Song 177: “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, Part One, Old Folks at Home (2024)

For those who haven’t heardthe announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a fifty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Light Flight” by Pentangle

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts athttp://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proustandhttp://sitcomclub.com/

Resources

There will be no Mixclouds for these episodes, as many of the songs either have extremely offensive lyrics, are by a mass-murdering cult leader, or both.

Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and others interviewing Terry Melcher. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks

Andrew Doe’sBellagio 10452site is an invaluable resource.

Jon Stebbins’The Beach Boys FAQis a good balance between accuracy and readability. Stebbins’ biography of Dennis Wilson,The Real Beach Boy,has been invaluable for these episodes.

Philip Lambert’s Inside the Music of Brian Wilsonis an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson’s music from 1962 through 67.

Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin is the best biography of Brian Wilson.

I have also referred to Brian Wilson’s autobiography,I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love’s,Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy.

As a good starting point for the Beach Boys’ music in general, I would recommendthis budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. Most of the songs covered in these episodes come from the albumsFriendsand20/20.

Information on blackface minstrelsy comes from Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States by Matthew D. Morrison. Other resources used for that section includeThe “Mythtory” of Stephen Foster by Deane L. Root, this Stephen Foster FAQ,The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies by Steven Saunders, and The Juba Project.

Transcript

Before we begin, this episode needs a longer disclaimer than most, and also, unusually, it will need a note about sources, and about the manner in which I’m telling this story.

This series of episodes deals with the Manson murders, a series of murders which involved, peripherally, a lot of people whose music we have looked at in previous episodes. Those murders were so shocking, and had such ramifications for how the counterculture was viewed, that they have to be dealt with as part of anything claiming to tell a history of rock music, however unpleasant the topic is, and however much I wish I didn’t have to deal with them. There will be discussions of all sorts of unpleasant topics, even beyond the normal levels of this podcast — discussions of cult membership, grooming, sexual abuse, racism, drug abuse, and of course murder. I will be trying to be as unsensational as possible, but of course people may well still get upset, and you should avoid these episodes if that is likely.

Some people might wonder why I’m discussing the Manson murders. Well, as you’ll see in this series of episodes, the Manson Family were very involved with many people we’ve talked about in this series — most notably the Beach Boys, but we heard about some connections with the Rolling Stones last time, and there are also connections with Neil Young, Love, Byrds producer Terry Melcher, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and many others from the Laurel Canyon scene. The Manson murders had a huge cultural impact and would need to be covered in this history much the same way as the Vietnam War or the assassination of Martin Luther King did, and given Manson’s musical ambitions and musical connections, it makes sense to do this with a song he was involved in.

But I also have to talk about a very conscious decision I have made not to use one particular source, and why I’ve made that decision, and what it means about the way I’m telling this story.

In the last few years, one book on the Manson murders has been very widely disseminated and recommended as containing information that no other book has. And some of the information in that book is likely a useful corrective to some misinformation.

But the book itself is a book based around a conspiracy theory, and like almost all conspiracy theories, its thesis boils down to seeing patterns in coincidences. Conspiracy theory is essentially a form of narrative pareidolia — the same kind of thing that means that we see patterns in clouds or fireplaces.

And if you look at an oversignified narrative, one where the ground has been trodden again and again, you can see these patterns *everywhere*. As an example, the first edition of the book Principia Discordia was printed on Jim Garrison’s Xerox machine by one of its co-writers in 1963. Garrison, of course, went on to be a leading advocate of Kennedy conspiracy theories, and led the unsuccessful prosecution against one of the people he alleged was involved in the conspiracy. But the other co-author of the book, Kerry Thornley, was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald — there were only two steps between Jim Garrison and Lee Harvey Oswald. It must mean *something*, right?

Well, no. Those kind of connections are *everywhere*. We only see them when we’re looking for them. And they only have the meaning that we impose.

Now, this happens to be a big chunk of the way I tell stories — and indeed it’s an important part of the way *anyone* tells stories. You look for patterns and connections that other people haven’t seen before, and present them to the audience. Sometimes those patterns have actual meaning that sheds light on the history, other times they’re just interesting resonances and coincidences that make for an interesting story.

But the story of Charles Manson — if we assume the official story is true — is a story of how that kind of pattern-matching can go very, very badly wrong, with hideous results. And Manson is still a figure who has an outsized presence in the culture, and we live in times where conspiratorial thinking is having *profoundly* negative effects on politics, and potentially on the very future of human existence.

Given that to do this series at all I have to discuss Manson’s paranoid, conspiratorial, thinking and present what he would consider the “evidence” for his beliefs, I believe that it is absolutely incumbent on me to practice a kind of informational hygiene. So while I will go into my normal digressions in parts of the story that don’t relate directly to Manson — I hope you’re really interested in the history of minstrelsy for example — I am going to stay *well* away from the narrative pareidolia when it comes to anything relating to him or his beliefs. And that means not incorporating information or ideas from that book, as well, even where that information would supplement the story I am telling.

Manson himself only turns up towards the very end of this episode, but I thought it worth saying that up-front, as this set of episodes is meant to be listened to as a sequence.

This episode, though, deals with anti-Black racism, slavery, suicide, drug use, and mental illness. People who find those topics upsetting may want to read the transcript or skip this one.

Anyway, let’s get on with the story:

[Excerpt: Mavis Staples, “Hard Times Come Again No More”]

The popular music industry is founded in racism. That much is clear.

Note what I said there, and what I didn’t say, though. I said the *industry* is *founded* in racism. There have been many, many, streams that have contributed to popular musical culture over the hundred and ninety years or so that we can sensibly talk about popular music — from New Orleans jazz to Irish folk song to polkas to the music hall to Delta blues to Caribbean rhythms — and while, as all culture has been, those have been *shaped* by racism, very few of those types of music have been *rooted* in racism.

But the *industry*…

The music industry as an industry — the major record labels and music publishing companies — can ultimately trace its ancestry back to Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley was a precursor to the Brill Building which we’ve talked about a lot when talking about late fifties and early sixties music, and was a section of New York where the seven major music publishing companies, which between them controlled eighty percent of the market for sheet music in the early years of the twentieth century, were based.

Those companies were mostly set up in the late nineteenth century, after the American Civil War. Up until 1831 musical works had not been copyrightable at all, and it took some time for an industry to consolidate based on the ability to copyright those works, partly because of course the mid-nineteenth century was also a time of deep unrest in the USA, as friction began to grow between the comparatively liberal Northern states which had banned slavery early in the century, and the states in the South whose ruling classes still considered it perfectly acceptable to hold people prisoner, claim to own them, and torture them and force them to do backbreaking labour.

But 1831 also coincided with the start of something else, because it was in the 1830s that blackface minstrelsy first rose to prominence.

As far as records show, the first performance that we might now call a blackface minstrel performance was actually by a visiting British performer, Charles Matthews. Reports are garbled as to the exact origins of Matthews’ performance, but as best I can figure out from the conflicting versions of the story, Matthews would cover his face in black grease or cork, and do what he considered an impression of one of the few Black American-born Shakespearean actors of the period, Ira Aldridge. Matthews would perform Hamlet’s soliloquy in what he considered an hilarious dialect, such as a Black man might speak in if you’re a gigantic racist, lines like “and by opposum end them” instead of “and by opposing end them”.

He would then perform the song “Possum up a Gum Tree”, a song which apparently had its roots in slave songs longing for escape and freedom, but which when published in sheet music form in the UK came with a note about how if a raccoon bit the tail of a possum, the possum would squeal for its freedom, “but is notwithstanding too slothful to quit the vicinity of his Oppressor”

[Excerpt: The Red Hots, “Possum up a Gum Tree”]

With many of these songs, I’m going to be excerpting instrumental versions, because a lot of the lyrics to these songs are too offensive to excerpt them.

Matthews’ performances began in 1823. There were performances by white actors in blackface before Matthews — if nothing else that is how the character of Othello had traditionally been performed — but Matthews is the first that I know of to combine blackface, caricatured versions of Black American dialect, and songs claiming (sometimes accurately) to be inspired by the music of slaves, the three elements that form the basis of the artform — if we can call it that — of minstrelsy, as it became commonly practiced.

The first performer to become primarily known for this kind of performance, though, was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who created a character named “Jim Crow”, supposedly inspired by a disabled enslaved man he had observed singing a song and doing a funny little dance. Rice claimed that he took the song directly from this man, who was also supposedly named Jim Crow and singing about himself. Rice’s song became an international sensation in 1828, and remained popular for centuries:

[Excerpt: Henry Reed, “Jump Jim Crow”]

To give an idea of how popular that song became, I’m going to read an excerpt from the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a classic study of crazes and mob psychology written by Charles MacKay in 1841, some thirteen years after Rice made his debut, with MacKay talking about popular songs in London:

“Several other songs sprang up in due succession, afterwards, but none of them, with the exception of one, entitled “All round my Hat,” enjoyed any extraordinary share of favour, until an American actor introduced a vile song called “Jim Crow.” The singer sang his verses in appropriate costume, with grotesque gesticulations, and a sudden whirl of his body at the close of each verse. It took the taste of the town immediately, and for months the ears of orderly people were stunned by the senseless chorus—

“Turn about and wheel about,

And do just so—

Turn about and wheel about,

And jump, Jim Crow!”

Street-minstrels blackened their faces in order to give proper effect to the verses and fatherless urchins, who had to choose between thieving and singing for their livelihood, took the latter course, as likely to be the more profitable, as long as the public taste remained in that direction. The uncouth dance, its accompaniment, might be seen in its full perfection on market nights in any great thoroughfare and the words of the song might be heard, piercing above all the din and buzz of the ever-moving multitude.”

Rice’s character became so popular, in fact, that more than a hundred and thirty years later, the laws that made Black people second-class citizens in America were still known as the Jim Crow laws, referencing Rice’s song.

And, to be clear, while Rice was primarily an entertainer, he would have welcomed this, and had no patience at all with the idea that one can extricate politics from entertainment. His Jim Crow character was very explicitly intended as propaganda for white supremacy, and he said as much. There is a claim on the Wikipedia page for the song that it was in some way promoted as anti-slavery, but that was certainly not Rice’s position. To quote from a speech he gave at the end of his shows:

“Before I went to England, the British people were excessively ignorant regarding our ‘free institutions’. They were under the impression that negroes were naturally equal to the whites, and their degraded condition was consequently entirely upon our ‘institutions’ but I effectually proved that negroes are essentially an inferior species of the human family, and they ought to remain slaves… I have studied the negro character upon the southern plantations. The British people acknowledged that I was a fair representative of the great body of our slaves, and Charles Kemble attested to the faithfulness of my delineations.”

To be clear, that’s a white comedian arguing that his blacked-up grotesque caricature of a disabled Black man “proved” that all Black people were inferior to all white people. No doubt these days he would have a Netflix special titled “Silenced”, with tape over his mouth.

Rice was successful enough that he soon inspired a host of imitators, including George Washington Dixon, a white performer who later became a crusading editor of a right-wing populist newspaper, whipping up moral frenzies against local abortionists while also being known as a fraudster and con-man in his personal life. But early in life Dixon was second only to Rice as a blackface performer, and he wrote a song — or is credited as writing it, as many of these songs had disputed credits — which is still extremely well-known to this day in the US, where it’s best known now as the music played by ice cream vans:

[Excerpt: Burl Ives, “Turkey in the Straw”]

While that song is generally known now by the title “Turkey in the Straw”, and the nonsense lyrics that go along with that title, the original title was rather different. Dixon named the song after his blackface character, a rather effete, dandyish, free Northern Black man who would be regarded by Dixon’s audience as having airs above his station. The character’s first name was Zip, a diminutive of Scipio, a name often given to slaves. The character’s last name was a four-letter diminutive of the word raccoon, beginning with c. That word is now considered one of the worst racial slurs against Black people, and that is entirely down to Dixon. Before the debut of his character, it was a term that was largely used against members of the Whig party, but it became attached to Black people by the 1840s, because Dixon’s character was so popular.

Of course, it could be worse. There’s a recording of the same melody from the early years of the twentieth century that was released under the title “N-word Love a Watermelon, Ha! Ha! Ha!”, but without censoring the n-word.

Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a whole genre of songs that were just known as c-word songs, some of them just pure racial abuse, while others are more good-humoured songs about rural life, as in “C-H-I-C-K-E-N”, a song from 1902 which could be performed by Van Dyke Parks into this century with only minor lyrical alterations to remove a couple of slurs:

[Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, “C-H-I-C-K-E-N”]

Those two characters, Jim Crow, the stupid, lazy, Black man who is considered funny because of his disability, and Zip the effete, queer-coded Black man who is considered funny because he thinks of himself as an intellectual and as good as a white man, became the two principal stock characters of the minstrel show, along with a third, Miss Lucy Long, a physically unattractive but sexually aggressive Black woman played by a white man in blackface and drag.

Soon whole troupes of blackface performers started performing together, doing comedy sketches, and singing these songs. The first of these were the Virginia Minstrels, who were responsible for the songs “Jimmy Crack Corn”, “Ol’ Dan Tucker”, and one particularly memorable song, “Dixie”:

[Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “An American Trilogy (Dixie)”]

You will notice something about many of these tunes — despite the fact that the lyrics were written as parodies of supposed Black dialect, and they were performed using instruments like banjos which were associated with slaves, they don’t actually sound melodically like any of the forms of music we associate with Black culture.

In fact, structurally, most of these songs take the form of jigs, music associated with Ireland and Scotland (and indeed another term that became racialised against Black people because of these shows, though less thoroughly). Their eight-bar melodies, pentatonic scales, and straightforward rhythms all suggest Celtic folk music more than anything else. And the scholar Matthew D. Morrison, whose work I’m drawing on a lot for this section, suggests (to simplify his argument enormously) that minstrel performances were a way for minoritised white ethnic groups such as Irish Americans to actually enjoy their *own* traditional music but presented in a way that didn’t mark it out as being Irish — they wanted to assimilate into Anglo American society, and so the music was presented as if it was “Black” music. “It’s not us who make this weird sound, it’s them over there! We’re normal! Good, though, isn’t it?”

But to do that, that music had to be presented in a “Black” manner, and that mostly meant in Black performing styles, so the vocals would be sung in pseudo-Black dialect, the banjo and fiddle would be played in the same styles that slaves played in, various vocal effects that were common in Black singing were imitated, and Black dances would be performed.

This overlay of a surface-level imitation of Black American styles on what is otherwise a European-derived musical style, Morrison has termed “blacksound” by analogy with blackface, and we can of course see examples of blacksound throughout popular music history.

Morrison makes another point about this as well, which is that the nature of copyright law made blacksound possible. We’ve talked before in the podcast about how the elements of music that were traditionally considered copyrightable included things like melody lines, but not areas like rhythm and groove, which have often been areas in which Black composers and performers have innovated.

Now, of course, in the early nineteenth century most Black Americans were enslaved and so had no property rights at all, but even after the emancipation proclamation and during Reconstruction, when Black people at least theoretically had some legal rights, copyright law still encouraged the practice of blacksound. Because copyright requires something to be in a fixed medium — which in the days before the development of film and recording technology basically meant written down, and writing continued to be the assumed form of a copyrightable work even after that time — performance techniques, which couldn’t be captured in a fixed medium, were not considered as protected by copyright.

If, after the 1860s, a Black playwright wrote a script, or a Black composer a song, the innovation encapsulated in that written work was protected. But a Black actor coming up with a new line reading, or a Black singer with a new vocal technique, or a Black dancer with a new dance routine, could be imitated with no recourse. Indeed choreography wasn’t protected by copyright in the US *until the 1970s* — the same time that the US finally got national sound recording copyrights rather than a patchwork of state-specific laws.

And that ability to reuse other people’s performance styles meant that blackface minstrelsy boomed in the US in the early nineteenth century, with thousands of performers all over the country imitating other people’s imitations of Black vocal and dance styles, and soon spread to other countries, including the UK, where there were regular prime-time broadcasts of blackface minstrel shows right up to 1978.

And at the same time, the protection applied to sheet music meant that it was possible, for the first time in history, to make a living purely as a songwriter. And while as we always say on this podcast “there is no first anything”, it is generally accepted that the very first person ever to make a full-time living just as a songwriter was Stephen Foster:

[Excerpt: The Beatles, “Beautiful Dreamer”]

We actually don’t know that much about the life of Stephen Foster, sadly — the only biographical work about him published in living memory of his lifetime was by his brother, who was very concerned about the family’s reputation and put out a carefully sanitised version of Foster’s life, and who also destroyed most of Foster’s correspondence, keeping only those papers that he thought wouldn’t reflect badly on his family by the standards of mid nineteenth century respectable society. As a result he has become something of a mythical figure, on which can be hung any ideology the person thinking about him wishes to impose. Some have portrayed him as a secret fighter for equality and against slavery, noting the sometimes-sympathetic portrayals of enslaved people in his songs, for example pointing out that the song “Nelly Was a Lady” actually uses the word “lady” about the enslaved woman the song describes, which is very unusual for the period:

[Excerpt: Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy, “Nelly Was a Lady”]

Frederick Douglass said of some of Foster’s songs “They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow, and flourish”, and I would not want to position myself as a greater authority on what actually counted as anti-slavery art than Douglass.

On the other hand, others have pointed to some surviving virulently racist private drafts of songs, the fact that Foster wrote some songs supporting the Democratic Party (at that time the party of the racist establishment just as the Republican Party is now) and his family connections to the party — Foster’s father had been a state representative for the Democratic Party, and his sister was married to the brother of James Buchanan, the last pre-Civil War President and largely regarded as among the worst Presidents of the US ever.

The evidence, such as it is, seems to me to point to Foster, a man whose concerns in the surviving documents we have seem primarily to be about money and respectability, being someone in the vast moderate middle, who thought that slavery was distasteful, but… well, not worth kicking up a fuss about. But it’s difficult to get any true sense of Foster the man, who for example wrote both drinking songs and Temperance songs. He wrote to the market.

Foster’s first published song, “Open Thy Lattice Love”, was published when he was eighteen, in 1844. His second publication came two years later, when he set a lyric by Charles MacKay that he’d read in a newspaper to music — he could do this because there were no international copyright agreements:

[Excerpt: Fred Feild, “There’s a Good Time Coming” ]

But Foster got his fame as a result of his connection to Edwin Christy, the leader of Christy’s Minstrels, the second major blackface minstrel troupe and the most famous — a troupe of minstrels so famous in fact that more than a century after Christy’s death one of the most popular folk groups in America was named the New Christie Minstrels in tribute to the original act — we’ve heard about them in many previous episodes, as several figures we’ve seen, including Gene Clark of the Byrds, Larry Ramos and Jerry Yester of the Association, and Barry McGuire, got their start as New Christie Minstrels.

Foster licensed Christy the exclusive rights to debut Foster’s songs, and the troupe gained international fame for their performances of Foster’s material. Foster became the most popular songwriter of his time, and is quite possibly the most popular songwriter of *all* time, partly because while copyright allowed him to make a living as a full-time songwriter, his material falling into the public domain meant it didn’t cost film-makers anything to use his work in their films — and later in the ASCAP radio boycott we talked about way back in episode two, Foster’s songs were given another lease of life because they were free to be played on the radio.

This combination has led to Foster’s music having essentially defined American popular song, to the extent that he gets talked about as “the father of American music”. More than a hundred and seventy years after his commercial peak, there are still several of his songs that I would guarantee that everyone listening to this knows, though often without having realised they were songs any individual wrote, and they’ve remained in the repertoire and been reinterpreted by thousands of musicians. Foster’s first big hit was “Oh! Susanna”, heard here in a version by the Byrds produced by Terry Melcher:

[Excerpt: The Byrds, “Oh! Susanna”]

Then there was “Camptown Races”, here sung by Kenny Rogers who, like Gene Clark of the Byrds, was a former New Christie Minstrel, and his group the First Edition:

[Excerpt: Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, “Camptown Ladies”]

“Swanee River”, here sung by Ray Charles:

[Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Swanee River Rock”]

“My Old Kentucky Home”, here sung by Louis Armstrong:

[Excerpt: Louis Armstrong, “My Old Kentucky Home”]

And more. All these songs romanticised a South that Foster never knew — the only time he went below the Mason-Dixon line was a brief trip on his honeymoon, and he wrote his songs about log cabins, plantations, and slaves from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, the three states where he lived at different points.

As Foster’s popularity grew, he tried to move away from writing minstrel show songs in supposed Black dialect — though all those performances we’ve heard are by people who have altered the lyrics to make them be in standard English, as almost all performers have for the last century or so. He wrote at least some minstrel songs all his life, but he wanted to write more “respectable” music — specifically parlour songs, the kind of songs that were meant for performance in small gatherings in upper-middle-class people’s homes, and that dealt with “nice” subjects. These included “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”, sung here by Sam Cooke:

[Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”]

And “Beautiful Dreamer”, sung here by Roy Orbison:

[Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Beautiful Dreamer”]

That last song was published posthumously in 1864, and was claimed to be the last song Foster ever wrote, though that, like many of the facts of Foster’s last years, is disputed thanks to his brother’s destruction of the historical record. While he had made a good living as a songwriter for a time, making the equivalent of about forty thousand dollars a year in today’s money — not a massive amount, but far more than anyone would have believed possible at the time — his songs had been pirated by rival publishers to such an extent that he was no longer making any real income from them, and while he was still writing great songs like “Beautiful Dreamer”, the stuff he was writing wasn’t a popular success in quite the same way, partly because the Civil War had completely changed the economics of the entertainment industry — Edwin Christy had died by suicide three years earlier, because of this.

Foster had also been estranged for many years from his wife, for whom he had written “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”, and there has been a lot of suggestion that he was likely queer, which may have been a factor in his brother burning most of the documentary evidence of his life that was in existence.

All we can say with any certainty is that Foster was found aged thirty-seven with his neck cut open, and died in hospital three days later of his injury — his brother claimed he’d fallen and accidentally cut it, but many suspect it was suicide. At the time he died, America’s most popular songwriter ever, the man who defined what American popular songwriting was, and who may well have been the world’s first ever professional songwriter, was living in a dosshouse in the Bowery, and had only thirty-eight cents to his name.

[Excerpt: Brian Wilson singing “Beautiful Dreamer”, and saying “Beautiful Dreamer Wake, BDW, Brian Douglas Wilson, that’s me”]

When we left the Beach Boys, they had just released the album Smiley Smile. This album has seen some critical reevaluation in recent decades, as some have started to see it as a minimalist psychedelic masterpiece — and indeed at the time there were some who also saw it that way, as we saw in that episode. But the critical response to the album among the members of the new rock press was desultory at best, and the combination of that, the lack of commercial success for the album, and the group pulling out of the Monterey Pop Festival, meant that in a matter of months the Beach Boys had gone from being the hippest group in America to being seen as ridiculously behind the times and yesterday’s news.

This wasn’t helped by the decision to release the album’s weakest track, “Gettin’ Hungry”, as a single credited not to the Beach Boys but to Brian Wilson and Mike Love:

[Excerpt: Brian Wilson and Mike Love — “Gettin’ Hungry”]

That became the first single with one of the Beach Boys singing lead not to chart since “Barbie” a single that three of them had recorded under the name “Kenny and the Cadets” back in March 1962.

It may have been released that way because Love had been increasingly worried about the way he was marginalised in Brian Wilson’s songwriting. Wilson had always worked with multiple lyricists, but Love had always been the principal one — though the credits didn’t always reflect that, as the Beach Boys’ publishing was run by Wilson’s father, Murry, who was Love’s uncle, but who left his nephew off the credits for many songs in favour of his son. But in 1966 and early 67, Love had been cut out of the songwriting process almost completely, other than the big hit “Good Vibrations”, as Wilson, who was being promoted as the genius of the group, chose to collaborate first with advertising executive Tony Asher, and then with Van Dyke Parks, a folk musician and session keyboardist and arranger he’d met at their mutual friend Terry Melcher’s house at 1050 Cielo Drive.

The unfinished Smile album’s songwriting had been close to a fifty-fifty collaboration between Wilson and Parks, but only three of the Wilson/Parks collaborations had made it to Smiley Smile — the single “Heroes and Villains”, “Vegetables”, and “Wonderful”:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Wonderful (Smiley Smile version)”]

Meanwhile there were two Wilson/Love songs — “Gettin’ Hungry” and “Good Vibrations” — and one song that had originally been a Wilson/Parks collaboration, but for which Love had written a new set of lyrics, “She’s Goin’ Bald”, while the other five tracks were fragmentary, fragile, things credited to Wilson alone.

The “Gettin’ Hungry” single was interesting in another way, though — because it was the only single released in the initial attempt at starting Brother Records.

Brother Records was a label that the group had decided to start a year or so earlier. It was being run by David Anderle, an A&R man who had previously worked at MGM records and been part of the reason they had signed the Mothers of Invention — he’s credited on the sleeve of their first album, Freak Out! — and who was a close associate both of the Byrds’ manager Jim Dickson and of Derek Taylor, the former and future Beatles publicist who, thanks to Anderle, became the Beach Boys’ publicist for a while before moving off to work for his old employers at Apple Records.

And Brother, had it worked out, was an attempt to do Apple a year before Apple happened — and indeed the trajectory of the two labels was curiously similar. Both labels were started out by the members of the biggest bands in their respective countries, to put out their own music and experimental music by their friends, and to be distributed by EMI records. Both later focused primarily on the intellectual property of the bands in question — Apple still holds the Beatles trademarks and various other rights, while Brother Records owned the Beach Boys IP until it was bought out in 2022.

As in many of these cases, Brother Records came in part out of a lawsuit — the Beach Boys sued Capitol Records for unpaid royalties, and as part of a settlement it was agreed that their records from Smiley Smile on would be distributed by Capitol but owned by the group, with the rights reverting to them at the end of their Capitol contract.

While “Gettin’ Hungry” was released on Brother Records, the next Beach Boys single, six weeks later, was back on Capitol. The title track to their next album, “Wild Honey” had production credited to the group, and saw them turning in an R&B direction. It was also the first single released under the Beach Boys’ name since “Barbara Ann” two years earlier to be a group effort instrumentally — other than Paul Tanner’s electrotheremin, every instrument on the track is played by a Beach Boy:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Wild Honey”]

That made number 31 in the charts — a reasonable effort by most groups’ standards, but the Beach Boys weren’t most groups. Not counting their two Christmas singles, the group had had a run of sixteen top-twenty hits in a row. Now they were not even making the top thirty.

Not only that, they were once again struggling for material. They needed to get an album out by the end of the year and it was already October. They’d originally planned to release an album of the live shows they’d played in Hawaii in August, but they were considered unreleasable even after the group had done studio touch-ups and rerecordings (though the tapes have been released more recently and are, to my mind, very good). They were in trouble.

Oddly, though, the “Wild Honey” single wasn’t the only material from the Beach Boys’ family to be released in October 1967. Murry Wilson, Brian, Carl, and Dennis’ dad, had been fired as the group’s manager in 1965, though he had carried on managing — and mismanaging — their songwriting copyrights. But he had tried to continue in the music industry anyway. First he had signed a new group, the Sunrays, who he had promised to make as big as the Beach Boys, though of their several singles, the closest they had to a hit was “I Live For the Sun”, which made number fifty-one:

[Excerpt: The Sunrays, “I Live For the Sun”]

Though the song, written by Sunray Rick Henn, was strong enough that the British group Vanity Fare had a top twenty hit with it in the UK, three years later:

[Excerpt: Vanity Fare, “I Live For the Sun”]

But Murry had always been a songwriter, and he wanted to prove himself as a musical force in his own right. And Capitol Records were keen enough to keep the Beach Boys happy that they agreed to put out an album by him — though they charged the cost of recording it to the Beach Boys’ royalties, apparently with Murry Wilson’s blessing but not with the band’s.

While Wilson was credited as the artist for The Many Moods of Murry Wilson, he did not perform, arrange, or conduct the album, a collection of Muzak instrumentals. There’s no performer credit, but it was likely played by the Hollyridge Strings, Capitol Records’ in-house easy-listening orchestra. The arranger and conductor was Don Ralke, a presumably long-suffering arranger whose other credits include work with William Shatner and Lorne Greene. The album was, though, “supervised” by Wilson, and five of the songs were written by him, one co-written with his wife Audree. And the other songs were selected by him from people in his life.

There was one Beach Boys cover, a syrupy version of “The Warmth of the Sun”; a song written by Ralke which had previously been recorded by the Sunrays; one song written by Rick Henn of the Sunrays; a song written by a lifelong friend of Murry’s about whom I can discover nothing else; and two songs written by his plumber, the gloriously-named Eck Kynor.

It also contained one track supposedly secretly produced by Brian Wilson rather than Murry, though still arranged by Ralke, an instrumental version of a song Al Jardine had written, entitled “Italia”:

[Excerpt: Murry Wilson, “Italia”]

Other than a co-writing credit with Brian and Dennis Wilson on “South Bay Surfer”, a rewrite of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” on the Surfer Girl album, that was Al Jardine’s first songwriting credit — a small sign that the members of the group other than Brian were starting to push their songs a little.

And they were going to need to. The group were desperate for new songs at this point. Brian, meanwhile, had got more interested in a new band he’d signed to Brother Records, Redwood, and produced a couple of tracks for them:

[Excerpt: Redwood, “Time to Get Alone”]

But with the pressure on to produce a new album quickly, Mike Love and Carl Wilson commandeered the backing tracks, and Redwood’s time at Brother Records was over. They went on under the name Three Dog Night to have a great deal of success.

That song we just heard, “Time to Get Alone”, ended up being held back for a future Beach Boys album as it didn’t fit with the soul-inspired but largely acoustic sound the group were going for on their new album. The other song Wilson was producing for Redwood, though, fit the bill nicely.

“Darlin'” had started out as a song called “Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby” that Brian and Mike had written in 1964 for a singer called Sharon Marie, which had been a flop single:

[Excerpt: Sharon Marie, “Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby”]

But three years later Brian had returned to the song, come up with a totally new chorus, and altered the arrangement drastically, taking it from a slow pop ballad to an uptempo piece of blue-eyed soul, with new lyrics by Love:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Darlin'”]

That took the group back into the top twenty at least, and would remain a staple of the group’s live set for the rest of their career, though most fans think that it worked better in the rather more muscular arrangement they played it in live, with Carl Wilson singing with a fuller voice than on the record, as in this live version from 1972:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Darlin’ (Sail on Sailor box set version)”]

“Darlin'” and “Wild Honey” were included on an album named after the latter track, and most of the rest of the album was made up of newly-written Wilson/Love material, mostly in a vein that mixed the influence of soul with an almost folk-rock feel, a more commercial-seeming take on the stripped-down sound that characterised the Smiley Smile album.

There were two tracks that weren’t Wilson/Love songs, though. One was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her”, but the other in a way was pointing towards the future of the Beach Boys:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “How She Boogalooed It”]

That is not an impressive record, and I suspect it’s not even in anybody’s hundred favourite Beach Boys songs (though please don’t bother correcting me if it’s your favourite). But it *is* the first actual song, as opposed to instrumental jams, to be credited to the members of the Beach Boys other than Brian Wilson — it was credited to Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston. From this point on, the involvement of the other Beach Boys in the songwriting would increase dramatically — the next time that Brian would have a songwriting credit on every original track on an album would be in 1977, and by the early seventies Brian was reduced to writing two or three songs per album on records that were otherwise mostly the work of his bandmates.

Oddly the other Beach Boy not to be credited for that track was Brian and Carl’s brother Dennis. It didn’t seem odd at the time, because Dennis was the drummer of the group, and wasn’t considered a songwriter or even a particularly good instrumentalist. But in fact, since the Smile sessions, Dennis had been working on songs of his own and occasionally using studio time to cut backing tracks, like this one recorded two weeks after the end of the Wild Honey sessions:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Tune L”]

While Brian had been the primary creative force in the band, Carl the onstage musical director, and Mike Love the frontman, Dennis’ role in the band had often been to be a pointer in new directions. He was the only original Beach Boy to live a beach lifestyle (Bruce Johnston, who joined in 1965, also surfed, and apparently was still doing so well into this century, and Mike Love would apparently go surfing occasionally in the sixties, but Dennis was the only one of the originals for whom surfing was a major part of life), and he was the band member who was most eager to embrace the counterculture, or at least that part of it that got assimilated by the Hollywood celebrity lifestyle he was also eager to be part of.

And it was Dennis Wilson who pointed the group towards the Maharishi. They met him, at Dennis’ instigation, at a benefit show for UNICEF in December 1967 — Dennis was impressed that the first thing he heard the Maharishi say was “live life to the full”. All the Beach Boys initially took up transcendental meditation — with the possible exception of Bruce Johnston, the only one I’ve never seen explicitly say he meditates — but only Mike Love and Al Jardine would stick with it in the long term. Dennis would go in search of other gurus.

But Mike in particular became one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the Maharishi’s teachings around, especially after he and Bruce went to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour launch party a couple of days after the meeting. Love soon found himself in Rishikesh, studying the Maharishi’s teachings along with the Beatles, Donovan, and the film star Mia Farrow, who had just finished making the film Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski.

While Love was in India, the Beach Boys’ music continued to be recorded. The Friends album was recorded largely without the participation of the group’s lead singer, who only appears on four tracks — apparently on at least one track, the bass part that Love would normally have sung was performed by Murry Wilson instead.

The songwriting credits for the album were much more democratic than any previous album. While Brian would later refer to it as his favourite album, and even as his second “solo album” after Pet Sounds, and he definitely took charge in the studio, the credits show Brian as first among equals as songwriter. He is credited as writer or co-writer on ten of the twelve tracks, but a typical credit is for the title track and single off the album, written by Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson and Al Jardine:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Friends”]

The B-side to that single, “Little Bird”, was the first Beach Boys original to be released on a single without a Brian Wilson writing credit — though part of the music is inspired by a then-unreleased Smile track Brian had written, “Child is Father of the Man”:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Little Bird”]

“Little Bird” was Dennis Wilson’s first composition (other than a drum solo filler) to be released. The lyrics were by Stephen Kalinich, a poet who was also signed to Brother records, and for whom Brian would the next year produce a spoken-word-with-music album, A World of Peace Must Come, which would not see release until 2008:

[Excerpt: Stephen Kalinich, “Be Still”]

The poem Kalinich recites there was the basis of the other song Brian didn’t write on Friends, “Be Still”, when Dennis took a few lines from Kalinich’s long poem, with credit, and turned it into almost a lullaby, which he performed in his cracked voice as a solo vocal, backed by Brian on organ:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Be Still”]

Friends is one of the Beach Boys’ best albums, a gentle, lovely, album that combines the childlike feel of Smiley Smile with, at points, the lush orchestration of Pet Sounds, and it’s the most comforting of the Beach Boys albums — the peace the whole band seemed to be finding in Transcendental Meditation shines through in every note. It’s also, despite its multiple songwriters, among the most sonically unified of the Beach Boys’ albums — the entire album feels like one coherent statement, in a way that few other of their records ever did.

It also, though, saw the start of a catastrophic decline in the Beach Boys’ fortunes, at least in the US. In the UK, both single and album did perfectly respectably — the single made number twenty-five and the album number thirteen.

But in the US, where only a year earlier they’d had an unbroken run of top twenty hits going back years, the single didn’t even make the top forty at all, only getting to number forty-seven. The album did worse. Two years earlier, Pet Sounds had been a commercial worry for them because it “only” made number ten. Friends never got higher than number one hundred and twenty-six. It’s been estimated that US sales of the album that year were fewer than 18,000 total.

The Beach Boys’ career was suddenly going so badly that they seemed to be causing career problems for other bands too. The group had a tour with the Buffalo Springfield and Strawberry Alarm Clock as support. As we discussed in the episode of the podcast on Buffalo Springfield, not only were several dates of the tour cancelled after the assassination of Dr King, but Buffalo Springfield split up directly as a result of that tour, and according to Stephen Stills explicitly because of Mike Love. Stills later said “The inside story on that tour was Mike Love turning into this svengali influence on Neil. It was weird. They were always off in a corner, whispering. And Mike Love is just a spooky character.”

After that tour, the group went on another tour, this time themselves acting as support act — for the Maharishi. The idea was that the Beach Boys would play their hitsand thenthe Maharishi would speak to the audience for an hour about meditation. The problem was that the group’s last really big hit, “Good Vibrations”, had been eighteen months earlier, an eternity in sixties music time, and that there was almost no overlap between people who wanted a lecture on meditation and people who wanted the Beach Boys.

The original plan was to do twenty-nine shows in sixteen days — at that time the group would often play a daytime show and an evening show in two different nearby towns — but the tour ended up lasting three days. By the second day one show was cancelled as they turned up to the 16,000-seat Singer Bowl to find only eight hundred people had turned up. After the third day the Maharishi decided to cut his losses and quit, to go off and make a documentary about himself instead. The rest of the tour was cancelled and the Beach Boys lost between a quarter and half a million dollars.

Meanwhile, Brian Wilson’s mental health was declining. At some point over the summer he spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, apparently as a voluntary patient. Steve Desper, the group’s recording engineer, remembers Wilson getting him to create a tape loop of just the chorus to “Be My Baby”, placing the speakers in the echo chamber of his home studio, and listening to the loop on repeat for five hours:

[Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby” chorus looped]

Desper also recalls Wilson making dozens and dozens of attempts at recording the song “Ol’ Man River”, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s pastiche of Black spirituals, though thankfully in the couple of versions we have by the Beach Boys they don’t sing in the minstrelesque pseudo-Black dialect that Hammerstein wrote his lyrics in, and they omit the section with the n-word included:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Ol’ Man River”]

“Ol’ Man River” and “Be My Baby” are both examples of songs that Brian keeps coming back to, sometimes over a short period and sometimes for years — he’s also often returned, for example, to “Shortenin’ Bread”, and to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary”. Another song that he drew on for inspiration multiple times in the sixties was Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks At Home”, which he had rewritten with his brother Dennis and Al Jardine as “South Bay Surfer”:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “South Bay Surfer”]

And by himself as “Surfin’ Down the Swanee River” for his wife’s group The Honeys:

[Excerpt: The Honeys, “Surfin’ Down the Swanee River”]

And the best version of “Ol’ Man River” that Wilson produced was actually a medley of the two, with Foster’s song serving as a piano intro to a take on the Broadway song recorded in a style reminiscent of Wilson’s productions for Smile, bringing together a hundred and seventeen years of American popular music, creating a continuum from the minstrel show to Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to the psychedelic rock scene:

[Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Old Folks at Home/Ol’ Man River (I Can Hear Music version)”]

Eventually, though, the other Beach Boys got weary and sick of trying to record the same song over and over again, and that track remained unfinished, and wasn’t released until the 1990s.

But despite all the problems, there was still hope that the Beach Boys’ record label, Brother Records, could create stars. And around the same time that the group were recording their versions of “Ol’ Man River”, they were also in the studio cutting demos for someone they were considering signing, the guru who had replaced the Maharishi for Dennis. Charles Manson.

[Excerpt: Charles Manson, “Cease to Exist”]