Teenage Music (Formula, Part 2)
A new concept for Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in 1964.
The first part of this comment on “formula” traced an outline of the Beach Boys’ path to nationwide stardom, beginning with the local hit “Surfin’” in late 1961 through to the breakthrough, “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” in spring 1963, and then to their car-song phase in the latter months of that same year. Something like a formula—a specific way of making and marketing records—developed during that time. For a moment, the formula required the band to write and sing specifically about the beach, but by the end of 1963, it amounted to something different. The first part left off with the idea that surf songs and car songs could be grouped together within the single category of fad music.
Go back to first part: “Their Solution”
Second part:
1963 was the year the Beach Boys broke through as surfing stars; a group with brand-new songs about surfing and the Southern California beach scene. Looking at it another way, the songs were only the tangible, musical manifestation of a certain underlying approach to business. Whatever might be said about the Beach Boys’ music in 1963—harmonies, arrangements, instrumentation, production quality—it was all done within the context of a fad model of pop music. First with their beach-surf songs, and then with the car songs, the Beach Boys purposefully wrote and performed whole batches of tunes on one circumscribed subject of broad but transient appeal.
Nobody could seriously fault the group for doing this kind of work at this point. Was there a more “serious” or “honest” band on the scene (with vocals and lyrics) doing something that would have made the Beach Boys seem chintzy by comparison? No. In fact, through 1963 it was the Beach Boys who sounded real. To the record-buying fans across America, the Beach Boys were authentic (Southern) Californians singing about their own culture and experiences; singing honestly about surfing, surfer girls, and surfboards not because it got them on the charts, but because it was how they lived and what they knew.1
Meanwhile, within the business, honesty and authenticity mattered only to the extent they affected sales. This was the music business—who cared if the Beach Boys (save Dennis) didn’t surf, or if surf songs were a fad? In any case, the entire genre of rock ‘n’ roll itself wasn’t necessarily expected to survive. It could have easily been assumed (and it was) that rock ‘n’ roll was moribund, having peaked in the 1950s. From the music-business p.o.v., the viability of surfing and car songs could have been understood to be even more short-lived—likeable but trendy fad songs within an already transitory genre of music. (i.e., “surf music” as a sub-genre of “rock ‘n’ roll.”)
This helps explain the Beach Boys’ quick jump into car songs, and why they did their beach and car songs in bunches, maximizing the return on the fad while they had the window of opportunity. Records like “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Shut Down” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” were just as good business as they were music. Notwithstanding the “Beach Boys” name and the band’s association with surfing, by the end of 1963 the formula was fad, not strictly surf or beach. More specifically, it was probably fad + Southern California lifestyle.
Or maybe it wasn’t? Is it possible the Beach Boys never made fad music?
Derek Taylor, the Beach Boys’ publicist of the Pet Sounds and Smile era, said that during those later mid-’60s days, Brian (and Dennis) Wilson steadfastly maintained that the Beach Boys, in Taylor’s words, “had never been involved in any way with the surf and drag fads.”2 Taylor remembered being baffled and frustrated by their obstinacy:
I was told this [by Brian and Dennis] one afternoon and I kept saying, ‘Listen, how can. . . I mean, how dare you give me this nonsense about you never having been involved in this? I have the proof right here. But no, they would not concede. I just felt it sad that they should be so determined to disown their past.
It’s possible Brian secretly agreed with Taylor and was just yanking his chain. But Taylor seemed to think Brian was serious, which was what made the whole thing, in Taylor’s opinion, so sad: two brothers in serious denial of something embarrassing about their musical past.
Taylor was a nice guy and a friend; he wouldn’t have used the term “fad” as an accusation or put-down. It was only a simple description of how his client Brian Wilson used to make records. It certainly had nothing to do with the music Brian was making in the midst of Pet Sounds and Smile, which Taylor had been hired to help promote. And Taylor was right. Of course the Beach Boys had done fad music, because surfing and car songs had absolutely been a fad. The proof Taylor claimed to have would have included stuff like the Little Deuce Coupe and Surfer Girl albums.
But what if Brian was right too? What if it was true that his group, the Beach Boys, had never participated in the surfing and car fads? Could those two contradictory positions be reconciled?
Yes, possibly—as long as it is understood that Taylor and Brian were speaking two separate languages: one of business, and the other of music (or art). Speaking as a public-relations specialist (a music-business salesman, effectively), Taylor invoked the concept of the fad merely as a way of describing how Brian, the Beach Boys, and Capitol had conducted business at one time. It was an innocuous statement of fact, a plain business reality.
Yet Brian and Dennis took issue. Leaving Dennis’s views aside, “fad” would have offended Brian, insofar as the term connotes shoddiness, mendacity, anything-for-a-buck ethics, and worst of all, inability to do anything better. If Brian was to concede that he made fad music—even in his past—it would amount to a confession that all these things had applied to him; that he had once been that kind of record-biz hustler. It might also constitute an admission that his records were popular because of the fad topics instead of the music, production, and vocal quality. It would also imply an equivalence amongst all “fad groups”—the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the Rip Chords, and other imitators of even lesser quality. Brian would have disagreed with that. While he was friendly with guys like Jan Berry (Jan & Dean producer), Terry Melcher (Rip Chords mastermind), and Gary Usher (producer of the Hondells and various other car-concept efforts), Brian had to have known the Beach Boys were a cut above, and taken pride in that fact.
Maybe the brothers said something like: You’re wrong, Derek, the Beach Boys were never involved in the surf-fad. Or, even better: Fad? Beach Boys? I haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re talking about. Or: Sorry, I don’t understand you (which is what you say to someone speaking a different language). At that point, Brian was neither speaking nor thinking as a businessman, but as an artist who put music first. It was the businessmen, not the musicians, who conceived, promoted, and followed fads. Who liked them. It certainly wasn’t how a musician went about things, at least not one who approached his work as an artist. (Though Brian was unlikely to use that term to describe himself.)
This is just one way to interpret Brian’s seemingly bizarre “disowning” of the Beach Boys’ formulaic surf-and-car era. (Who except Brian could say what he was really thinking at the time?) In the end, the most interesting thing is that the conversation occurred in the first place; that Brian and Derek Taylor once had a disagreement over “fad.” (And also that it was memorable enough for Taylor to mention in an interview close to a decade later.) Even if Brian protested a little too much, it at the very least shows how touchy he was about the assumption that he had ever been a fad songwriter; one who had adhered to fads as a kind of formula.3
In strict terms, the disagreement with Taylor only shows what Brian Wilson felt about the Beach Boys’ fad-era when he looked back at it from a distance of two or three years. Although there is no clear, direct evidence that he chafed at the fad-formula when it was at its height in 1963, there are a couple of hints: (1) the Surfer Girl album track “Catch a Wave,” and (2) the “Be True to Your School” single in late October of that year.
The music on the Surfer Girl album improved on Surfin’ U.S.A., while it was also more faddish and commercially-motivated in its presentation. With Surfer Girl, Brian and the group returned, with vigor, to what had just recently (with “Surfin’ U.S.A.”) been confirmed as a winning formula. Eight or nine of the new album’s 12 tracks traded in surf or beach-centered themes. The sensitive ballad “Surfer Girl” was the single and lead-off track for the album, while “Catch a Wave”—an early Beach Boys classic and one their best surf songs—was left aside, to be an album track only.
“Catch a Wave” obviously could have been a single. It was on-the-money in every way—melody, lead and harmony vocals, arrangement, and lyrics. Except those lyrics delivered a very tired message. Had “Catch a Wave” been a single, it would have marked the fourth straight time—after “Surfin’,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.”—the Beach Boys put out an up-tempo number saying: surfing is fun, let’s go out and surf. Fans may not have noticed or cared, but a certain kind of songwriter would. (The song is credited to Brian Wilson and Mike Love.) Conceptually, “Catch a Wave” distinguished itself from its predecessors by not having a title and tag-line with the word “surf” in it, but beyond that, it was stale product, reheated.
It’s possible Brian or Mike recognized “Catch a Wave” to be a fad-song, for here was a song whose lyrics betrayed a defensiveness about surfing, as if the surfer-narrator has already been denigrated, or “put-down” for being a surfer and partaking in a fad. “They said [surfing] wouldn’t last too long,” he says, before claiming, “they’ll eat their words with a fork and spoon.” For no apparent reason, the lyric goes out of its way to clarify that surfing is “not just a fad ‘cause it’s been going on so long.” Specifically, this refers to the actual sport of surfing itself, not the making of surf-records. But if the sport wasn’t a just a fad, then maybe the music wasn’t either?
It’s admittedly speculative, but maybe Brian Wilson (or Mike Love, or both) was not only aware he was making fad songs, but had a little chip on his shoulder about it. The defiant lyrical posture of “Catch a Wave” could have been a way for Brian to subtly resist the fad-formula at a time when he was unavoidably beholden to it: just include some lyrics telling everybody that the fad song they’re listening to isn’t really part of a fad. And then, sideline that tune and push for a less faddish ballad to be the single.4
A more efficient strategy, in the longer term, would be to just stop writing about surfing and try something else. As the popular B-side to the “Surfer Girl” single, “Little Deuce Coupe” helped the Beach Boys transition (seemingly overnight) to cars, but that material assumed its fad-character immediately, even faster than the surf songs did. Were there any other topics?
It so happens that this was the time—while the drag race/custom-car concept was speeding along in the second part of 1963—when Brian came up with “Be True to Your School” and wedged it into the Beach Boys’ release schedule. As thematically tone-deaf as it was, “Be True to Your School” (the subject of this post) still yielded a positive benefit for Brian as a songwriter: the Beach Boys now proved they could make some noise by singing about school, or more broadly, the teenage life.
Whatever Beach Boys formula existed was now evolving into something more flexible. As a non-beach, non-car hit, “Be True to Your School” nudged the group away from the restrictive fad-driven mode in the last days of 1963, by peaking at No. 6 the week of December 21.5
It was only a couple of weeks later, in January 1964, when local record producer and scenester Kim Fowley ran into Brian at Gold Star Studios. With admiration, Fowley asked Brian if he could explain his songwriting method. As Fowley remembered it, Brian replied, “well, school is nine months a year and the summer holidays are three months, and you write about that and getting into trouble with your parents.”6
Brian wasn’t obliged to be forthcoming or engage meaningfully with Kim Fowley about music. Fowley buttonholed Brian one day at the studios, and Brian’s glib response could have translated to little more than I’m busy, leave me alone. That said, there’s a good chance Brian was speaking honestly and directly not only about “Be True to Your School,” but the new music he was working on at that very moment: “Fun, Fun, Fun” and other music for Shut Down Volume 2 like “Keep an Eye on Summer” and “In the Parkin’ Lot.”
Those songs lined up perfectly with Brian’s (casual, even dismissive) description of Beach Boys music, which amounted to an outline of a typical teenage American life. Obviously, something like “Fun, Fun, Fun” was well-suited for the teenage sensibility. At the time, you probably had to be a teenager to really “get” and enjoy it. The same of course could be said of “I Get Around,” and most of the All Summer Long album in July—”Wendy,” “Little Honda,” “All Summer Long,” “Drive-In,” and “We’ll Run Away” (which returned to the parent-problems theme).
It could be that Brian gave Kim Fowley as clear and honest a statement of a Beach Boys formula as could be, straight from the horse’s mouth. Brian and the Beach Boys made teenage music, and if anything like a formula existed in 1964, that’s what it boiled down to.
It was entirely appropriate for the Beach Boys to be a teenage group (i.e., one with an exclusively teen audience), first because that’s what it meant to play rock ‘n’ roll at the time, and second because it allowed the band flexibility. While always remaining Southern California’s ambassadors to the world of music and entertainment, by mid-1964 the Beach Boys had successfully incorporated a variety of material into their repertoire—not just surfing and cars, but high school and teen lifestyle songs, ‘50s covers, boy-girl relationship songs, and various hybrids. Brian had taken the lead on romantic ballads (which often referenced the beach and summer) and there was also that curious outlier, the solitary (but acceptably teenage) “In My Room.”
Being able to execute this varied material—and have it be accepted by the public—was progress for the Beach Boys, a group that broke through by agreeing to be typecast (and typecasting themselves) as boys-from-the-beach-who-sing-about-surfing. It had to be progress. What better alternative existed? The Beatles? Maybe so, as the Beatles made it in both the U.K. and U.S. as a band—as themselves—not fadsters. Still, in 1964 the Beatles too were makers of teenage music; they would not begin to reach an older audience until, at the earliest, the following year.
Teenage would remain Brian Wilson’s conceptual touchstone for the remainder of 1964. But would it be “teenage” as just another formula, or “teenage” as a concept broad enough to allow Brian to distance the Beach Boys from formula and labels?
In August, Brian said in the press that he wanted the Beach Boys to just keep identifying with “the young people.” He meant it. For Brian, this was a good place to be, giving him both the flexibility and justification to move forward with “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” Surely, identifying with your natural audience—observing what they do and imagining their thoughts—was better than getting pigeonholed as a silly fad-group. And surely, doing this would allow Brian plenty of freedom to do what he wanted to do as a composer, while also selling lots of records.
Wouldn’t it?
Selected References
Grevatt, Ren. “The Beach Boys Ride the Trends.” Music Business, August 15, 1964.
Kent, Nick. “The Last Beach Movie, Part 2: Smile…” In Domenic Priore, Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMILE! San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1994.
Kubernik, Harvey. “John Lennon Escapes the Beatles’ Shadow.” Goldmine, August 28, 2009).
__________ . Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972. Solana Beach, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2014.
Accordingly, it was the people closest to the Southern California surf scene—the surfers themselves, already a bit clannish and territorial—who were best situated to see the commercial artifice right from the start. Also, the surfers of the early 1960s were probably too old (late teens, early twenties and older) to get with surf-song craze. (Surf instrumentals were a different thing.) Even if the tunes were good, they had nothing to do with surfing as it really was. Later generations of Southern California surfers could (and did) like the Beach Boys’ hits, but only because they liked the music, not because the Boys sang about surfing and the beach.
Taylor related this anecdote to journalist Nick Kent, who used it in his “Last Beach Movie” article for New Musical Express in 1975. The italics were in the original article.
Before he joined with the Beach Boys, Derek Taylor had been the press agent for the Beatles, with whom he remained in contact. He told Nick Kent that the Beatles were similarly uncomfortable with their past: “the Beatles went through that—at about the same time, as it happens.” Was this “sad” too, or does it have something to do with the artistic mindset? Denigrating one’s past—or, in Brian’s case, denying what he had to do to succeed—could very well be necessary if the artist is to move forward. (You could also add Bob Dylan’s repudiation of his acoustic / folk / protest / voice-of-a-generation persona, occurring at roughly the same time.)
The mid-1963 time-frame of the Surfer Girl album was when Brian, with the help of his father-manager Murry Wilson, began to secure greater creative freedom from Capitol’s oversight. (See discussion in “The Road vs. The Studio.”) This is typically understood in terms of Brian’s increased control over the technical aspects of record production, but it may have also concerned his authority to choose the singles (which Brian did secure at some point). Having already speculated in detail about Brian’s choice of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” over “Little Honda” as a single in 1964, I’ll spare readers (and myself) a similar discussion about “Surfer Girl” and “Catch a Wave” in 1963. But try listening to “Catch a Wave” while looking at the cover of Surfer Girl with the ears and eyes of a Capitol executive in 1963: shouldn’t the single be “Catch a Wave?” Shouldn’t the album be titled Catch a Wave? Why isn’t there a girl on the cover of an album titled Surfer Girl?
Even if the song accomplished this, it did so at a cost—at least in the opinion of Brian Wilson, who said years later that the Beach Boys “blew their career” (read credibility with the public) by doing “Be True to Your School.” The overall vibe of the song is so extremely un-Brian Wilson, to such an extent, that fans, critics, and historians could reasonably suspect that the idea originated with Mike Love—who, unlike Brian, likes the song and remains proud of it. However, Mike has said that he only wrote the words; Brian was responsible for everything else, including the original idea and title. The reason a thoughtful, interior guy like Brian-“In My Room”-Wilson could come up with “Be True to Your School” could be that his prime motivation was not to celebrate school loyalty, but get the band away from cars and surfing in the second half of 1963. This is just idle speculation; see this post for more.
The Fowley-Brian exchange was recounted in Harvey Kubernik’s book Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972 (Santa Monica Press, 2014).