Northern Light Book Shop

June 3rd 2002, The Golden Jubilee Pop Concert at Buckingham Palace.
It doesn’t seem like 25 years since the last Jubilee, but the musical line up on offer has outlasted the 1977 lot who proclaimed ‘No Future’ and death to all rock dinosaurs.
In 1977 The Sex Pistols “God Save The Queen” was the true sound of The Jubilee, but the 2002 edition exhibited very different tendencies.
For it is the ‘rock dinosaurs’ who dominate the bill, iconic figures from the 1960s. This ability of the British to turn people who seem outside the pale into loveable scamps and Great British Eccentrics was demonstrated-Ozzy Osbourne before the Queen indeed.

To look at the roots of this appeal we have to go back to the 1960s proper, when this Rock music was actually invented and constructed from a diverse range of sources. In fact there doesn’t seem any musical form that was excluded – the film “Spinal Tap” spares no one in its exposition of this. Though the resulting form is primarily a white music in the end.
The most significant contributors to this music were The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan and The Byrds (initially ‘The American Beatles’).
Phil Spector who wrote his teen symphonies through the ‘Wall of Sound’ production method, mutually influenced Brian and The Beatles. Brian’s favourite song, in the whole universe, as he says on the “Live At The Roxy” album is Spector’s “Be My Baby”. When it came out at first he played it over and over again, trying to work out how Spector had done it (John Lennon was very taken by (Remember) Walking In The Sand).
And, without Elvis, said Lennon, there would have been no Beatles. Brian got HIS rock and role beat from Chuck Berry, another rock and roller, his harmony influences from barber shop type singing (the Four Freshmen)!
The Beatles were the punks of their day; they understood and could play the rock and roll form, without knowing of the blues, soul, hillbilly and gospel influences that created it – sourced from black and white musical forms. Elvis knew that though.
But, on the day of the Royal Concert, one artist completely stood out; why he was there at all seemed a mystery to the Royal Box, as the camera scanned across them – WHO IS THIS GUY? A non-British performer too.
But Eric Clapton knew, as he strode out to play very understated guitar and harmony vocals on a quiet tune that seemed out of keeping with the general air of raucous celebration produced by the Brits.
Luckily for these rock gods the one to whom they ALL pay homage to had been on tour in Britain and they snapped him up.
A man whose musical reputation has only increased since the 1960s.
“The Warmth of the Sun” is not an obvious crowd pleaser, the album from which it comes a series of quiet pleasures for those alone. Following with “Caroline No”, another track from the same album, Brian Wilson performed tracks from the album that McCartney reckons is the best ever, and individual copies of which he bought for all his children.
In fact had the organisers persuaded Bob Dylan to play the circle of influences would be mostly complete. Dylan turned the Beatles from Scotch and Coke and speed freaks into potheads. (More follows)
He influenced John Lennon in particular in the way that lyrics could be written, from ‘boy meets then loses girl’ to a more personal, sometimes autobiographical style couched in tropes.
He, in turn, was influenced by them to return to his rock and roll roots, allying a folk music and poetical lyrical style to an amplified beat.
But that is why HE was there, the risen god from across he water. He is of the same generation as the main artists, and the fact that HE IS HERE is enough really, for the British rock gods.
It is well known that Wilson slipped into a kind of netherworld, partly due to a copious intake of drugs but these merely exacerbated some very deeply laid patterns of honour and shame derived form his relationship with this father.
In fact this period did not last forever and Wilson, since the 1980s, has been producing solo albums though not performing concert tours, notably working with Van Dyke Parks again on “Orange Crate Art”, his collaborator on “Smile”.
That in the last few years he has felt able to undertake longer dates and even seem ‘reborn’ is slightly at odds with the figure that seemed to be only waving, nodding and smiling as his band performed around him.
It is more that he is playing the songs that he himself wrote in the 1960s, including the whole of “Pet Sounds”, that are the root of the appeal.
The “Live at the Roxy” Internet only souvenir album from 2000 whetted the appetite, and when he actually turned up in person last year for a concert date the reception, the homage, emboldened him to come back again.
His old band, the Beach Boys, for whom these songs were originally written – Wilson, famously, wrote them, and stayed at home while the band performed them – hardly seem part of the roots of modern popular music, in the way that Ozzy Osbourne is; ‘the kids’ still pay to see him, but Brian Wilson?
The roots of the Beatles and the Beach Boys are in the period before the 1960s, they are children of the ‘50s really when the social changes gathered pace. The Quarrymen were formed in 1957, and they spent years scuffling before their first major hit, “Please Please Me” in 1963. The Beach Boys date from 1961 when the home demo of “Surfin’ USA” was recorded.
The Beach Boys were phenomenally successful in the early days, across the world, but it was the challenge posed by the Beatles, which spurred the young Wilson on, to try and produce whole albums that possessed a lasting value.
He felt that there was a competition going on. Albums from the major players in the construction of the new ‘rock music’ were famously described as ‘musical postcards’, and the influence of the previous one was cheerfully acknowledged to the progenitors of the musical inspiration by the others.
On the “Summer Days and Summer Nights” album, by the Beach Boys, released in 1965 there is a track called “Girl Don’t Tell Me” which is a perfect pastiche of the Beatles sound, though apparently a less Beatlesque version also exists.
“Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” spurred Wilson to “Pet Sounds”, now considered Wilson’s major musical statement, and voted very near the top, if not at the top, of polls of the 100 best ever albums.
He then decided to top this, to produce THE musical statement of the decade. “Sergeant Pepper” caused him think that it had already been done, so “Smile” was never completed.
The rest of the band raided “Smile” for subsequent albums. The Beach Boys grew into a BAND after this, in the early ‘70s, as Wilson became less and less involved. But the last track of Wilson’s set at the Palace; “Good Vibrations” was the lasting legacy of that time. This one did produce a response, people have heard this song.
The concert then demonstrated the legacy of the 1960s, (the continuing, or the end of?) and finished with a jolly sing-along under the auspices of Paul McCartney of some of the Beatles more popular tunes. There was nothing of McCartney’s own later work though.
I saw Brian Wilson; live at the Oxford Apollo, on Saturday 17th July 2004. It is billed as ‘The Smile Tour’, and he is going to play the complete version of this long lost album. Which he does.
So he is still out there, still doing it. Rather his band did it. They do sound a lot like The Beach Boys, only they sing better, and instrumentally they are more proficient. They are based on a group called The Wondermints, but it also included The Stockholm Strings for the stringy bits of Smile.
They also have a rather fetchingly ravishing blonde back up singer called ‘TayTay’ as far as I can make out, and she doesn’t do that much but look gorgeous. Maybe more of that later.
The concert is divided into 3 parts. They start smack on time, at 7.47pm, by my watch. They all sit in one corner of the stage, with acoustic guitars, and they sing some of the later Beach Boys tunes, like California Girls, Marcella and Friends. Brilliant. Brilliant harmonies and brilliant spot on singing. What a great band. 2 songs were dedicated to Carl and Dennis; it is quite a thing to be the only surviving brother, and the oldest one too. It must be quite haunting. I certainly felt that way.
They take a break, then it is into ‘Smile’, the whole suite of it, for it is indeed a suite. Nothing like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, or ‘Surfer Girl’ which he plays in the 3rd part of the set.
Miles removed from ‘Pet Sounds’ too, the preceding opus to this intended ‘masterpiece’.
Brian draws together its various elements, and you realise how familiar a lot of it is, in that you have heard a lot of the fragments before. What he does is join them up, and you suddenly realise that he HAD almost finished it.
The Fire sequence, Mrs O’ Leary’s Cow, Vegetables, Wind Chimes, Cabinessence, Surf’s Up, finished off by Good Vibrations. All had been heard in various places before. The Heroes and Villains theme underpins the links between these various sections.
That doesn’t make it any less tedious in this way; it was good to hear it, but people preferred the other stuff, and were glad to get this together once. It is ‘progressive’ music, aiming in a classical direction. You could tell why he had to give it up then, the rest of the band could never have managed to play it, though this one certainly did.
It is quite amazing to think of them actually learning this, sequences of quite small performances per performer. They must have really practiced.
Brian sat there with his keyboard and a couple of computer screens, looking like he wasn’t entirely connected, and he was always first off stage – this performance was taking it out of him, you could see. I can’t remember his age, but I am not sure that he is long for this world either.
Funnily enough, while the first set was probably more musically complex, it was the simple early songs that really got us all up and dancing. I know the words, and I clapped along, sometimes on the offbeat.
What more can I say about Smile….

THE BEACH BOYS ‘Live at Knebworth 1980

Brother Records Cat No. EAGCD155

21 tracks of super songs from the time when the Boys decided they preferred to be a travelling juke box, playing their old songs to an audience who knew them as by osmosis.
And why not, when they are as ‘classic’ as these? The CD comes as a deluxe package in a cardboard slipcase, with a repro poster of the gig, 21st June 1980, where they were the headliners. There are also copious liner notes and comments by the band on the songs played that night, giving the release all the flavour of an event.
The set is sold as the last time the classic line-up (the original 5 plus Bruce Johnston) appeared together. Much as the current Brian Wilson setup a cast of session musicians fills out the sound, which is notably rockier, more ‘contemporary’ than of old.
One wonders what Brian is actually doing, but he is there, and gets to sing a couple of songs, not to mention being sung to as it is his birthday. Too the group sounds noticeably less fraught than on the between song comments on the 1973 ‘In Concert’ album (which itself is a real gem), but Mike Love’s intros verge on the supercilious.
But, the music, what about it? The songs are great, you know them all pretty much, and it would be a great party/driving record given the way it powers along.
It begins with ‘California Girls’, described here thus, “…has there ever been a better intro to a hit record?” and who could disagree – you can imagine yourself standing at the edge of the western ocean, with your surfboard and your baggies.
‘Sloop John B’, ‘Darlin’, ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Help Me Rhonda’, et al, are all given the full treatment, style being traded for power, but at an outdoor concert projection is all.
It may cause a few people to go to the back catalogue, particularly now that it is available in such handsome form, but, overall, a good souvenir of the event, probably aimed more at fans than the casual listener.