FLOW TALK Q & A
JOIN US for a collection of conversations with Beach Boys‘ members Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston, with a little help from Brian Wilson, offering a window into a critically underrated and unheralded artistic period in The Beach Boys’ history.
GOLDMINE: Bruce, in 1970, you spoke about the problem with how the public perceived the band as “Surfing Doris Days.” The music you were creating during this period stands among the band’s most artistic and forward thinking. How did you work to counter attack that problem?
BRUCE JOHNSTON: We didn’t have anyone adjusting our image and perception. That was just who we were. People didn’t know image-wise that we were anti-war at the time I said that. I still thought more about music than image. How can I expect Brian Wilson to win a gold record in the Olympics every year of his life? He was the leader of the band for so long in the studio, and he did beautifully in those first five or six years. But I think we started getting wimpy and watered down. Then when you mix in how angry the young part of our nation was in fighting a French war that we inherited from the French, from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon. We were so angry that we let that slip into the imagery of where we were at. Our music was so “Doris Day” and I mean that as a compliment. But it was very unhip and uncool. We kept it light. All of a sudden being this band that kept it light for so many years, we weren’t cool or relevant. Yet we did make some great music.
GM: Mike, the music you created during this period stands among The Beach Boys’ best, both from an artistic point of view and with its ambition.
When the Vietnam war was heating up in the late ’60s and everybody was concerned about their draft status — Carl received a draft notice and he became a conscientious objector and that led to us playing a lot of prisons and hospitals as part of his community service — Capitol Records would be promoting us at the No. 1 surfing group in the U.S.A. That’s what Bruce meant by that remark and it was irrelevant. At the same time, we’d done “Good Vibrations,” which is one of the more avant-garde classic psychedelic songs. It was both avant-garde and commercially successful, mystical and poetic. I dictated the words to my then wife Suzanne on the way to the session. I didn’t say “Don’t f**k with the formula.” I like to be creative and artistic, but I also like to be successful and that’s the beauty of “Good Vibrations.” It was as avant-garde as you could ever hope to be. It was a classic arrangement and so unique and so brilliant musically but also because it was so unique and such a departure musically, I thought that this was gonna be challenging for some of the fans in mid America, but I know that everybody can relate to boy and girl so I wrote (recites), “I’m picking up good vibrations, she’s giving me the excitations.” For Capitol to say that we were the No. and onward. But I wouldn’t place the blame fully on the label. Had we had our stuff together, we would have been able to handle it better. I was in India at the teacher’s training program with the Maharishi in February/March of 1968 and had a conversation one night with Paul McCartney on the roof of this building. He said, “Mike, you really ought to take more care with your album covers.” Here’s the mastermind of and that brilliant album cover they did with the costumes and the various people, Gandhi and whomever, and our album cover was a photograph taken of us at the San Diego petting zoo. When he said we needed to take more care with our album covers, I said, “You’re absolutely right, but we’ve always felt what went inside the sleeve was more important” so it was like a touché moment. It’s kind of intimidating when Sir Paul says that. He was trying to be helpful and advise us. We being the boys next door from Southern California, we weren’t as together as The Beatles were in showing the evolution of the band. If we had proper management and PR savvy, I don’t think Capitol Records and the world would have perceived us that way.
