What to Make of Rod McKuen?

> As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew.

That’s interesting.

> In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written.

Tough lot for a poet. Why is it so natural that he resonated with late 60’s/early 70’s American culture? As a child of the 80’s, that period will always be the weird era of the before time, when everything apparently sucked so much that it had to be replaced by anything at all as soon as possible, like an avocado green / harvest gold kitchen decor in a newly purchased house.

""" but there was a time when, as a profile that appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” """

I guess that shows what barbarians we were, and may have something to do with my growing up to shop at Tower Records during daylight hours.

In the early 1970s, some English graduate students apparently would make a point of disparaging McKuen to their intro to literature classes. The one McKuen fan I knew did not learn to prefer Eliot and Yeats, but she did learn to resent English grad students. (She was a musician, and I'm not sure what she'd have said had I spoken up for Mantovani.)

McKuen trivia: at some point not that long ago (2010?) he was the president of the American Guild of Variety Artists, a small union.