Interview ~ Why The Beach Boys Matter, with author Tom Smucker

Available Here>>>

Phil Miglioratti (Pray For Surf blog) interviewed Tom Smucker,

author of "Why The Beach Boys Matter"

PHIL ~ Tom, what prompted you to write "Why The Beach Boys Matter?" Did you approach your writing as an author, journalist, fan...?

TOM ~ I’ve been wanting to write a book about The Beach Boys since I published a two-part article about them in Creem magazine in 1972. I’ve written about pop music off and on over the years but never full time. I made my living working as a telephone tech. Stephen P Hull, the originator of the Music Matters series, and Evelyn McDonnell, the series editor,  were willing to take a chance on me and I did my best to write a book that fit into their ideas for the series, one of which was to keep it short. I tried to write as a fan who has thought about and listened to and read a lot about the Beach Boys.

PHIL ~ "Why The Beach Boys Matter" reads like a sociological analysis of the life and times that shaped The Beach Boys ... and became shaped by The Beach Boys. Is that an accurate description? ...and if so, how does that change the discussion of the true significance of this rock and roll band?

TOM ~ Thanks Phil, that’s a good description. I’m someone who thinks a lot about politics and social context. Others have written about the Beach Boys from other perspectives that are just as legit. I’m not a musician or a surfer or a music biz insider or an interviewer and have never lived in southern California. I am a fan and try to make the case in the book that the story of The Beach Boys as it stretches from the early 1960s across the 1970s and beyond is one, (but only one) important story about the last half of the twentieth century.

Puzzling out how they went in and then out and then back in fashion has a lot to tell us about the last 60 years, if you care about such things. I know lots of wonderful people who have no interest in the Beach Boys or their music and that’s OK, but I would argue that the Beach Boys pop music career represents a significant chunk of shared experiences from a significant era and location – post World War II suburban North American white teenagers, to simplify.

As a long time fan I lived through the era when they were popular but not that hip and then completely out of fashion and then popular again. Why did that happen? That’s an interesting question to me.

At the same time, in our world of globalized pop culture, all of us respond to music from times and places far from our own for all sorts of reasons, and that’s part of the fun and human connection.  From that perspective The Beach Boys can be appreciated for their role in rise of pop music as an art form.

PHIL ~ Give us a chronological list of authors/critics/journalists who, because they think/research/write from this perspective, have brought us to the point where we are ready for a hard/fresh/new look into why the music and the members of The Beach Boys matter.

TOM – That would be a book length list if I was going to be accurate!  So I’ll just skim the surface and apologize in advance for all the omissions.

I was lucky to be on the fringe of the invention of rock criticism and my book comes out of a tradition created by Robert Christgau, Richard Goldstein, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis and many others. Christgau and Marcus prove that you can do this for over 50 years and remain as interesting as when you started. In Beach Boys world I owe the biggest debt to David Leaf and Domenic Priore who have helped shape the story. I count Leaf’s Tribute To Brian Wilson at Radio City both as an event and DVD to be important moments in that shaping.  Likewise, the Love and Mercy movie. And a shout out to all the fans and musicians who have been so important.

Where Did Our Love Go?, Nelson George’s great 1985 Motown book was a big influence. George mentioned (page 103) that Motown and The Beach Boys (I might add The Four Seasons) survived and thrived before during Beatlemania. That stuck in my head along with the book’s ability to place Motown in a social context while honoring the music as music.  Greg Tate’s writing has been an inspiration for the same reasons. 

PHIL ~ Why do these factors matter?

TOM ~

•Protestant hymnody ~

It’s my contention that one of the dynamics going on in Beach Boys music involves the combination of ideas about vocal harmony from doo-wop, pop jazz, African American gospel quartets and what sounds to me like midcentury mid-American Protestant hymn singing. Full disclosure: I’m a church going Protestant and that’s what I hear. It’s the spiritual tinge in a lot of Beach Boys singing, the oohs and aahs, and it adds a dimension to their singing, sometimes about cars, or surfing, or summer coming to an end that I believe is unique. Maybe it’s not particularly Protestant, but that’s how I hear it.

           •Stratocaster guitars

The Beach Boys come from a place about equidistant from the beach and the first well made mass produced electric guitar and as far as I know, the very first playable electric bass, and that was an explosive mixture they shared with Dick Dale and then much of the world.

           •Suburbia 

What I mean by suburbia in my book is not the world of elite little towns outside of big cities as existed before WWII, but the civilization that spread alongside the growth of the interstates and affordable mass-produced cars that became the dominant way of life in the last half of the twentieth century in North America. This civilization was disparaged by snobs in big old-fashioned cities like New York, or reactionaries in actual small towns still connected to rural America. The Beach Boys were too naïve to know they weren’t supposed to sing about the world they inhabited so they did, and as it turned out, living in single family homes that you drove to in a metropolis connected by roadways was how most people ended living or hoping to live. Pointing out that this by now predominant way of life as it took shape in the 1940s and 1950s was racially segregated by law and not merely by custom is only meant to clarify the world I shared (in the suburbs of Chicago) with the Beach Boys as kids.

           •” The Beach Boys weren’t a group discovered by a record producer; they discovered themselves in the studio.“

For better and for worse, the studio was Brian Wilson’s instrument. And the recording studio and record producer were relatively new inventions when the Beach Boys took shape. In this way, The Beach Boys may stake a claim in the permanent history of pop music. Only time will tell. Maybe a present-day version would be someone who masters the art of YouTube and becomes a celebrity or even pop music notable via social media.

PHIL ~ Why do these groups matter?

TOM ~

          •The Four Preps and/or The Four Freshmen  

The Four Preps were an early sixties vocal harmony group that were pleasant and The Beach Boys could have sounded like them if it had not been for Doo Wop, Little Richard, and the Ronettes. The Four Freshmen were a pre-rock pop jazz group hugely influential to Beach Boys harmony, very sophisticated in their own way but hard to comprehend for much of the sixties Rolling Stone Mag “rockist” milieu.

          •The Four Seasons 

The Four Seasons influenced the Beach Boys and were their east coast counterparts but unlike the Beach Boys failed to project an identity and a story until Jersey Boys hit the Broadway stage. Both groups along with Motown matched the Beatles for well-produced sixties pop.

           •The (four) Beatles

It took a while for the influential back and forth between the BBs and the Bs to become part of the public consciousness.  Rubber Soul influenced Pet Sounds influenced Revolver and so on. There was Beatlemania but there was also Beatles worship.

PHIL ~ “With a corporate schizophrenia never really explained, Capitol records was able to market the Beatles in the United States as hip, fun, serious, and arty.“  Why does this matter to the story of The Beach Boys? 

TOM ~ The BBs struggled to regain their footing after Pet Sounds/Good Vibrations and Capitol records actually sabotaged their career. I’ve never read a good explanation. At the same time the same record company was able to market the increasingly sophisticated, hip, popular Beatles as increasingly sophisticated, hip, and popular. This was not the only reason the BBs went out of fashion but it was a part of their nosedive after Pet Sounds.

PHIL ~  Tom, you wrote “Pet Sounds is my favorite album, speaking to me, consoling me, and explaining me to myself for more than 50 years.“  You then trace critical perspective on that album by looking at lists from 1979, 1983 and then 2003… Talk about  why that matters… 

TOM ~ For those of us for whom Pet Sounds is a touchstone the changing fortunes of the album among the public and some of the rock press were personal experiences. “My favorite album is considered cornball” became “My favorite album is considered the second best album ever” There were lots of reasons for this and much of my book explores those reasons. The more recent elevation of Pet Sounds is as interesting as its original pop chart flop in the USA.

PHIL ~  “As numerous Beach Boys session outtake releases reveal, Brian‘s music without the vocals isn’t less of something but rather something different.“ Why is this an important insight to understanding why The Beach Boys matter? 

TOM ~ Under the vocals a lot was going on, and Brian at his best was layering the instrumentation and then layering the vocals on top of that and it all fit together. Remove the vocals and you can hear

Surf guitar, Gershwin, Chuck Berry, Earl Palmer mixed by Brian and the Wrecking Crew. Unlike Phil Spector, Brian’s production never sounds over-layered to me. Take a listen. There is a lot going on, but never too much going on.

PHIL ~  One of your chapters is entitled “Storytellers, Historians, and Fans.“ What has been the role of writers/authors/journalists in helping us understand why The Beach Boys matter? 

TOM ~ Because the Beach Boys became a “hard to figure out” or even “no longer interesting” group in the late 1960s their story had to be constructed by fans and authors and publicists and over time it was. To me, that’s a big interesting story in itself and it’s a long chapter towards the end of the book. I think it’s fairly unusual in pop music and it resonates with the ups and down of American self-esteem over the last fifty or more years. Or put another way: coming to terms with The Sixties, all if it, both ends and the middle. And we’re still working on it.

PHIL ~ As more fans and professionals (critics, commentators) gain a greater, fuller, clearer understanding as to why The Beach Boys matter, how will it change how we view them? Their music? Their significance?

TOM ~ I have no idea. What’s considered timeless changes over time, but it’s interesting that both Janelle Monae and Kacey Musgraves have collaborated with Brian Wilson recently.  That suggests to me that there is still a lot to explore in their music.

PHIL ~  Anything else you’d like to say that helps us recognize why The Beach Boys matter?

TOM ~ Read the book! Thank you so much for doing this interview Phil. I’m now the published author of a book about the Beach Boys and I couldn’t be prouder and more grateful. But I’m first and foremost a fan. They matter to me, they matter to people I sit next to at concerts, they matter to anyone who listens to and responds to their music.

{ My Podcast with Tom Smucker }

{ Rare Beach Boys videos @ www.YouTube.com/BB45s }