The Beach Boys

views updated

The Beach Boys

As long as bleach-blond beach bums ride the waves and lonely geeks fantasize of romance, the Beach Boys will blare from car radios into America's psyche. Emerging from Southern California in the early 1960s, the Beach Boys became the quintessential American teen band, their innocent songs of youthful longing, lust, and liberation coming to define the very essence of white, suburban teenage life. At the same time, they mythologized that life through the sun-kissed prism of Southern California's palm trees, beaches, and hot rods, much like the civic boosters and Hollywood moguls who preceded them. From 1962 to 1966, the Beach Boys joined Phil Spector and Berry Gordy as the most influential shapers of the American Top 40. But like the California myth itself, the Beach Boys' sunny dreams were tempered by an underlying darkness, born of their tempestuous personal and professional lives. That darkness sometimes fueled the group's greatest work. It also produced tragedy for the band's members, especially resident genius Brian Wilson, and by the 1980s the band collapsed into self-parody.

The nucleus of the Beach Boys was the Wilson family, which lived in a simple bungalow in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne. At home, brothers Brian (1942—), Dennis (1944-1983), and Carl (1946-1998) were introduced to music by their temperamental father, Murry Wilson, whose rare displays of affection were usually accompanied by the purchase of musical instruments, records, or lessons. Although each son adopted his father's love of music, it was the eldest, Brian Wilson, who embraced it with passion. His two earliest childhood memories were central to his musical evolution and future career. As a toddler, Brian remembered requesting George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" whenever he visited his grandmother's home. He also remembered his father slapping him at the age of three; he blamed the loss of hearing in his right ear in grade school on the incident. Brian was left unable to hear music in stereo for the rest of his life.

As the Wilsons entered high school, they absorbed the music and culture which would later fuel the Beach Boys. In addition to his classical training at school, Brian loved vocal groups (especially the close-harmony style of the Four Freshmen) and the complex ballads of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. But the Wilsons—even the reclusive Brian—were also immersed in the teenage culture of suburban America: hot rods, go-karts, drive-ins, and, most importantly, rock 'n' roll. They listened to Bill Haley and Elvis Presley and above all Chuck Berry, whom guitarist Carl Wilson idolized. By high school the boys were playing and writing songs together.

In 1961, the group expanded beyond Carl's improving guitar, Brian's accomplished bass, and Dennis' primitive drums. The Wilsons' cousin Mike Love (1941—), a star high school athlete with an excellent voice, joined on vocals. Brian's friend from school, Al Jardine (1942—), rounded out the band after aborting a folk-singing career. With that, America's most famous suburban garage band was born, at first hardly able to play but hungry for the money and fame that might follow a hit record.

Their sound came first, mixing the guitar of Chuck Berry and backbeat of rhythm and blues with Brian's beloved vocal harmonies. But they knew they lacked an angle, some theme to define the band's image. They found that angle one day when Dennis Wilson, sitting on the beach, got the idea to do a song about surfing. By the early 1960s, the surf craze in Southern California had already spawned the "surf music" of artists like Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, based around the crashing guitar sounds intended to mimic the sound of waves. Surf music, however, was just beginning to enter the national consciousness. With prodding, Dennis convinced Brian that there was lyrical and musical potential in the surf scene, and in September of 1961 they recorded "Surfin"' as the Pendeltones, a play on the name of Dale's band and in honor of the Pendleton shirts favored by beach bums. By December, the single had climbed the national charts, and the band renamed itself the Beach Boys.

In 1962 Capitol Records signed them, and over the next three years the Beach Boys became a hit machine, churning out nine Top 40 albums and 15 Top 40 singles, ten of which entered the top ten. In songs like "Surfin' U.S.A.," "Little Deuce Coupe," and "Fun, Fun, Fun" the group turned Southern California's youthful subculture into a teenage fantasy for the rest of America and the world. A baby boom generation hitting adolescence found exuberant symbols of their cultural independence from adults in the band's hot rods and surfboards. The songs, however, articulated a tempered rebellion in acts like driving too fast or staying out too late, while avoiding the stronger sexual and racial suggestiveness of predecessors like Presley or successors like the Rolling Stones. In their all-American slacks and short-sleeve striped shirts, the Beach Boys were equally welcome in teen hangouts and suburban America's living rooms.

By 1963, the Beach Boys emerged as international stars and established their place in America's cultural life. But tensions between the band's chief songwriter, Brian Wilson, and the band's fan-base emerged just as quickly. Wilson was uninterested in his audience, driven instead to compete obsessively for pop preeminence against his competitors, especially Phil Spector and later the Beatles. To make matters worse, Wilson was a shy introvert, more interested in songwriting and record production than the limelight and the stage. He retreated into the studio, abandoning the proven style of his earliest hits for Spector's wall-of-sound sophistication on songs like "Don't Worry Baby" and "I Get Around." At the same time, Wilson's personal melancholia increasingly entered his songwriting, most notably on the monumental ballad "In My Room." Together, these changes altered the Beach Boys' public persona. "I Get Around" was a number one single in 1964, but "Don't Worry Baby," arguably the most creative song Wilson had yet written, stalled ominously at number 24. And "In My Room," while unquestionably about teenagers, deserted innocent fun for painful longing. It also topped out at number 23. The Beach Boys were growing up, and so was their audience. Unlike Wilson, however, the post-teen boomers already longed nostalgically for the past and struggled to engage the band's changes.

The audience was also turning elsewhere. The emergence of the Beatles in 1964 shook the foundations of the Beach Boys camp. Suddenly supplanted at the top of the pop charts, the rest of the band pushed Brian Wilson toward more recognizably "Beach Boys" songs, which he wisely rebuffed considering rock 'n' roll's rapid evolution during the mid-1960s. In addition, the entire band began living out the adolescent fantasies they had heretofore only sung about. Only now, as rich young adults, those fantasies meshed with the emerging counter-culture, mysticism, and heavy drug use of the late-1960s Southern Californian music scene. With the rest of the band tuning out, Wilson's Beatles obsession and drug abuse accelerated, Beach Boys albums grew more experimental, and Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown.

For two years after Wilson's breakdown, the Beach Boys' music miraculously remained as strong as ever. "Help Me, Rhonda" and "California Girls" (both 1965) were smash hits, and the live album The Beach Boys Party! proved the band retained some of its boyish charm. But no Beach Boys fan—or even the Beach Boys them-selves—could have been prepared for Brian Wilson's unveiling of Pet Sounds (1966), a tremendous album with a legacy that far outshines its initial success. Completed by Brian Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher, with only vocal help from the other Beach Boys, Pet Sounds was Brian Wilson's most ambitious work, a dispiriting album about a young man facing adulthood and the pain of failed relationships. It also reflected the transformation of Southern California's youth culture from innocence to introspection—and excess—as the baby boomers got older. Moreover, Pet Sounds' lush pastiche pushed the boundaries of rock so far that no less than Paul McCartney hailed it as his favorite album ever and claimed it inspired the Beatles to produce Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In subsequent decades, some critics would hail Pet Sounds as the greatest rock album ever made, and it cemented the Beach Boys' place in the pantheon of popular music. At the time, however, critics in the United States had already dismissed the band, and their fans, accustomed to beach-party ditties, failed to understand the album. Although two singles—"Sloop John B" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice"—entered the top ten, sales of the album fell below expectations.

Disappointed and increasingly disoriented, Wilson was determined to top himself again, and set to work on what would become the most famous still-born in rock history, Smile (1967). Intended to supplant Pet Sounds in grandeur, the Smile sessions instead collapsed as Wilson, fried on LSD, delusional, and abandoned by the rest of the group, was unable to finish the album. Fragments emerged over the years, on other albums and bootlegs, that suggested the germ of a great album. All that survived in completed form at the time, however, was one single, the brilliant number one hit "Good Vibrations," which Smile engineer Chuck Britz said took three months to produce and "was [Brian Wilson's] whole life's performance in one track."

If Britz was right then Wilson's timing could not have been better, for short on the heels of the failed Smile sessions came the release of Sgt. Pepper. As if he knew that his time had passed, Wilson, like his idol Spector, withdrew except for occasional Beach Boys collaborations, lost in a world of bad drugs and worse friends until the 1990s.

The Beach Boys carried on, occasionally producing decent albums like Wild Honey (1967), at least one more classic song, Brian's 1971 "'Til I Die," but their days as a cultural and commercial powerhouse were behind them. In 1974, with the release of the greatest-hits package Endless Summer, the band finally succumbed to the wishes of its fans (and at least some of its members), who preferred celebrating their mythic land of teenage innocence the Beach Boys had so fabulously fabricated in their early years. The album shot to number one, spending 155 weeks on Billboard's Hot 100, and the quintessential American teen band now remade itself as the quintessential American oldies act. They traveled the country well into the 1990s with beach party-styled concerts, performing their standards thousands of times. In 1983, Interior Secretary James Watt denied them permission to play their annual July 4 concert in Washington, D.C. to maintain a more "family-oriented" show. Miraculously, they scored one more number one single with "Kokomo," a kitschy 1988 track intended to play on their nostalgic image. Along the way, they endured countless drug addictions, staff changes, inter-group lawsuits over song credits, and two deaths—Dennis Wilson in a 1981 drowning and Carl Wilson of cancer in 1998.

That some of the Beach Boys' early music perhaps sounds ordinary 30 years later owes something to the group's descent into self-parody. But it also reflects the degree to which their music infiltrated American culture. No artists better articulated California's mythic allure or adolescence's tortured energy. And when that allure and energy was lost, their music paved the road for the journeys later musicians—from the Doors to the Eagles and Hole—would take into the dark side of the Californian, and American, dream.

—Alexander Shashko