The Beach Boys did for surfers what David Bowie did 10 years later for bisexuals. Known for their annoying patois, bushy, bushy blond hairdos, and sun-damaged skin, surfers had been denied a table in the lunchrooms of southern California high schools since before the introduction of public education. At my own junior high school, one of the German-surnamed fascist PE instructors had informed us boys that surfers’ penchant for lightening their hair with hydrogen peroxide was indicative of incipient homosexuality. After the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ Safari was No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart for nine consecutive weeks, though, high school surfers got to eat lunch near the cool kids’ table.
Originally from the godforsaken 110 percent white south-of-Los-Angeles suburb Hawthorne, the Boys comprised the Wilson brothers — Brian, Carl, Jackie, Marlon, Tito, Randy, Flip, and Woodrow — their oft-maligned cousin Mike Love, who’d begun losing his hair at an age when most male babies are first starting to grow hair, and a neighbour, Glen Campbell. The only one of them who actually surfed was Jackie, but the oft-maligned Mike Love had the perfect surfer voice — nasal, insouciant, and suggesting that he’d never heard a black person sing.
They were spectacularly corny in every way. Their name was corny (though not as corny as that which they’d started with, and been forbidden to retain — The Pendletones). Their attire (short-sleeved sports shirts of the sort popularised years before by the fervently collegiate folkies The Kingston Trio) was corny. Their harmonies, inspired by the likes of The Four Freshmen and The Five Caucasians, were corny. Pendleton wool shirts, earlier the province of lumberjacks, had somehow become hugely popular among surfers even though they had to be worn as jackets — that is, over another long-sleeved shirt — because they were woolen and scratchy.
After their early hits about surfing, they sang for a while about cars, which I, for one, found enormously disheartening. At my high school, many miles north of Hawthorne, but south of Malibu, boys clearly destined to become Real Men a few years hence would gather in the student parking lot to admire each other’s cam shafts and to debate the relative merits of Ford and Chevy. I couldn’t have been less interested, or felt more left out.
Felicitously, the Boys’ automotive phase was short-lived, as Brian began to enjoy psychedelic drugs and to lose his marbles. Their music became more adventurous. They used a theremin, heretofore the favoured instrument of composers of B-movies about mad scientists, on their big hit Good Vibrations, and hired Dick Van Dyke Parks & Recreation to write incomprehensible but apparently very arty lyrics that (understandably!) inspired the oft-maligned Mike Love to remark, “WTF?”
In the early 70s, in a brazen attempt to appear multiethnic, they hired a couple of South Africans, one of whom went on to star in The Rutles. No one was fooled.
Marble-less, Brian spent several years out of sight. When he finally re-emerged, slightly sleeker, and with slightly less terror in his eyes, he gave interviews in which he sounded like a six-year-old, or, if you prefer, Chance the Gardener. The oft-maligned Mike Love, who’d taken to flouncing around on stage like Mick Jagger on estrogen supplements, gave a speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that offended everyone, and went on to great success as a white alternative to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell with his own cousin Courtney Love.
I have always found discomfitingly ambiguous the lyrics of their iconic hit God Only Knows. I may not always love you, Carl sings, “but long as there are stars above you, I’ll never make you doubt it…” Am I the only one who, in that, hears the singer saying he’ll continue to pretend to love whomever he’s singing to even after he’s stopped loving her, and begun spending more and more nights “at the office, catching up some some stuff”?
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