https://www.avclub.com/beach-boys-jim-henson-idea-man-disney-documentaries-1851514989

Interesting article that explains how the documentary came to be on Disney+. Originally it was going to be on the Epix channel, now called MGM+ - a pretty minor player in the cable/streaming business. But Irv Azoff felt a documentary about the guys deserved a more prestigious and more viewed platform and that’s where Disney came in.

Text of the UK Telegraph article, by Ian Winwood

What Disney’s Beach Boys film doesn’t tell you about Brian Wilson’s broken brain
The pop genius’s many horrific battles with mental health began in the 1960s and continue to this today… Then why gloss over them?

In November 1969, the American network television channel CBS set up their cameras and microphones for the filming of a Beach Boys special introduced by none other than Leonard Bernstein. The timing was less than optimal: the group as a whole were in desperate straits, while their principal songwriter, Brian Wilson, was in the foothills of the kind of mental disrepair that would imperil his wellbeing for decades to come. Even so, when Wilson played an unaccompanied version of the unreleased Surf’s Up on a grand piano, Bernstein described it as being nothing less than “the most brilliant piece of contemporary music [he’d] ever heard”.


This resonant endorsement from America’s most prominent composer blew minds, and not in a good way. According to an 81-page essay in the book The Dark Stuff, by the music writer Nick Kent, “Brian Wilson broke down there and then. Freaked right out and ended up phoning his astrologer, a woman named Genevlyn, who told him to beware hostile vibrations. So he stayed in bed for five days, eating candy bars, smoking pot and brooding to the sound of wind chimes.”

If you happen to be one of the people keenly anticipating the arrival of the documentary film The Beach Boys, available now on Disney+, please be advised that this remarkable account fails to occupy a single moment of its near two-hour running time. Never mind that in marrying wild acclaim – from Leonard Bernstein, of all people, not some stoned hack from Creem or Hit Parader – with crushing insecurity, the story handily typifies the triumphs and terrors running wild behind the group’s sun-kissed exterior. For the life of me, I cannot account for such an obvious omission.


While it wouldn’t be quite fair to accuse Beach Boys of entirely overlooking definitive and sometimes grisly details, it is right to accuse the film of seeking to place a positive spin on even the ugliest moments. Worse still, it seeks to imply that talent of the group’s members was, to some degree at least, evenly spread. But it really wasn’t.



Without wishing to discard notable moments from younger brothers Carl and Dennis, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to note that it was Brian Wilson who shaped their scene. By dragging rock and roll from the American South to the West Coast, he even defined the modern image of California as a sun-kissed idyll ideated the world over. Beat that.

With its devious sleights of hand, though, Beach Boys is practically a magic show. It’s only in the credits, for example, that viewers who have just emerged from comas lasting half a century are informed that Carl and Dennis Wilson are long dead. There’s certainly no mention of the recent conservatorship request filed in a Los Angeles court by family members who described the now 81-year-old Brian Wilson as an “easily distracted” man who is “unable to properly provide for his own personal needs for physical health, food, clothing, or shelter”. Not a word is said about the other times the courts have been asked to rule on who controls his life and estate, either.


Of course, any serious attempt to tell the full story of the life of Brian Wilson would require Beach Boys to clock up more episodes than Coronation Street. Sad to say, though, that the cutting of corners seems to be about more than merely saving time. In one particularly startling omission, the name Eugene Landy, the American psychologist who glommed onto his life, off and on, for three decades of coercive and sometimes brutal treatment, merits not a single mention.



Eventually disbarred from practising in the state of California, Landy charged up to $430,000 a year for his services, as well as a cut of publishing rights. At times, the dominance was total; he reportedly had a minion stood over Wilson with a baseball bat as he tried to write songs. His stricken patient once described the shrink as “my master”, before adding, ominously, that “a good dog always waits for his master”.  

“I want to go places, but I can’t because of the doctor [Landy],” Wilson once stated in a revealing interview in Oui magazine. “I feel like a prisoner and I don’t know where it’s going to end… he would put the police on me and he’d put me in the funny farm.” Eugene Landy even ghost-wrote Wouldn’t It Be Nice, an autobiography from the early 1990s credited to Brian Wilson himself. In a fiercely contested field, it remains the most dishonest and depressing music book I’ve ever read.

 
The most generous interpretation regarding the chaos of the Beach Boys and their stricken artistic engine is that no one really knew what to do for the best. In the entertainment game, people rarely do. A more reputable psychologist than Landy once told me that “the creative mind is a vulnerable mind”, an evaluation which suggests that, for some, talent and instability are inseparable. The music industry doesn’t require people to go mad, but it will certainly tolerate those who do so. Family life, meanwhile, is often less forgiving. In the midst of terrifying drug benders in 1970s, Brian Wilson’s wife insisted he live in the small changing room of their swimming pool so as to avoid contact with their children.



Possibly he was doomed from the start. Raised in the LA suburb of Hawthorne, his childhood home was a place of danger, oppression and alcoholism. Patriarch Murry Wilson was a frustrated but talentless songwriter whose blows to Brian’s head were so frequent as to be creditably identified as the reason he went deaf in one ear at the age of two. The father saw his son’s genius as a means of swapping his lot in the machining business for a hop with the rock biz jet set. When his tyrannical tenure as the Beach Boys’ road manager came to an end after a beating at the hands of singer Mike Love, in 1964, he retained control of the songs. The decision to sell the group’s publishing for a relative pittance saw his eldest son once more retreat to his bed in shattered dismay.



“You go through your childhood and you have a mean father that brutalises you and terrorises you – and Dennis and Carl – [and] he knocked the hell of out of us,” Wilson once said. “In fact, I asked myself, ‘What in the hell was that all about?’ A mean father who turned us into egomaniacs, ‘cos we felt so insecure our egos just jumped up. It was such a scary feeling.”

 
With the seeds of madness germinating early, he was certainly never in any kind of shape to deal with the demands of life on the road. The Beach Boys documentary mentions a nervous breakdown en route to a concert in Houston, in 1964, but fails to acknowledge several other acute episodes in its immediate aftermath.

Brian Wilson never enjoyed playing live; the studio was where he felt most alive. But when bandmates and executives from Capitol Records first heard the songs that would grace the Pet Sounds album, both parties were unconvinced. Despite being a masterpiece, the LP duly underperformed in the US charts.



In a field in which image and marketability are key, inevitably, the reluctance of music executives and creative dependents to fully support Wilson’s progressive instincts dealt a terrible blow to his already fragile sense of self-worth. Tellingly, as was the case with Leonard Bernstein’s remarkable endorsement, effusive encomiums proved equally damaging. When Paul McCartney (on whose talents the principal Beach Boy obsessed) opined that he sometimes believed that God Only Knows was the perfect song, its author swan-dived into yet another plummeting funk at the prospect of being a washed-up has-been who would never write anything as good again.

It should be borne in mind that some of the stories about the eccentricities of Brian Wilson are not that far removed from other “out there” artists and public figures from the laissez-faire 1960s and 1970s. As Carol Kaye, who played session bass guitar for the Beach Boys, told the writer Jeremy Gluck, “There’s a lot of slander going around even yet, many false things that never happened. So what if he was in his robe at his big house? Hugh Hefner lives in his robe. And so what if he wanted to record in the bottom of his empty pool? [Flautist] Paul Horn went to the pyramids for the same reason – great echo.”


Also, it wasn’t as if other members of the family didn’t exhibit their own alarming tendencies. After allowing Charles Manson into the group’s orbit, the always heedless Dennis Wilson (who died in 1983 as a penniless and homeless drunk and drug addict) earned death threats following the Manson Family murders in Los Angeles in 1969. Suitably spooked by the mayhem, brother Carl moved with his own family to his parents’ home, much to the alarm of his alcoholic mother. “I don’t know why you brought them here, son,” Audree Wilson whispered through a thick fog of whisky. “Those Manson people are bound to know our address too.”



Somehow, though, Brian Wilson stood out even in this deranged ecosystem. After filling a recording studio with smoke during sessions for the long-aborted Smile album, he believed he’d “mystically” managed to start a fire in a house two doors away. He once fled a cinema in panic after believing a character onscreen was talking to him directly in the voice of Phil Spector (another musical titan, this one equally troubled, on whom he obsessed). Believing himself underserving of happiness, throughout, he filled his life with troubled parasites and lost ne’er do wells whose sole purpose, it seemed, was limiting his own already diminished circumstances.  

Then there were those who fixated from a distance. “Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks,” noted the writer Bill Holdship in a 1995 article for Mojo magazine. “There are fans who feel it’s their role in life to protect Brian’s image. Something about the vulnerability of the finest Beach Boys music must act as a beacon for unbalanced people, fans who project their demands onto Brian in a way that’s unique among performer/fan relationships. When I did that 1991 cover story on Brian for BAM [magazine]… I actually received several death threats.”


Throughout it all, of course, whether he wanted them or not, he always had the Beach Boys. “They’re all I’ve got,” he once said. In a relationship that produced transcendental music and (often, at least) acute personal acrimony, they too were unable to wrest themselves free from the teat of Brian Wilson.



“They’re like birds with their mouths open for a worm,” he told Nick Kent. “They’re all so groovy, they’re real good at music, but they also know how to really f___ me over. Mike, Carl and Al [Jardine, the group’s rhythm guitarist] are the three guys that stomped my head in. Over the years they managed to stomp my brains out. They knew the secret formula [of] how to f___ Brian Wilson over. And they still do.”

Not that you’ll hear anything of this kind in the Beach Boys documentary, you understand. What you’ll get, instead, is Mike Love saying that “if I could, I’d probably just tell [the rest of the band] that I love them, and nothing can erase that.” The film ends with the surviving members greeting each other beneath a cloudy sky at the lip of the Pacific Ocean. As music fills the screen, one is left to wonder whether the singer took the opportunity to do even that.

The news just in that Eric Carmen, one of the greatest of all Brian’s disciples, died in his sleep this weekend age 74, RIP

Just looked at Instagram and there are some photos of Mike and David at Chiller Theater, plus over a dozen of Carnie - who celebrated her birthday at the convention.

John Cowsill was the drummer at the tribute for the Rascals’ Dino Danelli last night at the Cutting Room in NYC. Eddie Brigati sang some numbers and Gene Cornish attended, but apparently Felix Cavaliere was absent.

Are you sure it was Felix that was absent, not Eddie? Felix and Gene have been doing some work together recently. Eddie doesn't want to be a part of it.

Eddie was onstage, several photos of him at event on FB. Also pics of Gene looking reasonably good, but he took a bow from the audience and didn’t play. Pretty impressive lineup of drummers besides John: Corky Laing, Steve Jordan, Simon Kirke, Dennis Diken. Paul Shaffer on keys. Will Lee and even the Alessi brothers.

John Cowsill was the drummer at the tribute for the Rascals’ Dino Danelli last night at the Cutting Room in NYC. Eddie Brigati sang some numbers and Gene Cornish attended, but apparently Felix Cavaliere was absent.

https://youtu.be/_04Gj6kvz24

I don’t think it’s been mentioned on the board but a few months back, by way of marking both the 55th anniversary of Song Cycle’s release and his 80th birthday, Van Dyke did a podcast, over an hour and a half long, where he and Richard Henderson who wrote the 33 1/3 book on the album discussed its making, track by track, going into more detail about the process of its writing and recording than I can remember him doing in any previous interview. He also talks about his pre-SC career a little, focusing a bit more on his MGM era than on Smile. Besides the YT link above the podcast can be found at Apple and the other usual suspects.

The Chiller Theater convention is actually next weekend, April 28 to 30. Interestingly, Carnie Wilson will be there Fri and Sat too. Mike and David are top-billed, above Priscilla Presley.

 The convention’s site refers to Mike as making a “super rare” appearance. Usually, if a Chiller guest has never appeared at a signing show before the site will play that up, but it may be that Chiller’s people decided against saying it was Mike’s signing-show debut because there are dozens or maybe hundreds of these shows going back close to 30 years, and if a guest is mistakenly billed as making such a debut someone will point that out later.

Some other musical notables there will include some members of the Blues Brothers band (the living members that were in the first movie minus Steve Cropper, plus Tom Scott who was in the band initially but left before filming); Jimmy Hart, who will attend in his capacity as wrestling legend but I guess will be happy to sign his old Gentrys records; and Bebe Buell, who according to the site will sign musical items - that is, her records as a singer - as well as photos.

From Mike Stax of the Ugly Things zine the sad news that a sudden attack of meningitis has taken Jeff Beck. Whether or not you think his tour with Brian was an interesting experiment or a mismatch or maybe even a success, no denying the enormous degree to which he expanded the possibilities of the electric guitar. I stood 15 feet from him at his Louisville show in ‘76 and the word phenomenal is what comes to mind all these years later. RIP

Yes, VDP has reached what the Gettysburg Address calls four score. May he see some score more!

By way of comparison Rolling Stone’s earlier list

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-greatest-singers-of-all-time-147019/aretha-franklin-6-227696/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-singers-all-time-1234642307/

Rolling Stone’s done another list of the greatest singers of all time - pointing out in the intro that the criteria used to determine greatest singer are different from those used to decide the greatest technically proficient vocalists.

The last time the magazine put together such a list, a dozen years ago, it was 100 greatest; now it’s 200 greatest.

Much more so than was the case in the previous list, non-rock singers are included. For example, Om Khalsoum, the great Egyptian singer is on it, and so is Ofra Haza.

Brian is at number 57 and Carl is not included.

Very remarkably, Joe Cocker, who certainly would have been in the top ten or at least 20 if Rolling Stone had done an issue like this in the 1970s, isn’t included at all. He was number 98 in the earlier list of 100.

Harry Nilsson is another fine singer not in the list.

Happy Birthday Brian!

Sorry about starting the thread twice but at first I got an error message and I tried it again.

It’s interesting to compare the 125 smackeroos Mike charges to what others charge. Carnie asks for $75, Neil Sedaka for $399, Debbie Gibson $250, for example.

https://www.cameo.com/mikeloveofcl?utm_medium=owned-crm&utm_source=email&utm_audience=customer&utm_type=singlesend&utm_subtype=newtalent&utm_drip=email&j=9c2fa43a1933572e9589028d16b99eaa&utm_campaign=210420%3ACus%3AHEng%3ACRM%3ANewTalent%3ALonzoBall&sub=5dfb106e577acd01839489e1&fbclid=IwAR22lK7fXnr2_1ticbTeupJCUl3-wV-fLkIfhk7h3XbnBtKSFU9t-_gCf5g

I think we all could see this coming but the question is who’ll be next in the band to sign with the personalized greeting service?

https://www.cameo.com/mikeloveofcl?utm_medium=owned-crm&utm_source=email&utm_audience=customer&utm_type=singlesend&utm_subtype=newtalent&utm_drip=email&j=9c2fa43a1933572e9589028d16b99eaa&utm_campaign=210420%3ACus%3AHEng%3ACRM%3ANewTalent%3ALonzoBall&sub=5dfb106e577acd01839489e1&fbclid=IwAR22lK7fXnr2_1ticbTeupJCUl3-wV-fLkIfhk7h3XbnBtKSFU9t-_gCf5g

I think we all could see this coming but the question is who’ll be next in the band to sign with the personalized greeting service?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1971-Beach-Boys-Dennis-Wilson-hand-written-note-to-Dad-I-Owe-You-50-cash/143730306492?hash=item2176fe6dbc:g:ExYAAOSwUyZfWkzw

Rockaway Records which often sells curious memorabilia on Ebay and its own site has come up with a dilly this time: a note in longhand from Dennis agreeing to repay a $50 loan from “Dad” at Bri-Mur publishing, as an advance for “See Spot Run Prod. Co.”

Mountvernonandfairway.de in its miscellaneous topics page lists the five songs published by Bri-Mur: "Break Away," "Soulful Old Man Sunshine," "Shyin' Away" and two Dennis songs from 1971, "Behold the Night" and "It's New Day." The document is dated 1971 and the handwriting is quite recognizably Dennis’ so it looks authentic... but what See Spot Run was and how it connected to Dennis’ songwriting at that point I don’t know.

Thought about putting this in On Topic since he was after all Hawthorne’s leading musical visionary not named Wilson....but anyway word has come that Emitt Rhodes died peacefully this afternoon, age 70, RIP.

At the 46:45 mark a teamup for the ages, the Quasar of Rock...and Van Dyke Parks...
https://youtu.be/Y7d16oTJ7yQ

- at the 11:47 mark:

https://youtu.be/3NbQkyvbw18

I think this is the first time any of the guys have been referred to by name in a Dylan tune...unless he’s got one still on the cab discussing Mike’s Rock’n’roll Hall of Fame remarks....

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18&feature=youtu.be

At the stroke of midnight Bob Dylan released this very long murder ballad. Not quite as multifaceted as Desolation Row, not quite as melodic as Phil Ochs’ song on the same subject Crucifixion, but, as Bob says on Twitter, his fans “may find it interesting.” Whether this has been sitting around for a while or whether Bob just thought he’d make one last big statement in case covid-19 got him, who knows? Anyway there ‘tis....

A quick reminder, or notice if you haven’t heard yet, that on Saturday Feb 29 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale just north if LA there will be a benefit show in the Wild Honey series which raises funds for an autism nonprofit. Each show focuses on a particular artist or sometimes album. The featured artist this time is the Lovin’ Spoonful. Early on Steve Boone and Joe Butler agreed to appear....then when John Sebastian got word of the show he agreed to perform with them, for the first time since the Spoonful reunited 20 years ago at their Rock ‘n’Roll Hall of Fame induction not long before Zal Yanovsky’s death.

Besides the Spoonful’s set various musicians of note will be playing, from Micky Dolenz, Moby Grape’s Peter Lewis and Dave Alvin on down. Carnie Wilson will be representing our guys there. A few dozen seats in the balcony are still available at $30 but since Rolling Stone’s site just did an article on this show you’d better move quick if you want to attend.

Further info at

https://alextheatre.org/event/wild-honey-foundation-presents-wild-honey-orchestra-lovin-spoonful-autism-benefit

and a list of artists performing is at

http://glendalearts.org/event/wild-honey-foundation-presents-wild-honey-orchestra-celebrates-the-lovin-spoonful-to-benefit-the-autism-think-tank/

If you’re not an Amazon Prime subscriber, Seconds can be seen for free here:

https://archive.org/details/John.Frankenheimer..Seconds.1966angeeParaZoowoman.website

Fast forward to the 20 minute mark if you want to start at the point Brian walked in to see it.... though I should add that even when seen from the beginning this is uneasy viewing and if watched after dark preferably should not be seen alone.

I’ve discussed Seconds a bit in other topic threads about the movie here so will just note, again, that the casting of two actors playing the same person naturally brings Love and Mercy to mind though I don’t know if Bill Pohlad had seen this film before deciding to use two actors to play Brian. That said there are definite similarities between the second half of L&M and the second and third “acts” of Seconds....

Kim Shattuck, who first gained notice as a member of the Pandoras and later led the pop/punk band the Muffs, died this morning in LA at the age of 56 after a two year battle with ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As a rocker and a screamer she was second to none. The first two Muffs albums hold up as well as just about anything released in the 90s. But sometimes her songwriting displayed a gentler and occasionally BB’s influenced side. That was probably why she and her Muffs bandmates appeared at one of the Wild Honey shows in LA some years ago and performed this:

https://youtu.be/IHj8wKXiLR0

Seeing Kim taking on one of the most complicated Brian melodies is a little startling and though she might have done better tearing through, say, Little Honda, there’s something gentle and childlike in her delivery that fits in. She’ll be missed.

https://www.estatesales.net/CA/Santa-Monica/90405/2264232

Dusting off this thread because this Saturday and Sunday at the late Gary Stewart’s Mar Vista home there’s a sale of all his belongings (except for his gigantic vinyl/CD/tape collection which was bequeathed to his Rhino store colleague Jeff Gold). Items include his huge collection of books (which would have many out of print and extremely collectible music related titles), his countless x-large Hawaiian shirts, lots of DVDs and VHS tapes, tons of promotional swag from T shirts down to badges, potted plants...and his bike. Proceeds go to his favorite charities. Further details and photos at the link above.