Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [61]
In that golden age.
Like all golden ages, Boone thinks as he veers right again, crosses the railroad track, and climbs up to the famous old beach town of Del Mar, it had to end.
The golden age was done in by its own success.
As the culture of Highway 101 became the culture of America itself.
Gidget hit the screens in 1959, creating a new kind of sex symbol—the “California girl.” Fresh-faced, sun-tanned, bikini-clad, sassy, healthy, and happy, Gidget (“It’s a girl.” “No, it’s a midget.” “It’s a gidget.”) became a role model for girls all across America. Girls in Kansas and Nebraska wanted to be Gidget, to wear bikinis and cruise the strips of the 101 beach towns.
Gidget begat a slew of beach movies, which would be forgettable except for lingering images of Annette Funicello, previously of the Mickey Mouse Club, who swapped her mouse ears for a bikini. These movies featured handsome guys like Frankie Avalon and bodacious babes like Annette and had just a suggestion of sex about them—Beach Blanket Bingo in 1965 never revealed what was happening on or under the blanket. And they usually had a “beatnik,” replete with beret and goatee, wander on playing the bongos, and they always featured the “kids” dancing on the beach to music.
Surf music.
It also came right out of technology.
In 1962, Fender guitar developed a “reverb” unit, which produced the big, hollow, “wet” sound that became the trademark of surf music. In the same year, the immortal Dick Dale and the Del-Tones used the reverb on “Misirlou,” featuring the classic Dick Dale guitar run that sounded like a wave about to break. The Chantays responded the same year with “Pipeline.”
In 1963, the Surfaris released the first breakout, national surf hit—“Wipe Out,” with the sarcastic laugh, then the famous percussion riff that every teenage drummer in America tried to copy, and the surf music craze was on. Boone inherited all this music from his old man, all those old surf bands like the Pyraminds, the Marketts, The Sandals, the Astronauts, Eddie & the Showmen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and The Beach Boys.
They just blew it up.
The Beach Boys had kids all across the world singing “Surfin’ Safari,” “Surfin’ U.S.A,” and “Surfer Girl,” mimicking a lifestyle they’d never lived, mouthing the names of places they’d never been: Del Mar, Ventura County Line, Santa Cruz, Trestles, all over Manhattan and down Doheny way … Swami’s, Pacific Palisades, San Onofre, Sunset, Redondo Beach, all over La Jolla.…
All along Highway 101.
Boone doesn’t know the answer to that old Ethics 101 question from his freshman year in college—if, knowing what you know now, you had a chance to strangle little Adolf Hitler in the cradle—but he’s clear about the answer for Brian Wilson. You’d splatter his baby brains all over the bassinet before you’d let him make it to the recording studio to turn the 101 into a parking lot.
By the mid-sixties, every kook with a record player or a transistor radio was hitting the surf, crowding the breaks, jamming the waves. People who never wanted to surf wanted the lifestyle. (There’s a messed-up, inbred mongrel of a nonword, Boone thinks. Lifestyle—trying to be both and ending up neither. Lifestyle—like pseudolife, a bad imitation of something worth living. Like you don’t want the life, just the style.) So they headed out to sunny Southern California and fucked it up.
What was it the Eagles sang—“You call some place paradise, / kiss it goodbye”? Well, pucker up for Highway 101. So many people moved to the SoCal coast, it’s surprising it didn’t just tilt into the ocean. It sort of did; the developers threw up quick-and-dirty condo complexes on the bluffs above the ocean, and now they’re sliding into the sea like toboggans. Those little beach towns swelled into big beach towns, with suburbs and school systems, endless strip malls with the same shit in each of them.
You had traffic