Caine's Blog: Volume 1, Number 1, Page 1 of ESQ/ A LOOK BACK

NOTE: This piece, very blandly titled, appeared as the lead article in the very first issue of Endless Summer Quarterly, August 1987. I've copied it, with only a few changes, from the original dot-matrix printing off a word-processor called Bank Street Writer.

THE BEACH BOYS

No one who was in his teens in 1963 can forget the sonic whirlwind of "Surfin' USA." It was as if Chuck Berry's classic rocker, "Sweet Little Sixteen," had been magically transformed from black-and-white to Technicolor. Its polished blend of voices became the trademark sound of the Beach Boys: the sweet falsetto lead of Brian Wilson perched atop the textured harmonies of brothers Carl and Dennis, along with the versatile Al Jardine in the middle ranges, all rounded out by the nasal whine of cousin Mike Love on the fast leads and bass parts. Like no other band before or since, they made us feel like singing along.

For the suburban Sixties generation, they symbolized ourselves as we dreamed we should be, suntanned and barefoot in white Levis and Pendleton shirt, driving our GTO convertibles to the beach where there were "two girls for every boy." They enacted and ennobled our search for kicks in their universe of "Fun, Fun, Fun," but perhaps even more significantly, they tapped the teenage heart with ballads of romantic longing and loss in such as "Surfer Girl" and "Don't Worry, Baby." The Beach Boys were not just cousins, friends and brothers to themselves; they were also our own brothers in fantasy. Always optimistic, yet equally vulnerable, they were our innocence.

Now they are our lost innocence. Superseded in the Top 40 in the late Sixties, first by the British Invasion and soon after by San Francisco's psychedelic explosion, the Beach Boys quickly became not only passé, but outcasts in the brave new world of pop music. America largely rejected the Beach Boys as an unhip relic of our now-despised middle-class roots. In the curious symbiosis between the American public and its show-business idols, to be sure, we often perform the ritual of killing our gods. The extraordinary thing is that the Beach Boys managed their own resurrection, mounting two major comebacks in the Seventies and surviving the dilemmas of commerce, art, drugs, and even death, to emerge in the Eighties as America's premier nostalgia act. Their sheer longevity, over a quarter century of rock and roll history, sets them apart from the usual run of superstars and places them among the very short list of immortals of American show business.

David Leaf's The Beach Boys and the California Myth (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978; revised edition Courage Books, 1985) was the first serious attempt to unravel the group's tangled history. Exploring the dark side behind the band's sunny image, Leaf's work drew upon a thorough review of periodical literature scattered over more than a decade, in addition to the author's own interviews of participants, friends, and hangers-on.

At the center of Leaf's story is Brian Wilson, affectionately portrayed as a seemingly ordinary teenager who fell in love with the harmonies of the Four Freshmen and proceeded to translate them into the rock and roll idiom of the early Sixties. Driven by their jealous and demanding father Murry Wilson, a small businessman and unsuccessful songwriter, the Wilson brothers grew up in suburban Hawthorne, California. Brian, in particular, found refuge in the imaginary teen paradise of the California dream. Beginning with the Beach Boys' first local success in 1961, Murry took over the management of the group and propelled them to national stardom by securing a contract with Capitol Records the following year.

Their string of hits, beginning with "Surfin' Safari," continued unabated through 1966, with the appearance of Brian's magnum opus, Pet Sounds. Seconding and carrying to new heights the "Wall of Sound" conceived by Brian's mentor, Phil Spector, the album set standards of writing, performance, and production still unmatched in pop music. In the formal sense, the album broke new ground as a loose narrative unified thematically with an avalanche of musical effects, discovering Brian's "pet sounds" in everything from string quartets to bicycle bells. Signalling, in effect, the emotional boundaries of its creator's adulthood, Pet Sounds combined words and music in a manner somehow reminiscent of an earlier epoch of popular music; it expressed the questing, anxious, and uncertain private side of a generation that was beginning to prefer the public exhortations of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Paradoxically, while Pet Sounds signified the attainment of a new musical plateau for the group, it also forecast dramatically the end of their popularity.

At the same time, this chapter of the Beach Boys' story is that of Brian's prolonged creative breakdown. In December 1964, overwhelmed by his professional and family responsibilities, Brian suffered an emotional collapse and began his twelve-year separation from the rest of the band. He had worked at a backbreaking pace for three years, writing, teaching the group, arranging, and above all producing records (some eight LPs of Beach Boys material for Capitol, four of them in 1964 alone, not to mention a half-dozen "outside" projects.)

Henceforth Brian would be the phantom Beach Boy, nearly always a presence, to one degree or another, in their recorded sound, but no longer a member of the touring band seen by the public. When, in 1965, Bruce Johnston replaced him on the road, Brian was freed to create recordings that were, and still are, nothing short of astonishing in their imaginative range and daring combinations of timbre, rhythm, and melody. Brian, inspired by and contributing mightily to the pop explosion of the mid-Sixties, set out to redefine the art of music. "Good Vibrations," released in the fall of 1966, was to be the Beach Boys' first and only million-selling single and their entry into something new: the notion, initiated by a fledgeling rock critical establishment, that contemporary pop music could stand as legitimate art.

Encouraged by the worldwide success of the record, Brian put his heart and soul into a new project, a body of work to change forever the standards by which pop music is judged. After nearly a year of unprecedented experimentation in the studio, the next album, which was to have been titled Smile, sadly disintegrated under the pressures of group bickering, Brian's LSD intake, and a lawsuit against Capitol Records. Never released, Smile has become perhaps the most celebrated and sought-after "lost" album in rock history and the single most significant turning point in the Beach Boys' career.

In The Beach Boys (Ballantine Books, 1979), Byron Preiss gives the most complete and detailed account of the musical content of Smile. Such unfinished masterpieces as the breathtaking "Can't Wait Too Long," "Do You Like Worms?" (evoking the temporal span of America from Plymouth Rock to Hanalei), a four-part "Elements"suite of sometimes frightening mimetic power, and a superior, almost beatific rendition of "Wonderful," were recorded but never released. Other material, released piecemeal over the next six years, provides a captivating listening experience in itself but lacks the cohesion and sometimes the production values implicit in Brian's original concept. Excepting the handful of fanatics who have managed to obtain bootlegged copies of the abandoned studio tapes, the public could henceforth have only fitful and sporadic glimpses of the musical vistas surveyed by Brian Wilson in 1966.

At the age of twenty-four, Brian now understood the meaning of pop music success. The golden boy of American music, he had become a commodity in the mass entertainment market; stretched to his limits, he broke. Unfortunately, Preiss's book seldom dives beneath the surface to assess the tragedy of Smile. While it remains the book for the Beach Boys aficionado, including song lyrics, dazzling artwork, a wealth of anecdotal material, and an extensive discography, the book deliberately veers away from the shadows darkening the group's career from the Smile era forward.

A more balanced and up-to-date account is provided in John Milward's The Beach Boys' Silver Anniversary (Dolphin-Doubleday, 1985) Milward's book, while rivaling the lavish graphic production of Preiss's, manages both to simplify-- in the best sense of the word-- and deepen the story of the Beach Boys. Based almost entirely on secondary sources, the book nevertheless succeeds as no other in communicating the tragedy of the Beach Boys-- in essence, the tragedy latent in the American success story and, in a larger sense, the tragedy of the American family. Better than anyone else, perhaps, Milward understands the band's mystique and appeal, and he admirably recaptures the romantic mindset of the Beach Boys fan. Milward also appends a usefully annotated selective discography, and it is this central role reserved for the Beach Boys' music that saves his book from becoming either maudlin or lurid.

Perhaps not so curiously, nearly all who write about the Beach Boys' music have dwelt upon their pre-1970 material at the expense of their later output. While it would be pointless to deny their failure to match the consistent brilliance of Pet Sounds, Beach Boys records of the 1970s and 1980s, now almost entirely out of print Warner Brothers and Caribou/ CBS releases, without exception have their cosmic moments. The best of these justify a faith in the transcendent and redemptive power of all great art. Such miniature miracles as "'Til I Die," "Marcella," "Mt. Vernon & Fairway," "Had to Phone Ya," "Hey, Little Tomboy," "Good Timin'," "Male Ego," and nearly the whole of Sunflower and The Beach Boys Love You can stand comparison with anything else the band has achieved. Many of the period's highlights were lovingly compiled on the 1981 Caribou collection Ten Years of Harmony, which provides a fitting complement to the double-platinum Capitol repackages Endless Summer and Spirit of America, the albums that reintroduced the classics of their youth to the 1970s.

Yet by all accounts the group responsible for this music's creation was in the worst of times. Within the past decade and a half, the Beach Boys, individually and collectively, have undergone traumas that, in the final analysis, we would rather not know about in detail. Unfortunately, the apparent aim of Steven Gaines's Heroes and Villains (NAL, 1986) is to reopen a lot of old wounds, for the book is bound by the sympathy, good taste, and discretion of a National Enquirer piece. Having done scores of interviews with nearly everyone of significance involved in the Beach Boys' lives and careers, Gaines has chosen to dwell upon the bitter recriminations of ex-lovers, envious former associates, and spiteful relatives and to descend to the level of office gossip. In musical matters, moreover, Gaines's many errors, both factual and judgmental, lead one to doubt the accuracy and fairness of the rest. While the book contains much that is of interest and value, it manages, almost in spite of itself, not to shed any real light on the story of the Beach Boys.

As the teenage messiahs of the Sixties, they made it all seem so simple and natural, a life in the fast lane where the only dues one had to pay were broken hearts. Between the flesh-and-blood debilitations of family strife and the dog-eat-dog carnage of the pop industry, the men from Hawthorne have since made heavy sacrifices, including the life of Dennis Wilson, who drowned ignominiously in Marina Del Rey three days after Christmas, 1983. Bankruptcies, divorces, and the precipitate turns of the show business world have left deep scars within the surviving Beach Boys. In particular, Brian's dirty laundry is now public property; his private agony stands in bizarre contrast to the image of the group he helped create in his youth and to his continuing musical invention, as inspired and dignified as always.

For the band as a whole, existence has taken on an almost schizophrenic appearance. For many years now, their best work has languished in the marketplace, while their scattered entries on the charts have rarely been their best work. The broad public continues to perceive them as comforting reminders of the heady, hedonistic Sixties. The group, which once entertained anti-war marches in Washington, has received smiles and blessings from the Reagans and Bushes; the Beach Boys, in reciprocating, have made perhaps the greatest sacrifice of all.

Yet they endure, a great positive in a time fraught with cynicism and peril. Brian Wilson, at the age of forty-four, appears at the Grammy Awards in Hollywood, the industry's elder statesman, squinting at a teleprompter and stumbling through his lines to award the Best Producer statuette to someone else. Absent from his eyes now is the almost palpable fear that has clouded his visage in so many photographs. He looks good now, trimmed down, beardless, and somehow still baby-faced in spite of the battle lines etched in over the years. He shakes the hand of Jimmy Jam, the new center of attention, and tries to stay off-camera, yet Brian seems to dominate the time and space. For better or worse, and in no small measure because of Brian and his mates, what was once pejoratively dismissed as "teen music" is now solidly in the pop mainstream of Western culture. Once-provincial L.A. is now one of the world's great recording capitals, as befits this "Iowa by the beach" where the great American folk myth has at last come of age.

Just to balance this entry, here's my last missive to ESQ, dated September 5, 1997. At this time, ESQ was edited and published from Charlotte, NC, by Lee Dempsey and David Beard. Shortly afterward, it was Beard alone, and I was out of the picture.

Subject: 10th anniversary felicitations

Dear Lee & Dave,

As ESQ's tenth anniversary approaches, I share your pride in what has become one of the best fanzines ever, Beach Boys or otherwise. Ten years ago, of course, this brainchild of Rick Edgil and Phil Nast was hatched in San Diego on a typewriter, a xerox machine, and a prayer. As it happened, I had sent Rick an article, my first ever about the Beach Boys, in time to become the lead piece in ESQ's maiden issue. (I still think it was the best one I ever submitted.) Though I've submitted many since, I never kid myself: as Rick and Phil found out, it's a lot easier to write for a fanzine than it is to run one. I still wonder how you two do it, as I marvel at the fact that this is a 'zine that keeps on topping itself. I have to think that Lee, with all he's invested in the trail of artifacts left by the Boys, must be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy!

Thanks a lot, fellas. May all the waves you ride be Big Ones.

2021: A LOOK BACK

FROM THE BEGINNING, ALBUM BY ALBUM

To return to my original topic: What exactly was it about "Surfing' U.S.A." that made it much more than an imitation of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen"? It had nothing to do with the new lyrics or the group's "technicolor" vocal arrangement. The thing to understand is that Brian Wilson's restructuring of the tune placed the climax much closer to the end of the record.

In both tunes, the climax occurs during the instrumental break, with Johnny Johnson's brief piano spot near the middle of the tune, before a final verse. Brian Wilson split his instrumental break between an energetic organ turn and a guitar solo, almost exactly like Berry himself would have played it, that punts the ball out of the stadium and over the clouds, followed only by a brief vocal tag into a quick fade-out.

How does a twenty-year-old kid like Brian know how to make such a crucial move? He certainly didn't pick up the knack during his early piano lessons at home.

Upon reflection, it was that little shift in the song's structure that got me to understand that this record, this remarkable vocal performance, was for all time, not simply hitting its lofty sales goal for the spring and summer of 1963, not simply until the current twenty-first century situation of The Beach Boys vis a vis Brian Wilson. Overall, it achieved that rare status of outlasting the men who created it in the first place and likely to continue living for a very long time ahead of us.

The Beginning/ The Garage Tapes (Sea of Tunes 2-disc bootleg, 1961-1962)

Lost and Found (?, 1961-62)

etc...........

BW timeline

A. LEARNING

after years of vocalizing, co-creates the groups officially

upswing: he unpacks and repacks the recording process in his own, unmistakeable musical image

IN MY ROTATION:

ANOTHER SHORT WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, June 8, 2021:

Just the other day, I bought a new used Aiwa 3-CD changer/ dual cassette from a neighbor living just across Cline Avenue, in the Gates of St. John subdivision. I'm still trying to learn how to operate this bad boy, but I've successfully managed to hear the latest musical acquisitions, in superior sound.

On the downside, however, it must be said that there seems to be no way to connect a turntable to this player/ changer, nor have I much patience for learning the basic procedures of operation, especially where the remote is concerned.

The likelihood is that I shall return to the old Sony unit with its receiver and use it until I finally can't stand it anymore. I hope only that the Aiwa can outlast me.