As I've said before, I don't really like to do a lot of tributes or obituaries for the simple reason that creative people die all the time and I could quite easily record the passing of someone significant two or three times every week. One thing I really don't want to start doing is ranking celebrity deaths in order of importance until I have some kind of amateur Hall of Fame thing going on.
Mostly I've stuck to marking the departure of people, the news of whose death has some more than usual personal resonance for me, something I find quite hard to predict or even, occasionally, to explain. For that reason, I wasn't immediately motivated to post anything, when I saw a couple of days ago that Sly Stone had died.
Sly Stone (and his eponymous "Family") is a bit of an outlier for me. I'm not even sure I'd heard of him at all before I snuck in to see the Woodstock movie when it had a brief cinema revival in the mid-seventies.
I can place that fairly precisely because it was rated 18 (Or in fact, "X", I think, because we would still have been on the old letter-based ratings then.) and I wasn't old enough to see it legally. I was close though. I'm pretty sure I was seventeen. I remember it clearly because it was the only X-film I ever lied about my age to see, which tells you everything you need to know about my priorities as a teenager.
In the movie, Sly and the Family Stone are seen doing the now-classic I Want To Take You Higher, which Rolling Stone just this week described as showcasing the power of live music "better perhaps than any other performance ever captured on film". It certainly had an impact on seventeen-year-old me because after that I sure as hell knew who Sly Stone was.
It was probably also the moment when I realised I liked funk. Until then I don't think I'd paid much attention to it at all. It was the mid-seventies by then and funk was all over the radio. As a recovering prog and heavy metal fan I was finding new musical interests in all directions, something the supposedly barrier-breaking but actually frequently prescriptive punk hierarchy strongly discouraged, as I was about to discover.
Didn't stop me listening to and enjoying all kinds of forbidden sounds, from Joan Armatrading to the Hues Coroporation but for a while I did learn to keep some of my less culturally acceptable tastes to myself. I don't recall anyone ever compaining about me listening to Sly Stone, though. To have done so would have been be tantamount to admitting you were a cloth-eared philistine (Which, to be fair, would have been a badge some people I knew then would have worn with pride...)
So, I was still pondering on whether or not to say something about Sly's passing, when someone else rolled over and stole Sly's thunder. Sly Stone was a very major figure in the history of popular music, albeit he'd been off the pace for a long while, so it was going to take someone very big to put him in the shade. And of course it was.
If we're talking western 20th century pop/rock canon, there aren't a lot of names left alive bigger than Brian Wilson. When I was talking to Mrs Bhagpuss about it, I described his demise as a Bob Dylan level event.
Bob, of course, is still happily and very actively with us, so maybe I could more accurately have referenced Bowie or Lennon but I already had Dylan in mind because Mrs Bhagpuss had been telling me only the day before about a video she'd watched, going through the top musicians and bands he hated.
I haven't watched it myself. I know how these things go. I'm also way, WAY more tolerant and accepting of all kinds of different music now than I was fifty years ago and I bet Bob is too. I mean, he has to be or what the hell is he doing acting as hype man for Machine Gun Kelly?
Anyway, most of Bob's pet peeves, as relayed to me by Mrs Bhagpuss, didn't surprise me much - Coldplay, the Grateful Dead, the Eagles, Oasis... there's a particular kind of monocultural blandness to them all that you might expect would rile him up, but the one that really didn't fit the profile was the Beach Boys.
For one thing, he seemed to be homing in on their early surf era, which is hardly the whole of their identity. Given that most of Bob's heavyweight contemporaries were falling over themselves to praise the Beach Boys even when they were only singing about cars and girls, even that seems odd. Post Pet Sounds, just about all the critical traffic was headed in their direction, with the Beach Boys being widely thought of as America's best answer to the Beatles, something openly acknowledged by the Beatles themselves, especially when Paul McCartney called God Only Knows "the greatest song ever written", an opinion he seemingly still holds today.
That conversation meant I'd already been thinking about the Beach Boys and their legacy even before the sad news of Brian's death exploded all over the entertainment news feeds. And one thing I'd been thinking was that although I'd never shared Bob's disdain for the band, I certainly used not to take them any more seriously than he apparently did.
Unlike Sly Stone, I was very well-aware of the Beach Boys even before I was old enough to start buying records or going to gigs. Those early-sixties singles are very child-friendly, with their bouncy rhythms and cheery harmonies. Plus Good Vibrations always sounded utterly weird whenever it came on the radio. Who could forget that?
A curious thing that happened around the time punk began to take over my attention in 1976 was that I started listening to a lot of 1960s bands I'd never really bothered with before. Somewhat ironic considering the Clash's proclamations about "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones" in 1977. There was a very simple reason for it: if you wanted to listen a lot of short, loud, fast, songs back then, you'd run out in about half an hour if all you had was a stack of punk singles. There just weren't enough yet.
Which is how my punk-inflected pals and I ended up listening to a lot of sixties r&b, early Who, Tamla, US garage bands and... the Beach Boys. I played the hell out of a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits I picked up second-hand around then and the whole vibe seemed to fit right in. A lot better than all that dub reggae that got the official punk stamp of approval anyway, that's for sure.
Even then, though, I never thought of the Beach Boys as having any gravitas. In the 'eighties I developed a theory, which I would occasionally expound at parties if anyone put a Beach Boys track on the stereo, that only men liked the band. For some reason the band's obsession with sports, automobiles and objectifying women (Or "Girls", as they would have it.) seemed archetypally male to me. Plus I had more than once heard women express distaste for the band or even ask for Beach Boys records to be taken off if they were playing, so it seemed like a safe position to take.
Eventually I did meet women who really liked the Beach Boys so I abandoned that one. I had a lot of strongly-held musical opinions in those days but I was always happy to give them up and make up new ones. Few survived for long, I'm happy to say. (Simply Red are still crap but that's not an opinion, just a fact.)
The Beach Boys as major figures in contemporary music, though? That one took a looong time come through. I don't think I even began to notice that anyone was taking them seriously until the 'nineties and it took me a few years of reading that "Pet Sounds" (Consistently ranked #2 in Rolling Stone's influential Top 500 Albums list.), or maybe "Smile" or "Smiley-Smile", might be the greatest album of all time before I thought maybe I should find out what any of them sounded like.
I still don't have much of an opinion on that. Certainly not an informed one. I suspect it's one of those "You had to be there" things and although, technically, I was there, I would have been eight when Pet Sounds came out, which is probably a bit young to appreciate its subtleties.
In fact, embarassing though it is to admit it, I still have never sat down and listened to any of those three albums all the way through. I've almost certainly heard every track at some time or another but the only Beach Boys albums I've ever owned are the aforementioned Greatest Hits and the really excellent early seventies album "Surf's Up", which I do love, although by then Brian was already having issues and his influence over the album isn't as all-consuming as it once would have been.
For all of the above reasons, I wasn't going to do a tribute to Brian Wilson either. Also, it's interesting that throughout this piece I've been implicitly suggesting he and the band are interchangeable, when of course there were other songwriters in the mix. It's always Brian Wilson that everyone thinks of in that context though, isn't it? That's where the Beach Boys differ from their friendly rivals the Beatles or even from the Rolling Stones, where the other Brian (Jones, that is.) used sometimes to be cast in a similar role, until he made the mistake of dying young and leaving Jagger and Richards the field.
This morning, despite my reservations, I thought maybe I would do something after all and as you can see I followed through on that thought. And as usual it's ended up being much more about me than them. But then, that's just a sign that they had some definite impact on my life, I guess. It would be worse if I just rehashed their biographies, like one of those vicars at a funeral who never met the deceased.
I don't really want to just slap up three or four of either of their top tunes, which would be extremely easy to do since they both wrote so many absolute bangers (Not, I imagine, the term either of them would have used and, to be strictly accurate, I don't think it's controversial to suggest Brian wrote a lot more bangers than Sly.)
Instead, I've chosen to include a couple of my personal favorites and a selection of odd or unusual covers. Not to suggest that some of each of their work wasn't already weird enough...
The legends may have passed but the legacies live on.
I honestly thought the Beach Boys got a big boost in the critics eyes when in the early 1980s the US Secretary of the Interior wanted to stop the annual Beach Boys concert in Washington DC because he felt they were too radical, and he wanted Wayne Newton instead. After all, the easiest way to get people to buy your albums is to be accused of being a radical element.
ReplyDeleteStill, I never really understood the critical outpouring over their music. I didn't think their arrangements were any better than, say, The Mamas and the Papas, and as you pointed out the lyrics weren't exactly deep stuff. If you wanted that, The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane were a bit deeper.
However, The Ramones were heavily influenced by surf music, so that might be another reason for the long term critical approval of the Beach Boys.
I think that being a decade younger than you, Bhagpuss, put me firmly in the anti-Disco camp, and correspondingly anti-Funk by association. It took me a long while to accept Funk --Disco is still a work in progress-- and even longer to listen to Sly and the Family Stone. (Being a Cincinnatian, I gravitated first toward Parliament Funkadelic, given that Bootsy Collins is a local legend.) Still, Sly's music is absolutely fantastic and it's a shame that his passing was overshadowed by Brian Wilson.
As for Bob Dlyan, I've never been that overly impressed by him. He's entitled to his own opinions, but like some other musicians (::cough:: Sting ::cough::) his ego is his own worst enemy. I looked at the Nobel Prize he won as less a lifetime achievement award and more of a license to be even more egotistical than ever before. Back in 1988, I used to frequent a CD store over the summer after my freshman year of university and on one particular day one of the employees had gone to see Bob Dylan in concert the night before. "Dude was an asshole, man," he told me. "He walked on stage, played music, walked off. No acknowledgement of the crowd, not even a hello or a goodbye. It was as if we weren't even there." If this were Van Morrison, that'd be almost expected due to his issues with anxiety and stage fright, but Bob apparently did not want to be there in concert. Period.
The irony is that if people told Bob that his claim to fame was that he mainly wrote songs that The Byrds recorded, I'm sure his head would explode.
LOL! "He walked on stage, played music, walked off" would appear to be an exact description of Bob's job! I can't imagine what that guy was wexpecting. Maybe some juggling or a high wire act? I've been to a lot of gigs and if anyone I ever went to see " "walked on stage, played music, walked off" I'd be pretty sure I'd gotten what I'd paid for. I mean, it's not like the audience goes there to hear the musicians talk, is it?
DeleteAs for Brian Wilson, I'm very firmly in the camp that thinks he was a genius. A musical genius and an incredible songwriter. I hope that came over in the post but maybe it didn't. I think what I was trying to put across in the post was how very late I came to appreciate Brian Wilson's talent, not that I couldn't see it even after it was pointed out to me. And And if Brian Wilson's a musical genius and an amazing songwriter then I guess we need to come up with some even more positive descriptions for Dylan, who's pretty much on another level again.
Also, it just occured tome that a band I saw play twice who literally never addressed a word to the audience either time was the Ramones. The first time i saw them, there was an electrical failure half way through the set and all their amps stopped. It took the tech guy maybe five or ten minutes to get things working again and the Ramones literally stood there, silent, as if their power had been switched off too. Then when they got the word it was all working again, they started up as if nothing had happened. Not a word to the audience. I've seen a few other acts have similar problems and peopel tell jokes or do an acoustic number or just shioot the breeze with the audience but not Joey and the guys!
DeleteWell, the way the guy was saying it to me was that the audience was kind of superfluous to Bob. If Bob were to play to an empty outdoor amphitheater (this was an outdoors concert), he'd have probably had the same reaction. All I can say is that if my livelihood depended upon people buying my music, at least acknowledging that they exist isn't a bad idea. Unless refusing to acknowledge the audience is kind of your schtick, I suppose.
DeleteOn the flip side of it, an acquaintance in college told me about a Joe Jackson concert he went to that was being recorded live, and Joe was so anal about nobody applauding or cheering or anything during the recording that they had even notes on each seat telling the audience to not do anything during the concert because it was being recorded. Apparently one person began to clap after one piece and Joe glared at the person until they stopped after one or two claps. I get it if a musician doesn't want superfluous sounds during the music, such as during a Classical concert, but good luck with that in a pop or rock environment. I mean, if they wanted to record it "live in a concert hall", just don't have the audience there.
Hoo boy, The Ramones. Great music, and a band that definitely put the "fun" in dysfunctional. I've heard a ton of stories about the band, to the point where I doubt I'd ever get a real history of them without a bunch of apocryphal stories. At least you got to see them twice, because by the time I got around to listening to them they were at the end of their run.