REVIEW: Joel Selvin’s Hollywood Eden

By Dave ‘Ghosty’ Wills

The trick to making oft-told history compelling once more is in the telling. A cursory glance at the bibliography toward the back of music critic and journalist Joel Selvin’s new book Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars and the Myth of the California Paradise proves that there’s no shortage of literature already out there concerning the LA pop/rock scene of the early to mid-1960s and its major players. Astonishingly, Selvin has managed to come up with a unique angle to these well-worn stories. It’s the revelation that many of the movers and shakers who created West Coast pop all attended the same high schools … and often at the same time!

Selvin makes a point of introducing the protagonists in this sweeping saga as the book’s “cast.” It’s a fitting conceit because reading Hollywood Eden sometimes feels like you’ve managed to get your hands on a treatment for an alternate universe “American Graffiti,” but this time with even bigger stars. University High’s Class of 1958, for example, boasts a motley group of archetypes that seem straight from central casting, but, of course, were real people. Jan Berry, the pivotal figure in the book and the mischief-maker Selvin credits with kicking off the Los Angeles rock and roll record industry, is like Brad Pitt playing Ferris Bueller. Dean Torrance is his snarky second in command. Nancy Sinatra is the teen queen in waiting. Kim Fowley is the geeky outsider swearing revenge on the cool kids. Even Kathy “Gidget” Kohner is here (yes, Gidget is a real person).


I mean, if someone had told me a few weeks ago that Jan and Dean went to high school with Gidget, I would’ve thought they were putting me on. This is one of those circumstances where the expression “only in Hollywood” is appropriate on multiple levels. 

Ultimately, this is a book about connections and how these young rock and popsters made the most of them whether they had met in high school or on the street corner. Like something out of another kind of teen-centric movie, the reader envisions the slithering tentacles of the music biz stretching out to connect the likes of Herb Alpert, Phil Spector, The Mamas & Papas, Terry Melcher, etc. Think “The Blob” but with a much better soundtrack. 

Obviously, The Beach Boys and their friendship with Jan & Dean factor into this saga as well, but special mention should be made of the pre-Beach Boys career of Bruce Johnston, another University High alum, who warrants a lot of attention in Hollywood Eden and with good reason. The fame and branding of The Beach Boys’ image often obscure the fact that Bruce was, to put it mildly, industrious to the point of nearly becoming a teen tycoon like Spector himself. Bruce seemed to be writing and producing everyone’s records as well as singing and playing on them. If he wasn’t partnering with Terry Melcher then he was in cahoots with Kim Fowley and his latest bizarro music scheme (in a perfect world, the unlikely friendship between clean-cut Johnston and warmed-over beatnik Fowley would warrant a book itself).

Selvin divides Hollywood Eden into three sections: “Dawn,” “Daylight,” and “Dusk.” After the whirlwind of successes and accomplishments in the first two sections, not least of which is the creation of surf and car culture and the California myth referenced in the book’s title, inevitably things start to unravel for our main characters. Jan Berry seems to get lost in trying to predict where pop music will go next and then suffers a tragic car accident. Phil Spector’s grand masterwork “River Deep, Mountain High” fails to catch on with the kids. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album simmers on the boil but quietly cools off before drifting into a kind of stasis until the next generation can discover it (incidentally both Pet Sounds and “River Deep, Mountain High” were huge in the U.K. … Go figure). 

Rather than leave us in dire straits as the book ends and before the record industry turns its attention away from Los Angeles and toward San Francisco and the love generation (neither of which were ever as hip as LA was in the early to mid-60s IMO), redemption comes in one last gasp of innocence and sunshine courtesy of “Good Vibrations” and Brian Wilson. The song acts as Selvin’s epic summation of Los Angeles record-making as well as a note-perfect crescendo for Hollywood Eden itself. I seem to recall another song by The Beach Boys cast in the same era-defining role in the aforementioned “American Graffiti.”

Jan, Dean, Bruce, Kim, Nancy, Brian, Sandy Nelson, Jill Gibson, Lou Adler, and their pals were having fun all summer long and making good vibrations and it was captured on records built to last. 

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