Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Thursday, October 7, 1971 Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Thursday, October 7, 1971 urf s U: The beach Boys from then til now By NEAL GABLER Mysterioso. Back in 1963 or '64 that was the equivalent to "mind blowing." Very mys- terioso. I'm sprawled on my couch listening to just about every Beach Boys record ever made. The needle is jumping over Surfin' USA, Surfer Giril, In My Room, 409, Little Deuce Coupe, Wendy; there are so many clicks and ticks from the years of wear that it sounds as if Miriam Makeba is accom- panying them. Then, suddenly, in the mid- die of some absolutely delicious counter- point, it hits me. The Beach Boys, these Beach Boys, are our Doomsday Machine. our Gibraltar monkeys, our talisman against mortality. If any thing happens to them we've had it. America sucked into the ocean! Far out! So our existence, in case you didn't al-. ready know, is a precarious one and more precarious still when you stop to consider those zillions of iteens who think of the Beach Boys as a kind of collective Bing Crosby, lounging around somewhere on the West Coast counting their dough and slow- ly wasting away from skin cancer. But know this, all you Grand Funk fans: The Beach Boys, thank God, are alive and well (other- wise how do you explain my being able to write and your being able to read this ar- ticle), have just finished what may be their finest album, Surf's Up, and have thereby, if you believe my cosmic , evelation, assured Amazon queen named Calafia, who might very well be the spiritual mother to Reagan- land. Unhappy with her humdrum existence, she exhorted her all-female army to join forces with the Turks in fending off the Christians. But facing defeat, discretion be- ing the better part of valor, the pagan queen converted to Christianity and lived happily, if not peacefully, ever after. It remained for us Americans to give life to the romance, to create the pagan-Chris- tian kingdom here on earth. Pushing ever onward and outward, our hardy pioneers reached the Golden State out past the Rock- ies, where their scions procedeed to contra- dict Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis by erecting a new spiritual frontier once the real estate ran out. What we've done, in the true individualist tradition, is find ourselves some psychological breathing space. And though the change, in truth, is much more a matter of cosmetics than soul-searching, we have found a place where a person can almost fantasize himself into a new exist- ence. In short, we've placed California at what Professor William Thompson calls "the edge of history," at the brink of myth lying beyond all the day to day routines of our lives. We know, deep down, that California -sunshine, redwoods, surf licking at your feet, tanned starlets, ranch houses for the asking-cannot actually exist. But, as in bush, the Hudson and Ebbetts Field for LA, the Pacific and Chavez Ravine. Which just goes to show that even the most hardened reprobates aren't immune to the State's strange power. This lemming-like quest for the rewards of neon Valhalla might be termed "material romanticism'"-a kind of religious faith in the ability to transcend nature, society, even ourselves, through possession. But the fact that the faith involves money, status or property makes it no less romanticism than the faith held by the nineteenth century's nature boys. Those first romanticists doted on flora and fauna. The new American, though this is by no means confined to our continent, turns his reverence toward acqui- sition. Like those early romanticists, the pleasure he gets is derivative; it lies not so much in the utility of what he has as in the sense of having. The Beach Boys from middle-class Haw- thorne, California, practically a skate-board trip from the beaches that rim Santa Mon- ica Bay, were almost fatalistically cast as purveyors of material romanticism. The fact that they lived in the Golden State and within spraying distance of the surf was bound to imbue them right off with some of the material romanticist spirit. But as adolescents in the land of sunshine they were doubly susceptible, since, I can recall from my own teenhood, no one romanticizes objects so much as a teenager. And so when the Boys' first nationwide single, "Surfin' Safari." "409", hit the charts in the summer of '62 it inevitably spoke the glories of those twin icons of California teendom -- surf boards and hot rods. And why not? In a society as mobile as Drag Strip USA's, the car is a source of power and freedom. And for an adolescent, especially back in the early 60's when guys practically masturbated in their tail-pipes, wheels were roughly equivalent to a double- dose of testosterone. Crusin' along, looking for action, car growling like a Mack, the radio blasting crazy rock tunes: "Giddyup, giddyup 409. My four-speed, dual-quad, p'ositraction 409." "I've got the fastest set of wheels in town. She's my Little Deuce Coupe. You don't know what I got." "Tack it up. Tack it up. Buddy, gonna shut you down.' NIRVANA! Looking at the world through a wind- shield, however, does give one a slightly my- opic view of things, and on the Beach Boys' early hot rod albums there is a dull, fetish- istic sameness of theme: Car Trouble, Chea- ter Slicks, Our Car Club, Cherry Cherry Coupe, Custom Machine, Car Crazy Cutie, or The Ballad of Ole' Betsy about a '32 Ford going to that great junkyard in the sky. Even Spirit of America turns out to be a rhapsody over Craig Breedlove's record- breaking car; and A Young Man is Gone, sung to the tune of Their Hearts Were Full of Spring, deals not with Vietnam, as almost any song with that title would have after 1964, but with James Dean's fatal auto crash. The rod music undoubtedly endeared the Beach Boys to all those prole teens whose hands were grimy with car grease. But it was the surfing music, literally the other side of the car singles, that endeared the group to all those young members of the leisure class. While kids in baggy grays were swinging to car tunes, Surfin' USA, released in the spring of 1963, was making its pitch to kids with pressed levi's, penny loafers and perfect complexions: "If everybody had an ocean across the USA then everybody's be surfin' like California-ay." Although admittedly that message may not sound terribly radical, Surfin' USA as well as the rod music, did what few other rock songs of the period were doing. While most Top 40 artists were warbling maw- kishly about young love, the Beach Boys were writing songs with closs consciousness! were writing songs with class consciousness! mind you, but two distinct appeals on each side of the disc-one to urban and another to suburban teens. The Beach Boys, however, didn't confine themselves to water and gasoline. They touched, in fact, on many of the little ec- stasies and agonies of high school life that had amazingly been neglected in pop. In the Parkin' Lot told the story of two love- sick teens necking before the school bell rings. Pom Pom Play Girl was about the high- school Beatrice we all adored from afar. Be True to Your School, with a classic back-up line of "rah rah rah rah cis boom bah," was a discourse on school spirit. And In My Room, one of the early signs of ma- turity, was a rare song of adolescent intro- spection: "There's a place where I can go and tell my secrets to." Musically, the Beach Boys' idiom has be- come as familiar as a Coke sign. The early lead vocals alternated between Mike Love's raspy toughness and Brian Wilson's lilting falsetto, with those incredibly thick harmo- nies and counterpoints that you could al- most bite out of the air. The accompani- ment had Brian's brother, Carl, on lead plucking out Chuck Berry guitar lines, ano- ther brother, Dennis, on drums, and four- teen year-old David Marks on rhythm gui- tar. The result as anyone who's listened to AM radio in the last ten years knows, was a kind of HiLo's Meet Rhythm and Blues. On the sleepy pop scene of '62 and '63 rock buffs agree that the Beach Boys' music was among the few innovations. Much of the credit for the addition of clean harmon- ies to the driving rhythms the Boys saluted in Do You Remember (the guys who gave us rock and roll)?, for the shifting tempoes of songs like Finders Keepers and, actually, for the whole California sound must go to the group's prime mover, Brian Wilson. Wil- son has earned his spot in the rock panthe- on. He not only sang many of the leads, but more profound effect on the rock scene than this change in tone. Consider: The Beatles had been England's top group for nearly two years; and yet it wasn't until a month after President Kennedy's assassi- nation that the guartet broke on the Ameri- can charts, pulling other British groups with them. Certainly the general dullness of America's white rock since Presley aided the Britishers, and certainly PR played its part in the "phenomenon." But the real I In a society as mobile as Drag Strip USA's, the car is a source of power and freedom. And for an adolescent, espec- ially back in the early 60's when guys practically masturbated in their tail-pipes, wheels were roughly equivalent to a double- dose of testosterone. Crusin' along, looking for action, car growling like a Mack, the radio blasting crazy rock tunes .. . NIRVANA! massiggisimissitsalississsaisagg ssigisssaisingsssisiaistffssgsseinisitlis"::ti":: :":"i:":':':':::":???": i:':::":??:?"::':':":":::? s#15129ssats:sissis' is The Beach Boys, these Beach Boys, are our Doomsday Machine, our Gibraltar monkeys, our talisman against mor- tality. If anything happens to them, we've had it. America sucked into the ocean! Far out! our survival for a few more months at least. Unfortunately, despite their importance in the divine plan, despite even their import- ance in the capitalist scheme (they've sold more records than any other group save the Beatles), the Beach Boys were shunted long ago into the relative obscurity-curp-nostal- gia reserved for the trappings of the placid days of the early 60's. The group just didn't seem to belong to our truculent period. It was naturally tied to place and time, and was indeed a five-man troubadour for the California-Kennedy mystique or, to be less charitable, myth. Certainly in the case of California, myth looms as large as fact. Appropriately enough; the state is the namesake of a fic- tional paradise from the sixteenth century Spanish romance Las Sergas deu Esplandian. Again appropriately, it so happens that the gold and pearl rich isle was ruled by an fairy tales, if everyone closes their eyes and wishes very very hard, the dream may come true. The, risk is that, ala the Emperor's New Clothes, each person's new identity (compliments of California) rests tenuously on his own and everybody else's acceptance of the myth. The reach of the dream, throughout the USA is really quite staggering. It's so much a part of our culture that people setting about the task of remodleing their lives in- variably head out to California for the re- newal. Consequently, millions of disaffected Americans of all races, creeds, colors and ages collect under the sun and wait for the transformation to be wrought. Symbolically, I can't help but think that the Brooklyn Dodgers somehow represent all these des- perate emigres scrambling for the good life. Here were the Bums (has anyone called them the Bums lately?) leaving behind Flat- also single-handedly, wrote just about all the Boys' hits and later arranged and pro- duced each record. All this from a guy under twenty! Yet for all his musical sophistication, Wilson's chief contribution to the group may have been the stunning unpretentious- ness of his lyrics, lyrics that seemed to cap- ture exactly what it was like to be a teen in the California of the early 60's and, by spiritual connection, to be a teen anywhere, when the Zeitgeist of the Kennedy years overtook us all. So while a young Baez or Dylan, more members of the 30's than the 60's, were making moves among collegians, Brian Wilson could write: "The feelings you get from going to school, being in love, winning and losing in sports-these are my inspir- ations. A sociologist might say I am trying to generate a feeling of social superiority. I live with my piano and I love to make records that my friends like to hear." That could almost be the sentiment of the age. And then came November and Dallas and Oswald and Parkland Memorial Hospi- tal and, yes, Lyndon Johnson. Camelot was over. Whatever America's psychic wounds from the assassination and, perhaps more, from Johnson's ascension to the presidency, in rock the immediate impact was subtle- a half-turn away from the optimism of Walk Right In, He's So Fine, I Will Follow Him, Sugar Shack or Surf City, toward the more dour themes of Hard Day's Night, World Without Love, House of Rising Sun, Where Did Our Love Go? But the chronology of events points to a boost may have been young America's slow- ly surfacing disenchantment with their own country's breakneck culture, and concomi- tantly, the need to find a surrogate for their fallen leader. The Beatles served that purpose. The new political mood didn't exactly fit a group like the Beach Boys who had been so closely identified with the ornaments of happy 60's America. But if one had listened carefully to the Boys' lyrics he would have found that they too had been somewhat so- bered. Their first hit of 19, Fun, Fun, Fun, tells the story of a fabulous chick tooling around in her old man's T-Bird on the pre- tense she is going to the library. The chorus, typically Wilson, yells, "She'll have fun fun fun 'til her daddy take the T-Bird away." Of course, her daddy gets wise, and she loses her car privileges. Loss of car equals loss of status? No, because the Beach Boys con- found material romanticism with the final chorus, "We'll have fun fun fun now that daddy took the T-Bird away." True, it's just a little thing, but when the Beach Boys came out with I bet Around in May 1964, once again the old Tom Mix- Tony attachment of boy to car was missing. The auto is no longer the object of rapture; that passion has been transferred to the mobility the car affords. Likewise, the cool guy is not the fellow with the fastest set of wheels in town, but the fellow who "gets around." From wheel-power it's a short step to dollar-power, and for the first time in their music the Beach Boys use money as a status symbol. Now this may be regression in some people's eyes, but it does indicate See FROM, Page 6 41 I w' I L} NOTICE TO ALL 18 OR OVER 4 ON JANUARY 1, 1972, YOU WILL HAVE ALL ADULT RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN MICHIGAN.. To Purchase or Consume Alcoholic Beverages You Must Have Two or More ID's Including One With Photo. DON'T DELAY-GET YOUR IDENTIFICATION CARDS NOW 4 1, Michigan Drivers License 2. Michigan State Police ID Card 3. Voter Registration Card 4. School Identification Card 5. Draft Card 6. United States Passport 7. Employment Identification Card 8. Out-of-State Drivers License BIRTH CERTIFICATES WILL NOT BE HONORED 4 Here's your chance to do something about the environment and win $500 for your club or organization. Enter the Nabisco® Clean Sweep Stakes, open to recognized student organizations. Then clean up a pet eye-sore... river bank, vacant lot, street block, whatever. The group that makes the cleanest sweep wins $500. Entry blanks and rules are in the mail to campus organizations. Also available at the Organizational Services Office in Michigan Union. Contest closes midnight, October 31, 1971. IMPORTANT: IF YOU HAVE A MICHIGAN DRIVERS LICENSE A STATE POLICE ID CARD .; p : > , ' °,'^ - II I