SURF’S UP: BRIAN WILSON & THE BEACH BOYS by Peter Doggett

Behind a cover that shamelessly mimics the typography and colour scheme of Pet Sounds lies the best book on The Beach Boys I have read since Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place in 1994. This is not to disparage the work of David Leaf, whose closeness to the group, and Brian Wilson in particular, gives him an insider’s edge, or Steven Gaines, whose flair for drama made his 1986 biography Heroes & Villains a page-turner, just that Peter Doggett mixes precise literacy and in-depth research with an impartial critical assurance that previous books have lacked. Moreover, it’s my guess that he has spent much of his adult life considering what he wants to say about a group whose music he clearly adores, before finally settling down to write the book that might well be the last word on the subject.  

First, an acknowledgement. I have known Peter Doggett since the 1980s when, as editor at Omnibus Press, I commissioned him on a fairly regular basis to produce discographies for inclusion in the music books we published. At the time Peter was the editor of Record Collector magazine whose discographies, I had noted, were the most comprehensive and accurate to be found anywhere. I wanted the best and found it, and as we got to know one another I commissioned him to write several books for Omnibus, some of them published under the pseudonym John Robertson, taken from the Byrds song, because the powers-that-be at Record Collector took a dim view of their staff moonlighting elsewhere. 

But I digress. Although Surf’s Up begins more or less at the beginning (after Peter’s coverage of an astonishing, unexpected appearance by Brian Wilson at a London fan club event in 1988) and ends with Brian’s passing, this is not a linear biography that follows the career of The Beach Boys year by year, song by song or trauma by trauma. Instead it jumps around, artfully leaping from key issues into subsidiary areas, the sum of which leads to a greater understanding of the progressive forces and, perhaps more importantly, malign undercurrents that shaped the group’s career. Among them are razor-sharp profiles of the widely contrasting personalities involved, the power struggles between them, anecdotes galore, many of them unflattering, and, of course, plenty about the mental health of Brian Wilson, their in-house maestro who wrote and arranged all their best songs. 

To this end, Surf’s Up is a jigsaw with 59 pieces, each one a shortish, unnumbered chapter, or essay, on some aspect of The Beach Boys. In a book of 382 pages (discounting end matter), that works out at about six a half pages per bite-sized chapter, which makes it more of a compendium than a biography; an easy read then, and, for that matter, one you can dip into here and there without losing the plot, complex as it is. This structure might not suit newcomers to the saga of The Beach Boys’ but, by now, it’s unlikely that those interested in the group, this book’s core market, will be unfamiliar with the lurid details of what went on behind the scenes. Nevertheless, at the start Peter helpfully proffers potted biographies of the dramatis personae, all 41 of whom in some way or other play a role in the story, from Brian and his brothers right down to management, auxiliary musicians and even a few in-laws. 

Let’s pick a random essay. “Why do people hate Mike Love?” begins one. “Let me count the ways.” Plenty of them follow, though Peter does recognise that, obnoxious as he can be, without Love’s energy the group might never have got off the ground in the first place. The relatively long chapter on Pet Sounds emphasises how so many of its songs laid bare Brian’s insecurities yet doesn’t quite nail what everyone thought about the LP at the time, not Peter’s fault of course, just that mixed messaging over the years and, quite possibly, fake news reportage, has blurred reality. Keith Moon, however, hated it, probably for the same reasons that Mike Love may or may not have hated it too. Among the many others, therapist Dr Eugene Landy’s influence on Brian gets two chapters, and there’s plenty about deaths in the family, relatives galore, surfing as a sport, the joys of California, dietary and spiritual matters, Dennis’ indiscretions with Charles Manson (and 17 naked girls), Mike Love’s money-making schemes and whatever rivalry existed between The Beach Boys and The Beatles. 

What else have I learned? Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean sang uncredited lead on ‘Barbara Ann’; Al Jardine is a bit dull; ‘Good Vibrations’ lost out to ‘Winchester Cathedral’ by The New Vaudeville Band for Best Contemporary Song at the Grammys in 1966 (what were they thinking?); ‘Heroes And Villains’ was re-written after Brain’s Rolls Royce was nicked from a cinema car park; supplementary Beach Boy Bruce Johnson, born Benjamin Baldwin as the son of a single mother from Illinois, had the enormous good fortune to be adopted by an uber-wealthy LA family. No wonder he always looked so laid-back. 

There’s almost 30 pages of reference notes at the end, a reflection of the author’s dedicated research, a three-page bibliography but no index which would have appalled at least one mutual friend of ours. Neither are there any pictures, no doubt because no new ones could be found and, in any case, everyone knows what The Beach Boys look like. It’s what they sound like that really matters, and Peter Doggett’s deft musical analysis sent me back to the music, specifically my Good Vibrations box set and a CD of remasters called Summer Love Songs, time and again over the past week, the only trusted and true factor in judging the merits of a music book. 

        “The music survives best in the hearts and souls of everyone who has been touched by it, enriched by it, opened themselves to all its emotional ambiguities and riches,” writes Peter at the close of his book. “Nobody else made music like Brian Wilson; nobody ever could.” 

        I couldn’t agree more. 

SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson by David Leaf

David Leaf has risen to a Beach Boys’ role similar to that of Mark Lewisohn with The Beatles and the late Johnny Rogan with The Byrds. He is now the group’s foremost archivist and biographer, though in Leaf’s case his focus is primarily on Brian Wilson, their dominant figure, with whom he has worked in various capacities over the past four decades. This is his third book about the group, though his first, The Beach Boys & The California Myth, originally published in 1978, has been republished, retitled and updated many times, just like Rogan’s Byrds books and, to a lesser extent, Lewisohn’s Beatles books.  

        Leaf’s latest book is an oral history of the making, aborting and re-making of SMiLE, Wilson’s follow-up to Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ 1966 album widely acknowledged as his masterpiece, and consists of hundreds of old and new quotes from everyone involved, punctuated by the author’s informed explanations and commentary on a legendary album that never was, not until 2004 anyway, though in the meantime tracks recorded for it had appeared on other Beach Boys LPs and their exemplary 1993 5-CD box set Good Vibrations: 30 Years of The Beach Boys. 

        The book is, in every conceivable way, the last word on a subject as complex as it is fascinating. As the follow-up to Pet Sounds, expectations for SMiLE were off the scale but it was not to be. “Determining how, when and why SMiLE began to fall apart is much more difficult,” writes Leaf after mention of non-musical issues impacting on The Beach Boys in 1966, among them Carl Wilson’s draft notice and an impending lawsuit with Capitol Records. “Actually, it’s impossible.” 

        Nevertheless, Leaf and several others, among them Wilson himself, do their best to explain why SMiLE never happened, drawing attention at some length to the lack of enthusiasm for Brian’s SMiLE songs from other members of the group, most notably Mike Love, who felt he was ‘fucking with the formula’, which sapped Brian’s confidence. “He hated it,” says Brian at one point. “I didn’t know how to deal with it.” Their record company, eager for more big hits in the style of ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and ‘I Get Around’, wasn’t too keen on it either. 

        Another factor was what seems today, as I write this, a disturbing omen for Los Angeles. During the recording of a track provisionally titled ‘Fire’, part of an ‘Elements’ suite that would eventually emerge as the freeform, slightly disturbing ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’, a building close to Gold Star Studios, where the album was being recorded, burned to the ground. This spooked Wilson who retreated into his shell, a situation exacerbated by his increasing dependence on mind-altering drugs. Furthermore, Brian felt strong competition from The Beatles and it didn’t help when Paul McCartney arrived in Los Angeles and played him the tender ballad ‘She’s Leaving Home’ from their upcoming Sgt Pepper album. 

        All of these matters take up roughly the first half of the book, with the remainder devoted firstly to Brian’s re-emergence after being sent off the rails by the SMiLE debacle, with the final third detailing how the album was finally re-recorded, and performed live, by Brian with a bunch of newly appointed, highly skilled musicians, all of whom worshipped at his feet. Such flattery is justly warranted, of course, though it does get a bit wearying as the book progresses. We all know that Brian Wilson was great at what he did, probably among the best young composers in the world during his heyday, but the number of times such acclaim is repeatedly expressed by one and all during Leaf’s book is its only flaw.

        SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson is published by Omnibus Press on 13 March, RRP £25 (£23 on Amazon) and contains 321 pages with an eight-page colour photo section and, in a concluding chapter, contributions from 14 other music writers in thrall to SMiLE and Wilson’s talents. The book lacks an index. 

THE BEACH BOYS: Convention Center, Anaheim, California, December 1973

Forty-two years ago, resident in Los Angeles as Melody Maker’s US correspondent, I drove down to the Convention Center in Anaheim in a red Ford Pinto with an English girl called Caroline in the passenger seat, there to see and review The Beach Boys. I refer to this night in a post here (http://justbackdated.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/california-girl.html) and my review appeared in the issue of Melody Maker dated December 8, today. Carried away by seeing the group in their own backyard, it's a bit on the cheesy side but here it is…

Hi gang. Round up Cindi and Patti, Kathy and Debbie, grab a Coke and a taco ‘cos we’re off to see the Beach Boys at Anaheim, California. Pack your surf boards away in daddy’s T-Bird, slip on those whites and let’s get ourselves a headful of good vibrations.

          These Beach Boys get around. They’ve changed a lot since the Wilson Brothers, Alan Jardine and Mike Love wore candy striped shirts and played gala concerts singing about the surf, sea, sand, cars and new girls in school.

          They’re older, probably wiser, and the group’s a whole lot bigger. But the songs remain the same and the only difference in the audience is that their hair is longer, and sweet-smelling roll-your-owns seem to have the edge on popcorn for peripheral enjoyment

          Tonight these Beach Boys – lots of ‘em – are entertaining in Southern California, their home base.

          They don’t go out on the road very often these days, but when they do they’re assured of a warm welcome, especially here, which in turn makes this evening especially interesting to yours truly, an Englishman weaned on The Beach Boys, fascinated by the “surf” music period and expecting a truly genuine Californian evening’s rock and roll.

It was a bit like a fantasy come true.

          Anaheim lies south of Los Angeles, about an hour’s drive down the Santa Anna Freeway, through the industrial belt of LA and towards Disneyland, which is actually only a stone’s throw away from the Convention Centre where the concerts are held in this locality.

          It’s just inside Orange County, an almost all white area which has a reputation for favouring the John Birch life-style. I didn’t see one black face at the concert – just 10,000 kids, mostly with blond hair, tans and tee-shirts. It could almost have been Sweden.

          The Convention Centre is one of those futurisitic buildings, large enough to accommodate an aeroplane, which was primarily designed for basketball.

          It’s full to the brim of eager Beach Boys fans, a 50/50 sex breakdown, most of whom appear very young. There’s youths with slight blond down on their upper lips, hoping their facial growth will impress the scores of nubile girls who have braces on their teeth, very long blonde hair and flat chests.

          Two seats down from me, one guy was asking a girl what grade she was in. That’s tantamount to inquiring one’s age in this country, and age is an important factor in a teenage boy/girl relationship.

          If you do IT under 18, the boy could end up behind bars on a rape charge. With all the bare midriffs floating around, it’s surprising the jails aren’t overcrowded after a Beach Boys show.

          These kids of 14, 15, 16 and 17 are sitting around exchanging their roll-your-owns as casually as I pull on a Marlborough. Even if The Beach Boys did start making records before these kids were old enough to work a turntable, they’re out to enjoy themselves tonight. Local patriotism, I suppose. Incredible though it seems, it’s raining outside – a peculiarly sour note for me as I always associated The Beach Boys with the sun. I tend to play my Pet Sounds and innumerable “greatest hits” or “best of” albums during July and August in England.

          This rain is holding up the concert. It’s a rare thing and, just as snow and ice holds up the world in England, a few drops of rain delay things here in California.

Drivers aren’t used to wet roads and they drive slower, bringing the freeways to a crawling pace. The Beach Boys, so the announcer tells us, are stuck in such a jam, so there’s a long delay between Three Man Army, the British rock trio who opened, and the arrival of the surfing kings.

          The same traffic jam delayed me, so I only caught a snatch of Three Man Army’s closing number. They appeared a competent, if not spectacular bunch of rockers, who were warmly appreciated – especially when they thanked The Beach Boys (who weren’t actually there, of course) for the opportunity to play.

          Any mention of The Beach Boys, and this audience yells and yells.

          But the delay gives me an opportunity to size up the crowd, and the roadies time to plant bunches of flowers around the stage. With the fancy lighting at the back (hundreds of tiny lights stretching from the stage to a bar about 20 feet high, in parallel lines), the stage begins to resemble a tropical garden.

          The lights eventually dim and everybody, but everybody, stands up, cheering, yelling and generally greeting the group’s arrival as if they’d descended from heaven. There’s four girls in front of me who decide a better view is available if they stand on their seats, which they do, thus blocking the view of several hundred people behind, including myself.

          But the initial euphoria dies down as the group open the set with a slow song, ‘Sail On Sailor’ from the Holland album. And it’s obvious from the outset that Mike Love is the front man these days.

          Dressed in a pink creation with matching pants and top, a huge yellow sunflower design over his chest and a straw hat that’s mildly comical in appearance, he takes the role of cheer leader, moving in a Jagger like fashion to most of the numbers and taking care of the introductions.

          The two Wilson brothers, Carl and Dennis, pick guitars in the centre of the stage, while the fourth original, Alan Jardine, adopts his usual pose with one hand over his ear, taking care of the falsetto, apparently contributing the least to the overall sound, but vital to the vocal harmonies that make the Beach Boys what they are.

          There’s a host of others on the stage too.

          The two South Africans, Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin are now really part of the act, singing their songs from the Holland set, almost as well loved as the originals.

Ricky is another drummer, while Blondie is to the fore, guitar at the ready. There’s a brass section, too, an extra bass player and an extra keyboard player. Indeed, there must be about a dozen musicians up there on the stage, some hidden behind the foliage, but all pumping out a very tight background to the songs, which soon come thick and fast.

          ‘Sloop John B’ follows ‘Sailor’ and at the first note of this first “oldie”, the audience are up again, dancing, jumping, yelling and singing along as if these songs were some kind of local national anthem, which they probably are.

          There’s new songs and old, but it’s the old ones that go down the best.

          There’s ‘California Girls’, dedicated to someone’s mother, and while they’re up there chanting about these fine specimens of female flesh from the golden state, the girls themselves are all around me loving every moment of it.

          Well, I gotta admit, most of them are kinda neat.

          “Here’s one of the first songs we ever wrote,” cried Carl in one break. “Our brother Brian wrote it and the words were written in a field in Hawthorne, California.”

          The song was ‘Surfer Girl’, the first time I’d heard this beautiful Wilson composition aired live. Fortunately the audience was respectfully silent as the harmonies filled the auditorium.

          Then there was ‘Darling’, and ‘Surfin’ USA’, which had everyone dancing in the aisles, then ‘Heroes And Villains’, a short version, and ‘Help Me Rhonda’, during which the whole audience sang along.

          They did ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, which Mike Love said was his favourite number of them all, and paused before the opening chords to ‘Good Vibrations’ as if this was to be the climax to the evening’s entertainment.

          The simple syllable “I”, sung to open the song, was the cue for total chaos. Each and every throat opened and sang along, building to a huge climax during the “Gotta keep those loving good, vibrations...” bit. It was the final number, but three encores followed.

          “This is about a girl who was always kinda special to us,” said Love as the group re-appeared. “Ba-ba-ba, Ba-ba-bra Ann.” More chaos. “Here’s one you might know... Round, round, get around.....”

          A great sea of blonde heads was swaying crazily around me by this time. The audience had rushed the front, grabbed the flowers from the stage and hurled them back at the group. You could almost have surfed over the top of them.

          Off again, but back for more....”She took her Daddy’s car, and drove through the hamburger stand now.”

          This was fun, fun, fun in the real meaning of the word. Off again, more yelling, house lights, boos, house lights down, cheers. The group stumbled on. Mike Love removed his shirt and, with the house lights up again, they closed on ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ with Love wiggling in his best Jagger fashion. That was it, they told us afterwards.

Mike Love stammered something about a party on New Year’s Eve to which the whole audience would be invited, and expressed a desire to go on tour and take this whole bunch of Beach Boy maniacs along with them.

          “There’s no place like home,” said one of the Wilsons. Then they were gone.

          And outside it was still raining. It hadn’t mattered a bit.

(The photograph, taken off the internet, is actually The Beach Boys at New York's Madison Square Garden on December 19, so the line up would have been the same.)

DON'T WORRY BABY

It’s the coldest day of the year so far in the UK, so on the train this morning, to counteract the frost I’d had to scrape off my car windscreen, I put on The Beach Boys, specifically their 2009 Summer Love Songs compilation which I reviewed on the Rocks Back Pages website when it first came out. Here’s what I wrote, but being as how ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ is reputed to have been Keith Moon’s all-time favourite song, I’ve tacked on a bit on the end from Tony Fletcher’s Moon biography Dear Boy.

If, like me, you still get a shiver down the spine when the you hear the words ‘Well it’s been building up inside of me for, oh, I don’t know how long’, then allow me to draw your attention to the ‘2009 New Stereo Remix’ of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ which opens a new Beach Boys compilation entitled Summer Love Songs.

Aside from a general improvement in clarity, the changes are not immediately noticeable in the intro and first two lines of the opening verse but thereafter and when the first chorus kicks in – and the group’s sublime choral harmonies compete with Brian’s lead – nirvana beckons in such a way that to these ears it trumps the original (which for longer than I care to remember has been one of my all-time favourite songs). The other Messrs Wilson (Dennis & Carl), Love and Jardine serve up  ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and ‘now don’ts’ with a freshness that I’ve never heard before, especially those in a lower register that are largely inaudible on earlier versions of the song. There’s no change in the mix of that absurdly simple plucked guitar solo, but I think someone has tweaked the volume of the harmonies slightly on the third verse so the competition between Brain and his men is even more pronounced. Wonderful.

For Beach Boys nuts this is worth the price of the CD. For the record, it also contains seven other very well-known romantic Beach Boys songs, songs like ‘Surfer Girl’ and ‘God Only Knows’, and a dozen or so lesser known songs, including some covers of doo-wop hits, all plucked from their early albums. I didn’t hear such pronounced differences in any other songs as I heard in ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ but at the end of the selection, after ‘Girls On The Beach’, its vocal harmonies only are reprised, a bit like the vocal only tracks on that fifth CD in the Good Vibrations: 30 Years… Beach Boys box set.

‘Don’t Worry Baby’, of course, has been widely cited as Keith Moon’s all-time favourite song, though in his book Dear Boy Tony Fletcher is unconvinced, believing that Moon was just as fond of many more up-tempo Beach Boys favourites. Nevertheless, Tony writes about ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ with the same flair he brought to everything else in this top-rate biography: “‘Don’t Worry, Baby’ was a direct musical response to Spector’s epic production of The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’: it opened with a resounding bass drum motif similar to that of its inspiration and while its vocal harmonies were clearly those of Wilson’s own invention, the overall production qualities and song structure owed much to his fellow boy-wonder. Sung by Brian himself, and co-written with hot-rod enthusiast Roger Christian, the lyrics were, unusually for its era and genre, buried beneath the production, so that the hopelessly vacuous verses in which a car enthusiast brags about his latest hot-rod were cast aside for the universally acceptable chorus (as sung by his reassuring girlfriend), “Don’t worry, baby, everything will turn out alright.”

         “Keith Moon, a non-driver and non-surfer who nonetheless identified totally with songs about both subjects, took the chorus to heart; in its simple promise of redemption, there lay justification for every act of madness, selfishness, generosity and individuality he would muster over the coming years, reassurance that his actions, however bizarre and unjustified they seemed at the time, could always conclude with a positive ending.

         “That was in the long run. In the short term ‘Don’t Worry, Baby’ was a beautiful ballad that served as an alternative to the upbeat surfing/hot-rod anthems he adored, and as respite from the aggressive music of the High Numbers. But it also highlighted a painful absence in his life: he had no ‘baby’ with whom to worry, no one to whisper the reassurance he needed to hear at the end of every hard-fought night as he embarked on his journey into uncharted waters.”

That, of course, would change when he met Kim, and before long she would have plenty to worry about. 

THE BEACH BOYS – Dennis Wilson Interview, March 1976

Beach Boy Dennis, the wild Wilson brother, died 31 years ago on Sunday. I met him a few times during my time on Melody Maker and always found him good company. He was in New York in March of 1976, and I interviewed him at his hotel. Accompanied by his wife, the lovely Karen Lamm, whom he’d married earlier that same year, he was in good spirits, clearly optimistic about The Beach Boys and brother Brian’s ongoing recuperation. Karen promptly divorced Dennis, only to remarry him a year or so later but that was the kind of thing that happened to him. I found this picture of them together on the net, credited to ‘Keep The Summer Alive’.

        

I remember reading about Dennis’ death in Rolling Stone and being dumbfounded by the circumstances. He drowned after drunkenly diving from a yacht in Marina Del Ray in a futile attempt to recover jewellery he’d thrown overboard from his own yacht a few years earlier. He was buried at sea a week later by special permission of President Reagan.

My interview with Dennis, published by MM in April 1976, is below. I really like that quote about his desire to ‘stand behind Brian, being a tool for his disposal for the rest of my life no matter whether it’s music or mowing his lawn for him’.

A new studio album is in the works, Brian Wilson is back in business and The Beach Boys are planning to visit England in late summer.

These were the main points to come out of a chat with Dennis Wilson, who passed through New York last week to spread the word that The Beach Boys are no longer going to rely on their golden oldies to maintain their current status as a major concert attraction in the US.

Over the past three years, the group has found a change of fortune here. While they were considered unfashionable at the turn of the decade and early Seventies, The Beach Boys have made a comeback of great proportions, helped not a little by Capitol, their old record company, releasing a couple of double albums comprising numerous Beach Boys hits during the summers of 1974 and 1975.

Two other factors have helped them re-attain their status as a major touring band. After years of management problems, the rock mogul James William Guercio, who owns Caribou Studios in Colorado and manages Chicago took over the handling of their business affairs. Guercio had a lifelong desire to join The Beach Boys and, while also playing bass with the group, brought a good deal of well-planned strategy to their management.

In addition, The Beach Boys were suddenly befriended by a whole host of other, more successful, groups, whose Good Samaritan attitude hoisted them back on the concert trail. They toured with Chicago in a double bill last year, were invited by Elton John to play at Wembley in London, and found themselves playing massive arenas with such top draws as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

While all this was going on, however, they had no current record to plug, only the classics of the Sixties and a few songs from Holland, their last album for Warner Brothers. This is about to change: “We’re doing a new studio album which we hope will be out in June,” says Dennis. “We’ve been working on and off on the album for about nine months, and the personnel includes the original Beach Boys, including Brian.

“He has already recorded six cuts with us and the way it looks is that most of the album will be Brian, although there’s one song of my own that may get on. Actually, we’ve put together something like 40 odd tracks over the past few years but never released them. I guess you could call the songs rather like choral religious music that moves into rock and roll later. What we want is an album where every track is great, no low spots, a total concept that we can be proud of.”

It must be hard shaking off the oldies image and getting down to new material, especially as the old material was finding a new life with new fans? “On the new tour that’s coming up we will be doing the new stuff as well as some old material,” says Dennis. “There will always be people wanting to hear the older tunes. I don’t get bored with them... they’re fun.

“I have to say, though, that I get tired of playing some of the old tunes, but many of them are timeless to me. As a musician you can let go with them instead of making them sound contrived. You can play them in a new way each time and bring in little variations.”

Nevertheless, it’s the old tunes that have brought about The Beach Boys current renaissance. “There was a time, long ago, when The Beach Boys were a very big touring group. Then, after a while, there was a time when it was uncool to be into The Beach Boys. Somehow The Beach Boys didn’t fit at one period, but now... well, I guess we’re just fitting again. It’s not uncool to like The Beach Boys any more. Personally I’ve always liked them,” he says, laughing.

“But that is a fact,” continues Wilson, serious again. “The group really wasn’t hot at one time, and the record sales weren’t hot, but we got back on to the concert trail and changed things around. It was hard work, but worth the effort because we’re very respected now.”

Wilson argues that the increased touring activity was primarily responsible for the enormous sales of Endless Summer and Spirit Of America, rather than the other way round. “There were problems with Warner Brothers but we couldn’t help that,” said Wilson. “We were drawing 100,000 people to concerts yet they couldn’t move our more recent albums at all. I’m sure a lot of people had never heard the group until those records came out. I see 14 year olds at the shows who were not even born when we started.”

And Jim Guercio’s influence? “Well, I think we were already coming back as a concert band when he joined us, but we have a great respect for him and we also like Chicago’s music.

“I think that now The Beach Boys represent the truth in the creative sense instead of the pop sense. There’s no hustle to get the three or four albums out in a year, just a desire to create something meaningful... and that’s why there’s been this delay in putting out a new album.”

Having consolidated their position again, Wilson says the group intends to relax live appearances in favour of the studio in future. “It may sound funny, but I want to concentrate the next ten years on making albums. As a Beach Boy I want to stay with them and stand behind Brian, being a tool for his disposal for the rest of my life no matter whether it’s music or mowing his lawn for him.

“He is a master, musically. I am dumbfounded at him. I am in awe of him. I’ve grown up with him and watched him go through changes, and he is the most vulnerable human being I know. The depth of that guy... I mean... he changed the world with his influence. When you sing on something like ‘In My Room’ and then sit back and listen to what he’s done, not just with my part, but with the song... then you realise. I’m devoting my life to Brian on a musical level, and the rest of the group all feel the same way. When Brian plays something for us, we just gape. It gets very emotional.”

Last year The Beach Boys opened their own studio in Los Angeles, a studio that Dennis describes as the best in the world. It is available to others for hire, but so far its only incumbants have been the group themselves, clustered around Brian Wilson, shaking down harmonies that he’s written.

“Brian is like a little kid in the studio, like a kid who’s just discovered sex for the first time. He rushes around playing this and that, and telling us to play this and that. The enthusiasm he still has is infectious, really.”

BRIAN WILSON, London Royal Festival Hall, January 29, 2002

Brian was having a massage when we arrived. Unmistakably Brian, big, gaunt, with a helmet of thick grey hair, he was sat at the bottom of the stairs that led to the stage, eyes focused on a point immediately ahead of him, mute, having his shoulders rubbed. We tried not to stare as we walked past towards the artists’ bar. He was still there, still being massaged, still staring straight ahead, when we passed by again on our way to our seats twenty minutes later.

         It was an extraordinary evening, and not just for the music. Brian Wilson, genius pop composer and legendary mental casualty, led his 10-piece band of multi-instrumentalists through just about everything and anything anyone wanted to hear from the Beach Boys’ repertoire, including the entire Pet Sounds album performed sequentially. They displayed a deftness of touch that made all past and present versions of the group sound second rate, not least because nine of them, plus Brian, sang. All those intricate harmonies and arrangements were replicated not only with superb technical skill but also with verve and an element of good-natured humour. Wilson’s iconic status was reverently acknowledged when he walked on stage but, sensibly, he’d evidently decided to nip this sort of thing in the bud by opening the proceedings with ‘Brian Wilson’, the Barnaked Ladies tribute song to his transcendental self. Perfect.

         But there was something else happening up there. Throughout, Wilson, sat before his large electric keyboard which he may or may not have played, exuded a strange, childlike demeanour that manifested itself in clipped announcements and weird hand gestures, as if he was gripping the steering wheel of a car. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one willing him on, hoping something wouldn’t go horribly wrong, but at the same time morbidly fascinated at seeing Brian Wilson in the flesh. He said things like, ‘Here’s a nice little song’, or ‘Thanks for coming down to the show tonight’, or – introducing ‘California Girls’ – ‘This was a big hit for the Beach Boys in the sixties’ (really!), in a voice that suggested he was reading the lines from an autocue, on remote control, pre-programmed. But he sang well, though it was often difficult to tell exactly who was singing what amid this great choir, and it all sounded wonderful and was fabulous value as they played two sets and upwards of 30 songs, maybe more. I lost count but I knew every single one of them. When the first half was over Brian stood up and marched, robot-like, off stage without so much as a second glance. He did much the same at the end of the second half until, after a slew of encores, he returned and proffered a bow. But if he smiled I never saw it.

         Fifteen minutes later Brian was in a room on the fifth floor doing a ‘meet and greet’ attended by the lucky winners of a competition in Mojo magazine. There he was again, wearing the same shirt in which he’d performed, sat at a table, signing autographs, not speaking, not looking too happy, his eyes still focused somewhere only he knew. I was told he was tired. I joined a queue of men – nearly all men – holding vinyl copies of Pet Sounds for Brian sign but all I had was my concert ticket which I proffered when my turn came. “A pleasure to meet you Mr Wilson sir,” I said, as politely as I could while he signed, using a thick black marker pen. “I was hoping you’d have played ‘Don’t Worry Baby’,” I added, smiling, hoping for a reaction. Brian looked at me quizzically and from the expression on his face I knew that I might just as well have asked him to comment on the deteriorating relationship between David Beckham and Alex Ferguson and whether this might impact adversely on Manchester United’s bid to retain the Premiership title for the 2001/2 season. He didn’t reply. “The concert was wonderful,” I said. Still he didn’t reply. Nor did he smile. I guess he was used to compliments. “May I shake your hand?” Brian held up his hand very briefly and touched mine. It was time to move on, as the lady sat next to him indicated by her concerned expression and dismissive hand gesture. As I wandered off it occurred to me that Brian hadn’t been programmed to answer questions like my ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ inquiry, only to accept compliments, and that this kind of spontaneous query was unwelcome.

         Twenty minutes later, after another drink in the artists’ bar (where Ray Davies was talking to Richard Ashcroft if I remember rightly), we decided to split but the only way out from this backstage area now was via a freight elevator down one floor to the stage door. It was a huge elevator, big enough to accommodate a concert grand piano, and when it stopped at our floor who should be inside, waiting to descend, but Brian with a small entourage. Out of respect we made as if to wait for the lift to return, but were beckoned in. Again, I tried not to stare. Brian was being helped into his anorak, scarf and gloves by the same lady who’d sat next to him at the meet and greet. At the bottom he marched stiffly out and turned, head high, staring ahead, just as he’d left the stage. Outside there was a crowd surrounding his car, held back by security men, and they cheered him mightily, but from the look on his face it occurred to me that he didn’t even know why they were there or why they were making all this noise. He was in his room.

BEACH BOYS - My California Girl

On a lovely sunny day last summer I put on some Beach Boys as I weeded the patio… on Saturday 16 November, 1973, CC and an English rose I’d met in LA called Caroline, who was working as an au pair in Santa Monica, drove down to Anaheim Stadium to watch The Beach Boys in concert. This was a really big deal for me. I’d loved The Beach Boys for years and seen them in London a couple of times but now I was going to see them in their own backyard, in Southern California, which to me was like seeing The Beatles in Liverpool or The Who in Shepherds Bush. I dressed the part, white jeans, tight t-shirt, trainers; Caroline too, and she was blond with an hour-glass figure which helped, though neither of us were sufficiently tanned to be the real deal. In the car park were woodies with surf boards on roof racks, so the locals took it as seriously as I did.

     It was a fabulous concert, just a great big fun-filled party, all swept along by an arena-sized sell-out crowd that danced in the aisles and sang along to every word – and there’s nothing closer to Beach Boys nirvana than hearing REAL California girls, like thousands of ’em, singing along to ‘California Girls’: countdown… ‘I couldn’t wait to get back in the states’, ignition… ‘back to the cutest girls in the world’, lift-off... ‘I wish they all could be…’, and the whole sodding place simply exploded into song. Magic!

     Caroline and I stayed at the nearby Disneyland Hotel that night and spent most of the next day at Disneyland so the weekend turned into a five-star California experience for us. Then, that evening, on the drive back to LA, she told me she’d decided to return to the UK, back to her childhood sweetheart in Kent who was studying to become a lawyer. Caroline No… sorry couldn’t resist that. Last I heard she was still married to him and is a grandmother now. C’est la vie.