How did you come to be a fan of the Beach Boys?
Dec 30, 2018 20:24:39 GMT -5
John Manning, filledeplage, and 3 more like this
Post by dustybooks on Dec 30, 2018 20:24:39 GMT -5
I wrote this elsewhere on the internet a long time ago -- it's long but I enjoyed reading everyone else's stories so here's mine. FWIW, I'm 35.
Like a lot of people I came to love the Beach Boys when I was a kid of 3 or 4, prompted specifically by "Little Honda" and David Lee Roth's cover of "California Girls," both of which were on a compilation LP called Beach Blow Out that I picked out at a discount store because I thought the painted girls on the front were pretty. This sounds made up but it isn't. In tandem with this, my brother was a gigantic fan and played Beach Boys tapes regularly, and kindly dubbed them for me. I played them over and over and over again for years. When I got a little older I found out he had most of the group's albums on either cassette or vinyl; in need of space at his apartment he left a box of LPs with us that contained the bulk. (As far as I can remember, he didn't have Smiley Smile, Friends or Love You; hard to imagine what I would have made of them as a child.) I listened to some a lot more than others and paid less attention to the '70s material, but they all got played a few times. One album that wasn't in the box was Pet Sounds, which I'm guessing he felt significant enough to keep with him. I found a duophonic copy at a yard sale around 1990 and it was my first time actually hearing "Wouldn't It Be Nice," which my dad had been singing since I was in the womb. The record did make an impression on me in that it seemed to have a different texture and a certain importance and melancholy -- it occurs to me now that one of the album's strengths is that it doesn't really announce itself as a break in tradition the way Sgt. Pepper does -- but I had no idea of its significance and didn't listen to it very much.
All roads lead back to the Beatles. I got bored with the Beach Boys in my early teens; I ended up with Endless Summer and Pet Sounds on CD as presents because they were the only non-budget releases by the band in print at the time. Sometime in 1997 I learned from- a Beatles book about the Smile fiasco; to say the least, it intrigued me and I took to the library's internet connection to learn more. Eventually I ended up with some cassettes of Smile material sent to me by a kind person on the web -- my dad, still convinced that anyone you met online was going to come murder you if they had your mailing address, was livid -- and set about trying to put together my own interpretation of the structure of the record. I got Domenic Priore's splendid, fanzine-like text Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! through inter-library loan and bought fully into its mythos and crazy theories (since proven inaccurate but still wildly entertaining, and essential for the many key contemporary texts and pieces of evidence it gathers). I was becoming obsessed, like many before me, with the idea of Brian Wilson as some eccentric wunderkind and with Smile as a lost masterpiece that could somehow be pieced together by its far-flung acolytes.
Smile can really suck you in, but it's also exhausting. I reached a point when my fatigue would maybe have prompted me to put the matter at rest permanently, but then I remembered I had those two Beach Boys CDs stuffed in a box somewhere and decided to reinvestigate them, now that I'd learned a great deal about the legend surrounding their body of work -- until not long beforehand, I'd really thought of them as a sort of empty teen idol phenomenon, a version of the Beatles that never progressed beyond Please Please Me (now, of course, I'd contest both the idea that empty teen idols are a bad thing and the idea that Please Please Me isn't already a masterful album, but I was a surly teenager and that was my thinking then). About half of Endless Summer fell into place for me, and parts of Pet Sounds really intrigued me too; over the next few months I listened to them more and more. I also became invested in reading forums and learning everything I could about the band; regardless of everything else, they were and are a damned interesting phenomenon and I couldn't get enough.
It was probably another year -- during which, it's probably pertinent to note, I fell pretty hard into a crush on a close friend whose interest I never worked up the courage to gauge -- before I started thinking of Pet Sounds as one of my favorite albums. But "God Only Knows" didn't even take that long, and it was swirling around me constantly at the same time I was learning about the work Carl Wilson had done over the years to try and keep the group together, and was coming to think of him as sort of the hero of the story. I pulled out some of the old records I still had -- giving my turntable its first workout in many years -- and started listening specifically for Carl's lead vocals, and I gathered up the Smile tapes I had and realized that the reason "Wind Chimes" was my favorite song almost from the beginning was that Carl sang it. I tried to special order Carl's two solo albums from a music store but was told they were impossible to find. Right in the middle of all this Carl Wilson died; it was the first celebrity death that affected me so strongly, likely just because of timing. I was literally trying to convince a friend to care about which Beach Boy was which a day before I heard the news. It was before the internet was totally ubiquitous in my life, so I'd had no idea he was even ill.
My world was dominated by another favorite band, R.E.M., for most of 1998 and when I read an interview with Mike Mills singing the praises of Smiley Smile and Wild Honey, I got my brother to lend me a cassette he had of the twofer with both, and this specific event probably gave me the last kick into lifelong hardcore fandom. When the '70s reissues happened in 2000 I picked them up one by one; the twofers of the Capitol albums followed a year later, and then all the peripheral stuff like compilations. One moment I won't ever forget in the annals of my physical music consumption was when I got the Good Vibrations box for free, having joined BMG specifically for that purpose; the excitement of owning something so "big" was hard to describe, tempered only slightly by the knowledge that I was in my junior year of high school and should maybe have been doing something more with my youth, but that's okay. "Catch a Wave" came over my headphones in mono and at the instrumental break I was made a true believer permanently. There have still been interludes and caveats when I wanted nothing to do with them, and I can't say they are still my favorite band or even my favorite American band, but by and large they remain major for me, as CDs have graduated to files and files have graduated to sought-after near mint copies of the vinyl records. More than anything, what's prompted me to re-immerse myself in the Beach Boys this summer has been how easy it is. Their work is second-nature to me, and falling back into it is like revisiting a very comfortable childhood home, evoked so easily by those yellow and orange Capitol swirl 45s. A childhood home with lots of terrifying stories of corrupt psychiatrists, familial betrayals and serial killers... but maybe that's only appropriate.
Like a lot of people I came to love the Beach Boys when I was a kid of 3 or 4, prompted specifically by "Little Honda" and David Lee Roth's cover of "California Girls," both of which were on a compilation LP called Beach Blow Out that I picked out at a discount store because I thought the painted girls on the front were pretty. This sounds made up but it isn't. In tandem with this, my brother was a gigantic fan and played Beach Boys tapes regularly, and kindly dubbed them for me. I played them over and over and over again for years. When I got a little older I found out he had most of the group's albums on either cassette or vinyl; in need of space at his apartment he left a box of LPs with us that contained the bulk. (As far as I can remember, he didn't have Smiley Smile, Friends or Love You; hard to imagine what I would have made of them as a child.) I listened to some a lot more than others and paid less attention to the '70s material, but they all got played a few times. One album that wasn't in the box was Pet Sounds, which I'm guessing he felt significant enough to keep with him. I found a duophonic copy at a yard sale around 1990 and it was my first time actually hearing "Wouldn't It Be Nice," which my dad had been singing since I was in the womb. The record did make an impression on me in that it seemed to have a different texture and a certain importance and melancholy -- it occurs to me now that one of the album's strengths is that it doesn't really announce itself as a break in tradition the way Sgt. Pepper does -- but I had no idea of its significance and didn't listen to it very much.
All roads lead back to the Beatles. I got bored with the Beach Boys in my early teens; I ended up with Endless Summer and Pet Sounds on CD as presents because they were the only non-budget releases by the band in print at the time. Sometime in 1997 I learned from- a Beatles book about the Smile fiasco; to say the least, it intrigued me and I took to the library's internet connection to learn more. Eventually I ended up with some cassettes of Smile material sent to me by a kind person on the web -- my dad, still convinced that anyone you met online was going to come murder you if they had your mailing address, was livid -- and set about trying to put together my own interpretation of the structure of the record. I got Domenic Priore's splendid, fanzine-like text Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! through inter-library loan and bought fully into its mythos and crazy theories (since proven inaccurate but still wildly entertaining, and essential for the many key contemporary texts and pieces of evidence it gathers). I was becoming obsessed, like many before me, with the idea of Brian Wilson as some eccentric wunderkind and with Smile as a lost masterpiece that could somehow be pieced together by its far-flung acolytes.
Smile can really suck you in, but it's also exhausting. I reached a point when my fatigue would maybe have prompted me to put the matter at rest permanently, but then I remembered I had those two Beach Boys CDs stuffed in a box somewhere and decided to reinvestigate them, now that I'd learned a great deal about the legend surrounding their body of work -- until not long beforehand, I'd really thought of them as a sort of empty teen idol phenomenon, a version of the Beatles that never progressed beyond Please Please Me (now, of course, I'd contest both the idea that empty teen idols are a bad thing and the idea that Please Please Me isn't already a masterful album, but I was a surly teenager and that was my thinking then). About half of Endless Summer fell into place for me, and parts of Pet Sounds really intrigued me too; over the next few months I listened to them more and more. I also became invested in reading forums and learning everything I could about the band; regardless of everything else, they were and are a damned interesting phenomenon and I couldn't get enough.
It was probably another year -- during which, it's probably pertinent to note, I fell pretty hard into a crush on a close friend whose interest I never worked up the courage to gauge -- before I started thinking of Pet Sounds as one of my favorite albums. But "God Only Knows" didn't even take that long, and it was swirling around me constantly at the same time I was learning about the work Carl Wilson had done over the years to try and keep the group together, and was coming to think of him as sort of the hero of the story. I pulled out some of the old records I still had -- giving my turntable its first workout in many years -- and started listening specifically for Carl's lead vocals, and I gathered up the Smile tapes I had and realized that the reason "Wind Chimes" was my favorite song almost from the beginning was that Carl sang it. I tried to special order Carl's two solo albums from a music store but was told they were impossible to find. Right in the middle of all this Carl Wilson died; it was the first celebrity death that affected me so strongly, likely just because of timing. I was literally trying to convince a friend to care about which Beach Boy was which a day before I heard the news. It was before the internet was totally ubiquitous in my life, so I'd had no idea he was even ill.
My world was dominated by another favorite band, R.E.M., for most of 1998 and when I read an interview with Mike Mills singing the praises of Smiley Smile and Wild Honey, I got my brother to lend me a cassette he had of the twofer with both, and this specific event probably gave me the last kick into lifelong hardcore fandom. When the '70s reissues happened in 2000 I picked them up one by one; the twofers of the Capitol albums followed a year later, and then all the peripheral stuff like compilations. One moment I won't ever forget in the annals of my physical music consumption was when I got the Good Vibrations box for free, having joined BMG specifically for that purpose; the excitement of owning something so "big" was hard to describe, tempered only slightly by the knowledge that I was in my junior year of high school and should maybe have been doing something more with my youth, but that's okay. "Catch a Wave" came over my headphones in mono and at the instrumental break I was made a true believer permanently. There have still been interludes and caveats when I wanted nothing to do with them, and I can't say they are still my favorite band or even my favorite American band, but by and large they remain major for me, as CDs have graduated to files and files have graduated to sought-after near mint copies of the vinyl records. More than anything, what's prompted me to re-immerse myself in the Beach Boys this summer has been how easy it is. Their work is second-nature to me, and falling back into it is like revisiting a very comfortable childhood home, evoked so easily by those yellow and orange Capitol swirl 45s. A childhood home with lots of terrifying stories of corrupt psychiatrists, familial betrayals and serial killers... but maybe that's only appropriate.
But the important thing was that I fell in love with Don't Worry Baby on the soundtrack. I decided it was time to seek out more Beach Boys music, and one of my early cd purchases was a low-budget BBs comp called (oddly) SURF'S UP. It was a start. But I wanted more, and soon I acquired the Made in USA comp. 
