SMART ASS: The Music Journalism of Joel Selvin

From the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean to the Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas, acclaimed music journalist Joel Selvin tells the story of a group of young artists and musicians who came together at the dawn of the 1960s to create the lasting myth of the California dream. Read more..

HOLLYWOOD EDEN PRESS:

• NEW YORK TIMES: From Brian Wilson to Nancy Sinatra: The L.A. Music Scene in the ’60s
Joel Selvin, the former pop music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, has explored rock’s history in a string of fun books, including “Monterey Pop” (written with Jim Marshall) and “Summer of Love.” In his new one, “Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise,” he tells the story, set between 1957 and 1967, of a network of young Angelenos who “captured a California of the mind” — one of “cars, sun, sex and surf; ‘Gidget’ set to a rock ’n’ roll beat.”

• LA TIMES: How California’s culture industry manufactured the California dream
As Selvin writes, a handful of young artists, including Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas, were largely responsible for implanting the myth of Southern California in the national consciousness. “Good Vibrations” sounds like a forever future, as if a fleet of tanned aliens touched down to share their music. (In fact, it was just the genius of Brian Wilson and an army of session musicians.)

VIDEO from TIME.com:
Let Paul McCartney Introduce You To Bert Berns, The Best Songwriter You’ve Never Heard Of
click here

HERE COMES THE NIGHT PRESS:

• New York Times: Many-Hit Wonder, Out of Obscurity Bert Berns, Songwriter and Producer, Remembered
Even in his mid-1960s heyday, Bert Berns was barely known beyond the obsessives who studied songwriters’ and producers’ credits on 45 r.p.m. records and LP album jackets. And then, after his death in 1967 at the age of 38, something truly odd happened: Though the songs he wrote and produced, like “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy,” proved to have durability, growing in stature and popularity as the years passed, Berns’s own reputation receded even further into obscurity..

• Bette Midler on Twitter

"Ok, just finished the book on Bert Berns "Here Comes The Night" and it was great. Anyone who loves early Rock and Soul will love it."

• Stephen King on Twitter

"BANG! THE BERT BERNS STORY. Great rockumentary about a forgotten giant. Narrated by Little Steven, written by rock legend Joel Selvin, my old bandmate.

• Los Angeles Review of Books: Stephen Deusner on Here Comes the Night : The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm & Blues
IN HIS NEW BOOK, Joel Selvin describes three different recordings of the song “Twist and Shout.” Two were not simply big hits, but seminal contributions to the rock ’n’ roll canon. ...

More HERE COMES THE NIGHT press here...

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Browse all of Joel's San Francisco Chronicle pieces here.

Linda Ronstadt back in public eye, and it’s not so easy

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Linda Ronstadt doesn’t feel like company much these days. At least, not too much company. And on a recent visit, she is definitely not going to put on clothes and makeup.....sfgate

Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner dies at 74
Friday, January 29, 2016

Jefferson Airplane founder Paul Kantner, a giant of the San Francisco rock scene, died Thursday afternoon after suffering a massive heart attack in his sleep two days earlier. He was 74 and surrounded by his three children at the time of his death....sfgate

Dead offers paint-by-numbers show, but fans provides color
Sunday, June 28, 2015

No rock band in the world boasts an audience as devoted and engaged as the Grateful Dead, and it was the Deadheads who brought the party Saturday to Levi’s Stadium for the first show on the five-concert “Fare Thee Well” tour featuring the four living members of the Dead back together for one last roundup.....sfgate

A night at the Fillmore changed B.B. King’s career forever
Saturday, May 16, 2015
One night in San Francisco changed everything in B.B. King’s life — in amazing and unpredictable ways.

B.B. King, the greatest bluesman of his generation, who died Thursday at 89 in Las Vegas, had played the Fillmore Auditorium many times before that night in February 1967. It had been operated by Charles Sullivan, a ghetto entrepreneur who ran jukeboxes and cigarette machines up and down the coast, as well as producing rhythm and blues concerts at the 1,100-seat upstairs dance hall in the middle of a black neighborhood that had thrived prior to urban redevelopment, a well-known stop on the so-called chitlin circuit....sfgate

Music: Ron Nagle’s ’70 album, popular flop and cult hit, returns
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Ron Nagle, a longtime curmudgeon of the San Francisco art and music scene, was swimming upstream in 1970 with the release of an album of dark, melancholy pop songs at the height of the San Francisco hippie psychedelic era. “Bad Rice,” his lone solo album, is a long-lost cult classic about to be issued on CD for the first time in a two-disc deluxe set....sfgate

On tour with Janis Joplin — an insider’s view
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
John Byrne Cooke strides across Washington Square, a place familiar to him because he lived around the corner of 45 years ago when he was road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company.

“The guys in Big Brother all wanted to know why I didn’t live in the Haight,” he says, “and I told them 'I’m a beatnik, not a hippie.’” ...sfgate

Emmylou Harris touring for reissue of cult classic 'Wrecking Ball'
Friday, March 28, 2014
The country music career of Emmylou Harris was already finished when she set foot in the studio in winter 1995 to make "Wrecking Ball" with producer Daniel Lanois. Country radio had stopped playing her records, and her label had no idea what to do....sfgate

Jeff Beck, Brian Wilson review: perfect harmony
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Brian Wilson and Jeff Beck have lived their lives in parallel musical universes, but in the wide, wonderful world of rock 'n' roll, parallel lines do meet. At the Paramount Theatre in Oakland on Tuesday, in an unforgettable tableau, the exquisite British blues-rock guitarist drew out Wilson's sunny melodies in silvery, wavering guitar lines as the combined forces of his band and the Beach Boys founder's backing group stitched together the complex harmonies and orchestrations from Wilson's lost masterpiece, "Smile." ...sfgate

Rascals' show revisits era of good lovin', playin'
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
How did Little Steven find the time?

He tours the world playing guitar with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He maintains a thriving acting career launched by a long-running part in "The Sopranos." He hosts a syndicated weekly radio show and runs his own record label, among other enterprises....sfgate

Fillmore's Poster Room filled with walls of sound
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
They ran out of space on the walls of the Poster Room at the Fillmore Auditorium years ago. The most recent addition advertises a Black Keys concert from 2007. Every available inch of the wall space in the upstairs bar and restaurant as well as the adjacent balcony room is covered with framed posters from sold-out Fillmore shows of the past ...sfgate

Giving credit to Woodstock hero Alvin Lee
Friday, March 8, 2013
His frantic, flashy guitar playing on the nearly 10-minute "I'm Going Home" made British rock musician Alvin Lee, who died this week at age 68 in southern Spain, one of the heroes of Woodstock, both the music festival and the subsequent movie....sfgate

Singer Rick Stevens embraces 2nd chance
Monday, January 28, 2013
Wearing a glacial-white suit and tie, set off by a blood-orange shirt, the compact, dark-haired vocalist Rick Stevens leaned into "You're Still a Young Man," his signature song as lead vocalist of Tower of Power, when the band burst out of the East Bay funk scene 40 years ago and Stevens had a promising future. ...sfgate

Review: Johnny Cash Columbia boxed set
Monday, December 3, 2012
Johnny Cash had to disappear from the skyline before it became obvious how tall a tree he truly was.

If any doubts remain, the newly released 63-disc boxed set, "Johnny Cash - The Complete Columbia Album Collection" - takes the full measure of the man's recorded legacy. With the addition of a single disc covering his first three years of recording for the Sun Records label - and Cash's absent latter-era sessions with producer Rick Rubin notwithstanding - this unwieldy set is an American treasury along the lines of....sfgate

Browse all of Joel's San Francisco Chronicle pieces here.

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Contact Joel: joelselvin@aol.com

Literary Agent: Frank Weimann: fweimann@theliterarygroup.com