Beatles '64
Part 16 of A History of Brian Wilson.
The preceding chapter left off with the oft-repeated notion that as of late 1963, American culture was safely ensconced in a “Fifties” mindset. With the No. 6 hit “Be True to Your School,” the Beach Boys would seem to have been comfortably situated as leading stars in a teen-scene that was still tied to the Fifties. In these days, the band found success by pairing various teenage-friendly themes with an innovative blend of 1950s musical forms.
The following chapter begins in the last days of 1963, with the Beach Boys ready to record a new Chuck Berry-derived tune about teenage life. Within a month or two, the Beatles arrive in America for the first time.
Part 16 below:
Sometime in the latter portion of 1963, Brian Wilson and Mike Love put together the basic concept, music and lyrics for the song, “Fun, Fun, Fun.” It was a straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll song that again borrowed heavily from Chuck Berry in the intro, rhythm and lyrical style. It told a teenage story in classic three-act form: a girl uses her dad’s property—his car—under the pretext that she’s going to the library to study; unbeknownst to him, she’s using it to have fun on the boulevard, where she’s the boss chick behind the wheel. Dad’s authority always looms however, and he at last puts his foot down and takes the car keys away. The song concludes, as it must, with the assurance that the girl can have just as much fun (fun, fun) without her dad’s car.
Like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” this is a fine Beach Boys signature tune from the early days. While still technically a car song, it helped the Beach Boys move into the slightly less restrictive thematic territory of the teenage lifestyle (where it was an improvement over “Be True to Your School”). The fact that it was about a girl was fortuitous if not necessarily a calculated choice. It made the song relatable to girls and boys alike. And it helped the parent-child drama go down smoothly: “Fun, Fun, Fun” would not have worked if it had been a boy who was trying to do an end-run around daddy’s rules, only to have his wings clipped. A girl could do that and still be cool and rebellious. Had it been a boy, the song would be a downer; the kid would have been shut down and emasculated by his father.
Arguably, “Fun, Fun, Fun” said more about where the Beach Boys were coming from than what appeared on the surface. A specific parent-child reality that for the Wilson brothers (especially Brian) had been horrific and would prove crippling in the long run was inadvertently reframed by Mike and Brian with light, Chuck Berry-styled whimsy. (It’s been said that Brian’s original title was “Run, Run, Run.”) It’s unlikely anyone knew this, including the Boys themselves. And what did manager Murry Wilson think when he heard a lyric that made light of a girl’s defiance of her father’s authority and unauthorized use of his property?1
Murry took exception to “Fun, Fun, Fun,” as evidenced by (among other things) his effort to obstruct its recording: exerting his authority as father-manager, Murry unilaterally cancelled a session for the tune that Brian had scheduled. Figuratively, Murry was indeed trying to take Brian’s “set of keys” from him. Brian had to take a long breath, push forward, and schedule another session for New Year’s Day 1964 so the Beach Boys could record the song.
Within a couple of weeks, the Boys were off to Australia for a big package tour featuring a number of popular acts. They found themselves on the other end of the world (where it was summer), about as far away from home as they could get, but they brought a little keepsake from Hawthorne in the person of their dad-manager.
The Australia tour is said to have been awful for the group. Murry raged, enforcing his selective version of morality and propriety. He forbade drinking, profanity and contact with females, and even stationed himself in the hallway outside the hotel rooms and conducted surprise bed-checks in an attempt to block any illicit assignations. When the group wasn’t on lockdown, Murry dog-and-ponied them before the press, fans, and autograph seekers. He monitored their deportment to ensure they carried themselves with sufficient humility. The fines he levied for single infractions have been said to be as low as $200 or as high as $1,000. (Who knows where this money went.) Murry went on stage while the band was performing and turned down Brian’s bass. He of course continued to berate and insult the Boys, with different sources reporting that he slapped favorite targets Brian and Dennis in public. Carl presumably kept his head down and toed the line.
Even if these stories are only partially true, what it means is that the Beach Boys—or at least the brothers, who were now working professionals at 21, 19 and 17 years old—were in position to live their young adult lives very much as they always had: battered, under Murry’s thumb. Mike Love was a mere nephew, but going on 23 years old, this couldn’t have sat well with him either. With Murry as manager, things were in place to continue like this indefinitely. It was degrading, embarrassing, and soul-killing. Mike Love has said that after returning home from Australia, he and Brian called a meeting at which the group unanimously decided that they would give Murry the boot.
While the Beach Boys toured Australia, the Beatles—who up to now had been virtually unknown in America—shot to U.S. No. 1 with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Years later, a musician from another band on the Australia package tour recalled sitting with the Beach Boys— while still in Australia—as they watched a film of the Beatles’ Royal Variety Performance from the previous November. He told writer Kent Crowley that the Beach Boys were not very impressed with what they saw and heard.
This isn’t too surprising. The Beach Boys would not have been predisposed to take any rock ‘n’ roll coming out of Britain seriously. At the time, the reasonable presumption would have been that British rock ‘n’ roll was inherently second-rate. Even without such prejudice, the Royal Variety performance didn’t present the Beatles in their best light. It was given in London for a fusty audience that gave nothing back to the band, who seem to be performing in a vacuum. The music was removed from its proper setting, and the Beatles—as evidenced by John Lennon’s famous “jewelry” comment—knew it.2
Soon after returning home from Australia, the Beach Boys got another look at the Beatles when they tuned in for the American television program The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9. The Sullivan studio audience was packed with enough kids (girls) to ratchet up the energy and place the Beatles’ performance in proper context. The TV camera work was crisp, the stage design was attractive, and the Beatles were by now a seasoned rock ‘n’ roll band who were at ease in the spotlight. Their sound—notably their sharp, Scouse-inflected vocals—was totally unique to American ears.
They looked different too. The Beatles were not proper adults, but neither were they kids or teenagers, nor were they trying to be. They weren’t American, but embodied something that appealed to American youth. Part of this was the boy-band effect; it’s said that Beatles manager Brian Epstein tarted them up a bit. But as Beatlemania took off, the band projected an attractive combination of youth, self-assurance, and worldly intelligence. They seemed beholden to nobody but themselves, and their sly, deadpan mockery of the older generation (in interviews) would have contrasted with a hit like “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which, after all, rubber-stamped parental authority. The Beatles were emancipated young people. They were doing something that had not been done before, and doing it well: even at this stage, their records were awfully good.
The Beatles had already hit No. 1 back in January—clearing the stage for Beatlemania but not quite launching it in full force. It was the televised Ed Sullivan performance in February that is said to have really changed the American recording industry, literally overnight. For the Hollywood record producers, it was like a standing eight-count. Men who ran busy recording studios said that the morning after the broadcast, the phones stopped ringing—the labels and producers were not calling to book studio time, because they were still absorbing what they had seen, and figuring how to respond.
It could be said, however, that Brian Wilson was responding immediately, in real time, for he was working on “I Get Around”—a new, exuberant song of youthful freedom—on the piano as the Beatles’ Sullivan performance flickered on his TV set. Still, Brian and the other the L.A. hitmakers never could have predicted that the new craze to succeed surfing and cars would be “Britain,” nor that it wasn’t going to be a short-lived fad at all.
The Beatles, and the “British Invasion” that followed, thundered through the American music scene, effectively ending careers and depleting the commercial viability of entire musical genres. The Beatles and their British contemporaries basically took various American forms and—naturally, without an excess of self-awareness—added other influences to shape it into a new version of rock ‘n’ roll that could only have come from over there. In the future, everything would eventually get blended up and there would be American groups influenced by earlier American groups who had tried to sound like British guys who themselves had wanted to sound American. But just as Bob Dylan put down the template for the modern singer-songwriter, the Beatles were now defining what the self-contained rock ‘n’ roll group does, or wants to do. Virtually every post-Beatles group in the typical rock ‘n’ roll record collection is influenced in some way by the Beatle model, with most of them musically influenced by the Beatles in one way or another.
The Beach Boys occupy an interesting space in the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll canon because their presentation and sound (and image) bears scarcely any Beatle influence. They achieved initial success in a pre-Beatles setting, and their foundational stance as a “vocal group” dates back to the ‘50s and earlier. At the same time, the Beach Boys continued to maintain a presence in popular music during the Beatle-era when so many other performers and styles dropped away. The time during which the Beach Boys performed in a punchy rock-band format was passing, and to their credit, the Boys had little interest in sounding like the Beatles anyway. They had always been a vocal harmony group that could play instruments and would, for the time being, remain true to that form. The four and five-part vocal harmony was something the Beach Boys had over everybody else. But Brian now understood that whatever they had been doing with it was not going to work in the future. Something had to change.
Many pop stars and groups held their own records off the market hoping Beatlemania would fade out. Of course it wouldn’t. They are too great. In fact they are a shot in the arm to the entire recording industry.
—Brian Wilson, 1964
Keep reading A History of Brian Wilson here, in Part 17
Selected References for Part 16
Crowley, Kent. Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys. London: Jawbone Press, 2015.
Felton, David. “The Healing of Brother Bri." Rolling Stone, November 4, 1976.
Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.
Kubernik, Harvey. Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972. Solana Beach, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2014.
Leaf, Earl. “Brian Births a New Song.” The Teen Set, Vol. 1, October 1964.
Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.
MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007.
Marcus, Greil. “The Beatles.” In Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke and Holly George-Warren, eds. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House, 1992.
Menand, Louis. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Sharp, Ken. Sound Explosion! Inside L.A.’s Studio Factory with the Wrecking Crew. Woodland Hills, CA: Wrecking Crew LLC, 2015.
The Wrecking Crew! Directed by Denny Tedesco. Wrecking Crew LLC, 2014. DVD: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2015.
White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.
Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Wilson, Brian. Foreword to Paul Trynka, ed. The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World. London: DK, 2004.
On the subject of defiance of Murry’s authority and usurpation of his property, see “The Founding of the Beach Boys,” particularly Part 2 of that essay.
Introducing “Twist and Shout,” Lennon coyly encouraged audience participation: “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands; and the rest of you—if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”