A Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, CBS-TV, aired April 9, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night – Sunday, April 9 – CBS-TV aired a special called A Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys, which I’d been really looking forward to. I’ve lived with the Beach Boys’ music nearly all my life, ever since I hear their early stuff on Capitol in the early 1960’s. Back then I actually liked them better than the Beatles, mainly because the Beach Boys sang about surfing, fun and cars (ironically, I had fantasies of being the world’s greatest race-car driver as a kid and as an adult I never even learned to drive at all!) and the Beatles just did yucky songs about people holding hands. (Give me a break: I was still pre-pubescent.) I had pretty much forgotten about the Beach Boys when everyone else did,in the mid-1960’s, until in 1971 I met a friend in junior college who introduced me to a lot of music legends that hadn’t been on my radar. Among the people I heard of for the first timoe from him were David Bowie and Syd Barrett, the crazy founder of Pink Floyd who burned out after just one Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He took me to Winterland in San Francisco in 1971 for the first time I’ve ever seen The Beach Boys live, when they were touring to promote their incredible Surf’s Up album (a 1971 release which takes its title from one of the songs Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks wrote for the ill-fated Smile album.

The other time I’ve seen The Beach Boys was at the San Diego Sports Arena in 1981, in a concert in which Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean joined them to sing the high vocal part on Fred Fassert’s “barbara Ann” as he’d done on the Beach Boys’ record 16 years earlier, and Brian Wilson descended from Olympus, Valhalla, Nirvana or wherever he was hiding in those days to sing the lead vocal and play piano on one of the Beach Boys’ most heart-rendingly beautiful songs, “God Only Knows.” (At the time his voice was in terrible shape – like the rest of him, it recovered later – but just to see him in person 17 years after he’d had a panic attack on an airplane and dropped out of the BeachBoys’ live lineup was heartwarming.) For the first half of the 1960’s the Beach Boys followed a similar progression to the Beatles, starting with well-crafted, innocent songs about teenage love, fun and good times and evolving into stunningly produced, emotionally and lyrically expansive album-length masterpieces: Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the Beatles, and Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys. In 1966 Paul McCartney famously called a band meeting and told the other Beatles, “Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys have released the greatest rock album ever made. We’re going to have to work our asses off to top it.”

Brian Wilson was inspired by the U.S. version of Rubber Soul (which was re-sequenced from the original British version) to make Pet Sounds, Pet Sounds in turn inspired the Beatles to make Revolver, and Revolver inspired Brian Wilson to collaborate with Van Dyke Parks on a series of poetically dense, cryptic songs that were supposed to compose the next Beach Boys album, Smile. Alas, Brian Wilson’s heavy drug use and underlying mental problems caused him to freak out and Smile was never finished until 2004, when he and Parks re-collaborated on a new version released as a Brian Wilson solo album. In 2011 Capitol Records released a boxed set of Smile tracks that included a rump version of the album, which spliced together the Beach Boys’ recordings of the songs in various stages of completion and used the track sequence of the Wilson-Parks 2004 version as definitive. I burned several homne CD’s of the Smile tracks, including one that followed the list of songs the Beach Boys or someone in their organization had provided to Capitol in 1966 so they could print album covers and then hold them for the release of the album – and this sequence, though hardly definitive, offers an insight into what Smile mght have sounded like in 1966 or 1967 if it had beenr released as originally intended. I’ve long believed that one of the reasons for Brian’s nervous breakdown and near-total loss of sanity was the sheer amount of pressure he was under: the Beatles had two genius-level songwriters, John Lennon nad Paul McCartney, and an outside record producer, George Martin. The Beach Boys were relying on Brian as their sole lead songwriter and their producer, and he simply cracked under the strain.

Through the 1970’s Brian was literally in bed for most of the decade, though he was occasionally roused both literally and figuratively to contribute to one project or another.Then came the years in which he was in psychological bondage to the notorious Dr. Eugene Landy,who at least got him out of bed and back into the studio, only he maintained such total control over Brian’s life he ultimately lost his license to practice psychiatry because it’s considered unethical for a therapist to be involved in business partnerships with a patient. Ironically, when Brian Wilson was visiting the set of the biopic about him, Love and Mercy, he was so traumatized by the memory of Dr. Landy that he freaked out at the sight of actor Paul Giamatti, who was playing Landy in the film – and yet the title of the movie comes from one of the songs on which Landy insisted on being listed as co-composer. Eventually Brian got out from under Dr. Landy and went on to a memorable if not spectacualrly successful solo career. I’m glad that the CBS-TV Grammy tribute to the Beach Boys did not ignore the latter part of their career and focus on the “surf, cars and girls” songs of their early days.

Of the 22 songs represented (not counting the ones included in archival clips of the Beach Boys themselves, including the famous clip of Brian Wilson rehearsing the Wrecking Crew L.A. studio band in the backing, of “Good Vibrations”), six – “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?,” “You Still Believe in Me,” “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “I Know Ther’es an Answer” and “Caroline, No” – were from Pet Sounds. Two, “Goo Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains,” were from the Smile project, and there were a few odds and ends from later Beach Boys releases, including “Darlin’” from Wild Honey, “Do It Again” from 20/20 (their last Capitol album for 18 years, released in 1969) and ”Sail On, Sailor” from the bizarre Holland project, an attempt by the Beach Bous to record an album in The Netherlands (though “Sail On, Sailor” was written and added later in L.A. after Warner Bros. rejected the first version of Holland because it didn’t have a potential hit single).. There was nothing after 1973 in the song lineup – I was dreading the prospect of sitting through “Kokomo” (actually a great pop song, but hardly on the level of the Beach Boys’ earlier work), but they didn’t include it. And even the earlier songs included introspective numbers like “In My Room” (superbly performed by one of my favorite modern singers, Brandi Carlile) and “The Warmth of the Sun” (which I’d never realized was actually written just as the Beach Boys heard that President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated).

The musicians playing the Beach Boys’ songs (as well as a few covers the Beach Boys also performed, like Fred Fassert’s “Barbara Ann,” written for The Regents, and Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?”)were predictably mixed about the all-important issue: do you try to copy the Beach Boys’ original versions as much as possible or do you rethink the songs in your own style? The program started with a set of performances that pretty much stuck to the Beach Boys’ versions – Little Big Town’s “Help Me, Rhonda,” Weezer’s “California Girls,” John Legend’s predictably bland “Sail On, Sailor” (Legend is a first-rate ballad signer but he has no business trying to rock), and Hanson’s “Barbara Ann” (Hanson gave a little speech about how the Beach Boys allegedly harmonized so well because they were brothers – the key early members were Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson and their cousin, Mike Love – and so are Hanson) – more or less followed the broad outlines of the Beach Boys’ versions. Brandi Carlile, one of my favirote modern singers, then gave a beautiful, heartfelt performance of one of Brian’s most complicated early songs, “In My Room” (it and the Beatles’ “There’s a Place” were two of my favorite songs during my own tortured, introspective adolescence; I felt at home in Brian Wilson’s room and John Lennon’s mind). After that Charlie Puth did a nice, serviceable version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” that had at least some of Brian’s dazzling orchestration from the original. Then former Doobie Brothers lead singer Michael McDonald and the a cappella Black vocal group Take 6 did an O.K. version of “Don’t Worry, Baby” – McDonald’s gravelly white-soul voice didn’t blend well either with the long, soaring lines of Brian’s melody or the harmonies of Take 6, but it wasn’t bad.

Then came the most remarkable performance of the night: Norah Jones turning “The Warmth of the Sun” into a 1940’s style lounge-bar cabaret number – and doing so quite effectively. Norah Jones isn’t one of my favorite artists – I usually find her too bland – but she hit it out of the ballpark here. Afterwards soemone or something called “Foster the People” did one of my favorite Beach Boys songs, ”Do It Again,” the lead song off the 20/20 album which offers proof that even as early as 1969 the Beach Boys were alternately acknowledging and still fighting being pigeonholed as a nostalgia act. Then Lady A, the group formerly known as Lady Antebellum until they caught on how politically incorrect that name is (i literally means “before the war” and it’s mainly associated with nostalgia for the pre-Civil War South; when I first heard there was a band called Lady Antebellum I joked, “What are they going to call their album – Slavery Was Cool?”),did a nice version of “Surfer Girl” and, like Norah Jones with “The Warmth of the Sun,” didn’t change the pronouns in the lyrics.Then Fall Out Boy did a version of “Do You Wanna Dance?” and boasted that it was one Beach Boys-associated song they could do as punk rock. (Since then I’ve listened to Bobby Freeman’s original – it begins with an explosive bongo-drum intro – though my all-time favorite version is the slowed-down version Bette Midler used to open her first album, available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtZX56T6Bcc.)

Afterwards Beck did a version of “Sloop John B.” – a song with a convoluted history; it was originally a folk chanty from Nassau, first published by Richared Le Gallienne in 1916, included in a U.S. folk collectionin 1927 and eocred by the Kingston Trio in 1958. Beach Boy Al Jardine was a big fan of folk music generally and the Kingston Trio in particular, and he suggested the song to Brian,who wasn’t thrilled – “I’m not a big fan of the Kingston Trio,” he confessed – but ultimately worked on the song and turned it into an infectious Beach Boys record. Beck’s version, like a lot of the performances on this program, more or less did justice to the original but wasn’t all that exciting. Then LeAnn Rimes did a quite beautiful version of “Carolien, No,” the haunting final song on Pet Sounds, and she did something I might have expected from the “out” Lesbian Brnadi Carlile: she sang it as the love song to a woman Brian Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher wrote. After that Mumford and Sons did a quite lovely version of another Pet Sounds song, “I Know There’s an Answer,” with a guest artist playing a weird contraption that looked and sounded like an upturned didgeridoo made of plywood. After that Andy Grammer came and did “Darlin’,” a song from the Beach Boys’ R&B album Wild Honey (1967), in which they did a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her” and did a looser, funkier version of their usual sound even on the originals. Then St. Vincent – whom I keep forgetting is one woman instead of a band – did an exceptionally beautiful version of another Pet Sounds track, “You Still Believe in Me.” (For some reason, the Pet Sounds songs generally seemed to bring out the best in last night’s performers. Maybe it’s just that the original Pet Sounds holds up exceptionally well.)

After that another pop-punk band, My Morning Jacket, turned the Beach Boys into proto-punks with a version of “I Get Around,” and Pentatonix turned in a beautiful version of the only Brian Wilson-Van Dyke Parks song on the program, “Heroes and Villains.” I still wish Pentatonix would lose the annoying drum-machine effects (not a real drum machine but a contribution from one of the Pentatonickers). Afterwards came time for the duets, including Lyle Miller and Tyler Munson (two modern artists I know virtually nothing about) doing a spirited medley of two of the Beach Boys’ early hits, “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” “Surfin’ U.S.A.” was so blatant a rip-off of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” that Berry sued for plagiarism, won and got a one-third composer credit (and the accompanying royalties), though Brian Wilson once admitted, “You take a Chuck Berry lick, put Four Freshmen vocal harmonies on top of it, and you’ve got The Beach Boys.” After that Beck was joined by someone named Jim Jones for “Good Vibrations,” whose flirtations with electronica should have put it right up Beck’s alley, though he did surprisingly little with it except sing a straightforward version. The final song was “God Only Knows” in a duet between Brandi Carlile and John Legend, and though Brandi said that at her marriage to her wife, their two kids had ukuleles and were playing the song, the performance was one of the most misbegotten of the night. Brandi Carlile gave the song a typically straightforward phrasing that managed to evoke the spirit of the original, but John Legend ill-advisedly tried to turn it into 1950’s lounge pop, phrasing like Frank Siantra at his most drunk.

One real disappointment was that the Beach Boys didn’t perform themselves on this show, as has been customary for other artists and songwriters receiving this sort of Grammy tribute. The surviving Beach Boys – Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston – were all there sitting in a box above the action, lordly observing it, but they didn’t come on stage and play. I can pretty well guess why not; relations between Brian wilson and Mike Love have long been prickly at best, and after uniting the band members for a 60th anniversary album and tour they pretty much stopped speaking to each other after th at. It was ironic that a number of the artists referenced the fact that the Beach Boys were originally a “brother act” (though of the three Wislon brothers Brian is the only one still alive) and said that made them especially “harmonious” in both their vocals and their lives. Sorry to disillusion you, but some of the bitterest band breakups of all time have happened in groups led by brothers – from the Dorseys in the 1930’s to The Kinks and Oasis more recently. A Grammy Salute to the Beach Boys was actually a pretty good program, paying a welcome tribute to one of the greatest American rock acts of all time, and quite frankly unevenness seems to be hard-wired into the concept.