When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams by Bob Greene

Author:Bob Greene [Greene, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Biography
ISBN: 9780312376918
Google: tqjcmAEACAAJ
Amazon: 031237691X
Barnesnoble: 031237691X
Goodreads: 6531150
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

In Huntington Beach, California, there were Lucille Balls and Jackie Gleasons spread out before us.

Actually, they were Lucy Riccardos and Ralph Kramdens; the waitresses and waiters were dressed in character: the Lucys in housedresses, the Ralphs in gray bus-driver uniforms. This was at an outdoor dinner party in the swimming pool area of a hotel—the theme had something to do with the early days of the television industry. So the Lucys and the Ralphs arranged the table settings as, with the sun still hovering in the end-of-the-day sky, the guests arrived and were served cocktails.

The way the evening was planned, the rest of us would do a set first, without Jan and Dean, and then later the two principals would join us for the main concert. We couldn’t do any of the Jan and Dean or Beach Boys hits during our opening set, because we had to save those for the second show. So it was an even more unconstrained atmosphere than usual as we sang anything that came to our minds. We just threw the titles of songs out to each other and then performed them; we sang Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” and the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week,” and it felt like a bunch of guys standing around in front of live microphones and having fun. Which it was.

I had flown out that day for the show. When we finished our Jan-and-Deanless set, and had a short break before the real concert, Randell called me aside.

“There’s something you should do,” he said.

“What?” I said.

There was a street separating the hotel’s pool deck from what waited across the way: the Pacific Ocean.

“You ought to take your shoes off and go over there and step in the water,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because you were in Chicago when you woke up today, and now it’s not even dinnertime and look where you are,” he said. “Why would you want to travel all this way and get this close to the Pacific Ocean and not feel it?”

Randell was always getting semi-spiritual like this, and usually I did my best to brush it off. Which I did again this time. “I can see the ocean,” I said to him. “I don’t have to feel it to know it’s there.”

But then, a little later, just as we were about to play, I realized that what he had said made pure and shimmering sense. And I told him so.

He and I crossed the street—the Pacific Coast Highway—and walked over to the ocean. And, just for a moment, I stepped into it.

You do owe it to yourself to pause once in a while, to stop and tell yourself that these things really are happening—these things our grandparents never permitted themselves to dream about, things that don’t even make us blink. From the Midwest to the Pacific Ocean, all in the course of a day, as if this is the way it has always been.

Randell was right. Every now and then you need to remind yourself to feel it all.

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