A Private Beach Party in San Diego
With the Beach Boys
In my last post, I wrote about going to Miami, sailing with the Kiwi team who won the America’s Cup, and risking life and limb on an airboat in the Everglades, courtesy of IBM.
I’ve also written about how songs like In My Room by the Beach Boys resonated with me as a kid when after my parents broke up, I spent months being rotated from one household to another. One of those was the home of radio disk jockey Peter Hill, who had a great selection of records for me to listen to, while I read all of The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings books.
The IBM Sure One PoS terminal was proving to be very unreliable and I made the call that we would go to the next BPEC in San Diego to meet with the team who managed the product. We were getting loads of complaints about this system and unless they sorted it out, we wouldn’t be selling it anymore. We had high hopes for this product targeted at mid-range stores, as it filled a gap in stores with 5-15 checkouts and a large inventory file.
So our merry team from New Zealand and Aussie arrived at the airport in San Diego on a very hot day, to be met by the usual crowd of IBM hosts. We knew the drill and headed for a bus to take us to our Hotel.
It turned out we had to wait a while. San Diego didn’t have enough buses for the number of IBM Business Partners that had arrived, and there were several buses arriving from San Francisco.
Eventually, we boarded a bus and we were on our way. The only thing was, we seemed to be headed in the wrong direction. We arrived near the big Navy base and I had been questioning the driver because we passed street signs that seemed to be pointing where we wanted to go. The driver had no GPS and no idea where he was going and had to stop for directions. He said he had never been to San Diego before.
A 30-minute drive in the heat of the day turned into 2 hours. The hotel turned out to be not dissimilar to the one we enjoyed in Miami. It was right on the waterfront with a marina and some great walks.
One of the first things I did after checking in was to go for a walk. This took me to the nearest shopping mall. I loved visiting the cool gadget shops and may have picked up the odd item.
On my way, I was really surprised to see a huge number of homeless people foraging in curbside trash cans for scraps of food, which they ate on the spot, and collecting cans and bottles, I assume they were able to convert them into cash. In years of traveling to large cities, Tokyo was the only one that matched what I saw in San Diego in terms of the number of rough sleepers.
The conference was OK, nothing special. I met with the retail solutions team who assured me that there were fixes coming, and I assured them that if they didn’t come soon, we would be dropping the IBM agency for both New Zealand and Australia.
We had one night of organised entertainment, which I will never forget. It was to be a beach party. Again, I can’t find the photos I took on that trip which is a terrible shame. Hopefully, I can find them at some stage. I was using my new Casio digital camera, which took 640 x 480 pictures, so very grainy, but the content was great.
The beach party was an event celebrating California in the 60s and 70s. There was a hall with arcade games, pinball (I used to love pinball), and other games in one room. Another room had a surf machine, where you rode a surfboard in front of a green screen and had your photo taken, often in ungainly poses. There was a band playing in a bar in another room, and then finally:
The doors opened into a banquet hall, where there was food laid out, loads of cocktails, tropical fruits, and a stage. There wasn’t anything happening yet, so I went out to watch a few people on the surf machine, then the banquet hall started filling up.
An MC came to the stage and said, “Folks we have managed to get a great band together for your afternoon entertainment. I would like to introduce you to Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, and the rest of the band.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes, as they started playing Surfin USA, Surfer Girl, Good Vibrations, and more. I don’t know what it was, maybe people were out exploring the town, but I was in a room with about 100 people in it, watching the Beach Boys playing live!
Now anyone who knows me, knows I don’t like to dance. I joke that’s the reason why I play guitar so I can be on the stage instead of making a fool of myself on the dance floor.
I can tell you, that day I danced, by myself and covered all the corners of the dance floor, having the time of my life. This was CHOICE! as they say in NZ.
I think I’m going to have to tell this story in two parts because a lot more happened on that trip. The band was great, they built us up and then slowed down, with, you guessed it. In My Room.
Here’s a clip from 1995. The closest I could find of the Beach Boys lineup that year was at a beach party on Baywatch.
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Were you there? Leave a comment below.