Fender Demands Builders Stop Making Stratocaster-Style Guitars

Following on from its legal victory regarding the Stratocaster trademark in March, a law firm claiming to represent Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has reportedly sent cease and desist orders to a variety of guitar makers demanding they stop producing instruments that use the Stratocaster design.

Back in 2009, Fender lost a high-profile US case when the brand attempted to file trademarks for the Stratocaster, Telecaster and P-Bass body shapes. At the time the filing was protested by a group of other guitar makers, who ultimately succeeded in having the trademarks cancelled.

In the years since, it was widely assumed that this defeat – following on from Gibson’s 2005 loss in a lawsuit against PRS in 2005 – gave other builders the freedom to use classic body shapes, provided that they didn’t infringe on things like headstock shape.

However, Gibson’s protracted but ultimately successful battle against Dean Guitars over the Flying V body shape showed that the big brands still have the ability to win these cases in the right circumstances. [...]

The Fender ruling, crucially, was NOT a trademark dispute – Fender and Gibson have both lost trademark cases on their body shapes in the EU in years past – but sought to reframe the Strat’s body shape as an artistic work, subject to copyright, instead.

by Josh Gardner, Guitar.com |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/uncredited
[ed. Idiots. How to destroy decades of history, goodwill, and brand loyalty in one letter. See also: Is this the beginning of the end for the S-style? (Music Radar).]

via:

[ed. French rocker.]

The Specials

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler

Rita Ray

[ed. Ms. Steal-Your-Man, Pt. 2. Bonus: Oh Honey (studio version).]

Alistair Colling and Tortured Soul (feat. Sabina Sciubba)

Critical Mass

Rick Beato Versus the NY Times

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article—so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy—but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally—the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in”—whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list.” But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter.” The survey was just a “starting point.” The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment—when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.”

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader—simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny. [...]

During the subsequent 72 hours, the backlash intensified. A fiery response from esteemed jazz pianist Brad Mehldau was ostensibly a defense of Billy Joel, but focused mostly on the problems with music criticism of this sort. He describes a music critic character type very similar to the one I warned against in my article:

He is a snob who wants to be hip, so he becomes a critic. He listens to music not because he loves music, but because of how it defines his understanding of himself, narcissistically.

But even this response was mild compared to Rick Beato’s take, which went live yesterday. Rick is a very smart guy with big ears and a deep understanding of music—much deeper than those Times insiders. And his words carry weight. By my measure, Beato has more influence than any music critic in the world right now, and when he says something, it gets attention.

Rick had already released a video about the Times songwriter list, and he rarely deals with the same issue a second time. “I don’t usually make videos back-to-back on the same topic,” he explains. But he was also irritated by the tone of the Times video and felt compelled to respond to it.

His rebuttal is going viral with a vengeance. It’s been up for less than a day, and already has ten times as many views as the original Times video.

For the most part, he just shares clips from the Times podcast—which are damaging enough—before asking in frustration: “You hear these guys competing for the worst take?” In his words, they come across as “the most pretentious, cork-sniffing smug people”—whose condescension is all the worse because they have “no background in music.”

Rick, I should add, is not just a pundit, but is also a very skilled guitarist, record producer, music educator, etc. He possesses real credentials—the same ones the Times critics lack—and not just opinions.

But did he go too far?

The people watching his video clearly don’t think so. It already has 10,000+ comments—that’s more responses than the original Times article received. And they are brutal.

That first comment has almost 8,000 likes. As I said above, Hades is getting hotter—especially that level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for music critics.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:
Images: NYT/YouTube

[ed. No Paul McCartney, Jimmy Webb, James Taylor... but Missy Elliot, Taylor Swift, Young Thug (?!), Babyface, Stephen Merrit, Romeo Santos, Outkast (?!), Lana Del Ray (?!), The Dream (who?), Bad Bunny, other greats...]

Loggins & Messina

[ed. See also: Live From Daryl's house: I'm Alright.]

Moonlight Jazz Blue

Hollow Body

I enrolled in MUS 253: Classical Guitar out of desperation. I’m an English professor, and since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, things have changed. I watched students, staff, colleagues, and administrators outsource their thinking to the machine, and the academy soon became a sham to me, a farce of its former self. I once taught students to spend time inside sentences, to wrestle with difficulty, to make productive use of their uncertainty by paying close attention to how language works on the page. We once sat inside paragraphs, dwelt inside language in its richness and complexity.

But the ease of AI has devalued language, difficulty, and the work and perseverance and focus necessary to make meaning out of words. Believing a writer should write her own sentences and a reader should read instead of relying on AI summaries, I have become Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, the work of teaching and learning, reading and writing seemingly pointless in the face of the juggernaut offering to do my students’ work for them. After years of this, I descended into a severe depression marked by panic attacks, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. A complete loss of meaning in your life’s work will do that.

A therapist once told me that one way to manage the hollow of depression is to find an activity that creates pleasure but also demands mastery—something like baking, or the arts, or sports. Such pursuits engage both mind and body, reorienting your focus away from the myopic self-obsession of depression and toward, instead, something beyond the self, some palpable problem that can be worked through and, with enough time, eventually solved. There is peace in that, my therapist said; satisfaction too. And, he added, these activities tend to be much better for you than the many vices people often turn toward to fill that emptiness when stressed, anxious, and depressed.

So I signed up for guitar lessons. I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery. I also wanted to retreat into a familiar role, to become a student again, and to rediscover what it means to, and how one does, learn. I hoped that, in the long hours of practicing, I might somehow cast aside the cynicism and despair overtaking my teaching and so rekindle my love of the classroom—and of life.

by Peter Wayne Moe , Longreads | Read more:
Image: Mischa Willett

Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters

[ed. From Just For Today (full album). Bonus: Song for a Sun:]

via:

[ed. Juilliard School of Fine Arms.]

Japanese House

Rosalía’s LUX Listening Party in Barcelona Changes the Paradigm for Live Event Curation (Hypebot).

***

Rosalía hosted a semi-secret listening party with about 900 guests for her newly released, and highly acclaimed, album L U X at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), in Barcelona.

But this was unlike any listening event we’ve seen before.

The Spanish singer and pop sensation dressed in white, stood and sat and laid down silently and nearly motionless throughout the full hour-long event. There was no rapturous introduction, and when the last notes of the album’s final track rang out, Rosalía simply walked offstage to the sounds of her applause, without uttering a word.

She existed like a living sculpture for an extended moment in time, as her courageously orchestrated and sound-designed album draped her and her audience in sound.

Backline: What Happens Before Doors Open

When fans walk into a venue, they see the lights, the merch lines, the dark stage, and eventually the band walking onstage. What they don’t see is the world that made that moment possible.

That world is backline.

Backline is the instruments and equipment artists use on stage — drum kits, guitars, bass rigs, keyboards, amps, stands, pedals, thrones, cables, and all the details in between. It’s also the people who source it, prep it, transport it, set it up, troubleshoot it, and pack it down after the encore.

If everything goes perfectly, nobody notices us. That usually means we did our job right.

It Starts Long Before Show Day

Most backline orders begin when a promoter is booking talent for a show. Somewhere in that process, an artist’s backline rider gets sent over. That rider is the gear wish list: exact drum sizes, amp models, keyboard stands, strings, sticks, drum heads, and sometimes highly specific requests that only make sense if you’ve spent years on the road.

Our goal is simple: fill the rider exactly as requested.

Sometimes the artist team tells us, “This is our full touring rider — since it’s a fly date, we can simplify a few things.” Other times, every detail matters.

Promoters are naturally budget-conscious, but they also know artists don’t want to walk onstage and see low-grade gear. While the promoter may be the client on paper, the artist is the one trusting us in real time. That’s why cutting corners is never a smart move.

The Perfect Fly Date Doesn’t Exist

The best fly-date riders are realistic, clear, and tailored to the show. Those are gold. They help everyone win. Then there are festivals. Multiple bands, tight changeovers, shared drum kits, shared amps, shared keyboards, limited stage space, and no chance every artist gets their exact dream setup.

That’s where backline becomes equal parts logistics and diplomacy. We want every artist to have a smooth day, even when five bands are sharing the same stage gear.

The Real Work Happens at the Warehouse

People assume the hard part is show day. Sometimes it is. But one of the most important parts of a rental happens when the gear comes back. Returns mean inspection, testing, cleaning, recoiling cables, wiping cases, checking hardware, and making sure everything is ready to go again.

Road cases protect gear, but attention to detail keeps gear exceptional. Clients notice when cymbals shine, drums look fresh, and guitars feel dialed in.

Then comes prep for the next show.

Depending on the schedule, we may be packing days ahead—or hours ahead during busy season. Drum heads get installed and tuned. Guitars and basses get fresh strings. Spare cables get packed. Cases get labeled. Trucks get loaded.

Then it’s wheels up.

Arrival: Controlled Chaos

We usually aim to arrive before the artist. Ideally, security knows we’re coming, stagehands are ready, and we have a clear path to the stage.

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it’s a muddy festival field where road cases are bouncing through grass and dirt on the way to the stage. Show business keeps things interesting.

Once we hit the stage, our techs move fast. We check the stage plot with audio and lighting, uncase gear, position amps, build drum kits, and make sure everything is where it needs to be.

If we haven’t met the production manager yet, we’ll often reference recent show photos or videos to get placement close before the artist arrives. A standard band setup can usually be show-ready in 90 minutes to two hours — assuming the day behaves itself.

Then the Artist Walks In

This is where the human side matters.

An artist arriving at a venue is stepping into the first moments of their workday. New room, new stage, new energy, rented gear, and a schedule that’s already tight.

We introduce ourselves casually: we’re the backline team, we’re here to help, and we’ve got you covered.

by Neil Rosenbaum, Hypebot | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: In the New Era of Touring, Artists Are Planting in One City. For Weeks. (Hypebot).]

Grateful Dead

 

Glen Campbell

[ed. Never heard this before, but apparently Brian Wilson gave it to Glen as a thank-you for something or other. Glen does a great job, but you can easily guess who wrote it.]

Amaia

[ed. Very talented young lady (and fun group). And she plays a chair.]

I'm Just a Sound

One Sunday​ morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs including ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, ‘Caroline, No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘God Only Knows’. All around three minutes long or a bit less, they can make you feel as if you are standing alone in a cathedral, bathed in sound. Wilson was able to make pop music that was uplifting without ever being sickly. Secular hymns baited with pop hooks; heavy themes made exquisitely light. ‘His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).

From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get Around’. Yet there is a logic here. Rock’n’roll was born from the uneasy tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning, church pew and dance floor, showing out and making things right with God. After those beginnings, pop and rock would go on to supply plenty of carnal jolt, but far fewer intimations of the sacred.

To an extent rivalled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair. Many of the people in it – abusers, exploiters, bad magi – are not rounded or sympathetic figures; it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly natural to come up with the idea of writing a pop music suite embodying the four elements?

Everything in this story is multiple and contradictory. No fact is secure, no testimony certain: all is apocrypha, surmise and legend. Over the years, the principals have offered wildly different readings of the same events, none more so than the prodigy at the heart of it all. In his brisk, canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past ... the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed through his head. There are even two starkly different Brian Wilson memoirs. [...]

Murry Wilson, the father of Brian and his two brothers, fellow Beach Boys Carl and Dennis, was not by all accounts an easy man to love. He was a businessman, but his dream life was dominated by the siren call of music. It nagged at him that his talent as a composer and songwriter wasn’t getting its due. Why weren’t his melodies heard everywhere? He was snappish, sniping, volatile, and doled out violent punishments to his three sons. The only time he wasn’t angry was when he could be soothed by the syrupy sounds of easy listening music. Off the back of his sons’ success he would eventually release his own LP, The Many Moods of Murry Wilson (1967) – the title is apt. The middle Wilson, Dennis, took the brunt of Murry’s physical abuse, but Brian, first born and most gifted, was the one in the dangerous position of being able to realise his father’s dreams. The ire of a disappointed god: anything you do will be either too good or not good enough. In this eggshell atmosphere, while the boys’ mother, Audree, rustled up huge amounts of anaesthetic food – hyperactive Dennis was the only one who didn’t pile on the pounds – Brian taught Carl and Dennis to sing in harmony; this, he later reflected, ‘brought peace to us’.

Brian studied Bach and Beethoven, and learned to trust in the healing balm of counterpoint. And like Beethoven, who also had two brothers and a violent, overbearing father, he was slowly going deaf. ‘Before he entered his teens,’ Doggett explains, ‘Brian’s parents noticed that he tended to talk out of one side of his mouth and would turn his head around to pick up sounds or voices that came from the opposite side of his head. Tests were carried out, and it was determined that he enjoyed less than 20 per cent hearing in his right ear.’ There seems never to have been an official diagnosis. All we know is that Brian didn’t seem to hear like anyone else. As with Beethoven, his partial deafness and the ringing in his ears didn’t hinder his work as a composer, but it did make live performance a living hell and caused him to withdraw slowly from the hubbub of social life. The crossroads moment took place high up in the air: in December 1964 Wilson was flying to Houston to start a tour when he had some kind of convulsive breakdown. Too much pressure, in both senses. Things that make your head go pop. He no longer wanted to be up on stage with all the feedback and screaming.

The recording studio made possible new ways of listening. Tiny increments of syllable and sound to juggle. Listen to tapes of Wilson working in the studio and you can hear just how precise and in control he is: this is the one place where he knows who he is and what he wants. Did he ever sound more sensual than when he delivered the lines ‘I can hear so much/in your sighs’ and ‘Listen, listen, listen ...’ from ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’? ‘Music became his language of choice,’ Doggett writes, ‘with which he was far more articulate than he ever was with words.’ You could say things to girls you could never say in real life. You could conjure up swells, plateaux, shivers; the sound of the sun coming up over the sea. Like many a Romantic man, his way of feeling intimacy is via something cloudy, oceanic, mountain-top. The nearest faraway place.

One of​ the mythic promises of rock’n’roll was escape to a place where the action was and where you could maybe find others like yourself. But there would be no such getaway for the Beach Boys – no big city salvation, no yellow brick road. They would live and die in LA. The Beach Boys didn’t scour snow-strafed city streets looking for old blues 78s. They idolised the very ‘square’ barbershop quartet the Four Freshmen; Wilson wrote a song called ‘Be True to Your School’. They were not, in a word, cool. They didn’t leave home, didn’t mooch, didn’t stray: they were already in the teen fantasy promised land. In Hawthorne, south-west Los Angeles, everything was on their doorstep, including their future bandmates: livewire cousin Mike Love; high-school classmate Al Jardine; long-time neighbour David Marks.

The Beach Boys, like many of the new bands of that era, sprang out of a local scene with its own heroes, slang, fashion. In this bright diurnal paradise, four of their early singles were hymns to a local leisure pursuit/metaphysical quest: ‘Surfin’’, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’. But then there suddenly appeared the achingly introspective ‘In My Room’. Co-written with Gary Usher, it’s a swerve away from the world of the drive-in, the burger place, the drag strip into a wholly/holy inner world where the singer can ‘lie awake and pray’. It’s a vulnerable song about the desire to be invulnerable. ‘You’re not afraid when you’re in your room,’ Wilson once said. The recording studio was his other panic room. It was somewhere you could explore a spectrum of emotional tones, as heard in early songs like ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963), ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (1964), ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (1964) and, most of all for me, the near-perfect pop record ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (1965), written, arranged and produced by Wilson, sung by a young Glen Campbell.

Wilson would soon become notorious for how much time he took to record things, but at this early stage everything was a blur. There were ten Beach Boys studio albums between 1962 and 1965. There were no maps, no precedents; their de facto manager and ‘appropriate adult’ at this point was their irascible, interfering father. Brian Wilson may have had his mood swings but he was, in his own way, quite sturdy. Something you begin to notice, leafing through all the Beach Boys books, is how strapping the teenage Brian looks in high-school snaps and how sporty too; this was no neurasthenic squirt. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a cut-up. A twelfth-grade report card reveals that he got an A in Physical Education, a B in Senior Problems (Personal Psychology) and only a C for Piano and Harmony.

Wilson was famously not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and curls, seeking moments of transcendence, measured in seconds or a few short minutes – just like the pop music Wilson was about to unleash on the world.

by Ian Pernman, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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