Why I love the Beach Boys

My taste in music, like my taste in politics, is moderate, which might explain why my favorite band is the Beach Boys.

And why I grieve the loss of Brian Wilson, the band’s beating heart and resident genius.

With the grief, simultaneously, is the pleasurable memory of my favorite California Girl, whom I will call Laura, rather than use her real name. She took me inside the mind of Californians, on one of my early visits there. 

Although a native Angelino, she was so jazzed and fast-talking she struck me as a high-speed chick from my native New York. And I guess I could mention she was a 5-10 strawberry blonde with more curves than the Pacific Coast Highway.

My Beach Boy memories are like a jigsaw puzzle, with one piece interlocked with another.

I will start in the early ‘70s, when I was the features editor of the Philadelphia Daily News.

Our music critic was Jonathan Takiff, who shocked me when he told me that the Beach Boys was “elevator music.”

He knew a lot more about music than I did, or do, but it didn’t matter. The Daily News was always understaffed and we didn’t have time to argue the point. One of our editors, the brilliantly goofy Gil Spencer, described the tabloid as “a puppy running in traffic.”

Maybe 25 years later, Takiff wrote a column about the genius of the musicality of the Beach Boys, especially Brian Wilson.

I had the good manners to not remind him about his earlier “elevator music” opinion. 

Something else I didn’t tell him is that the lovable music critic in my novel, Press Card, was suggested by him. Not based on him, because it is fiction. . . Suggested by him. To this day, he does not know. 

In 1980, I became the Daily News’ TV critic, and the five years I held that title was the busiest professional period of my life.

The Evening Bulletin had a couple of TV writers, the Inquirer had two or three, rising to five, as I remember. The News had me. Each week I wrote news of the local broadcast scene — breaking stories about anchor changes — along with features, interviews, TV reviews and ratings stories. Often nine bylines a week. For those outside the industry, that is a lot.

The job also required me to travel to Los Angeles in June and January for press gatherings, where the networks showed off their new shows, and offered stars and executives up for interviews.

My first was in June 1980, the first time I was west of Texas.

I was in the Century-Plaza Hotel for eighteen straight days before I got to leave the hotel, other than on escorted bus trips from the hotel door to studios for interviews.

My work day started around 8 a.m. with breakfast interviews, usually ended around 10 p.m. with screenings of new TV series.

Then I went to my room, wrote and filed copy, every day, using an unreliable box-like “computer” with a three-inch-square screen, before upgrading to a Radio Shack TRS-80. We  called it a Trash 80, because journalists are so clever. 

Because the equipment  was so bad, and I lived in fear of a crash that would delete my copy, I first typed everything out on a manual typewriter, rented from the hotel, where I spent about six weeks a year.

While I transmitted, I looked out the window at Santa Monica on the horizon, its lights glistening like fireflies, wondering when I would get to stand on the edge of the vast blue Pacific.

Then I’d get a drink or six at a network hospitality suite. 

Then sleep, and start again. I was in my early 40s and the most fit I ever was, or will be.

It was maybe on my third L.A. tour that I met Laura, then (and now) a publicist who owned her own company.

I don’t recall who her client — they were usually B- stars — was at that time, but we hit it off immediately.

She was a Golden Girl from the Golden State (never a Surfer Girl, though) and we wound up going out to dinner, and then wound up in bed. 

It was from Laura I learned that Angelinos were very interested in physical appearance, and more caring about how their cars looked than how their homes looked. Laura’s apartment had loads of magazines, not that many books. L.A.’s heart is the entertainment business, not publishing, and the ever-perfect weather kept people outdoors.

If you remember the play (and then movie) “Same Time Next Year,” by Bernard Slade, you have an idea of what was going on with Laura and me — only it was semi-annual. Had I been willing to move to L.A., or she to Philly, it might have gone farther, but we each had a career, so it remained on a fling level, friends with hot benefits.

It continued until Laura got married, and subsequent to that, she has met two of my wives. We remain friends to this day, more than 40 years after our first fling.

To end this anecdote, a favorite memory is me dancing with Laura to “California Girls” at the Hamburger Hamlet, then the hottest club in L.A.

Laura always could get in to the hottest spots, and taught me to never self-park, always use the valet, even when there was free street parking right outside.

That was a lesson that did not stick. 😊

——

On my first visit to L.A., at the end of the grueling network tour,  a new friend, a TV critic whom I will call Joyce, said I simply had to experience a hot tub, then a sensation in L.A.

Joyce (not her real name) was short, had blue eyes so bright she could land an airplane, and was the daughter of a prominent national journalist, whose work I admired. Although Joyce grew up in Beverly Hills, she was a thinker, a voracious reader, she dressed very conservatively, but had a sly and wicked sense of humor. She was a different sort of California Girl.

When she invited me to go to a hot tub with her and a male friend, I hesitated.

“Oh, you have to the first time you are in L.A. It’s part of the experience,” she cajoled.

What the hell, I thought. 

Her friend picked us up at the Century-Plaza and we drove to West Hollywood, I think it was, to the site of a former Montessori school that was reinvented as a hot tub salon.

As I prepared to change into my swimsuit, Joyce said “no.”

Part of the experience was to be jaybird naked.

Even looking my best, I was never comfortable being naked, maybe because I was a chubby kid. And adult, often and on. Currently on. Am I fat-shaming myself?

Anyway, what the hell. 

Into the hot tub we went, all three of us, where we drank margaritas and I listened to Joyce weave stories of all the celebrities she knew through her mom. Naturally, most of them were dicks.

In the hot tub, did I peek? Did she?

Yes, and I don’t know, but we remain friends only to this day, and I am in her debt for that L.A. experience.

—-

I was a fan of the Beach Boys well before all of this happened. I loved the bouncy beat, the heavenly harmonies, and the sense of fun, aside from the few less-happy melodies.

As I think about it, maybe I connect their music with my youth, but, really, my formative years were dominated by doo-wop. I came of age as rock and roll was birthed, and always kidded my friend the Geator, the irreplaceable Jerry Blavat, that he should play the Del- Vikings “Come Go With Me” any time I walked into Memories in Margate.

Memories.

That’s what the Beach Boys are to me. And they will be played at my funeral.