The Rolling Stones, ‘Come On’
The Chiffons, ‘He’s So Fine’
Roy Orbison, ‘In Dreams’
Martha and the Vandellas, ‘Heat Wave’
Little Stevie Wonder, The 12 Year Old Genius
The Beach Boys, ‘Be True To Your School’
Peter, Paul & Mary, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’
23 DECEMBER 1964
LOS ANGELES AIRPORT
The rock star as tragic genius
IT WAS JUST two days before Christmas. Like everybody else engaged in the music business in that year of the great pop explosion the Beach Boys were nearing the end of a hectic twelve months. In that one calendar year they had recorded and released three studio albums and one in-concert recording. This rate of productivity suggested that nobody was really looking after their long-term interests. There was not a lot of reason to think these young men had any long-term interests. The group had been christened in a hurry to take advantage of the fad for surfing. Impelled by the feeling that their moment of pop success might prove to be no more than that, the Beach Boys had also toured unceasingly, hoovering up cash while they could. In 1964 they had visited Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden and France, and now they were starting a two-week tour of the West that would take them into the New Year.
1964 was the year pop went wild. It was the year of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, the year of Shindig! and Ready Steady Go! It was the year Motown became the sound of Young America, the year the Rolling Stones first toured the United States. Pop music seemed to be gathering itself for a moment such as it had never had before and might never have again. Songwriting, singing and production talent were converging from all points of the compass and from all over the world and aiming at the US singles charts, which were the only game in town. The Beach Boys only had to look back to their appearance on the T.A.M.I. Show in October to see just how competitive a year it had been. There they had lined up alongside James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes and Chuck Berry, who had only recently been released from prison. In their striped Pendleton shirts, with their gleaming teeth and just-so hair, they couldn’t help looking and sounding tame and suburban, because that’s what they were.
It was the Beach Boys’ tragic misfortune to come along at the same time as the Beatles, who matched their invention, outdid them in charisma and had the further novelty value of being English. Whereas the Beach Boys’ albums looked as though they were put together by the record company, the Beatles’ seemed to be the work of the band. Whereas theirs had all their singles on them, the Beatles didn’t feel compelled to put their hits on their albums, which was a sign of how easy they seemed to find it to keep producing smash singles like 1964’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘I Feel Fine’. And it didn’t help that the accident of the alphabet meant their being placed next to each other in record shops.
The principals of these hit-making groups of the sixties were under a new kind of pressure. Suddenly they were expected to compose the songs as well as perform them. Elvis had always been able to rely on a stable of back-room boys. The raw materials of his hits came from songwriting factories. Somebody else did the sweating for him. Elvis could relax and assume that the best available tunes would be on his music stand when he turned up in the studio. The same didn’t apply to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Beach Boys. They had to face the new reality: good original material, songs catchy enough for the mass audience to sing along to and intriguing enough to win the tight-lipped respect of their fellow pros, ideally embedded in records that didn’t sound like the records they had made only a few months earlier, records preferably embellished with some noteworthy tweak at the recording stage, records that said something that pop records hadn’t said before – this was what was expected if you wanted to compete. In the great game of pop, which was suddenly afoot, brilliant 45s were the cost of entry. They were no more than table stakes.
Although other members of the Beach Boys would pitch in with words, particularly when it came to the songs about surfing and hot rodding that had made their name over the past three years, the one who had to do the heavy lifting where the songwriting was concerned was twenty-two-year-old Brian, bassist and oldest of the Wilson brothers. Brian was beginning to find this responsibility a burden. He was also beginning to find the endless live shows, when they would do their best to present their songs in front of crowds of girls who couldn’t hear for their own screams, an expense of spirit he could no longer afford. Brian was the first of his generation to notice the more depressing features of this tough new school: the expectations of fans, the unquenchable hunger of radio and the business, the unanswerable questions from people jabbing microphones at you, the mortification of hearing the latest single by one of your peers and fearing it might be better than yours, the spats and squabbles within the band that you always had to referee, the constant, nauseating travel, the bad food and, hovering over it all, the unrelenting, soul-sapping, prematurely ageing effect of the fatigue.
When Brian Wilson arrived at Los Angeles airport that late December morning he wasn’t sure he could go through with the trip. He rang home from the airport, not to speak to the wife he’d married only weeks before, but to his mother Audree. She tried to stiffen his resolve and told him he’d be letting his brothers down if he didn’t go. Reluctantly he got on the plane, which was taking them to a show in Houston. As it gathered speed down the runway, lifted off and began to climb, all Brian’s standard flight anxieties were joined by the concerns he’d been feeling about where the band was going, where the next hit was coming from, and whether he could possibly satisfy the expectations he appeared to have awoken, cap the events he’d set in train when he’d innocently started making music in the garage of the family home a few years earlier. Once the brittle shell of Brian’s confidence had been pierced, in flooded the dark waters of uncertainty, and right there in that aeroplane, still some way from its cruising altitude, his systems simply shut down. He blacked out. He was to remember very little of the events of the day. What his fellow Beach Boys saw was their mild-mannered older brother, the man who had given the world such blithesome dreams of escape as ‘I Get Around’, ‘Surfin’ USA’ and ‘Be True To Your School’, suddenly on his knees in the aisle of the plane. Crying like a baby.
The Beach Boys had always been a drama. They came from Hawthorne, California, a lower-middle-class suburb of south Los Angeles, and had been formed around the three Wilson brothers and their cousin Mike Love. In the Beach Boys the tensions and jealousies that simmer away in every band were superimposed on a family unit with quite enough tensions of its own. They were whipped into shape as a family band by the Wilsons’ martinet father Murry. Dad had the handicap of knowing just enough about music and its attendant business to wish to compete with them as well as help them. He was happy when it was the familial vocal blend capturing people’s attention; once that attention turned to his eldest son’s songwriting talent he was plain jealous. He was given to corporal punishment, which was not particularly unusual for a father of boys in the 1950s.
As the brothers became less dependent on Murry and identified more with their sophisticated friends in the Hollywood music business, he became resentful of the way they were having their heads turned by the bright lights. When the success of his sons brought them what appeared to him to be easy money in unimaginable amounts he could never stop himself pointing out that when his parents had come out to California from Kansas they’d been so poor that they’d lived on the beach. Those were real beach boys. The Wilson boys ended up sniggering about their own father behind his back and sometimes arguing openly with him in front of music business professionals. In 1963 they finally and painfully relieved him of his duties as their manager. He still retained the rights to their catalogue of songs. He sold them for a pittance at the end of the decade, ostensibly believing that there would be no place in the future for a bunch of son
gs about sun, surf and teenage escape.
Brian, the eldest, was tall and awkward and prone to putting on weight. Carl was the baby brother. The lead singer, Mike Love, introduced a number of complications. He was older, taller, thin-skinned and deeply immodest. He was also a cousin and felt that he was not dealt with fairly because Murry was jealous of his father’s relative wealth. Love had married the first girl he impregnated but in 1962 was describing himself as single in fan magazine interviews just as she was giving birth to his daughter. The following year they were divorced as quietly as they had married. The middle Wilson, Dennis, was handsome, horny and a terrible judge of character. Dennis lived the life the band sang about. He was the one who surfed. He was the one who got around. Carl and Brian never went near the water. Dennis went near everything. It was Dennis who, in picking up a couple of nubile hippy hitchhikers, as was his wont, was to bring his family into uncomfortable proximity with that infamous family headed by Charles Manson.
The young women who married the young stars of the pop boom in the early sixties were quickly brought face to face with the over-arching truth of the music business. It was this. Young, virile men who sing and play in groups are offered lots of no-strings sex and in the majority of cases these are offers they take advantage of. It would be foolish to believe otherwise, no matter how much the songwriters’ lyrics harp on the subject of fidelity. Any observer of the human race can see that the natural inclination of the young adult male in the wild is towards promiscuity. The rock world of the early sixties provided a whole new arena for demonstrating this truth. The opportunities presenting themselves to even the humblest bass guitarist or drummer were greater in number than for any earlier generation of entertainers. In this new world fans might actually get to meet their heroes, contraception was becoming more available, and the men themselves were often far from home and lonely as well as horny. Unconsecrated sex was bound to happen. Within the Beach Boys the most energetic in this regard were Dennis and Mike, but they were by no means alone. Just three weeks before he got on that plane to Houston, Brian Wilson had married Marilyn Rovell. He was twenty-two, she was seventeen. They had already been seeing each other for two years when they wed. The marriage didn’t seem to have brought Brian peace of mind. Already he imagined that he’d seen Marilyn and Mike exchanging meaningful looks.
That night in Houston, having got through the show as if in a dream, Brian sat and looked at the wall of his hotel room and promised himself this was the last night he was going to spend away on the road. Tomorrow he would go home to Los Angeles. Audree met Brian at the airport. He was like a kid who had come home early from camp. Session musician Glen Campbell, who had already played on some Beach Boys hits, flew out to Houston to deputize for Brian for the remainder of the tour. It was resolved that henceforth Brian wouldn’t tour. He wasn’t cut out for the gilded vagabond life. The rest of them were prepared to blunder on from hit to hit, from tour to tour, from dumb photo opportunity to embarrassing TV appearance, without giving a thought to the inevitable truth that the hand of fate that had plucked them from obscurity two years before would be likely to drop them back into the same position just as abruptly. Brian was different. Brian was thoughtful. Brian was the one who wondered where it could all be going. Brian was the one who realized it couldn’t go on for ever, and Brian was the one who most dreaded it ending. Brian was the first of his generation of songwriters to realize that success inevitably meant raising expectations that at some time had to be dashed. He suffered the singular agony of the man at the top. There is nowhere to go but down.
Having resigned from touring, he and his teenage bride took a house in Beverly Hills and he settled down to write and produce songs for the Beach Boys and others, without exposing himself to the psychic buffeting of life on the road. The year that followed Brian’s incident on the plane saw a flowering of his talent. The Beach Boys Today!, which came out in 1965, is their best album. The second side, made up of ballads perfectly suited to the angora mood of young marrieds like the Wilsons, has a sustained feeling that even the Beatles didn’t dare try, a mood sadly shattered by the inclusion at the end of a track of studio chat called ‘Bull Session With The “Big Daddy”’. This is the sort of thing the Beatles would have been wise enough to keep for the Christmas flexidisc they mailed out to their fans. Throughout their career the Beach Boys could always be relied upon to let themselves down.
The fact that Brian was at home while the band were on the road meant he was free to make more use of session musicians, moving towards a situation where the band would be used as featured vocalists on records that had been effectively made before they got there. By the end of 1965 this approach had resulted in ‘Good Vibrations’, which was certainly his finest hour, and also a dead end masquerading as a fresh start. Pop songs couldn’t usefully get much more complicated than ‘Good Vibrations’, which is something it took Brian a long time to realize.
Remaining at home may have freed him from the stress of touring but it brought him face to face with the pressure of the blank page. It was this that eventually led him to install a huge sandbox in his house so that he would be able to write songs evoking the carefree beach life he had once written about with such success. It also led to him spending more time in bad company. He was introduced to cannabis, which he felt unlocked his flow. He took to it as enthusiastically as food, which had always been a problem for him; in the marital home he would command his wife to magic up huge roast meals. He and his new stoner friends would sit in high-backed chairs, gorging themselves on vast bales of cannabis like noblemen back from the chase. Once he felt he’d come up with the tune for ‘California Girls’ after taking LSD, he convinced himself that he needed drugs in order to translate the music of the spheres into hit singles. Within a year his brain was fried and his productivity at an end. Marilyn Rovell, another child bride turned mother figure, later looked back on those years when they stayed in that house and played the piano all day. ‘For Brian, sitting down at the piano and writing music is just as easy as walking. That was the easy part. Life was hard for Brian.’
Despite his success he was haunted by the fact that the Beatles seemed to do things easily that were a struggle for the Beach Boys, and obsessed with the feeling that his group would always be held back by their image. He hired the Beatles’ PR man, Derek Taylor. The first thing Taylor did was tout him to the press as ‘a genius’. This was the first time anyone had felt moved to make this kind of claim about a composer of pop songs. This placed even more pressure on poor Brian’s shoulders. It was hard enough to match Phil Spector. Now was he expected to be Beethoven as well? The word ‘genius’ didn’t seem the right word for a man in a Pendleton shirt grinning through ‘Barbara Ann’ in front of a phalanx of fruggers on TV’s Shindig! But for an increasingly unhappy, overweight, insecure, unshaven, drug-addled rock star remaining indoors in front of his piano there seemed no better word.
1964 PLAYLIST
The Beatles, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’
The Beatles, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’
The Beatles, ‘I Feel Fine’
The Animals, ‘House Of The Rising Sun’
The Kinks, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’
The Beach Boys, ‘I Get Around’
The Rolling Stones, ‘It’s All Over Now’
Bob Dylan, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin”
Roy Orbison, ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’
Them, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’
26 SEPTEMBER 1965
AARHUS, DENMARK
The rock band as ongoing drama
IT WAS A Sunday. In the middle of a short Scandinavian tour, the Who were in the city of Aarhus in Denmark. They were booked to play two shows that night, the first at the main hall, the second at a club. In itself this was not unusual. The previous night in Copenhagen they had also played two shows, one in the evening and another at midnight. Pete Townshend, John Entwistle, Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon had been performing almost every night
for the previous two years, first as the Detours, then briefly as the High Numbers, then as the Detours once again and finally as the Who. During that time they had released two hit singles, ‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, appeared on all the major TV shows, had their management taken over by well-connected entrepreneurs Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, and been hailed in the grown-up press as harbingers of an exciting new hybrid of pop music and pop art.
This was exciting, but it was also hard work. The only way the four of them, whose average age was twenty, could endure their punishing schedule was by taking drugs, the kind of drugs that in an earlier era had been provided to troops going into combat in the early hours. These amphetamines had the inevitable effect of further agitating the already quarrelsome relationships between the members of the band. The band had been formed initially by the dogged Daltrey, who had recruited the mercurial Townshend, the inscrutable Entwistle and the indescribable Moon. Unlike the Beatles, whose names were always listed in chronological order to reflect their time of joining, the hierarchy of the Who did not remain the same. The big-nosed guitarist turned out to be an enormously productive songwriter and the drummer was not only the member of the act with the most teen appeal and the biggest show-off but also the musician whose peculiar qualities led to the Who playing in a way no band had ever played before. The Who made the sound of things boiling over.
This was a musical reflection of the relationships within the band. The arguments tended to start with the same members. Townshend and Moon liked to provoke a reaction. The guitarist was made that way. He once dangled a £5 note in front of an old friend not as well off as he was. When the friend declined to take it Townshend tore it into pieces in front of him. The drummer had a similarly unpleasant streak. Back in Wembley, where Keith Moon grew up, there were rumours that he’d been treated in the local mental hospital for having physically attacked his mother while a child. They said he’d been bought the drums as a way to channel his aggression and save the wear and tear on his parents. John Entwistle was thick-skinned and apparently imperturbable. Exposed at the front of the stage without a machine of his own to hide behind, Roger Daltrey suffered the lead singer’s anxiety that the others might be smirking behind his back. In the case of Moon, these worries were well-founded.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 10