Dark Side of the Sun
Harmonies, hits... and a whole lotta hurt. JAMES MEDD digs beneath the surface of the Beach Boys to reveal the reality of the all-American pop dream.
Of all the legends of pop music, the Beach Boys are the most confusing. For many of us, they’re the all-American, surf-and-sun harmony hitmakers of California Girls and I Get Around, a cheesy throwback beloved of television adverts and wedding DJs. But for the serious music snob, they are pop music’s greatest achievement and the vessel of its most revered genius, a singularly inspired musical savant who sacrificed his sanity in pursuit of pure and sacred art.
If that isn’t complicated enough, there’s also the gulf between their clean-cut image, all teeth and smiles and brotherly love, and the messy behind-the-scenes reality. Though they’re still sold as the archetypal all-American family band, the Beach Boys were rooted in trauma, mental illness and addiction, and they set the bar for every rock-star cliché from drug meltdowns, grandiose concept albums and internal warfare to religious conversions, murderous cults and suspicious death. However sweetly they sang about a life of ease, fun-fun-fun and good vibrations, their story was a 60-year-long psychodrama.
It began wholesomely enough around a kitchen table in the small and unremarkable town of Hawthorne, south of Los Angeles. Here, at the turn of the sixties, awkward but ambitious Brian Wilson dragged his younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, and his cousin Mike Love into his pop fantasies, inspired like many of his peers by the simplicity and directness of Chuck Berry but also by the harmony singing of pre-rock’n’roll vocal group the Four Freshmen. Under the guidance of their father, Murry, a frustrated songwriter and archetypal pushy parent, they recorded their first single before they were out of their teens, and were soon the biggest group in the country.
Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ U.S.A. led to Fun, Fun, Fun and I Get Around and then to California Girls, moving the subject matter along from the beach to cars to romance. Whatever the words said, their music hit home as a celebration of youth and independence, capturing a time when teenagers had more money, more entertainment and more freedom than any generation before. Through the Beach Boys, California became the symbolic home of American youth, a paradise of sun, smiles and smooching, free from responsibility, lived in the moment of an everlasting August.
When the Beatles arrived, they were one of the few American acts to survive, even if they had none of the English boys’ charisma or beatnik cool. In their uniform of striped shirts and white trousers, the three Wilsons, cousin Mike and their pal Al Jardine were square enough for parents to approve of them, and deeply unsexy: of the five, the only good-looking one was Dennis, and he was seated at the back behind the drums. Rather than objects of worship, they were entertainers, and their response to the ‘British invasion’ was to keep their heads down, keep smiling, and crank out another attention- grabbing single and hastily recorded album.
California was the symbolic home of American youth, a paradise of smiles lived in an everlasting August.
Amid the inevitable dross, though, was pop perfection: instantly catchy choruses, relentless energy, the thrill of the soaring voices, the sheer blue-sky joy of being alive. Brian seemed able to conjure a seemingly unending succession of uptempo hits that sounded enormous on even the smallest car radio, soundtracking the ideal teen life, real or totally imagined. Then there were his sad tunes, which came with an even more powerful, slow-burn magic: Surfer Girl, Don’t Worry Baby and Girl Don’t Tell Me turned the high-energy harmonies to the service of melancholy, summoning sunsets on the beach with your girl or the sweet ache of remembering summers past, the peculiar adolescent nostalgia for something you never had that is one of pop’s secret weapons.
In truth, sad and reflective came more easily to Brian. Though he always worked with a lyricist, he’d needed a lot of help when writing about life on the waves, hanging out with the guys and summer lovin’, but something like In My Room (“I lock out all my worries and my fears”) was all him. This disposition helped as the decade accelerated and tastes turned from frantic dance numbers to more sophisticated compositions. While the decade’s other great innovator, Bob Dylan, was playing a different, more cerebral game, Brian and the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, two peas in a pod in both tastes and ability, became locked in a musical arms race.
