Column: Tales from Exit 22

The Beach Boys are coming!

The news of their approach brought back memories of bygone days when the Beach Boys sang of a world unfamiliar to me. They were southern California surfers. I was a southern Minnesota farm boy. We didn’t have much in common. Surfing? Where would I surf? I suppose I could have taken my mother’s ironing board to the sewage ponds but it was difficult to catch a wave there. Besides, to me a wave was something done by a hand. The Beach Boys sang of California girls. Those girls sounded nice, but I was much more interested in Minnesota girls.

The Beach Boys hung out at beaches. I was familiar with only two beaches — one at St. Olaf Lake and the other at Beaver Lake. There were no surfers at either. The closest thing to a surfer we had was a farmer who rented a rowboat at St. Olaf Lake and claimed to be a serf working for the man.

The lyrics to “In My Room,” one of the Beach Boys’ hits, went something like this, “There’s a world where I can go. And tell my secrets to. In my room. In my room. In this world I lock out. All my worries and my fears. In my room. In my room.”

Who says there hasn’t been any good poetry written since Yeats died?

It was during a part of my life when things took their own sweet time. It was when seeing an out-of-state license plate (other than Iowa or Wisconsin) on a car was reason for wonderment. I’d finish the chores, inhale supper and head to my upstairs bedroom in our elderly farmhouse. It had the requisite “Keep out” sign on the door. My room was a place where I could be myself — whoever that was.

I never had to adjust the temperature in my room. There was no thermostat. It was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. I couldn’t change that.

When dance fever hit, I remained healthy. I had no stereo that I could play loud enough to kill the neighbor’s marigolds. That was a setback, but I made do.

Cradled in the comfort of the familiar, I grabbed reading material from a stack of books. Before I read a single sentence, I flipped on the radio. It was an old, battered AM radio the color of decaying peaches.

The night sky filled with radio waves. I sat alone in my room and listened to radio stations doing countdowns of the top 40 songs. The hits just kept on coming.

I listened to WDGY during the daytime but I dialed in the 50,000-watt powerhouses at night. KAAY (mighty 1090) out of Little Rock, KOMA (1520 on the dial) located in Oklahoma City, and WLS (890) in Chicago kept me company. Dick Biondi of WLS is credited as being the first in the US to air a Beatles song when he played “Please Please Me” in 1963.

I did not know Biondi or the other voices, but I gave them my ear because, in a way, they were my friends, even if they didn’t know it. Disc jockeys played records, told me how to be cool, and said things like, “I’m playing stacks and stacks of groovy wax.” They said “groovy” a lot, which I thought was groovy.

My radio had pictures. They were in my mind. With my imagination carried on the wings of radio, I could go anywhere.

I listened to as much music as I could stand. Sometimes the Beach Boys provided it. They sang of surfing, cars and romance. They had 36 top 40 hits and 56 top 100 hits.

The Beach Boys sang tunes like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you don’t worry baby and help me Rhonda, Barbara Ann, California girls, and Sloop John B to have fun, fun, fun while I drive my little deuce coupe with a 409 with good vibrations as I get around Kokomo on a surfin’ safari as I try to be true to your school and wonder why do fools fall in love, do you love me Surfer Girl, and do you wanna dance?”

The Beach Boys are not coming to my room. Where would I put them? Where would I put the beach? They are coming to the fair.

I can’t decide whether to see the Beach Boys in person or to listen to them on an old AM radio in my room.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.