep a computer or a phone handy to hear the songs Selvin mentions and to consult the list included in the endnotes. You’ll never quite listen to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” in the same way after reading

producer Lee Hazlewood’s unprintabl­e direction for how Nancy Sinatra, the young woman he considered “the Pope’s daughter,” should think of herself as she sang the song.

If Altamont marked the premature end of the 1960s, “Hollywood Eden” is the decade’s origin story, capturing the lingering 1950s and the transition in Southern California music from surfing and hot rods to the singersong­writers of the canyons.

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 ?? House of Anansi Press ?? Author Joel Selvin is a former Chronicle music writer.
House of Anansi Press Author Joel Selvin is a former Chronicle music writer.
 ?? By Joel Selvin (House of Anansi Press; 320 pages, $32.95) ?? Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise
By Joel Selvin (House of Anansi Press; 320 pages, $32.95) Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise

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