“Imagine a football team winning the Super Bowl one year, and then losing to injury, free agency, or retirement its starting quarterback, and its best receiver, running back, defensive lineman, and cornerback, as well as its coach and half the front office, all over the course of the next season. Not likely to win another championship, or even a game, for quite some time.

“That's not too far from the plague that hit rock 'n' roll in 1959-60. Within little more than a year, (Buddy) Holly--easily the brightest young star of the moment and possibly the wave of the future--was dead, Elvis had been drafted and was stationed in Germany, Chuck Berry was arrested and indicted under the Mann Act for transporting a minor across state lines, Little Richard gave up music to become a preacher, and Jerry Lee Lewis was vilified and ostracized for marrying his underage cousin. Meanwhile the recording industry was hit with a major scandal over payola schemes between record labels and disc jockeys, a controversy that would bring down some of the most innovative independent studios and revered jockeys, including the legendary Alan Freed himself. The Day the Music Died, indeed.”

I offer the above quote, from some guy named David N. Townsend (www.dntownsend.com), as a forward to what might have been titled, in the days of Shelley or Keats, “An Apology for the Beach Boys.”

I know, I know. The mere mention of the words “Beach Boys” conjures up some not altogether pleasant connotations. I realize they were favorites of Nancy Reagan. I realize the song ‘Kokomo’ is a homocide-inducing piece of dogshit that falls just short of qualifying as a crime against humanity. I realize they’ve degenerated into a bunch of squabbling nuts, addicted to personal gurus and surrounded by packs of lawyers (at least those them still living, anyway).

But a long time ago they helped hold the rock ‘n’ roll fort during a critical period.

Let’s have a little more early ‘60s rock history from Mr. Townsend (I have no idea who the fuck this guy is, by the way, but he appears to know his shit).

“On the charts, the top slots were handed over to the likes of Paul ("Put Your Head on My Shoulder") Anka, Connie ("Everybody's Somebody's Fool") Francis, Brenda ("I'm Sorry") Lee, Bobby ("Volare") Rydell, Ricky ("Travelin' Man") Nelson, Pat ("Moody River") Boone, Bobby ("Take Care of My Baby") Vee, and the wonderful Frankie Avalon. If anyone doubted that rock 'n' roll had crashed and burned, these frightening wraiths were convincing proof.”

In 1963, Bob Dylan announced that ‘the times, they are a changin.’ But at that time only a few select folkies were listening. The Beatles and Rolling Stones had been toiling away throughout 1962 and 1963, but their success was local. In fact, the Beatles had actually packed off to Hamburg in early 1962 after a British record executive had informed their manager that “groups of guitars are on the way out.”

And yet it was exactly at this nadir of rock ‘n’ roll that The Beach Boys rose to fame. To me, the Beach Boys largely begin in 1962 and end in 1964. That’s when they earned their stripes. Most of their biggest songs (‘Help Me Rhonda,’ ‘California Girls,’ ‘Good Vibrations’) came in 1965 and 1966, and it’s true that 1966’s ‘Pet Sounds’ album is credited with pushing the Beatles to pull ‘Seargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ out of their hats, but none of that was real rock ‘n’ roll. There were plenty of others who could write good pop songs by then. What the world didn’t have in 1962 and 1963 was plenty rock ‘n’ roll bands.

The most notable tunes the Beach Boys recorded during this early period include the following: ‘Surfin’ Safari,’ ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,’ ‘409,’ ‘Shut Down,’ ‘Little Duece Coupe,’ ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ ‘Little Surfer Girl,’ ‘I Get Around,’ and the unfortunately titled but still rocking ‘Be True to Your School.’

During this time, most of the band were teenagers. The core of the group revolved around bassist Brian Wilson, and his younger brothers Dennis (drums) and Carl (lead guitar). Cousin Mike Love was added as a Shirley Partridge-like pseudo-lead vocalist/keyboardist, and neighbourhood pal Al Jardine played rhythm guitar. Mike Love was the oldest, maybe nineteen or so in 1962. Carl Wilson was the youngest; only fourteen when the group started.

This is the first thing I like; they’re a neighbourhood garage band. The early rockers, like the ones mentioned by Townsend in the opening paragraph, were solo artists, some of them, like Chuck Berry, with many years of playing behind them. The Beach Boys were one of the first prototypes of the Do It Yourself teenage rock ‘n’ roll band. In fact, much of Brian Wilson’s vaunted skill with harmony and production was practiced by himself as a kid in his parents’ garage, with the help of a rudimentary multi-track recorder.

Which takes us to another hallmark of the group; they were the prototypical nerd band. Yes, they wrote songs about surfing, but they wouldn’t go near the water. Al Jardine and Mike Love were clearly geeks, and of the Wilson brothers, Brian and Carl were portly and unathletic. The only guy who looked the part was drummer Dennis Wilson, and his athletic ability in the waves (unlike the others he really could surf) was undercut by his curious lack of flair behind the drum kit. Most of the rhythm in the Beach Boys’ music comes from the bass and the guitars.

This is the next thing I like about them: they were an early example of a guitar band that could lay down a groove. I’d say Chuck Berry was the key influence on their early tunes, and they combined the Berry chugging with the reverb-drenched sound of surf stylists like the Surfari’s and Dick Dale (Carl Wilson may have ripped off Chuck Berry’s signature ‘Johnny B. Goode’ intro in ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ but he laid it down with great skill for a kid in his mid-teens.) The real star of the show, however, is Brian Wilson’s bass. His playing is like the surf itself, ebbing in the background one minute, then swelling into pulsing lines that carry the whole band along the next. Brian Wilson, in addition to being a first rate songwriter, was likely the first bass hero in rock.

Lyrically, the early Beach Boys songs are more ‘50’s than ‘60’s; they’re still of the era when rock ‘n’ roll was written for teenagers. Simple, yes, but so what? The drag race play-by-play of a song like ‘Shut Down’ is great fun, made by kids for kids. A song like ‘I Get Around,’ despite it’s swaggering title, is actually a kind of revenge-of-the-nerds style anthem:

“My buddies and me are gettin’ real well known
The bad guys know us and they leave us alone.”

I thought rockers were the bad guys? Not in this case. Here we have a bunch of geeks who manage, just by playing some mean guitar, to establish a detente with the goons who would otherwise be beating the shit out of them on a daily basis.

By 1964, Brian Wilson stopped touring with the group after suffering a nervous breakdown. A few years later, despite a valiant attempt to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the likes of the Beatles, he simply went to bed and stayed there for a year, wiped out and riddled with demons. The band was creatively finished from that point on. It was eventually revealed that the Wilson family home of his youth was a bit fucked up; not at all like ‘My Three Sons.’ The whiteass suburban-ness of the band may well have been an assett in 1962 and ‘63, but there was a David Lynchian underside to this story.

And this underscores the what I like best about the Beach Boys. The shiny escapism that is so present in their sound, and which so irritating to some, is actually the point. It’s not the audience that is really doing the escaping, it’s the band, especially Brian Wilson. For me his writing, a technical virtuosity not for its own sake, but at the service of a simple, consistent vision, represents the ability of music to transport its creator completely out of his own skin. For a while, anyway.