Vinyl Highway by Dee Dee Phelps

In a way, the pre-Beatles ’60s — the era featured in Vinyl Highway, Dee Dee Phelps’ new memoir — were rock ‘n’ roll’s awkward puberty years. A lot of ‘50s wildness had been symbolically tamed: Elvis was back from the Army and posting decidedly lower on parental threat meters; Chuck Berry blew lonesome renditions of “Johnny B. Goode” on his prison harmonica; Little Richard found his Heavenly Father while Jerry Lee Lewis found his heavenly cousin; and Buddy Holly…alright, you know all this. But payola too, remember, inflicted charges of wrongdoing onto rock ‘n’ roll’s office sector, and to such an extent that one can easily view the era as a collective tiptoe — a moment at which America’s still-robust youth industry chose to calm down and regroup.

What flourished instead of “Be-Bop-a-Lula”, cat clothes, and pompadours, then, were “Be My Baby”, coats-and-ties, and bouffants. Delicate, love-lorn teen idols ruled the day, as did girl groups, folk singing, song craft, and lush orchestration. Phil Spector built his wall of sound during these years and young professional songwriters like Carole King, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil built the Brill building. And, contrary to what some might have us believe, these are hardly reasons for framing an entire era as a dark age. The fun never stopped, really — it just kinda changed its tune.

One of my favorite aspects of the era is that notwithstanding its overtures to good behavior and respectability, it still spawned many a slab of exciting vinyl that sounded singularly crude and/or weird, often due to one of the following factors: 1) The record was — or may as well have been — recorded in someone’s kitchen (The Beach Boys, “Surfin’”); 2) The record makers sought to cloak their low budgets with inventive tricks (The Tornadoes, “Telstar”); or 3) the record makers, having otherwise healthy budgets, banged out sloppy B-sides, assuming that no one would hear them, anyway.

This was the case, in fact, with Dick and Dee Dee’s fabulous “The Mountain’s High”. Tossed off as the flipside for a carefully groomed ballad called “I Want Someone”, it accidentally caught fire at San Francisco station KYA and shot all the way up to Billboard’s #2 slot in 1961.

“The Mountain’s High” epitomizes my own romanticized vision of those lost years. The overdubbed, falsetto voices sound like faraway ghosts while the drums crash like millions of little metal wheels on wooden roller rink floors gone by. Surely all the characters in The Incredibly Strange Creatures and Carnival of Souls had this song crackling away on their car radios. Phelps, born Mary Sperling, begins her narrative, in fact, depicting herself hearing that song, which she’d done for giggles with friend Dick St. John, on the radio for the first time while stuck in the backseat of her family station wagon.

She and her shocked family would hear it seemingly non-stop between hometown LA and Seattle. The surprise smash hit turned her teenage life upside down in a snap, and Vinyl Highway covers her ensuing celebrity decade in which the duo tours the US extensively (including an exhausting summer with the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars Tour), appears regularly on TV’s Shindig, and attempts, in vain, to record songs that could scale the same heights as their debut.

This isn’t the stuff of best sellers, but it is great fun, especially for record-happy types like myself. Among the goodies for these readers: A lively view of the pandemonium Gary U.S. Bonds could stir up, even in the race-conscious South; a simmering, unrequited mutual attraction between Bonds and Phelps; high school assembly gigs with the Beach Boys, who at first couldn’t handle anything that wasn’t in the key of C; unsurprising (and unsuccessful) attempts by Beach Boy Dennis to seduce Dee Dee; a cramped sedan ride across the US with Jan and Dean; the story of Dick and Dee Dee’s collaboration with the Rolling Stones; and plenty of behind the scenes glimpses of the duo’s dealings with labels, producers and management (including workaholic manager/promoter Bill Lee, who Phelps would eventually marry).

Aspects of Vinyl Highway that make it of possible interest to the general reader are Phelps’ vivid portrayals of the baseball bat-wielding, Freedom Rider-haunted South, as well as the all-pervasive theme of a young girl trying to keep her head and self-respect in such a tumultuous decade. Fortunately for her, if not for fans of steamy tell-alls, she seems to pull it off.

There are a couple of elephants dancing the twist in this room. One is the duo’s peculiar vocal sound, which features Dick St. John’s quavering vibrato handling the main melody, and then overdubbed in falsetto. Sandwiched in between are Dee Dee’s harmonies, which never figure prominently on any of their hits. While the early ’60 were certainly a golden age for male falsetto, with acts like the 4 Seasons, the Beach Boys, Lou Christie and the Newbeats all reaching memorably for the high notes, you can’t help but wonder how much, especially in Dee Dee’s view, this vocal approach might have been a help or hindrance to the group’s long term success.

And then there’s the very character of St. John who — notwithstanding what he and Dee Dee lead us to believe in their “Love is a Once in a Lifetime Thing” — was of zero romantic interest to her from day one (and vice versa, apparently). Presented here as an almost maniacally career-driven, loose cannon who speaks in exclamation points and who lives with his mom, one feels that there’s quite a bit more to St. John’s story, for better or worse, than what she’s giving us.

The same goes for Phelps herself, who leaves out just a tad bit too much personal background, in my view. How did her friends and family, including her mysterious sisters, for example, really deal with her sudden stardom? How have her celebrity years affected the rest of her life? I kept wondering things like this to such an extent that her announcement at the end of the book that she’s got a sequel in the works hit me with a measure of relief. Shrewd one, that Dee Dee.