LaSalle Family Thanksgiving/Stephen Gaines's Heroes and Villains: the True Story of the Beach Boys(1985)

LaSalle Family Thanksgiving/Stephen Gaines' Heroes and Villains: the True Story of the Beach Boys

I come from a big family, especially on my father's side. My father grew up on farms in Ohio and finally in the Missouri, Ozarks, outside of Miller, MO. His father was a farmer and his mother was a nurse's aide(at least late in life.) Together they had 10 kids, 6 boys and 4 girls. 

So family reunions in my family get a little crowded. But we have two every year: at Thanksgiving In Mt. Vernon, Missouri and one on a farm near Wauseon, Ohio on the Fourth of July. Usually most of my uncles and aunts come along with their children, great-children(and possibly, because the age spread among the ten siblings is pretty wide) great-grandchildren. A lot of people. Sometimes, depending on how many people make it, over a hundred. WE have to rent a big hall with a kitchen and tables and chairs. The extended family is probably three or four generations now and I probably don't even know half of the people who show up.

 Although I haven't been to a Thanksgiving reunion since 2000, I have fond memories from childhood of  Thanksgivings with the extended fam: memories of building snowmen(with my uncles); playing 'kill the man with the ball' and later trying to play (American) football(which I never got into and didn't really understand how to play); memories of talking vulgarities to my cousins;  playing the final, annual, grand 'hide-and-seek' game in the autumn leaves as evening fell into night with all my cousins. Boys outnumber girls in my family and I have several male cousins all around my age and we had a conspiracy in which we would stick together: if we were 'IT' and we found one of the others, we would overlook him and find one of the little kids instead. In this way, we were seldom it. It was kind of a shitty thing to do when I think of it, and I feel all the worse that it was MY idea; I quarterbacked my cousins in these games just as my other cousins  quarterbacked in the football games(where I was never quarterback, because I didn't understand the rules and I'm not really a physical person anyway. I was really pretty worthless at football and, indeed, most sports.)

And of course I remember the food; all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes along with ones that were unique to various branches of our family. The long prayer uttered by my uncle Terry before each meal. The tables laden with food and plates that we'd line up for. The rented-out kitchens where my aunts labored; the bottles of Coke and Sprite and juice. The leaves on the grey, frost-covered ground, the last furious splashings of orange and red on the trees. The stuffed animals behind glass upstairs(the hall we rented was in the basement of a museum). The late afternoon/evening games of euchre which the family would play where my uncles would talk and laugh and fart and drink beer after beer after beer. 

I guess these are pretty standard memories of an American thanksiving.

But the thing I do remember that might be  slightly unique is the post-lunch football game. After the Thanksgiving lunch proper, the plates would be put away and most of the women would linger at the tables, talking and gossiping about life and kids and the every day;perhaps cleaning (well probably washing dishes, now that I think about it) while the men would trek across the golf course that lay behind the hall to some baseball fields, that, left fallow in late November, were good enough for a football field. My uncles (by blood or marriage) played football along with male cousins once they were old enough (.I don't think I ever reached an age where I was allowed to play. I probably still haven't reached that age. I used to sit on the sidelines and read. )

Anyway, the game begins well enough. It's touch football. The brothers divide themselves and the two captains pick various cousins. The game commences. It's an informal affair. Beer is drunk. Jokes are made, punctuated with flatulence, belches and belly-laughs. But something happens after some time. 

You see, my family is competitive. Really competitive. Unhealthily so, in fact.

 For most of them this is expressed through sport(for the unsporty like minority, i.e., me, this competitiveness is expressed...well, in pretty much every other aspect of my life.)

ANyway,  at some point someone snaps. A foul is made. A bad call. Or just a call that someone doesn't agree with. The first one was usually(but not always) my uncle Terry,  a choleric Southern Baptist preacher who led prayers before meals, but also a bit of a hothead, at least when he was young. He's probably mellowed now.

Anyway, he'd snap. There would be shouts and he'd storm off the field in a huff. My uncles would sort of make excuses for themselves, shrug their shoulders at his hot-headedness in easy-going cameraderie("he's always been that way, since he was  a kid"..."well, he upsets himself"...'chip on his shoulder'...'he's never gotten over...'..."wish he wouldn't do that"..."he'd have a better time if he wasn't so high-strung"...and so on. ). After a break and a beer, the game would resume.

Until the next uncle snapped.  And stormed off the field in a huff. the next break. The next beer. The next resumption of play.

And eventually, the whole  game would collapse as the uncles, pissed off, a little drunk, tired out, made their way back in pairs or groups to the humid warmth of the hall to watch the Rose Bowl on television and slowly nurse their sullen anger over a beer and a second lunch back to brotherly cameraderie. 

I don't think they ever finished a game.

The last Thanksgiving I went to, when I was about thirty, ended the same way. Only this time, it ended with my cousin, Derrick(a biologist in Colorado, I think) screaming at my uncle Jim(a then soon-to-be-retired football coach/history teacher in Miller MO) that he wasn't going to hit him because Jim was about 60 and Derrick might accidentally kill him. My youngest brother Craig, still a teenager, had been hurt by my uncle John, who stood there lamely excusing himself, telling us that that was how he had been trained to play in high school, to hurt the opponent as much as you could get away with. Another family thanksgiving....
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I was reminded of these Thanksgiving fights between my uncles and cousins when I was reading Stephen Gaines' Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. Because there's something of my family in the Beach Boys family. Something I recognize. A little. But there's also something more...

All great rock bands and musicians have a good story behind them. A narrative arc. Most of them are familiar to us, from tv or cinema biopics. Typically, the RockStarHero, makes his first splash, rising from the rank and file of normal musicians due to some musical quality that sets him apart. As his fame grows, so grows his appetites for life and love as everything he can wish for is set before him on a silver platter. Women, money, fast cars, big houses. Drugs. And then it happens. What begins as a curiosity or a way to cope with enormous pressure or just becomes an increasingly large problem for the musician as he struggles to remain on top and maintain and control his various addictions and his career and lifestyle. Eventually he sinks under the weight of it all. Someone he knows dies. It becomes a nightmare. He loses everything, He goes down as far as he's come up...eventually he grows up and gets out of the hole he's in and continues making his music, older and wiser.

that's one story arc.
Another is the Beatles' arc. It starts with one small success leading to a bigger one and that to a bigger and so on. A friend once told me that the Beatles had the greatest story of all rock bands. He wasn't a big fan, but I was.  I hadn't thought about it, but I immediately realized he was right. The scrappy beginnings, the Hamburg struggles, the mounting super-fame, the pressure of the road and the darker events of 1966 leading to the transformation from rock band to psychedelic studio band, the trip to India and embrace(and subsequent rejection) of Eastern Mysticism, the last 'perfect' album, the sudden disintegration right at the point that the rot started to set in and then the final, unexpected splintering into four distinct artists, leaving behind a body of work almost perfect...After that, it gets messy, with slagging off in the press and suits and counter-suits and nasty rancor, but, hey that's the POST-Beatle story. The Beatle story itself...There's just something so...neat about it. So Beatle-y. Like the almost cheesy final twelve-string guitar lick in "If I Fell."

I mean, it works so well, you almost don't want to like it. 

The Beach Boys' arc is not like that. IN fact, I'm not sure if there is a Beach Boys arc. Or maybe it's that there are so many narrative arcs, each contradicting the other. 

Were they a band whose foundations on Brian Wilson's undoubted genius were sabotaged by the ungrateful, greedy others, causing the leader's artistic, delicate soul to completely shatter? Were they a band of hard-working talented individuals whose careers were sabotaged by Brian Wilson's self-indulgent excesses and flat-out insane behaviour? Is it a story of a group of super-talented brothers, tortured by a physically and psychologically abusive childhood, triumphing in music only to be pulled down and destroyed by the talented but ordinary efforts of the rest of the band, a group too narrow-sighted to give the Wilson's their creative head because it would mean decreasing revenue for their high-flying lifestle?Or is it the story of several talented musicians generously struggling to keep the geniuses in their midst from fatal self-destruction by any means necessary? Is it a story of a hard-working man who made his ungrateful sons and their ungrateful friends stars only to be stabbed in the back by them at the height of their success...or is it the story of an abusive man who attempted and almost succeeded in destroying his own childrens' futures...? Is it a story of artistic triumph or greed? Fun or depression? Sanity or madness?

 The thing is, it's all of these.

 The Beach Boys are probably the most confounding of the 'great bands of the sixties.' I mean, a quarter of their music is absolutely sublime, really, some of the most amazing and complex progressive pop music EVER; and a good 50 percent of it is superior pop-rock, a little on the soft side for some people's tastes, perhaps, but no less brilliant for all that.

And then there's the last quarter. The worst, most crass commercial pap ever released, arguably. Just letting the music tell the story doesn't help because the music itself is as contradictory as the various members and their respective points of view. 
Gaines does a pretty good job of uniting the strands of these various narratives and twining them together into one complex story. But no one could make this story into one as neat as most bands'. Gaines doesn't talk too much about the music,(and when he does, I don't always agree with him) but then, the music speaks for itself, for the most part, good and bad.. Instead he focuses on the personality and actions that they take. And well...

None of the Beach Boys or their various associates come off particularly well, with the possible exceptions of peace-maker Carl Wilson and the loving easy,going mother, Audree Wilson. I mean, it's called Heroes and Villains...but it  could  have just been called 'Villains.'

 Gaines doesn't spend much time on 'lesser egos' of the band,: Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston; and especially Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar and original guitarist David Marks; all  remain sort of enigmatic and colorless. 

Much light, however, is shed on, Brian Wilson's mad, uninhibited actions and the groups never-ending attempts to tame his mental illness for his(and their) own good.  Mike Love's anger management problems are stressed. The choleric, abusive father/manager Murry Wilson emerges surprisingly well drawn. Some supporting characters, like Brian's long-suffering wife and the violent and perhaps leechy Love brothers,  who worked for the organization in the late seventies, are also fairly prominent.  Youngest Wilson Carl, whose production talents and band-leading skills got them through the seventies is sadly, undemphasized.

But the real triumph of the book is in the well-drawn portrait of Dennis Wilson, the also-ran genius of the band, the slightly less brilliant and slightly less mad(though still incredibly talented and incredibly fucked up) middle brother, whose tender and incredibly sad last days are set down in painful detail. His is a story of substance abuse trumping all else. Unlike addicted icons like Ray Charles or JOhnny Cash, once Dennis Wilson went down, he never hit rock bottom and resurfaced. He stayed down there and died.

Gaines treats his death as a sort of cathartic sacrifice, as he ends the book on positive note for the rest: 1985:The Beach Boys band as one of the top ten American concert draws; Brian Wilson fit and healthy and heading towards productivity again thanks to the eccentric but effective techniques of since-defamed 'doctor' Eugene Landy. It's a tidy, neat ending to a long story of changing fortunes and rock star ego-clashes, drugs, and murder, and even incest...the Beach Boys were indeed, a 'diseased group of motherfuckers' as Lester Bangs put it.

With hindsight, thirty years after it's publication(in 1985, less than two years after Dennis Wilson's death) the optimistic ending seems...well, almost comical. For the story did not end there. It trudged on in the same confounding tradition, through the late-career commercial re-peak in the late 80s(and simultaneous descent into kitsch and cheese); the fitful, faltering solo career of Brian Wilson; the 'divorce' between the Landy/Wilson team, resulting in Landy being prohibited from practicing medicine; the many law suits of Mike Love against various other members; the emerging oldies act for seniors;  the surprising 50th anniversary tour and album of 2012, when the Beach Boys released the best album they had done since the late seventies(some would say the early seventies) and the all-too-predictable disintegration into bitterness of 2013...

The book needs a sequel. 

But for now, it's probably the best, i.e., least syncophantic and complete biography of the Beach Boys as a band we have. (Catch a Wave by Peter Ames Carlin is a great, even revelatory, Brian Wilson biography, though.)
I recommend it for anybody who's a fan of the music or thinks that they could be. But ultimately, as mentioned above, the music tells the story in all it's absurd contradictions just as well...

Book Review

I'm going to write a book review of the last book I read but first I'm going to make and drink some coffee and maybe use the toilet.