Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) sponsored this “Norwegian sing-a-long” special along with many other Nordic delights that perhaps await you now at your 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.) The title of the selection below translates to (I think) “You Get Candy,” and it’s guaranteed to cheer you up under any circumstance.
Walter Eriksson and Andrew Walter’s Orchestra – “Du Ska Fa Sukkertoy”
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.
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.”)
The effect of the late sixties/early seventies on popular music’s old guard is worthy of a book. But I think if each tablespoon of “Golden Throats”-style camp and ridicule required to market and sell the book was matched with at least an equal portion of respect and/or compassion, it would be closer to what the doctor ordered. I got to talking about this stuff once with my dad, who used to play in show bands for countless oldies-but-goodies acts in the late sixties/early seventies, and his comment that “that era scared the hell out of a lot of people” has always stayed with me. And it wasn’t the turbulent politics or volatile cultural divide we were talking about so much as the jarring, disorienting changes in the pop music playing field.
The collective memory of this era is Bing Crosby singing “Hey Jude,” Mel Tormé in a cravat (see above), and Elvis shaking hands with Nixon. Less memorable are details of the dogged efforts classic vocalists like Tony Bennett and Andy Williams made to keep active and stay at least somewhat relevant by releasing steady streams of movie theme LPs and hair-trigger reinterpretations of contemporary hits. (Tony Bennett, according to Stan Cornyn in Exploding, was a standards purist who dragged his feet throughout the entire era.) Or songwriting legend Sammy Cahn prematurely publishing his memoirs in 1974 (I Should Care) when he ended up having an illustrious career of songwriting and songwriting advocacy still ahead of him (Cahn assumed leadership of the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in the early 80s). Or this absolutely nifty – under any standard – cover by Mel Tormé (see above) of Joe South’s “Games People Play.” That’s LA studio legend Carol Kaye tearing the house down on bass.
“This album of sacred and secular songs comes to you … as an expression of appreciation to our clients, their patients, and our friends everywhere who, with us, are dedicated to the ideals of providing humanity with relief from pain and suffering. When United Medical Laboratories was established sixteen years ago [in Portland, Oregon], its founders recognized the vital role scientific data could play in improving the health-care of mankind. The handful of people who made up its original staff endured every sacrifice to achieve scientific excellence in their commitment to this ideal.” (liner notes)
I’m big on scientific methods too, and here’s how I deduced the probable year of this record: I took a close look at the middle picture on the back, which looked like Che Fong’s forensics team from Hawaii Five-0 episodes of the late 1960s. Hence the year I’ve chosen: 1969.
United Medical Laboratories, Inc. Concert Chorale – “The Lord’s Prayer”
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 food-wise (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.)
[Update: See a gorgeous nighttime photo of the Adams Extract Building.]
The most scorned radio hits of the mid-seventies tend to 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 B-side in case you missed it back then. A potential “Boneyard Media” theme song? Thanks(?) to Janet for bringing this back to memory.
David Leaf, now a successful TV writer, producer, and film director, is the senior caretaker 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 (a 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. Grab 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 read in the 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 dangerous 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 insurmountable this great obstacle in Brian’s artistic life seemed, but he also never refrains from making 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 other glorious aspects worth mentioning 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 he also ended up making the documentary.
OK, one last medley for the road. This Beatleflick tribute single (devoid of any sort of musical nod to Yellow Submarine) was a disjointed Frankenstein pastiche, but it did quite nicely, hitting #12 in ’82.
