1/12/2024 0 Comments Beach boys surfs up![]() He demanded they rid themselves of the matching stage uniforms that shouted “passé.” Jack also put them to work rehearsing their asses off for the Big Sur Folk Festival, a performance that helped to re-establish their cred and earned them an apology from Jann Wenner, who had publicly written off the Beach Boys as failed Beatles imitators. He immediately promoted Carl Wilson into the bandleader role, ending Brian’s Howard Hughes’ style reign. The most important quality Jack Rieley brought to the table was his decisiveness. Figuring they had nothing to lose, the Beach Boys fired longtime co-manager and promoter Fred Vail and turned over the keys of the kingdom to Jack. Sensing opportunity like a buck smelling a doe in heat, Rieley submitted a six-page plan designed to return the Beach Boys to relevance. Rieley-Frank was a DJ who told Brian he’d won a Peabody Award as a journalist for NBC News (bullshit), leading Brian by the nose to his first full-length radio interview (accompanied by Mike Love and Bruce Johnston). ![]() There’s always a capitalist ready to turn disaster into opportunity (see Trump Family, The) and at this point, American huckster Jack Rieley aka John Frank thrust himself into the narrative. While record sales remained strong and steady in the UK, the Beach Boys were yesterday’s news in their homeland their previous release, Sunflower, peaked pathetically at #151 on the Billboard charts-the worst-selling Beach Boys album up to that time. The highly-anticipated Smile album never came close to completion, and Brian’s participation in the creation and recording processes became spotty at best. ![]() Meanwhile, Brian Wilson had begun his drug-fueled decline into mental illness with his bandmates doing their best to hide the truth from the public. A nasty royalty dispute with Capitol resulted in the label deleting their entire catalog when their contract expired in the midst of the controversy, Brian Wilson told the press that the band was near bankruptcy, a dumb move that ended contract negotiations with Deutsche Grammophon. An American tour with Maharishi Mahesh Yoga in support of TM began right around the time that John Lennon was on The Tonight Show denouncing the Maharishi as things turned out, the self-styled guru abandoned the tour to fulfill film contracts, forcing the band to cancel twenty-four shows and kiss a quarter of a million dollars in revenue goodbye. Pulling out of the Monterey Pop Festival at the last minute was a really bad call, as was Dennis Wilson’s decision to start hanging out with Charles Manson. While both perspectives have some validity, many of the wounds were self-inflicted. But I think basically the Beach Boys are squares. One of the most iconic bands in American history was essentially dismissed by their compatriots as the washed-up, seriously unhip “Bleach Boys.” Even Brian Wilson seemed to agree with the sentiments of his fellow Yanks: “I think rock n’ roll-the pop scene-is happening. The other view is that the Beach Boys did some of their finest work during an exceptionally difficult period but the only people who noticed were music fans in the UK. That’s one perspective on the post-“Good Vibrations” era. Within months of releasing “one of the greatest masterpieces in rock music” to worldwide acclaim, the Beach Boys entered a four-year period of hyper-bad karma where nearly everything that could go wrong went wrong.
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