Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Brian Wilson’s friend and drug buddy Loren Schwartz later recalled there was ‘not an ounce of guile or malice in him’. His music was both immature and universal. He was an adult child, a genuine naif, breaking off from songwriting to watch episodes of Flipper, the dolphin whose young sidekick Sandy would invariably learn a life lesson which made Brian cry. On the Beach Boys’ 1965 album Today! was a stumbling but beautiful song called ‘In the Back of My Mind’ that revealed Wilson was ‘so happy at times that I break out in tears’. His emotions, whatever really was in the back of his mind, seemed to come out without any filter for what was deemed cool, or appropriate, or even musically acceptable, which is what made the Beach Boys’ music the most emotionally satisfying in the whole modern pop canon.

  The same album’s ‘She Knows Me Too Well’ opened with ‘Sometimes I have a weird way of showing my love’, a line that wouldn’t shock in the catalogues of Nick Cave or the Jesus and Mary Chain, but was pretty unsettling in the hands of the car-crazy Californians. Brian was aiming for Johnny Mercer but coming up proto-indie. Maybe with this in mind he turned to an untried lyricist called Tony Asher for help on the 1966 album Pet Sounds. Again, Wilson seemed unaware of any concept of roots credibility; Asher described himself as ‘a nothing who had never done shit’2 save write jingles for Mattel toys and Gallo wine.

  Pet Sounds, released in May ’66, was a song cycle, a love affair that began with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ (‘We could be married, and then we’d be happy’) and ended with the gentle apocalypse of ‘Caroline, No’ (‘Where is the girl I used to know?’). Nik Cohn described it as an album of ‘sad songs about happiness’, which is only partly true. Astonishing productions like ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’ are more complicated than that. The bassline is a beating heart, the ride cymbal is a ticking clock; beyond that there is very little. ‘Listen, listen, listen …’ sings Brian, and then the strings dip down, like the singer’s heart dropping into his stomach. He knows that this is it, these are the last hours they will spend together. He wants the moment to last forever, and it isn’t a happy moment.

  In 1964, while on tour, he had written a letter to his young bride Marilyn, ending it ‘yours ’til God wants us to part’. With Tony Asher’s help, the sentiment was built up into ‘God Only Knows’. It’s impossible to exaggerate how beautiful this song is. Everywhere, it takes risks. The opening line is ‘I may not always love you’, but the sentiment is that real love is all-consuming, it’s frightening. The moral of the story is that love is about total surrender and without it there is no reason to live. Towards the end of the album is an extraordinary insight into Brian Wilson’s darker thoughts, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’, on which his insecurities and shortcomings are carefully transcribed by Tony Asher and backed by an almost atonal harpsichord, plucked bass and theremin. Though he was the leader of the biggest pop group in America, though he was married to a thoughtful and loving woman, though he was only twenty-three, there was something incredibly old and incredibly melancholy within Brian Wilson. ‘Sometimes I feel very sad,’ the song goes, and no amount of convoluted Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell wordplay is as effective or affecting.

  The first cracks had appeared in 1964, when he found himself crying on a plane, unable to fly. He was replaced on tour by Glen Campbell3 and, given time to mature in the studio, came up with The Beach Boys Today in 1965 and Pet Sounds in ’66. When every insider from brother Dennis to Leonard Bernstein claimed the follow-up, Smile, was going to be five times better, expectations went through the roof. Dylan was a lone wolf with no dependants. There were four Beatles, so their load could be borne more easily. Also, strangely, no one made cosmic claims about what masterpiece they might be concocting in the aftermath of the wildly celebrated Sgt Pepper (which, seeing as these recordings included ‘I Am the Walrus’ and George Harrison’s visceral noise collages ‘It’s All Too Much’ and ‘Only a Northern Song’, is rather surprising). Brian Wilson was on his own, with some members of his own group deeply suspicious about his new music. Mike Love had warned him, ‘Don’t fuck with the formula,’ when he first heard the backing tracks for Pet Sounds, and even forced one of the song titles to be changed from the hep ‘Hang On to Your Ego’ to the simpler ‘I Know There’s an Answer’. Brian himself would have been happy to turn back the clock, goof around in a little Honda and sing Four Freshmen songs for fun. He didn’t mind being called a genius, but the family and record-company pressure, combined with his fondness for LSD, eventually tipped him over the edge.

  In the UK, Pet Sounds had been greeted with unbridled awe, and reached number two in the album chart, only kept off the top spot by the Sound of Music soundtrack. Paul McCartney heard it, claimed it to be the greatest record ever made, and in a moment everybody wanted to know where Brian Wilson was heading next. Six months later, with the teenage symphony ‘Good Vibrations’ number one worldwide, they got some idea – somewhere very different but at least as revolutionary as Pet Sounds.

  During that summer Wilson had met a young session musician around Hollywood with the exotic name of Van Dyke Parks. ‘I met Van Dyke at my friend Terry Melcher’s house. I talked to him for a couple of hours and I said you have a good way with words. You seem to be very poetic, do you think you could write some lyrics? And he said sure, I probably could, so he came over to my house a couple of weeks later and we wrote “Heroes and Villains”, “Surf’s Up”, “Wind Chimes” … it came together very quick, we wrote very fast.’ At this point the new album, all written in the fragmented style of ‘Good Vibrations’, was to be called Dumb Angel, ‘but Van Dyke said we need something more jovial and he thought of Smile. So I agreed. I said great title, let’s go with it!’

  The key word on Smile was humour – Wilson felt that the moment someone laughed they lost self-control, and that moment was a spiritual experience. He and Parks wrote their songs in a sandpit built in Brian’s living room. At the same time, Smile would be an American travelogue, from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head, in time as well as distance. Its ambition had no precedent; no idea seemed too oblique.

  During the recording, Wilson decided that everybody involved had to be healthy. One night he dumped all of his living-room furniture and replaced it with blue tumbling mats, and out of this came the song ‘I’m in Great Shape’. He wanted to create the feeling of ‘being healthy in the morning, paradise in the morning in Hawaii’. So he opened a health-food shop called The Radiant Radish. He had to be talked out of opening a twenty-four-hour table-tennis shop soon after.

  If opening shops as part of the creative process seemed wild, it was nothing alongside a piece of music called ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’. Part of a suite called ‘The Elements’, representing fire, it was a terrifying atonal cacophony which abruptly ended the good vibrations and pushed Brian into a well of paranoia: he was convinced the music was responsible for a string of fires across Los Angeles. When his fellow band members returned from a fabulously successful tour of Europe to hear what their leader had been up to, they were horrified by the concrete abrasiveness of ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’. Brian’s confidence evaporated, Van Dyke Parks split the scene in the face of band hostility towards his evocative lyrics, and Smile was dumped. There’s no doubt that, had Smile been released in late ’66, it would have taken pop down a completely untrodden track. But in June ’67 Brian Wilson pulled the group from their Monterey performance. He then left both Smile and the Beach Boys behind and, like Gerald at the end of Women in Love, walked off into the snow.

  * * *

  Post-Monterey, the Beach Boys flushed the bad karma of Smile out of their system with the emasculated Smiley Smile, the same songs that had been abandoned after a year’s work, only this time recorded over ten days with a bag of weed and a portable tape recorder. Barely three months later came Wild Honey, an about-turn into DIY blue-eyed soul which confused the hell out of a pop public wondering how to come down from their summer ’67 high.

  In the early seventies, isol
ated from his band and beset with mental and pharmaceutical problems, the touchstone album for American pop’s erstwhile golden boy was Randy Newman’s Sail Away, and in particular the title song. Newman was painting a picture of America as broad and fanciful as the golden, perfect California dream outlined by Brian Wilson ten years earlier, but in the Watergate era.

  By this point, Brian was living in his bedroom, overweight, lank-haired, creatively stymied by bandmates and inner demons. Though he was ill, he was still expected to earn a living for the Beach Boys. It was hard to run away as they were essentially his family. They waited for him to snap out of his deepening depression throughout the late sixties and seventies. Only music could end Brian’s crisis, though, and he knew that if he carried on listening to Sail Away he could draw on it. The song was about how a free spirit can be tricked and trapped by economic greed: ‘We will cross the mighty ocean … it’s great to be an American.’

  In 1971 Brian Wilson wrote a song called ‘’Til I Die’ for the Surf’s Up album: ‘I’m a leaf on a windy day, pretty soon I’ll be blown away. How long will the wind blow? Until I die.’ But he didn’t die; he went into deep freeze, and only re-emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. By this time Dennis and Carl were dead, and Mike Love – for his part in the collapse of the Beach Boys – was possibly the most reviled person in all of pop. Things were different. Away from the old, poisonous environment, surrounded by well-wishers, and with the help of a bunch of fans who were also a tidy power-pop band called the Wondermints, he was finally convinced to revisit Smile and play it live.

  Crawdaddy’s Paul Williams encapsulated the feel of the Beach Boys’ music in three words: warmness, serenity, friendship. For this reason, there is more love directed at Brian Wilson than anyone else in this book. One of the most poignant moments of the 2004 Smile shows at the Royal Festival Hall wasn’t musical at all. As Brian left the stage to a standing ovation his shirt caught on something; he tried to walk off, his feet kept moving, but he was held back. Everyone wanted to run on stage and help him, wanted to help Brian Wilson. After what seemed an age he noticed what was wrong, but not before he had appeared, in front of two thousand people, as a lost little boy, Charlie Brown aged sixty-five, bumbling and bemused.

  1 As was the soulful Laura Nyro, who appeared clad in a black cape and, with her female backing singers, recalled a modern Chiffons. She got one of the worst receptions at Monterey. Legend has it she was booed, but footage released in the last ten years shows nothing worse than a tepid response, which was still enough to have the singer visibly welling up.

  2 Asher wrote lyrics for Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends in 1967, a west-coast soft-harmony act whose sole album is, in many ways, a twenty-something sequel to Pet Sounds. He was then badly hurt in a car crash which ended his brief music career.

  3 As a thank you, Brian wrote and produced the single ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ for Campbell, which, recorded immediately before Pet Sounds, is a match for pretty much any track on that album.

  21

  THE GOLDEN ROAD: SAN FRANCISCO AND PSYCHEDELIA

  The sixties were like science fiction.

  Paul Kantner

  The Beatles first took acid when John, George and their girlfriends had their drinks spiked by their dentist, one John Riley, at a dinner party in 1965. The four of them left the party unaware of what they’d taken, and entirely ignorant of what LSD could do. They got into George’s Mini, he drove into the West End, and they all went to the Ad Lib, a club with fur-lined walls which was on the top floor of a building on Leicester Place – on the way up they all thought the lift was on fire, and ran in screaming. After a few rum and Cokes, George somehow drove them back to his home in Weybridge: ‘We were going about ten miles an hour,’ John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, ‘but it seemed like a thousand and Patti was saying, “Let’s jump out and play football.”’ Back at George’s place, John was convinced the house was a submarine and that he was driving it: ‘God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic.’ The Beatles were among the very few people in Britain to have taken LSD, but on the west coast of America, a whole community was going through a similar lysergic experience.

  Psychedelia was where modern pop first decided it could look beyond the dancefloor. It was all about inner space, although it was grounded in one specific city – San Francisco. And, like that city’s best beat writers,1 it leaned towards the rediscovery of a sense of wonder, it set out in search of a new sensory excitement. It was a leap into the unknown.

  In many ways the San Francisco scene resembled the Liverpool beat boom of four years earlier. Both cities looked west, out to sea, separate from the rest of the country; both were known to be left-leaning and politically active; and both had a large dollop of civic pride which rubbed off on the young, who were happy to follow and support their local acts. Where Liverpool had cellars, San Francisco had ballrooms – the Avalon, the Carousel, the Longshoremen’s Hall. Why San Francisco? It was a big city but small enough to sustain a scene – not manic like New York, not spread out like Los Angeles. One major difference from the Mersey boom, though, was that the Frisco bands were frequently not natives: Janis Joplin had arrived from Texas, Steve Miller from Canada. San Francisco was a post-war beacon. Drawn to the city as Dada’s creators had been drawn to Zurich, incomers saw the city as neutral ground where you could walk the streets and not get your head kicked in for having hair that grazed your collar. The beat scene, which was centred around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore and publishing imprint, drew in small-town outcasts, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, and they soon built a small hipster community in the low-rent Haight-Ashbury district.

  In the rambling Victorian houses, bands lived together (just like the Beatles did in Help!) and could play for kicks, practise, experiment, with no real plans to go out and work as jobbing musicians as the Searchers or the Hollies did. There was an acceptance of bohemian values, a more relaxed playfulness than pop had seen before: Moby Grape were even named after a punchline – what’s big and purple and lives in the ocean? Unsurprisingly, the music was initially a little ramshackle. With most bands drawing on blues, folk, country and jazz, the result was not unlike an improv extension of folk rock – if there was a Top 20 fore runner to the SF sound it was the east coast’s Lovin’ Spoonful. The Beau Brummels, early US adopters of Beatle haircuts, had been the first Bay Area group to score nationally with ‘Laugh Laugh’ (US no. 15) and ‘Just a Little’ (US no. 8) – both melancholy, fogged Merseybeat – in ’65; more typical were the Warlocks, who started out similarly Beatle-bound but, on stage, stretched their songs out over six, seven, eight minutes. In 1966 they changed their name to the Grateful Dead.

  It wasn’t any predilection for jazz or even the sea air that fuelled this localised creativity. Above all else, the San Francisco scene was about acid. Another oddball drawn to the Bay Area was a Russian-speaking, bee-keeping former ballet student from Kentucky called Owsley Stanley. Enrolling at Berkeley in 1963, he discovered LSD for himself, learnt how to make it, then began cooking it up and handing it out to friends and the favoured; all people had to do was stick out their hand and maintain eye contact, and he’d keep pouring them acid that was very strong and very pure.

  The San Francisco bands2 weren’t even aiming to make records, let alone hits. This musical freedom was new and, with acid leading the musicians on, it had no boundaries. A go-for-broke philosophy developed; the laces of conventional chord changes and song structures were loosened and came undone. It’s hard to know whether the Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ (US no. 8 ’67) is one long verse, one long chorus or – climbing ever higher, increasing in intensity from its ominous fidgety intro to its climactic cry of ‘feed your head’ – just riffing on Ravel’s ‘Boléro’. Whichever, it doesn’t sound much like ‘She Loves You’.

  The Jefferson Airplane, led by ex-model Grace Slick and the gentle guitarist Marty Balin, were the first band to make a noise nationa
lly. They had their own bumper stickers made that read ‘The Jefferson Airplane Loves You’. After becoming a local cause célèbre with much support from the San Francisco Chronicle (where the Airplane’s manager Bill Thompson just happened to work) they headlined the Human Be-In at the Polo Grounds, Golden Gate Park, in January ’67, where speakers included Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Timothy Leary. Participants were urged to bring flowers, beads, costumes, feathers, bells, cymbals, flags and food to share. The Jefferson Airplane entertained, while the A&R men from LA and NYC looked on. By this point people had messianic expectations for LSD. They didn’t want to talk about what a hellhole of homeless, drug-addled teens Haight-Ashbury was rapidly becoming, they wanted to talk about their hopes. They wanted to talk about how there would be universal love in the near future, and how we’d all go back to farming. Cattle, they said, would be grazing in Times Square in the year 2000.