![]() Others in the Beach Boys’ world were more motivated to sell records. Johnston called Reprise, known at the time for acts such as Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, “an insanely cool fan club with a checkbook. I thought the record business owed that man a living.” “He created sales figures that are incomparable to anybody else he created jobs in the American workforce. “He was persona non grata, and that made me angry because he was a guy who built an industry,” Parks says. Parks, then working for Reprise’s parent company, Warner Bros., had “campaigned vigorously” to get the band signed, he said, because he “felt a sense of debt to Brian” after “Smile’s” failure tarnished Wilson’s reputation. The band felt a similar warmth about its new label home. “I don’t know why Marilyn put up with us,” Jardine adds of Brian’s wife at the time. We’d just make ourselves at home and get the project going,” a laid-back vibe that comes through in songs like “ Deirdre” and “ Our Sweet Love.” Brian had a fantastic … larder, is that the right word? Big walk-in with refrigerators and freezers. According to Jardine, “We’d show up every day at pretty much the same time. “You’ve heard of a man cave - we had a band cave,” Johnston says with a laugh. Yet they ended up with a protective environment in which they all felt free to experiment. (Iconic Artists Group LLC/Brother Records Inc. ![]() “The studio was right below Brian’s bedroom, so it was very convenient for him to come down when the thought moved him, rather than having to go down to Western,” Love recalls, referring to the complex on Sunset Boulevard where the Beach Boys made “Pet Sounds” and “Good Vibrations.” (Wilson, 79, was not available for an interview but wrote in his 2016 memoir that, along with drug troubles, he’d lost the “control and confidence” that powered his world-changing work in the ’60s.) In a way, the Beach Boys’ under-the-radar positioning was a creative boon as they recorded “Sunflower,” which the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau later described as “far more satisfying, I suspect, than ‘Smile’ ever would have been.” Working with their trusted engineer Stephen Desper, they’d built the studio at Brian’s mansion to make it easier for the band’s fragile mastermind to participate. “It’s such a beautiful song,” he says of “Forever,” which Brian Wilson once described as “a rock ’n’ roll prayer.” (The new reissue features a stunning a cappella mix of the tune that showcases the group’s heavenly vocal harmonies.) Looking back, Wareham compares the Beach Boys in the early ’70s to Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers in the late ’60s - titans of rock’s first generation who “were still making these great records that no one paid any attention to.” Years later, a fellow musician, Pete Kember (a.k.a Sonic Boom) of Spacemen 3, turned him on to what he’d missed, including “ Forever,” an achingly pretty Dennis Wilson ballad from “Sunflower” that Wareham eventually covered. “As the culture started changing, they just seemed so out of step,” he says. Those who did listen, though - whether in 1970 or afterward - were charmed by the stirring melodies and adventurous arrangements the group devised in a newly collaborative mode, with each member writing and singing lead.ĭean Wareham, of the acclaimed indie-rock bands Luna and Galaxie 500, says he couldn’t have cared less about the Beach Boys when he was a teenager in the mid-’70s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |