| Great Western Express Lincoln 1972 |
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Great Western Express Lincoln : Sunday May 28 1972 Full transcript from the Official Programme for: |
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Just five years ago, scared, it's said, that the New Breed, the San Francisco hippy crowd, might laugh, Brian Wilson pulled the Beach Boys out of the Monterey Pop Festival, right at the last minute. 1967, Janis and Jimi, Eric Burdon even, Ravi Shankar ... high harmony in duck pants, buck shoes and competition kandy-stripe T-shirts - what was it they'd call them, crown princes of whimp-rock? - it wouldn't go, Brian thought. The Beach Boys kicked off as one of those nice California families who play together on the courts before dinner and swim together before bed. They were the Wilsons, Brian D, Dennis C, and Carl D, their very own cousin Michael E Love and friendly neighbour and high-school soprano David L. Marks (soon replaced by another pal, Al Jardine). Brian, of course, being the cleverest, was the song-writer, and as it turned out, a natural; the other guys chipped in where they could. The songs came easy: all you had to do was lie still and look around. After Surfin', their first hit, in 1961, the Beach Boys found it hardgoing to miss out. In no time, Brian had become the daddy of Surf Rock; he'd hit on a perfect formula. The voices were always way up front and the tune always seemed to be a re-working of Surfin' Safari's racing chug-a-lug-a-chug-a-lug-a. A whole style was catalogued. Car Trouble, Cheater Slicks, Catch A Wave, Be True To Your School, Girls On The Beach, Fun, Fun, Fun, All Summer Long ... The Boys had a sound and an image, they were originals and nobody - not Jan and Dean, the Rivingtons, the Eligibles or Ronnie and the Daytonas - nobody could come within a mile of touching them. Singing their songs of The Dream and generally reinforcing their myth, they travelled and recorded non-stop for 4 years, knocking up singles sales of 16 million and earning ten gold records, one for every album they'd released. It could have gone on forever, but it didn't. By the end of 1964, Brian was exhausted. All the travelling had left him with no time to write or think and the answer seemed obvious: he would stay home and work while the other guys kept the show rolling on the road. A fine replacement was found in Bruce Johnston (who has just now quit after seven years) and the Beach Boys looked like they'd come through the other side unmarked. Suddenly though, Brian started to get ambitious. Musically, he hadn't travelled very far from Hawthorne and Dorsey High. Beach Boy albums were still chock full of air and light, the old formula of solo voice and back-up harmonies still riding way over that basic drum/bass/rhythm structure. In mid-1965, after experimenting on an album called 'Summer Days', and turning out the Beach Boys Party album, another first of its kind, Brian started in on what was to become 'Pet Sounds', and he'd work on that for a full twelve months, correcting, editing, dubbing and over-dubbing tapes while the others were away. Coming four months before the Beatles' Revolver, 'Pet Sounds' was headlined as a new beginning and Brian Wilson started to look like he could be more than just the Beach Boy who'd copped out, writer of all those 'slop-rock' surf songs. 'Good Vibrations' left no doubts. It had taken him more than 6 months, 90 hours of tape and 11 complete versions to get a 3 min 35 sec master tape of Vibrations that satisfied him. Using, among other stuff, a theramin, an electric machine that had been used on the soundtrack of 'Spelbound', an old '40s movie, he'd ploughed into work on the record soon after his first experiments with acid. In the States, it sold 400,000 copies in just four days and hit the English charts at number six, jumping to one the next week. Before long, his home in Beverley Hills was crawling with the Heavy Mob, the best and highest of Hollywood's cultural elite, and Brian started preparations for what was to be the masterwork of all pop, an album called 'Dumb Angels' (later changed to 'Smile'). 'I'm writing', he said, 'a teenage symphony to God'. Day and night, he'd slap new sounds onto miles of tape in 3 different recording studios booked round the clock for him in month-solid blocks, but as the months passed he became less and less productive, more erratic and a bit frantic - the tales told are legend. Van Dyke Parks, who he'd hired early in the summer of '66 to work with him on the album's lyrics, got tired of being beaten down and left, finally, in February '67, meaning that Brian would have to match his own lyrics (never, to say the least, strong) with those started by Parks. In the event, of course, 'Smile', the album of the elements, never appeared. The songs though that have slowly surfaced from those sessions - 'Heroes and Villains', 'Vegetables', 'She's Goin' Bald', 'Wonderful', 'Iron Horse', 'Surf's Up' - all of them collaborations with Parks, are certainly among the Beach Boys' very best work. 'Smiley Smile', issued in September 1967, only hinted at what 'Smile' could have been but, with 'Wild Honey', 'Friends' and '20/20', it prepared a way for what has turned out to be a rejuvenation. 'Sunflower' and 'Surf's Up', the group's second generation output, can stand alongside anything they've produced - including 'Pet Sounds' - and although the words, and especially the subject matter, will always be a weakness, the last three songs on 'Surf's Up', their last record to be released, are as brilliant as anything Brian Wilson has ever done. He's home safe. Text credited to: Gordon Burn Advertisments: Shared inside front cover, full page, for 'Carl and the Passions - So Tough' and The Faces' 'First Step', 'Long Player' and 'A Nod's As Good As A Wink...'. By Brother/Reprise and Warner Brothers Half page Page 10: 'The Best of the BEACH BOYS is on EMI' featuring 'Greatest Hits' (on Capitol) and 'Surf's Up' (on Stateside). 'Both available on cassette and cartridge'. Cartoon: Full page on Page 14 by Anthony ? |
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