Review: 'God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and the California Myth' (Remastered edition)

In 1977, The Beach Boys were still a going concern, but one that had recently released fluff like 15 Big Ones while playing the oldies festival circuit. The group's reputation was not strong. Mike Love was flapping his chicken wings and croaking "Fun, Fun, Fun" for the billionth time. Brian Wilson was shattered. His history of making progressive, futuristic music was not what the average person thought of when confronted with the name "Beach Boys."

Review: 'Sounds Of Summer: The Very Best Of The Beach Boys' Expanded Edition

There has certainly been no shortage of Beach Boys compilations throughout the group's 60-year history, but few have really looked beyond the biggest hits to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of a group that released about thirty albums between 1962 and 2012. The two CD box sets, Good Vibrations and Made in California, actually do a good job, but for the vinyl cult, which has been growing rapidly in recent years, those aren't options. The 2003 CD Sounds Of Summer: The Very Best Of The Beach Boys did a fair job of collecting the usual big ones, and it did get a vinyl release in 2016, but it could hardly be called comprehensive since it exclusively focused on singles.

For the band's 60th anniversary, UMe is reissuing Sounds of Summer on CD and vinyl but with a bold move toward comprehensiveness. Expanded from a 1CD/2 LP compilation of 30 tracks to a 3 CD/6 LP, 80-track monster, Sounds of Summer can't help but move beyond the obvious because as huge as The Beach Boys are, they didn't produce 80 mega-hits. So the new edition of Sounds of Summer can get a bit deeper into the brilliance of Brian Wilson's early harmony arrangements, his psychedelic-era flights of extreme creativity, and, for those who swing that way, the stuff the other guys produced after Brian basically checked out in the mid-seventies. 

Review: 'Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles'

A few months ago I reviewed Joel Selvin's Hollywood Eden, an interesting, well-written chronicle of the earliest days of L.A.'s fertile rock scene in the sixties. Because that book halted just as Brian Wilson created "Good Vibrations" and the scene was really about to take off, I described Hollywood Eden as "an extended prologue" and ended the review by suggesting that "further reading is required to learn the complete story of why LA was so important to sixties rock."  

Published four years before Hollywood Eden, Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles could be that further reading. William McKeen's book covers the same period Selvin's does (though with fleeter feet through the 1950s run-up to the main story and a lot less focus on dopey Jan and Dean), but then he moves beyond the point L.A. really exploded. Selvin cuts his tale short just as The Byrds and Mamas and Papas were getting together. Key L.A. artists such as Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and Joni Mitchell, never get to jump in Selvin's sandbox. However, they're all on board for Everybody Had an Ocean, and instead of Jan and Dean, the far more artistically and commercially pivotal Beach Boys become the track on which the narrative rolls. Natch, that narrative rolls into some pretty dark places as Brian Wilson loses his grip on his group and brother Dennis runs into a certain charismatic psychopath with a grudge against producer Terry Melcher.

McKeen's writing also brims with humor, vulgarity, and the willingness to confront the artists' myriad flaws--all the things a rock writer should bring to the table. I wish he'd given more attention to at least two key L.A. artists: Love, who (with the exception of Brian Wilson, and arguably, The Byrds) made better records than any of McKeen's mostly white main cast of characters, and The Monkees, a massively popular, massively weird group that could not have sprouted anywhere but L.A. Oddly, Selvin's two pages on Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter are riddled with errors (he states that it took The Monkees a couple of years to take control of their music when it was closer to six months, suggests non-instrumentalist Davy Jones had "musical chops" Micky Dolenz lacked, and repeats Mike Nesmith's line that The Monkees outsold The Beatles and Stones combined as if it was fact, though Nesmith later admitted he was bullshitting). So maybe it's for the best the author didn't devote more time to them. These mistakes also made me question some of the other factoids McKeen lays down, but there's still no question that Everybody Had an Ocean is a highly entertaining read. It's now being published in paperback for the first time.

Farewell, Hal Blaine

A session musician becoming a household name is almost unheard of, but the name "Hal Blaine" is probably as close as it comes. This is the guy who thumped out what may be the most iconic beat of all: the two bass hits/one snare snap that launched "Be My Baby". That startling moment is just one of many, many startling ones. The list of songs Blaine helped bring to life is absolutely staggering. He was responsible for scattering majestic fills all over Simon & Garfunkel's "America". He brought orchestral grandeur to Pet Sounds and SMiLE. He funked up The Monkees' "Mary Mary". He pummeled out those rolls that make Neal Hefti's "Batman Theme" go POW! That's him on Elvis's "Bossa Nova Baby", The Association's "Along Comes Mary", The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Hungry", Love's "Andmoreagain", The Mamas and Papas' "Go Where You Wanna Go", The Crystals "Da Doo Ron Ron", The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man", The Vogue's "You're the One"... the theme from Three's Company! Phil Spector and Brian Wilson would have been nowhere without Hal Blaine. By his own estimation, he played on some 6,000 tracks.

Blaine was also a big personality, as evidenced in the numerous documentaries to which he contributed his memories, such as The Wrecking Crew! and Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of SMiLE. Sadly, the world just lost that beat and that personality because Hal Blaine died at the age of 90 yesterday. You can't say the guy didn't live a full life though.

Review: The Beach Boys' '1967—Sunshine Tomorrow'

1967 was a tough year for The Beach Boys. While their chief rivals The Beatles were dropping jaws with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Brian Wilson terminated his struggle to create SMiLE, an ambitious project that would have made Pepper’s sound like Please Please Me. Despite an invitation to perform at the taste-making Monterey Pop Festival, The Beach Boys pulled out, supposedly out of fear that they would look pathetically unhip sharing a stage with the likes of Hendrix, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane. Unable to follow up on the smash commercial and artistic success of “Good Vibrations” in 1966, our boys from Hawthorne seemed to be in a pretty grim way in ’67.

Review: 'Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol'

Sometimes a rock autobiography works because it reveals that a great lyricist’s way with words translates well to prose. However, as I recently learned from reading I Am Brian Wilson, a convincing translation of the writer’s peculiar communication idiosyncrasies is often what’s really needed. I didn’t want Melville-level wordsmithery from the cat who wrote “He sits behind his microphone-JOHNNY CARSON!—he speaks in such a manly tone—JOHNNY CARSON!”, and I sure don’t want it from the guy who called Bill Grundy a “fucking rotter” on live TV either.

As the host of his own radio show, Jonesy’s Juke Box, ex-Pistol Steve Jones is not exactly an uncomfortable communicator as Wilson famously and endearingly is. In fact, Jones is quite comfortable communicating anything and everything about his checkered past. Those who pick up memoirs because memoirs tend to be lurid will not be disappointed by Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol. Each page squishes with smack addiction, sex addiction, nonces, compulsive wanking, peeping, vacuum fucking, bread fucking, and/or kitten strangling. However, it is Jonesy’s creative thievery that stands out most among his crimes. He nicked Ron Wood’s portable TV, Keith Richards’s coat, Ariel Bender’s guitar, Bryan Ferry’s tuner, and half of Bowie’s stage gear. That alone would warrant a memoir.

Of course, its Jones’s time in The Sex Pistols that probably sealed the book deal, though Lonely Boy is the rare rock auto-bio that is often least interesting when focusing on its subject’s music. But that may just be because I never gave much of a toss about the Pistols. It can also get tiresome during the druggy/recovery passages, but that’s only because you’ll find that kind of stuff in every memoir ever written. Nevertheless, Jones’s unapologetic yet disarmingly humble and really funny voice make Lonely Boy readable all the way through. Plus, steering clear of the atrocities on his appendix list of things that are not Rock & Roll (examples: sandals; selfies; cunts who get your signature on stuff then sell it on ebay…) constitutes a pretty good life plan.

Review: 'I Am Brian Wilson'

The big problem with pop-artist autobiographies is that pop artists are much better at stringing together phrases like “ooooh baby” and “yeah, yeah, yeah” than composing compelling prose. A few songwriters have been versatile enough to produce really well written autobiographies (Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Kristin Hersh, Stuart David, etc.), but most should probably stick with the “oooh babies.”

Brian Wilson is an interesting exception. His persona is one of charming, and rather inarticulate, sincerity. He is a pop star with a true “voice” beyond his singing one, and though I do not expect or even want compelling prose from Brian Wilson, I still want to read his story as told by him because it is such a fascinating and intensely personal one.

I Am Brian Wilson fits the bill perfectly. Wilson wrote his book with the assistance of the versatile Ben Greenman, and its too-articulate and linear prologue chapter had me worrying that I’d be reading Greenman’s voice instead of that of the show’s star. With the first proper chapter, that articulateness evaporates and the linearity splits like an egg to allow Brian’s ping pong-ball mind to bounce out. One moment he is waxing nostalgic about the old children’s show Beany and Cecil, the next he is remembering the 1973 Holland sessions, the next he is leaping ahead 25 years to discuss his solo album Imagination. Greenman seems to play the role of stenographer rather than co-writer as Brian unleashes his flood of memories, opinions (favorite albums: Rubber Soul, A Christmas Gift for Your from Philles Records, and Tommy—great choices, Brian!), and creation stories. Serious fans will swoon when he discusses marvelous oddities such as “Busy Doin’ Nothin’”, “A Day in the Life of a Tree”, “Girl Don’t Tell Me”, and “In the Back of My Mind” with the same attention he affords “California Girls” and “God Only Knows”.  The utter lack of pretense in the prose captures that familiar slightly flat, slightly sad, often rhapsodic voice with true authenticity. A definitive passage has Brian describing how he once dressed up as a mummy to amuse a cousin in the hospital and clarifying that “I wasn’t really a mummy.” That absence of guile, that innocence, that subtle and perhaps unself-aware humor is what makes Brian Wilson’s complex music so uncomplicatedly beautiful and him so lovable.

Of course, I Am Brian Wilson would fail as the Brian Wilson story if it did not deal with the darker corners of his life, and Wilson wanders through these areas fearlessly. He basically leads the story with a run down of all of his troubles with drugs, family, isolation, weight gain, and chemical withdrawal, and discusses each more thoroughly and with trademark honesty as the tale continues. He goes into depth about the two most dreaded figures in his life—father Murray and Svengali “doctor” Eugene Landry—but does so without a trace of bitterness and a loving portion of balance, acknowledging that both of these men did Brian a little bit of good as well as a fair share of harm. He wastes almost no space on his clashes with Mike Love, though.

Bitterness, like articulateness, has no place in a Brian Wilson autobiography. Love, music, and an immensely sincere man’s true voice are what you should expect and what I Am Brian Wilson delivers.

Review: 'The Beach Boys Pet Sounds: Classic Albums' Blu-ray

Next year the BBC’s Classic Albums documentary series turns 20, and it’s kind of amazing that the album many would rate as the definitive classic album has taken so long to be featured. Turning fifty this year, Pet Sounds has finally found its place in the series’ canon with most of the major players showing up to sing its praises and give an interior perspective of its making. Brian Wilson is there, and though he is most responsible for creating The Beach Boys’ most lauded work, it is the other guys who often make this discussion of such a much-discussed record fresh and interesting. Al Jardine provides the most candid perspective, admitting to bitter feelings about being shut out of the session for “Sloop John B.” after he’d done so much to develop it as a Beach Boys record and describing the arduous “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” vocal sessions in less than romantic terms. Mike Love bats down his “Don’t fuck with the formula” reputation and admits to his discomfort with the acid-tinged lyrics of “Hang on to Your Ego”.

The most fun part of any Classic Albums doc is when an engineer starts fading the original multi-track recording in and out, spotlighting various instrumental and vocal bits, and though the album under discussion has already received this treatment on the Pet Sounds Sessions box set, it’s still fun to see remastering engineer Mark Linett sitting down with Brian to pull out additional choice segments of the ultimate mono album.

The importance of Pet Sounds’ mono mix, however, is one of the important issues that got passed over in the broadcast edit of The Beach Boys Pet Sounds: Classic Albums. Fortunately, that discussion has found a place among the significant bonus material on Eagle Rock Entertainment’s new Blu-ray of the documentary. Amazingly, “Caroline No” is another essential piece of Pet Sounds left out of the broadcast version that gets addressed in the bonus interviews, as is “Good Vibrations”, an important example of how the group continued to build upon their Pet Sounds developments. Unfortunately, SMiLE is not discussed at all (though footage from the “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” promo makes up the bulk of a full-length “Good Vibrations” video included on the disc). I’d like to think that this is because a SMiLE: Classic Albums documentary is on the horizon, but if it takes the BBC another twenty years to make it, we probably won’t be getting much insight from the boys who made it.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 259

The Date: June 15

The Movie: Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile (2004)

What Is It?: David Leaf’s triumphant documentary traces the long and troubled history of Brian Wilson’s abandoned masterpiece SMiLE. Wilson overcomes the odds of his own mental issues and his Beach Boy band mates to finish the project with the help of Darian Sahanaja and the Wondermints.

Why Today?: Today is National Smile Power Day.

Review: 'Beach Boys’ Party!: Uncovered and Unplugged'

There was an astonishingly natural progression from Beatle album to Beatle album as Revolver built on the developments of Rubber Soul while Sgt. Pepper’s inflated the ones on Revolver and so on. The Beach Boys were another matter. This is largely because Capitol, the label that treated The Beatles’ artworks so shabbily in the U.S., placed unfair demands on its top American act. Brian Wilson most certainly is that rare example of the pop genius, but even a genius needs time to replenish the inspiration reservoir. Capitol had little respect for such matters, so Wilson and his band were forced to intersperse a relatively uninspired album like Shut Down Volume 2 or an assemblage of new and old tracks like Little Deuce Coupe among the excellent LPs like All Summer Long and Surfer Girl or jumble filler with masterpieces on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). This surely frustrated Brian Wilson, especially after he heard Rubber Soul, which blew him away because of its consistent quality and mood. Hearing that album in late 1965 is what drove him to create his defining work, Pet Sounds. Had that album followed Summer Days, The Beach Boys’ catalogue might have started to seem as though their work was finally progressing more naturally.

Instead, Capitol demanded more product for the coming holiday season. So The Beach Boys decided to knock out a record as hastily as possible, gathering in the studio with nothing more than a couple of acoustic guitars, bongos, their flawless harmonies, and a bunch of covers they could dump out for the Christmas shoppers. They later dubbed on some chattering and beer-glass clinking to give the impression that the tracks were cut at one of the guy’s houses during a party instead of at Western Recorders Studio in Hollywood.

Beach Boys’ Party! is hardly among the band’s greatest albums, but a project that began as a sloppy stop-gap before becoming a full-fledged gimmick has had a pretty impressive life. Not only did it spawn the last of the old-style Beach Boys hits with a cover of The Regents’ “Barbara Ann”, but it was a genuine predecessor to the “unplugged” fad of the nineties. And though it was a definite backwards step after Today! and the best of Summer Days, it did contain some very good music that is easier to appreciate today than it must have been fifty years ago when albums like Rubber Soul, Highway 61 Revisited, Otis Blue, and My Generation were new releases. Today, it’s easy to enjoy the ace trilogy of Beatles covers, Al Jardine’s sincere take on “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, and Mike and Brian’s angelic harmonies on the should-be-considered-a-classic “Devoted to You” without feeling forced to compare this music to anything The Beach Boys or any other band was doing at the time.

Beach Boys’ Party!: Uncovered and Unplugged makes it even easier to appreciate this music, as Mark Linett’s new stereo mixes strip away the faux “party” chatter that was often very inappropriate on the original album, especially when the guys make a mockery of Al’s Dylan tribute. This new double-disc set also fills in the story with versions of numerous songs that didn’t end up on the original album, which really would have been better if it had lost novelties like “Alley Oop” and “Hully Gully” or piss-takes of the band’s own “I Get Around” and “Little Deuce Coupe” and used Brian’s attitudinal yet good-humored version of Dion’s “Ruby Baby” or a hootenanny-turned-funky version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” instead. There are also some fascinating song choices that shed light on other grooves in the band’s discography. The boys try out Leiber and Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block No. 9”, which Mike Love would later rewrite as the little-loved “Student Demonstration Time”. There’s an abortive attempt at “Ticket to Ride”, the song that inspired “Girl Don’t Tell Me”, and a fleeting tease of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”, a song that Brian would remake years later. Uncovered and Unplugged may not be the monumental release that the Pet Sounds or SMiLE Sessions were, but then again, it is not a document of a monumental work. It is, however, a document of a very interesting and a very fun one. Uncovered and Unplugged also affords an opportunity to hear something precious you won’t hear on those Pet Sounds or SMiLE sets: The Beach Boys playing in the studio as a real band. It’s worth the price of admission for that alone.

Review: 'Elton John from Tin Pan Alley to the Yellow Brick Road'

Say what you will about the Donald Duck costumes and his lame MTV-era hits, but Elton John was one of the very best pop hit machines of the seventies. Not everything has aged well for various reasons (“Crocodile Rock”, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, and “Candle in the Wind” come to mind), but blockbusters such as “Rocket Man”, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, “Levon”, and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, and a net-full of album tracks such as “Where to Now St. Peter”, “Blues for My Baby and Me”, “Harmony”, and “Madman Across the Water”, rate among the best pop released in the first half of the decade. So the fact that Keith Hayward’s Elton John from Tin Pan Alley to the Yellow Brick Road focuses almost exclusively on this period isn’t too much of an issue in itself. In fact, this book is actually a sequel to one that detailed the pre-stardom phase of Reg’s career. As Hayward suggests in his introduction, you won’t exactly be lost if you read volume two without reading volume one first, but a few important aspects—most notably John’s relationship with lyricist Bernie Taupin—will remain a bit hazy.

Nevertheless, we still get a fairly clear idea of who this unlikely superstar is just from these scant 200 pages. Elton John was a guy who used outrageous antics and attire to fight through his shyness and uncertainty about what kind of career he should pursue. While Hayward’s preface kind of frames his book as a tale of the music business in the seventies with John as the main reference point, this really is more of a biography than that, though certain limitations keep it from being definitive and may account for why Hayward chose to not represent his book as a biography. The people he interviewed often steer this story, and because they aren’t always the most integral characters in the core Elton John story, they sometimes steer it down tangential roads. For example, we get a lot more about the casting of Tina Turner in Tommy— a movie in which Elton John plays a very minor role— than is probably necessary because Hayward happened to interview the movie’s producer, Beryl Virtue. It’s an interesting story—I certainly cannot call any part of From Tin Pan Alley to the Yellow Brick Road anything less than interesting—but it is off-topic, and since this is a pretty short book, that is an issue worth mentioning. Discussions of John’s work and play with John Lennon, Rod Stewart, Kiki Dee, and Brian Wilson manage to fold other stars into the story without leaving out its main man.

Review: 'The Beach Boys: America’s Band'

Active on-and-off from 1961 to the present, The Beach Boys’ career packs a lot of history, so it would be naïve to expect a 250-page book dominated by large photos to say everything that needs to be said about all those great songs, strange personalities, terrible tragedies, and tedious lawsuits. Nevertheless, Johnny Morgan does a pretty admirable job in his new coffee-table centerpiece The Beach Boys: America’s Band. The basic narrative runs through the book occasionally supported by half-page profiles of albums and singles. While coffee table books usually don’t present a point of view, Morgan asserts his personality with lively writing and a critical viewpoint of the band’s music and the often questionable ways certain members (Mike Love) have chosen to represent a band that has been profoundly splintered for more than half of its five-decade history. There are no gaping omissions here, though there are no revelations either. Morgan sticks to the essential tale told in many other books, which he often quotes throughout.

Although his book boasts no firsthand interviews, the author has clearly read a lot about his book’s topic, which makes the occasional major error rather jarring. He marks “Kokomo” as the band’s third number one hit (it was their fourth) and confuses the content of Revolver for that of Rubber Soul, which really affects his discussion of Pet Sounds. More forgivable is his assumption that Between the Buttons “must have sounded like a nightmare” to Brian, though if Morgan was aware that Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham played the LP for Brian Wilson, he should have also read that Brian really dug the record and ranked its only nightmarish track, “My Obsession”, as one of his favorite Stones songs.

Morgan’s critiques can be odd too, as when he calls the extremely simple and graspable metaphors of “Til I Die” “inane nonsense.” Kudos to the author for taking The Monkees as seriously as he does, but reviewing Smiley Smile as if it’s some sort of direct response to Headquarters is an inadequate and misguided approach. Of course, most serious Beach Boys fans will crack America’s Band not for history and assessments but for its lovely abundance of photos, and on that account, it’s definitely a looker.

Review: 'Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961-1963'

Composing the book you’ve always wanted to read is probably one of the better reasons to start a writing project, but not everyone has the ability to do the job right. I’m ashamed to admit I chuckled when I saw that the sole credit in James B Murphy’s author bio on the back of Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961-1963 was “veterinarian.” I shut up when I started reading his book. Murphy is a very good writer, and the book he always wanted to read was definitely worth writing. 

The main goal of Becoming the Beach Boys is to examine the band’s earliest years to clear up the multitudinous misconceptions about that era. Murphy’s research is almost absurdly thorough. He lets no detail go un-checked. Brian Wilson claimed it was raining when The Beach Boys recorded “Surfer Girl”, so Murphy checked the local weather records to confirm that memory. The author goes to tremendous lengths to find out how the group’s long-lost first recordings were found and settle the circumstances behind the band’s first song, “Surfin’”. According to legend, Wilson patriarch Murry and matriarch Audree were on vacation in Europe when their sons used their food money to rent instruments to learn the song. Murphy consults period documents, such as Murry Wilson’s passport records, and utilizes his own powers of deduction to chisel out the most likely version of this oft-told tale. 

Murphy’s work is particularly necessary since The Beach Boys story stars so many unreliable narrators intent on telling the most self-serving versions of the tale (Murry, for example) or suffering patchy memories (Brian). The relatively minor players fascinate Murphy too, so we get extended bios of the band’s associates and collaborators during this period. Admittedly, the information digging can get a bit excessive, and only serious Beach Boys scholars won’t skim Murphy’s minutia about the guys who started Candix records or serial numbers on record labels or the dimensions of the handbills used to promote concerts. Consequently, Becoming the Beach Boys is not always a fun read, but it is an important historical document through and through. James B. Murphy definitely possesses the attention to detail I want from the dude who’s either writing a book about my favorite American band or diagnosing why my cat keeps throwing up all over the place.

Review: 'The Wrecking Crew' DVD

No Rock & Roll education is complete without getting familiar with the rotating ensemble of session musicians now known as the Wrecking Crew. Guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Glen Campbell, drummers Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer, bassists Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, saxophonist Plas Johnson, and pianist Leon Russell are just a few of the musicians who helped bring records for Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, The Monkees, The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, Nancy Sinatra, The Mamas and the Papas, and too many others to life. Since they rarely received any credits on the records they made, a documentary like Denny Tedesco’s (son of Tommy) The Wrecking Crew is long overdue.

And overdue it is. The younger Tedesco started work on this film in 1996, completed shooting in 2008, and was finally able to release it this year with the aid of a 2013 Kickstarter campaign. The age of the project is certainly detectable in the finished product. The interview footage is all full-screen with the only wide elements being still photos and certain pieces of archival footage. There’s none of the animation or stylish computer manipulation used in seemingly every contemporary pop doc. This is a straight-up, twentieth-century-style documentary full of shot-on-video talking heads. The filmmaker’s relationship with his subject also means that The Wrecking Crew is mostly celebratory. Nevertheless, we do get the gist of some member’s irritation with their lack of credits, being serious jazz musicians making records for The Association and Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and seeing the rise of “album artists” reduce their workload in the late sixties. The Wrecking Crew is not a piece of audacious filmmaking, but its humble style is a very fitting way to tell the story of a group of musicians never known for their audacity.

The Wrecking Crew comes to DVD from Magnolia Home Entertainment with a massive bundle of deleted scenes. While this kind of thing is mere filler on most discs, the scenes here actually fill out the story in essential ways. Despite being synonymous with the Wrecking Crew, Phil Spector receives very little attention in the proper film. The deleted scenes make up for this with pieces on his demanding working methods and his Christmas album, one of the most significant showcases for the Wrecking Crew’s talents. We also get deeper looks at the recordings of specific songs (guitarist Billy Strange tells a touching tale about cutting “Sloop John B.” that spotlights Brian Wilson’s generosity), how Beatlemania affected the crew, and insights from several major players missing from the proper film.

Review: '33 1/3: The Beach Boys’ Smile'

There are two excellent books about The Beach Boys’ “lost” masterpiece SMiLE, both very different and both by Domenic Priore. Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! is a scrapbook of period articles and more recent essays chronicling the anticipation leading up to a release that never happened and the cultish (though deserved) fan obsession that followed. SMiLE: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece is a more straight forward biographical look at the record that takes us up to Wilson’s solo recreation of it from 2004. Since the SMiLE story didn’t end there—The Beach Boys have since did the once unimaginable by sanctioning the release of a wealth of the original sessions in a deluxe box set—a third book on this particular record is not necessarily unnecessary. The SMiLE Sessions opens the story further by providing a more thorough portrait of the music and its making than most people previously heard and finally providing some closure to this uniquely open-ended story. However, Luis Sanchez doesn’t get into that in his installment of the 33 1/3 series. In fact, his Smile doesn’t really deal with SMiLE much at all, at least not for the first 88 pages of his 118-page book. Those pages are spent with each Beach Boys record leading up to SMiLE. They are discussed with light criticism and basic history most fans will already know. When Sanchez finally gets around to the ostensible subject of his book, he gives SMiLE a bit more attention than Surfin’ USA or The Beach Boys Christmas Album but not nearly enough to satisfy. I applaud the writer for not falling into the worst traps that 33 1/3 writers sometimes tumble into. His book is not preciously personal. It is not inaccessibly academic for a book on pop music. It does not eschew The Beach Boys for tangential discussions on agrarian economics or Vampire Weekend. However, this simply is not a book about a single album, which is supposed to be the purpose of the 33 1/3 series. It’s a brief history of The Beach Boys on record from 1961 through 1966 finished off with a decent but general essay on SMiLE that touches a little on the album’s troubled history, a little on Van Dyke Parks’s consequential contributions, a little on its themes and sounds, and a little on its more recent rebirth. While it is not satisfying as a 33 1/3 book, Smile certainly isn’t bad as an early-Beach Boys primer. I don’t think Domenic Priore is going to lose any sleep over this one though.

Psychobabble’s Perfect Beach Boys Box Set Recipe!

The review of the new Beach Boys box set I posted last week led to some interesting comments. The consensus seems to be that while Made in California has a number of legit selling points, it’s not quite the perfect six discs of Beach Boys classics and rarities. This inspired me to compile my own sextet of sun, fun, and warped psychedelia.

I believe a perfect Beach Boys compilation is more necessary than, say, a Beatles or Who comp because those groups generally made albums that demand to be heard from beginning to end. The Beach Boys didn’t quite reach this place until 1965’s Today. Before then, they mostly made hit-and-miss albums like Shut Down Volume 2. While that particular album houses the absolute classics “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the rest of it is pretty poor. Most of the other early discs generally have a higher ratio of good stuff than Shut Down Volume 2, but even the best of them (All Summer Long) has some junk (“Our Favorite Recording Sessions”) that disrupt the flow of classics.

Review: The Beach Boys’ 'Made in California' Box Set

A lot has happened since the 5-disc, career-spanning box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys was released in 1993, and much of it was unthinkable at the time. Carl Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, and we lost him the following year. Brian Wilson worked past his aversion to touring and performing, and even more incredibly, gave us both a solo version and approved a Beach Boys box set of his unfinished masterpiece SMiLE. He has reunited with the often-feuding surviving members of his group for a fiftieth anniversary album and tour. This year marking the five-decade anniversary of The Beach Boys’ unchallenged dominance of pop music (at least in America where the British Invasion was still a year away), it’s a good time to update Good Vibrations, and Capitol/UMe has released a 6-disc set called Made in California that brings the story to the present.

Non-Review: 'The Beach Boys in Concert'

When I agreed to write The Who FAQ for Backbeat Books I knew there would be one unfortunate side effect of the joyous occasion: I’d no longer be able to review the publisher’s books. This made me a little sad because I’ve enjoyed reading several of their titles in the past. Plus I love getting free stuff. Nevertheless, I figured it would be a conflict of interest or some other ethical issue to continue reviewing Backbeat’s titles after I started working for them, so I stopped requesting review copies.

Despite my resolution to be a good, ethical boy, I still received an unsolicited copy of a new Backbeat title called The Beach Boys in Concert. I assume this was either because Backbeat's publicist is not aware that I'm writing a book for Backbeat or it's a really subtle way of letting me know I've been fired. In any event, I read and enjoyed Ian Rusten and John Stebbins’s book, so I figured it would not be unethical to at least give it a little shout— not a “review”… that would be very naughty—but a shout, like when you shout at a fellow employee, “Good job!” I assume people with actual jobs do that sort of thing.

Rusten and Stebbins give a thorough view of 50 years of Beach Boys concerts, not just listing dates, venues, and when available, set lists, but providing a more colorful portrait of the shows with excerpts from period concert reviews and recollections from early Beach Boy David Marks, backing musician Daryl Dragon, fans in attendance, and others. I found the reviews particularly enlightening: I was surprised to see how early on the critics had grown tired of Mike Love’s jackass stage act (although at a performance on December 28, 1966, Love did manage one genuinely funny quip amidst a career of painful groaners). It’s a good summer read.

Lucifer Sams and Satanic Majesties: Cult Sects of Rock Gods

Who is Pink Floyd? Cold experiments and saxophones. Twenty minute opuses and barren atmosphere. Faceless, immobile, serious musicians. Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

Who are The Rolling Stones? Sleazy sex and heroin. Mick’s lips and strutting. Blues, booze, and Berry. Exile on Main Street and Some Girls.

Who are The Beach Boys? Surf and sun. Hot rods and bikinis. Prancing old Reaganites in Hawaiian shirts. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Surfin’ Safari”.

Who are The Who? Rock operas and ponderous proto-metal. Bluster and bashing. Classic Rock radio staples and Broadway bounders. Tommy and Who’s Next.

Four of Rock’s institutions as they’re understood by the masses. When their congregations file into the hallowed halls of their local stadiums to hear the hits, the hits are what they most often receive. A sacrament of the familiar, fulfilling essential stereotypes, banishing the obscurities to torchlit basement gatherings where the freaks and obsessives huddle around turntables to spin gouged copies of Their Satanic Majesties Request and fifth generation bootlegs of SMiLE. Bruce Johnston calls them “the one percenters”: the one-percent of The Beach Boys’ fans who hope to never hear “Kokomo” again but cannot get enough of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and “Do You Like Worms?”

Classifying these acts as cult bands is a far-fetched stretch. They are among the most enduringly popular in Rock history. The Beach Boys were the biggest white American Rock band of the ‘60s, scoring three number one hits in their hey day and another some 25 years after their debut. Pink Floyd are responsible for one of Rock’s all-time bestselling and most iconic records. The Stones and The Who may only fall behind The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the British Rock race. Yet within each of those band’s expansive histories lay genuine cult items; recordings that the majority of their fans and the bands, themselves, generally ignore. The cultists these oddities have attracted feel decidedly stronger about SMiLE, Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Who Sell Out, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. We are the one percent.

Cult items are natural products of any long and fruitful career. Perhaps The Beatles and Zeppelin are the only top Rock bands of the classic era who don’t really have any, which is likely because both had relatively short careers that produced relatively few records. Had The Beatles continued making music for another decade, it is possible that at least one of them might have dipped through the cracks. It was inevitable that The Beach Boys and The Stones would make their cult records, because they both created tremendous bodies of work (as of this writing, The Beach Boys have made 30 albums; The Stones made 22 and are apparently at work on another) and are both confined by most people into tight compartments. Those people include the artists, themselves. Brian and Dennis Wilson were the only Beach Boys who really seemed to recognize the genius of the stereotype-defying SMiLE, with its fragmented structures, whimsical humor, and stoned avant gardism. Mike Love famously (perhaps apocryphally) warned Brian to not “fuck with the formula” of surf and hot rod songs. He hated Van Dyke Parks’s poetic, cryptic lyrics and most of the guys claimed they felt degraded by being forced to simulate barnyard noises and orgasms by a giggling, LSD-infused Brian during the sessions. Keith Richards is similarly embarrassed by the blues-eschewing, psychedelic onslaught Their Satanic Majesties Request, dismissing it as “flimflam” in his autobiography. Mick’s embarrassment seems to cloak a genuine affection for the record, constantly vacillating between deeming it “nonsense” and “lovely” throughout the years.

Review: 'Brian Wilson: Icons of Pop'

These days Rock commentators toss around the word “genius” pretty indiscriminately. Way back in Rock & Roll’s earliest days, no one would dare call some greasy haired goof with a guitar a genius unless he or she wanted to get laughed off the playground. That began to change in 1966 when Beatles publicist Derek Taylor started freelancing for The Beach Boys, mounting the now legendary “Brian Wilson is a Genius” promo campaign. Surprisingly, the first time “genius” was applied to a Rock & Roller, it was actually apt. Yet even with some of Rock’s most brilliantly constructed and recorded music on his resume, there are still those who contend the whole “genius” thing was nothing more than a great big advertising sham, that Brian was little more than a purveyor of dopey tunes about surfing and cars sung in piercing falsetto, that the “genius” label mostly derived from music no one ever got to hear (of course, that final argument has now been neutralized by last year’s release of The SMiLE Sessions).

In his installment of Equinox Press’s Icon series, writer Kirk Curnutt addresses even the stupidest charges against Brian’s genius to explain it in accessible yet musically knowledgeable terms. Curnutt delves into every aspect of the man’s music—not only his recording, singing, and composition techniques, but less analyzed matters too, such as his lyrics, keyboard skills, and bass playing. For those of us who are already converts, the music speaks clearly enough for itself. So the book often shines a greater light on the ignorance of music critics than as-yet-undiscovered nooks of Brian Wilson’s genius. While the complaint about him receiving too much praise for unreleased work may have once held water, charges that the relative brevity of his songs and albums, his complete lack of cynicism, and The Beach Boys’ perceived “whiteness” are somehow musical flaws are so ludicrous they hardly deserve to be acknowledged at all. Yet Curnutt does acknowledge them, always with seriousness, respect, and intelligence, as if he’s the world’s greatest parent patiently telling a tantrum-throwing tot why he can't have cookies for dinner. Even if this book doesn’t change any of the naysayers’ minds, it articulates why we fans are so devoted very well, and that can’t be a bad thing.