Postcards from the Rogue Valley

If everybody had an ocean
Across the U. S. A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like Californi-a
You’d seem ’em wearing their baggies
Huarache sandals too
A bushy bushy blonde hairdo.
– “Surfin’ USA “

On a recent flight to Denver to visit our son and his young family, I did what I rarely do: I watched a movie. The documentary Long Promised Road about The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was the draw. In the film, released last November, longtime friend and Rolling Stones editor Jason Fine takes Wilson on an intimate road trip through Los Angeles, revisiting places that helped shape his career. Fine invites the interview-averse Wilson to reminisce as one or another of Wilson’s best known songs fills the car speakers. 

It got me reminisicing too.

When “Surfin’ USA” topped the charts in March 1963, I was a sophomore in high school in Santa Monica, California, by then two years into exchanging my childhood in Ivy-clad Princeton, New Jersey for the teeny-bopper-heaven of LA.

I loved Los Angeles — and I loved the Beach Boys. It would be hard to imagine a more exuberant soundtrack to Southern California in the early 60s than Brian Wilson’s soaring vocal harmonies.

I came from sturdy academic stock — three generations of Ph.D. mathematicians — so I knew what came first: straight-A’s. Otherwise my world opened. My brothers, who stayed East when my family split up, said I’d gone rogue.

I took a deep dive into rock ‘n roll, adding  to my playlist Stevie Wonder (“Fingers Tips”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave”), “Louie Louie” and “It’s My Party,” along with the Beatles’  “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and much more. I’d find any excuse to borrow our family’s Rambler so that I could listen to the Top Ten singles at high volume on the car radio, making sure to switch the channel back to the classical music station my mother considered sacrosanct when I returned home. Brahms, not rock ‘n roll, ruled my family.

At Samohi, my girlfriends and I watched our figures, shared crushes, signed up for clubs, competed with who could do well without appearing to try.

The summer after my junior year, I landed a job working at Santa Monica’s fancy Jonathan Club, supervising the kids’ playground forty feet from the Pacific. I made out on Mulholland Drive (LA’s prime necking spot in those days), savored Seventeen, and, on a few occasions, even crashed parties with friends, though I had a reputation as a goody-too-shoes.

Mary Poppins was the top-grossing film in America, Bonanza had over 48 million viewers, and Baskin-Robbins had thirty-one flavors and then some.

Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, civil rights demonstrations, and early news footage of the Viet War challenged this euphoria, but they fell short of suggesting that the world was unraveling. 

For privileged white girls like me, the world seemed darn good.

Beneath the surface

Well it’s been building up inside of me
For oh I don’t know how long
I don’t know why
But I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong.
– “Don’t Worry Baby”

In 1964, when Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys started to abandon their beachgoing themes in favor of personal lyrics and ambitious orchestrations, I became an even bigger fan. Like the rest of the world, I didn’t know how much Brian Wilson was struggling off stage, hearing voices not near as sweet as his own (what’s called a schizoaffective disorder). An apparent panic attack on a flight to a Houston concert ended his onstage appearances for more than a decade — while expanding his creative genius.

“He doesn’t deserve the accolades about his music,” Elton John cautions in the “Long Promised Road” documentary. “He deserves the accolades about his personal life.”

From today’s vantage point of Facebook and Instagram disclosures, of living out loud, our personal lives, what lay beneath, weren’t often part of what girlfriends and I shared.

On sleepovers, we exchanged views on how far we had gone — or would go— with a boyfriend, gossiped, and built each other’s self-confidence. We tried out opinions. I remember one late night debate with my friend Susie about whether women should work outside the home and the freedoms women should but didn’t have. It was bold talk, we agreed. We felt connected, delighted that we had — were — best friends.

Our secrets, we mostly kept to ourselves: living with a seriously depressed mother, an alcoholic father, an eating disorder, being bullied. For those to whom this applied, we did not compare notes on the ways our parents’ divorce upended our lives or, perhaps most unspeakable, on the molestation we’d experienced at the hands of a relative or an adult to whom we had been entrusted.

For some of us, it was our affinities that we kept hidden. My classmate Jon was a budding entomologist, a far-from-cool pastime pursued in the corner of his small bedroom in his family’s bungalow a block from the Santa Monica Pier. Bill was becoming an acolyte in the John Birch Society (which already had a foothold in 1960s southern California), developing views he knew better than to share. 

As for me, I fell into the twin camps of negotiating my parent’s divorce and putting off a predatory uncle, stressors I never revealed then and still prefer not to talk about. Closer to the surface, though, was my infatuation with a senior whose grades might keep him from graduating, who slept on a couch in his older sister’s apartment, a surfer who thought nothing of skipping school when the waves were up. Our lives couldn’t have been farther apart (perhaps that was the point). Johnny Jumper grabbed my hormones to which I added shame, embarrassed by my choice. Johnny and I didn’t double date with my friends or his, a fashion then, and kept our relationship largely out of sight. When he showed up drunk outside my bedroom window one night, having just stolen gas from a stranger’s car, I finally realized our relationship was doomed. I veered back on course, sharing little about this detour.

Despite his demons, Brian Wilson was decidedly un-silent these years, writing songs like “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man)”, which I could relate to: “Will I look back and say that I wished I hadn’t done what I did?”

When my friends and I crossed the graduation stage (along with 1,000 other seniors in our class) in June, 1965, we negotiated what regrets we had and smiled brightly, diplomas in hand. Graduation night we spent at Disneyland with our current beaus, a tradition for graduating seniors across the Los Angeles basin. The next day, after breakfast at The Pancake House, we passed the day tanning and dozing at the beach.

Coming of age

At Santa Monica High School, going “East” to college rarely took you farther than Colorado. In the fall of 1965, I arrived at Harvard with an orange dayglow dress, the brightest star in my Southern California wardrobe, determined to remain a not-quite-surfer-girl rather than a “Cliffie” (a Radcliffe student) who wore her intellect on black sleeves and memorized Emily Dickinson poems.

Nonetheless, I was as academically ambitious as my classmates and doing well in school — proving that I was not a “mistake” that had slipped through the admissions process — became my driver. I racked up A’s (and flunked risk-taking and curiosity, eschewing courses that might lead to lower grades) and turned to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, sometimes touted as the best album of all time, when feeling homesick.

There was nothing pacific, though, about the wave that was about to sweep over university campuses nationwide: the antiwar movement. I’ve never understood why people refer to the 1960’s as if they were one piece, when they were decidedly two.

As classes came to a virtual halt on campus in 1968, my senior year, I joined teach-ins and marches, eventually occupying the Harvard University president’s office. I debated with male friends about the draft-evasion choices they faced (with the two prevailing choices seeming to be acting up at their army physical or fleeing to Canada). To my relief, many classes became pass/fail.

The Jefferson Airplane’s “We Can Be Together” (“Come on all you people standing around/
Our life’s too fine to let it die/We can be together”) became my anthem. I couldn’t shake off Bob Dylan’s “Tears of Rage.” I remember the first time I heard the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Like most of America, I had lost my innocence.

Epilogue

The day after our flight home from Denver, my morning glance at the NY Times cast a dark shadow: “Panel Ties Trump to Fake Elector Plan, Mapping His Attach on Democracy”; “Head of State Police Calls Response to Uvalde Shooting an ‘Abject Failure’”; “Two Years Later, We Still Don’t Understand Long Covid”; “Wildfire Burns Thousands of Acres in New Jersey.”

I headed into the sunshine to weed our garden. I usually content myself listening to the mourning doves as I work. After settling on my knees and eyeing a stubborn patch of weeds, I ran back inside and grabbed my iPhone and earbuds, opened up my Beach Boys playlist, and returned to weeding. Filled with the luminousness of Brian Wilson’s harmonies and the hopefulness of those days, I felt sixteen again.

I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I’ll make you so sure about it.
– “God Only Knows”

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