I was reading one of those great Continuum 33 1/3 CD-size books on great LPs, this one on Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle, and I was struck by the opening: “Anyone unlucky enough not to have been aged between 14 and 30 during 1966-67 will never know the excitement of those years in popular culture. A sunny optimism permeated everything and possibilities seemed limitless.”

The quote is actually from Ian MacDonald’s extraordinary Beatles book, Revolution in the Head, but when I read it, it made me see why in my own novels I find them often set in years that overlap 1966-67, witness Meet the Annas, Look at Flower, and the forthcoming Surf Music Rules.

Surf Music Rules is the reason I was checking out the Van Dyke Parks book. My novel is an epic tale of the L.A. music scene from th

e surf music days of 1961–2 to 1968, when my hero, Nick Berry, dies on the beach in Mexico from a heroin overdose. The novel’s completed; publication should be announced soon.

In his life, Nick Berry passes through that magical time of ’66–67, and I realized that one of the reasons I write my musical fictions is to capture that magic and make it present and rich for all readers, especially those who weren’t there. I was myself 15 and 16 then, and as I recall, possibilities did seem limitless … as possibilities always should.