Joel Selvin's 'Hollywood Eden' Mines The Highs And Lows Of SoCal's Early Music Scene

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Auther and music journalist Joel Selvin

Author and journalist Joel Selvin spent almost 40 years as the pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1972 to 2009, giving him a front row seat to one of the most vibrant eras of popular music history and one of its most enigmatic scenes. He co-wrote Sammy Hagar’s acclaimed memoir, “Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock” and collaborated with such figures as L.A. Reid, Randy Bachman, rock photographer Jim Marshall, Ed Hardy, and the author/musicians of the Rock Bottom Remainders. He’s written books on the Summer of Love in San Francisco and the deadly debacle of “Altamont: The Rolling Stones, The Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day”

Selvin started his career as an author in 1990 with “Ricky Nelson: Idol For A Generation,” which to some degree plants the seed for his latest effort, “Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise.” Published by House of Anansi, a Toronto, Canada-based publishing house, the book describes the roots of Southern California rock ‘n’ roll, beginning with the University High School Class of 1958.

The book begins and ends with Jan Berry, a borderline juvenile delinquent living with his parents in Bel Air, and starting bands with friends like drummer Sandy Nelson (whose bike crash into a school bus inspired Jan & Dean’s eerily prescient “Dead Man’s Curve”), keyboardist Bruce Johnston and, of course, Dean Torrence.

But in between, “Hollywood Eden” is populated with richly drawn characters including Uni High classmates Jill Gibson, Nancy Sinatra, Kim Fowley and Kathy Kohner, a tomboy misfit nicknamed “Gidget.” At less-privileged Fairfax High was Phil Spector and Herb Alpert. And much further down the boulevards from West L.A. were the Wilson family and friends in dreary Hawthorne. Selvin deftly explains how the teenage dreams of sun, surf, cars and guitars could only have come true in Southern California, and reminds you that there isn’t always a happy ending.

Pollstar: I associate you and your work so much with San Francisco. Why write a book about Los Angeles’ early music scene?

Joel Selvin: Oh, this is easy to address, and I understand; hippies are us. And they’ve put a lot of butter on my bread. But I’ve always seen myself as a Californian. It’s an amazing nation-state. But the crucial point and the breakout of California culture was the opening of Disneyland. Walt just mercilessly pimped that thing out on his weekly TV show, which was one of the most-watched television shows in the nation. All over the country, kids saw that crazy, goofy amusement park in the strawberry fields and immediately it resonated that it could only be in California. And so that’s sort of the platform. It slips right into the Gidget movies, music and The Beach Boys. California is bold in the public imagination; it attracts people because of that state of mind. And it was born, in many ways, in that University High School class of 1958. I think it’s a perfect storm in history and that time and place was perfect for teenagers.

Even though the young people in the area are portrayed as quite privileged, you find parallels between Southern California surf and San Francisco beat cultures.

The surfers were outliers. I find those early ‘50s and early ‘60s surfers very parallel to what was happening in San Francisco. They were outdoors and they were athletic, but they were still outside society; nonconformists. They had their own language, their own values, and they were rejecting the norms of Eisenhower America. I found a lot of parallels in there. The surfers were big fans of jazz at that time, although by 1958, rock and roll was it.

Your book begins and ends with Jan Berry, starting in the high school locker room and ending in a coffee shop some time after the crash that almost killed him, recognizing a friend. How did you come to the decision to end the book right there?

Maybe he recognized him! It’s very Sopranos-like. I resisted my editor’s strong recommendation to put another chapter in, catching up on what happened to everybody. I told him, ‘No, this is a story and the story’s over.’ That’s how it feels to me, it’s like when I get to that coffee shop with this messed-up Jan and he’s got so far to go, and there’s Joe Lubin. Complete circle. Bingo. I’m out of the story.

Jan was the one who first had the dream to perform music and managed to keep it going when others came and went in the early days. Except for Bruce Johnston, who is a constant presence; that surprised me.

Isn’t it amazing? I think that one of the book’s real accomplishments is revealing the true dimensions of Bruce Johnston’s rock and roll heroism. He’s a major figure in Southern California music and an extraordinary character. And everybody just thinks of him as this guy who joined The Beach Boys sort of late in the game.

Dean Torrence is one who came and went, too, but continues to carry the torch in a way.

Dean is such a peculiar character, because he’s really not an initiator of anything. This is a guy who’s willing to go along for the ride and even take a fair amount of abuse. Dean is this very passive, regressive character in California terms.

He’s that laid back personality that is such a common feature in Southern California culture. Yet he keeps his own agenda. He’s kept it going and can get a new car every couple of years. He was a lucky guy and he knows it.

Lou Adler and Herb Alpert co-managed Jan & Dean before there was much of an L.A. music industry yet, outside of the Central Avenue R&B scene and maybe Capitol Records. How low was the bar for entry in those days?

There were open doors at the ground floor. Herb and Lou were probably not constitutionally suited to be partners. Adler is such an aggressive, ambitious guy and Herb is much more of the sort of jazz musician mentality.

Adler’s never really been revealed in any major way by a biographer and he’s fought that. He really has been very scrupulous about his public comments about his career. Though he was very helpful with the book, I walk away wondering so much more than I know.

I love hearing about his beginnings as a dance competitor and just sort of falling into the music business while he was trying to figure out what to do with his life. He is somebody, again, who invented himself in California.

A recurring, kind of sleazy, character making cameos is Kim Fowley. Was he comic relief?

Fowley was a horrible person. There’s no question that (former Runaways bassist) Jackie Fox’s rape accusations against him are true. I don’t doubt it for a second. In “Hollywood Eden” he’s merely a creep. But he graduated from creep status.

And the other thing about Fowley is he’s a character that only exists in Hollywood. He doesn’t write songs, he only co-writes songs. He doesn’t produce records, he only co-produces records. He’s not a record company executive. It’s hard to see what his talent is. And he’s so unlikable that there would be a few people who would even deal with him, although Bruce Johnston remained a loyal and true friend all his life.

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How did he do it? Fowley was certainly more than a hanger-on but it’s hard to see how he wasn’t blackballed unless it was through the good graces of Johnston.

You know, there’s something about friends in high school that stayed friends for the rest of your life. It is remarkably ironic that that whole scene at the end where Bruce is in London and plays Pet Sounds for Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon], and Fowley’s right there. It’s just another fantastic little bow tie in this story.

There’s women who figure in the story as well, including Nancy Sinatra and Jan’s wife Jill Gibson who briefly joined the Mamas and the Papas, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to have been much of a place for them at that time.

It was very important to me to try and bring the women out in the narrative. It was a boy’s club of major proportions. And beyond being someone’s girlfriend, there weren’t a lot of roles that had been proscribed for women in that world.

It was important for me to focus on Jill and I worked extensively with her doing many interviews because she’s quite the introverted person. I wanted to bring her into the foreground because she was such a great example of what it was like to be a Southern California teenage girl in that era. She steps into the foreground in the third act, in the hospital with Jan, then joins the Mamas and Papas, [her affair with] Adler and all that.

What about Nancy Sinatra?

I don’t understand how a figure who had so much significance in her time could be so ignored in the accounts of that time. I suspect that has to do with the fact that most of the rock historians and critics are also males and have tended to ignore or minimize the roles women play in the music.

Nancy Sinatra has her own personality issues. I imagine that there’s not enough approbation in the world for her. I heard tell of The B-52’s inviting her to be their special guest on a couple of concerts. They were huge and she complained about having to be a special guest and not the headliner. She’s clueless about that, but her last name will explain that.

Phil Spector stands out as a Fairfax High School product. He seemed to have emerged already fully formed as Phil Spector. And another tragic figure from sunny Southern California.

I wouldn’t have wanted to have his childhood. His father was a suicide victim, he had an absolutely insane, overbearing mother and a clinically insane older sister. And he was thrust into Fairfax High, straight out of the Bronx with a bad case of acne and a chip on his shoulder.

It’s really much more working and middle class. University High was the privileged elite of Bel Air and Brentwood with a lot of kids in show business.

Then you have this family out of Hawthorne, which is nowhere near West L.A. or the Fairfax District?

It wasn’t near anything then. It was between L.A. and the beach. I absolutely love that the Barbie doll and The Beach Boys are from the same neighborhood, with Mattel being like 10 blocks from the Wilson house.

Again, Los Angeles in the ‘50s was this set of villages and they were remote from each other, connected by these broad avenues, these highways. But Hawthorne was a long way from Hollywood and Hollywood was separate from Brentwood and Bel Air. And all of that was separate from the Orange County coast with Huntington Beach and Manhattan Beach and all that, and all of them were separate from Malibu.

The last few years have seen a light shone on Laurel Canyon, a decade later than the era in which your book takes place. What did you take away from Jan & Dean, The Beach Boys and the story of that earlier era?

Laurel Canyon interests me a lot less than small-town Hollywood. Ricky Nelson and all those storefront R&B record labels, that stuff really strikes me as the beginnings of real heroism.

It’s been pointed out to me that this is the first book that ever mentions Terry Melcher and doesn’t mention Charles Manson. The table was already set. You can see it there. And Jan was just the first one to fall by the wayside. Well, Sandy Nelson was the first one to fall.

Something weird about that Sandy Nelson story: There’s the scene where Sandy crashes his bike into that school bus. And that scene belongs totally to Sandy Nelson. You know who was on that bus? Thirteen-year-old Bonnie Raitt. Oh, she remembers it to this day. She was traumatized; she thought the guy was dead. But I just couldn’t put that in there. It would take everybody’s focus away from Sandy, at the most important time to have it.