Early Warning Signs

I was a lumpy, plain 15 year old girl in 1960s upper middle class suburb in Florida. My piano teacher had lived next door to Mike Love’s family in California while he and his cousins the Wilson brothers, were growing up. So when the Beach Boys took their Pet Sounds tour around Florida in 1968, they visited her, met my parents and they all hit it off. We hosted the after-show party for them at my house. Then, we went down to Miami and hung out with them after that show on a huge vintage wooden sailboat with captain and crew in Biscayne Bay, with the full moon reflected on the water. An amazing, pivotal experience...for me. The Boys were not so easily impressed though; they stayed below all night with the adults playing poker. 

The next day, we went deep sea fishing with them in the Keys, my dad hosting. Close quarters, and in bathing suits! And they pretty much ignored me the entire time. As if I didn’t exist, invisible. Now I was shy, but not able to disappear like that without the express wish of the ignorer. Only their substitute guitarist would talk to me, the guy who played Brian Wilson’s parts on the road, Bruce Johnston  a self-described “hired hand.”  But the rest were so self-absorbed that I had to admit, famous people were really not all that interesting. The hired hands, though, would sit and talk for hours about all kinds of great things. And I learned that at 15. 

My family’s association with the Beach Boys ended in financial losses, and a friend’s very tragic death.  I’ve never cared that much about actors or musicians after that experience. So it was a natural that I would someday be in the music business.