TROUBLE IN PARADISE – THE BEACH BOYS

September 19, 2022 / By

TROUBLE IN PARADISE – THE BEACH BOYS

By Duncan R. Shaw

Madrid, 18 September 2022

Would you like to be whisked away: from our dismal age of war, crisis and mourning? To an age of youth, innocence and good clean fun?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to me last night. I was transported back to the carefree early 1960s in sunny southern California – back to the halcyon world of the Beach Boys…thanks to this fetching little documentary.

Which reminded me of exactly why the Beach Boys were one of my favourite groups growing up in northern England in the 1960s, along with the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, the Kinks, the Bee Gees, the Monkees and the Rolling Stones.

What this documentary confirmed to me is that things are never quite what they seem on the surface. To be more precise: that there is a sad backstory to the Beach Boys, or rather a whole series of paradoxes that belie and undercut the sunny official narrative of the surfing, car-driving, girl-chasing, richly talented clean-cut California brothers.

Don’t judge a book by the cover – the truth is often more nuanced…trouble in paradise…

For starters, only one of them was interested (vaguely) in surfing: the extroverted middle Wilson brother Dennis. The tortured genius older brother Brian had no interest whatsoever in the beach – neither did younger brother Carl, cousin Mike Love or friend Al Jardine.

The Beach Boys name and image were artifically created by ambitious, domineering, often violent father Murry, who was desperate to cash in on his boys after a failed musical career himself.

Shades of Leopold Mozart showing off young Wolfgang to eighteenth-century Europe, or of Mike Agassi building a tennis machine and obliging poor young Andre to play against it for fully eight hours a day…

Murry Wilson quickly realized that Brian had a rare musical talent, and single-mindedly (often brutally) built the group around his mercurial older son.

The demanding, authoritarian, often hysterical Murry regularly beat up all three of his boys, and was reportedly responsible for poor Brian being deaf in one ear.

After five torturous years with Murry as manager, Brian finally pushed his domineering father out of the recording studio. But by then Brian was suffering a series of nervous breakdowns and ugly hallucinations (partly because of taking LSD, partly because of a bizarre marriage to a 16 year-old starlet), and was refusing to tour with the band.

So much for the official narrative of the carefree surfing boys from southern California…

With Murry cast aside and Brian confined to the record studio, a new leader emerged: the rather talentless cousin Mike Love, a clumsy frontman the Wilsons could surely have done without.

The mediocre Love tried to become the epitome of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ (transcendental meditation, endless affairs and illegitimate children) but ended up as a vocal supporter of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump – to the chagrin of poor Brian and Jardine…

Just about the only positive thing the tiresome Love had going for him was his surname: perfect for the Sixties.

In the 1990s Love completely ripped apart the band by filing an acrimonious lawsuit demanding that he be co-credited (and massively paid) for most of the songs.

Am I being too harsh on Love? He claims to have written many of the group’s most memorable and sophisticated lines, such as the classic California hot-rod anthem:

“Well she got her daddy’s carAnd she cruised through the hamburger stand nowSeems she forgot all about the libraryLike she told her old man nowAnd with the radio blastingGoes cruising just as fast as she can now
And she’ll have fun fun fun‘Til her daddy takes the T-bird away(Fun fun fun ’til her daddy takes the T-bird away)
Well the girls can’t stand her‘Cause she walks, looks and drives like an ace now(You walk like an ace now, you walk like an ace)She makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race now(You look like an ace now, you look like an ace)A lotta guys try to catch herBut she leads them on a wild goose chase now(You drive like an ace now, you drive like an ace)
And she’ll have fun fun fun‘Til her daddy takes the T-bird away…”
Meanwhile, the tortured Brian was in the studio for countless days, with evil genius Phil Spector, making the extravagant Pet Sounds album – which Love and the others found incomprehensible.
Poor Brian then degenerated into reclusiveness and obesity, from which he was ‘saved’ by the polemical Dr Eugene Landy…
The only time I saw the Beach Boys was at the (usually overblown, disappointing) Knebworth festival in southern England, in June 1980.
We were a callow, conceited, pretentious small gang of university-bound boys and girls who had just passed our (extremely demanding) A Levels. We were going to celebrate the end of our exams and the summer solstice by drinking and loving all night on Ashover Rock. Instead, somebody (I can’t recall who) insisted we see the Beach Boys – and drove us down the M1 to Knebworth.
In the packed mini-van we tried to get in the mood by singing Good Vibrations and Help Me, Rhonda, but we were punk rockers (Strummer, Weller, etc) who for three years had been trying to pour scorn on the ‘boring old farts’ of our childhood – such as the Beach Boys…
So we arrived at chilly, rainy Knebworth more disposed to bury Caesar than to praise him…However, despite ourselves, we ended up enjoying a memorable set from the boys from Hawthorne.
Brian (slimmed down but slow, thanks to the obsessive Dr Landy) had finally rejoined the band on tour, and wild Dennis had been readmitted to the fold after being sacked for his drug excesses.
It was just about the last time the boys were all together, before Dennis’ demise in 1983. Rarely have I seen a band work so hard on stage (it was a cold night), and they finally won us all over with their tireless enthusiasm and sunny optimism.
We drove back north conceding that these particular ‘boring old farts’ hadn’t actually been too terrible, singing California Girls…

I was delighted to find, last night, the entire 1980 Knebworth concert on YouTube. You might want to take a look…

You might also want to see the tempestous Love & Mercy: about Brian, Dr Landy and Melinda Ledbetter; by no means an easy film, but (or am I wrong?) an ultimately rewarding one…

 

 

4 thoughts on “TROUBLE IN PARADISE – THE BEACH BOYS”

  1. Finbar King

    The irony here is that, despite pop being a feral front for all things capital, the Beach Boys did give hundreds of millions of people pleasure for over twenty years and in the recordings they still do. I guess that’s the Faustian bargain made by us all.

    Reply
  2. James Hooke

    Ahhhhh... Lovely memories rekindled of the late 60s/early 70s. It was difficult admitting to friends that one was a BB fan, but then we knew all of their lyrics.

    Reply
  4. Kieran McGovern

    The words to Fun, Fun, Fun also the indicate the influence of Chuck Berry - openly acknowledged in Surfing USA (to the tune of Johnny B Good). This linked them to The Beatles who were early BB admirers - see Things We Said Today, for example.

    Creative rivalry would drive both to greater achievements - Brian conceived Pet Sounds in response to Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds in turn dazzled McCartney. Alas it was while striving to top Revolver & Sergeant Pepper that Brian seriously went off the rails. Firstly he followed The Beatle example in abandoning touring - the band didn't get the memo but did have high class cover with Glenn Campbell and then Bruce Johnston.

    The split should be understood in this context. Mike Love did behave obnoxiously, but some of Brian's crazier antics in the recording of fabled Smile were, ahem, challenging. Famously he obliged his band mates to record in a sand pit while wearing firemen's helmets...

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *