The Smiley Smile Message Board

Looks like a good read


https://www.pollstar.com/article/joel-selvins-hollywood-eden-mines-the-highs-and-lows-of-socals-early-music-scene-147802

I lived in the Bay area for 20 years back in the 1970's and '80's and I used to read Joel Selvin reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle. Selvin used to give the Beach Boys some tough write-ups. He actually worked for the Beach Boys in 1976 in publicity but he had to keep up the San Francisco hipper than thou attitude when it came to the Beach Boys. Sounds like an interesting book though.

  I split my time between SoCal and S.F., and I read Selvin's columns and reviews for years.  I must agree with the comment above in that I found that Selvin had an irrationally negative view of the BBs.  I remember him absolutely trashing the Pet Sounds Sessions box set, basically calling it a ridiculously over-the-top treatment of an album.  Nonetheless, this sounds like an interesting tome, so I just put a hold on the book at my local library.

Thanks for the hipping to this ... gonna buy it.

Bruce is much more interesting than his latter day stage persona, his solo records, or his loyalty to Mike would suggest. I'd love to read his autobiography but he's said several times over the years that he's not going to write one.

The author of this book, Joel Selvin, will be a guest on the Michael Shelley Show on WFMU, Saturday May 15th 11am to 1pm EST. Available to stream everywhere and also all the interviews are archived for later access. This is the same show Al Jardine was just on this past Saturday.

Link:

https://wfmu.org/playlists/SH (https://wfmu.org/playlists/SH)

Give WFMU a listen, their Saturday morning and afternoon programming is fantastic.

I preordered the Selvin book. I consider it a substitute to a Bruce book.

It's a fun read... reads like a novel... interesting set of characters and stories... some we've heard or met before, some we haven't.

This book came out last month, it's written by Joel Selvin. It covers the rock scene in LA from the end of the '50s to the '60s. I find it very interesting to see how many of the main  characters (like Jan & Dean, Beach Boys, Phil Spector et al) had connections early on. Many details of Jan & Dean with Brian that I didn't know of.

Thanks for the heads-up! I think there was a thread on that book a couple of weeks ago:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,27678.0.html


Regarding Jan and Brian, I guess you'll find more about their relationship in this upcoming must read:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,27399.0.html

Oh boy, I can only imagine what kind of revelations he uncovers this time out.  :(

I merged the two topics - The book is worth checking out IMO. It starts with the late 50's DIY scene around Hollywood and ends with Brian and Good Vibrations.

The author's interview with Michael Shelley was broadcast over the weekend, and it's pretty interesting. If you click on the link below you can listen to the entire show, and Michael Shelley played a lot of records relevant to the book, like early Jan & Dean, solo Bruce, Jill Gibson, etc.

Give it a listen:
https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/103802 (https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/103802)

Interview around 25 minutes into the show, but the playlist is pretty cool leading up to it too.

He's only famous for being in the band. He joined them at the peak of their popularity but his accomplishments within the group are quite minimal, although he wrote a handful of songs that were of quality. Otherwise known for his wearing of short 80s shorts, slightly weird persona and laughter, dog-like subservient attitude to Mike Love and being in general an old conservative white man, who like most of them abandoned any pretence of decency and dignity when they supported Donald Trump. Not much to write about really  ::)

Obviously being a Beach Boy is not a bad thing in my eyes. But you'd be surprised how many times Bruce's name comes up in (californian) music history.

Exactly! I remember reading a book called 'Waiting For The Sun' ? Many years ago, and it was the same deal.... Bruce is all over that book.

That's really pathetic. He always struck me as very full of himself (like someone else who used to be a member here) and a shill for concerts that he was assigned to review. This book looks decent though.

The book is an interesting enough read, although Selvin tends to fall back on BB mythology sometimes (Wrecking Crew, nobody liked Pet Sounds, etc.). Some of the more questionable BB books were included in the bibliography, most notably the faux autobio for Brian.

For posterity, here it is... Selvin's 1-star review of the PS box (SF Chronicle, Nov. 28, 1997).

BEACH BOYS The Pet Sounds Sessions Capitol; four discs; $61.97 Yes, Brian Wilson's 1966 masterpiece still stands as one of pop history's greatest achievements, the album that inspired the Beatles to produce "Sgt. Pepper." But this is the most useless, uninteresting exhumation of those legendary sessions imaginable. The single-disc mono mix is, of course, the album .as originally recorded, but there is no explanation for why a stereo mix is included on one of the other discs because Wilson, deaf in one ear since childhood, never heard stereo. The remainder of the box is taken up by snatch es of instrumental tracks, vocals without instrumental tracks (and Mike Love has such a lovely voice) and boring outtake versions of the album's famous songs, right down to an alternate take of the dog barking that closes the original LP

Yeah I am enjoying the book but as Emdeeh said the book does use some old info-my book is not in the bibliography, which is fine, but as a result he says that Jan and Dean first played with the BBs on feb 14 1963 at hermosa  beach high school. However as noted in my book-the BBs played with Jan and Dean as early as august 1962 at the reseda jubilee and although Keith Badman mistakenly stated that they appeared at hermosa beach high school, a simple google search will tell you that there is no high school in hermosa beach! The BBs did play the Hawthorne high school dance on February 15 1963 but Jan and Dean were not there

This is typical Selvin. He was the guy who reviewed Bob Dylan's 1979 show at Old Waldorf as "Bob's Godawful Gospel". He wrote a book about Rick Nelson that dug up all kinds od dirty laundry. I don't like his writing.

In the book, Joel misdates the Kingsmen's Louie Louie to 1965. Makes you wonder how many other things he got unforgivably wrong

I don’t think those errors are “unforgivable”. After all even if every fact isn’t correct-a memoir can still be great.  But those errors are unfortunate because than the books that come later pick up those errors

He uses the supposed 1965 release date in service of an anecdote about a cover version that was released "a week later." Imagine thumbing through a book by a so-called "music historian" and reading "Sgt Pepper was released in 1968, just a week after Pet Sounds ..." IMO a line like that should vaporize the author's credibility. The historical magnitude of these records is too great to f*** up the years of release.

As a collector of pop-rock music books on a wide variety of subjects, I think I've seen it all: books where authors stated that their work is deliberately filled with mistakes so to catch plagiators; books where it was the same except authors did not warn of this; books by some well-known publishing houses which were dictated by authors to tape with the sad result of some clueless transcriber putting their false interpretations of people's names to paper and nobody responsible for checking the results; etc etc. So, if a noted author like Selvin made just several mistakes, even of this kind, over what is a typical "Selvin book" (chock-full of interesting information, that is), I'll happily take it.

When I was in high school, I once checked out a book from the school library with a generic titled called “Rock Stars”. I remember it said Brian drowned in 19972 after years of depression due to SMiLE not selling well. 🤔

I remember a newspaper blurb in 1995 alleging that longtime Rolling Stones collaborator Don Was had just cooked up a documentary called 'I Just Wasn't Made for These Times' about deceased guitarist Brian Jones.

I'm about a third of the way through -- yeah Bruce is prominent and an interesting character.  As a teenager he witnessed a murder while him and his group were trying to get a record deal!

I lived in the Bay area in the 1970's through the 1990's and was a regular reader of the San Francisco Chronicle. Joel Selvin was a music critic for them and a rather harsh critic of the Beach Boys. Even when he praised them it was backhanded. You see, this was San Francisco and it was way too hip for the Beach Boys, I caught a lot of flack for my obsession but I did win some people over. I would take whatever Selvin says with a grain of salt

I finished it and it was a good read but no revelations for those of us who’ve read other books over the years. Seems like he got some good interviews from Jill Gibson and Lou Adler but the info on the BBs is outdated.

I finally got around to reading this, and I was quite entertained.

Of course, it covers ground that has been scoured over for years, and some people have noted here that Slevin includes some glaring errors in fact here.

That said, you can always learn something, and I found it was a unique take, as it covers a certain time frame, and really uses Uni High as the ground zero for this emergence of the California Sound. It sure sounded like an idyllic time and place.

Bruce has said many times, re: the early days, 'We just wanted to sound like the Radio' and you can understand that quote a bit more, after reading this. I always was interested in learning more info from the Bruce and Terry era, and we get a little glimpse of it here.

The main takeaway for me, I guess, is the books ends as the curtain comes down on, say, the 'first wave'. Jan's accident means he is out of the game. Spector feels River Deep-Mountain High is his absolute peak and sees nowhere to go, and slides deeper into his idiosyncratic world. And Brian, with Good Vibrations such a grand achievement, well we know what happens next. The creative forces all almost simultaneously have major set backs. Meanwhile the hustlers in this story; The Adlers and Fowleys etc keep moving right along.

And that Brian quote to Marilyn as he lands back in LA after flying off to teach the guys how to handle Good Vibrations live, and has requested all his friends come out to the airport...'I don't know whether to say Hello, or say Goodbye...' That is really stuck in my head currently.

Great post and thoughts. I've felt the same about the airport photo saga since digging deeper into it, and what was happening. That quote really does bring it home, and I didn't used to as much but now think more and more that Brian wanted to capture the moment on film because he had a feeling it was a passing moment in time that only comes once in a lifetime, when possibilities are endless and no one says no to ideas and challenging the status quo. That photo was the support mechanism in place in Fall '66 and along with it came the endless imagination which the support inspires. And in that photo, specifically the back row in the most famous versions, is the late 1966 condensed LA version of an Algonquin round table of musicians who would sell over a combined 100 million records both before and over the next several years in pop music. Then it all changed.

Lots.

Mark Moore’s book on Jan berry is a lot better