Yes, it was me. I wrote it, and here’s why.
By the time I began to write California Pop in 2008, I had been a Southern California ex-pat for fifteen years and was finally beginning to feel a bit homesick.
And although fifteen years might sound like a long time for this yearning to kick in, there were a couple of mitigating factors that delayed the onset of that most natural response. One was that I never really imagined that our eastward sojourn (a career move for my wife) would be permanent.
But I had fallen victim to my own, outsized, sense of adventure. It’s a very common trait among native Southern Californians of my generation. I was willing to go along with this relocation, but always with the unspoken understanding that it was only a temporary displacement, and we would eventually circle back to where we belonged. And, over the years, several attempts were made to do just that; but the career momentum continued to pull even further eastward.
And then, somewhere around the ten year mark, my desire to return home began to wane. Through news stories, documentaries, and my own infrequent visits back to the Southland, it became painfully clear that the Southern California I knew was long gone.
Like the man (Thomas Wolfe) said, “you can’t go home again.” And this is especially true for us natives who were born and raised during the greatest era of the region’s history and find its current state much more difficult to accept than those coming new to the area for the first time. And so, in 2008, having recently worked on some documentary films, I thought it might be nice to make a short film on the Southland I used to know.
It was really just an excuse to indulge myself in some shameless sentimentalizing and nostalgia. And in what I thought would be only a small gesture, I could relive, or at least re-remember, the Southern California I experienced in the mid-20th century.
Of course, the moment I sat down to consider just how I might pull it off, I began to see the enormity of the undertaking. After all, the glorious southern California scene I grew up in did not begin at the moment of my birth. No, it evolved over centuries.
So it became obvious, if I was going to do a proper job of creating even a short film, I would have to do the kind of extensive research an author does for a non-fiction book. And with that realization, there seemed to be only one way to proceed. So not long after the notion occurred to me, I began the reading and writing for California Pop – the book, not the film.
So, like I said in the introduction, Its “a valentine from a loving expatriate born of an affection that can only be achieved through prolonged absence,” concluding with, “as a part of my ceaseless effort to make those wondrous Southern California summers last a lifetime, I have created this modest remembrance – California Pop. I hope you enjoy it.” And I truly hope you do. Thanks to all who took the Cpop plunge.
California Pop’s author, Dorian MacDougall, was born and raised in the suburbs of San Diego, California during the heady days of the Cpop era. A true dabbler of arts, he has, at various times, worked as an actor, a musician, a documentary filmmaker, and a writer for television, technical publications, and works of non-fiction. Between writing projects, he restores and repairs old guitars.
If you’re really interested in this subject and you’d like to do some further reading, then I would suggest you will find no better reading list than the California Pop Bibliography right here on this site.