MICHAEL JACKSON: It’s not as if Elvis just died!

From all the fuss of the past few days anyone would think Elvis has just died. Instead it’s just the ever-encroaching end, the gradual unravelling, of an American Idol of yesteryear. To me, Jackson embodied in one increasingly strange person all the show business imperatives necessary to get to and sustain yourself at the top of celebrity today. Looking at all the Madonnas and Britney Spears of the past half-century, who have followed Jackson’s lead, it’s amazing how much success can be engendered by essentially stupid people with a single idiotic but unquestioned idea pursued single-mindedly, without thought entering to disturb the ‘creative’ process.

He was the dream of every American Idol show and its multifarious spinoffs around the world that perpetuate such realities as: the generic ‘rock’ voice shorn of all distinction or real emotion, pared of all identifying idiosyncracies or sign of humanity, so as not to offend anyone by unsightly originality or unseemly singularity — the equivalent of the ubiquitous fuzzed guitar notes and chords backing rock tracks for the past thirty years.

The toast of Motown and little soul-groovers around the world in 1970 (‘I Want You Back’, ‘A-B-C’, ‘The Love You Save’), the Jackson Five lowered themselves fast to Osmonds Pop and on to disco mid-decade. By late decade Michael as a solo had rid himself of genuine soul and found something distinctive: white skin and a perky little nose, which alarmingly shrank year by year into an almost microscopic compass point. More than music, most charitably described as amorphous sound designed to dance to, the multitude of stage moves he devised, all executed jerkily at lightning speed but still with immaculate timing, were right up there in the best traditions of circus performers seen on America’s Got Talent — and, it must, be remembered, years before them.

Most successfully of all in the superstar firmament, he developed an unparalleled ability to generate fan sympathy in the face of evermore outrageous self-indulgence, previously the domain of friends and mentors such as Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Ross. Was that his underlying essence, and predestined downfall, that he possessed the psyche of an androgynous being in which the rules that everyone else had to live by didn’t count? Like your ordinary garden-variety diva (and many are said to have the mentality of cultivated, nurtured pot plants) but encumbered by male expectations?

Generating so much money for so many people, he was pampered so that every whim no matter how bizarre was catered for. Every momentary desire was met with a resounding “Yes” by the Yes Men surrounding him day and night, and female celebrities spread their legs to be implanted with his divine seed in hopes of producing cloned products in a dynasty of inevitable success. Not only were the needs of others of no account but he was so far removed from reality that he brought others into actual physical danger — as when he used his baby as a public performance prop — to satisfy his own need for public acclaim, at least notoriety when he was capable of nothing more.

Above all he is responsible for the superstar mantra “Make your own rules” — not in stretching the boundaries of intellect in creating imaginative new music.

And tonight on the news there is a mass spontaneous tribute to his “Moon Walk” — with fans crowded in the street, linking hands and all shuffling backwards together, at least with better coordination and timing than you would expect from, say, a gathering of demented winos. What greater legacy can a performer leave?

His other trademark innovation on stage was simulating masturbating on stage, in time, into a white clinical glove — presumably all the better to inspire those better endowed with semen to donate. It undoubtedly inspired Justin Timberlake to develop his own innovative great leap forward in performance art: simulating humping women dog-like from behind, on stage, to the delight of his millions of fans around the world who pay hundreds of dollars each to see this and the other wonders of his talent.

That all said, I once caught a sustained glimpse of Michael Jackson in a two-hour interview, probably recorded around the turn of the millennium, undertaken to ameliorate the worst backlash after the pedophile accusations. (For the record, I believe them to be false, but how stupid can you be to take unrelated children into your bed and explain it “as the most loving thing in the world”?) I remember my mother, who had just watched it with me and was genuinely intrigued, asking what I thought of him as a genuine creative personality. I told her that I didn’t know if he was a genius but he came across to me as a genuine artist in pursuit of what artists should be — thoughtful, considered work.

Given the nature of the sensationalizing media and the chameleon-like image of Jackson’s public persona as portrayed, who can say what was in his mind from one minute to the next? So I bow to the authority of Quincy Jones, a hugely influential figure in music production for half a century, for the final word — confirming Michael Jackson didn’t like being a black man but dubbing him all the same a “performance genius”. Who might guess what Leonardo da Vinci would have turned out looking like had a mass media existed to shine the brightest spotlight in the world on him 24-7?

And so the debate goes on …

5. ENGLAND SWINGS

– an excerpt from another chapter of G. A. De Forest’s book ‘Beach Boys vs Beatlemania: Rediscovering Sixties Music’, published by Booklocker.com in November 2007 and available for around $17.95. Highest position thus far on Amazon’s sales list in the Music: History & Criticism category is #23 on April 26th 2008.

“Eng-a-land swings like a pendulum do/ bobbies on bicycles two by two/ Westminster Abbey, the Tower, Big Ben/ the rosy red cheeks of the little chil-dren.”—Country Music’s Oklahoma stump philosopher of the mid-Sixties, Roger Miller, observing the myth of Merry England. By the time of Miller’s paean—what, in any other era, would have been a giant pain—England had ruled pop music for two years and was conquering the rest of pop culture. The miniskirt, fashion designer Mary Quant, supermodel Jean Shrimpton (Twiggy to come), and Carnaby Street were all household names around the world. In London they took their fashion so seriously that anyone walking down Carnaby Street or Chelsea’s King’s Road out of fashion might have been ritually stoned, in both senses of the word.

The coolest tv program was The Avengers—karate-kicking Emma Peel and immaculately Savile Row-attired John Steed. The chic actresses were Julie Christie on the big screen, by acclaim, and by definition Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher, and Mick Jagger’s, Marianne Faithfull—by her own account blessed by an accident of birth with “The Look” and so doubling effortlessly as a chic rock star.

The Beatles in '65: John and Paul styling their hair, Ringo and George still generic moptops

The Beatles came in 12th at American box-offices for 1965, 6th UK. America’s two no.1 movie stars through 1965-66 were Brits Sean Connery (James Bond) and saccharine songstress Julie Andrews, dis-placing all-American team Doris Day and Rock Hudson —suddenly hopelessly outdated 40-year-old born-again virgins, plopped down from Planet Quaint into The Swinging Sixties. The British had cornered the movie market (apart from westerns, fading fast): Bond and Michael Caine the nattiest dressed screen spies; Peter Sellers superseded Jerry Lewis as America’s most popular comic; Hayley Mills still the world’s no.1 child star, turning 20; Margaret Rutherford was the screen’s adored septuagenarian. An entire generation of British actors—Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, Susannah York, Sarah Miles—were said to be the most interesting on screen. The swingingest middle-aged affair involved fifth-time-around Liz Taylor/Cleopatra and her consort Richard Burton/Marc Antony. And more UK actors—Richard Harris (‘MacArthur Park’), Noel Harrison (‘Windmills of Your Mind’)—were held to be the most expressive vocalists in recording.

For the first time in centuries England defined cool. Three months after the Beatles arrived in America, Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan were trying their luck with extended tours in England, previously a whistle-stop. Those who could fake being English to Stateside audiences were flavor of the month, often literally. New LA groups the Byrds—first goofily calling themselves the Beefeaters—and the Turtles, false-advertising themselves as from England, strained mightily for Beatle accents in the frenzied quest for fame before stumbling on to Dylan and folk rock. Others hoping to fool the public were the Buckinghams and Golliwogs (later Creedence Clearwater Revival). For more than two years Americans were mindlessly Anglophile, and it took an English songwriter, Ray Davies of the Kinks, to debunk it all in the spring of 1966 with the flaying derision of ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. Still, only slowly was the spell broken: Britons had nine number ones in America that year.

While it lasted the edict—more powerful than if a law had been passed—shut out the all-too-American Beach Boys for their obvious aural and visible handicaps: being so un-English as to commit a heresy against revealed wisdom. The Four Seasons, older and more brittle, broke—no longer superstars in ’65 due to media neglect. Wide-ranging surveys in the mid-Seventies by WNBC-New York, WFIL-Philadelphia and WRKO-Boston to discover the most popular hits long term showed that the Seasons were done in by someone: ‘Dawn’, ‘Ronnie’, ‘Rag Doll’, ‘Bye Bye Baby’, ‘Let’s Hang On’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘Opus 17’, ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, ‘C’mon Marianne’, mostly greeted without fanfare on release, ended up like most Beach Boys hits among the top dozen or so Eastern Seaboard sellers from their respective years— rated higher than Beatle number ones ‘Ticket to Ride’, ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Yellow Submarine’.

Frankie Valli: “A lot of American groups got lost… Everybody has to have their own identity—it’s very important. That’s what we did. We said, ‘Sink or swim, but we’re going to stay with what we do’ and it’s the only chance that anyone could have.”

The towering, enduring irony was that the best to come out of Britain in the Sixties by its best—The Who, the Kinks, the Stones, Cream—was created on vinyl by American record producers, resettling in Britain because anxious to get in on the scene. Foremost among an array of dominating American producers was Shel Talmy, who described Dick Rowe, “the man who turned down the Beatles”, as “one of the few people in England who was pro-American”. The anti-Americanism was a pathetically hypocritical defensive screen erected by a domestic industry built on a framework of American music as its direct inspiration, and now heavily reliant on imported American talent to make it work.

The Beach Boys would have to overcome the dictates of fashion—a feat unheard of in the pop scene—generated in London and pervading America via New York, always susceptible to trends crossing the Atlantic. In choosing artistic integrity they chose values that held no currency in the prevailing showbiz climate. And if they won they presented a danger that show business might never recover from, a threat to the whole basis of marketing: “Go with the bestselling commodity of the moment. Undersell, then dump, yesterday’s goods.”

For Capitol/EMI, the Beach Boys’ primary business connection —the multinational that manufactured and distributed their recordings but was now dependent on the quick-sale Beatles—the course was clear.

WHEN SIXTIES HISTORIES RECORD THE BEATLES saved pop music from dreary, saccharine crooners of no originality it is partly true—in the UK, not the multifaceted, ever-changing American scene. The Cliff Richards, Shadows and Joe Meek acts including the Tornadoes had already made strides in Britain. For all their individual qualities their passing would not be mourned by the Beatles who, pre-fame, derided them as smoothies in suits. While rock’n'roll had cooled from its original white heat, the American mainstream had the vital three-pronged thrust of the Beach Boys, Motown and Atlantic primed to explode, a mainspring integrating black and white performers now put on hold by the Beatle-led aberration.

The year the Beatles had their first hit—1962—the UK top 20 was full of inferior covers of American records, as bemoaned by Britain’s own industry spokespersons: ‘Moon River’, ‘Tower of Strength’, ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, ‘When My Little Girl is Smiling’, ‘Roses Are Red’, ‘Spanish Harlem’, ‘Bobby’s Girl’, ‘Up On the Roof’…. These remakes and their performers—Danny Williams, Frankie Vaughan, Karl Denver, Johnny Spence, Craig Douglas, Jimmy Justice, Shane Fenton, Ronnie Carroll, Mark Wynter, Susan Maughan, Maureen Evans, Kenny Lynch—weren’t heard overseas except in dutiful British Commonwealth markets loyal to the mother country. Orchestra leaders left over from the big band era purveyed restful ballroom numbers: Acker Bilk, Joe Loss, John Barry. If Kenny Ball—popular in America with ‘Midnight in Moscow’—hadn’t introduced post-War-styled ‘Sukiyaki’ it is unlikely Americans would ever have let the original out of the bottle to contribute to the apparent malaise of 1963.

While rare knowledgeable British fans have been praised by American rock’n'rollers for recognising quality, the UK had an all-powerful clobbering machine keeping rock’n'roll down—“Auntie BBC”, which in its duty to young and old ears alike efficiently suppressed black music under the guise of preserving the country’s cultural heritage: akin to the White Australia Policy elsewhere in the Empire. It was the brief liberalisation of the airwaves, 1964-67, when they finally got some exposure as private ‘pirate’ radio stations flourished around the British Isles, that the rock’n'rollers were thankful for.

So it was that the run of new UK groups formed by 1963 left much to be desired in originality and style, but what did America’s fashion-conscious youths, white middle-class teenyboppers who hadn’t heard real rock’n'roll, care? Most British rock’n'roll in the invasion was about as convincing as Italian westerns or Japanese Elvises. The Beatles and other UK r&b groups always preferred the original US recordings, if they could get them—then spoilt the effect by performing inferior covers themselves, true to the English spirit of anyone-can-put-their-hand-to-it-rock’n'roll, one level removed from the makeshift skiffle groups. Obviously, like the Rolling Stones, the more up-close exposure the Beatles had to American practitioners the better they got.

Still, Music Hall style and sensibility were deeply ingrained in the Brit psyche. David Jones, a struggling singer with several bands, as late as 1967 put out novelty parodies of rock’n'roll: ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ and ‘The Laughing Gnome’ in the style of early-sixties comics Mike Sarne (‘Come Outside’), Bernard Cribbins (‘A Bird Up On My Bike’), Tommy Steele (‘Little White Bull’) and Anthony Newley (‘That Noise’). It was a breakthrough tactic that caused im-mense embarrassment later. With a leap towards cool and a hefty push by Yank producer Shel Talmy he released ‘Space Oddity’ to be one of the great English figures of the early Seventies. By that time he had changed his name to David Bowie.

A persuasive view contra to Beatle omniscience comes from the British documentary tv series Dancing in the Street: American music was progressing very well, thank you, on diverse fronts most broadly represented by an r&b/soul barrage, only to be stifled by a cheapened homogenised product from UK groups with fashionable hair as their claim to popularity, a qualification unmatchable by the black originators of the music.

The coup was resented in some circles to the lengths that a “Stamp Out the Beatles” campaign was organised by Detroit student activists, fans of Motown and devotees of the grassroots r&b and blues of their city. When Paul McCartney heard of it he sensitively riposted that the Beatles would stamp out Detroit. British musicians were by and large clueless to the nuances of Blues, Gospel, Soul and any number of other American idioms of expression. And entrepreneurs of Epstein’s ilk would never have understood the dedication to quality and authenticity of Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Phil Spector, Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, Jerry Wexler of Atlantic, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil of Brill Building ‘pop’ and many others in the American recording industry of that time: Jewish aficionados of black music.

Fans of Motown invaded the broadcast of the Beatles’ second Sullivan show in Miami, in vain. By the end of that year, 1964, a Leiber-Stoller produced, blues-tinged ‘Go Now’ was commandeered by new English group the Moody Blues for their US debut; and the Shirelles’ ‘Sha La La’ overwhelmed by a Manfred Mann cover following up ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, yet another song (by Mann-Weil) with girl group written all over it. As Dancing in the Street concluded, if the English acts had saved American music, what had they “saved” it from?

THE BEATLES WERE WORKING-CLASS LADS RAISED as pets of the aristocracy and enthroned by America, having freed itself from the British Empire two centuries before only to now don the chains wholeheartedly. Homebred musicians withered from unrequited wooing, shunned by their own media. Who would challenge the invaders?

Not a few bluecoats turned redcoat, going mod in a half-assed process totally out of cultural context. Peroxide-blond ‘surfers’ had carried surfboards through fashion-governed Chelsea in 1963, just for the look, and now the tables were turned with a vengeance. To make the switch was to be “fab”, “smashing”, “gear”. But instead of carrying it off with aplomb as the Beatles and Kinks did, Yanks started looking and acting like Austin Powers: aping foreign fashions, and parroting music alien to them. Just as the English did, to American music. In some twisted sense of karma the Byrds and Righteous Bros latched on to British wartime heroine Vera Lynn, suspecting that her flagwavers of a generation before might be just the ticket, and produced hideous remakes of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. The Beau Brummels (‘Laugh Laugh’, see John Candy comedy Uncle Buck) posed English enough to appear on The Munsters as Beatle standins. Their Revolutionary War period costumes were outdone by the bluecoat uniforms of Paul Revere & the Raiders, cashing in on lace and frills but sticking for a while to a tough LA r&b produced by surf music alumnus Terry Melcher.

P. J. Proby: introduced to the UK by the Beatles and had talent overflowing enough to go worldwide and then some.

Ponytailed and knee-breached on the same theme, P J Proby from Texas was befriended by the Beatles, annointed by them on UK tv and had his career made—in England, joined by Righteous Bros-soundalikes the Walker Brothers. The highly talented Proby blew his chance of continuing superstardom (or more important, widening it to his homeland) when in early ‘65 he was banned by UK theatre chains and BBC-TV for deliberately splitting his tight britches to get a reaction. Tom Jones, on the same tour, took over as the star. Jones and Dusty Springfield squeaked in by the back door—welcomed by American audiences who thought they were black. The favored groups in both Britain and America now typically offered a maximum of volume and minimum of finesse, or hummable singalong melodies set amid this mishmash of so-called “rock and roll”.

Precipitating all this, the shock of the Beatles hitting America was all the more so when it was realised they were only the tip of an ever-broadening iceberg. England was soon so central to the pop culture of the Western World that within two months of the Beatles landing her two feeblest rock and roll pretenders, Brian Poole & the Tremeloes and Freddie & the Dreamers, were greeted with screaming fits in Australia on a package tour with Gerry & the Pacemakers, Dusty Springfield and adopted Yank Gene Pitney. That May the Dave Clark Five were mobbed by 5,000 fans in Washington DC, helped by well-placed pre-publicity; Fred Vail recalls being told that only two of their tour dates made money. In June the Stones dropped in to Chicago’s Chess studio to jam as equals (in fame) with their teachers Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon; but in Sacramento the Stones managed an audience of only a thousand, not helped by the exorbitant $6 price (personal communication, Fred Vail). Yet by the end of the year top US acts Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the Supremes and almost the entire Motown star roster on a package tour—aside from the Shangri-Las and many less stellar—were obliged to pay return visits to England for sheer commercial reasons, if not to bow to the new Mecca of reconstituted rock and roll.

Cliff, c.1964, now with pompadour and sideburns trimmed like the tamed-down Elvis

English teen idols with swished-back hair—but otherwise hardly differing from the Beatles—were not welcome in the US and chief among them, Cliff Richard, had suffered more initial rebuffs than the Beatles. ‘Livin’ Doll’ (1959) had made top thirty, prompting an invite from The Pat Boone Show in the New Year. But his only apparent advance was to lead Elvis Presley’s move from rock’n'roll. A huge seller in Europe, especially Germany where Elvis was still stationed in the army, it is hard to believe the song’s sedate shuffle beat didn’t lead directly to ‘Stuck On You’, ‘Good Luck Charm’ and more sounding a lot like Cliff’s pace.

‘Lucky Lips’, another massive world seller, made a reentry and then late 1963 Cliff’s remake of ‘It’s All in the Game’. Unfortunately the Beatles arrived in America just as Cliff was entering the thirty again and his pompadour went stone-cold-dead out of fashion. Songs like ‘Don’t Talk to Him’ and others written by a combination of Shadows/Cliff were better than Beatle music of the time except maybe ‘Please Please Me’. But he was disqualified from serious consideration Stateside for another twelve years, continuing a household name almost everywhere else. His biggest English teen rivals, Adam Faith and Billy Fury, each had a dozen (shrinking) hits into Beatletime at home. Though Faith was pushed by the influential Jack Good, resulting in a solitary US top forty hit backed by the Roulettes, and Fury too had contacts, neither got within a bargepole of American acceptance.

The Shadows too—backing Cliff but having a spectacular career of their own ex-USA—were surplus to requirements. They’d been blocked in 1960 by one-hit-wonder Danish guitarist Jorgen Ingmann’s cover of their world multi-million seller ‘Apache’; after that, well America already had the Ventures, thanks for askin’.

For UK audiences local teen raves Helen Shapiro, hitting at 14, and Kathy Kirby, specialising in speeded-up Doris Day retreads, vied with Brenda Lee and Connie Francis. Shapiro even went to Nashville to record in 1963 but remained unknown to the rest of the States but for minor Easy Listening hit ‘Tell Me What He Said’. Anyway, Lesley Gore already had the teen girl franchise in America, Connie Stevens runner-up, and sultry Connie Francis and wholesome Annette Funicello between them cornering beach movies. In January of that year the Beatles, with just ‘Love Me Do’ under their belts, were ranked fifth on the Helen Shapiro show touring the UK, behind secondary American teen idols Tommy Roe (‘Sheila’) and Chris Montez (‘Let’s Dance’). By the end of the year they were at the top and she was nowhere, her demise highlighting the useless waste and anti-female bias at the onset of the Beatle era. The Beach Boys would choose her as the main support act on their spring 1967 UK tour and she later made a go of a jazz career.

There were legitimate, barely decipherable routes to American hearts other than on the lacy cuffs and billowing shirttails of the Brit Invasion.

Dusty, late '63, with the thick mascara and beginnings of a La Ronette hairdo, but still in the gingham a la the country-styled Springfields

The husky ‘black’ voices of Dusty Springfield (‘Wishin’ and Hopin’’, ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’) and Tom Jones (‘It’s Not Unusual’, ‘What’s New Pussycat?’) saw them embraced as Blue-Eyed Soul, as coined by the Righteous Bros. Neither was quite as successful in the blue-eyed genre as Bill Medley & Bobby Hatfield under Phil Spector, though they lasted longer. And each was courteously credited by black artists with opening ears to black tones, though Britain remained immune for some years yet. In reality, Dusty was an acceptable torch singer, her forté the intimate whisper that Cilla Black did badly. There was a whole vocal ladder between her and Nancy Wilson or Dinah Washington, and a good few rungs up to Betty Everett or compatriot Shirley Bassey. In the UK real soul singers of the day like Madeleine Bell and the Flirtations were hardly appreciated compared with the acclaim showered (mainly justly) on Macy Gray, Joss Stone and Amy Whitehouse two generations later.

Touring America early on with the Springfields, Dusty settled as a solo in New York City and remolded herself from a wholesome Irish-styled colleen belting out country-folk to the first Brit girl replicating Soul. To highlight the new image she took up a bleached-blonde variation of the big backcombed beehive hairdo and black eye makeup of the Ronettes. She cited the Exciters’ ‘Tell Him’ as her style model, and her backing vocalists the Breakaways had done a UK cover of ‘He’s a Rebel’ though Phil Spector and the Crystals’ original became the hit. Thank goodness for small mercies because the Brits had accepted everyone from Tommy Steele to Max Bygraves as stand-ins for the real thing—and continued to, as the French did their own in a rock toujour spirit.

Dusty rivalled Dionne Warwick as top songstress in the States through ‘64, but then with the second big wave of invasion a songbird reminiscent of a French-styled Vera Lynn won over sentimental (white) hearts.

Euro-chanteuse Petula Clark as 'Downtown' broke, aged 32 -- an age before which Pete Townshend hoped to die.

‘Pet’ Clark was over thirty and well established in middle-aged French cabaret when she introduced ‘Downtown’. A parallel movie career and accomplished stagecraft assured her place as long as the Invasion lasted and an American career as long as there were musicals on Broadway. In 1967, when Aretha Franklin discovered Soul, Pet’s days on Top 40 radio were numbered though two of her biggest hits came the first half of that year: movie director Charlie Chaplin’s ‘This is My Song’ and ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’ by her writer/producer Tony Hatch, by his account modeling it after the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

It wasn’t until this point, when the thrust of the Invasion was blunted, that Lulu made her biggest impact in the US, ‘To Sir With Love’, helped by the movie starring Sidney Poitier, America’s new no.1 box-office star. Resembling a Scottish Brenda Lee, Lulu went on from her ersatz stab at the Isley Bros’ r&b classic ‘Shout’— faked well enough for the British Commonwealth—to develop an individual delivery on her classics including ‘Oh Me, Oh My’. Some years later the Brits would again show their weakness for little girls in their early teens with big, put-on gravel voices by making Lena Zavaroni a star for her talent-quest renditions on tv of ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’ and ‘Personality’.

But at the height of the Invasion America was impervious to Britain’s two best-liked girl vocalists, Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw, both tressed in Brit bobs, enjoying one Top 40 hit each, ‘You’re My World’ and ‘Girl Don’t Come’. Cilla, a Liverpool/Cavern mate of the Beatles, was the US flop for manager Brian Epstein—but a British institution, moving effortlessly to television hosting. Model-like Sandie, discovered by Adam Faith, scored a small consolation in ‘(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me’ outselling Dionne Warwick’s version. But she reached her peak in Eurovision Song Quest winner ‘Puppet on a String’—not the Elvis ballad but a horrendous Bavarian-style oompah song beloved of Brits and other Euros that sold four million-plus.

Cilla Black

[caption id="attachment_213" align="alignleft" width="120" caption="Sandie Shaw"][/caption] Gawky Cilla, overflowing with English working-class “If she can make it I can make it” appeal, made pseudo-operatic versions of Bacharach-Warwick’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and ‘Alfie’. English aping led to such disasters as a cover of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’, just pipped to UK no.1 by the original. Cilla, with Manfred Mann, the Hollies, Tremeloes and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch, participated in the decline of British pop in the late Sixties, now reliant on homegrown writers and producers, laid to rest by styleless Marmalades and Love Affairs. The much better Foundations, Amen Corner, The Move and others were unfortunately short-lived.

But with all this—1964 being above all a novelty year—the biggest American impact by UK-based females was made by one-off novelty takes. Overshadowing Dusty and Dionne for three months, “Millie”, Small by name and frame, promoted her native Jamaican ska beat with ‘My Boy Lollipop’ performed at the World Fair in New York with a bevy of dancers sponsored by the newly independent Jamaica’s tourist board. It was a bouncy ditty that went to #2 in Billboard, attracting as much airplay but not sales as the Beach Boys and Four Seasons through early July. The same beat, same everything, was trotted out for lesser hits. Julie Rodgers in early fall trod her footnote in history with ‘The Wedding’, moving seven million in the next eight years—seemingly played at every second wedding in the Western World in that time. The key line “You by my side—that’s how I see us” rang out the death knell of a romantic era.

IN AMERICA PRODUCERS AND SIMPATICO ENGINEERS had wholly realized advances in the studio. Hailed above them all was Phil Spector as creator extraordinaire—now coming to be rivalled by George“Shadow” Morton and Motown’s team Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland. All were widely acknowledged for weaving spells at the control panel—a bewildering press-button device looming large in the lives of girl artists as a metaphor for a loss of control over self-expression and their own careers. Spector in particular was widely modelled by aspiring Svengalis around the world but living up to the substance was something else. In Britain the dark shades and bodyguard-henchman clearing the rabble for the royal procession were embellishments adopted by Andrew Loog Oldham, the echo chamber effects overdone by independent producer Joe Meek.

The Rolling Stones in 1964. From left, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, a stoned Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, a young, relatively humanoid Keith Richard

[caption id="attachment_215" align="alignright" width="468" caption="The Animals in 1964: better musicians and singers than the Stones. Eric Burdon is up front, Alan Price on keyboards and bassist Chas Chandler partly obscured"][/caption] Along with the scene came girl group songwriters admired by the Beatles, Rolling Stones and others. Goffin & King, writing for Little Eva, the Chiffons and Cookies (‘Chains’), wrote ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ for the Animals and later Aretha Franklin’s breakthrough ‘Natural Woman’. Other major New York spousal teams were Mann & Weil—now with ‘Walking in the Rain’ (Ronettes), ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ (Animals), ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’ and ‘Soul and Inspiration’ (Righteous Bros); and Barry & Greenwich—an array including ‘Leader of the Pack’ and ‘River Deep, Mountain High’.

Spector, the model of the go-getter entrepreneur, reveled in the chutzpah it took to make a hit out of nothing in a make-or-break showbiz world as the rock’n'roll era wound down in 1959 and businessmen who made their livings from teen music looked for certainty in trends—a predictability that the best, most vibrant rock’n'roll abhorred, by definition. Three of the Beatles turned to Spector above anyone to produce their starting projects and reignite their solo careers. But as rock moved on, the spontaneity of the original rock’n'roll would only be recaptured in moments, and by the most talented artists.

SCREEN HEROES: THE MOUNT RUSHMORE FOUR

If there are four screen stars with the granite jaws and steely gazes worthy of replacing the presidents’ faces on Mount Rushmore, they are those who rose as actor-producers in the immediate post-World War II era and projected themselves as larger-than-life characters on screen: Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston.

Gregory Peck

[caption id="attachment_95" align="alignright" width="235" caption="Charlton Heston"][/caption]

Burt Lancaster

[caption id="attachment_97" align="alignright" width="234" caption="Kirk Douglas"][/caption]In their time and for long afterwards they were derided by critical cognoscenti for not being the same type of actor as Olivier or Laughton or Muni, totally losing themselves in their roles. I’ve come to agree with Bette Davis, who, remarking on her Warner Bros studio-mate Paul Muni, regretted that he submerged himself so far into his role that there was little real flesh and blood showing on the screen. Spencer Tracy, if not Fredric March, might have lent something to them — though he too was too much of a thespian and boozer to be a producer. Brando, too, in the end, thought little of his craft, dabbling in directing often to the detriment of his films, and bent as he was on being an activist.

The Rushmore Four were also liberal activists in their day, even Charlton Heston — sticking his neck out for others’ civil rights, like Burt Lancaster, on protest marches. Gregory Peck, particularly after he gained civil-rights iconic status through To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), was near the top of Nixon’s dirty tricks hitlist. As far as acting went, the Four were plenty disciplined enough (unlike Brando) and convincing enough to carry the central role in at least a hundred major films between them from 1945 to say, 1975, though the flow had thinned out considerably over the last decade.

Though all could be relied on best to project virility effortlessly on screen — something hardly captured by the Arnies and Sylvesters with all their huffing and puffing, in their biggest, pumped-up bodies — Burt and Kirk were from the start capable of considerable subtlety of emotion along with the naked power, and Gregory and Chuck improved with age. Burt (The Killers, 1946) and Kirk (Champion, 1949) were both launched to stardom at age 33. Greg and Chuck made it at 27 — vi Days of Glory (1944) and Dark City (1950) respectively, though a little less convincingly. None had difficulty filling the screen from the outset — better than say, contemporaries Richard Widmark, who just misses this bunch, with Robert Mitchum, missing only for reasons of lackadaisical anti-heroism — but only two of them made the annual top 10 box-office stars lists, and only twice each, Greg and Burt. Kirk and Charlton narrowly missed the honors list several times, as did Widmark and Mitchum. Sure there was more, and hotter, competition for places in those days. But there also wasn’t the all-fired rush for bigger blockbusters every time. Many of their films were actually made to be personally uplifting. Also, for whatever reason, in recent decades the Harrison Fords, Sylvester Stallones, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Chuck Norrises, Samuel L Jacksons and Jackie Chans have been named top box-office draws when special effects afficionados would go along to see a trained chimp in their roles.

As far as their acting went, some of their roles have rarely been surpassed: Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (1956) as Vincent Van Gogh and as the disillusioned colonel in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1958). Lancaster, after a swashbuckling period — The Flame and the Arrow (1950), The Crimson Pirate (1952) — applied himself to as versatile an oeuvre as Brando, including such classics as Elmer Gantry (1960) and The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Watching him recently in Run Silent, Run Deep, up against the old warhorse Clark Gable, admittedly twenty years past his prime, Lancaster came across as fine — sensitive and subtle. Surely, adding that same year his frightening portrayal of abuse of power in The Sweet Smell of Success and of sexual frustration (pursued by Rita Hayworth at her most alluring) in Separate Tables gave him the acting honors for 1958. All of them infuriated a certain type of critic at one time or another — Peck especially for Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and evil Dr Mengele in The Boys from Brazil, “boring” or inert in other roles; Heston for being irredeemably dignified and monumental — as if he could be anything else in his best, most demanding roles; Lancaster for not being “method” enough to need a therapist — so definitely not the actor’s actor in the Fifties; Douglas, though more “method” and facile in displaying feelings, still too much of a hunk to please other, generally weedy actors.

Burt was an acrobat pre-acting, Kirk a professional wrestler, and Greg and Chuck similarly athletic. That by itself is enough in most circles to consign them to the monosyllabic Action Man category and disqualify them from serious artistic consideration today, when slightly built, androgynous Johnnny Depps, Brad Pitts, Matt Damons and Leonardo DiCaprios rule.

All four retreated to rather routine westerns in the latter 1960s to extend their commercial lives — and all were better for their presence. All boasted marriage partnerships of extraordinary duration, especially where Hollywood is concerned. And all lived at least into their mid-eighties, Douglas still going at 92, again maybe reflecting outstanding professionalism and discipline.

Women’s Liberation in the Movies

No, I’m not talking about this era of the new millennium — when women movie stars are only superstars in magazines. I’m defining the era of more freedom in the media for women from the time commercial movies began. Men from all over the world had contributed to the invention and technical development of filmmaking apparatus, only for women to grab a bigger and bigger slice of the cake once it was obvious “The Movies” were turning into big business.

From the start, some of the most admired and successful screenwriters — Frances Marion, Jeanie Mcpherson, Anita Loos — and particularly starring actors, were female. In America, from 1910, Florence Turner and Florence Lawrence were as popular as any male star of the day, and from 1914-15, Mary Pickford, Pearl White and Theda Bara more so. Their equivalents in Europe were international superstars the androgynous, “mannish” looking Asta Nielsen who would play Hamlet, and Francesca Bertini, so seductively feminine she had perfume and fashions named after her from Paris to Tokyo. In 1913 a film starring 60-year-old French stage veteran “The Divine” Sarah Bernhardt, circulating the United States, made so much money it allowed Adolph Zukor to found Paramount Pictures — proving it was not just the “cheesecake” angle that was successful.

Gene Gauntier

At that period too, beginning before the First World War, Gene Gauntier of the Kalem studio was a combination of highly paid star and screenwriter, while Lois Weber at Universal was among the highest paid directors and producers — and usually starred in her films — moreover specialising in ‘modern’ women’s issues such as abortion and white slavery as her subjects. Alice Guy, head of production at France’s highly prolific and prestigious Gaumont, had formed the template at the turn of the century for such ‘behind the scenes’ women. Later in the US she started the Solax production company, admired for its high standards. But somehow, apart from directing the whole scenario as a screenwriter, not being able to show off in front of the camera didn’t appeal to most women attracted to showbiz.

The popularity of women on screen overtook that of men in the late Twenties and peaked through the Thirties. By the mid-Twenties, Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge and Gloria Swanson were all on contracts guaranteeing them a million dollars a year; Barbara LaMarr and Colleen Moore similarly averaging $250,000 a film — equivalent to a great deal more than Elizabeth Taylor’s million-dollar fee in 1962, and considering there was then virtually no income tax to pay, probably more than Julia Roberts got at her peak.

La Talmadge: bigger at the box-office than Pickford or Swanson through the last six years of silents, 1923-28

Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were the only stars to sustain these rewards into the Depression years, when austerity measures were introduced and even screen stars were taxed much more. The biggest box-office draw of the early Thirties, bar none, was the extremely homely, elderly Marie Dressler — a union activist in the movie industry and boasting a great comedic talent: everything but cheesecake. Behind her was sweet’n'wholesome Janet Gaynor, who necessarily adopted a policy of tight secrecy about her sexuality, succeeded by Shirley Temple at the very top through the rest of the Thirties. Other top female stars made appearances at the top of the pay heap through the decade: staunch capitalist Corinne Griffith, socialite Constance Bennett, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, and into the Forties, Bette Davis, Deanna Durbin, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Ginger Rogers.

Money is power, and I needn’t belabor the point here that women have always been at least as adept as men at wielding any power that comes their way. Unfortunately, beginning around 1938, certain powers in the movie industry made sure that particularly independent-minded female stars like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn were tarred and feathered as “box-office poison”. All were ‘run out of town’, dead or drastically demoted in the industry. Only Hepburn, Crawford and Dietrich survived at all — because able to reinvent themselves at other studios. And it has never been remotely the same ever since for Hollywood women as far as the power game goes. Sure, more women are directors these days but that isn’t where the power lies.

Is 40 the New Teen?

Think of Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and a few others who have made it to the top in Hollywood in the past decade and what descriptive words pass through your mind, assuming you’re not a pubescent female? Juvenile? Weedy? Androgynous? Other Oscar winners like George Clooney and Denzel Washington might best be described as bland — I’m comparing them to their earlier equivalents, say Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier respectively.

Brad Pitt: looking boyish even behind the suit and grown-up moustache

And for all the gay innuendo passed off today about late-Thirties ‘pretty boys’ Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, they were still willing to take the weight of the world on their shoulders when the time came — in a World War. War turned them middle-aged before their time. But think about it… At the age of 42, as Brad Pitt goes around wearing his cap backwards like a street kid — and is the breeding stock of choice for probably millions of women today — Clark Gable was fighting the good fight in daylight raids over Germany, risking his life daily as a tail gunner.

Leonardo DiCaprio: pedophile-candy, even in adulthood

As a general rule these days, young people take on less and less personal responsibility. Today I watched the Dr Phil show as he repeatedly berated a young man who in his early twenties had succumbed to deliberate sexual exhibitionism by a 15-year-old who came on to him. Dr Phil, a psychologist, again and again beat the young man up with The Law, purposefully ignoring his guest’s psychology to paint him as the bad guy. In his own defense this army veteran pleaded that he had experienced the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a stress coper became addicted to pornography, which gave way to sex addiction. Phil McGraw’s argumentative reply was “Are you qualified to make that diagnosis?”

Well, Phil is actually older than me, but I can’t help but think that for a good ole Oklahoma boy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and has 30 years’ experience as a psychologist, he has seen very little of real life — or takes his own books too seriously. The first clue that would have occurred to most people is “war casualty”. Not Dr Phil. My grandmother, who was raised not very far from Oklahoma, was married and had a child by fifteen and a half. As were a lot of people in those days, she was ready and willing to take on full adult responsibilities. In contrast, Phil McGraw, admittedly to suit his purpose, kept referring to this 15-year-old girl in question as a “child”, when she might just as easily be a mother.

And, don’t forget, when it suits The Law, it is quite capable of treating 15-year-olds and younger as “adult offenders”. This must have slipped Phil’s mind.

PET SOUNDS rebounds from RUBBER SOUL—gunned down by REVOLVER

Excerpt #4 from BEACH BOYS vs BEATLEMANIA: Rediscovering Sixties Music by G. A. De Forest, published by Booklocker.com and available for around $19.95 from Amazon, Borders, Books-a-Million, Barnes & Noble or any other of your favorite Internet stops

Sales peak thus far: #23 on Amazon.com’s hot 100 Music History & Criticism books, April 26th 2008

On hearing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul Brian Wilson was spurred to create an album of songs that “sound like they belong together, like a collection of folk songs”. The Beach Boys had done that with their first album, and each song distinctive. What the Beatles had really done was create an album of mood-related songs with an unvaryingly sombre tone. Wilson’s group would try it, but he was temperamentally incapable of being monotonous.

By the US media and as the legend has gone ever since, Pet Sounds was a flop album. The greatest masterwork of the Beach Boys, America’s greatest-ever band, was said to have failed precisely in the terms that America appreciates best: dollars. Until the year 2000 it had never been awarded an RIAA Gold Disc to confirm a mere 500,000 sale. Then a three-month audit by Capitol, not counting “missing paperwork”, tallied 670,000 copies over the previous 15 years and estimated a lifelong US tally of two million-plus—ranking it well up among their studio albums, all assuming naïvely they didn’t have paperwork problems too. Lyricist Tony Asher’s earnings from it were $60,000 by 1990—his cut of royalties at one quarter of 1%, implying world revenues by then of $24 million just for known sales of the eight songs he contributed lyrics for; therefore $39 million had been earned from the 13-song album. Given that its price ranged around $4 in its heyday this would extrapolate to anything up to ten million units (worldwide) had they sold all at once. With steadily rising prices over succeeding decades, and adding in a couple million sales since 1990, a total of well over six million units by now might be guessed at. Even the boring 4-CD ‘documentary’ Pet Sounds Sessions (1996) quickly went gold in the US.

It took the rock world by storm—the Beach Boy image unrecognisable under a sophisticated veneer—and softened the ground for Revolver three months later. In this new millennium the album that has been most frequently voted the greatest of all, ever, is one that, according to the angle perpetuated by the press, came out of the blue, a fluke—the one (grudgingly) acknowledged work of genius supposedly by an idiot-savant cum schizophrenic. The same consensus of rock critics who hold his band up as America’s most important ever belittles their other work in relation to the Beatles’.

But Brian Wilson had been in direct competition with the cleverly crafted songs of Lennon-McCartney-Martin for more than two years. His highly developed sense of rivalry had finely wrought a style more distinctive and more celebrated than any other in modern pop, apparently without any reference to the Beatles or other contemporaries. Was it enough?

RUBBER SOUL, THAT ‘PROVED’ BEATLE PRIMACY, began recording on October 12th 1965, five days after The Moors Murders were reported to the police by a witness—a graphic shock to Britain with its unfathomably (to Americans) low murder rate: a series of sado-sexual snuffings-out of children on the bleak moorland above Manchester, committed (and recorded for their own enjoyment) by an ordinary young couple.

The day after the Beatles got underway the Beach Boys started work on ‘The Little Girl I Once Knew’, unattached to an album, and Brian was working solo on the first vocals for ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’—for Pet Sounds, postponed by Capitol’s insistence on new l.p. product by Xmas: hence the stop-gap Party released November 8th.

Brian Wilson in the studio for the Pet Sounds sessions

For two days Brian holds court over a 40-piece orchestra led by Four Freshmen veteran Dick Reynolds. He goes home filled with ideas about how to apply orchestration to modern rock and starts sketching them out.

Rubber Soul accompanied ‘We Can Work It Out’/‘Day Tripper’ in release the first week of December and set a US record of a million sold in a week. In Britain the 45 was their most popular post-1964, but album sales didn’t approach their usual flood. The double and upcoming single ‘Nowhere Man’ were by far the most commercial songs on the (UK) album but with all that—under the direct influence of Bob Dylan—the basis of the group’s critical cred had shifted from their hit-making ability to a consistent general standard. So while ‘If I Needed Someone’ (by George), ‘In My Life’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ were poignant and ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Run For Your Life’ deserving as well, non-entities such as ‘I’m Looking Through You’ and ‘What Goes On?’ were deemed quality because, given Beatle magnitude and their songs’ huge exposure, every one found followers. Still, there are three tracks I can’t recall hearing.

A vaunted innovation was the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’—remembering that Shel Talmy had applied a sitar sound on Kinks single ‘See My Friend’. What the Beatles did had to be successful—so the Stones used one on ‘Paint It Black’. Used out of context of Indian music—also on Petula Clark’s ‘Color My World’—it lends a quirky trendiness rather than integrated musicality.

Since ‘Yesterday’ on Help! statisticians had been totting up cover versions of Beatle songs. That one reaped nearly 1,200 and now ‘Michelle’ from Rubber Soul scored half that—still a large tally. The similar ‘Girl’, this time from John, probably did well in the cover department too. They were all that kind of song—simple and memorable, of the kind that café and cabaret singers could take endless stabs at in the pre-karaoke era. Paul McCartney: “‘Michelle’ was a joke really. A French tune that you may hear at a party and you’d parody it to death” (Pritchard & Lysaght).

October 26th the Beatles, minus George Martin, had received their MBE medals from the Queen, recognizing their export value—the next bonanza, Rubber Soul, due for the Xmas market around the world. Interviews of George Martin in Pritchard & Lysaght’s The Beatles: an Oral History show how integral he still was—three years on—to the whole process of creating Beatle music. “If there was a keyboard used it was generally me who played it… I was responsible, generally, for the solos. I don’t mean that I would write George’s solo necessarily, although sometimes that did happen, but I would say, “Right, we need a solo here.” Or “We need a line here. How about this?” For example, in the song ‘In My Life’ I played the harpsichord solo. There was a gap in the song… They went away and had their tea… I wrote something like a Bach invention, and played it, then recorded it… They said, “That’s fantastic. We don’t need more. That’s it.” Later on, when we came to do the middle of ‘Michelle’, I actually wrote that.”

In the works was a Beach Boy album to top the Beatles. Like other rare works of art that also qualify as creations of the soul, the impression looking in at Brian Wilson’s soul is deep and enduring, a claim never really made for Beatle music—as admitted by John Lennon. The Beatles’ recorded music was often exciting and sometimes even brightly toned, but always seemed infused, at its core, with the inhibitions of Englishmen.

ANYONE WITH A REASONABLE KNOWLEDGE OF Beach Boys music sees Pet Sounds, far from a one-off, as a natural development of a thematic tone obvious from the time of Beach Boys Today and apparent in Brian Wilson’s work from starting recording four years before in ‘Surfer Girl’, ‘Lonely Sea’, ‘In My Room’… Now in Pet Sounds he gave his music an orchestral setting—beautiful and moreover lending it a certain snob appeal that impressed culture vultures who wouldn’t have bothered otherwise with such an obviously suburban figure.

In what the world construed as a sudden shift, Brian, left alone in the studio for once, was creating a personal masterpiece, honed to perfection without the pressure of others looking over his shoulder. But the legend that Pet Sounds is the one album on which the Beach Boys played not a single note is not quite right. After the band returned from their Japanese tour they got together on ‘That’s Not Me’ with Carl, Dennis and Brian (organ) all playing. Brian as ever played bandleader and choir master on all tracks. Since summer 1963 he had employed the best musicians available, whether in the group or not. His second group still featured Hal Blaine on drums, Glen Campbell (guitar/banjo), Carol Kaye (bass) and other regulars from LA’s “Wrecking Crew” as well as legendary black saxophonist Plas Johnson. Now symphonic players too were collected for their technical expertise and compliance to Brian’s instructions, not for creativity. He cajoled all into a cohesive ensemble interpreting his most subtle nuances of tone, as the Beach Boys themselves had become used to.

No wonder the touring band was nonplussed. Said UK bible Melody Maker, “It was immediately obvious that Brian had travelled further than anyone in popular music, extended its scope beyond a fantasist’s wildest dreams. Pet Sounds was a massive elaboration on the more interesting aspects of his earlier work; the harmonies were denser, structured in myriad layers, achingly lush, yet pure… It was the arrangements that blew minds. Brian had used a bewildering array of resources, more than Spector and the equally iconoclastic Burt Bacharach combined.” To celebrate it, unselfishly, Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham took out a full-page ad urging people to buy it.

Its perfection is not the studio sanitisation of recent decades, interpreted as ‘technical perfection’ by today’s critics: Brian’s commands to instrumentalists (“Drums!”) are audible in places. While the composition phase has an inevitability about its sequence of notes, as has been said about Beethoven—unlike the Beatles, renowned for their quirky twists—it still fills repeat listeners with surprise and delight. One gets a similar sense about The Who’s sixties hits—maybe related to Pete Townshend’s early affinity with recording technology. It has become a truism about Beach Boys music (and for different reasons the electronic tracks of the Beatles), that much of it is difficult if not impossible for other musicians, no matter how skilled, to reproduce never mind interpret.

The piece de resistance is that exactly the right instruments are chosen for each passage no matter how unconventional, e.g. the Japanese koto. What is played and how it is played is so right. As has been told so often, one can picture Brian going to each musician and showing him or her how to play to elicit just the right strain of emotion; and his vocalists—the Beach Boys—the same. Still, from the bewildering jumble that is the Pet Sounds Sessions it is impossible to see how a coherent work is finally delivered, never mind the unquestioned masterpiece it is. We can only stand back and marvel at the creative process of mind and heart that results in the finished work.

The supreme test of Wilson’s achievement as a pure composer is that the two instrumentals, originally intended to have lyrics, stand as wholly finished works and lack for nothing—a testament to wordless poetry, pure music unadulterated by any other consideration like ‘profundity’ of lyrics. In Q magazine’s September 2004 roundup ‘Pet Sounds’ was judged among the fifty greatest instrumentals of all (‘God Only Knows’ ditto in the ballad section).

From left: Bruce Johnston, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson

As has been remarked on by many critics, perhaps coming new to Beach Boys music, the harmonies move in striking counterpoint as on the a capella break in the middle of ‘Sloop John B’, throughout ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ and in the cyclical end of ‘God Only Knows’. But what most appreciators of the new music have found most impressive had always been there—Brian’s own transcendently expressive vocals for ‘Caroline No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’, ‘You Still Believe in Me’…. In Europe it was fully appreciated for its startling emotional/artistic impact as an integrated whole which springs from every track.

RECORDING CONTINUED AT A SANITY-SAPPING PACE that had delivered five album-length projects in a 14-month span. Party was according to some sources their fastest-selling yet but was never awarded Gold. Over that winter the young advertising agency jingle-meister Tony Asher had observed Brian at home every day—the better to devise figure-fitting lyrics for his songs. Not least of Brian’s abilities was in choosing a lyricist to work most perfectly toward his current aim: Gary Usher or Roger Christian for technical-teen appeal; Mike Love for the telling cultural image; on occasions his brothers, frequently himself.

The ‘adult’ lyrics Brian chose from Asher—which superficial observers have hailed as the big advance over Brian’s previous songs—can be put down to the advertising profession wordsmith. Hardly passionate, they are more adult in a certain sense, meaning more of the ‘grown-up’, corporate world, but (mostly) they are non-intimate, even impersonal: They are not the kind of sentences a man would actually say to a lover, at least not one he is close to; rather the politically corrected, gender-sanitised kind from a counselling session or Oprah/Dr Phil tv show:

“I know perfectly well I’m not where I should be/ I’ve been very aware you’ve been patient with me/ Every time we break up you bring back your love to me/ And after all I’ve done to you—how can it be?—You still believe in me…”

Since when has passionless prose been a criterion to judge a work of art? Compare it with Brian’s usual confessional, conversational style, say in ‘Let Him Run Wild’:

Brian’s falsetto:

“When I watched you walk with him tears filled my eyes/
And when I heard you talk with him I couldn’t stand his lies/
And now, before he tries it, I hope you realise it [girl!] /
Let him run wild—he don’t care, Let him run wild—he’ll find out, Let him run wild—he don’t care. Guess you know I…

Mike’s bass voice insert: … waited for you, girl.

Brian’s falsetto resumes:

All the dreams you shared with him you might as well forget/
I know you need a truer love and that’s what you’ll get/
And now that you don’t need him, well he can have his freedom [girl!] Let him run wild…”

Statements on the world in general or personal expression? In this way he did emulate Bob Dylan, and the Beatles, who had recently switched from personal-pronouned—if not exactly personal—to pontificating lyrics (‘We Can Work It Out’, ‘Nowhere Man’). It might be politics but is it art?

For four years so far the street-savvy influence of Mike Love’s lyrics in the Beach Boys’ rock’n'roll had brought out the group’s broad commercial appeal, while the emotional B-sides had come direct from Brian’s soul.

Mike Love, early '66

Mike drove the group’s hit status; Brian’s overall creative command dictated that he push boundaries, whether the results were saleable to a mass public or not.

Capitol saw it differently. Having just had huge world hits with upbeat treatments of ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘Sloop John B’—still approaching its sales peak in Europe as Pet Sounds went to the presses—it wasn’t about to go with a downer: an entire album exploring Brian Wilson’s fragile soul, no matter how deep. Here was a man more capable than anyone else in pop music of expressing his emotions directly through music—and “They just didn’t get it” (Bruce Johnston). Even many admirers including this writer had to take a couple of steps back on first hearing the album, such was its advance over everything else in pop. From the Beatles, Capitol had received a nonstop string of tunes everyone could sing along to, and now they were deemed to be important too. Why couldn’t this boy genius produce the same? His avowed philosophy, “I’ve never written one note or one word of music simply because I think it will make money” was hardly in accord with the label’s fiscal ambitions. Repeatedly summoned to Capitol Tower in Hollywood to please explain, at the last meeting Brian attended he refused to utter a word and instead played to the executives prepared tape loops of “Yes”, “No”, “No comment”, “Can you repeat that?” and other potted answers.

They initially flatly refused to release the album, and only relented when Brian threatened never to make another record for them. A compromise was reached—inclusion of the out-of-place ‘Sloop John B’, though its adventurous arrangement and sound meshes in with the original material. Obviously, having zero confidence in the album—an attitude borne out by the execs’ fatally compromised ‘promotion’ of it—Capitol sought to salvage a few sales through the hit at no extra expense. The label committed money to the first of the Best of the Beach Boys series. Capitol’s denial of the new music—misleading the public by highlighting the hit—was a crisis for the group. The Beach Boys’ business partner was effectively sidelining them by refusing to build a wider audience, so favoring the Beatles in their ongoing contest.

Brian acceded against his better judgment, only to be double-crossed by Capitol, pushing heavily the compilation mostly made up of songs from 1963—a planet light-years away from where the group was now. Five weeks after making Billboard, July 2nd, Pet Sounds hit #10. The label issued Best of the Beach Boys three days later and the masterpiece went no further, clinging on two more months top twenty. Five days after the compilation, in accord with its back-to-the-future mentality, Capitol reissued an anachronistic ‘Help Me Rhonda’/‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ double one week ahead of the should-have-been showcased ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’/ ‘God Only Knows’ from the new album. Having put off the real double for so long, this left a yawning gap of two months with no Beach Boy single on the charts, and the favored Best of… inevitably overshadowing the new material left without a single to promote it (and vice versa).

In what would be a coincidence only to a blind optimist, Brian’s third major nervous breakdown struck him soon after release of Pet Sounds, sensing what was in store. The question has to be asked, What was in their corporate mind, if anything? If the label was compos mentis the stakes must have been high to warrant pulling the rug out from such an important act—at potentially a substantial loss of profit. Was it a business write-off as far as Capitol was concerned? Better to stick to promoting the mod quirkiness of the Beatles, reissues of classic fifties Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and early-sixties Beach Boys, with their assured, predictable markets?

Mike Love, in retrospect (1975): “Pet Sounds in 1966 was the climax of our new group awareness of more positive and emotional issues. Capitol wanted Shut Down Vol. 5. They released Pet Sounds but they didn’t promote it very strongly…”. “Mr Positive Thinker” as he called himself had put a ‘positive’ spin on the album.

THE TOURING GROUP BACK IN FEBRUARY, BRIAN placed their vocals: He had done demos of the lead and harmony parts himself, to such an extent that it was looking like a solo album. The completed ‘Caroline No’ track was released as a solo early March. In the circumstances it probably shocked Capitol as a nice little earner, keeping pace in many markets, flopping nationally once caught up by ‘Sloop’, issued two weeks later. One of the album’s key tracks but lacking a recognisable “Beach Boy” sound or label, it deserved better according to record-buyers in Canada, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Central Valley, upper New York, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee and Billings, Montana—all places where it entered top 20; the ten in San Jose, Orlando, Boston-New England, the Ohio River Valley in Cleveland and Louisville, and in Wisconsin, where it was broadcast hundreds of miles from clear channel station WSPT, Stevens Pt. Again New York City—where the song was listed at #57 by WMCA—had the casting vote over what America liked and didn’t like.

Brian’s voice came through too on ‘Sloop’ (reproduced by Al or Carl in concerts); Carl handled ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’, Mike subsidiary verses or the bridge on each. Brian’s original vocal of ‘God Only Knows’ was excellent but Carl made a classic of it. Of the rest, ‘Here Today’ (a UK cover hit, and in San Bernardino), ‘You Still Believe in Me’, and ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ appeared on compilations, growing familiar to a broader public. The instrumentals and four other tracks by no means suffer for their lack of fame: ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, Brian emoting in similar fashion to ‘You Still Believe in Me’ and perhaps not often reissued for that sole reason; his ‘Hang On to Your Ego’ substituted by Al to better effect as ‘I Know There’s an Answer’; dynamic ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ (Brian again), alternately gentle and commanding with its kettle drums; and ‘That’s Not Me’ (Mike), probably the least commercial song—but with Brian, Carl and Dennis accompanying making it special.

Listened to today the most spectacular rock treatments on the album, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ and ‘Sloop John B’, sound every bit as overtly exciting as Rolling Stones rockers. In fact there is an unmistakable kinship arising from this album. Disregarding the Beach Boys’ harmonies, which anyway sound nothing like their usual Four Freshmen-influenced style (on ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ Brian took six months to get the harmonies to his liking, so exacting had become his aural vision), they and the Stones almost meet in their sheer force of vocal and instrumental drive. Given juxtaposed listening the resemblances seem obvious, posing the likelihood of influence of passages from ‘Here Today’ on ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, or ‘Pet Sounds’ on ‘Honky Tonk Women’. Certainly, the chording and pacing similarity between the later ‘Wild Honey’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’ are striking.

While the Beatles fought it out with the Stones in whipping up fans’ adrenaline they looked elsewhere for their music model—continually. In the early days it had been Lonnie Donegan, Elvis Presley, the Everly Bros; by 1963 Carole King, Motown and unnamed “current Americans” obviously including the Beach Boys and probably (judging from results) Burt Bacharach; the following year Bob Dylan. From spring 1966, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney, at Andrew Oldham’s residence, listened and relistened to the acetate recording of Pet Sounds brought from America by Lou Adler, the most apparent direct influence on them—apart from the ever-present Music Hall tradition—is the Beach Boys. From testimony by Paul McCartney and others who knew the Beatles well, and from internal evidence, they drew on Beach Boy material from 1965, from Pet Sounds and from Wild Honey. In McCartney (1998) Paul’s mid-Sixties associate Barry Miles, confirmed by Beatle producer George Martin, says they saw the Beach Boys as their creative rivals: “The real contender was always Brian Wilson… He had managed to reach the top several times in charts dominated by British Invasion groups but commercial success was not his main interest, though it was for the other Beach Boys.” Miles does not draw the conclusion nearly far enough. McCartney has for forty years called ‘God Only Knows’ the greatest song ever written, and he spent four of those years trying to emulate it.

Brian’s bass guitar roots specifically brought effusive compliments from Pete Townshend and McCartney: “Pet Sounds blew me away. It’s still one of my favorite albums. When I first heard it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is the greatest record of all time!’ Brian took the bass into very unusual places. The band would play in C, and Brian would stay in G. That kind of thing. It gave me great ideas. That musical invention of Brian Wilson was eye-opening, I mean, ear-opening” (from Pritchard & Lysaght, 1998). In Miles’ biography, McCartney expresses a kinship with Wilson as a fellow writer of melodic bass lines, and waxes mystical citing him, himself and James Jamerson of Motown as the apex points of a geographical triangle (LA-London-Detroit) of influential bass-players. Father Murry, too, praised his son’s bass lines and betrayed fatherly pride in speaking of Brian’s “beautiful approach to rock’n'roll”, impressed that he had come some way from rock’n'roll to his own preference for “good music”—orchestrated.

McCartney credited Pet Sounds as the inspiration for his Sgt Peppers—by which time the Beach Boys, or at least Brian Wilson, had pulled further ahead. Others who are said to have called it the best album ever range from Elton John to Tom Petty; and citing it as a major influence: New York City’s pioneer of proto-Punk Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, and English favorites Oasis—often called the Nineties’ echo of the Beatles.

Britain was in spring 1966 just catching up on the Beach Boy catalog. Party, with a timely release for once, exited top ten in April as Today (a year late) entered. It is no surprise that, asked a week after Pet Sounds‘ US release in May, British EMI said it had “no plans” for it. It was sheer public pressure that brought the far-advanced, much-feared album into EMI’s plans. On grudging release in early July Pet Sounds, followed into top ten a week later by Summer Days, did all but reach the very top to the company’s shock. It seems the UK headquarters had no more insight into (or interest in) great, truly innovative music than its American subsidiary. Three decades later it was voted by a panel of international critics assembled by The Times of London as the best album of the rock era, heading off Sgt Peppers. Another belated British accolade was an assessment by New Musical Express (October 2nd 1993) as “Greatest Album of All Time”. As a satisfying double, upcoming ‘Good Vibrations’ would be dubbed by Mojo magazine (1997) “Greatest Single of All Time” heading a list of a hundred. But in May ‘66 when it counted, British EMI’s belief in the Beach Boys’ new music, if not a negative entity, was close to zero.

The touring group at a Capitol reception, early '66: From left, Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson

In the States it was a steady mover, taking a year to sell Gold. Number one featured album at WLS, Chicago’s premier top 40 station, nationally it peaked on average only one or two chart places short of the Beach Boy albums immediately before and after; in Japan, the next biggest market, it did better than them. It was easily their most successful studio album ever in the UK: six months top ten. At the end of the year all the anti propaganda should have been put to bed by Cash Box’s roundup of 1966’s Top 100 Albums: 13th best-selling pop/rock album behind “Best of” compilations from Herman’s Hermits, the Animals and Stones, the Mamas & the Papas, Rubber Soul (5th), the Stones’ Aftermath, Out of Our Heads, December’s Children; four places ahead of Revolver, six ahead of Beach Boys Party and further back to Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, The Young Rascals, the Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! and Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream. The leading albums of the Supremes, Four Seasons and Sonny & Cher were nowhere. But the story put about of the failure of new Beach Boy music—almost willed by British EMI and Capitol—simplified the choice between them and the two-forked Brit attack.

Capitol would continue to divert attention from the group’s groundbreaking, Beatle-influencing music. In spite of all, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’/‘God Only Knows’ turned out one of the summer’s two premier double-sided hits, outdone commercially by the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’/‘Eleanor Rigby’. Both peaked in late August, the Fabs keeping the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ out of the number one spot in the UK sales chart. The same happened between the two groups’ current albums.

ON APRIL 6TH AS ‘CAROLINE’ AND ‘SLOOP’ MADE strides up local charts the Beatles had begun work on Revolver, the album that continued the public eclipsing of the Beach Boys. The Fabs had unstoppable career momentum and it made sense when George Martin assigned novice engineer Geoff Emerick to take charge of sound. In the direction Beatles Inc was going it took an inexperienced whizzkid coming in fresh who could devise evermore contrived sounds to include on some of their upcoming albums.

George Martin: “With the new sounds on Revolver it was basically an attempt to get more colour into our records. I mean, The Beatles were always looking for new sounds… They didn’t know much about instruments, though, which put pressure on me. They needed someone to translate for them. I was there…”

Donovan Leitch: “That was the breakup really with The Beatles, I think. Because Paul is so creative… Paul needed, at that time, somebody like me, who could sit around and jam with him. The Beatles didn’t jam at that time. They made records” (both quotes from Pritchard & Lysaght).

It was at the end of summer 1966, three weeks after Revolver appeared—with their last concert at Candlestick Park, San Francisco—that the Beatles decided they had just done their last tour. Fourteen dates in eighteen days hardly added up to a demanding schedule, especially given their rather perfunctory 30-minute concerts—the idea was just to see the Beatles and scream your hardest—but they were exhausted and highly stressed by events unrelated to entertainment. The target of death threats from Japanese traditionalists, hounded out of the Philippines for offending ruling family the Marcoses, in America made to publicly answer for John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus: these were among the personal depths they had plumbed in the previous weeks that decided them.

Paradoxically, given the bad press later directed at McCartney for breaking up the Beatles, it was George Harrison who, in his first relaxed moment after the Candlestick concert, declared: “I’m not a Beatle anymore!” According to Beatle publicist Tony Barrow it was Harrison and Lennon who were most vehement against them ever becoming a genuine, performing band again. Brian Epstein, who had made looking after the Beatles his life—and would die within a year of dejection and neglect—knew better than to ever suggest it to them. Such was his state through drugs that he was no longer handling their affairs with his customary aplomb. It was not long, in November, that John and Paul on Mick Jagger’s recommendation were seeking out accountant-to-the-rock-stars Allen Klein, wanting him to renegotiate the measly returns on their EMI contract.

Paul embarked on the first Beatle solo project, writing the soundtrack for a Hayley Mills film, The Family Way; and by the end of 1966 George had made a spiritual pilgrimage to India to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of TM fame and learn sitar from Ravi Shankar; and Lennon met self-described avant garde Paris-based Japanese artist Yoko Ono. It was the beginning of a great deal of free time — extending through the remains of their career — with little of genuinely outstanding quality turning up on vinyl. One well-coordinated group project was to grow Zapata moustaches, seen in recent ’spaghetti’ Westerns.

SURFIN’ US/K

Excerpt #2 from BEACH BOYS vs BEATLEMANIA: Rediscovering Sixties Musicby G. A. De Forest, published by Booklocker.com and available for around $19.95 from Amazon, Borders, Books-a-Million, Barnes & Noble or any other of your favorite Internet stops

Sales peak thus far: #23 on Amazon.com’s hot 100 Music History & Criticism books, April 26th 2008

In 1965 the world was looking scary—and not only because the most inane warblings of the British Invasion looked like they were here to stay. Twenty years after the end of WWII it turned out that old tensions and seething enmities between cultures had only been swapped for new ones. The USSR, China, and satellites Eastern Europe, Cuba, North Korea and North Vietnam lined up against The West. In January, Britain’s Winston Churchill, savior of western democracy and hawk of the Cold War, died. Khruschev of the USSR had been deposed for not bringing the West to heel though his USA opposite number John F Kennedy was dead a year. In little more than twelve months the three potent figures of the post-War world were gone.

In February and March two events denied all the brief Kennedy Era stood for. Malcolm X, Black Muslim and leader in the civil rights movement, was murdered, spurring race riots in the Watts district of LA. And President Lyndon B Johnson (“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”) committed the first combat troops to Vietnam, an undeclared war plaguing the American psyche long past its ten-year duration.

The Beach Boys, summer of '64, three months before their first UK visit. From left, Carl Wilson, leader Brian Wilson, middle brother Dennis Wilson, cousin Mike Love, and Brian's Hawthorne High School grid iron teammate Al Jardine

The Beach Boys, victims of their idealism, were about to be trapped in a time warp, objects to be vivisected by the fashion police. For a year pop commentators had questioned the reason for being of these stubborn squares who seemed naïvely unaware of all Beatledom had to offer. The Byrds, switching to folk rock and Dylan, still made the effort to look and sound like Beatles; everyone knew they were “America’s answer” to them. It was “in” and “far out” to conform to the new ‘Counterculture’.

Dennis had gone some way toward beatlesque, hair-wise, in summer ’64; a year later the others were looking fluffier too, if not longer, yet. Mike grew a neatly trimmed beard to distract from his thinning hair, lending a ‘Peter, Paul & Mary’ professorial look to the frontman of a group already up against it with ever younger record-buyers. Touring the UK the eldest Beach Boy—months younger than Ringo Starr and John Lennon—went the whole hog for the Oxford don look, posing for group publicity stills dressed eccentrically in British tweed, country gentleman’s cap and holding a pipe. Brian (replaced by the lean and handsome, if bland, Bruce Johnston on tour) and Carl were unfashionably chubby— and still clean-shaven unlike the bulky turned-on musos of San Francisco psychedelia just emerging, who knew where it was at and let it all hang out: Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Bob Hite of Canned Heat…. It was all a clear snub to populism: the Beach Boys would go their own way, in their own time.

FEBRUARY 15TH 1965 BROUGHT A REALISATION THAT irreplaceable figures had died in the past two months: Sam Cooke, murdered; Alan Freed of a failing spirit; now Nat King Cole of lung cancer. For the Beach Boys the year opened with their first ever shows in Canada—good for a dozen big hits so far, their second expedition into the foreign territory of the British Commonwealth. First came a date at Vancouver, the French city of Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. Brian, hungry for new experiences, plays all but the last, replaced by Glen Campbell. They will take in the same round of cities again in September, with Bruce Johnston and supported by new stars Sonny & Cher.

On vinyl, from the completed Beach Boys Today, a new 45 is lifted that fatal February day. On top of a wall of sound but in a flourish of driving, modernized rock, is their rebirth of ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ both spirited and lush—so maybe too American. Dennis’s sole solo hit, it’s the top debut in the Nashville top 40; streaks fifteen places into the St Louis ten to quench a nine-month drought there (#6); L C Cooke, brother of Sam, rushes out an alternative version that hits the St Louis r&b chart. In Chicagoland, Dallas, Washington DC, New England, Twin Cities, the Rockies, Tulsa, Cincinnati it is top five with stray California districts—sales are taken by its B on the West Coast; top ten Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. Taking off the gloss are slightly below par receptions in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Miami and New York, best at WINS, #12-13, its level in the major hit parades. Elevated to no.5 in Gilbert’s nationwide youth survey for April 17th, mainstream it is no threat to Herman’s Hermits and Freddie & the Dreamers with their red carpet treatment from the media and squatting pampered in the penthouse. The current WABC-New York sales survey lists Brit acts taking 11 of the top 16 tunes.

In the UK it wasn’t released (‘All Summer Long’ was—a joke in terms of the hard tack Brits expected from groups at the time), maybe because EMI feared it could take long-term sales from its Cliff Richard & the Shadows’ 45. Following as it did their recent European tour, ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ should have reinstated them on the Continent, which had given the previous two singles the silent treatment. While it was bought in loyal Scandinavia and played in Italy, it was invisible in Germany, France, Holland and now Australia too, preoccupied with all things Fab.

‘Please Let Me Wonder’ was the chosen ‘A’ in San Jose, where it went to no.1; San Diego, Ohio, Idaho, upstate New York top ten; Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Denver and San Antonio the 20. It drove to no.9 on the Gilbert nationwide poll on April 10th but stalled halfway up the two big charts, to be a favorite on compilation albums and retrospective videos.

April 21st they played both sides on Shindig, ‘Help Me Rhonda’ just released and pocket jams of ‘Fun Fun Fun’ and ‘Long Tall Texan’, demolishing English guests Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders and Cilla Black, producer Jack Good still plugging his countrymen and women though as many would come unstuck as stick; no.1 Italian songstress Rita Pavone also ran. They met up too on set with the Shangri-Las and the Ikettes—from that first bill over three years before.

Both hits were—happily—out of sync with prevailing (lack of) taste, which saw what was already a year-long lapse accelerate into a headlong dive. The public was forcefed the silliest pop ditties yet, Top 40 stations now programmed via remote control by bosses in other cities, even star DJs straightjacketed from injecting local content or personal favorites. Songs masticated into the new chew for a few weeks, losing what bland flavor they had. Previously this trend was signalled by the Beatles’ superior ‘And I Love Her’ and ‘If I Fell’, lapped up by sentimental moviegoers. The Dave Clark Five succumbed to the Beatles’ lead, and made them utterly sickening: ‘Because’, ‘Everybody Knows’—two glutinous-syrupy ballads vying with Brian Poole & the Tremeloes’ ‘Someone, Someone’ for most nauseating weepie of the era.

The Beach Boys sustained their fun-loving, exuberant image, seen in a stocktake-of-things-that-matter Carl wrote for Tiger Beat:

Brian: a Cadillac Eldorado and Mustang

Dennis: a Ferrari and Cobra

Mike, the real collector: a Pontiac MG, Jaguar and Classic MG

Carl: an Aston Martin (James Bond style), Triumph 500 motorbike

Al, ever sensible: a lone T-Bird, as featured in ‘Fun Fun Fun’

The Beach Boys posing with their muscle cars a year before in early '64, the Beatles about to arrive (as can be seen by Brian's experimental hairstyle): From left, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love

By now the three Wilson brothers had bought their own homes on the outskirts of Hollywood. Mike and Al stayed close to home at Manhattan Beach. A roll call of Dennis’s pets told much of the elemental Beach Boy: two (wild, freedom-loving) horses, an otter (at home in water), a parakeet named after mother Audree, a power-dog German Shepherd and ever-present underdog for Dennis to look after—a lost puppy run over outside his house, with a broken leg needing healing. Always a mass of contradictions, supposedly least talented when the group started, he was turning himself into a multi-instrumentalist. The most Beach Boy—runner-up in a Hawaiian surfing tourney, an accomplished danger-skier on hair-raising Rocky Mountain slopes—he was also the most un-Beach Boy, developing a husky, cracked blues voice.

It was Dennis in full flight who pulled as much mob appeal as a Beatle. Fans would breach the carefully mounted barricades at concerts, and all of the boys had their clothes torn and were taught tactics to escape girls’ clutches—rolling out of the tackle grid-iron style. Dennis, though, sometimes surrounded despite the best game strategies, had several times been literally k.o.’ed by love. In Louisville, Kentucky, coincidentally the home of Muhammed Ali, he required three stitches to his head. When audience reaction was deemed out of hand local police forces used their ultimate power of censorship, cutting the feed to amplifiers or yanking down the stage curtain mid-performance, much to the group’s disgust. In l.p. liner notes Mike remarked on the Cincinnati fans as champion “cop-dodgers” and “Then there’s the helpless feeling of seeing a girl, who maybe spent her last dollar to see us, crying or something, ’cause the cops wouldn’t let her stay and get a Beach Boys autograph.” Unlike the Beatles, the group never had sealed, womblike limos to duck into to separate them from their public, and for less hysterical crowds would often stay behind for hours to sign autographs and chat.

UNLIKE THEIR HERMETICALLY PROTECTED RIVALS the Beach Boys no doubt felt themselves in the full swim of the Swinging Sixties. Carl named his favorite acts as the Beatles, Four Seasons, Supremes, Manfred Mann and the Animals—in preference over the Rolling Stones. The Stones, he said, showing considerable prescience, would be around as long as they made hits. Brian, in a 1996 interview, said that he and Carl “liked John [Lennon] a lot”—and that he wrote ‘Girl Don’t Tell Me’ as “a kind of tribute to John.” Said at one time to have been intended for the Beatles to record, it was one of Brian’s favorite songs, written on vacation in Hawaii without a piano or guitar: “And it’s the only song I wrote that way.” He had penned ‘Kiss Me Baby’ months before in a Copenhagen hotel room, also without much in the way of composing aids.

Certain other revelations Brian has made about his lifestyle at this time have shed light on his creative processes: Put simply, take marijuana and sit down at the piano. For The Beach Boys Today!he was experimenting: “The whole second side had been written and arranged while I was high. Compared to previous Beach Boys albums the music was slower, more plaintive, and emotional. The chord patterns were more complex, the production denser, richer in sound, and my thinking in regard to making records was different. Able to break down songs to precise little increments, I began to deal with each instrument individually, stacking sounds one at a time” (BrianWilson.com).

Three months later in April he took a quantum leap into the drug world with his first experience of LSD. He at first justified this by the fact that it led instantly to the composing of ‘California Girls’. Later, he noticed that it was the beginning of auditory hallucinations—voices talking to him, often threatening ones—and an everworsening fragility of mind. It was about this time too he wrote and recorded its flipside ‘Let Him Run Wild’ in hommage to Burt Bacharach’s renowned chord progressions—and that’s as far as any resemblance goes.

“WE LOVE YOU BEATLES, OH YES WE DO!”

Excerpt #1 from BEACH BOYS vs BEATLEMANIA: Rediscovering Sixties Music by G. A. De Forest, published by Booklocker.com and available for around $19.95 from Amazon, Borders, Books-a-Million, Barnes & Noble or any other of your favorite Internet stops

Sales peak thus far: #23 on Amazon.com’s hot 100 Music History & Criticism books (April 26th 2008)

The Fab Four, mops flourishing by mid 1964

To be caught up in Beatlemania ’64 was something as exciting as it was indescribable. Imagine Irish music, Riverdance and leprechaun outfits taking over the world—held aloft for everyone else to aspire to: a crude but apt comparison. The Beatle phenomenon has been uncritically celebrated long past the point of drop-dead kicking-the-corpse boredom, so to this day no one has been able to say convincingly what their music had to do with it. But you had to be there—the pop culture ‘happening’ of the mid-Sixties. It was experienced so deeply by many youths it seemed all that was needed to fix the world was immersion in Beatledom so everything would turn “fab”. Harrypottermania is the only phenomenon to compare with it today.

Tony Barrow, rock journalist and Beatle publicist: “The whole thing changed. The balance of power fell from an average age of 40 to 25 overnight.”

Derek Taylor, Beatle and later Beach Boy publicist: “We saw them in that sense [of being saviors]. People saw them as being some sort of answer to the miseries of the world or in our own little lives. They were the four-headed Santa Claus.”

Astrid Kirchherr, designer of the Beatlehair: “My heart just opens up with pride and joy to know I was so lucky to get to know these wonderful people who deserved all this fame and fortune.”

Astrid Kirchherr: “You could tell Paul really hated [Stuart]” (Salewicz).

Murray Kaufman (Murray the ‘K’), star DJ and self-proclaimed Fifth Beatle: “To this day when you hear [other superstars] you know it. With every album The Beatles gave us a 180-degree change. A completely different change, a different sound, a different attitude. They kept changing with us. The Beatles inspired a lot of the political and social revolution that took place, because from a subliminal standpoint The Beatles represented change. We saw the Beatles change right in front of our eyes.”

This habit of the Beatles being diverted every six months sounds alarmingly like a description of one of the Sixties’ most charming and persuasive fakers, Andrew Loog Oldham, by his friend John Douglas: “… a dilettante: though he’d got natural ability, he didn’t stick long with things, because there was always something new to have a crack at.”

George Martin, who produced all the Beatle records: “In my book The Beatles were the greatest performers and writers ever… They were never satisfied with sticking to one style, one format, one sound… I think I was part of a five-piece group… My particular specialty in the beginning was introductions, endings and solos. The rest of the song was theirs. Later on it [was] the addition of things they hadn’t thought of—all the backward guitar stuff and that kind of thing.”—Excerpts from Pritchard & Lysaght’s The Beatles: an Oral History (1998).

Note that Martin’s “specialty” was composing beginnings, endings and middles of Beatle songs?! “The rest of the song was theirs”, he adds amusingly. For Martin it all came down to how well crafted the song and the variety of ways they were presented. For Murray the K, how mutable the sound and attitude. Changeability was the common theme. So they might rate above Gilbert & Sullivan in adventurousness but below genuine artists in not having a recognisable style. Picasso changing his Blue Period and succeeding phases every four to six months?—the interval between Beatle albums. Novelty, and reading constantly changing trends— Murray the K: “They kept changing with us”"—was their real stock in trade.

These four Liverpool lads of Irish descent had no small touch of the blarney in their blood: the pixieish wit; the crude, crying-into-your-beer sentiment and, encouraged by Dylan, self-pitying bitterness in layers; and Celtic “animal magnetism”—as ascribed by Brian Wilson to the Britons in general. If the Irish kissed the Blarney Stone for luck the Beatles and their minders must have ravished it full-frontal. Ritualistic mystique was all there staged in the Beatles—the Parisian styled hair, the Gallic cut suits, the Beatle bow in unison from the waist. Even Paul’s intriguing German-made ‘violin’ bass guitar, like no other. Was he dead?—Only true initiates could read the signs. It all assumed titanic significance, like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter overlapping into real life.

Clean-cut American Beach Boys as they looked on the arrival of the Beatles, February 1964: didn't stand a chance

They had charm by the bucketful; presence—not the smarm or vacuous additood that passes for it today and is glibly called charisma. To immune observers they were interchangeable mop-tops, but fans knew better: John, the defiant leader with a loose chip on his shoulder, standing at the mike bowlegged gunslinger style; Paul, the smooth, fun-loving pretty boy and the most versatile musically, popping out melodies literally in his sleep—but called “the shrewdest and the toughest” by a teacher who knew them both; George, “the Dark Horse”—only fragments showing above surface, the most “vociferous” at the first meeting with George Martin and the most business minded, but passive-aggressive because dominated by his senior partners, overlooked until his death prompted a gushing media, when his palatial estate showed he had just as massive an ego; Ringo, contributing his personality on drums and off, the best actor in films—seemingly earthbound, living off a suitcase of baked beans on a spiritual exploration of India (the others ate theirs in the studio, scooped from silver service). Starting with no higher ambition than to open a hairdressing salon once the Beatles had struck modest success, ironically he was probably the most spiritual one through his childhood illnesses. But he was painted goofy. Girls liked to mother him for his melancholy. Later, with his head shorn, on his unshaven days he bore an unfortunate resemblance to Yasser Arafat.

At the start they were so… fluffy—and so saleable. While little girls wanted them as cuddly toys who walked, talked, peed and sang, mature females too fantasized about cuddling up to one or other of them. It wasn’t that the marketing strategy was inspired— just that everyone jumped on the bandwagon at once creating an unstoppable momentum, the more venal devotees grabbing fortunes hand over fist. The worldwide money-go-round was carved up continent by continent by seriously monied men, who made Elvis’s Colonel Tom Parker look like a nickel-and-dime grifter. There were Beatle suits and ties, Beatle shoes, Beatle wigs, even Beatle guitars and drum kits. On their first trip to the US, from their tiny cut of the money generated by their own image the group made more from Beatle bubblegum than from performances.

Despite their “Luv, Luv, Luv” mantra, nasty personal politics emerged in breakup as all burst into song unflattering to all—tit for tat attacks in unbounded superstar self-indulgence, abusing their exalted position to demean their art form. Yet because the group died violently in its prime (and resisted all pleas for a rebirth) the Princess Diana Effect mummifies a far-fetched pristine image. There is no question of speaking ill of their legacy, and an objective reappraisal of their value will wait till all media contemporaries in their thrall have retired from the airwaves.

While the Beatles weren’t responsible for every loopy gesture of fandom a finger points at them for hyping it: shaking their hair got their biggest audience reaction, not playing a favorite song—all of their songs were favored. The fans were screaming too loud to care how the music sounded, or if it sounded at all, so that the group at times stopped singing (or substituted bawdy rhymes) unnoticed. Their unbounded, unconditional success has a lot to answer for in foisting a travesty on the musical world, preventing a genuinely new course for modern popular music. They could be accused of corrupting rock in their own way as much as the tame Elvis-lookalikes they allegedly saved rock’n’roll from.

AS AMERICAN POPSTERS PROTESTED AT THE TIME, the Beatles—first called “the English Everly Bros” though Phil & Don weren’t thrilled about it—were offering little that Stateside acts hadn’t, musically; they had once even called themselves the Four Everlys. Their records were unsophisticated, producer George Martin having no experience in rock, coming from the show tradition of the Goons (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan & Harry Secombe), forerunners of Monty Python. Sound engineer “Hurricane” Smith had to work with primitive UK studio equipment. So it is no wonder to the ears of American industry professionals ‘Please Please Me’ sounded like the Country Pop of the real Everlys. In fact it is very much like ‘That’s Old Fashioned’ (1962)—so, an attractive recording but obviously nothing new.

English record producer and former rock journo Charlie Gillett: “For a while in the mid-Sixties, to be an American producer in Britain was to be in a distinct category, as Americans were recognized to have more adventurous production styles [and] played an important part in educating our engineers in American production techniques.” Yanks in the UK included Jimmy Miller helming the Rolling Stones and Spencer Davis Group, Shel Talmy the Kinks and The Who, Bert Berns (a.k.a. Russell) of Don Kirshner/Brill Building pop producing recordings for Them and Lulu, Felix Pappalardi for Cream, and Phil Spector, eventually, for the Beatles themselves. Yet Gillett claims Beach Boy music, from the same mainsprings of rock, was outdated on the arrival of the Beatles— without offering any illustration of his point—and presumably came right on first hearing the Beatles in 1964 (?)! Maybe it is to fit this outlandish statement that Gillett post-dates the commencement of Brian Wilson productions three years to ‘65.

While well-bred manager Brian Epstein put his twopenn’th in about what the Beatles should record, the group obviously knew better and were happy leaving to chance Capitol’s doctoring of the master tapes in America—recognising virtually any Americans (and Capitol ‘experts’ fell into that category for rock’n'roll) would improve on Parlophone’s work done with the Beatles’ own input. No surprise that many Beatle records, especially releases outside the US, have a quirky feel of Tin Pan Alley uncomfortably mixed with rockabilly, or an English attempt at it.

Yes, they were different, in their Old World charm that urban Americans had long forgotten. If their charm and humor was Irish via Liverpool, the down-to-earth opportunism—and an awe of all that was flashy in American culture—was pure working-class England. An American equivalent might be experientially deprived hillbilly Jethro Beaudine coming to the big city and aping all he saw—in his fashion. Their presentation, via influences from Bert Kaempfert, Klaus & Astrid & Jurgen, Brian Epstein, came from Continental Europe. Not only appearance: Close your eyes and listen to early Beatle music, and picture everyman’s Liverpool-via-Hamburg group putting out the same: an act that Rory Storm & the Hurricanes could call their equal. People who knew them and their music intimately at the time said it. It was on top of hundreds of years of European traditional music that they attempted to overlay rock’n'roll. Question: Was this rock’n'roll, an advance on rock’n'roll, or a diluted alternative more related to other Euro acts: Edith Piaf, Johnny Halliday, James Last, Kraftwerk?

Lennon & McCartney came up with a perfect combination of show tunes and ersatz rock’n'roll—not a blending of the two but a craft division as in two assembly streams in a song factory. Their rock’n'roll was as straight as they could make it, improving in the late Sixties with ‘Revolution’ and ‘Back in the USSR’; and their Music Hall songs, which by Sgt Peppers they learned to give a rock veneer, were pure sentiment. Everyone could take something from it, and this catchall ‘something for everyone’ approach— that Elvis had turned to in 1960—brought unparalleled success.

It was all over after the music critic of The Times anointed Lennon & McCartney “the greatest composers since Beethoven”— not even Gilbert & Sullivan. Their habit of descending a third from minor to major, then another third back to major (as in ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’—personal communication from Celia Wood-Calvert)—brought comparisons with Schubert but was the sort of thing untutored musicians not hidebound by academic orthodoxies were likely to stumble upon in the normal course of exploring possibilities. It was their good fortune to be hailed for it.

A passage in Gerry Bloustein’s Musical Visions: Selected Conference Proceedings from 6th National Australian/New Zealand IASPM compares Lennon-McCartney songwriting with Brian Wilson’s. “The songwriters who most often utilised blues-based songforms were Brian Wilson and John Lennon-Paul McCartney. Wilson’s surf and hot rod songs… often involve original and creative adaptations of the standard blues form, and in this sense Wilson should be accorded more credit as the songwriter who was best able to create a logical development of 1950s rock, and surf groups should be considered to be updated rock and roll bands.

“Wilson’s use of the blues-based form is deserving of some detailed attention. He rarely used the form for a complete song… Most of Wilson’s songs are verse-chorus forms, while in some songs (such as ‘Little Deuce Coupe’, ‘Little Honda’) the blues form is employed in the verse but not the chorus. In others (like ‘Dance Dance Dance’, ‘Drag City’ and ‘Surf City’) the reverse applies. The other technique employed by Wilson was to vary the standard chord progression over the last four bars of the form, thereby creating a striking hook effect, usually in combination with prominent multi-part vocals and a strong lyric hook. This technique is evident on ‘Shut Down’, ‘Drag City’, ‘Surf City’ and ‘Three Window Coupe’.

“Lennon-McCartney also used (copied?) [Bloustein’s term] this latter technique, most notably in ‘Day Tripper’ and they too created some idiosyncratic adaptations of the form… Like Wilson, Lennon-McCartney rarely employed the form for a complete song. Their normal procedure was to use the blues scheme for the A section of the typical AABA form and to create a strongly contrasting B section by using a progression totally unconnected with the blues idiom, as in songs such as ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘She’s a Woman’.”

Bloustein goes on to point out that during 1963-66 no other successful writers but the Motown ones make significant use of the blues-based form. But Beatle use of it was strongly tempered by their AABA scheme, which “had been commonly used by popular songwriters for ‘thousands of Tin Pan Alley tunes… a form totally predictable to mid-century listeners’.”

AS AMERICAN POPSTERS PROTESTED AT THE TIME, the Beatles—first called “the English Everly Bros” though Phil & Don weren't thrilled about it—were offering little that Stateside acts hadn't, musically; they had once even called themselves the Four Everlys. Their records were unsophisticated, producer George Martin having no experience in rock, coming from the show tradition of the Goons (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan & Harry Secombe), forerunners of Monty Python. Sound engineer “Hurricane” Smith had to work with primitive UK studio equipment. So it is no wonder to the ears of American industry professionals ‘Please Please Me’ sounded like the Country Pop of the real Everlys. In fact it is very much like ‘That's Old Fashioned’ (1962)—so, an attractive recording but obviously nothing new.

English record producer and former rock journo Charlie Gillett: “For a while in the mid-Sixties, to be an American producer in Britain was to be in a distinct category, as Americans were recognized to have more adventurous production styles [and] played an important part in educating our engineers in American production techniques.” Yanks in the UK included Jimmy Miller helming the Rolling Stones and Spencer Davis Group, Shel Talmy the Kinks and The Who, Bert Berns (a.k.a. Russell) of Don Kirshner/Brill Building pop producing recordings for Them and Lulu, Felix Pappalardi for Cream, and Phil Spector, eventually, for the Beatles themselves. Yet Gillett claims Beach Boy music, from the same mainsprings of rock, was outdated on the arrival of the Beatles— without offering any illustration of his point—and presumably came right on first hearing the Beatles in 1964 (?)! Maybe it is to fit this outlandish statement that Gillett post-dates the commencement of Brian Wilson productions three years to ‘65.

While well-bred manager Brian Epstein put his twopenn’th in about what the Beatles should record, the group obviously knew better and were happy leaving to chance Capitol’s doctoring of the master tapes in America—recognising virtually any Americans (and Capitol ‘experts’ fell into that category for rock’n'roll) would improve on Parlophone’s work done with the Beatles’ own input. No surprise that many Beatle records, especially releases outside the US, have a quirky feel of Tin Pan Alley uncomfortably mixed with rockabilly, or an English attempt at it.

Yes, they were different, in their Old World charm that urban Americans had long forgotten. If their charm and humor was Irish via Liverpool, the down-to-earth opportunism—and an awe of all that was flashy in American culture—was pure working-class England. An American equivalent might be experientially deprived hillbilly Jethro Beaudine coming to the big city and aping all he saw—in his fashion. Their presentation, via influences from Bert Kaempfert, Klaus & Astrid & Jurgen, Brian Epstein, came from Continental Europe. Not only appearance: Close your eyes and listen to early Beatle music, and picture everyman’s Liverpool-via-Hamburg group putting out the same: an act that Rory Storm & the Hurricanes could call their equal. People who knew them and their music intimately at the time said it. It was on top of hundreds of years of European traditional music that they attempted to overlay rock’n'roll. Question: Was this rock’n'roll, an advance on rock’n'roll, or a diluted alternative more related to other Euro acts: Edith Piaf, Johnny Halliday, James Last, Kraftwerk?

Lennon & McCartney came up with a perfect combination of show tunes and ersatz rock’n'roll—not a blending of the two but a craft division as in two assembly streams in a song factory. Their rock’n'roll was as straight as they could make it, improving in the late Sixties with ‘Revolution’ and ‘Back in the USSR’; and their Music Hall songs, which by Sgt Peppers they learned to give a rock veneer, were pure sentiment. Everyone could take something from it, and this catchall ‘something for everyone’ approach— that Elvis had turned to in 1960—brought unparalleled success.

It was all over after the music critic of The Times anointed Lennon & McCartney “the greatest composers since Beethoven”— not even Gilbert & Sullivan. Their habit of descending a third from minor to major, then another third back to major (as in ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’—personal communication from Celia Wood-Calvert)—brought comparisons with Schubert but was the sort of thing untutored musicians not hidebound by academic orthodoxies were likely to stumble upon in the normal course of exploring possibilities. It was their good fortune to be hailed for it.

Alan Livingston, Capitol president and inventor of Bozo the Clown, presents the Beach Boys with what must be their first RIAA Gold Discs in 1965: they were always albums, never singles, and awarded so late because audited belatedly.

A passage in Gerry Bloustein’s Musical Visions: Selected Conference Proceedings from 6th National Australian/New Zealand IASPM compares Lennon-McCartney songwriting with Brian Wilson’s. “The songwriters who most often utilised blues-based songforms were Brian Wilson and John Lennon-Paul McCartney. Wilson’s surf and hot rod songs… often involve original and creative adaptations of the standard blues form, and in this sense Wilson should be accorded more credit as the songwriter who was best able to create a logical development of 1950s rock, and surf groups should be considered to be updated rock and roll bands.

“Wilson’s use of the blues-based form is deserving of some detailed attention. He rarely used the form for a complete song… Most of Wilson’s songs are verse-chorus forms, while in some songs (such as ‘Little Deuce Coupe’, ‘Little Honda’) the blues form is employed in the verse but not the chorus. In others (like ‘Dance Dance Dance’, ‘Drag City’ and ‘Surf City’) the reverse applies. The other technique employed by Wilson was to vary the standard chord progression over the last four bars of the form, thereby creating a striking hook effect, usually in combination with prominent multi-part vocals and a strong lyric hook. This technique is evident on ‘Shut Down’, ‘Drag City’, ‘Surf City’ and ‘Three Window Coupe’.

“Lennon-McCartney also used (copied?) [Bloustein’s term] this latter technique, most notably in ‘Day Tripper’ and they too created some idiosyncratic adaptations of the form… Like Wilson, Lennon-McCartney rarely employed the form for a complete song. Their nor-mal procedure was to use the blues scheme for the A section of the typical AABA form and to create a strongly contrasting B section by using a progression totally unconnected with the blues idiom, as in songs such as ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘She’s a Woman’.”

Bloustein goes on to point out that during 1963-66 no other successful writers but the Motown ones make significant use of the blues-based form. But Beatle use of it was strongly tempered by their AABA scheme, which “had been commonly used by popular songwriters for ‘thousands of Tin Pan Alley tunes… a form totally predictable to mid-century listeners’.”

The AABA songform is four 8-bar sections. Many Beatle songs were dependent on a quirky, not to say cute ‘middle eight’ (B) section that caused traditionalists to prick up their ears in gladness.

The myth of Beatle omnipotence—almost a religious belief in which faith triumphs over facts—was reinforced by the likes of Gillett when he misinformed his readers (1975) that “the Beatles brought the idea of the organic songwriting, singing and instrument-playing unit to the American record business”—a myth perpetuated by Murray Kaufman as late as 1998. It was there in germ form in Johnny Cash & the Tennessee Three; even, mostly, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, Bill Black & D J Fontana; and Buddy Holly & the Crickets. The Beach Boys took it to the ultimate before the Beatles, as such, were ever recorded.

ACCORDING TO THE ROCK HISTORIAN’S BOOK OF Genesis one summer 15-year-old Paul McCartney saw John Lennon, twenty months older, singing with his band for the local Woolton village fete in their home city of Liverpool, the chief north-of-England port that serviced Lancashire’s coal mines and had cargoed cotton from the Confederacy during the American Civil War in defiance of Abraham Lincoln. Equivalent to New York City’s East River dockland but without the prosperity—Great Britain had won the war but “lost the peace”—Liverpool working people were clannish and proud of their scrappy cum entrepreneurial Irish roots. For the Dead End Kids, in the Hollywood B-movies that had informed so many British Empire kids, read John, Paul, George & Ringo. Who can imagine latter-day serene guru George Harrison as the head-butting kid he was, as described by Paul, when he joined the Quarry Men? Lennon, better at lyrics, and McCartney took quirky Scouse humor and added clever wordplay for their songs. Once they started mixing with the fashionable-arty London crowd in 1963 literary pretentions crept in.

It was early 1958 that the three-man core of the Beatles consolidated. This was three years after Lonnie Donegan hit with skiffle, and Bill Haley & His Comets impacted rock’n'roll on Britain with deva-stating results via ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, the theme from gang/rebellion movie Blackboard Jungle. English youths—egged on by violent Teddy Boy subculture—reacted accordingly when Haley & the Comets toured just a few months before, rioting and tearing up seats with flick knives. More than the Teddy Boy image and attire rubbed off on the Quarry Men. Reportedly, the lads themselves were not above a bit of opportunistic rough-housing to get what they wanted from the mean streets of Liverpool or Hamburg.

And it was two years after Elvis Presley. The younger and better looking Elvis had burst from the Tupelo, Mississippi backwoods into throbbing blues center Memphis, Tennessee to mix r&b and country music and take over Teen America. His scintillating, melodramatised performances of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Hound Dog’ were frenetic and frailly breathless, and held to be extraordinary, coming as they did from a white man’s vocal cords. His ‘Jailhouse Rock’ broke a year later at the time Lennon and McCartney were meeting, with Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘Peggy Sue’, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ just as popular.

Though less authentic than Elvis’s earlier Sun recordings of ‘That’s Alright Mama’, ‘Mystery Train’, ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ and ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, white rock’n'roll was, after a breach birth, coming out of incubation. Always just a heartbeat and last gasp away from crib death by misadventure, it would soon be rolled on in its slumber by hefty corporate America, rock’n'roll’s domineering stepmother.

Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Fats Domino had already scored their first hits on the (white) pop charts—‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Maybelline’, ‘Bo Diddley’/‘I’m a Man’, ‘Ain’t That a Shame’. All were remorseless rock’n'rollers, until Richard repented, and were black—so couldn’t be teen icons in the eyes of the music industry of the time. The substitutes who were allowed to make white girls go all gooey were pale-complected, fussily groomed Italo-American boys—Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Freddy Cannon, Bobby Rydell, James Darren, Lou Christie. Ethnics like Tony Orlando, Teddy Randazzo and Steve Alaimo who didn’t ‘regularize’ their names had viable recording careers but were obviously less stellar. The teen idols were promoted by Bandstand and Pat Boone’s series from the 1957-58 tv season, Billboard magazine and its new Hot 100, and a host of other mass media outlets.

The absence of Elvis Presley in the army for two years cleared the way for these ballroom imitations to replace real rock’n'roll.

BEACH BOYS REVIEW

THE BEACH BOYS (Mike Love, Bruce Johnston, John Cowsill, et al)

Supported by: Christopher Cross & band

Vector Arena, Auckland, New Zealand; 7.30 to 10.50pm
18th November 2007; $NZ129

Promotion was good for this show. There had been an interview done with Mike Love on the Australian leg of the tour, shown on New Zealand current affairs tv two nights before the Auckland concert. And news footage of the Beach Boys entourage of Thirties-Forties American classics, speeding up the highway the morning after their New Plymouth show, heading for Auckland 400 kilometres away. But the fact that ticket sales were slow was shown by the fact that after four months, the very day before the show, there were still tv ads trying to move them. In the event, a crowd of 5,000 (my estimate) filled the 12,000-capacity Auckland venue with joyous noise and singing.

The tv ads for the concert had only mentioned Christopher Cross in support, so it was with mixed feelings—torn between irritation and resignation—that we entered the arena three minutes after start time to be greeted by a nondescript ‘girl band’ intent on singing Queen and ELO songs. (All these people must have come simply for nostalgia, so anything pre-Rap will do, right?) I had been expecting to grit my teeth through Chris, the one-time crown prince of castrato Easy Listening, but this was too much. Ambiguously called the Ladykillers, I recognised two of the four as popular Kiwi stars of yesteryear, one of them (Suzanne Donaldson that was) going back the entire forty years and more to the mid-Sixties heyday of the Beach Boys, the other (Tina Cross) merely to the beginning of Disco. They might have been reasonably entertaining in their field of Cabaret Soul on another occasion, accompanied as they were solely by a pianist, but I just wasn’t in the mood. Why not give an opportunity to local up-and-coming rockers—someone at least vaguely in the spirit of things?

I had bought two tickets in July when the box-office opened, half intending to take my usual girlfriend. Only, whenever I had played her the Beach Boys on record or DVD before she had made unfortunate remarks like, “They should do songs that are easy to sing, like Abba or the Beatles.” By a few days before the concert I’d suffered months of daytime nightmares involving her sitting through the concert, seemingly enjoying herself, as she always did, then remarking, ‘Ah, that was quite nice… But if only it had been Abba, or the Bee Gees!” I’d asked my mother first if she wanted to see the Beach Boys—she’d expressed a liking for their music for years, in fact forty years. But, inundated with it whether she wanted it or not, as she’d been since the Sixties, I wasn’t sure that she wasn’t just being sociable in hesitantly assenting. At these prices I wanted someone who would actually appreciate the experience for what it was—the last ever visit to these shores by representatives of the greatest sound ever. I was determined not to take my best (male) friend, as I had to Brian & the Wondermints in December 2004. So “Maw” it was.

The brilliant planning of logistics that went into this special evening—I only fork out for shows when at least one Beach Boy is involved—was something to behold. My mother is elderly, heading well towards frail, is diabetic, and needs a walker to travel more than fifty metres at a time. She needs careful timing of meals and snacks, and she’d decided to leave her walker at home.

I’m glad the current Beach Boys turned out to be worth every penny and every bit of inconvenience. For quality and enjoyment I would rate them well ahead of the February 1978 lineup—made up of the five originals —and behind only the April 1970 lineup (Bruce substituting for Brian) with its immaculate reproduction of recordings. And this show outdid the classic 1970 show for enjoyment because of its overwhelming crowd reaction compared to the staid, inhibited audience of that time, offering polite applause.

As it happened, the surprise guests mainly acted to slow the show down, heralding the beginning of long setting-up delays and disruptive but fortunately intermittent lighting problems. It was a happy surprise that Christopher Cross was more of a rocker than I expected (I only knew ‘Theme from Arthur’ and ‘Sailing’). Though I’m certainly no expert, Christopher seems a fluent, skilled lead guitarist and his accompaniment—good vocals also—especially from a sexy blonde California Girl keyboard player and veteran bassist, improved things beyond anything I’d anticipated. His voice is somewhat stronger and more versatile than it sounds on record, and its Carl-Wilson-before-his-balls-dropped quality would come in very handy on a sincerely felt ‘I Can Hear Music’ guest spot within the Beach Boys’ segment; and later faithfully rendered ‘Carl’ vocals on ‘Kokomo’. The final song in his set, ‘Hey Laura’, was a lovely solo tribute to Dennis & Carl.

The Beach Boys Band, a more accurate description surely than what is implied by coopting the Beach Boys’ name with all there is to live up to, came on around 8.50pm after a 15-minute interval, to the tune of ‘Wipe Out’. This, in a single moment, set the tone—with a contagious bonhomie flowing out to the audience and back again in waves. Make no mistake, this was “The Mike Show” delivering a hits package—but all in great style and spirit. It was actually like being back in the Sixties, a claim I can’t make for any other show I’ve seen, by anyone. The Big Kahuna surfboards brought on to stand either side of the stage set helped, and two or three sweet little girls later invited on stage to singalong with ‘Barbara Ann’, ‘Fun Fun Fun’…

What Mike Love has lost in mobility at 66, possibly due to reported back problems, he has certainly made up for in working the crowd far better than I’d seen from him during the previous Beach Boys shows in Auckland. He has blossomed, admittedly belatedly, out from under the gaze of Brian and the others, regardless of the rights and wrongs of all feuds among the original members—which will never be resolved objectively or justly no matter how long the arguments continue to fly back and forth.

Bruce Johnston, 63, on keyboards—backed up by a specialist producing all sorts of sounds from a multi-deck instrument—was no slouch, the cheerleader for Mike and others at the slightest sign of the pace of the show flagging. The only time it happened was during the aforementioned lighting problems. Bruce sang ‘Do You Wanna Dance? well, with surprising energy—and performed ‘God Only Knows’ even better.

Certainly the most energetic of all was John Cowsill, who must be well into his fifties. Taking the trouble to reproduce percussive subtleties in a way Dennis rarely did live, at times he looked a lot like Dennis, flailing as he did in his youth, long hair flopping on his face. Apparently this was a warm-up tour for him, before he returns to his own family band, the Sixties’ Cowsills—styled halfway between the Beach Boys and the Mamas & the Papas. This Cowsill sang ‘Darlin’, ‘Help Me Rhonda’ and ‘California Dreamin’ (more like the Mamas & the Papas original than the Al remake) passably well.

Of the three unknown players thus far unmentioned, two were young guitarists and the other a bass player/falsetto. The falsetto sang a serviceable solo on ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ and so on but of course without anything like the dexterity and feeling of Bri. He was better singing backup on the likes of ‘Surf City’, where a somewhat limited, shrill high voice would serve. Between the three of them they sang about ten of the leads—I can only assume engineered by Mike and Bruce to save energy.

Given that, the only jarring interpretation came from the young rhythm guitarist, who on ‘Then I Kissed Her’ gave nothing like the quality of Al Jardine (and isn’t the primary role of stand-ins to reproduce the sound of the originals?), but more like an American Idol contestant trying to do Phil Collins. An interesting variation on this song, though, was contained in the middle break—there isn’t one in the Beach Boys’ recorded version of 1965—reverting to the Crystals’ more elaborate 1963 original.

If I was tempted to carp a little more I would mention the Latin rhythm rather annoyingly employed on ‘When I Grow Up’— seriously missing Denny’s innovative stick work heard as a highlight on the original track. Conspicuously missing: ‘Heroes & Villains’, and all others from the Smile era—obviously not a Mike scene. And the way Mike has brought ‘Kokomo’ into focus for the encore instead of ‘Good Vibrations’ is a little obvious. Mike himself, as always, was best in his his deeper registers, on ‘Catch a Wave’, ‘Hawaii’, ‘Still Cruisin’, ‘Kokomo’…

Early on, the two ‘Dance’ numbers were performed best, and seven songs in, on ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’—a revelation, counterpoint harmonies that wouldn’t be matched the rest of the evening. ‘Warmth of the Sun’, ‘Good Timin’ and ‘In My Room’, in that order, also boasted excellent harmonies. Somewhat surprisingly —and all the more so because following a lacklustre ‘Sloop John B’— ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’, which was written off as “obscure” in 1970 by an Auckland reviewer, raised the humungous audience response of the night: a standing ovation and singalong from start to finish. Not to disparage the motive for such an overwhelming ovation, it is probably due to (a vastly inferior version) being the theme for Cadbury chocolate ads, played on television here for years.

Yet, ‘God Only Knows’, the theme to tv’s Big Love, got nothing like the same reaction, though equally beautifully done all round. ‘Little Honda’ was all excitement, attracting second biggest response and almost bringing the house down, then ‘Surf City’ and ‘Surfin’ USA’, with ‘Little Deuce Coupe’, ‘Help Me Rhonda’, and ‘Fun Fun Fun’ other big participation numbers. Strobe lighting effects pulled out for ‘Good Vibrations’ were highly effective; ‘Surfer Girl’ had been introduced as the “cellphone participation song”, prompting innumerable flashes toward the stage from all points for the duration. By the time of ‘Barbara Ann’—with the Christopher Cross band joining the Beach Boys on stage in a party atmosphere—all the stops were well and truly pulled out and what had been a fast-paced show accelerated still as ‘Surfin’ Safari’ segued frantically into a rocking-out ‘USA’.

Oh, and Maw really grooved, as well as she was able—as I was taking notes in the dark. I’m glad I gave her one of the highlights of her life as it winds down. She still tells people about it more than two months later. Count them: three dozen hits in two hours flat. I call that value for money.

SETLIST

1. California Girls 20. Don’t Worry Baby
2. Dance Dance Dance 21. Still Cruisin’
3. Do You Wanna Dance? 22. Little Deuce Coupe
4. Then I Kissed Her 23. 409
5. Darlin’ 24. I Get Around
6. When I Grow Up 25. In My Room
7. Why Do Fools Fall in Love? 26. Good Timin’
8. Sloop John B 27. California Dreamin’
9. Wouldn’t It Be Nice? 28. God Only Knows
10. I Can Hear Music 29. Good Vibrations
11. Surfer Girl 30. Help Me Rhonda
12. Do It Again 31. Rock and Roll Music
13. Surf City 32. Barbara Ann
14. Catch a Wave 33. Surfin’ Safari
15. Hawaii 34. Surfin’ USA
16. Little Honda
17. Be True to Your School Encore:
18. Warmth of the Sun 35. Kokomo
19. Getcha Back 36. Fun Fun Fun

G. A. (Gary) De Forest
‘Beach Boys vs Beatlemania: Rediscovering Sixties Music’
Booklocker.com, November 2007

To be published in the “Beach Boys Britain” newsletter

WHAT PRICE STARDOM?

We seldom if ever give a thought to movie stars of a hundred years ago, partly because most people think they didn’t exist as early as that — but also because we live in a world that treats people as highly disposable commodities. Who can remember the divas that came after Madonna and disappeared before Whitney? The other day I struggled for hours to remember Kevin Costner’s name, even though — in his day — I had paid to see a couple of his movies, a rare thing for me: ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘JFK’.

Florence Turner, a great screen personality and a champion face-puller (gurner), taken on by Vitagraph studio, Brooklyn, in 1906 for a top wage of $18 a week

Actually, to call a film actor a ’star’ before about 1909-10 is, strictly, incorrect. Movies’ leading actors’ names were rarely publicized before that, for two main reasons:

1) Participating in movies at that time was even lower than performing in ‘legitimate’ theatre, only now shucking off its pariah status. Female performers in burlesque or novelty sideshows were previously thought no better than prostitutes, and were prey to the same social stigma, often purveyed by social climbers of their own sex. Performers of either gender hesitated to drag their family’s good name through the muck and would often appear for screen work under a pseudonym. In addition, for some seventeen years when the business of exhibiting movies was in its barely gurgling infancy, and until the courts finally ruled otherwise, it was believed that most movie production companies were illegal operations — that is, those who didn’t pay Thomas Edison royalties for using movie-making apparatus he held patents on. These ‘outlaws’, which included some of the best movie innovators of all, were reluctant to be thrown in the hooscow on old man Edison’s say-so, by his private police force.

2) Up to almost World War I it wasn’t necessary for movie actors to withhold their names because the studio they worked for did that — knowing full well that when a performer became a ‘name’, especially one with international exposure, he or she could command recompense in proportion to the size and popularity of that name.

The temptation became too much for Carl Laemmle, a diminutive German emigre who had worked his way up to own the biggest nickelodeon chain in the Midwest. In the spring of 1910, a year after he had made his first film (a single-reel version of the ‘Hiawatha’ story) for his own company, IMP — Independent Moving Pictures — he approached perhaps the most popular proto-star of her day with a promotional scheme that couldn’t miss. Florence Lawrence — not the kind of name a star would get away with today — had started on screen three years earlier with the then most successful American film studio, Vitagraph of Brooklyn, New York. In 1908 she had moved to local rival Biograph to be directed by the revolutionary D W Griffith, universally acknowledged as “Father of the Movies”, just shifting from acting. Florence, a year before Mary Pickford’s screen debut at the same company, quickly became the studio’s most popular ‘player’ (actor) — distinctive enough to be called by audiences “The Biograph Girl”. (Gene Gauntier was “The Kalem Girl”, Kathlyn Williams “The Selig Girl”, and so on.)

Florence Lawrence, the first American screen 'star', created in 1910

With matchless chutzpah (most of the second and third generation studio bosses were Jewish) Laemmle planted a story in newspapers that the Biograph Girl had been killed in a streetcar accident. Taking credit for her ‘rebirth’, he announced that she would reappear disembarking a train in St Louis. A huge crowd turned out for the occasion, and newspapermen and others insisted on knowing actual names. Thus was born a megastar with the mellifluous name of Florence Lawrence, “The Imp Girl”, officially the first* American movie star to be known by name. With a shipload of public sympathy behind his new prime leading lady, Laemmle was well on his way to founding Universal Studio. His initiative had revolutionized the industry, but other studio bosses, forced to top the exorbitant $200 a week he was paying Florence, didn’t thank him for it.

In 1915, the year Universal City opened for tours at the new base of Hollywood, and a new comic called Charlie Chaplin began his rapid rise to world stardom, Florence was badly burned helping a workmate escape a studio fire and was forced to retire for a time to recuperate. A comeback attempt failed. She continued in acting, though quickly forgotten by the fickle media. By the late Twenties she had been hired, like her early Vitagraph rival Florence Turner and other former stars fallen on hard times, by MGM boss Louis B Mayer for small, dignified parts on a steady salary. Studio shots of her in the early Thirties show her looking withdrawn, even distressed, far from the madcap camera hog she had been at her height. It is likely she sustained longlasting disability from the burns suffered in her heroic impulse to save fellow workers. In 1938, aged 52, she committed suicide by ingesting insect poison.

Sort of puts all the Britneys and Courtneys into perspective, doesn’t it.

*There is scholarly debate over what movie stardom precisely constitutes. G. M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, who had appeared in very early films including the legendary ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903), from 1907 starred himself in highly popular westerns so that his name was generally known but without attracting the overboard ballyhoo that passes for stardom today. There is also international competition to enliven the discussion. In France, early comic Andre Deed had the popularity associated with stardom, but under his clown’s pseudonym. Following him, Max Linder, invariably playing the character “Max” from late 1907, and quickly accruing a vast European popularity that included Russia with its 30,000 cinemas, is said by many to be the first true international star of movies.

THE MOPTOPS

Talk of the Moptops, vintage 1963-4 — John, Paul, George & Ringo — reminds me of that individual lost to history who refused to become one, a Moptop that is: Pete Best, the Beatles’ original drummer for two years. Because he wanted to keep his James Dean/Elvis style pompadour and was no druggie or boozer like his three ‘mates’ gigging Hamburg, Germany, and the North of England, he was dumped, but only at the Moptops’ first recording session — so that it could be said his drumming wasn’t up to par. George Martin, Parlophone’s chief producer and creative head, was hardly enthralled with the musicianship of the others and he and group manager Brian Epstein seriously discussed whether it would be best to substitute their playing with session musicians for recording. That included new drummer Ringo, brought in from Rory Storm & the Hurricanes by Beatle George and Paul. Paul was so impatient to move on he phoned Epstein in the middle of Best’s dumping to check if the dirty work had been done. And then Martin substituted session drummer Andy White anyway for Ringo for that first recording session, August 1962, on ‘Love Me Do’.

Before they met Epstein, John, Paul and eventually George had changed their hair to shortish Julius Caesar-style cuts combed forward, emulating French students of the day.

Beatles 1964: fluffier and cuddlier than ever

But through 1963 their locks grew longer and were styled fluffy, so that with the prime directive from Epstein to burn their ‘rebel’ leathers and dungarees and don natty suits and ties they resembled more a group of walking, talking, singing cuddly toys — and therefore one of the greatest merchandising products, if not the greatest of all, ever conceived by an upwardly mobile entrepreneur.

Brian Epstein taking them on as clients, George Martin taking them on as recording artists, Sir Joseph Lockwood (head of EMI) hoisting them as an export industry, and America raising them to all-conquering superstars had almost nothing to do with their music and everything to do with their winning personalities. It’s all there in the history books. But it turned out one more hoodwinking triumph for the mass media and big business, and one more scam written off to the power of celebrity.

See my book published November 2007, ‘Beach Boys vs Beatlemania: Rediscovering Sixties Music’, available from Booklocker.com (offices and printers in London and Bangor, Maine) and Amazon outlets everywhere including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France and Japan.