Previously on TSDK: Mr. Kalder traced the development of the beach song from ancient times to the early 20th century and discovered a world of failure, despair and suicide behind the jolly lyrics. This prompted him to ask: “But did it need to be so dark?”
And now, the story continues…
I
Let’s try again. Leave behind the decaying pleasure beaches of Britain, the haunted music halls, the cloudy skies, and fix our gaze upon the California coastline. It’s fifty years later: the waves of the Pacific are breaking on the shore, the all-American boys are riding their surfboards and nubile girls in bikinis are watching in admiration (although sometimes they go surfing too). O, to be young and on the beach in 1961! Somebody should write a song about it.
And they did. However, as with the advent of the first wave of beach songs in England, certain historical preconditions were necessary. Yet these coalesced over decades rather than centuries; history was accelerating. They were:
The invention of the teenager (late 1940s).
For most of human history adulthood began early: you went to work as soon as you were able to join your parents in the fields and got married at 13 or14. The term “teenager” wasn’t coined until the early 20th century, and even then it only entered widespread use after World War II as compulsory education kept young people in school longer, creating a space in which adolescence could be more clearly expressed. This new category of person, highly impressionable and with a malleable identity, was swiftly embraced by marketers as an easy target for all manner of trivial nonsense.
The invention of rock n’ roll (1951).
Although Bill Hailey’s Rock Around the Clock (1954) was once widely regarded as the original rock n’ roll song, it would be more accurate to describe it as the song that first brought the genre to the attention of a mass audience, following its inclusion in the film The Blackboard Jungle (1955). Today, Rocket 88 (1951) is generally accepted as the song that started it all. Attributed to “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats” it was primarily the work of Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Later, Ike would form a successful duo with his wife Tina (nee Anna Mae Bullock) and spend $11,000,000 on cocaine.
The invention of the wetsuit (1952).
Like many technological innovations, from the Internet to GPS, the wetsuit was originally developed for military purposes so that US frogmen could spend long periods in the water without developing hypothermia. The first wetsuit was developed by Dr. Hugh Bradner, a physicist at UC Berkeley who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Ultimately the navy rejected his design, but then two surfing enthusiasts, Jack O’Neill and Bob Meistrell, began working on commercial applications of the concept almost simultaneously. Both men would later claim to be the true inventor. In 1959, the success of the film Gidget (based on the life of teenage surfer Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman), transformed surfing from niche pursuit into a mainstream sport.
By that point, it was just a matter of time before somebody combined the pop music craze with the surfing craze to sell lots of product to excitable teenagers. Lebanese-American guitarist Dick Dale was the first to seize the opportunity. Dale released the 7” single “Let’s Go Trippin’” in September 1961, which was, entirely coincidentally, the same month that the 30 year Eritrean War of Independence began. Dale duly crowned himself king of the surf guitar, but many would follow in his wake, including The Surfaris, The Challengers, The Marketts and The Trashmen. By far the most successful surf rock act, however, were The Beach Boys, who sang songs dedicated to the glory of the sea, the beach, California, beautiful girls, and of being young and in love: “Surfin’ USA”, “Good Vibrations”, “California Girls”, “Surf’s Up”, “Surfer Girl”….
Strikingly, although surf music was very much music for young, healthy bodies in various states of undress, and America was on the cusp of the sexual revolution (the contraceptive pill had been approved by the US Food and Drink Administration in May 1960), the songs for the most part are as chaste as “Those Lovely Seaside Girls” had been half a century earlier. Only Jan and Dean’s “Surf City”, the first surf-themed song to reach number one in the US pop charts bucked the trend. Co-written with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, the frequent references to “two girls for every boy” and the protagonist’s “woodie[1]” make it plain that the singers are two horny fellows who are young, dumb, and full of cum, and that their primary interest is not so much surfing but rather getting laid as often as possible.
II
Of course, surf music turned out to be a fad, like the hot rod music fad or the twist fad that were more or less contemporaneous with it (in March 1962 alone, 11 out of the top 100 songs in the Billboard chart had the word “twist” in the title[2]). By the end of 1964 it was a sound that had worn out its welcome, leaving The Beach Boys as the last men standing. Yet the genre had an unusually long half-life: when I was a child in Scotland in the 1980s you still heard a lot of those songs on the radio, in ads, on TV shows. The generation that had bought those 45s twenty years earlier was entering middle age and just beginning to assert a death grip on the culture that lingers to this day (it would get much worse in a few years, when their younger brothers and sisters who wished they had been at Woodstock joined them, of course).
But we can forgive those forty-somethings their nostalgia. They were among the first teenagers ever to have existed, and surf music is a sound infused with light and warmth and the vigor of youth. It is a dream of the beach that is entirely American, and yet so powerful that it crossed oceans and colonized the imaginations of people living as far afield as France, Denmark, Wales, Bavaria, Iceland. Many of those listeners lived on windswept rocks like I did, while still others were landlocked and had never been near a wave. No matter: the dream swept millions along with it.
As a result, The Beach Boys were one of those mega-bands whose songs you just knew without knowing how you knew them. “I Get Around”, “Surfin’ USA”, “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations” in particular had the same ubiquity as The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” or The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”. But unlike their peers who were still making regular, if disappointing, offerings to the chart gods two decades later, The Beach Boys were an oldies act, who belonged purely to the past, like Bill Hailey or Jerry Lee Lewis. In their world, man had not yet walked on the moon and JFK was still alive (or perhaps his brains were cooling on the tarmac). Even John Lennon, who was dead, seemed more contemporary.
It was a surprise, then, to learn that The Beach Boys had not in fact gone into occultation, but still walked the face of the earth. I remember exactly where I was when I received this revelation. It was 1983, and I was sitting in the back of the family car with my brothers, returning from a visit to our grandparents in Clydebank. The darkness was coming in, and we were listening to the radio. Suddenly the newsreader announced that one of The Beach Boys had fallen over the edge of a boat and drowned.
I was shocked. How could someone who sang so confidently about the joys of surfing die this way? I imagined him going under, arms outstretched, fingers clawing at the light on the surface of the water, cheeks and eyeballs bulging as he descended into an immense and relentless darkness.
III
Over the next decade, I learned more about The Beach Boys, albeit not intentionally. The information was parsed out sporadically and at random, in articles that appeared in my mother’s daily newspaper or perhaps the occasional clip on TV. Mike Love, the leader of this modern iteration, had a big beard and looked like an easily-angered cult leader. Or maybe that was Carl Wilson, the guitarist, I didn’t really know. The others had weird pudding-bowl haircuts and chubby cheeks, and later took to wearing baseball caps and Hawaiian shirts, but they weren’t fooling me. These guys were neither surfers nor boys. They were middle-aged men with a job, and that job was performing as a tribute act to their younger selves. I learned, too, that they were related — a mix of brothers and friends and at least one cousin. There they were, condemned to be together for decades because of a musical fad that was over by 1964. This was probably why they were constantly fighting and suing each other.
Meanwhile, I didn’t actually meet a Beach Boys fan until the early 90s. One day a kid in my brother’s class in high school started arguing passionately that their 1966 record Pet Sounds was possibly the greatest album of all time, on a par with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for its impact and musical adventurism. He pulled the CD from his backpack and showed it to me: the cover art was terrible, a photograph of the band in winter coats, feeding some goats at the zoo. He also told me about the real darkness that lay at the heart of their story. It wasn’t the squabbling or the lawsuits or even the death by drowning of one of their members; it was the disappearance of Brian Wilson, their main songwriter. How shocking it was to learn that the man who had written all those upbeat, pretty songs about boys and girls and surfing had unraveled completely and withdrawn from the world, apparently taking an incomplete “masterpiece” named Smile with him.
This added not only depth but an element of tragedy to The Beach Boys. I still wasn’t convinced about Pet Sounds, however, although as the decade continued I would see versions of the same argument recur in the pages of newspapers and magazines and (after they were invented) music websites. Whenever there was a list of the greatest albums of all time, Pet Sounds was close to the top: a classic, a work of genius, etc. Music journalism is a field that is easy to dismiss, of course, and I did dismiss it. After all, this was also the period during which critics were touting TV band The Monkees’ psychedelic cash-in LP Head as a “classic”.
Only John Cale gave me reason to doubt my skepticism regarding The Beach Boys. Born in 1942, Cale was one of the first teenagers and a musical prodigy from a Welsh mining village. In the early 1960s he migrated to New York to study classical music , before ensconcing himself in the avant-garde scene and forming The Velvet Underground with Lou Reed. In his autobiography What’s Welsh for Zen? (1999) Cale wrote that while he was making his album Slow Dazzle “My Beach Boys records were my personal soundtrack” and that the opening track, “Mr. Wilson”, was a tribute to Brian Wilson. Cale was no fool: was I wrong about The Beach Boys?
IV
In January 2000 I moved back to Moscow after living for several months in Almaty, Kazakhstan. In those days I would carry cassettes with me across borders, and one of the tapes I brought to Moscow was Meadville, a live recording of David Thomas and two pale boys assembled from performances in France, the Netherlands and Slovenia in the late 1990s. Sitting in my apartment in the depths of winter, I played it over and over again until I could recite many of the lyrics from memory.
Thomas is best known as the leader of the “avant-garage” rock band Pere Ubu, whose non-hits include dissonant noise attacks like 30 Seconds Over Tokyo and Final Solution. The two pale boys were his “art house” project: he would squeeze away on a melodeon while sing-speaking over a semi-improvised backdrop of trumpet and electric guitar fed through an array of delays, loops and other effects. Meadville was an eerie, aural road trip across a hallucinatory America in which Thomas wove together songs about broken hearts and wry, rambling narratives about Styrofoam heads, haunted diners, self-pity and the end of civilization. At the heart of the record was a radical reinvention of Brian Wilson’s Surfer Girl, a song I had never heard before. Thomas’ interpretation was uncharacteristically sweet and gentle — but then he suddenly switched to intoning a series of ominous warnings over the bass line to Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me”:
Don’t worry about the blood
It rains like that every day
And don’t worry about the frogs and mud and worms
I’ve seen it rain like that before
The next song was called Beach Boys. Here, Thomas narrated a scene from an imaginary movie. He was sitting in a bar with Brian Wilson: “Nobody knows all the things that you and I know,” says Wilson. Thomas agrees emphatically: “Nobody knows all the things you and I feel.” Then the dialogue takes a darker turn:
I see it in your eyes, I see it in your eyes: You say to me, David, you’re always leaving me. Why don’t you go?
David you’re always leaving me. Why don’t you ever go?
Brian, nobody knows what it’s like to be always leaving, never to go.
Just as David Lynch had uncovered the darkness inside Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, so David Thomas had revealed the extreme strangeness inherent in The Beach Boys’ songs. This was not sunny music at all: it was weird music, seething with mysterious undertones. When Thomas released an album called Surf’s Up a year later, I could resist no longer: I took the metro to Gorbushka, the pirate CD market in the north of Moscow, intent on finding a copy of Pet Sounds. But Russians weren’t very interested in early American pop music — for them, The Beatles were where it all began — and so the best I could do was a bootleg of The Beach Boys’ own Surf’s Up from 1971. The cover depicted an Indian brave in profile against a dark and murky backdrop, slumped forward on his horse, an image that exuded profound exhaustion and defeat. This must be the sinister Beach Boys record, I thought, written by Brian Wilson as he slid into madness…
Certainly the first track, Don’t Go Near the Water, was strikingly different from the upbeat ditties I associated with The Beach Boys. It was an anti-beach song, a warning to the listener to avoid the water because of all the pollutants and poisons in it. Perhaps The Beach Boys had been reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring:
Don't go near the water
Don't you think it's sad
What's happened to the water
Our water's going bad
It was also not good. Three years later, Johnny Cash would release a song with the same title, but his Don’t go Near the Water was a lot less insipid:
Don't go near the water children
see the fish all dead upon the shore
Don't go near the water
cause the water isn't water anymore
The rest of Surf’s Up sounded like early 70s pop music with mild psychedelic affectations. Better than The Osmonds, perhaps, but that wasn’t saying much. I played it once, twice and then never again.
V
Years passed, and The Beach Boys did not impinge on my consciousness. Then one day I found myself thinking about the member of the band that had drowned.
By that point he had been dead a long time; thirty years, probably. Mildly curious, I googled “drowned beach boy” and learned that he was Brian Wilson’s younger brother, Dennis, the drummer in the band. It turned out that Dennis was the only member of the Beach Boys who actually had any interest in surfing, but he was a lot more interested in doing lots of drugs and getting extremely high. Wilson kept strange company: at one point he befriended Charles Manson and persuaded The Beach Boys to record one of the cult leader’s songs, “Never Learn Not to Love” as the B-side to their 1968 single “Bluebirds Over the Mountain”. Wilson’s death at the age of 39, meanwhile, was exceptionally pointless. He was on a friend’s boat, had been drinking all day, then decided to go diving to see if he could find some things belonging to his ex-wife that he had tossed in the water three years earlier. And that was the end of him.
Then I spent an hour or so down a Beach Boys rabbit hole. Brian Wilson’s madness. Dennis Wilson marrying Mike Love’s illegitimate[3] teenage daughter. Mike Love getting a restraining order against Dennis Wilson. Mike Love suing Brian Wilson. Mike Love suing Al Jardine, the rhythm guitarist. The Wilson boys’ dad Murray managing them at the start of their careers, and then producing a clone band, The Sunrays, when they fired him. Murray Wilson selling off the band’s catalog without telling them. Brian Wilson in his bedroom, with drugs and burgers and ice cream, making tapes of secret songs. Carl Wilson’s death from lung cancer at age 51. The knowledge that The Beach Boys hadn’t even played on Pet Sounds; it was almost all the work of Brian Wilson and some session musicians. An ancient Mike Love fronting a corporate entity called “The Beach Boys” performing songs about surfing and girls to an audience teetering on the brink of eternity. They weren’t The Beach Boys at all: they were the drug boys, the litigation boys, the madness boys, the geriatric boys, the death boys.
But it’s getting dark again. It’s not supposed to be dark.
I’ll try again. Brian Wilson returned from madness. He started touring again. He finished his lost album Smile. They made a film about his life, people liked it. In fact, people got so used to having Brian Wilson around that his appearances ceased to be events and became normal, like a Neil Diamond concert.
And let’s not forget all those other songs about beaches, like “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”, and what about Jimmy Buffet and Kenny Chesney, don’t they have songs about beaches? I’m not saying they were great songs, but they were definitely songs, and people liked them. Then there’s “San Tropez” by Pink Floyd about doing nothing on a French beach, and “Sea, Sex and Sun” by Serge Gainsbourg, a song about doing something on a French beach. Lana Del Rey recorded “High by the Beach”, a song about leaving a bad boyfriend behind and getting high by the beach. But better than all of these is Brian Eno’s “On Some Faraway Beach”, which closes out his debut album, Here Come the Warm Jets. A few notes on the piano and then Eno starts building up the song layer by layer until his voice finally breaks through with the surreal lyric:
Given the chance
I'll die like a baby
On some far away beach
Oh dear.
Alright, well what about Morrissey’s “Every day is like Sunday”? That’s probably my favorite beach song: “the seaside town that they forgot to close down”. Where Jan and Dean sang about the erotic delight of two girls for every boy, in Morrissey’s world the pleasure beach is no longer a destination but a trap, a zone of decay from which you yearn to escape, as he wishes for nuclear war to come and wipe the town out of existence…
But it’s getting dark again. I don’t know, maybe that’s just how it is, maybe it’s always going to end in darkness. So probably we should just stop right here. Yes, let’s. Although I would like to say one thing before I go: I did eventually listen to Pet Sounds, and “God Only Knows” is a beautiful song.
Read more from “Beach Bodies”:
[1] Admittedly, a woodie could also be a reference to a wood-bodied station wagon that was popular among surfers in the early 1960s.
[2] Among them The Alvin Twist by Alvin and the Chipmunks
[3] Allegedly: Mike Love has never acknowledged her.
Putting in a request for On the Beach by Chris Rea.
"Dale released the 7” single “Let’s Go Trippin’” in September 1961, which was, entirely coincidentally, the same month that the 30 year Eritrean War of Independence began. " Absolutely hilarious!