IVIV surf music

[Doug Millison]

John Carvill:
>
> I gues it's hard to impart to US p-listers just how weird (and not
> necessarily in a good way) surf music sounds/feels to European
> ears/sensibilities.

Only once in my young European travels did I find a scene where it  
seemed truly appreciated - a bistro in a village near Pau, in  
southwest France, where I went to school from August '77 - January  
'78.  The owner of this bistro had been welcoming University of  
California exchange students for a while by then.  In addition to a  
fine selection of Belgian beer (from pretty much all the monasteries  
and great breweries) and single-malt Scotch, he had a amazing library  
of American rock & roll, pop, blues, psychedelia, surf, you name it.  
And he loved us American students, always buying us drinks, putting on  
this or that album, looked the other way when we went outside for a  
breath of fresh air and a smoke, somebody always had a crumb of hash  
from Spain across the border not many miles away.  What a fun scene  
that was, all that high-class European hooch, tasty local chow, it's  
the old Bearn, a la sauce bearnaise, rubbing shoulders with Basque  
cuisine when you get well knotted into the folds of those Pyrenees,   
full of French students, fun-lovers across the border from Spain, plus  
a handful of us UC students, the joint throbbing with the Beach Boys  
and all the rest of the ghosts from that golden grooveyard.


> Wouldn't it be nice....to get Jules's opinion on IV?

Didn't he write a book about this one, too - Whineland II

> I recall him
> saying he went to visit PYnchon just before going to interview DYlan,
> and Pynchon saying he would be better interviewing the Beach Boys.

I thought he also made the claim that he turned P on to their music,  
and that he took P to Brian Wilson's house, but maybe I'm mixed up.   
Somebody else will know better.

>
> Rewinding a bit to an earlier thread, I also recall Jules saying they
> (i.e the counterculture folk) always regarded Tim Leary as "a CIA
> stooge".
>


>
>> Charlie Manson was still connected to the Beach Boys? I don't know.

It's an intriguing thought, at the very least, that Pynchon might have  
been in an LA mansion with the Beach Boys at the time they had their  
connection to Charles Manson.  If that did happen, it's easy to  
understand why it might stick with the author this many years to  
emerge in IV.  Or maybe this is all just counterfactual speculation  
based on a confused remembering of what I've read about who said or  
did what.


>
> Neil Young had a lot of interesting stuff to say about all that,
> particularly frustrated pop star Charlie's interactions with people
> from the pop music world. Wasn't NY's song 'Mansion on the HIll' about
> that? Maybe not...  But there are loads of Neil Young resonances in
> IV, from the cover art to 'On The Beach' and those sinisted 'dune
> buggies' rollin' down the hills... Pulls in Manson, the Kent State
> shootings, the yin and yang of 'The Sixties'.


>
> One random scattered thought on Manson: can Ronald Reagan be
> considered as Charlse Manson writ large, doing for 'America' what
> Manson did for 'The Sixties'?

Reagan is Nixon with the ability to project an easy-going persona and  
pliable enough to be shaped by the folks who were pulling his strings.  
So people still love him, he looked so great on TV, and after Nixon,  
Agnew, Ford, and Carter they were tired of looking at Presidents too  
closely, that's my interpretation this morning anyway. But the  
corruption and rot was spreading all along, from Pynchon's '60s in IV  
through the '80s in Vineland, and we've still got Cheney to remind us  
of the organizational reality behind a president whether it's Nixon or  
Reagan or some other polluted piece of pond scum.

My 2 cents.