Let’s Go To Hawthorne: A Beach Boys Pilgrimage
Editor’s Note: The following article is image-heavy, so allow sufficient load time for the complete Hawthorne experience. Also, a special thank you to the very wonderful David and Carrie Marks from all of us at REBEAT!
“It’s a beautiful, blindingly sunny day in Los Angeles and Neal and I are on our way to see a bunch of bricks standing next to a pile of dirt.” I’m being unnecessarily snarky when I scribble this in my journal, thinking of other tourists in town who can’t wait to make it to the beach, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, or any number of more photogenic sights in the area. It’s true that I’ve had to explain to more than a few people why I’m so excited about visiting the corner of 119th Street and Kornblum Avenue in Hawthorne, but once they’ve heard the words “Beach Boys,” they understand.
The Beach Boys have been part of the soundtrack to my and my husband Neal’s relationship since the first time he sent me an mp3 of his own “Heroes and Villains” edit back in 2000. We celebrated Neal’s 29th birthday at the Chicago stop on Brian Wilson’s 2004 Smile tour, featured “Our Prayer” and “God Only Knows” at our wedding, and have built some pretty fabulous friendships through the band’s fan communities. And today we’re going to see where it all started — where Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson grew up and became the Beach Boys.
Growing up as the daughter of two historians, my summer vacations were just as likely to include battlefield and history museum visits as trips to the beach. In fact, our annual road trips from Maryland to Newport, RI, were usually structured to allow for plenty of historical sightseeing along the way. I wanted my Hawthorne trip to feel just like the first time my mom visited Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val-Kill cottage, or the first time my dad walked in the footsteps of the soldiers at Antietam. Like a pilgrimage.
Unfortunately, the U.S. National Parks Service doesn’t feel quite as strongly about 1960s pop groups as it does about First Ladies or the Civil War. It’s honestly a wonder that the Beach Boys have any kind of monument at all. After the Wilsons’ childhood home was demolished to make way for the Glenn Anderson Freeway, there was nothing left to mark what had happened at 3701 W. 119th Street, until longtime fan Harry Jarnagan began a campaign in 2003 to have the spot designated as a California Historical Landmark.
The monument was dedicated in 2005 in a celebration involving performances by band members, family, and friends; most of the ceremony is on YouTube, and Beach Boys historian Jon Stebbins included his own account of the festivities in his book, The Beach Boys FAQ. I knew from everything I’ve seen and read that the monument is small. One or two friends even advised me not to bother with it. But other friends described visiting the monument and feeling awed just to be standing near the Wilsons’ homestead, imagining Brian, Dennis, and Carl playing in the front yard, or getting together with family and friends to sing.
Our friends David and Carrie Marks have volunteered to be our tour guides for the day. David brings a unique perspective to a tour of Hawthorne, having grown up right across the street from the Wilsons, taking guitar lessons with Carl, getting into mischief with Dennis, and watching Brian’s musical talents develop. His rhythm guitar playing was an integral part of the Beach Boys’ early sound, and he’s continued to collaborate with his old band members over the years. David’s no stranger to showing friends and fans around his old neighbothood. In fact, I’ve taken some of this tour virtually, thanks to the YouTube video he made with Chuck Kelley, “Let’s Go to Hawthorne With David Marks.” (In homage, I’ve labeled today in my calendar as “LET’S GO TO HAWTHORNE!” In all caps, because I am VERY EXCITED.)
David drives us past a small sign pointing the way to the monument, a slightly larger sign warning us not to deface the monument in any way, and then — there we are.
We’re the only visitors at the monument — in fact, we appear to be the only people out on the block today. We take pictures of the monument’s centerpiece, a stone carving of the six Hawthorne Beach Boys, based on the Surfer Girl album cover. (Al Jardine, who was not on Surfer Girl, is included in the carving between Dennis and David. Or at least that’s our best guess.) Many of the bricks on the monument are carved with the names of family, friends, and fans—we find plenty of names we recognize, and Carrie and David point out a few we’ve missed.
I try to call up the ghosts of the Boys who used to play here, but instead I keep thinking of an interview David gave here a few years ago for the Dennis Wilson documentary, The Real Beach Boy: “The Wilsons’ house was right here, under this pile of dirt, and my house was over here, directly across the street, under this pile of dirt. Can’t go home, nothing there, empty air, pile of dirt.”
I spend the rest of the day trying to connect the past and present, with similar results. It’s hard to put the two together when so little of the past remains. David explains that we can’t go to the infamous Fosters Freeze where the band first heard themselves on the radio because it doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the A&W Root Beer stand that the guys immortalized in the song “Chug-a-Lug,” though we do get to see the shopping center that now stands in its place.
A few places are virtually unchanged. For lunch, we stop at Pizza Show, where the band used to eat and hang out after local shows. “I used to come here a lot when I was growing up,” David tells our server, who tells him to start coming back regularly again. Rusty’s Surf Ranch on Santa Monica Pier, where we get a drink later in the afternoon, plays an important part in recent Beach Boys history — it’s where David, Carrie, and Jon Stebbins held the release party for David’s biography, The Lost Beach Boy. There’s a list of “surfing rules and regulations” posted inside the “Surfer Girls Only” women’s bathroom, surfboards hang from the ceiling, and the speakers blare Jan & Dean’s “Sidewalk Surfin’” (a skateboard-themed reworking of the Beach Boys’ “Catch A Wave”) and then the Boys’ own “Don’t Worry Baby,” featuring a young David on guitar.
We close the day at Chez Jay, one of Dennis Wilson’s favorite old haunts, where we’re joined by our friends Darcy and Michael. There’s a small, framed picture of Dennis on the wall, and I imagine he’s smiling as he looks down from wherever he is, seeing his childhood companion and friends hanging out and talking about the band that brought them all together.
On the way home, I try to figure out what exactly I’d been expecting from the Hawthorne tour, and just where my battlefield- and history museum-fueled expectations veered from reality. Was I hoping for a bigger monument? More plaques? Maybe some costumed reenactors portraying the band’s legendary first recording of “Surfin,’” or an animatronic Wilson family (press this button to hear patriarch Murry Wilson sing his classic song, “Two-Step, Side-Step”)? Maybe just one other person making the same pilgrimage we were?
In hindsight, it’s probably not surprising that Hawthorne seems ambivalent about its famous musical sons. After all, the Beach Boys have left one of the most confusing musical legacies in American pop culture. We remember them as the golden boys who sang about surfing, cars, and beautiful girls, as the innovators who recorded Pet Sounds and Smile, and as the cheesy aging rockers who danced with D.J. Tanner on Full House and rapped about recycling on Baywatch.
We remember the cute plaid Pendletons and striped button-down shirts, but we also remember the gold lame and ponytails. We think of Brian Wilson as a counter-cultural icon and musical genius, and as the damaged man who retreated to his bed in that Barenaked Ladies song. We try to reconcile all these aspects of the band, and we try to defend their strengths to people who only remember the embarrassing missteps.
Maybe we won’t know how to memorialize the Beach Boys until we really understand their legacy. And considering that the surviving members show no signs of slowing down, there’s probably still time to figure it all out.
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