The Beach Boys, Wow! Remember hanging out at the beach in the summertime, driving around in the car stopping at the McDonald's to see who was there, and the Beach Boys putting it all together and laying it out for us on the radio? "Surfin U.S.A." "fun, Pun, Fun." "Little Deuce Coupe." "Shut Down." Arid Ian and Dean with t'Surf Vity" (Co-authored by Beach. Boy Brian Wilson)?

J don't. I went to biglischódl~httheH North Shore super suburbs of Chicago in the early Sixities) and I didn t think about the Beach &iys much They were like the Kingston Inc and I lumped them all together with nerythitig else that was happening that I couldn t or didn't want to reltte to I was in the ab :.enated intellectual category -~ sue ce~sfuI in the classroom, artistic and .gexual privately,, and freakin gout about~ anti Freedom Rider jokes in the hall way I anticipated something better in the future - a world of big cities, beat niks, radicals neurotics and mteJJee~ 2:~L4.. or Woody .Guthrie in Puatbowl .::c.~uahoma.

The Beach Boys sang about dates, school sports, cars and the beach, and I wasn't a part of any of those things when I: graduated in 1963. The beach was probably the place to go as much in Illinois then as in Southern California, just harder to find~ Getting a dark tan was an acheivernent many worked towards, and not getdng one probable either meant you had to work during the summer or stayed indoors reading and watchjng television, I knew where the beach was and I avoided it. I was off $o~4øhere else probably learnmg the riles of folk music~purisrn.

And~hini ftnished (escaped from") high sd~o1 and made t into a super intellectual super neurotic snobby col le~ with real. live socialists, the most authentIc folk festival in the country dm1 netvous breakdowns everywhere Ed made it~ and after awhile so what" It just wasn t panning out like I d P!~ it. wau1i~

of 5 J was In My: Room at Hitthco~k Flail. staring QU the window or .t~Ag tostudy with the radio on in. the ba~k~round. (If .1 studied hard enough I would get good enough grades to get into something called General Studies in the Flumani ties, which was supposed to be a lucky break.) The FM. side (classical-folk) was. broken, so.! was listening to AM. Top forty WLS~

Aiid then a Beach Boys song came on; I don't remember now what, and a deja-vu mystical self-identity shock of recognition pop revelation stun. PHYSICAL CHILLS Up And Down My Body! Physical Chills!

The Beach Boys sounded like me. That's what I sounded like. That was me. And it felt and sounded good.

Soon to come were various public and private changes. My first love affair and my very own nervous breakdown, The beginnings, of the Vietnam draft quota surge, and friends worrying about Canada/jail/not graduating/the. Arrny/ death. Electric Dylan~ "Satisfaction." "Tracks `Of My Tears," "Since I Lost My Baby. Everybody buying Rubber Soul. Black power. Revolver. Tom Wolfe Journalism. Whites smoking pot.

That year we skipped the Folk Festival and went to see some Andy Warhol movies instead. A friend commented about the woman I was going with, “I don’t know what’s happened to —, she used to buy Bach and now she’s buying records by the Zombies.”

One night we were browsing in Sears and I saw the latest Beach Boys record — Beach Boys Party — on sale and decided to buy it. The pop thing was working pretty well and I was still intrigued by my experience from the previous Spring, so I reasoned that I might like the record.

I didn’t. Although a big seller (maybe even their last gold record) I couldn’t relate to it at all, except for its big single “Barbara Ann.” It was mainly other people’s hits (from an earlier rock and roll era which us snobs-turned-pop-fans didn’t like) and exploited the novelty of a “live” sound at the expense of typical Beach Boys studio orchestration heaviness. And it was also from the era when the Beach Boys did put-down versions of their earlier car hits. Old rock classics and A1 Jardine singing “The Times They Are A-Changin” just wasn’t where I was at. Then.

But in the back of my mind I was still fascinated with the Beach Boys, even with this album I couldn’t stand. It had little tear out pictures of the Guys Havin Fun At The Beach With Their Girlfriends that I put up on my wall. There I was, alienated from All That -real people and experiences I could remember from high school — trying to edge my way into some sort of decadence/revolt/escape scene; and there were the Beach Boys on my wall, taking a stance right in the middle of It. And not even seeming to care that maybe they were slightly square. Out there in regular America-Suburban-White-Teenage culture, making songs that, even if you tried to think were horrible, you had to admit stuck in your mind. Like “Fun, Fun, Fun,” or “Shutdown.”

Songs that even believe it or not, when I was stoned and listening to the radio, weren’t so simple and revealed a high, hidden, ripping edge up there in the polyphony. A yearning/whining out of their/mine Amerikan vortex. The same alienation that hit me in such a way that it made me flee the whole scene; and there was the scene, the pleasures and the alienation all in one song or sound. What was going on?

In future years when someone would ask me why I liked the Beach Boys so much, my answer would be something about being from the suburbs and hating it and trying to escape it and then realizing that it was better to admit where you were from than to bullshit that you were something else. And how, when I tried to play out my high school fantasies in college, I saw them turn into prisons too.

Later years extended this answer, particularly when I became more political. The Beach Boys came to represent not just what I’d missed in high school, but the essence of white youth culture. School work was alienating, so that’s why they didn’t sing about it. Teenage social culture was an anti-authoritarian, latently revolutionary leisure time world, free of parents, teachers, and other adult authorities. Cars were a spontaneous personal mastery over a part of modern technology. If not the means of production, then the means of transportation in the meantime.

And the Beach Boys somehow hung in there with it all — unlike myself — and so were able to form all of it into real good Rock and Roll songs. You might even call it Art.

When I moved to New York City in 67-8 and started buying old and new Beach Boys albums for real, this took another twist. Maybe the Beach Boys represented my best link with Midwestern culture; Los Angeles being an extension of the Midwest just as San Francisco is the extension of the Eastern Seaboard. They pronounced their big hit “I Git Around,” the same as me. (Although this is complicated by the fact that right now the Beach Boys are more popular in New York than in L.A.)

Or maybe it’s because we were both Protestants. Or middle-class in our culture references. Or maybe I became a Beach Boys fan when they were unpopular because I had been raised in a little Protestant denomination and was more comfortable with a minority cultural identity. And so on.

But I’ve been a Beach Boys fan for so long, and they’ve been around for so long, through so many of my own changes, that it’s hard to remember anymore exactly why I am a fan. Or when I play “Shut Down,” whether it reminds me of high school, the summer I heard it when I was working at a camp, the Tollroad to Chicago, or hearing it and being reminded of high school, a party two years ago, driving my car last Spring, or dancing in the kitchen this morning.

Like a lot of people, I assumed that the Beach Boys started recording when I entered high school, at the very beginning of the Sixties. As a matter of fact, their first album (Surfin Safari) was released in December of 1962, my last year of high school. That makes them just barely pre-Beatles.

So maybe they don’t even really represent the emergence of car or surfing culture in L.A.; maybe those were all just already constructed teen craze metaphors they could utilize for their songs. Maybe they really represented the soon-to-emerge studio rock culture of L.A., with Brian as the first producerwriter-singer-artist. Which might make them too old to be heavy in the pop music capitol of the world they helped create. I don’t know.

Whatever it all really signified for music or me, I know I was zapped in my deepest zapping place that night in ‘65. Beyond or besides all the sociological shit, I just plain craved that sound.

It was revealed to me that night that I would become a Beach Boys fanatic as much as it was revealed to me that I was forced into a false culture choice in high school.

The San Diego Zoo and Japan

Another fan, who’s dug the Beach Boys since “Be True To Your School,” said that he was freaked out when he first saw the Pet Sounds album cover ‘cause he was worried that they had turned into hippies. But I was coming out of the snob bag of my college and recent past as a folk music moralist. I didn’t think the album cover was hip enough, and was put off by the record’s "commercial sound.” Meaning the strings, echo chambers, layers and bits of instrumentation and vocal overdubs. Which for me at the time meant corruption. (Of what? It’s hard to remember.) Furthermore, unlike Pop but “artistic” songs like “Yesterday” or “Eleanor Rigby,” stirred in with the “beauty” of Pet Sounds were Hawaiian guitars, ukeleles, farting tubas, dowahs, Halloween noisemakers and even a barking dog. Real America!

But when I got past my hang-ups (which included, at first, not being able to buy it, and then not being able to play it) I discovered that this record was right where I was at myself. No complex emotional problem here of liking the song but just not being into Cars, Surfin, Football or Proms; the Beach Boys were as far out of high school as I was. And “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” or “Caroline No” or maybe “I Know There’s An Answer” gave me the same jolt as “For No One” did on Revolver. Like “Holy Shit, this isn’t just good Pop music, it’s coming directly out of my experiences.” Maybe even more relevant than Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and was it Catcher In The Rye?!

The music no longer had any direct teenage connotations, but it sure had middle-class, Southern California, American 1960’s connotations. And that’s what had put me off so much to start with.

But if I kept finding it so moving and reassuring — even on acid (which was a big deal then) — something was fucked-up about my point of view.

What I’d thought was so middle-class and commercial couldn’t be that bad if it produced something I liked so much. Maybe, rather than being the big-business controlled aesthetic enemy of “working class” folk culture as I had once thought, Middle-Class in this case meant the populist art expressions of my own real life. Battling with the European-aristocratic upward mobile cultural tastes that college was trying to teach me. Or the elitist avant-garde beatnikism I had longed to learn.

So all right. I realized that it made Pet Sounds even better, because then I felt some sort of ethnic?-class?regional? personal? validation when I listened to it. There was Brian Wilson, taking my-our tender teenage feelings and older confusions-alienations and all sorts of different indigenous musical ideas, from sentimental to vulgar, and MAKING ALL THAT SHIT SWING.

It’s my favorite album, believe me. Still_

I was conscious that the Beach Boys and I didn't seem to be in the same place. I didn’t live high school over and come out someone else. Or move to L.A. or learn to surf, or get into the record biz. And when I got into my revolutionary phase, the Beach Boys didn’t appear to make a correlated move; unlike Peter Townshend, who said positive things about youth culture, or the Grateful Dead, who played free benefits, or the Airplane, who used words like “Motherfucker” and “revolution” on one album.

But I didn’t mind.

As I put it together, we had different jobs in the cosmic plan. Mine was to go through abrupt changes, more closely paralleled in the pop aristocracy by someone like Dylan, whose power came from what he pretended and the identities he tried on. My knowledge was supposed to come from the view I got from the distance of my alienation. Tlie Beach Boys’ job was to be from Hawthorne, California and become famous and just take that whole scene as far as it would go. I was supposed to be good at reading Ramparts and knowing that Ho Chi Minh should win. And they were supposed to be good at making magical transcendent songs about cars and whatever else followed. Sometimes we would intersect, like the fact that we both went to high school, or that time in my room, or that we both became hippies. And sometimes we wouldn’t, like when they cracked a weird suburban joke at a Gallic Park concert one summer like “Oh yea, Watts, it’s just a riot ha ha” — or the extremes of their good vibes and interest in the Maharishi.

So it did blow my mind when 1 found out they’d played — the first act, yet — at Mayday, a Movement gig that supposedly more virtuous groups like the Airplane and the Dead had shied away from. I knew it was a moment of cosmic rock fan astrology revelation, signifying important alterations in me, the Beach Boys, the U.S.A., Rock and Roll and the War in Vietnam.

Or when, at their March concerts in New York City, they appeared with two new Beach Boys: Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplan, formerly of a Beach Boys-produced group from South Africa called Flame. And with a woman piano player in the band, which inside sources report may have been a consciously anti-male chauvinism move.

But unlike the implications of the promotion Warner/Reprise has been using since the band signed with them (You might think the Beach Boys are still into surfing music, but they're actually profound and committed and hip, they’ve got long; hair, they jammed with the Dead, Bob Dylan likes them, they played at Mayday and a benefit for the Berrigans) or the feelings of the new mass audience it was designed to reach, it’s never been crucial to me that the Beach Boys were “hip,” “committed,” or “profound.”

As it turns out, maybe, in fact, they even have the “best politics” of any supergroup. If true, I’ve got to admit that it’s gratifying and reassuring. But whether they do or not, I always knew they had latched onto something heavy from the beginning.

A new song like Bruce Johnston’s “Tears in the Morning” can rattle my inside around by connecting with my own experiences in the most severe and beautiful way. But so can something as old as “Spirit of America,” from their Little Deuce Coupe album, released in late 1963.

First it’s just a good song about the record-breaking jet-powered car of the same name (and what a name!) driven by Craig Breedlove. And then it’s a pretty good artistic-mythological layout of American technological fascinations. With an unbelievable singing job.

Religious people sometimes use the word “apprehend” to describe religious understanding. A level of grasping something that you miss with just emotional or rational “comprehension.” And for me I do believe something happens so heavy with “Spirit of America” that the song helps me apprehend heavies about life as I’ve lived it out. Just the other night I got drunk and put it on and almost started to cry.

Continued on page 77.

Continued from page 38.

Or maybe it was just because I went to high school in the suburbs and was from the midwest and was touched by a plastic freeway Chuck Berry Duane Eddy Four Freshman lonely teenager hand of God.

Years of Abuse

The first time I went to see the Beach Boys live was at the Fillmore East in 1968, I think. I almost made it to a concert in Chicago once, but pretended to think it wasn’t that important. And there was a concert with the Maharishi in 1967 in New York but I missed that too. Lucky for me. Someone who went said there were about 50 people in the audience and no concert. The Maharishi and the Beach Boys cancelled each others audiences it would seem. Fifty people and no concert, that’s just what I’d been led to believe the Beach Boys live would be like.

Let me quote from a full page editorial in the third issue of Rolling Stone by Editor Jann Wenner himself. December 14, 1967

How they do it is anybody’s guess, but I recall a conversation in the back of the Avalon Ballroom about what the Beatles might do after Sgt. Pepper’s. Someone suggested that they would set the Bible to music. “Ah no,’’ was the reply, “They’ll write their own.” And the reply to that was that if we had just come up with the idea the Beatles would be doing something well beyond that. ..

Unfortunately for the Beach Boys and leader Brian Wilson in particular, they won a British poll two years ago which ranked them one ahead of the Beatles ... In person the Beach Boys are just a totally disappointing group .. . The Beach Boys are just one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung Up in trying to catch the Beatles. It is a pointless pursuit... The Beatles have introduced to rock and roll all the new ideas.

Or what about this?

The Beach Boys do not offer a clear conception of the nature of man like, * say, the Stones, nor like the Beatles, true images of themselves, but rather a composite image of good times and vibrations that turn out to be written in clear musical concepts.

That shit, written by someone named Michael Ross, appears on a BEACH BOYS ALBUM ITSELF - called Dance, Dance, Dance — a quickie repackage of The Beach Boys Today minus two songs.

It’s an actual fact that people booed when the appearance of the Beach Boys at the Fillmore was mentioned on preceding weekends. And even booed at the concert. And that the review in the Villaga Voice called it, “the weekend the Fillmore sold out.”

I have read in different places, and even heard from the Beach Boys themselves in between songs at concerts that Capitol records really fucked them over starting with Pet Sounds. That when their sound changed Capitol refused to go along with it Wanting what they thought was the sure fire success of the surf-car sound. Even though Pet Sounds contained three hit singles and was followed by “Good Vibrations” — their only number one nationwide hit. I don’t know what forms Capitol’s hostility took, although there was a lawsuit that lasted for years and just ended it looks like, with the Beach Boys getting control of all their recent albums starting with Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds is going to be reissued with their new studio album, Carl and the Passions which may even be out when this article is published. And the long discussed but never released Smile (including the “Fire” tapes, which haven’t been destroyed according to Carl — esoterica here for all true fans) is supposed to come out this year. The latest plans are to keep releasing one of the five old albums as a sort of free bonus with each new album that comes out.

Starting with Pet Sounds it did look like the only contribution Capitol made was to repackage old hits in various different new albums. Maybe the right promotion could have made the Beach Boys popular — the Warner/ Reprise “see how hip they are” approach has definitely helped the group.

But I can’t believe that the Beach Boys’ obscurity was just due to lack of good promotion. These were the years when I really go into them. And as you can see from the quotes above, my defensiveness as a Beach Boys’ fan wasn’t just caused by my own hang-ups and the absence of the right ads.

The meaning of What’s hip changes and it’s hard to remember exactly what was hip. I must admit I placed myself in a milieu where it mattered to some extent. But whatever it was, the Beach Boys weren’t it, with one exception, as we will see later.

I’ve liked the Beach Boys for so long that I’ve even written this article before, in 1969. (Although it was never published back then.) When I wrote it then I said,

The problem with the Beach Boys is that their singing comes from a place seemingly inaccessible to the sensibilities that Pop 1969 uses to absorb the world.

They aren’t pop like the Mamas and Papas, digging but aloof from everyday vinyl S. California life and the good old 50s Rock and Roll. Not into a love /hate thing with it like Frank Zappa or transforming themselves in its image like the Who.

They were back there in it all as part of their public career.

Neither imitation black (like Canned Heat) or imitation white (like the recent Byrds) but apparently sincere and straight out.

You couldn’t/can’t dig them as period piece. Like playing your old Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers records. Remembering the old days.

Nor as something current but vulgar and distant.

No. The Beach Boys are/were right here.

But never really like the Beatles. Or Bob Dylan. Never creating and leading the avant-garde or counter avant-garde rock scene.

Dated huh?

Times change. The Mamas and the Papas are a part of the past and the Beach Boys are popular again.

But back then the Beach Boys were corny, and too directly connected with what seemed like the unhip past. Foolishly tripping up trying to catch the Beatles at the task of recording a musical Bible. And all of it without a clear conception of the nature of man! Playing music that didn’t have enough balls.

That was when being raunchy was good, and hostility towards “chicks” who were “uptight*’ wasn’t a cliche. Of course, this Rock and Roll virtue started getting undermined when the Women’s Liberation Movement pointed out that it was sexist.

But let’s not underestimate what it meant back then. For instance: although it is perhaps embarassing and humiliating to recall now, I can remember listening to “Busy Doin’ Nothing” on Friends (released July ‘68) and being embarassed. Although I was all alone when I listened to Friends, since nobody liked it. Not even my friends. And I was embarassed because at a certain point Brian’s voice sounded so sincere, kind, soft, and affectionate that I thought maybe he sounded, well, uh gay. Right.

It really happened. {« v

For a Beach Boys fan in his formative stages the whole thing was a trauma, believe me. In fact, it might have even been that my fanaticism was created as a defense against all that hostility. And that it put me in the position to think that 1 had a sort of special private relationship as a fan with the Beach Boys. That their music had a special secret parallel to my own life. How else could you explain enjoying a group that was so disliked?

When I went to the concert at the Fillmore I was shocked to find that the Beach Boys were as good or better than I had hoped. Never will I forget a party that I attended the next night, where elated, drunk and stoned in a moment of exuberance I sneezed a mouthful of wine on everyone in reach. Misdirected, I’ll admit, but it definitely meant “fuck you everybody the Beach Boys are good afterall” to me.

With experiences like those, you can see how us Beach Boys fans might be a little confused about their developed mass appeal. We had our own thing going back then, while the record buying public went elsewhere. For one thing, tickets to conerts were much easier to buy back then. And Beach Boys music wasn’t suffering at all.

After Wild Honey, which sold fairly well, and before Sunflower, which at least got a lot of good reviews, came their two most ignored albums. 20/20 was one of my favorite albums for the longest time. It sounded like it had something on it from every Beach Boys musical era and direction. As a matter of fact, I’ve even heard it was made up of a variety of tracks that were never used for other albums. It was their last album for Capitol and had their last two hit singles, “Do It Again” and “I Can Hear Music.”

I don’t play it much at the moment, but I play the other one — Friends — all the time. It is reported to be Brian’s favorite album, too, and as a fellow fan says, “It’s easy to listen to.”

It was so unpopular, or just obscure, when it came out that I played it very little myself. When I started playing it again about a year ago, I noticed it looked almost new, I had used it so little. But it’s going to get another chance as a reissue. I’ll buy it again.

[To be continued.]