Review: 'Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles'

A few months ago I reviewed Joel Selvin's Hollywood Eden, an interesting, well-written chronicle of the earliest days of L.A.'s fertile rock scene in the sixties. Because that book halted just as Brian Wilson created "Good Vibrations" and the scene was really about to take off, I described Hollywood Eden as "an extended prologue" and ended the review by suggesting that "further reading is required to learn the complete story of why LA was so important to sixties rock."  

Published four years before Hollywood Eden, Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles could be that further reading. William McKeen's book covers the same period Selvin's does (though with fleeter feet through the 1950s run-up to the main story and a lot less focus on dopey Jan and Dean), but then he moves beyond the point L.A. really exploded. Selvin cuts his tale short just as The Byrds and Mamas and Papas were getting together. Key L.A. artists such as Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and Joni Mitchell, never get to jump in Selvin's sandbox. However, they're all on board for Everybody Had an Ocean, and instead of Jan and Dean, the far more artistically and commercially pivotal Beach Boys become the track on which the narrative rolls. Natch, that narrative rolls into some pretty dark places as Brian Wilson loses his grip on his group and brother Dennis runs into a certain charismatic psychopath with a grudge against producer Terry Melcher.

McKeen's writing also brims with humor, vulgarity, and the willingness to confront the artists' myriad flaws--all the things a rock writer should bring to the table. I wish he'd given more attention to at least two key L.A. artists: Love, who (with the exception of Brian Wilson, and arguably, The Byrds) made better records than any of McKeen's mostly white main cast of characters, and The Monkees, a massively popular, massively weird group that could not have sprouted anywhere but L.A. Oddly, Selvin's two pages on Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter are riddled with errors (he states that it took The Monkees a couple of years to take control of their music when it was closer to six months, suggests non-instrumentalist Davy Jones had "musical chops" Micky Dolenz lacked, and repeats Mike Nesmith's line that The Monkees outsold The Beatles and Stones combined as if it was fact, though Nesmith later admitted he was bullshitting). So maybe it's for the best the author didn't devote more time to them. These mistakes also made me question some of the other factoids McKeen lays down, but there's still no question that Everybody Had an Ocean is a highly entertaining read. It's now being published in paperback for the first time.

Five Truly Frightening Stories

Serious horror fans are often victims of a frustrating catch 22: we love to be scared, but our constant consumption of scary stuff leaves us almost impossible to scare. As much as I love to reread Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein, they do not actually frighten me, and I am highly dubious when some twenty-first century person includes them on one of those “50 Scariest Books Ever!” lists that litter the Internet. How many of the entries on those lists actually frightened the people who wrote them?

I, dear reader, refuse to cheat you in such a manner. When I tell you a book is frightening, it’s because it actually frightened me, because sometimes a work is effective enough to hack through that thick horror callous I’ve built up over the years. It should be telling that I searched and searched through the cobwebby attic of my memory to come up with books and stories that actually scared me and was only able to come up with five, but I assure you, the following five frightening stories scared me, indeed. And if you’re not careful, they may scare you too.

1. The Bad Seed by William March (1954)

Surprise is horror’s best friend. That’s why lazy scare meisters like sudden loud noises and scary faces popping out of shadows unexpectedly. The Bad Seed is a surprise of a different sort, because if you are familiar with Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 cult classic, you probably regard the tale of evil little Rhoda Penmark as a work of high camp. Stripped of Patty McCormack’s googly eyes and the rest of the cast’s ham sandwiches, there is nothing funny about children killing children. March’s conception of the development of a calculating murderer without an ounce of human empathy is inherently scary and deeply troubling because Rhoda’s mother still loves the girl and wants to believe she did not give birth to a demon even though she knows she totally did. Rhoda completely exploits that fact, manipulating her mother’s emotions with ruthless crocodile tears. Rosemary’s Baby is the nightmare of every pregnant woman, but The Bad Seed will chill all parents…and based on the fact that I first read it long before becoming a parent, plenty of other people too.

2. Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry (1974)