The Beach Boys' Smile by Sanchez Luis

Author:Sanchez, Luis
Language: eng
Format: epub

“We Three Kings” a cappella, folding the show’s bustling pop pageantry into an atmosphere of ethereal wonder.

It’s a jarring moment that directs itself inward, but in its passing, The Beach Boys prove that the conviction in this music doesn’t come cheaply.

The day the Shindig! Christmas special aired was the same day that Brian experienced the emotional

• 63 •

S M I L E

breakdown that led to the decision to remove himself

from touring altogether. Traveling with the rest of The Beach Boys on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston

to start a two-week U.S. tour, he realized he could no

longer write, produce, and perform to the same capacity.

He announced to the rest of the group several weeks

later that his role as a Beach Boy was best confined to the studio. It wasn’t a retreat, but a realization that the group’s best chance of advancing into new pop terrain,

terrain that would open up for something as bold as

Smile, meant that Brian had first to win both access and creative autonomy.

• 64 •

To Catch a Wave

As of now, early 1973, it is clear that rock is neither the ultimate in cultural hallucinogens nor last year’s

rush. It is an established, pervasive social force, and it is still growing. Note that I refer not to “rock and roll,”

the pop-happy big beat that was disdained by nearly

everyone except the kids who listened to it between 1955

and 1964, but to “rock,” a term that signifies something like “all music deriving primarily from the energy and

influence of the Beatles—and maybe Bob Dylan, and

maybe you should stick pretensions in there someplace.”

Robert Christgau, “A Counter in Search of a Culture”

from Any Old Way You Chose It: Rock and Other Pop Music 1967–73

Rock Myth

“Rock” is a weird, loaded term. It has a capacity to evoke some combination of attitude, principles, ideas, and

maybe even a discrete kind of music. Rock may matter

as a kind of social common sense, a development that we can trace from the emergence of rock criticism in the

• 65 •

S M I L E

mid-60s and the establishment of the flagship journal

Rolling Stone all the way to the present-day academic preoccupation with it (there are universities where you can earn a postgraduate degree in Beatle-ology). But

even in its ubiquity, its meaning still seems unsettled. Do people even make rock music anymore?

If there is such a thing as a baseline narrative to rock history, constructing it has been the work of journalists, critics, and fans who watched it unfold in front of them, not historians. Because of this, it often suffers from a generational perception of being blessed, a conviction

that if you came of age in the ’60s your claim on the music is therefore more valid than if you made the mistake of being born too late. It is somewhat ironic, then, that rock legacy tends to be based on a glorified idea of what the music came to represent. There is a self-perpetuating

notion that drives a lot of rock history, which says that things had to happen the way

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.