IVIV surf music

[Doug Millison]

I was 18 in 1970 graduating high school in Phoenix then at college in  
Fort Worth, Texas, and surf music was everywhere.  On AM radio, on sit- 
com TV, and the 60s beach movies were still recent. The Beach Boys  
album "Sunflower" had come out in '69, I guess, I heard it first in  
1970 in a rather elevated state of mind where it has been well-grooved  
ever since, "Surf's Up" came along in '71, thereabouts, and it has a  
sad, downer feel that reflects the poisoned ocean & etc. and their  
previous hits were still played regularly on Top 40 and also on the  
"underground" FM stations I listened to in Phoenix in high school,  
then in Texas in '70-71.  I posted previously that The Boards house  
seems to be the crazy Sunset Blvd. mansion where Pynchon supposedly  
met Brian Wilson and smoked dope with in his living room, which at the  
time I think I heard once was done up like a beach with sand, maybe  
that was just a rumor though.  I also still think IV has the feel of  
an underground comic book, that's one of the only ways that I can make  
sense of some of the over the top, in-your-face obsessions in IV.  R.  
Crumb has his fixations, so does IV. Only in a comic book does it seem  
normal for a short hippie guy private eye to smoke a joint and roll  
his hair up in some kind of imitation 'fro, pass out, and wind up  
facing a Black Militant the next day who openly stares at the hair.   
The one really creepy thing that Pynchon does in IV, and it makes the  
novel of a piece with his earlier work, in my book at least:  the way  
he brings in Charlie Manson, and the complexities of his police.  The  
police are evil as shit and of course some of them are fine family  
men, and some are straddling the bobwire, and meanwhile they are all  
also and always it seems covering up political murders that serve the  
needs of the powers-that-be, that feels right in a Pynchon novel.   
Manson evokes a freaky, bloody edge of the hippie scene in a way that  
gives this novel a Pynchonian edge, for me at least. And I think the  
way that the pot and LSD work in the novel is cartoonish yet also a  
reasonable reflection of the way it worked then.  In college dorms and  
off-campus apartments, in the Gulf oil field where I worked a year  
before getting drafted into the US Army -- pot and acid were  
everywhere, in the Army, too, there was always somebody getting hits  
of Windowpane or Clear Light in a letter from back in the world, and  
pot cost like $5/kilo in Seoul in '73, maybe $10 I don't remember  
exactly but it was cheap enough we kept big Saltine cracker cans of it  
sitting around the dayroom in our barracks at Camp Howze up there on  
the Frontier of Freedom. Aabove all the early 70s "hippie" scene was a  
hard-partying scene, lots of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, just like in  
Rolling Stone magazine where Pynchon's old roomie was a journo, the  
one who took P to meet the Beach Boys and who knows, maybe that's when  
Charlie Manson was still connected to the Beach Boys? I don't know.  
But whatever the truth of those reports about Pynchon might be,  I do  
think if you read IV as if it were a graphic novel, let Pynchon's  
prose paint the pictures, and forget about trying to make it into some  
great American novel, maybe it will be more enjoyable?  Maybe not, and  
that's OK, too.