90 The Beach Boys
Brian Wilson, Mike Love et al recall how the band were creatively revitalised between Wild Honey and Surf’s Up
Nobody can remember precisely why The beach boys pulled out of the Monterey Pop Festival. It might have been because of Carl Wilson’s impending court appearance for draft evasion. or perhaps because the band were in dispute with Capitol Records over unpaid royalties. or maybe it was because, weeks before the festival, brian Wilson reluctantly scrapped
SMiLE – his “teenage symphony to God” that promised to outdo even Pet Sounds in scale and scope. but whatever the reason, everyone remembers the outcome. only eight months after stunning the world with “Good Vibrations”, the band were now dismissed as cultural lightweights – teen relics in candy-striped shirts, outdated by the new, heavier California sound rising from San Francisco. “Turning down Monterey wasn’t the greatest career move,” says Al Jardine, dryly. “It was a huge turning point in our industry and we should’ve been there. We failed to take advantage of the cultural shifts. ”
Mike Love, however, has another, possibly more accurate version of why, a fortnight before the festival opened on June 16, 1967, The Beach Boys decided not to play. “We weren’t afraid to play Monterey,” he says. “But we weren’t unified as a band. There was incredible dysfunctionality within our group at that point. Drugs were involved. Brian was in no shape to want to do anything. We made a decision not to go forward with the concert.”
Things had been very different for The Beach Boys at the start of the year. They ousted The Beatles as the World’s Best Group at the NME’s annual poll in December 1966, while “Good Vibrations” became the band’s first single to sell over a million copies. But their momentum slowed during 1967 – thanks to Carl’s stance as a conscientious objector, the Capitol dispute and abandoning SMiLE. The latter was a significant setback for Brian Wilson. “All the songs came very easily for Pet
Sounds,” he says today. “It was like I reached up into the sky and grabbed them. But it was always a challenge for me to live up to my name. People expected me to come up with great orchestral stuff all the time, and it became a burden. I got tired of it.”
The next few years saw Wilson’s siblings – along with Jardine, Mike Love and Bruce Johnston – regroup and attempt to find new focus, making a series of albums increasingly removed from the traditional Beach Boys sound. In doing so, the band negotiated an unsteady path between craft and commerce, breakdowns and artistic liberation. These were records – both intimate and wide-ranging – that flirted with R&B, psychedelia, soul, Americana, lo-fi experimentalism and much more. Ironically, while this run of albums represents a band taking a major creative turn, it coincided with the exact moment popular culture doomed them to apparent obsolescence.
“The winds were changing, quite rapidly, and maybe it could’ve gone either way for us,” adds Jardine. “‘Good Vibrations’ had been the pinnacle for us, the top of the mountain, but we had to move on beyond that somehow. That’s when we all started to work together. Brian was still involved in those albums, but just not in a dominant way.”
“People in America couldn’t see what The Beach Boys had become,” continues Johnston. “In their eyes, we were like Forrest Gump during the Vietnamese War.”
ON July 4 this year, The Beach Boys played the annual Independence Day concert in Washington, DC. Further afield, their touring itinerary includes two shows next summer at London’s Royal Albert Hall. This touring version, led by Mike Love, appears in remarkably good health. But 50 years ago, The Beach Boys were struggling. How could they reconcile their wholesome image with the new counterculture? It transpired that their record company weren’t much help. “Capitol were still promoting us as the No 1 surfing group in the USA, which wasn’t exactly relevant with the student demonstrations, racial unrest and the Vietnam War,” Love explains. “Pet Sounds and ‘Good Vibrations’ had been a remarkable departure from what we’d been doing, but I don’t think the record company understood that we were making these transitions, musically and philosophically. The A&R guys were still saying, ‘Can’t you give us something more like ‘California Girls’ or ‘I Get Around’?” After he abandoned SMiLE, Brian Wilson gathered his band mates at his home studio in Bel Air and set about constructing another album, Smiley Smile, from the remnants. “I wanted it to be about laughter,” says Wilson. “Where did something like ‘She’s Goin’ Bald’ come from? From my head! Love made me write something like that. Van Dyke Parks and I sat down and wrote ‘Heroes And Villains’, with that lovely organ sound on it. I think it took 23 takes to get it right.” Viewed retrospectively, Smiley Smile can be seen as a transitional record; the beginnings of what became a second wave of creativity for The Beach Boys, leading to the emergence of Carl and Dennis Wilson as the band’s creative motors. “We were hitting this big wall of change,” says Jardine. “Instead of SMiLE, we ended up with a little home-movie version and disparities in production value.” Smiley Smile certainly revealed a new dynamic for the band. Working together, The Beach Boys picked up guitars and basses and began playing parts that would previously have been delegated to the Wrecking Crew. In doing so, they reconfigured themselves back into the beat group they’d been in Hawthorne, California, while also setting up their own individual creative developments. Released in September 1967, Smiley Smile became the first Beach Boys album to miss the US Top 40. But by then the band was already deep into a follow-up: Wild Honey was released three months later. “We decided to make an R&B and soul record,” says Wilson. “It wasn’t like a regular Beach Boys record! It was good to go back to the boogie-woogie piano I’d grown up with.” Wild Honey arrived in December, as psychedelic pop reached its pinnacle of complexity. According to Wilson, “We consciously made a simpler album” – but this back-to-basics approach only reinforced the impression that The Beach Boys were now adrift from the cultural tides. But the truth was a little more complicated. Although most of the tracks are credited to Brian Wilson and Mike Love, Wild Honey finds each of the band’s core members – along with Bruce Johnston, Wilson’s touring replacement since 1965 – contributing in unprecedented ways. At Brian’s urging, Carl began to take over the producer’s mantle. Despite – or perhaps because of – these creative upheavals, Wild Honey was The Beach Boys’ lowest-selling LP to date. “In America, as long as you’re having hits they’ll just call you an eccentric,” says Three Dog Night singer Danny Hutton, a close friend of Brian Wilson. “But when you stop making hits, they turn you into this little guy who’s lost it. I think they did that to Brian.”
In the same week that Wild Honey was released, the band was introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at a UNICEF benefit in Paris. The Beach Boys – primarily Mike Love – fell under the guru’s influence. “I learned transcendental meditation from the Maharishi, along with several of the rest of us, in December 1967,” Love says. “Then a month and a half later I was invited to go to Rishikesh, with The Beatles and Donovan. Having learned meditation, I stopped drinking hard liquor. I found I was able to relax without resorting to excessive drinking or any kind of drugs. There was a schism in The Beach Boys around that time. Some people were attracted to a lifestyle choice that included any and every kind of drug, then there were those of us who were fortunate enough not be become entrapped in that.”
“I tried transcendental meditation, but it didn’t work,” reveals Wilson. “It’s supposed to make you feel peaceful, but I was feeling too nervous to do it. I couldn’t concentrate because I had so many thoughts in my head.”
The Beach Boys’ association with the Maharishi fed directly into the sessions for their next album, Friends. Love went one step further by inviting him out on the road with them in May 1968. It was a disastrous move, the audience routinely heckling the Maharishi during his 30-minute segment, in which he taught spirituality while seated on a green sofa.
The tour was cancelled after only five dates. “Many people just weren’t ready for that,” concedes Love. Fellow TM practitioner Al Jardine feels that the scheduling of the shows, just weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, was unfortunate too. “It was a very tough time for us,” he offers. “It wasn’t very cool to be a Beach Boy. It wasn’t ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ any more.”
ACCORDING to Brian Wilson, “Friends is in my top five favourite Beach Boys albums.” Wilson continues, “I was still into love music at the time. I wanted happy music.” Love? Happy music? In the year of political assassinations, civil disorder and student unrest – of Hendrix, Cream and the Jefferson Airplane – it’s hard to image a more blissful album than Friends, with its gentle tempos, airy disposition and subtle experimental shifts. One of its songs, “Busy Doin’ Nothin’”, is an account of a lazy day chez Wilson, with loose directions to his house. “It was like a bossa nova thing,” he explains. “Was it an indication of where my head was at during that time? Very much so.”
The same sense of woozy ennui is apparent elsewhere, while the gorgeous title track wraps itself around a classic Beach Boys melody and “Diamond Head” is a strange, seductive instrumental with oddball effects. Naturally, too, there’s an ode to the band’s new pastime in “Transcendental Meditation”. “We were expressing ourselves without drugs, which of course was contrary to what was going on at the time,” Jardine explains. “Everybody was turning on and we were turning off, into the transcendental state of mind. The music reflected that; it was more passionate and subtle.”
One of Friends’ most striking features was the emergence of Dennis Wilson as a creative force. Previously dismissed as merely a pretty-boy drummer, his two co-writes with poet Steve Kalinich – “Little Bird” and “Be Still” – were evidence of a unique talent, blessed with soul and sensitivity. Laughs Jardine: “Dennis was like a meteor shooting through the universe at high speed, with the rest of us going, ‘Huh? What was that?’”
“Dennis really did his thing on that record,” acknowledges Wilson. “It surprised me, too. He learned a lot from me about producing, and he just went on his own. And I couldn’t believe how good he sang.”
The dynamic was changing within the band yet again. During late 1967, Al Jardine remembers “Brian was going through withdrawal” as a consequence of the fallout from SMiLE. He began to spend more and more time in his bedroom, although his bandmates coaxed him downstairs to direct Wild Honey and Friends. But by the time Friends was released in June 1968, the exacting, often stressful progress of making new Beach Boys albums had taken their toll on Brian Wilson. Danny Hutton believes Wilson “felt isolated. It’s like he’d lost it and stayed in his bed for about a year.” On one occasion, Wilson turned up backstage after a show at the Whisky A Go Go and threatened to throw himself out of a window. “There was a bunch of people there that night,” Hutton recalls. “I think he’d had a snort of cocaine, but then so had everybody else. Brian tended to be a little dramatic.”
Drama? There was plenty of that. While Brian was briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital, possibly of his own accord, his brother Dennis fell under the influence of Charles Manson. During summer, 1968, Manson and his followers set up camp inside Dennis’s house on Sunset Boulevard, where they proceeded to fleece him for most of his possessions. “Manson was a scary dude,” says Jardine. “Dennis introduced me to him. I couldn’t wait to get out of that house, it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling.” Mike Love recalls being invited over one night for dinner, only to leave
“There was a lot of love in our voices” BRIAN WIlSON
“Dennis was like a meteor shooting at high speed” al JaRdiNE
when Manson suggested conducting an orgy. “I thought he was extremely weird and I wasn’t going for his programme,” says Love. “Dennis wanted us to join the Manson Family for the time being. One time, Dennis and I were at the studio at Brian’s house. I remember, he was acting very nervous. He said, ‘I just saw Charlie take an automatic weapon and blow a black cat’ – meaning a human being, a guy, a person, an African-American fellow – ‘in half and stuff him down a well.’ Dennis was rattled by that experience, as you would be.”
Although Dennis parted company with Manson, his imprint, however slight, was left on 20/20, in the form of “Never Learn Not To Love”, reworked by Dennis from Manson’s own “Cease To Exist”. It is a weird interlude on a weird album. With Brian mostly absent – he doesn’t even appear on the album sleeve – 20/20 found the others assembling an album whose riches, although sparse in number, are far from underwhelming. There are two Brian numbers, both from the aborted
SMiLE sessions – the wordless hymn “Our Prayer” and the rapturous “Cabinessence”, co-written with Van Dyke Parks. Carl Wilson, becoming ever more valuable as a producer, oversaw a rousing remake of The Ronettes’ “I Can Hear Music”. Brian and Mike Love cooked up the glorious “Do It Again” – a nostalgic return to carefree surf themes that brought The Beach Boys a much-needed hit. “I went to Brian’s house, got him out of bed, drove us to the beach, walked along the sand, came back and sat down at the piano,” says Love. “We came up with ‘Do It Again’ in less than half an hour.”
Dennis, for his part, continued to enjoy a creative streak. There was the beatific soft-rocker “Be With Me” but also the more arresting “All I Want To Do” – a garage rock rave-up sung by Love and enhanced in the final moments by a recording of Dennis and a female partner engaged in coitus. Less dramatically, Johnson achieved his first songwriting credit with the piano-and-strings instrumental, “The Nearest Faraway Place”. “We all filled the vacuum Brian had created,” says Jardine. “He was around, but not in the forefront any more. Things started to open up for us, individually. The Beach Boys would never be the same again.”
NOVEMBER 18, 1969 proved to be an auspicious date for The Beach Boys. The band signed to Warner/ Reprise, on the invitation of label boss Mo Ostin. It was a welcome respite after a difficult few years. After four straight commercial duds, Capitol had let them go. As a parting shot to their old paymasters, the group revived their $2m lawsuit for lost funds, only for Capitol to delete The Beach Boys catalogue – effectively blocking their royalties. In November, Murry Wilson sold Sea Of Tunes, the publishing company that held rights to most of his son Brian’s songs. He pocketed $700,000 for his troubles. Brian was devastated. But The Beach Boys dug in. The Warner/Reprise deal brought with it renewed camaraderie. This played directly into Sunflower, the album they worked on through to the middle of 1970. “That’s the time when the band was as friendly as it could be,” recalls Johnston. “Everybody was cheering everybody else on with their songs, so you had different tones in terms of writing, singing and production.” Sunflower presented The Beach Boys as a functioning democracy, with each member making telling contributions. Nominally produced by The Beach Boys at Brian’s Bellagio Road home, the album owed much to the quiet diligence of chief engineer/mixer Stephen Desper. Among the session team Desper hired was pianist Daryl Dragon. “Brian was hardly ever there,” recalls Dragon, who, alongside wife Toni, later became one half of Captain & Tennille. “He’d go, ‘OK, you’ve got the idea’, then he’d walk out. Steve Desper was making a lot of the creative decisions.” With Carl spending more time in the producer’s chair, Sunflower grew around a set of songs that absorbed and reconfigured rock’n’roll, percussive funk and dreamy balladry. Brian’s blissed-out “All I Wanna Do” and “Cool, Cool Water” (both co-written with Love) proved that he was still a formidable asset. The two sides of Dennis were represented by the blustery spiritual awakening of “It’s About Time” and the delicate “Forever”. “Dennis was a very gifted person in terms of unique harmony structure,” states Dragon. “I’d played him some classical compositions, including Wagner, and he said, ‘Daryl, you’ve uncovered my internally located romantic spot.’ I hit right where his heart was. Like Brian, it transpired he had a gift from the heavens.” For all the band’s reinvigorated self-confidence, Sunflower only reached No 151 on the Billboard chart. “People in America couldn’t quite see that The Beach Boys had changed,” muses Johnston. “We were still viewed as surfing Doris Days.”
JACK RIELEy first met Brian at the Radiant Radish, the health-food store in West Hollywood that the elder Wilson sibling had helped open in 1969. A local journalist and radio presenter, Rieley talked Wilson into appearing on KPFK Pacifica Radio. During the interview, Rieley pressed Wilson on “Surf’s Up”, a song from the discarded SMiLE sessions that had taken on semi-mythic status. Rieley convinced him to revive “Surf’s Up” for the next project. “I’d given up on that song until I got talking to Jack,” Wilson admits today. Rieley’s next move was to submit a six-page memo, with the aim of “increased record sales and popularity”. Crucial to his strategy was an emphasis on political and social issues, in the hope that the band could reconnect with people. Before long, The Beach Boys hired him as their manager. “Jack Rieley realised the band were more than just cars and surfing,” says Love. “We weren’t known for activism, but he brought us into a sense of social responsibility.” Nothing symbolised The Beach Boys’ new outlook better than “Don’t Go Near The Water”, the opening cut from the album they began work on following Sunflower. In the American popular consciousness, the band were goodtime surflovers… but here they explicitly advised you to stay away from the waves. Written by Love and Jardine, it warns against growing pollution. “I got wrote up in Time for my lyrics,” recalls Jardine, “because we were concerned about phosphates getting into the water systems: ‘Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath/ So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath.’” Elsewhere, Love’s “Student Demonstration Time” may
have been well intentioned, but ultimately fell flat. Johnston was much nearer the mark with the bittersweet “Disney Girls (1957)”, a nostalgic dip into the past that managed to offset modern America with a less toxic post-war era. “In 1957 I was 15 and in high school,” he explains. “My girlfriend’s mom and dad were driving us out to dinner in the car. I was sitting in the back, holding her hand, and Patti Page’s ‘Old Cape Cod’ was on the radio. Fast forward to everybody at that age discovering drugs in the ’60s and I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to write about what it was like when I was your age.’ It was like living the first
Back To The Future.”
Rieley weighed in with three co-writes, one of which was with Brian. “He did a song called ‘A Day In The Life Of A Tree’, which he sang on, and I thought it was great,” says Wilson. But it paled next to Wilson’s majestic “’Til I Die”, a candid meditation on his place in the world, likening himself to a cork on a raging sea, a rock in a landslide. “That was a personal song for me,” he explains. “It was all about how I was feeling at the time: very small.”
They closed with the song that started it all off – and which gave the album its valedictory title. “Surf’s Up” was retooled as a beautifully melancholic coda to both the album and The Beach Boys’ own troubled journey over the past few years. They finished where they began – back in the water – only things were very different now.
“We were literally putting our careers back together again on Surf’s Up, by finishing the songs from SMiLE and creating others,” says Jardine. “I thought we were on an amazingly good track with the water theme and everything else. There were many interesting and complex moods on that album. In a lot of ways, Surf’s Up was a reconstruction.”
When Surf’s Up was released in August 1971, The Beach Boys had already begun to register again on the cultural radar. Rieley booked two strategically placed shows for the band. The first was a near sell-out at Carnegie Hall, where they largely abandoned the hits for selections from
Pet Sounds, SMiLE and Sunflower. “The whole thing turned around from that point on,” marvels Johnston. The second, just days after jamming with the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East, took place at a May Day anti-war rally in Washington, DC. The Beach Boys shared billing with Charles Mingus, Linda Ronstadt and Phil Ochs. Surf’s Up returned The Beach Boys to the US Top 40 for the first time since Wild Honey. It proved to be their best-selling album for years. “Everything has its time, everything happens in cycles,” ponders Jardine. “A few years later, after the Vietnam war, The Beach Boys had a platinum-selling hits album,
Endless Summer. So the whole cycle started again. People just wanted to enjoy their lives again. But that had been a very tough decade, man.”
JACK RIELEy is the man given credit for reviving the fortunes of The Beach Boys, but it’s more complicated that than. Jardine, for one, dismisses Rieley as merely “a creature of convenience, in it for his own gain”. In simple terms, he says, after 11 studio albums in under four years prior to Smiley Smile, “we were exhausted” and needed to regroup.
“Maybe that run of albums [Friends to Sunflower] wouldn’t have happened if Smiley Smile had got to No 1. It gave the other guys in the band a chance to finally go, ‘Look, here’s what I can do.’ Even though we didn’t create as many hits during that time, it was a really interesting period on an artistic level.” The Beach Boys’ revival as a commercial entity carried on into the next decade, though only 1973’s Holland displayed any of the mercurial wonder of those late-’60s albums. In summer 1976, the band released The Big Ones – a collection of old doo-wop and rock’n’roll covers that became their biggest seller for over 10 years. Critically, it marked Brian’s return to the studio as producer. Although Wilson was still beset by personal crises, Danny Hutton is keen to share memories of the good times. “We were at the Beverly Wilshire for Alice Cooper’s birthday and a few of us – Brian, Iggy Pop, Alice and me – got into Brian’s purple Rolls-Royce and drove to Brian’s house, which also happened to be purple. When we got there, Brian said, ‘Let’s do ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ – ‘Mama’s little baby’s got shortnin’ bread’.’ He sat on the piano bench and gave everybody vocal parts, the way he would in the studio. Iggy got the ‘shortnin’’ bit. We were all singing the same thing over and over, before Iggy lost his patience and said: ‘I’m getting out of here. This dude is crazy!’” Reflecting, though, on the band’s run of albums during the late ’60s, Mike Love attests, “We’ve always been kind of separate from anything. I call us a sonic oasis. All kinds of trends have come and gone over the course of our five-decade career, and we’ve just gravitated towards harmonies. The Beach Boys have always represented, primarily, a lot of warmth and positivity.” “There was a lot of love in our voices when we sang together,” says Brian Wilson. “I wanted The Beach Boys to bring a kind of spiritual love to the world.”
The Beach Boys With The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is available now from Universal/UMC