Love & Mercy
I never wanted to like The Beach Boys. They were my father’s favorite band when he was growing up and I didn’t want to be anything like him. They seemed corny because of their name and their look.
My image of them was of their pre-British Invasion years when they wore matching outfits: striped shirts with khakis. I found their style preppy, conservative and terminally uncool.
My impression of their music was that the backing tracks were nice but the lyrics were shallow observations and narratives about cars, girls and surfing.
I was puzzled by why they were held in such esteem by their contemporaries when they seemed so backward and out of step with their peers.
When reading the liner notes for Pet Sounds, I felt myself grow uncomfortable at references to prayers sessions and God. I imagined it to be like evangelical Christianity. I couldn’t conceive of them as anything but quintessentially American and having a more conservative bent.
It’s a miracle at all that I ever came to love The Beach Boys.
The first place I can recall hearing The Beach Boys was in the opening credits of Look Who’s Talking, which is soundtracked to “I Get Around.” I may have also seen the Muppets music video for their version of “Kokomo” on The Disney Channel or Nickelodeon.
The first time I recall hearing their name occurred on the same family trip to Florida in April 1995 where I learned about The Beatles
We were at Epcot at Food Rocks, an animatronic show about nutrition that was sponsored by Nestlé. My dad found the irony of that sponsorship amusing. One of the food-based parodies in the show was “Good Nutrition” by a group called The Peach Boys.Despite the name, only one of the animatronics was a peach, the others were different kinds of fruit.
That was when I learned that The Beach Boys had been a favorite band of my father’s when he was growing up. That cemented their status to me as unhip. At the age of six I already had a sense that my father was incredibly square.
I pushed The Beach Boys out of my mind and didn’t give them another serious thought until I was becoming a serious music fan in high school.
Most of high school I was obsessed with classic rock. Freshman year I got really into The Rolling Stones after getting Forty Licks. The next few years I was all about The Who. I didn’t get to The Beach Boys until I was a senior, when I bought Pet Sounds.
After seeing it regarded so well on lists of best albums and reading about how Rubber Soul influenced Pet Sounds and how it in turn influenced Revolver, I knew I had to check it out. At first I was unsure why such a fuss was made, my perceptions about the band no doubt shaping my response.
I got over my preconceived notions and took a real liking to the album. When the weather was nice, I’d usually blast music from my pickup truck as I waited my turn to exit the crowded parking lot of my high school. I have a vivid memory of playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and one of the students moving his arms in time with the electric 12-string that opens the song.
He was smiling and when I think of him, I smile, too. I never saw him before that day or after, but I will remember that moment every time I hear that song. It was a beautiful and brief moment of connection as when you make eye contact with a stranger on the opposite subway platform. No words exchanged but you think of each other long after your trains depart the station.
When I purchased Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of The Beach Boys later that year, the clerk at the Best Buy struggled to hide her laughter at my purchase. It was interesting getting the independent record store experience at a big box store.
College is really where I learned to stop worrying and love The Beach Boys. I started delving deeper with The Warmth of the Sun, another Beach Boys compilation that included a lot of great B-sides and I listened to their early 70s albums and the 60s albums that led up to Pet Sounds. Dennis Wilson’s solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, got a re-release before my junior year, but what really pushed me over the edge was a rite of passage for many music obsessives: SMiLE.
I listened to the 2004 Brian Wilson release, but I also downloaded fan versions of the album. One year for Halloween I went as Brian Wilson circa 1967. I got my Pet Sounds shirt, a pivotal piece of my wardrobe as it would turn out.
During my SMiLE obsession, I reached out to my estranged father. After my parents got divorced he was basically not part of my life. We spoke on the phone once or twice, I brought up The Beach Boys in an attempt to connect to one of his interests, but the conversations fizzled out quickly felt strained as if he was lobotomized. I soon gave up trying to connect with this stranger.
The day before I turned 21, a friend gave me a hash brownie. I had never had any marijuana at that point and had only a few sips of a White Russian during a Big Lebowski party when I was a college freshman. I figured that since I was already going to be drinking soon, I might as well try another substance.
I ate the brownie before we went to Mother Bear’s Pizza for dinner and it kicked in during the meal. It felt like a blast of steam had gone up my nose and I asked everyone else if they had felt it. I got super paranoid and calmed myself down by listening to my SMiLE bootlegs. I sobered up and we hit the bars.
As a senior, I made a decision to study musicology in grad school and decided I wanted to write my thesis on The Beach Boys. I wanted to be a professor and teach music classes like Dr. Glenn Gass. I served as his grading assistant my last three semesters of college. The Beach Boys came up during one of the classes he taught, History of Rock and Roll II, and his lecture on “Good Vibrations” was famous because of how he used the chalkboard in the lecture hall to illustrate the structure of the song.
Before my time at IU and after, there was a course on The Beach Boys, Captain Beefheart and The Residents. I dreamed of taking it.
I moved to Brooklyn for grad school and lived with my maternal grandmother. Much to my surprise, she was a fan of The Beach Boys due to her seeing The Beach Boys: An American Family. My initial plan for my thesis was to compare and contrast SMiLE and Van Dyke Park’s Song Cycle with the music of Charles Ives. My thesis advisor didn’t see a connection between the two, though I felt vindicated by email from VDP in which he stated he played Ives at conservatory.
The timing of my thesis was perfect as The Smile Sessions was released that fall. It also coincided with the group’s 50th anniversary and a new album and tour in 2012. I had a chance to see one of those shows and it was a memorable experience, especially getting to see Brian.
It was during grad school that I met the first woman I ever loved. We became friends on Tumblr via our mutual appreciation for The Beach Boys. We then learned that we had lived in the same dorm the previous year and that we had seen each other in passing at the cafe in the dorm. She had taken notice of me because of my Pet Sounds shirt and I had noticed her noticing and just assumed she was looking my way because I was looking her way.
Naturally, this occurred when I was living more than 700 miles away. When it comes to love, timing is key. I still think of her when I hear “You’re So Good To Me,” a favorite of hers.
When I had my first psychedelic experience, I turned to The Beatles and Beach Boys to keep me grounded. Appropriate because of the influence LSD had on them. I remember telling a woman in my first journalism class that Brian Wilson had written the introduction to “California Girls” while under the influence of acid.
I suspect now that my love for The Beach Boys was born out of a desire for acceptance from my father. Fitting in a way because of the way I associate The Beatles with my mother. Both groups influenced each other and there are several notable parallels. Both feature bassists born in June 1942. Paul McCartney was born on June 18 and Brian Wilson on the 20th.
Both bands lost their lead guitarist to lung cancer. Carl Wilson passed on Feb. 6, 1998 and George Harrison on Nov. 29, 2001. And two members were lost in ironic fashions: Dennis Wilson, a surfer, drowned and John Lennon, an advocate for peace, was murdered. And course there are the connections to Charles Manson. He was an associate of Dennis Wilson’s for a time and interpreted “Helter Skelter” as about a coming race war.
Now I’m living in the heart of Beach Boys country in Southern California and not far from Van Dyke Parks. Last August, I attended a show at Zebulon and when I walked to the stage area, I immediately spotted Van Dyke Parks and he was talking to John C. Reilly. I was briefly surprised by this until I remembered that VDP had contributed lyrics to the SMiLE parody in Walk Hard.
And of course “God Only Knows” has prominent role on the soundtrack to Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson also used “He Needs Me” in Punch-Drunk Love. That song was originally written for Robert Altman’s Popeye and Van Dyke Parks collaborated on the music for that with Harry Nilsson. That was a childhood favorite of mine and looking at it now, a keystone for my taste in music and movies. It was always there, I just had to chip away at the marble.
The Beach Boys have touched my life in so many conscious and unconscious ways. NBA player Kevin Love is the nephew of Mike Love and cousin to the Wilson family. My favorite author, Thomas Pynchon once spent an awkward night with Brian Wilson.
In Brian Wilson’s liner notes to the 1990 release compact disc of Pet Sounds he wrote the following, “I experimented with sounds that would make the listener feel loved. I needed to get this one album out to my fans and the public from my heart and soul. I was in a loving mood for a few months and it found its way to recorded tape.”
He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Brian Wilson is God.
What You Leave Out
“Don’t Worry Baby” was the B-Side to “I Get Around” and inspired by Brian’s love of “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes. Ronnie Spector later covered it on her 1999 EP, She Talks To Rainbows. It was offered to The Ronettes but Phil Spector rejected it. Hard to see why, it’s a tremendous song. I consider it one of the best love songs of all time. The whole song is gorgeous, but the moment that makes it for me is a detail I only noticed recently. After the final “Don’t worry baby” one hears “Ooh ooh ooh ooh,” sung in the backing vocals. It completes the song in a beautiful way, if this were a love letter, it would serve as a postscript reaffirming the love.
I Lost It At The Movies
Love Letter (1959) dir. Seijun Suzuki, is as brief as it is gorgeously shot, clocking in at 40 minutes. If you’ve any traits of a hopeless-romantic, it’s well worth your time.
In-N-Out
Much like The Beach Boys, In-N-Out Burger is a California icon. The oldest existing location of the franchise is in Pasadena, the fifth location the company ever opened. Fast food really had its beginnings in California, it’s hard to find a chain that didn’t start in Southern California. The culture that The Beach Boys sang about in their earliest songs, were some of the primary customers of burger stands, hot dog joints and other places of business that served up food for those on the go. And while The Beach Boys were based in Hawthorne, they did covered “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena” at a show in Sacramento for a live album.
Uncle Magic
Lee Cummings was the nephew of Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Like his uncle, Cummings started his own fried chicken restaurant. He developed the recipe from working alongside his uncle. Musically, it calls to mind Uncle Tupelo, an alt-country band that split into two bands: Son Volt and Wilco.
Son Volt is the equivalent of Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, not as well-known and in some ways superior to the more popular version. Wilco is Kentucky Fried Chicken due to their popularity. I prefer Lee’s Famous, but that may be because I’ve only had it a few times and it’s less prone to the pitfalls of a chain with a lot of franchises. And like the Cold War, the wrong side won.
There’s even a Beach Boys connection: Wilco’s 1999 classic album Summerteeth is very much influenced by The Beach Boys and other 60s bands. Plus, “Fun, Fun, Fun” was used for a KFC commercial in the 1980s.
