The Beach Boys
Spent the last 45 years with a lost tribe in the
Amazon? In that case, here's a band you should know about ...
Brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson joined
forces with their cousin Mike Love, and David Marks, in the summer of
1961, releasing the first single, Surfin'. A minor hit,
it was overshadowed the following year by Surfin' Safari, the
epitome of the Beach Boys teen-dream confections, reflecting an age of
confidence in white middle America. In late 1963 Marks was pressured
out of the group by tyrannical patriarch Murray Wilson, and his place
was filled by erstwhile folk singer Al Jardine. Marks has managed to
live off his royalties since his dismissal, despite being in the band
for less than two years. The classic Beach Boys line-up was augmented
on tour by session men (including Glen Campbell).
The 45 rpm single was still the prime currency of
pop music in the early 60s and early Beach Boys albums tend to
be collections of great singles and so-so filler material. All
Summer Long (1964) was the first album to edge away from this
formula, and represented a quantum leap in terms of production. Brian
Wilson, a disciple of Phil Spector's 'Wall of Sound' technique, was
becoming more of a competitor than a follower.
Today (1965) and Summer Days (And
Summer Nights) (1965) consolidated the band's progress with a
number of sublime tracks distilling the essence of the California
dream - Help Me Rhonda and California Girls to name
but two. The increasing complexity of the material highlighted Brian's
increasing obsession with studio technique and sonic perfectionism, a
development paralleled by his move away from surfing and driving
towards deeper, more reflective topics.
 It
might have been drugs, family tensions or stage fright, but in 1964
the man who wrote In My Room decided that's just where he'd
stay.
Rumours swelled concerning Brian's mental health
and musical failure, but after more than a year of solitary living
(and a little LSD) he delivered the classic album Pet Sounds
and was crowned rock's insular genius.
God Only Knows (reportedly Paul
McCartney's favorite song) remains a gorgeous mood piece and the
whole album is possessed of a dreamy, ethereal quality. But its
intimacy sometimes gave way to melancholia and a sense of loss, such
as on Caroline No.
Pet Sounds was voted the greatest album
of all time by Mojo magazine in the UK. It would be a mistake,
however, to think that the band's new direction was universally
welcomed at the time. The conservatism of the group's fans even spread
to the band members themselves. Mike Love described Pet Sounds
as 'Brian's ego music', feeling that the self-obsessed tone and
complex sonic craftsmanship had their origins within Wilson's
increasing use of LSD.
Brian, meanwhile, sensed that things were
changing in the music industry, and felt eclipsed by the releases of
Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde and The
Beatles' Revolver in
August 1966. The result was a spiraling use of marijuana, pills
and LSD, and the onset of behavior that was eccentric, reclusive and
ultimately self-destructive. Amidst this atmosphere of frustration and
tension, Brian resolved to produce a studio masterpiece with his next
effort, provisionally entitled Dumb Angel, but later dubbed Smile.
However, he collapsed under the pressure of
expectation, compounded by an excessive drug habit. Smile, as
Brian conceived it, has never been released, although tantalizing glimpses of what might have been have surfaced through tracks from the
sessions appearing (often haphazardly) on subsequent Beach Boys
albums. Yet, as Brian's situation deteriorated largely out of sight of
the public, resurrection was at hand with a single recorded prior to
the Smile sessions.
Good Vibrations, released in the autumn
of 1966, was a metaphor for the heartbroken dreams of the 60s and,
like Sgt. Pepper, it neatly divided the decade between
innocence and experience. The product of six months' work, it was
co-written by Mike Love, who would soon become a key figure in the
song writing axis of the group. Good Vibrations cost £50,000
to record, reached Number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, and represented a
career peak. Although there would be further strong singles, such as Heroes
And Villains, which Wilson co-wrote with Van Dyke Parks, the
momentum was waning.
 They
seemed hopelessly un-hip to the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, and
after they cancelled a scheduled appearance at the Monterey Festival
in the summer of 1967 Jimi Hendrix introduced one of his songs with
the dismissive phrase, 'this ain't no surf music'.
Their image was dented by their unwillingness to
embrace music as a political tool, while their manufactured
studio-based recording techniques were out of fashion, as bands were
becoming increasingly assessed by their live, organic performances.
Carl Wilson also hit American headlines in 1967
when he turned down the 'invitation' that arrived in his mailbox from
Uncle Sam. It suggested he report to his local draft board for
induction into the armed forces. As this would inevitably mean a trip
to Vietnam after a spell in tough
military training, Carl decided to decline the offer. His decision set
in motion a five year legal battle that would eventually result in his
triumphant acquittal on charges of draft evasion.
Some of the Smile sessions were eventually
cobbled together and released as the indulgent Smiley Smile in
late 1967. The LP fared badly in the States, but the band
released a surprisingly fresh and cohesive set in early 1968 - the
organ-led, white-soul classic Wild Honey. It was the sound of a
band trying hard to please an audience that was no longer there, but
it outsold Smiley Smile. Love co-wrote the whole album, apart
from a spirited cover of Stevie Wonder's I Was Made To Love Her.
The follow-up LP, Friends (1968), was a
gentle, restrained and unremarkable set and 1969 brought 20/20,
a mish-mash of recent hit and miss singles and Smile sessions
which also featured a bizarre oddity; At this time Dennis Wilson was
hanging out with a young unknown musician named Charles Manson and Never
Learn Not To Love was apparently co-written with the soon-to-be
mass murderer.
After twenty albums in less than seven years,
they left Capitol for Warner Brothers, but Sunflower (1970) was
no improvement. Their subsequent revival and belated acceptance into
the rock fold was one of the period's more surprising reversals and
the impressive Surf's Up (1971) glanced back to the passing of
a simpler era in songs such as Disney Girls. The 1972 album, Carl
And The Passions (an early working name for the band) was a
wretched album, and The Beach Boys saga took another strange
turn when they decamped to Amsterdam to record Holland (1973).
The LP cost a fortune to make and is either 'a veritable shit-load of
meditative drivel' (Rolling Stone), or a strong, overlooked
gem.
By the early 80s, The Beach Boys' music, in
seemingly terminal decline, seemed tailor-made for the Reagan nation -
a country increasingly cocksure and bullish, with a craving for
patriotic nostalgia. For the curious, the Beach Boys Love You
album (from 1977) is probably the only post-Holland LP worthy
of inspection, with Brian producing all new songs for the first time
since Smiley Smile.
In December 1983, tragedy of a personal kind
darkened the saga of The Beach Boys. Dennis Wilson - a haggard and
bloated booze and cocaine binger, drowned in California.
He did leave behind a solo legacy, the excellent Pacific Ocean Blue,
released to modest acclaim and encouraging sales in 1977.
The story of The Beach Boys took on the
dimensions of a soap opera, incorporating tawdry business
squabbles, mental illness, creative inertia, death and, in Brian
Wilson especially, a descent into the dark corners of Californian
mythology. Brian quit the band to concentrate on his psychiatric
treatment with Dr Eugene Landy, whom he had first met in the mid-70s.
Some Beach Boys obsessives considered Landy a manipulative opportunist
who brainwashed Brian in order to share his glory. More objective
onlookers would reflect that Landy forced Wilson to work again and to
get a solo deal with Sire Records in 1987, which resulted in his best
new music for twenty years - 1988's Brian Wilson. Yet Sire
refused to release a second solo effort, Sweet Insanity, even
though it contained a duet with Bob Dylan on The Spirit Of Rock
And Roll.
The Beach Boys returned to the charts in 1988
with Kokomo, featured in the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail, but
it is widely felt that they exist in a sad, albeit lucrative, twilight
of self-parody. Mike Love's decision to work with the British dinosaur
rock outfit Status Quo, sleepwalking through Fun, Fun, Fun in
early 1996, was only exceeded when the whole band including Brian,
decamped to Nashville to play as backing band to a depressing set of
tired old country music farts like Willie Nelson.
Carl Wilson's death from cancer in February 1998
left the group bereft of its leader and cast their permanently-touring
career into doubt.
|
|
