Everybody Had an Ocean by William McKeen - Book Review

Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960's Lost Angeles by William McKeen (Chicago Review Press, 2017, 423 pages, $26.99/14.57) frames the music world of Los Angeles during the 1960's within The Beach Boys who, in many ways helped define West Coast Music, and Charles Manson, the murderous psychopath, whose murder spree at the end of the decade helped awaken the entire world to the destructive qualities represented by sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll when they happen in conjunction. This lengthy, name-filled, and often confusing book profiles most of the seminal performers, producers, and record company executives who fed off each other in a decade dominated by the movement from the placid 1950's through a period rife with a foreign war, multiple assassinations, dangerous sex, extensive drug use, campus riots, and sublime music taking the world from the comfort of Frank Sinatra through the riotous hippie era to a new awakening partially prompted by the brutal, senseless killings.

Perhaps the most effective components of this long and extensively annotated account are the profiles of artists as they develop and emerge in Los Angeles or move there to be a part of the increasingly dominant Rock 'n' Roll scene. Native Californians like the Wilson Family, who comprised most of the Beach Boys, as well as Jan & Dean, and others grew up in the sunny, laid back world of Hollywood dominated by the wave-filled ocean, hot rods, and lubricious, willing girls. Musicians developing across the continent were attracted to this burgeoning musical mish-mash. In the burgeoning world of California rock during the late fifties and early sixties, a number of songs, titles, bands emerge that raise memories for a teen of that era. Sadly, the names of record producers and labels seem to dominate, creating a confusing, at least for me, world of change whose only constant seems to be the successful combining of southern black and western white middle class surfer/car fanatic together to produce music for a new and different kind of music consumer. Names that become legendary, like Phil Spector and Herb Alpert almost drown in the proliferation of producers and wannabee labels.

The importance of the Wrecking Crew, a rather loosely defined collection of Los Angeles session musicians whose virtuoso musicianship helped define the sound of many Southern California bands is rightly emphasized throughout the book. These mostly anonymous musicians not only helped create the recordings, they taught the band members in groups like the Beach Boys and The Monkeys how to play their instruments well enough for road concerts while performing, usually without credit, on the recordings. For a wonderful profile, take a look at the documentary film The Wrecking Crew.

As long as Everybody Had an Ocean sticks to California, the Beach Boys, and the Wrecking Crew it does a fine job. But when McKeen seeks to place this large enough scene into a still larger context, his book loses focus and clarity. It's hard to keep a coherent narrative running straight ahead while jumping into the south, Cleveland, New York, race, the British Invasion, and more. Keeping focus within the larger context muddies the important role of the California scene. Couple this with the author's need to throw in the gratuitous anatomical reference and the book becomes trivialized. McKeen's language is gritty, scatological, and physical. For him, size matters, whether it's male or female. Much of his sexual imagery is particularly explicit. McKeen, insists on providing details about human superstructure, saying, for example, that Charlie Chaplin, “was a small man with a penis attached.”

Many of the profiles of artists are what stick in my mind. Joni Mitchel, Brian Wilson, Sam Cooke, Phil Spector, The Mamas and the Papas, and other seminal (oops!) groups were valuable. The story of how an off hand comment by singer Billy Ward in Cleveland struck a nerve with disc jockey Allen Freed, creating the name Rock and Roll is priceless. But the ocean is too big and deep to fill in this outline. The mixing of California beach and car culture with Black southern blues influenced (dominated) by the British Invasion has too many threads. The rather long story of the “kidnapping” of Frank Sinatra, Jr., seems extraneous, taking the narrative off focus, even though Jan Berry, an important character in the book, was involved.

William McKeen

William McKeen is the author of nine books and the editor of four more. His most recent books are Everybody Had an Ocean (2017), Too Old to Die Young (2015), Homegrown in Florida (2012), Mile Marker Zero (2011), Outlaw Journalist (2008), Highway 61 (2003), Rock and Roll is Here to Stay (2000) and Literary Journalism: A Reader (2000).

McKeen teaches at Boston University, where he chairs the Department of Journalism and serves as associate dean of the College of Communication. He teaches literary journalism, history of journalism, reporting, feature writing and history of rock’n’roll. He's widely published in both the popular and scholarly world.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in history and his master’s degree in journalism from Indiana University and his Ph.D. in higher education administration from the University of Oklahoma. He taught at Western Kentucky University 1977-1982, the University of Oklahoma 1982-1986 and the University of Florida, 1986-2010.

He has seven children and lives in Cohasset, Massachusetts. (edited from the author profile on Amazon.com)

Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960's Lost Angeles by William McKeen (Chicago Review Press, 2017, 423 pages, $26.99/14.57) is a too comprehensive and ambitious account of the Los Angeles music world to maintain coherence throughout. Nevertheless, it provides cultural guideposts for those who did not live through the era. For those seeking greater depth, I'd suggest reading specific books on the bands, the politics, and the issues of this important period. The book is extensively annotated and provides a very useful reading list. Listening to the music through one of the streaming services would prove helpful, too. Snarkily sexual, anatomical, and functional references seek to make the language sixtyish, or something hip, but left me, at least, simply turned off. So, who's the audience? It certainly can't be adults, not with the language silliness McKeen indulges in. And it can't be teenagers, either, because they'd miss many of the references and may not care about sixties rock and beach music anyway. He seems to me to be reaching out to Millenials rather than people who lived through the sixties, who might be interested in putting it all into perspective, now that they're sixty-somethings and people who still read books. I received the book from the publisher as an electronic Advanced Readers Copy through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline and read it on my Kindle app.

Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald - Book Review

Reading Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan & the Night that Split the Sixties (Dey Street/Harper-Collins Publishers, 2015, 368 Pages, $28.99/13.00) reproduces in wonderful, eye-opening detail the environment of the Newport Folk Festival during July of 1965 when Bob Dylan appeared on stage on Sunday evening fronting an electric band, sang three rock songs, and the world changed. To place the momentous events of Newport into the social and political climate of the times, Wald provides extensive mini-biographies of Pete Seeger, the guru of folk music and the old left in America, and Bob Dylan, the voice of an emerging youth culture and rock generation that continues to this day. For fifty years, rumors and myths have swirled around that evening about what Dylan intended and how Seeger reacted to the situation. In this carefully researched and extensively annotated account, Wald weaves an exciting and involving story about clashing cultures and long term outcomes. For students of folk music, rock music, and the emergence of Americana, this book is must reading.

Pete Seeger, by the time the Newport Folk Festival rolled around in 1965 was the leading light in the midst of a great folk revival that had been growing for years, centered in Greenwich Village in New York City. His career, in which he had traveled throughout the country supporting radical causes, unions, and civil rights had focused on finding wonderful local folk performers and bringing them to New York and to Newport to perform. During the sixties, Newport was featuring groups like Peter, Paul and Mary, individuals like Joan Baez, Jean Ritchie and southern gospel groups like the Staples Singers, as well as African dancers. Seeger emphasized the singing, playing, and sharing of folk music as a way to build community and discover connections. There were four major strains in folk music, identified by Wald. Community music making was encouraged, as young people played, sang, and danced together, often at summer camps and festivals. The preservation of songs and styles associated with particular regional or ethnic traditions. As such, rural black blues singers and gospel groups, as well as white rural mountain fiddlers and dance callers, or singing preachers were all a part of this movement. Peoples' music was to be celebrated in performance and introduced to those who might otherwise not hear it. Finally, there was the growth of a professional performance scene, represented by people like Josh White, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Seeger himself, whose enormous skills before large audiences brought comfortable middle-class people together to hear and sing about his radical causes. Not all of these strands were fully compatible.

Dylan emerges from the myths and legends of who he is and what he stands for as an intensely private person determined not to be pigeon-holed or stereotyped into a particular role or image while always seeking to express himself through his distinctive poetry and style. By 1965, Dylan was no longer Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, but his legend wasn't yet fully formed either. He had tried to create a new self through what can only have been lies he told about himself, yet his musical wanderings brought him to Greenwich Village in 1961 when The Village was a boiling pot of poets, writers, singers, songwriters, beatniks, and political radicals sharing their music and ideas. It had been such for decades. Dylan, awkward and unformed, always something of a loner, fit in and thrived in this environment, hanging out and performing in the small folk,blues, and jazz clubs and bars that proliferated there. He honed his skills in front of growing audiences, releasing his first introductory self-titled album in 1962 and by his first performance at Newport in1963, as a guest of Joan Baez, had four albums out. He was writing and singing folk and protest songs which were bringing him acclaim and leaving him uncomfortable as he worked to forge a new musical and personal self. His transition from folk singer to rocker was becoming inevitable, and the Newport Folk Festival scheduled for July 1965 was the venue to unveil it all.

The Newport Folk Festival had been established in 1959 as an offshoot of the already established Newport Jazz Festival. It quickly became a showplace for introducing folk performers from around the world as well as emerging recording artists. The design of singalongs, workshops, and concerts reflected Seeger's priorities and, in many ways, established a pattern for succeeding festivals. By 1965 it was attracting a youthful audience which had experienced the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was becoming embroiled in the war in Vietnam. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had both appeared in America and the British Invasion was well underway. In the chapters detailing the events of 1965 at Newport, Wald carefully dissects myth and legend from what he can verify. He carefully notes that the memories of those involved have changed over time. Even Pete Seeger had included elements in his memory that may or may not ever have happened. Films of the time have been clipped and re-arranged to create the environment the film-maker wishes to promote. By reviewing every piece of film, each newspaper review and account, by interviewing all the principals still available, and carefully stitching together the events of Dylan's appearance on stage with a Stratocaster in hand and backed by members of the Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Wald provides what must become the definitive version of this event that he describes as the moment that split the world. Seeger was the past, Dylan the future.

Elijah Wald

Elijah Wald has been a musician since age seven and a writer since the early 1980s. He has published more than a thousand articles, mostly about folk, roots and international music for various magazines and newspapers, including over ten years as "world music" writer for the Boston Globe. In the current millenium, he has been devoting most of his time to book projects, including volumes on such disparate subjects as Delta blues (Escaping the Delta), Mexican drug ballads (Narcocorrido), hitchhiking (Riding with Strangers), and a broad social history of American popular music (How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll). (from Wald's web site)

Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan & the Night that Split the Sixties(Dey Street/Harper-Collins Publishers, 2015, 368 Pages, $28.99/13.00) by Elijah Wald captures a central era and moment in the development of the America we live in now as he develops the idea of moving from a period of relative comfort, peace, and middle-class self-asssurance towards a youth oriented culture roiling with rebellion and discontent. The book is extensively annotated. Wald recreates a world I was peripherally on the edge of. I saw Pete Seeger live in concert in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania in the early sixties, Josh White at the same place. The early sea chanty recording of the Almanac Singers was in my home's record library. The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Oscar Brand were part of my musical education. I only saw Dylan a couple of times, both in this century, so, for me, this extremely useful volume puts a period into perspective. Its detail and exhaustive research is combined with a writing style making it both persuasive and highly readable. I supplemented my reading by listening extensively to Dylan's recorded work up to 1965 on Spotify. I read Dylan Goes Electric as an electronic galley provided by the publisher through Edelweiss on my Kindle App.

Billy Joel:The Definitive Biography by Fred Schruers - Book Review

Billy Joel by Fred Schruers (Random House, October 2014, 400 Pages, $29.00/11.99) is the right book written at the right time by the right person. Fred Schruers, a deeply experienced writer/editor at Premier Magazine, Rolling Stone, and other entertainment publications and now with Crown Publishing, has been given unfettered access to Billy Joel, his former wives and girl friends, members of his band, and archives as wide ranging as the pages of the tabloid press and the archives of the Holocaust Museum. From this he has fashioned a well-written and thoughtful biography of one of the icons of pop music whose songs are a part of the musical DNA of millions of fans, and whose life has been widely, critically, and often superficially examined in the serious and tabloid press. Using hundreds of hours of interviews with Joel himself, his family and associates, Schruers has produced a piece of celebrity biography that examines the man for his genius and his faults. Billy Joel, now age sixty-five and still performing at a back breaking pace, has wisely provided the insight without especially limiting the analysis for this biography that treats the man and his music in detail and with deep respect while never shying away from the flaws which have made Joel and world renowned singer/songwriter as well as a tabloid personality. For those interested in Joel himself, rock and roll music, or the music business, Billy Joel is highly readable and informative.

I must admit that while I have long loved much of Billy Joel's work, even considered myself a fan, I've had a superficial picture of the man himself. My impressions: Long Island, Christie Brinkley, frequent meltdowns, mammoth tours, and a wealth of songs written over a long period of time, were at best superficial. I almost put the book down after several chapters of feeling mired in Long Island's rock scene during the early and mid-sixties, when Joel dropped out of high school, formed, joined and left several bands, and became a locally popular rock singer while experimenting to discover his voice. The names were unfamiliar to me, and I almost quit. Then, as Joel begins to emerge, so did my interest, and the book took on a life of its own, as I moved through it with joy and enthusiasm. The book is sparsely illustrated and contains, insofar as I can see from the galley I read, no index or list of sources, although credit is freely given within the text. I supplemented my reading by using three resources: Spotify to listen to Joel's recorded work, especially the live concerts, Wikipedia for additional details about individuals mentioned in the book, especially those from the recording industry, and Google Images to allow me better to visualize the people, although I really needed no help when it came to Christie Brinkley. All three of these resources were enormously useful to me, as a casual fan, but would probably prove unnecessary for one more knowledgeable than I.

Billy Joel as a Young Rocker

The biography generally maintains a chronological view of Billy Joel, presenting a detailed account of how the Joel family, prosperous Jews from Germany escaped the holocaust, arriving in Cuba and then immigrating, penniless, to New York City. Billy's father, Howard, was a classical pianist, who soon deserted the family and eventually returned to Vienna. Joel was born in the Bronx in 1949, and his mother Rosalind soon moved to Hicksville, Long Island, in the heart of what emerged under the generic name of Levittown. Billy early studied classical piano, but in the musically overheated environment was attracted to rock and roll, and never left. While never finishing high school, Joel emerges as a voracious reader with a leftward lean, and a student of classical as well as contemporary music. From his early teen years, he asserts he wanted nothing more than to be a musician. Joel performed with several bands to increasing notice, and signed several early contracts in which he gave away most of the rights to his own compositions, an error which took him many years and millions of dollars to extract himself from. The cost of his early misplaced trust in shady characters in the recording industry probably is responsible for keeping Joel on the road much more intensely than he otherwise would have been, however, it's as a performer of his own highly autobiographical and emotive songs in concert and on recordings that his reputation stands. These people and errors are carefully discussed and analyzed in the book.

Despite the fact that Joel entrusted his career to many people whose efforts were not in his best interests, he emerges as a person who prefers to approach to world from a position of trust and relative lack of anger at those whose greed no doubt damaged his career from financial, personal, and artistic perspectives. As he catalogs in his hundreds of songs, his life has been a search for love and acceptance which has involved him with some of the most beautiful and fascinating women in the world, each of whom manages to leave a scar while, remarkably, still remaining in a friendly relationship with Joel. The costs of these relationships is fully cataloged without the scatological details the tabloid press is constantly seeking. Joel himself emerges, in his off-stage self, as pretty much a homebody who wants to have fulfilling relationships with beautiful women, but whose continuing life on the road always interferes with this ideal. Similarly, he surrounds himself with large and elaborate homes, cars, and boats around the world, only to discover that while he enjoys the perquisites of being a “rock star,” they don't bring him the internal happiness he seeks. The place where he seems most fully alive is on the stage performing before huge crowds in stadiums and arenas, although there are moments when a classroom audience or a lecture seems to give him as much satisfaction. Often the grind of the road, the boredom and the over-indulgence that goes with that life, hurts him emotionally and physically.

Fred Schruers

Fred Schruers has enjoyed a successful high-profile career as a writer at Rolling Stone, chronicling an impressive body of musicians and actors, including Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, Jack Nicholson, Sheryl Crow, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Chris Rock. His writing has also appeared in Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, Men’s Journal, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism Review. Billy Joel appears to be his first full-length book.

Billy Joel - 2014

Rick Diamond - Getty Images

Billy Joel by Fred Schruers (Random House, October 2014, 400 Pages, $29.00/11.99) is an intriguing portrait of the man in full. Music, romance, love, marriage seem to form the cornerstones of Billy Joel's life. When they fail, he becomes distraught. He says, you “need to know who you are, before you can look for who's next.” His life, career, and music have been defined by Levittown, an absent father, the baby boomer generation, a search for love and beauty, which seem to be two different, but often complementary ideals. During his life he has earned and spent hundreds of millions of dollars and sold over 140,000,000 records, making him one of the most successful of all rock artists. While Billy Joel has not written songs since 1993, he continues to write music, often in a classical vein, to present lectures and workshops on college campuses, and to perform incessantly around the world. In this very readable biography, he emerges as an interesting and thoughtful man who seems to have come out the other side with his life and many of his relationships intact, even when it isn't always happy. Billy Joel was provided to me by the publisher through Edelweiss as an electronic galley, which I read on my Kindle app. Highly recommended!