A couple of weeks ago I found time to sew two buttons onto a favorite shirt of mine. A big deal to me, as I am notoriously lacking in domestic skills. But it got me thinking....where did I come across buttons recently?

Then I recalled it was at work. A couple of co-workers were commenting on H.R. Pufnstuf. One made fun of the other because of her lack of Pufnstuff knowledge. Trying to be helpful, I did some research, and came up with the following:

“H.R. Pufnstuf began when young English boy Jimmy, out playing his flute Freddie, was beckoned out to sea in a colourful boat bound for Living Island. As it drifted toward the island, the boat turned out to be a trap set by the evil Witchiepoo, who wanted to add Freddie to her collection of magical belongings.

“Jimmy narrowly escaped his fate by jumping overboard, only to wash up on the beach of an enchanted isle, unconscious. The boy was promptly rescued by the local mayor, H.R. Pufnstuf, a giant orange and green cowboy/dragon. Jimmy and Freddie the Flute found themselves stranded on Living Island, where everything was alive with its own personality: books, candles, and mushrooms all talked, some houses had hay fever, and money was measured in buttons.

‘”Alarm, alarm, Witchiepoo is coming, Witchiepoo is coming!’

“Each week, the evil Witchiepoo, along with her henchmen--vulture Orson, hapless orange spider Seymour, and the aptly named Stupid Bat--would hatch a plan to steal Freddie from Jimmy and keep them both trapped on Living Island.

“Other memorable characters included Pufnstuf's deputies Cling and Clang, sister Shirley Pufnstuf, Lady Boyd, Judy Frog, and Ludicrous Lion (‘Buttons, buttons, who's got the buttons?’).”

Yeah, that’s why I was thinking about buttons. But what I really liked about this Pufnstuf precis was the idea of a character called 'Stupid Bat.'

And I got to thinking, a certain amount of stupidity can be a real asset. It’s like when you are inoculated, you are given a bit of the disease. A bit of stupidity in your system may taint your blood, but it also leaves you less psychologically vulnerable; you aren’t as plagued by the paralyzing reflection and over-consideration that often comes with intellect.

In short, you don’t think too much.

The problem is, simple-mindedness is a tough skill to learn.

“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.

I spent last weekend comfortably ensconced at the family country house in Burnaby while the clan patriarch visited his estates on the Island. I feasted on a variety of foodstuffs, including the inevitable frozen scones and no-name brand oatmeal cookies. The biggest difference between that place and my own, though, other than its tidiness, is the presence of cablevision.

It wasn’t easy, but at one point I actually found something worth watching. It was a film called “Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” made in 1986, a tribute to Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday. The birthday bash was held in a theatre in St. Louis, Berry’s home town, and involved an all-star band put together by Berry’s most prominent disciple, Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Naturally there were interviews with various rock notables, including Little Richard, Bo Diddly, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen had a particularly amusing story of being asked to back up Berry in 1974 or so. Berry walked into the auditiorium about ten minutes before he was supposed to go on. Springsteen’s band members asked Berry what songs they were expected to play, to which Berry replied “we’re gonna play some Chuck Berry songs.”

Simple songs perhaps, but Springsteen noted that a lot of them were in wierd keys. Not the usual open string E, A, D anchors of guitar rock, but oddball sharps and flats and so on. Obviously, this made the whole business of keeping up with the duckwalking dervish (or should that be ‘detonous duckwalking dervish’?) a bit of a challenge.

The most interesting comments in the whole thing, though, came from Keith Richards. There are few things I like more than listening to Keef rambling off his slurred musings on all things rocking. I’ve discovered that if you can actually make out what the fuck he’s saying it’s often quite interesting.

According to Richards, Berry’s songs are only in wierd keys if you look at them from a guitarist’s perspective. If you look at them from a piano player’s point of view, they make complete sense. The songs, says Richards, are in ‘piano keys,’ and not ‘guitar keys,’ because a piano player wrote much of the music.

The piano player he was talking about is a guy named Johnnie Johnson. Johnson actually started Chuck Berry off, bringing him into his group around 1951. Johnson, however, was bashful and introverted, and Berry’s over-the-top antics gradually made him the frontman. The guitarist was as ambitious as he was extroverted, and began crafting lyrics and jamming up riffs with Johnson. In 1955, Berry went to Chess records in Chicago, and was rewarded with a record contract. These were they days when the 45 was the central medium of music, and Berry fired off a string of hit singles over the next half-decade.

Johnson, meanwhile, stuck with Berry as a backing musician, but received no credit for any of these songs. (Berry’s first hit, ‘Maybelline,’ actually lists disk jockey Alan Freed as a co-writer, a condition imposed by the payola-soaked radio celebrity in return for playing the tune). Johnson eventually left Berry’s side, though he kept playing in and around the St. Louis area. But whereas Berry managed to rake in a pretty good living (Springsteen believed he was getting as much as $10 000 a set as far back as the mid-’70s), Johnson lived a much more mundane life.

By the time Richards (the hero of this story in some ways) pulled Johnson back into the scene in 1986, the piano player was making a living driving a bus for elderly people. In the making of “Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” he seemed as self-effacing as you could get, a kind of big shinking violet. But he was clearly the steadiest member of the band. There is one scene where Richards and Berry are hectoring each other during practice over how a particular tune should be done. They launch into the song and both sound ragged as hell, all preen and no polish. All the muscle came from Johnson. Apparently driving the elderly around on a bus is a better recipe for rock ‘n’ roll longetivity than drugs and debauchery.

A few others noticed this as well, and after the St. Louis reunion Johnson went on to enjoy some limelight of his own. He’s recorded a handful of albums, and has played with the likes of Richards, Clapton and Paul Shaefer. He has also been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and, most recently, has gotten round to suing Chuck Berry for royalties owed on all those old classics.

This is where the story got a little sour for me. Not that I mind Johnson trying to force Berry to give him a bit of the credit. It just seems that a nice story, heading for a bit of a fairytale ending, comes crashing gloomily back to Earth. In any case, they were a good pair. One guy supplied the groove and the progressions, the other layered it with signature riffs and licks (still widely copied) and almost era-defining lyrics. Johnson’s steady, rockin’ delivery may have been a great foundation, but without Berry’s on-stage antics and, more crucially, his off-stage hustling, there would be nothing for either of them to fight about today.

There’s a bit more to this; a bit of a sub-plot.

I was intrigued to find that one of the songs Johnson claims to have laid down the music for is ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ I noted this because I came across another reference to this tune recently. Chuck Berry received all the credit for composing the Beach Boys’ 1963 classic ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,’ essentially because the song was considered to be a rip-off of ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ The progression is the same, and the stop-start verse that expodes into a rocking chorus was used to full effect by Beach Boy writer Brian Wilson (in a further goofy twist, Wilson took no credit for writing his own lyrics on that song). Of course, if Johnson gets the credit he's seeking, he will by extension presumably be able to lay some claim to the music for ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’

When I was 12 or so some kid brought a record to school that had ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ on it. He was an erstwhile friend of mine, and he was curiously into old vintage rock, Elvis and such. I had nothing against any of it, but none of it (or any other music, for that matter) really got me wanting to play music until I heard that song. I immediately went out and bought the ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ album. The Beach Boys had not yet fully defined themselves at the time of its making, and much of the record was instrumental, in the veign of the Surfari’s or Dick Dale. One of the instrumentals was a tune called ‘Stoked.’ I always liked that title. Whenever I think of it I’m reminded of being 12 years old, and just getting into something new and exciting.

And I like the idea that some quiet, solid guy is behind ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ I owe you one Johnny, and I like the fact that it’s you that I owe.