"Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?": Lives of the Beach Boys

Did you hear? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his lyrics, a decision I’m still not convinced by. I’m not sure how comfortable Bob is with it either, given his reluctance to go and collect the thing. I know a trip to Sweden with a dinner, gold medal and a lot of money sounds horrid but it can’t be that bad.

But I suspect part of his reluctance is part of my discomfort; lyrics aren’t poetry, and don’t operate on their own. They aren’t written to be read or recited but rather sung or listened to. Which isn’t to say a good lyricist isn’t as skilful or artistic wordsmith as any other writer. But for a lyricist words and music, as the old Jo Jo Zep song said, go together. There have been a number of books about music or lyricists that have the words printed but the only way you can really read them is to have the tune in your head as you do so. Otherwise they lose a lot of their life. And while there is no Nobel Prize for music, there’s none for mathematics, art, architecture, engineering, and a whole lot of other human endeavours as well, and it doesn't make them less important.

The interplay between lyric and melody is crucial.  Tim Rice in his autobiography quotes the first verse of his lyric for the tune that became “I don’t know how to love him,” which he maintains would have killed that song dead had it ever been released, despite the melody.  All together now: 

I love the Kansas morning

Kansas dawn comes to greet me

Kansas winds

Shift and sigh

I can see you now, we’re flying high

Kansas love of mine

(It’s a prison song, a man in a jail cell in Maine lamenting his girl back home. Really.) On a more worrying note, George Gershwin’s songs are sung less and less, due largely to his brother Ira’s sometimes twee lyrics, despite the beauty of the melodies. Words and music go together.

Which brings me in a very roundabout way to two autobiographies I have read lately from two of the founding Beach Boys, Mike Love and Brian Wilson, both released in 2016 within weeks of each other. Mike Love is the front man of the band, one of their lyricists, and still goes about with a band called ‘The Beach Boys’, although he is only original one there.

Brian Wilson who wrote, arranged and produced the Beach Boys music, also tours but with ‘The Brian Wilson Band’ as Love has the legal rights to the name. It’s a long story.

The two books couldn’t display a greater contrast. Love’s is chronological, detailed, sometimes to the point of tedium, and I have to say, aimed at scoring and settling points. He feels his part of the Beach Boys’ success has been undervalued both financially and artistically. And to be fair to the man, he’s right. His lyrics on surf and girls was one of the features of their early albums and a big part of their appeal to people who had never seen the beach, leading to their worldwide success. As lead vocalist and front man, he was a dynamic performer. His name was kept off many of the singles for which he was lyricist (by Murray Wilson) and he had to sue to get his rightful recognition and money. Despite his practice and championing of transcendental meditation, he clearly has trouble letting go of years of resentment and anger and it seeps throughout the book.

Wilson’s books is more amorphous, drifting from present to past, in no particular order.  He can go from a description of his current family life to a session of Pet Sounds almost in a sentence. The oldest son of an abusive father, he has famously struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues, and these things affect him still. He finds it difficult to talk about his father Murray, the man who gave him music, who was crucial to the band's early years, but who also beat him and belittled him. His therapist Gene Landy saved his life, but also drugged him, abused him and exploited him. Yet here Wilson is, still writing, still performing but also aware of what his survival has cost. The book can be generalised at times, but at others picks up details and stories that may otherwise have been overlooked. He’s not the most reliable narrator, which he is aware of, but the writing is never confusing, and throughout displays a generosity of spirit that is lacking in Love’s work. 

Love is defensive. Although he is open about his own shortcomings as husband and as a father, as a band member he did no wrong. All those stories you heard about his criticisms of Pet Sounds or SMiLE? “Don’t fuck with the formula”? Never happened. Not one of them. Ever. And so much of the Beach Boys music would never have happened without his magic touch. Just a word, a minor suggestion and near disaster turns into commercial magic. I think he is overplaying his hand. He is also trapped in that idea that good work is commercial work, otherwise it's not good. He's not alone there.

Love’s greatest problem is that he is a classic Alpha male in a situation where he must play second fiddle. While his lyrics work in the main part, that is all they do. They don’t get taken out of the song and quoted, they way Dylan’s do. Or The Beatles. He is a workaday lyricist, successful for sure but no more. Nor as he got older did he ever really attempt to move on from his milieu of beaches and girls. Sometimes it worked - “Do it again”, “Kokomo” - other times it was embarrassing, tending towards creepy - “Hey little tomboy”. Love’s attempt at being political , “Student Demonstration Time”, is likewise painful to listen to, and his song about transcendental mediation oddly jarring. I have read some of his solo work is quite good but I haven’t listened to it.

The greater talent in the band was of course Brian Wilson. His melodies, his harmonies, and his arrangements are some of the greatest in the pop era. What still draws people to the Beach Boys is this music, sometimes in spite of the lyrics. “Don’t Worry Baby” is a stunningly beautiful song - about drag racing. They lyrics here are by Roger Christian, who wrote all the car song lyrics. Other lyricists include Tony Asher (Pet Sounds), Van dyke Parks (SMiLE), himself and other band members. Another big hit "Sloop John B" was a cover of a folk song. As he got older, he pushed himself as a musician, which lead to seeking out new collaborators. Some of his most beautiful work was not commercial but was genuine artistic expression.

In short, Brian Wilson’s successes were not limited to his work with Mike Love. But Mike Love’s success is limited to his work with Brian Wilson, and he resents it.  (Another exception here: "Kokomo" was the Beach Boys’ only number one hit for which Brian Wilson neither wrote or produced.) But at their height of commercial success, Wilson and Love were the core of the Beach Boy's writing. The biggest hit for the band, "Good Vibrations", was a Love lyric to Wilson's music and arrangement. Mike Love has been undervalued for his contribution to the band, and unfairly characterised as the Villain to Wilson' Hero. That said, I think the main difference between these two autobiographies is instructive:  Love admits to Wilson’s talents, while Wilson champions Love’s.

'Fathers and Sons' Hear me roar: The story of a stay-at-home dad.

Most people don’t like going to the dentist. Me, I’m fine. It’s not a hobby or anything but it’s not a fear I have to conquer either. And this is due to my childhood dentist, Mr Roberston (Later it on it was more chummy and I called him ‘Col’.) He and my father, a GP,  worked in the same building and shared the waiting room. He would make jokes, pretend that the sight of teeth made him sing, and generally made going to the dentist, if not something to be looked forward to, at least something that could be fun.

His son Ben went to school with me.  Apart from the fact our fathers worked in the same building, (so did we, come to think of it) we didn’t have much in common. Ben was a good sportsman and I was not, always a major division in a private boys school, and to the best of my recollection, we didn’t have any of the same classes. So while Ben and I had nothing against each other, we never became good friends either.

I’ve just read Ben’s book Hear me roar: The story of a stay-at-home dad. I probably came at this book from the wrong angle. I’d heard that Col ‘didn’t come out too good’ in this book, so I was reading mainly for that story. But the main thrust is Ben’s experiences when he suspended his journalism career to become the stay-at-home parent, first with one, then two sons, and the effect it has on his life and his marriage. It’s a journey that takes him from the euphoria of new fatherhood through to depression and all stages in between.

He’s also worried about the effect he has on his children. And this is where Col comes in. As a parent, it turns out, my funny childhood dentist was angry, violent, foul-mouthed and deeply unpleasant for his wife and children to live with. When the book begins, he is merely a bad example for Ben to react against as his own children take him to his limits, as children do. But when his estranged father rings him and announces he is dying with cancer, Ben chooses to go visit him, and resume their difficult relationship.

This is the central section of the book and for me the strongest. But as I say, I was reading from the

wrong angle. Those who are parents might connect as strongly or more so with the stories of the challenges and satisfactions of raising children. I found all that entertaining, written with journalistic clarity and humour. But it was Ben’s relationship with his father, and how it plays on his mind, that held me.

This is no ‘Daddy Dearest’. Ben forces himself to remember the good times, when his father was the father he wanted. There is one incident when he is explicity trying to make his son feel as safe and protected as his father made him feel at a similar time. And he knows his father was a good provider and ensured his childen lacked nothing material. But it seems it was like how a friend of mine described having an alcoholic parent – you never knew which parent you were coming home to. I cannot imagine what that was like. The older I get, the luckier I realise I’ve been.

And it made me think. What Ben is talking about is, in the main, a common experience for stay-at-home mothers. I’ve always been sympathetic to parents but obviously I have no idea of the experience. And I begin to get some idea of the vehemence behind my mother’s resentment every time an official form compelled her to say she didn’t have a job.

One of Ben’s mantras as a parent is I’m not going to be like him, which helps him contain his anger and frustration. Studies tell us the most abused children do not become abusers themselves, becaust they cannot imagine doing to others what was done to them. Ben is a good example of that. In the end, I believe, no matter our background, we all choose who we are.

And so it turns out I didn't know my childhood dentist at all well. But I do remember him as a man in a mask. It's heavy-handed imagery I suppose but not at all inaccurate.