Author's note: This article was originally published in the UK Beach Boys Stomp Magazine and reflected some tremendous frustration that many old time fans felt with the quality of Beach Boys performances in the early 1980s when Carl Wilson left the band for a year or so. This is a little trip backward in this writer's time machine....
A BEACH BOYS PARTY by Peter Reum
The two recent concerts that I have attended either in person or through the media were the August 20, 1981 concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater, Colorado, and the July 5, 1981 Long Beach, California broadcast by satellite over most of North America.
The atmosphere reminded me of the "media splash" style used by many political groups who have a desperate fear that they will not be heard unless the do it "in a big way." In the Sixties, such events were called "happenings." A third rate motorcyclist named Evel Knievel promoted such a hyped event in his attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle. The thing about the jump was that nobody ever took Evel Knievel seriously after it was over.
When I watched the concerts on last July 4th, 1980, and this July 5th, 1981, in Washington D.C. and Long Beach, respectively, I got the same feeling that people had about Evel Knievel. The music was tired! Few songs were performed competently, studio remixing and board tactics nonwithstanding. The concert that I attended in person at Red Rocks was similar. Every time Brian Wilson would try to sing a high note, some hired gun would step in and sing it for him. The pained and disgusted look on his face was hard to bear. It was as if they were trying to sweep dust under the rug when the whole house was dirty. Wrong notes were rampant, no one sang on key consistently, and the bass player was so loud that the ragged harmonies could not be heard. It made me wonder if the bass was mixed that way on purpose. The songs were strange...strained, they played very little past 1966, and they seemed to avoid songs that required even a modicum of harmony singing. Heroes and Villains, and a number of songs that made them popular in the early Seventies were conspicuous in their absence. The version of Be True to Your School they played was a direct lift from Papa Doo Run Run's version of it. The Beach Boys copying a copy of their own song....it certainly was a strange twist of fate. I am waiting for the day they do Surf City, One Piece Topless Bathing Suit, and Horace the Swinging School Bus Driver.
The whole atmosphere at Long Beach seemed like a carnival. When Wolfman Jack showed up I knew I should have been watching I Love Lucy instead. I wanted to see if Little Ricky had been born yet. The Jetsons were on too....it was the episode when George teaches Astro how to fly. But no....I had to be watching Wolfman Jack. Three Dog Night shared the stage with The Beach Boys. They were good, their song selection was representative of their entire career, and Danny Hutton never looked better. In short, they looked professional, even if no new material was performed.
There was no such feeling like that during The Beach Boys segment of the program. Things were ragged, and Mike Love looked like it was his show, which it was, and Brian said it was "the longest day of the year," which it was. To listen to Wolfman Jack, one would think that The Beach Boys played that way every time they performed, not just that day. I shuddered and hoped that it wouldn't get any worse. It did.
The show at Red Rocks on August 2, 1981 was a litmus test for me. If the debacle on July 5th was repeated, I was going to do a Carl Wilson and not show up again until they rehearsed. Red Rocks is a beautiful place to see a concert. Situated near Morrison, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, it is an outdoor amphitheater naturally shaped and surrounded by sandstone cliffs that provide nearly perfect acoustics. I have seen and experienced shows by The Kinks, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen there. The setting was optimal.
After an opening show by the latest Michael McDonald soundalike, The Beach Boys came out and played the same show that they had on July 5th, the same way. After five songs, I knew I had been taken. After ten songs, I looked at my friends to see who looked most like a pigeon. We all cooed to the music and I knew Carl's instincts had been right. It finally had become intolerable. Mike Love had won. It was a complete self-parody. Most of all, my heart went out to Brian. He paced before the show, the crowd not realizing that the big guy walking back and forth like a caged panther was the reason they were all there.
I took stock of the crowd, and realized that they didn't know what Sunflower was, much less Pet Sounds, and if anything clicked in their minds, they wondered which of the guys was the one who cracked up in the car wreck in 1966. The question that kept recurring to me throughout the concert was "am I just too jaded?" I wondered if I had been there too often in the times when they did rehearse, played new material, and cared what they sounded like.
The answer is complex, and intimately tied up with the inner politics in The Beach Boys themselves. Mike Love obviously has control, and his thumbprint on my forehead felt like a burn job. Several years ago several of my friends joked about what would happen if Mike Love got control of The Beach Boys. The consensus was that it would be "Mike Love and the Beach Boys" playing garage band versions of the old classics in some proto-naugahyde lounge in Las Vegas. This "worst possible" scenario is rapidly becoming reality. Meanwhile, the new fans continue to flock to the group, others having memories of "the good old days" back in '74, '71, '67, or whenever The Beach Boys were good in live performances. I can see the day in 1985 when some of us will look back at 1981, because Evel Knievel will be singing with Mike Love before Evel tries to jump The Pacific Ocean with The Beach Boys playing in the background with 25,000 pigeons in person and millions of pigeons watching on tv. You, too, can be part of a Beach Boys Party.
The last time I listened, Mike and company were trying to set up a concert at Fiesta Island in San Diego, and the folks with the City of San Diego were saying they didn't want any part of it in their neck of the woods. Listen Mike, there's a great little bullring down in Tijuana, but do me a favor and do the concert with the bull present, o.k.?
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