Steve Weitzman – “Zappa and the Captain Cook” (1975)
Taken from Rolling Stone, July 3, 1975 – this was the period where Zappa and Beefheart kissed and made up and went on tour together. You can still sense a bit of patronising and condescension though between the two, if you read between the lines…
Captain Beefheart, rock’s sometime genius, had just finished a show with Frank Zappa, with whom he’s touring after the end of their longtime feud. Slumped backstage at the Capitol Theatre, he scratched his shaggy head and slowly related the latest bizarre turn in his odd life.
“I said some silly things,” Beefheart noted, “because I’m a spoiled brat and I don’t understand business to the degree that Frank does. I probably felt neglected. I’ll admit it… and I told him so. I said, ‘I’m sorry Frank and I don’t mean that for an excuse.’ We shook hands and that was that.”
Zappa and Beefheart’s relationship goes back 20 years, to when they attended junior high school together in Lancaster, California. “I was there when he picked up his first guitar,” Beefheart recalled. “It was a funny little brown thing with hardly any strings, but it sure sounded good to me.” The two tried unsuccessfully in 1964 to form a group called the Soots, and then went their separate ways – Zappa to form the Mothers, Beefheart to search for his Magic Band.
The problems began in 1969 when Beefheart did Trout Mask Replica for Zappa’s Straight Records. “I did Lick My Decals Off, Baby right after Trout Mask. The group wanted to be commercial and since they were so nice about doing those two I thought I owed them a moral obligation and I stayed. But I should have gotten rid of them then.”
Beefheart added that his last two albums, Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans and Moonbeants were “horrible and vulgar,” and that he’d “headed for the redwoods to paint and write” as soon as he’d fulfilled his obligation to Mercury.
But other stories have Beefheart accusing Zappa of poor production on Trout Mask and interfering with its creativity. In 1972, Beefheart told the New Musical Express: “Zappa is an oaf. All he wanted to do was make me into a horrible freak . . . Zappa made me look out of the question, and the kids out there on the streets started to take dope because they thought that was the only way they could possibly get into my music. It was disgusting and totally degrading that Zappa should do this to me.”
Evidently, Beefheart had second thoughts in the woods, and he called Zappa to praise Apostrophe and “just to say hello.”
“He apologised for all the garbagio and asked for a job,” Zappa said. “The Captain repented. He had been real confused.”
Beefheart auditioned just before Halloween, Zappa continued. “He flunked. See, he had a problem with rhythm, and we were very rhythm oriented. Things have to happen on the beat. I had him come up on the bandstand at our rehearsal hall and try to sing ‘Willie the Pimp’ and he couldn’t get through it. I figured if he couldn’t get through that, I didn’t stand much of a chance in teaching him the other stuff.”
Zappa and Beefheart tried again this spring. “Although he still has trouble remembering words and making things happen on the beat,” Zappa said, “he’s better. Just before the tour, I tried him again and he squeaked by.”
Beefheart’s major contribution to the present Zappa show involves growling the lead vocals on “Poofter’s Froth, Wyoming” (which Zappa wrote for him), “Orange Claw Hammer” (from Trout Mask) and “Willie the Pimp,” the show stopper. Remembering the lyrics had apparently been a problem for Beefheart – he keeps them written down on a stand located at his feet onstage. Zappa is interested in getting Beefheart “to relax to the point where he can improvise words. He can do really funny stuff when he’s sitting around in a room. But he hasn’t really gotten comfortable enough yet.”
At this point, Zappa plans to remix and reissue Trout Mask, which Beefheart still describes as “my favourite.” Beefheart said he’s “had an extreme amount of fun on this tour. They move awfully fast. I’ve never travelled this fast. With the Magic Band – turtles all the way down. “Frank is probably the most creative person on this planet. He writes things for instruments that haven’t even been invented.” Beefheart paused for a moment and then resumed. “He’s another Harry Partch,” he said, referring to the avant-garde composer, “only he hasn’t dried up yet. Get it?”
Steve Weitzman
The Rolling Stones – “Hot Stuff” (Promo – 1976)
Promo clip from 1976 of The Stones lip syncing to their funk classic off the Black and Blue album…
Charles Shaar Murray – “Turning Points: Robert Johnson” (1999)
Written by Charles Shaar Murray for the Daily Telegraph, Nov. 1999 about mysterious legendary bluesman Robert Johnson…
The legend of Robert Johnson was a long time in the building, and it was forged by the fusion of his brilliance and his obscurity. He became the grand archetype of the pre-war Mississippi Delta blues singers despite having recorded, during his brief career, a mere 29 songs, few of which were released during his lifetime, and only one of those achieved the status of even a regional hit.
Over the quarter-century following his mysterious death in 1937, his songs survived on a few scratched-up 78s, on eagerly-traded tapes of his unreleased songs disinterred from record-company vaults, and in the anecdotal memories of his fellow Delta bluesmen, but most of all through the persistent notion that the uncanny power of his work derived from a deal he’d cut, like some Mississippian Mephistopheles, to sell his soul to the devil, and that his premature demise had been the price he’d paid to make such extraordinary music.
In the early ’60s, his work was collected on LP for the first time, and the resultant album, King of the Delta Blues Singers hit the blues revivalists of that era like the proverbial ton of bricks. His songs, like ‘Love in Vain’ and ‘Crossroads’, were recorded by the likes of Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones. A second Johnson collection followed a few years later, and researchers set to work to engineer, once and for all, the posthumous emergence from the mists of his own myth which finally rendered objective assessment possible.
Robert Johnson was simultaneously the last bluesman of one kind and the first of another. This is an oversimplification, but only a minor one: by1936, when he was first recorded, the golden age of downhome Delta blues was almost over. Radio was bringing the music of the swing bands into every home; urbanised Delta migrants like Big Bill Broonzy were recording with jazz musicians, and T-Bone Walker was already playing electric guitar with a big band. The idea of recording a Delta singer without even the rudimentary support of bass, drums and piano was already verging on anachronism.
But Johnson was different. Unlike the bluesmen of even a few years earlier, Johnson was familiar with recorded blues. Indeed, he was one of the first bluesmen to have learned significantly from the recordings of others rather than simply reworking and extending the ideas of local musicians through the folk process, and his songs were virtually conceived specifically to be recorded: tightly constructed both musically and lyrically, custom-built for the three-minute format of the 78rpm record.
Recording had broken down and irrevocably transformed the folk process, and Johnson demonstrated this perfectly, both in the manner in which he assimilated material from the recordings of others, and designed his own music for the recording process. For Johnson, in short, it was not the song which was the final stage in the creative process, but the record.
Robert Johnson was born near Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911. He got interested in music during his teens, progressing from jews-harp to harmonica to guitar, and by all accounts he was awful, hanging around with older, more skilled musicians like Charley Patton and Son House and receiving little but derision for his pains. Then he disappeared for awhile, and when he became back he was almost shockingly good. “He was in a little town named Friar’s Point, and he was playing on the corner there,” Muddy Waters once recalled. “People were crowdin’ round him. And I stopped and peeked over. I got back in the car and left, because he was a dangerous man … and he really was usin’ the git-tar, man I crawled away and pulled out, because it was too heavy for me …”
Johnson’s recording career lasted approximately seven months: he cut two sessions in November 1936 and a third the following summer. By the time New York record producer and promoter John Hammond heard of him and tried to book him for a massive “Spirituals To Swing” black music showcase at Carnegie Hall, he was already dead. In fact, he hadn’t survived to see the anniversary of his first session. Bill Broonzy ended up playing that gig, but Johnson had already succeeded in reshaping the Delta Blues in his own demon-haunted image.
His omnivorous ear had soaked up the songs of a variety of bluesmen ranging from locals like Kokomo Arnold and Skip James to big-star sophisticates like Lonnie Johnson (no relation) and Leroy Carr, and he not only adapted their songs but improved them. Carr’s ‘In the Evening’ is a fine song, but it pales beside the ‘Love in Vain’ which Johnson developed from it. Arnold had a bigger hit than any of Johnson’s with his ‘Old Original Kokomo Blues’, but it is Johnson’s ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ which we remember. Similarly, another Arnold piece sparked the creation of Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’, which subsequently became a career-defining signature piece for Elmore James.
His influence on James and Waters, and on the hordes of young white bluesmen who, in turn, were influenced by them, made him a pivotal point in the development of the blues, both as music and as myth. The archetype of the tortured drifter, wrestling both inner demons and the outer material world of the racist, apartheid South with nothing but his music and the prospect of the next woman, the next dollar and the next bottle to keep him going, has proved an enduring one, and the music he left behind backs it up all the way.
Johnson’s music is the Delta blues with all hints of meditation or repose stripped away: bare-wire, tendon-taut. His wired, wiry tenor voice and driving, driven guitar provide the scaffolding for epigrammatic lyrics with the enigmatic force of Delta haikus. Listening to songs like ‘Me and the Devil’ and ‘Hellhound on My Trail’ renders utterly irrelevant any questions concerning the ‘objective truth’ of whether Johnson did or did not, in any sense which Western rationalism can comprehend, sell his soul to the devil.
The point is that he evidently believed it, and listening to him, we do, too. The music of Robert Johnson represents the pre-war Mississippi Delta blues at its absolute artistic peak.
Charles Shaar Murray
Neu! – “Neu! 2″ (1973)
An undated review of Neu!’s 2nd album from the PopMatters website (circa early 2000s), written by Nicholas Taylor. This was one strange but fascinating album…
Neu! 2 is one of those rare albums that challenges the very notion of music itself. It scrutinizes the concept of the album, the relationship between the artist and the listener, the producer and the consumer, as well as making the very notion of originality extremely dubious.
In Krautrock/art-rock circles, the story of Neu! 2 is pretty well known. Neu! was formed in 1973 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Multi-instrumentalists Michael Rother (bass, guitar, keyboards) and Klaus Dinger (guitar, drums, keyboards, vocals) left an early formation of what was to become the most famous Krautrock band, Kraftwerk, dissatisfied with the band’s movement toward an entirely electronic sound (for the best example, listen to their classic “Autobahn”). Rother and Dinger wanted to pursue a more minimalist guitar experiment. Hence, Neu! was born.
Neu! recorded their eponymous 1972 debut in four days, and despite the album’s simplicity in terms of both melodies and rhythms, it sold extremely well in West Germany. When they went into the studio in 1973 to record Neu! 2, however, Rother and Dinger ran out of money after recording only a few tracks. Ergo, the bizarreness of Neu! 2. Desperate to get a full-length LP into the stores, Neu! remixed the existing songs at different speeds, resulting, for example, with three versions of both “Super”: along with the normal speed version, we are treated to alternate versions of the same track, simply sped up to 78 rpms (“Super 78″) and slowed down to 16 rpms (“Super 16″). The effect is startling and unsettling-much like the films of Ed Wood, the famed ‘worst director of all time’, these cheap, hastily thrown together tracks leave you wondering if these guys are really serious.
The tracks originally recorded for Neu! 2, however, are wonderful. The meat of the album is the 11-minute driving instrumental, “Für Immer [Forever].” A straight, dry drumbeat consistently chugs along as two clean guitars intertwine with a lightly droning keyboard. As the track progresses, new keyboards glide gently in and out and minimalist lead guitars rise and fade. The effect is something like the Velvet Underground under a warm blanket of synthesizers. “Neuschnee” also stands out, opening with plucked strings ringing out starkly, giving way to another driving instrumental, driven less by thumping guitars than a sublimely beautiful lead guitar ran through so many processors and effects pedals as to sound like a distorted synthesizer.
“Super,” the album’s closer, is nothing short of a time warp: instead of it being 1973, you could swear it was 1977. “Super” is a driving proto-punk guitar swirl, showing us what the Sex Pistols and the Ramones would sound like at their most daring and weird moments. In Dinger’s warped and effected snarls and screams, you hear a prototype for the “Oy! Oy!” of the Ramones later in the decade. And while we’re in the time machine, Dinger’s wailing and desperate gasps and indecipherable yelps on “Lila Engel [Lilac Angel]” are pure Thom Yorke-lilting, delicate, and amazingly affecting.
For all of the sparse greatness of these tracks, however, the fact remains that Neu! 2 is a joke. Not only is the band’s name (which means “New” in German) laughable in it’s tongue-in-cheek over-enthusiasm (an exclamation point?!?), but the cover of Neu! 2 barely qualifies as a cover at all. Over a stark white background, the word “Neu!” is written diagonally in gray in front of a crudely spray-painted bright fluorescent pink ‘2′. Not only did they not have the money to put together enough songs for an album, it also seems they did not have enough money to even attempt making a presentable album cover. And while you can rationalize the “remixes” till you’re blue in the face, they are not “remixes” at all-they are jokes. To play a record at 78 rpms and call it a remix is to throw the whole idea of remixing out the window.
So why do we remember Neu! today? Why are they valorized by such diverse artists as David Bowie, Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, Pere Ubu, Stereolab, and Radiohead? Precisely because of their practical joking. To dismantle the structures of rock and start fresh, you need jokers like Neu! to create music so unabashedly ridiculous and bizarre as to make the notion of “serious” rock a joke. To get some place new, you have to make the values of the past seem ridiculous. Isn’t all really great rock, after all, just a joke? What about “Louie, Louie,” Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, the Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” or the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray?” As great as they are, all of these are jokes.
What all of these artists did in their levity and glee was to push the limits of what “serious” fans would consider art. When an album like Neu! 2 can be re-released by Astralwerks and be heralded as a trailblazing visionary work that never got its proper due, the responsibility lays not on Neu! but on us. They were just bored musicians in a studio making funny sounds – we actually consume those sounds. So when Neu! simply fills in an album with the most ridiculous Ed Wood tactics and get away with it, what does that say about music listeners? When does minimalism give way to pure laziness (or, in this case, poverty)? Are we so enlightened that we can find beauty and meaning in Neu!’s silliness? Or are we simply pretentious fops, heralding anything bizarre as genius, losing all critical insight and some degree of objective evaluation? Neu! 2 is not a great album, but it is amazingly provocative and challenging. It pushes rock to its breaking point.
Is this an album? Is this music? Is this art? I certainly don’t know. But then again, I don’t think Neu! knows either, which is what is so thrilling.
Nicholas Taylor
Charles Bukowski – “Jaggernaut: Wild Horse on a Plastic Phallus” (1975)
Charles Bukowski actually wrote this article on The Rolling Stones for Creem magazine in October 1975. It’s hard to think of Hank attending a Stones concert when he was a lifelong classical music connoisseur…
They opened on the 9th at the Forum and I went to the track the same day. The track is right across from the Forum and I looked over as I drove in and thought, well, that’s where it’s going to be. Last time I had seen them was at the Santa Monica Civic. It was hot at the track and everybody was sweating and losing. I was hungover but got off well. A track is some place to go so you won’t stare at the walls and whack-off, or swallow ant poison. You walk around and bet and wait and look at the people and when you look at the people long enough you begin to realize that it’s bad because they are everywhere, but it’s bearable because you adjust somewhat, feeling more like another piece of meat in the tide than if you had stayed home and read Ezra, or Tom Wolfe or the financial section.
The tracks aren’t what they used to be: full of hollering drunks and cigar smokers, and girls sitting at the side Benches and showing leg all the way up to the panties. I think times are much harder than the government tells us. The government owes their balls to the banks and the banks have over-lent to businessmen who can’t pay it back because the people can’t buy what business sells because an egg costs a dollar and they’ve only got 50 cents. The whole thing can go overnight and you’ll find red flags in the smokestacks and Mao t-shirts walking through Disneyland, or maybe Christ will come back wheeling a golden bike, front wheel 12-to-one ratio to rear. Anyhow, the people are desperate at the track; it has become the job, the survival, the cross…instead of the lucky lark. And unless you know exactly what you’re doing at a racetrack, how to read and play a toteboard, re-evaluate the trackman’s morning line and eliminate the sucker money from the good money, you aren’t going to win, you aren’t going to win but one time in ten trips to the track. People on their last funds, on their last unemployment check, on borrowed money, stolen money, desperate stinking diminishing money are getting dismantled forever out there, whole lifetimes pissed away, but the, state gets an almost 7 percent tax cut on each dollar, so it’s legal. I am better than most out there because I have put more study into it. The racetrack to me is like the bullfights were to Hemingway – a place to study death and motion and your own character or lack of it. By the 9th race I was $50 ahead, put $40 to win on my horse and walked to the parking lot. Driving in I heard the result of the last race on the radio – my horse had come in 2nd.
I got on in, took a hot bath, had a joint, had 2 joints (bombers), drank some white wine, Blue Nun, had 7 or 8 bottles of Heineken and wondered about the best way to approach a subject that was holy to a lot of people, the still young people anyhow. I liked the rock beat; I still liked sex; I liked the raising high roll and roar and reach of rock, yet I got a lot more out of Bee, and Mahler and Ives. What rock lacked was the total layers of melody and chance that just didn’t have to chase itself after it began, like a dog trying to bite his ass off because he’d eaten hot peppers. Well, I’d try. I finished off the Blue Nun, dressed, had another joint and drove back on out. I was going to be late.
S.O. And the parking lot was full. I circled around and found the closest street to park in – at least a half mile away.
I got out and began to walk. Manchester. The street was full of private residents behind iron bars with guards. And funeral homes. Others were walking in. But not too many. It was late. I walked along thinking, shit, it’s too far, I ought to turn back. But I kept walking. About halfway down Manchester (on the south side) I found a golf course that had a bar and I walked in. There were tables. And golfers, satisfied golfers drinking slowly. There was a daylight golf course but these kitties had been shooting for distance on the straight range under the electric lights. Through the glass back of the bar you could still see a few others out there Jerking off golfballs under the moon. I had a girl with me. She ordered a bloody mary and I ordered a screwdriver. When my belly’s going bad vodka soothes me and my belly’s always going bad. The waitress asked the girl for her I.D. She was 24 and it pleased her. The bartender had a cheating, chalky dumb face and poured 2 thin drinks. Still it was cool and gentle in there.
“Look,” I said, “why don’t we just stay in here and get drunk? Fuck the STONES. I mean, I can make up some kind of story: went to see the STONES, got drunk in a golfcourse bar, pewked, broke a table…knitted a palm tree towel, caught cancer. Whatcha think?”
“Sounds all right.”
When women agree with me I always do the other thing. I paid up and we left. It was still quite a walk. Then we were angling across the parking lot. Security cars drove up and down. Kids leaned against cars smoking joints and drinking cheap wine. Beer cans were about. Some whiskey bottles. The younger generation was no longer pro-dope and anti-alcohol – they had caught up with me: they used it all. When 27 nations would soon know how to use the hydrogen bomb it hardly made sense to preserve your health. The girl and I, our tickets were for seats that were separated. I got her pointed in the direction of her seat and then walked over to the bar. Prices were reasonable. I had two fast drinks, got my ticket stub out, put it in my hand and walked toward the noise. A large chap drunk on cheap wine ran toward me telling me that his wallet had been stolen. I lifted my elbow gently into his gut and he bent over and began to vomit.
I tried to find my section and my aisle. It was dark and light and blaring. The usher screamed something about where my seat was but I couldn’t hear and waved him off. I sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette. Mick was down there in some kind of pajamas with little strings tied around his ankles. Ron Wood was the rhythm guitarist replacing Mick Taylor; Billy Preston was really shooting-off at the keyboard; Keith Richards was on lead guitar and he and Ron were doing some sub-glancing lilting highs against each other’s edges but Keith held a firmer more natural ground, albeit an easy one which allowed Ron to come in and play back against shots and lobs at his will. Charlie Watts on tempo seemed to have joy but his center was off to the left and falling down. Bill Wyman on bass was the total professional holding it all together over the bloody Thames-Forum.
The piece ended and the usher told me that I was over on the other side, on the other side of row N. Another number began. I walked up and around. Every seat was taken. I sat down next to row N and watched the Mick work. I sensed a gentility and grace and desperateness in him, and still some of the power: I shall lead you children the shit out of here.
Then a female with big legs came down and brushed her hip against my head. An usher. Grotch, grotch, double luck. I showed her my stub. She moved out the kid on the end seat. I felt guilty and sat down on it. A huge balloon cock rose from the center of the stage, it must have been 70 feet high. The rock rocked, the cock rocked.
This generation loves cocks. The next generation we’re going to see huge pussies, guys jumping into them like swimming pools and coming out all red and blue and white and gold and gleaming about 6 miles north of Redondo Beach.
Anyhow, Mick grabbed this cock at the bottom (and the screams really upped) and then Mick began to bend that big cock toward the stage, and then he crawled along it (living that time) and he kept moving toward the head, and then he kept getting nearer and then he grabbed the head.
The response was symphonic and beyond.
The next bit began. The guy next to me started again. This guy rocked and bobbed and rocked and rolled and flickered and rotor-rooted and boggled no matter what was or wasn’t. He knew and loved his music. An insect of the inner-beat. Each hit with him was the big hit. Selectivity was Non-comp with him. I always drew one of these.
I went to the bar for another drink and after getting this kid out of my $12.50 seat again, there was Mick, he’d put his foot in a stirrup and now he was holding to a rope and he was way out and swinging back and forth over the heads of his audience, and he didn’t look too steady up there waving back and forth, I didn’t know what he was on, but for the sake of his bi-sexual ass and the heads he was going to fall upon I was glad when they reeled him back in.
Mick wore down after that, decided to change pajamas and sent out Billy Preston who tried to cheese and steal the game from the Jag and almost did, he was fresh and full of armpit and job and jog, he wanted to bury and replace the hero, he was nice, he did an Irish jig painted over in black, I even liked him, but you knew he didn’t have the final send-off, and you must have guessed that Mick knew it too as he buried wet ice under his armpits and ass and mind backstage. Mick came out and finished with Preston. They almost kissed, wiggling assholes. Somebody threw a brace of firecrackers into the crowd. They exploded just properly. One guy was blinded for life; one girl would have a cataract over the left eye forever; one guy would never hear out of one ear. 0.K., that’s circus, it’s cleaner than Vietnam.
Bouquets fly. One hits Mick in the face. Mick tries to stamp out a big ball balloon that lands on stage. He can’t push his foot through it. One saddens. Mick runs over, jumps up, kicks one of his fiddlers in the ass. The fiddler smokes a smile back, gently, full of knowledge: like, the pay is good.
The stage weighs 40 elephants and is shaped like a star. Mick gets out on the edge of the star; he gets each bit of audience alone, that section alone, and then he takes the mike away from his face and he forms his lips into the silent sound: FUCK YOU. They respond.
The edge of the star rises, Mick loses his balance, rolls down to stage center, losing his mike.
There’s more. I get the taste for the ending. Will it be “Sympathy for the Devil”? Will it be like at the Santa Monica Civic? Bodies pressing down the aisles and the young football players beating the shit out of the rock-tasters? To keep the sanctuary and the body and the soul of the Mick intact? I got trapped down there among ankles and cunt hairs and milk bodies and cotton-candy minds. I didn’t want more of that. I got out. I got out when all the lights went on and the holy scene was about to begin and we were to love each other and the music and the Jag and the rock and the knowledge.
I left early. Outside they seemed bored. There were any number of titless blonde young girls in t-shirts and jeans. Their men were nowhere. They sat upon the ends of bumpers, most of the bumpers attached to campers. The titless young blonde things in t-shirts and jeans. They were listless, stoned, unexcited but not vicious. Little tight-butted girls with pussies and loves and flows.
So I walked on down to the car. The girl was in the back seat asleep. I got in and drove off. She awakened. I was going to have to send her back to New York City. We weren’t making it. She sat up.
“I left early. That shit is finally deadening,” she said.
“Well, the tickets were free.”
“You going to write about it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get any reaction, I can’t get any reaction at all.”
“Let’s get something to eat,” she said.
“Yeah, well, we can do that.”
I drove north on Crenshaw looking for a nice place where you could get a drink and where there wasn’t any music of any kind. It was 0.K. if the waitress was crazy as long as she didn’t whistle.
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski, now in his fifties, may be one of the foremost American literary figures. Certainly he is one of the loosest, most instinctive old buzzards around. We like him, and you should too – try either of the best of his many books, Notes of a Dirty Old Man and Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions & General Tales of Ordinary Madness, both available from City Lights.
– Creem Magazine, October 1975
Milt Jackson – “People Make the World Go Around” (1972)
This Milt Jackson piece comes from his 1972 Sunflower album and was used on the De La Soul track “Patti Dooke” from 1993.
The Beach Boys – “Friends” (1968)
July 18, 2008 Goldmine article, written by Gillian G. Gaar, about The Beach Boys’ underrated 1968 album Friends. Brian Wilson has stated in the past that this is actually his favorite of all The Beach Boys’ albums. This album also saw the emergence of younger brother Dennis as a talented songwriter in his own right…
The Beach Boys’ Feel-Good Record
In Southern California – during the summer of 1968 – Brian Wilson created a song cycle out of love and inner peace with the Friends LP… it is perhaps the group’s most overlooked summer album.
Defining moments
In the early- to mid-1960s, The Beach Boys were America’s band. They embodied an entire state’s (and coastline’s) lifestyle and sex appeal. Their music (literally) meant sun-drenched summers, cool waves, fast cars, good vibrations, girls and fun, fun, fun. Then, in 1967 – after Brian Wilson challenged the very limits of the recording industry with Pet Sounds (in 1966) – the group began to lose its dynamic stranglehold on the very genre they defined. When Smile was purportedly abandoned, musical peers, critics and fans stopped listening (almost) overnight… big mistake.
The recording industry and its AM radio counterpart were slowly leaning towards “music with meaning,” because times were changing and FM radio was embracing more and more album cuts as the new wave of cool and medium of choice. It wasn’t as though The Beach Boys lost their ability to make great recordings, though.
On the contrary, 1967’s Smiley Smile album featured ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes and Villains’. Possibly more damaging to the group’s image was Brian’s decision to pull out of the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in June of 1967.
Wild Honey (released in December 1967) included ‘Wild Honey’, ‘Aren’t You Glad’ and ‘Darlin” among its cuts. That was the same month that Rolling Stone ran an article by editor Jann Wenner unfairly describing The Beach Boys as “just one prominent example of a group that had gotten hung up trying to catch The Beatles.”
Regardless of the reason, the Brian Wilson “genius” hype had stopped, all (supposedly) because Brian abandoned Smile. This slowly overcame anything the group was actively doing – collectively destroying the groups’ reputation as a dynamic recording force. Public opinion swayed to the newer acts while other musical output continued to explore drug use and the recordings of the times reflected this. Striped shirts were out and incense and paisley were in.
The Beach Boys – almost overnight – became dissident imagery in a time of eruptive change. In June 1968 – a period that clearly illustrates (that) the U.S. was in a state of dramatic disarray – Friends was released. It was an album whose sum of parts collected almost perfectly produced tunes with the musical compass pointing not so subtly at simplicity. Even so, it, collectively, is the true “next counterpart” to the musical lineage that Brian established with All Summer Long, Today, Summer Days (and Summer Nights), Party and Pet Sounds.
Looking at these album titles we see the odd LP is the Party album. With the success of ‘Barbara Ann’ – a song that points back to the essence of All Summer Long and the group’s earlier LPs – Brian bought himself time to work on (and complete) Pet Sounds.
Theoretically, if Brian had done the same thing and recorded a Smiley Smile/Wild Honey-style LP and then released Smile the way he intended, it may have worked more to his advantage, because he would have (again) bought himself more time and appeased Capitol with ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes and Villains’ … he could’ve even placed ‘The Little Girl I Once Knew’ on the album. It still would have been a lot better than Capitol’s The Best of the Beach Boys Volume 2, and it would been fine for Brian to release ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes and Villains’ on two different LPs … He did it with ‘Help Me, Rhonda’. He had (at least) two dramatically different versions of ‘Heroes and Villains’, as well as various takes on ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Vegetables’.
But, because the perception of Smile was that it was ditched (as opposed to preserved), Smiley Smile became a light-hearted swat at what Smile was “supposed to be.” If you were to gather together the material on Smiley Smile and Wild Honey, you’d have a 1967 version of the Today album with one side being the latest and greatest from The Beach Boys and the other side being more – in this, case – lighthearted fare as opposed to music reflective of a strained relationship. Brian did not repeat himself with the Beach Boys albums and their music regarding the content. He kept growing, and that’s why we never got a second Pet Sounds. He moved on.
Since Smile was shelved, Brian continued forward and started working on his newest song cycle. The first step was Wild Honey, which hinted at the material on Friends with ‘Country Air’, ‘I’d Love Just Once to See You’ and ‘Let the Wind Blow’. He had written about everything except family and friends until now.
The group’s 1968 LP would become just that – a true celebration of “the good things in life.” There’s no angst or loss in the material… Perhaps that’s what people were hoping for, because Brian did such an incredible job tapping into his emotional pool in 1966. But now, things were different. Now, things were calm… spiritual. You could say that’s why the album failed; it’s too personal – almost like an inside joke.
Finding the right feel
In his introduction for the Friends/20/20 two-fer (1990), Brian explained, “The songwriting cycle for the Friends album project came quickly… I was, by then, an experienced songwriter, and I knew what each basic key meant to me. By this time I had a good thing rollin’ in my head. … This album was our best production to date. It had perfect instrumental tracking with no mistakes. …”
Spoken like a true perfectionist and composer. Brian remembers Friends as a perfect album and his best production to date. If you listen to the music, he’s right, and still, in spite of Brian’s fondness for the album, many Beach Boys followers have yet to embrace its eclectic semblance.
Maybe the problem is that critics and fans alike (by their own assumed virtue) compare it – and every other album the Beach Boys or Brian have recorded – to Pet Sounds; that’s another mistake, it always has been, and, with the notion that Brian failed with Smile, it’s no wonder few can accept anything after it as a success or (as) important.
The tumultuous abandonment of Smile had nothing to do with Brian’s musical, composing and recording abilities. In fact, he was getting better. “I think that The Beach Boy’s sound was evolving right along. I had developed a sixth sense for everybody’s voices, and we could all harmonize this way. When we all sing together I feel a spiritual closeness,” recalled Brian.
The music emits differently with its sonic usage on Friends, and it holds up within that sound … and that’s where the real dynamism takes place; it’s really an album that shines in an innocent splendor of the human spirit. The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson were all about (from 1966 onward) “feel” in their compositions and their harmonic blend. In many respects, Friends is Brian Wilson’s last great (complete) album with The Beach Boys, and it would prove to take on several other dynamics before it was completed.
Also, in December 1967, Dennis Wilson happened to be the first of The Beach Boys to meet Maharishi while the group was in Paris for a UNICEF benefit concert. Dennis once remembered the fateful meeting: “All of a sudden I felt this weirdness, this presence this guy had. Like out of left field. First thing he [Maharishi] ever said to me (was), ‘Live your life to the fullest.’ So the next day I went over to his room, and he said, ‘Tell me some words of your songs.’ So we told him the lyrics to ‘God Only Knows’ and he goes, ‘That’s the sun rising and the stars and the planets and it connects with …” So I said, ‘God, this is great!’ And he said, ‘We’d like to initiate you into the program.”‘
Dennis made a newfound connection to spirit. He wouldn’t be the only one. Dennis introduced the rest of The Beach Boys to the holy man that same night.
The sessions for Friends commenced in February 1968 and wrapped in April in time for a June release. The sessions were held at Brian’s house and (for the most part) completed at I.D. Sound. Just before the sessions began, Mike Love (who was enthralled with Maharishi) left for Rishikesh, India, to study along with Donovan, Mia Farrow and The Beatles (among others). He would return to the sessions and record vocals in April.
One of the few tracks Mike sang lead on for the Friends album was the opening minuet ‘Meant For You’ (initially titled ‘You’ll Find it Too’). When recalling the album’s opening track, Brian related, “Until now, Mike (Love) had only sung rock and roll songs. Here he had to sing in a peaceful tone of voice …” It’s this tone that sets the album’s peculiar and particular mood, and Love does an incredible job (Mike would return to this form on Sunflower’s ‘All I Wanna Do’ in 1970). Brian’s fondness for the Baldwin Organ (something that began on Smiley Smile) shines through on this song.
The album’s title track was unusual in its waltz-like structure, something Brian was trying to achieve. “The cut ‘Friends’ was, in my opinion, a good way to keep waltzes alive,” recounted Brian. “Carl (Wilson) had sung ‘Darlin” and some others before and now he spearheaded this cut with a heavy vocal performance.” The waltz-like feel was one style Brian was particularly keen on achieving, and it captured the spiritual context of the overall album’s pulse.
The album’s third track, ‘Wake the World’, was one of true beauty with an accompanying message of peace. So true to the overall feeling of the album’s material, this might have been a better name for the LP. It’s also one of the best collaborative efforts between Al Jardine and Brian.
When recalling the Friends album and the track, Al said, “I had a lot of good experiences with Brian when we wrote together. I really valued that time that I had with him. I felt that he still had a lot to offer. I think I helped bring that out during the Friends sessions. That was one of our favorite albums. It’s one of mine, and (I think) it’s one of Brian’s, too. I seem to remember that I was sitting at the piano with Brian, and he had the music worked out when we did ‘Wake the World.’ That was great; I love that song. We wrote that at his house right under that beautiful stained glass Wild Honey cover window. That’s where we did most of the Friends music. It was a great little room.”
Brian relates, ‘”Wake the World’ was my favorite cut. It was so descriptive to how I felt about the dramatic change over from day to night … ‘one by one, stars appear, the light of the day is no longer here’.”
Going deeper into the album we’re treated to the simplicities of life’s wonderment. ‘Be Here in the Mornin” oozes into the generalization that conceptually runs through these songs. The glockenspiel is as unusual a “pop instrument” to use as the theremin, but that never stopped Brian – if he heard it in his head, he’d use it.
This song even includes Murry Wilson (the father) on background vocals with the group. The names mentioned in the song – (Steve) Korthof, (Jon) Parks and (Nick) Grillo – belong to the Wilson brothers’ cousin, the band’s road manager and business manager, respectively. Steve and Jon would share a writer’s credit with Brian, Dennis, Carl and Al on the album’s next track, ‘When a Man Needs a Woman’.
It’s important to note that with the Friends album, Brian returned to the musical template he had established in 1966 with Pet Sounds: the “two instrumental tracks” format. On Pet Sounds Brian used ‘Let’s Go Away for Awhile’ and the title track. Brian returned to this formulaic, outline with ‘Passing By’ and ‘Diamond Head’. ‘Passing By’, a quaint, melodic jaunt of fun that leans heavily on its wordless, summery feel, is the perfect transitional track connector to side 2. (Of note, Carl, Al, Bruce and Brian are all instrumentalists while Brian handles the oohs, along with Carl and/or Al).
Reportedly about a friend of Mike’s, the first song on Side 2 (‘Anna Lee, The Healer’) – as with the first track on Side 1 – features Mike as the lead vocalist. As Brian remembers, “‘Anna Lee, The Healer’ was a delicate blend of our voices; my high voice takin’ the place of the girl’s voice. I never felt bad or self-conscious about my voice, because I can sing high and low both. Mike’s vocal on this one was strong.” The sparse instrumentation only gives more weight to the powerful vocalization and is the Beach Boys’ “light music” at its best.
For the true Beach Boys fans who still bought Beach Boys albums when they hit the stores (particularly overseas), the real musical unveiling came in the form of Dennis, because no one expected it. His compositions – ‘Little Bird’ and ‘Be Still’ (both co-written with poet/lyricist Stephen J. Kalinich) – made it evident that Dennis had discovered a contemporary awareness of self, friendship and life’s simplicities. The wild child, when sitting in front of a piano, became a serene soul.
As Brian remembered, “Dennis gave us ‘Little Bird’ which blew my mind because it was so full of spiritualness. He was a late bloomer as a music maker. He lived hard and rough, but his music was as sensitive as anyone’s. I helped Dennis on ‘Little Bird’ … with the chord progressions and showed him stuff on piano. I thought his songs were remarkable. I thought he was a genius. Dennis was a really, really good person with a lot to say musically. I was shocked (when I heard his stuff). I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.” This statement from Brian unequivocally puts Dennis’ musical contributions to The Beach Boys legacy in clear and proper perspective.
The next song, Brian’s ‘Busy Doin’ Nothin”, is a sweet and banal musical map to Brian’s home. Like everything on the album, its true dynamism lies in its subtlety and pure charm. The album’s last song, ‘Transcendental Meditation’, is perhaps the most unusual track to make the album, not because of its title, but it musically doesn’t fit.
In July of 1968, ‘Do It Again’ (initially titled ‘Rendezvous’) – a new formulaic composition created by Mike with Brian – would find the Beach Boys in familiar territory with a Top 20 single in the U.S. As it turned out, their fans were just waiting for that “old style” type of Beach Boys bliss they were known for.
The B-side to the single was ‘Wake the World’. In fact, when Friends was released in Japan, ‘Do It Again’ was added to the end of Side 1 (after ‘Passing By’). Had ‘Do It Again’ been included on the Friends LP (and) released in July and compiled like its Japan counterpart, history might look back a little more fondly at the Friends album.
‘Do It Again’ would go to #1 in England. When asked about the single’s success, Mike said, “When it went to #1 in England it actually… it sort of blew my mind. It was a retro-surf song. Ya know, let’s go back and do it again. It was the California lifestyle, the surf scene, seeing our old Friends and all that sort of thing. It was a song about how I used to go ditch class with some of my high school buddies. Bill Jackson, Craig Owens and I used to get in Bill’s old Ford convertible and drive down to the beach. On weekends we would go to San Onofre, Trestles and places like that. So, for something that’s so archetypal as ‘California beach life’ to go #1 in England was intense. I thought it was unbelievable. It showed how many fans we had there and how attractive the whole California lifestyle is. Even after we had gone into the other types of music for a while, we came back with ‘Do It Again’. It wasn’t a parody of the times so much, as it was a retrospective of wishing to get back to the fun times that we had had.”
Should the group have waited one more month to release the Friends album? You could argue the point, but there’s no real end result knowing that the Beach Boys’ first true stereo album tanked at #126 on the album charts, and the ‘Friends’/'Little Bird’ single stalled at #47. Still, in the summer of 1968, when the United States was coming undone, it was nice to have something as sophisticatedly simple and comforting as Friends.
Gillian G. Gaar
Lauri Adverb – “the beach of booze and women”
For Ross…
Where you are, the pigs are far away, and looking in the other direction, anyway.
Where you are, the boat you crashed has risen from the depths of the Bay. You pilot it, gleeful, cock-eyed.
Where you are it’s never last call.
Where you are the women wash yr dinner plate, clean the empties from the floor.
Where you are, yr drunk is always that manic everything-fresh elation-state. You remain there. You do not crash to self-pity, self-hate.
Where you are, the Sox play every night. Manny is the reason they win every game.
Where you are, yr friends never sold out, got jobs, and they never go to bed.
Where you are you flash yr grin and the one that got away finds you irresistible again.
Where you are, you and G.G. swill from drinks w/paper umbrellas. Kick sand down each other’s pants.
Where you are, you are judged by yr intentions, not yr actions.
Where you are yer alright w/Jesus. Get stoned w/Buddha.
That empty inside you chased every night w/a dirty rocks glass of scotch stays down here. From where you are, it’s just the scotch, smooth, all the way down.
Lauri Adverb
Colin Wilson – “The Mind Parasites” (1969)
Beat author William S. Burroughs reviewed this book by Colin Wilson for the June 19, 1969 issue of New York underground magazine Rat. The copy editing was so sloppy they misspelled Burroughs’ name as ”Borroughs.”
I am not familiar with the Wilson book itself and know nothing about it, besides this review…
“The human race is being attacked by a sort of mind cancer. Something is sucking the human mind dry and has been sucking it for the past two hundred years.” That is the shattering discovery made by Professor Gilbert Austin. Who or what is responsible? Mind parasites, malignant beings who lurk in the deepest layers of the unconscious… (in precise physiological terms this would correspond to the back brain or hypothalamus) …sapping the very life force of mankind, cutting him off from his natural capacity for self renewal… It was all so unsettling that I broke the habit of a lifetime and drank a bottle of champagne at lunch time.
There is considerable inferential evidence to indicate the actual existence of such a parasitic instance as this book postulates. An Italian sociologist said if you want to get to the bottom of any situation that seems on the surface inexplicable ask yourself the simple question ‘who profits?’ Who would profit from blocking every basic discovery about the human mind? Techniques are now available to alter consciousness and effect the hypothalamus directly. In a recent Mayfair article I described the experiments of doctor Miller who has demonstrated that any mammal can learn to control such seemingly involuntary processes as brain waves, blood pressure, rate of heart beats, his whole state of mind and body. Doctor Miller had great difficulty in raising funds for his experiments. The importance of these experiments was completely missed by the press. The means are at hand to conquer inner space but they are not being used. Despite impressive technical advances the planet is still in the stone age psychologically. Who would profit from turning the clock all the way back to the stone age and keeping man out of space? A parasitic entity that lives in the human body and could not survive space. Only in the last two hundred years have technological advances made space exploration a possibility. By maintaining control of inner space the parasites can block any discovery or destroy anyone who suspects their existence. It is in fact unexplained suicides among scientists investigating inner space that leads to the discovery of the parasites by the narrator Professor Gilbert Austin. Once the presence of the parasites is inferred the means to combat them is obvious. They must be combated by the brain itself pushed up to and beyond its limits so that men can read each other’s thoughts, control their own thoughts and feelings. So they join battle with the parasites on equal terms. These are precisely the measures I have advocated in the Academy Series, measures that must be applied whether we believe in mind parasites or not if man is to expand his horizons and survive in the space age. There is no turning back to the false security of dogmatic creeds. To travel in space you must learn to leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, priest talk, mother talk, family talk, love talk, country talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to see what is in front of you with no preconceptions.
In Mr. Wilson’s narrative it is a space voyage that finally defeats the parasites. They cannot survive in space. As the space craft travels further and further from the earth the parasites, still lurking in the crew, are in a panic. “Now they felt their psychic links with the earth stretching and growing weaker and they were frightened. We now understood the nature of ’space fever’ that had so far frustrated all men’s efforts to penetrate further into space.” Known, watched, the parasites became desperate. They now reveal themselves as creatures of a low intelligence floundering about like a beached squid. “It happened on the fourteenth day… Something infinitely evil and slimy was pushing its way from inside me. I realized I had been wrong to think of the parasites as separate beings. They were one, they were IT, an immense jelly like octopus whose tentacles are separate from its body and can move about like individuals.” (And this being is none other than the ancient slug Abhoth the Dark also known as Abhoth the Unclean)… “Now this infinitely vile thing was coming out of its lair and I could feel its hatred of me, a hatred so powerful and maniacal that it almost needs a new word. Then the inexpressible relief of knowing that it was gone…”
What has made this planet such a soft touch for Abhoth?… The greatest human limitation is that we are all tied to the present by an arbitrary identity, personal and national. What is identity? The identity of a shark is its teeth, its size, its ability to eat and digest almost anything. An oyster’s identity is its protective shell. Identity then is the means by which an organism protects and maintains itself in a hostile environment and all environments that contain such identities are hostile. And what is the identity of Abhoth the Dark? Its ability to remain hidden and carry on a parasitic existence that is hostile to its host by parasitic necessity. So we are all playing Abhoth’s game. And by setting one identity against another Abhoth maintains himself indefinitely.
Isolation from such an environment is the first step in the unexplored territory of inner space… As man loses touch with his inner being he finds himself trapped in the world of consciousness that is to say the world of other people. “Man is a political animal” said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men. Other men do not supply our values. Other men do not matter in the way we have believed. Man is not alone. You could be the last man in the universe and you would not be alone.
William S. Burroughs
