Boneyard Media

Bruce Golden’s Southern California Pastoral, another one of the very earliest Beach Boys books (the version pictured is the 1991 update), is an artifact from an era when laid back English professors were the primary academic curators of pop music studies. (One of my very favorite books from that era is David Pichaske’s A Generation in Motion (1979), a unique, “rock lyrics as poetry” social studies exercise on the sixties.) Golden, recently retired, worked the English beat at the University of California-San Bernardino, and his book was the first volume in a Borgo Press projected series of pop music analyses. (Vol. 2 was a 1997 treatment of Rush, so let’s keep an eye out for vol. 3 in 2018 or so.)

Golden’s main purpose is to tie the BB’s into the ancient Greek pastoral poetic tradition in which simple methods of expression, prompted by longings for peace and tranquility, were frequently used to communicate a wide range of complex emotions. Fine with me, and frankly, so is his decision to skip the details on the ancient side of things and to present us with a manageable 50 pages - yes, 50 (plus another 54 of discography, notes, bibliography and index) - on the music of our 5 modern day heroes. (I can think of more than a few people, though, who would raise their eyebrows especially high over this.)

Some things to keep in mind when you sit down to read your library copy: 1) Golden is writing to an audience that has perhaps heard of the Beach Boys but knows next to nothing about ‘em (his own professors, colleagues, and/or young students, I suspect); 2) this is not a biography so much as a rumination on their cultural significance, and may therefore be the only Beach Boys book not to mention Murry Wilson; 3) He sets a world record even in this small book for words written about the Still Cruisin’ album (but he skips altogether Carl and the Passions as well as everything - yes, everything - between Holland and Still Cruisin’); 4) He utters, in the beginning, what may sound like sinister words indeed to those who have always yearned for Brian to break down barriers and to never stop reaching for the heavens: “Learning to operate freely within one’s limits is the first sign of professionalism in the arts.” But don’t worry, that’s as sinister as it gets.

(Passage spotlight: “Perhaps the most interesting aspect of 1985’s Golden Harmonies compilation is the cover. Set in a golden frame, it shows a postcard-like picture of ‘today’s’ Beach Boys running along the shoreline. Most prominent is Brian, running in the middle of them all, his large, white, untanned stomach thrust forward and bearded head tilted back. He seems to be enjoying himself, as does the rest of the band.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen this album before, and the picture Golden paints in my mind is kind of hysterical. Does anyone have it handy? Would love to actually see it.)

posted by Kim Simpson

posted by Stanislav

Sad news comes to us that Krešimir Blažević has died. Krešo played guitar, sang and wrote songs for his band Animatori in mid ’80s Yugoslavia. Although his band was based in Zagreb, Kreš¡o was born in Slavonski Brod, a provincial town some 110 miles down the Sava river. Perhaps this was why Blažević and his Animators sounded so much more humble than any other band in Yugoslavia at the time. But that was not an obstacle for Animatori, who scored a huge success with their first album “Andjeli nas zovu da im skinemo krila.” The album had a disarming summertime feel to it and it revealed Krešo’s and the other band members’ informed influences, especially British pub rock and Americana. Their summertime feel was similar to that of Djavoli (who appeared a few years later), which was not surprising since the album was actually recorded in the coastal town of Split with producer Željko Brodarić Jappa. After this album, Animatori recorded two more LPs before Yugoslavia dissolved. They were not so successful in stores, but were far from embarrassing, and established Blažević as one of the region’s most consistent songwriters.

Animatori - “Andjeli nas zovu da im skinemo krila”

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Animatori - “Kao ogledala”

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Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) sponsored this “Norwegian sing-a-long” special along with many other Nordic delights that are just waiting for you now at the nearest Salvation Army. (The Standard-Colonial label actually issued a whole bevy of “World of Music” LPs - not just Scandinavian - but I haven’t been able to verify if they were all sponsored by airlines.) I haven’t remembered to play this the last few times I’ve felt really down, but I’m pretty certain it would do the trick.

Walter Eriksson and Andrew Walter’s Orchestra - “Du Ska Fa Sukkertoy”

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Hats off to Boneyard visitor Benji for having the foresight to capture the Adams Extract building in full nighttime splendor (and for sending it along). The sign is apparently still up at the new location. Here’s a slightly enlarged view.

Stuart Hamblen was a popular singing radio cowboy who found religion in the late forties after attending a Billy Graham revival and ended up running for president on the Prohibition party ticket in ‘52. After his conversion, he also transformed his radio show into “The Cowboy Church of the Air,” the popularity of which moved this single all the way to the Top Ten in 1955. The singers are Hamblen’s wife, his two teenage daughters, and their two friends. The record was recorded Chipmunk-style at 33 1/3 RPM so they’d all sound like children at 45 RPM.

The Cowboy Church Sunday School - “Open Up Your Heart (and Let the Sunshine In)”

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Another nugget from Ken Barnes’ The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words and Pictures:

“Finally, then, Pet Sounds appeared, complete with a piquant cover shot of the boys feeding goats at the Children’s Zoo in Balboa Park, San Diego (just before one or more of the boys began to torment the animals and the group was banned from the premises).”

One thing we can appreciate about USA Today is its music editor, Ken Barnes. The man’s a veteran, and he’s one of those rare breeds of entertainment journalists who can play that familiar role of the garrulous, opinionated remote-twiddler but also double up as a trustworthy and informed industry analyst. Barnes knows a thing or two about music biz nuts and bolts - not only did he work the record reviewing trenches in Rolling Stone and similar mags throughout the seventies, but he served a good chunk of time as editor for industry trade publication Radio and Records before settling in at USA Today in the late nineties. So the American Idol blog he currently maintains over there with such devotion, folks, is probably the single most worthwhile coverage of the show you’ll likely find anywhere. And the craziest thing about it is that he really does seem to be enjoying himself.

Which leads us to his The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words and Pictures (1976), which pre-dates David Leaf’s The Beach Boys and the California Myth by a couple of years and stands as perhaps the first serious - but never at the expense of fun - overview in book form of the Beach Boys’ music. It’s certainly got the aura of a quickie assignment. It was one in a series of six artist bios published by Sire-Chappell, none of them over sixty pages, and each of them jam-packed with photos and typos alike. But you never get a single hint from Barnes that he’s going through the motions, because he’s not. All too aware that recent magazine articles by Tom Nolan (Rolling Stone) and Nick Kent (NME) make any attempts at biographical revelations momentarily pointless (he even refers readers to these articles on the copyright page), he attends to the Beach Boys story using the classic, most basic rock-crit method: the record player. Approaching his subject the way a five-year old approaches monkey bars - rung by rung and with a focus on fun - Barnes evaluates the group’s entire catalog song by song, and even if the book’s format limitations don’t allow him to do much more than thoughtful drive-bys, it’s the very attempt at completeness and the always-engaging writing that makes this curio worth sniffing out. Barnes’ musical worldview, for that matter, in which reverent treatments of the Mystics, Tommy Facenda’s “High School USA,” and the “dense, dreamy mix” of Pet Sounds all share neighboring mountain peaks, is one we might all consider subscribing to.

(Barnes’ frustrations with portions of the BB’s 1971-73 period make for some funny moments. My favorite paragraph: “Sadly, the chief unifying factor [of the Surf's Up LP] was a pervasive lyrical banality, exemplified by Al and Mike’s opening track, “Don’t Go Near the Water.” Here the boys jumped on the trendy ecological bandwagon (no doubt with complete sincerity, etc. etc.), suggesting we all help the water out of a tight spot (’toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath/So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath,’ lines worthy of an Eric Burdon) and proving that writing [sic] on top of the waves was a much sounder idea than examining their constituent elements.”)

I’ve never had a good picture-taking habit, but I’m trying to change that. I deeply regret not having taken snapshots of certain buildings I always took for granted while they were still standing but have since been torn down. Like the Adam’s Extract building in the middle of a field on South I-35 on the way to Buda. I always imagined that everyone who worked there looked like vintage Betty Crockers. The odd thing about the great building’s demolition is that nothing has replaced it for a number of years now. I know that one should celebrate open spaces, but I can’t do it in this case.

Vic’s Restaurant in Oak Hill is another. It stood all by its tiny lonesome in the middle of a large plot of land since the late fifties. It was really nothing special foodwise (although you could get really full) and it had deer heads mounted on the wall. And here’s something - one day a week the entire staff would dress like Star Trek characters. Several years ago Vic’s, with no warning, was transported off the face of this planet. And that large lot it occupied for decades is still there - mysteriously vacant, I’m estimating, for at least five years.

(Here’s a pre-demolition 2001 article about Adams Extract from the Austin Chronicle. The company moved to San Antonio the following year.)

So many of the much-maligned radio hits of the mid-seventies bring back some of my happiest childhood memories of kite flying, splashing around in wading pools, and frisbee in the park. Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” is one of those. But here’s the curious non-LP B-side in case you missed it back in the day. A potential “Boneyard Media” theme song? Thanks(?) to my friend Janet for bringing this back to memory.

Terry Jacks - “Put the Bone In”

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David Leaf, now a successful TV writer, producer, and film director, is the senior custodian of the Beach Boy narrative, and his The Beach Boys and the California Myth (1978) was the first substantial book about the group. It’s well worth digging up (an absolute must if you’re a Brian Wilson cultist) but you might have to get it from your library since it’s never in print and goes for spirit-crushing prices on eBay. Or look in used bookstores for the potentially less expensive second edition (and, to date, latest), which came out in 1985 and is jam packed with essential “codettas” by the author. Simply called The Beach Boys (pictured above), you might mistake it for a coffee table fluff job, with its 80’s flamingo dust sleeve and thin, longish size, but don’t be tricked. Nab it if you see it (I found mine that way for $9.98, but that was around ten years ago).

Leaf admits to having found the inspiration to tackle his subject after reading Tom Nolan and David Felton’s seminal two-part 1971 article on the Beach Boys in Rolling Stone. By the mid-seventies, Leaf had packed his bags and moved from the East coast to the West and lost himself in his passion - the music of Brian Wilson - and churned out one of the finest bits of “advocacy journalism” (Leaf himself refers to it as this) one is likely to ever read in the notoriously discombobulated realm of pop music literature. “This book is written for one man, Brian Wilson,” Leaf writes in his intro, and so unwavering is he in spelling out the painful details of what he considers to be “ultimately a tragic story,” that anyone who reads his book from cover to cover will realize that he ought to have just called it “Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys Myth.”

Indeed, the overarching theme here is that Wilson’s loyalty to his family and the Beach Boys franchise - both of whom clearly feared any deviation from the successful hitmaking formula Wilson had mastered from ‘61 to ‘66 as a severe financial risk - was killing him artistically. There lay the blame for the collapse of Smile and God knows what else Wilson may have had brewing. Leaf never loses sight of just how seemingly insurmountable this great obstacle in Brian’s artistic life was, but he also never refrains from making resoundingly clear his view that “an artist must put aside obligations to family and friends; he must put his art and himself first.” (Even Eugene Landy, the now discredited therapist, is treated with suspicion by a tuned-in Leaf circa ‘85 for offering Wilson precious little in the way of artistic freedom.) This angle of Leaf’s, in fact - of the artist/idealist manacled to family expectations and commerce - is certainly as quintessentially American and epic (and at least twice as tragic) as the “California myth” we’re all too familiar with.

There are three more especially glorious things about the ‘85 edition of this book: 1) We get to read about the after effects of its publication, most notably the fact that it earned Leaf Wilson’s trust to the extent that he was admitted into the master’s inner sanctum and that it provoked the apparently ever-smoldering anger of the misnamed dullard we know as Mike Love; 2) we are assured that Leaf is such a true believer in Brian Wilson’s musical gifts that he was able to write, even in the retrospectively cloudy days of “Getcha Back,” that “I’m part of a small cult that has complete faith that the creative resurrection of Brian is imminent”; and 3) we are now able to read it with the glad knowledge that Leaf, who believed then that “a collection of [Smile's] still-unreleased fragments pieced together with the music that has come out would make for an unparalleled collection of pop music experimentation,” has not only seen its improbable release, but that he also ended up making the documentary. (It’s called Beautiful Dreamer - go get it if you haven’t already.)