California Dreaming: The LA Pop Music Scene and the 60s Paperback – 6 November 2015

The author defines his project slightly oddly. Although the book is called "California Dreaming", it only covers the scene in LA. He also uses a somewhat quirky version of "Pop". Somehow it includes Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Love and Lowell George, but not, say, the Doors. I suppose the latter qualify for a subsequent book on "Rock", while the the other four are unclassifiable, so might as well go down as Pop.The book ends sharp on 31 December 1969, which means that CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, etc. do feature, but only in truncated form. The hard cut-off at the decade's end severely limits the book's usefulness.What is does cover in detail are the surfin' and drivin' songs of the Beach Boys and others, plus the rather strange, to British ears, phenomenon of harmonised voice groups like the Association and Sagittarius. Also well covered are the multi-talented performers who were looking for careers in strictly Pop, among who are Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson and Glen Campbell.Being a history of Pop, the focus is on singles and not albums, and the book is divided into four page segments, each devoted to one single A-side. Singles bands like the Beach boys, the Monkees and the Mamas & Papas are therefore well covered. But this too is a limiting factor on the book.The book ends with an Appendix that gives a full list of the contributors to each recording, but, irritatingly, doesn't give the dates of the recordings.The book can be read from cover to cover, as I did, or used as a reference for each particular song. Reading it from end to end brings out certain themes. Firstly the degree of cross-fertilisation between the performers is very noticeable. Many performers worked on other performers' songs and even, in one case, deliberately impersonated another performer. It is surprising just how many of the people mentioned passed through Frank Zappa's studio or the multiple manifestations of the Mothers of Invention.The other theme brought out is just how dependent everyone was on the so called Wrecking Crew of sessions musicians. It was not just the Monkees who resorted to them, but the Beach Boys, the Byrds and many others. The author seems to bend over backwards not to name the individual members of wrecking Crew in the main text, although it is possible to find their names in the detailed appendix of contributors.Overall the focus is on the songs and the writers and performers of these songs. The author makes no attempt at social history, either of the performers themselves and their relationship to the music biz or of the consumers of this music in LA, in California, in the rest of the USA and ultimately across the world.Within its own deliberately set limitations, this is an very good book. It is packed with facts and, with Andrew Hickey, you feel in safe hands, in that these facts have all been properly cross-checked. But the cut-off just when things were getting interesting, the focus on A-side singles, the exclusion of anything deemed "Rock" and the avoidance of wider social issues mean that this is probably only one of the books you need to read on the subject, but it is an excellent place to start.

Great look at the music hotbed of the 60s and 70s.

A fun read though the narrative jumps around a lot. The only real negative for me is the author attempting to describe the music. You can't describe music- you have to hear it. No matter how hard he tries it fails. If he'd dropped the descriptions it would make for a better book imo. Plus he didn't mention my favorite 60's band Dino Desi and Billy so I was a bit bummed. Still it's an interesting read and I learned some new fun facts so I'm happy I got it.

excellent reading

I'm a big Beach Boys fan, and have been so since 1964 -- yeah, I'm OLD. But some of the groups author Andrew Hickey chooses to write about are barely blips on the overall 60's California landscape's radar screen. I have an extensive BB library, so am not missing much by having him only moderately cover them. And he DID treat them with admiration and respect.I think, for me, a better book was "Everybody HAD An Ocean" by William McKeen. Less of a trivia-pursuit, "bet you've never heard of THIS rare group" approach. McKeen's viewpoint is "Hey, there were ALL these great groups in one place at this point in time, and there was a LOT of 'cross-pollination' that went on that you might not know about."