The Beach Boys were "The Straights"

Yes, I loved the Brian Wilson movie, (see previous post), but to be honest, I've never really been a fan of the Beach Boys. When I was a wee lad, the Beach Boys seemed to be on the wrong side of the culture. They were so "uncool." They seemed like a band of straight arrow, conservative kids, the kind of kids who liked to sing in the glee club, and voted for Nixon.

They were accepted by the "straights" along with Sinatra, Elvis, Lawrence Welk, The Carpenters, Pat Boone.

I mean, to me there were the countercultural heroes - the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Bob Dylan and the Band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and then all those great bands from West Coast - Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, The Byrds, the bands who played the Monterey Pop Fest, and Woodstock.

My perception was that the Beach Boys were decidedly not part of the Woodstock Nation. What I didn't realize at the time was that much of their image was a marketing hook, a gimmick. When I found out that Brian Wilson wasn't a surfer, that all that myth making - cars, bikinis, surf boards, endless summer was pretty much a manufactured image, I began to separate the image from the music.

When Paul McCartney said that Wilson was a worthy rival, a pop-meister, a musical genius, I began to just listen to the sound they made. Certainly "Good Vibrations" with all those phenomenal sounds - a theremin, sleigh bells, was a knockout single. And Wilson's achievement is really amazing. Those multi-part harmonies were stunning.

So yes, the Beach Boys were an act of imagination. And Wilson was a complex character. But to me it's still true that the rest of the band really was pretty uncool.  Wilson was a solitary genius, surrounded by a band of brothers and cousins, haunted by his authoritarian, domineering, abusive father. And he was pretty much alone. And when he got weird, he really, really got weird. And maybe in fact, he was decidedly counter-cultural, but by the late sixties he was pretty much isolated in his own little world of madness. More myth than reality.