III. Artists ↑
13. The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are certainly the most important rock group to hail from the United States. At a time when groups such as The Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones were beginning their careers in Britain, The Beach Boys were really the only comparable American group. The Beach Boys also compare favorably to these British counterparts in terms of the lengths of their recording careers and the breadth of their accomplishments.
More than any other important rock group, The Beach Boys were a family act, including three brothers (Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson), and a cousin (Mike Love), and initially being managed by the father of the three brothers. Of the original and abiding five, only Al Jardine was a mere friend.
The group began by taking Chuck Berry’s sense of contemporary youth culture and adding a distinctive West Coast twist to it, blending in vocal harmonies from fifties pop, rock and rhythm’n blues groups. The band’s name, as well as the words from many of their early songs, evoked a distinctive mixture of sun and surf. Their early hits painted a picture of idyllic youth, with hot rods and surf boards, warm breezes, good friends, beautiful girls and tolerant parents. Almost single-handedly they created an image of Southern California as a modern utopia.
As the group evolved, Brian began to play the role of Phil Spector, relegating the rest of the band to that of Ronettes. While the rest of the band toured, Brian would stay home, writing new songs and recording backing tracks in the studio, using many of the same “wrecking crew” members who played on Spector’s hits. Like Spector, Brian favored a monolithic (and monaural) “wall of sound.” Also like Spector, Brian eventually became known for his demanding genius, his reclusiveness and his eccentricity, as well as his production talents. In conscious artistic and commercial competition with The Beatles, Brian worked to continually improve and evolve the group’s sound. This phase of the group’s career culminated in the release of the album Pet Sounds, a record hailed by many (including some of The Beatles) as a high-water mark for The Beach Boys and for rock in general.
The follow-up to Pet Sounds, called Smile, was to have been the masterpiece to match The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, but somehow the long-awaited project never materialized. Several factors were probably to blame. Brian was heavily into drugs at the time, and these no doubt took their toll. Brian also revealed a sort of emotional immaturity that impeded the group’s growth to its next level. Mostly, though, everyone involved, including Brian, expected too much from the young prodigy. In an art form where collaboration is an essential element, the growing myth of Brian Wilson as solitary rock genius isolated the group’s key member just when he most needed the support of the group’s other participants and co-creators. So while the world (and the rest of the group) waited breathlessly for the masterpiece to be revealed, Brian continued to tinker and change direction, ultimately losing whatever focus on the next stage of the group’s evolution he may have once had.
The group’s next few albums, while producing some worthwhile material, failed to live up to the expectations of either audiences or critics, and managed only to alienate whatever following the group had built before. The group floundered for a couple of years, seemingly unable to chart a new course without Brian securely at the helm.
Starting in 1970, though, with Sunflower, the group began a new period of artistic growth. They began to operate as a super-group, in a fashion similar to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. (During this period they even added two young black players, Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, as their rhythm section, in a fashion similar to CSN&Y’s use of Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves.) Multiple members composed, sang lead vocals, and arranged their material. Also key to their artistic success during this period were a number of co-composers who enriched the group’s lyrics, always one of the their weak points, especially in a post-Dylan rock landscape.
They continued in this fashion through Surf’s Up and Holland. Unfortunately, hardly anyone noticed that they were making some of the best music of their careers. Audiences who grew up expecting surfing and car tunes from the group were not ready for the sophisticated lyrics of songs like “Surf’s Up” and “Feel Flows,” nor the somber mood of a song like “’Till I Die.” Rock critics of the time were looking for guitar-based sounds and instrumental virtuosity, and the group’s trademark vocal harmonies and Spectoresque production techniques made them seem like throwbacks to an earlier era.
Then something happened that was the salvation of the group commercially, and the downfall of the group artistically. In 1974, Capitol Records released a greatest hits compilation: Endless Summer. The timing was perfect. The rock audience had begun to splinter, and many baby boomers were unhappy with the music of the seventies. The best of the early Beach Boys reminded these listeners of happier times in their youth, when the world was less complicated, before Viet Nam and Watergate. The compilation went platinum, and The Beach Boys became a popular live act again, playing these “golden oldies” in concert. The desire to please this rediscovered audience proved too strong to resist, and later albums rarely rose to the artistic heights they had ascended to earlier.