Song 177: “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, Part 4: “Sometimes I Have A Great Notion”

A history of folk music in 500 songs.

Song 177 Never Learn Not to Love by The Beach Boys.

Part 4.

Sometimes I Have a Great Notion.

Before we begin, this episode has more content warnings than I think any episode I've done so far.

In this one, there are at least mentions, and sometimes quite long discussions, of mass murder, psychiatric abuse, racism both personal and systemic, cult-like manipulation, animal slaughter, death by drowning, grooming, arguable incest, mental illness, and quite a lot more.

Also, part of the reason that this episode has taken a long time to come out is that I have had to balance two fundamentally irreconcilable needs.

This episode deals with the notorious mass murder, a murder of real people whose death was in living memory and who still have loved ones living today.

Sensationalising or trivialising that would be abhorrent, and I am trying my best not to do that.

But on the other hand, this podcast has to be at least one of artistic or entertaining.

Ideally both.

That means, by necessity, doing things which in that context may feel crass or exploitative.

There will, without any doubt, be some listeners who think I've crossed a line at one point or another.

There may well be parts where I will myself, in future, wish I'd handled things differently.

So please be aware going in, that if there are parts of this episode you find upsetting, they were not done lightly.

I wish that this podcast didn't have to cover the Manson murders, but they had such an effect on the culture that they can't possibly not be covered.

I have agonised over every choice I've made here.

Now, on with the show.

Brian Wilson is a man who, when he likes a song, really likes it.

We've talked in recent episodes about how he became obsessed with the Ronette's Be My Baby for a long time, and how he spent a period intensely reworking Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home.

But there was one song more than any other that obsessed Brian Wilson in the 1970s and for decades after.

Brian's obsession with the old folk song Shortening Bread is so well documented that fully a quarter of the song's Wikipedia page by word count is just taken up with anecdotes about Brian Wilson.

Some of those, like him insisting to Alice Cooper that Shortening Bread is the greatest song ever written, are amusing.

Others are less so.

One time he visited Roger McGuinn of the Birds and started playing a riff based on Shorten Bread and got McGuinn to come up with a couple of lines of lyric for it.

McGuin went off to bed, and when he got up the next morning, Brian was still at McGuinness's piano, still playing that riff, which a few years later came out as the song Ding Dang, credited to McGuinn and Wilson.

Another time, a similar mammoth shortening bread session on the piano, this time at Danny Hutton's house, led to Wikipop saying, I gotta get out of here, man, this guy is nuts.

In the mid-70s, Brian recorded multiple versions of Shortening Bread with the Beach Boys, with Carl Wilson gamely putting far more effort into the lead vocal than you would expect, though Brian was dissatisfied enough with Carl's vocals that he kept phoning Alex Chilton, the lead singer of Big Star and the Boxtops, in the middle of the night, to ask Chilton to sing the lead instead.

Slip on a leg.

Mamma's gonna make us love shortening brave.

And there ain't all our mamma's gonna do.

She's gonna poop us up coffee through.

And he just kept on reusing the shortening red riff for decades.

That recording we just heard is from the mid-70s, and around that time, the Beach Boys also recorded Rolling Up to Heaven.

A father, a big ginger, oh man you

did for rather you

a father, a big gentleman,

whoa,

a big ginger, who raised a jungle

rather than you,

a big gentleman.

There's this nineteen eighty-seven B-side.

Hey,

Getting this shape is what it's all about.

Don't you just feel it's true?

Roll it all around just like this nineteen eighty-nine collaboration with Paul Schaefer.

No

beach.

This from 1993 with Rob Wasserman and Brian's daughter Carnie.

Clanging, dangin, nothing, bells are ringing in the clang,

And believe it or not, there are a lot more.

A lot more.

The rift from Shortening Bread is never far from Brian Wilson's music from the time it first appears around 1973 until its most recent appearance so far in 2008.

A 35-year musical obsession.

Shortening Bread is a song whose origins are obscure and entangled entangled with many other songs, and over the decades it attracted bits of other songs to it as it bounced back and forth between being a folk song and a commercialized minstrel song, each stream feeding the other.

Its ancestors seem to include, among other things, the Civil War song Run N-Word Run, the title of that uses the actual word, an old banjo tune called Old Dad, and the Scottish folk song Mrs.

MacLeod of Rassey, as heard here in a recording Alan Lomax made in Edinburgh, of Busker Joe Cadona.

From there, the lines of transmission are so confused that most of the early documentation of it by folklorists is arguing about if it's a white commercial minstrel song, a black folk song, or a white hillbilly song.

The most likely story is that it was all of the above.

In the earliest versions of which we have record, the verses are nearly identical to the nursery rhyme now known as Five Little Monkeys.

Except that in these versions, collected by folk song collectors like E.

C.

Perrow and John Lomax, who published a version in his book American Ballads and Folk Songs, which came out shortly after he started to work with Hughie Ledbetter, the word used isn't monkeys, but a word for black people, which I'm not going to say here.

In this variant of the song, there are three or more children lying in bed, all deathly ill, and their mother calls for a doctor who tells them that the cure for their illness is to feed them shortening bread.

That version of the song remained in currency for many years.

Fat Swallow's version, for example, is very similar to that, although rather than use the N-word, he uses Senegambian.

Senegambia is a geographical area covering parts of Senegal and Gambia.

It gets its name the same way Texarkana gets its name from Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

And it's the area of West Africa from which many enslaved people were kidnapped and taken to America.

And so the term was occasionally used in the early 20th century as a euphemism for black people.

Two Senegambians laying in bed.

One turned over to the open side.

Fine, fine, fine, fine

Serve it, Mama, serve it!

The earliest versions of Schortenbread we know about don't sound much like the tune we're all familiar with.

The first recording of it we know of is from 1924, by a white southern harmonica player named Henry Witter, in a version done as a medley with two other songs, Hoplite Ladies, and the song we now know about as Turkey in the Straw, which we talked about in the first part of this series on Never Learn Not to Love, longer ago than I'd like to think about right now.

That was produced by Ralph Peer, the legendary record producer who was responsible for the twin insights that shaped the whole recording industry for the 20th century, and, among many other things, made this podcast possible.

Those two revolutionary insights were that some people might like to listen to black people and poor white people making music, and that poor people were easier to exploit.

The combination of those insights meant that we have Pierre to thank for recordings like Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, the recordings of Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family, and early recordings by people like Fat Swaller, Benny Moten, the Mississippi Drug Band, Blind Willie McTell, and more classics of early country music and blues than I can name here.

Indeed, it's partly thanks to Pierre that we think of country music and blues as different things.

His recordings of rural musicians were marketed in two different ways.

The white musicians were marketed as hillbilly music, while the recordings of black black musicians were race music, and those marketing categories evolved over several relabellings into what we now call country and R ⁇ B.

But at the time there was no real distinction in the music, just in the race of the performer.

Pierre also pioneered the idea of recording performers who wrote their own material, or at least who were doing traditional songs whose copyright he could claim.

Early on, Pierre would give the performers a flat $50 fee for the recording, paid for by the record company he was working for, but would take the copyright of the song for his own publishing company, with no royalties to the person who wrote it.

Though, after 1930, he started offering to let the writers keep 50% of the royalties, which became the standard model from then on.

The first black recording of Shortening Bread, by Bobby Lee Cannon's Needmore Band, was also produced by Pierre in 1927, three years after he produced Witter's harmonica version, and Pierre took the copyright for the composition.

I like it hot, I like it cold, I like it after it's far my cold, but I love my shortening shortening, I love my shortness rain.

I love my shortness shortness.

I love my shortened rain.

Be warned if you decide to go and listen to the full version of that track anywhere.

In his version of the verse we heard Waller do earlier, Lee Can does use a racial slur for black people, not the one that most white performers of the time, like Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers, would use, the N-word, but one that people may still take offence at nonetheless.

By the time Lee Cann's version of the song came out, the most familiar version of the song, the one we now know, more or less, had been published.

In 1925, the horror novelist and folk song collector Dorothy Scarborough, in her book On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, had collected a version of Shortenbread from a Mississippi professor, Wert Williams, which which went along the same lines as the other versions we've heard snippets of, racial slurs and all, but to the beginning she had attached a verse and chorus she collected from one Jean Field of Richmond, Virginia, and she set the whole thing to the melody Field had sung.

Scarborough wrote the lyrics, as so many song collectors did then, in a hideous attempt at a phonetic reproduction of what they thought black vernacular speech sounded like, and it would be horribly offensive for me to even try to reproduce that.

So I'm going to read them out here in standard English.

Put on the skillet, put on the lead.

Mammy's going to make a little shortening bread.

That ain't all that she's going to do.

She's going to make a little coffee, too.

Mammy's a little baby loves shortening shortening.

Mammy's a little baby loves shortening bread.

In 1928, the composer Jacques Wolfe and his lyricist partner, novelist Clement Wood, copyrighted an arrangement of Scarborough's version of Field and Williams' versions of the song in their own name.

In keeping with their radical political leanings, Wood was a Socialist Party candidate and a campaigner for atheism, while Wolfe would also go on to collaborate with the black gay communist poet Langston Hughes.

They removed the use of the N-word that had been in Scarver's text.

In keeping with the fact that this was 1928, one of the two uses was still replaced by a slur, though a less offensive one, and the other use was replaced with children.

The song was published as for black-faced minstrel performances, and the sheet music showed a horrifically stereotyped image of a black mammy character.

It was this version of the song that became an American standard, a hit for people like Paul Robeson.

Mammy's little baby loves shortening shortening.

Mammy's little baby loves shortening bread.

And the Andrews sisters.

They called me with the skillet, they called me with the lead, they called me with the gala making shortening bread.

Pits, styles for the skillet, pizza, styles for the letter.

Spend six months in jail, eat shortening bread.

Though luckily both Robeson and the Andrews sisters had the good sense further to balderise the lyric by removing the slur that Wood and Wolf had left in.

But what is shortening bread?

Reports vary, and it's possible that it's one of those foodstuffs where a label gets attached to different foods in different areas, with some descriptions saying it's a kind of cake, while others say it's a kind of cornbread.

But all the descriptions seem to involve something made out of cornmeal, cooked on a skillet, something cheap and filling, but which could nonetheless be seen as a treat.

A typical recipe is one in The Beautiful Music All Around Us, field recordings in the American Experience by Stephen Wade, one of my main sources for this section, quoting Helen Marie Rowe, a black woman born in 1933 in rural Mississippi.

When you get ready to make your bread, you put your grease in it, you take your cornmeal, put in just a little taste of milk and one or two eggs, stir it up as soupy as you want it, pour it in your skillet over a low fire and cover it, let it fix like a cake, then run a knife under it.

The important thing, the thing that gives shortening bread its name, is that first step, the grease.

Shortening, for those of you who are as hopeless in a kitchen as I am, is the fat that's added to certain types of dough to make the resulting pastry crumbly.

These days, the term almost always refers to vegetable shortening, an artificial ingredient made of hydrogenated vegetable fats.

But at the time shortening bread first came into circulation, it meant one thing to almost everybody: lard.

Lard which you get, of course, from killing pigs.

Mama's little baby, love, short and shilling.

My mama's little baby load,

Because shortening bread is, as far as we can tell, a hog-killing song.

Indeed, one of the earliest versions of the song collected by folk song collectors makes this explicit.

A version collected in 1913 was titled, Ain't I Glad the Old Sow's Dead?

and started, Ain't I Glad the Old Sow's Dead?

Mammy's gonna cook a little shortening bread.

That ain't all she's gonna do, she's gonna make a little coffee too.

It may seem odd that I refer to it as a hog-killing song, as if that were a normal thing for a song to be.

That's because there is a whole huge tradition of blues, folk and early country music specifically about pork, and there's a reason for that.

These are all music from rural areas, and in the early part of the 20th century in rural America, a hog slaughter was the biggest excuse for a party there was.

In the rural south of America, almost all the meat was either chicken or pork, because those were animals that would mostly live off scraps and leftovers, and so didn't require any additional expense to raise, and because they took up comparatively little space.

You didn't need a huge field to graze them in like a cow, just a chicken coop and a pig pen.

In an environment without much in the way of refrigeration, and certainly without our current just-in-time supply chains, people in rural areas had to supply their own meat, and that meant that anyone who kept animals would have to butcher them themselves.

That would be the only time they'd have very fresh meat, and it was also the time when, as quickly as possible, as much of the meat as possible had to be preserved.

In the case of a pig, that meant meant making as many sausages, hams, and other preserved meats as possible, and that required all hands on deck, so you'd throw a party.

The neighbours would come round and everyone would help out, cooking and eating the fresh meat while they also did the work.

These events were so popular that while it's not an idiom in British English, Merriam Webster's Dictionary has hog killing defined as a jolly or riotous party, with the first cited usage being in nineteen oh three, and, as you can imagine, this meant that in both country and blues music, there was a whole sub-genre of songs about these parties, or about pork more broadly.

Sometimes they would be about the pleasures of just eating pork at all, like Bessie Smith's Give Me a Pig's Foot and a Bottle of Beer, the last thing she released in her lifetime, produced by John Hammond with a backing band including a pre-famed Benny Goodman.

want a clown.

He's a beautiful drink because he's bringing me down.

He's got a rhythm.

Yeah,

when he stomps his feet, he sent me

red off the sleep.

Check all your razors.

Sometimes they would be using pork or pigmeat as a sexual euphemism.

Georgia Tom Dorsey said that pigmeat meant an attractive young woman, but it seemed to be an all-purpose euphemism for anything potentially sexual, as in Memphis Minis Pigmeat on the Line.

Say worry me so,

I just can't keep on crying.

Getting late in the era that is so

barbecue best by Lucille Bogan.

Now, some like it hot,

some like it cold,

some take it anyway

so I'm talking about barbecue.

Only thing I crave,

and that good doing me is going to take me to my grave.

Some people want it.

Some people don't.

Dead to buy my barbecue.

It was also used in the name of Pigmeat Markham, the most popular black comedian of the first half of the 20th century, whose career spanned performing in minstrel shows with blackface makeup, even though he was himself black, to touring with Bessie Smith, to being the artist who performed at the Harlem Apollo more often than any other, to late blooming celebrity in 1968 when he recorded what some call the first first hip-hop record.

Though, as we always say, there's no first anything.

Here come the judge.

Everybody knows that.

He is the judge.

Who's there?

Eyes.

I've who?

I's your next door neighbor.

And we have, of course, already heard about the dance come game come song Hambone, which was so popular in black communities in the early part of the last century.

Hambone, Hambone, have you heard?

Pop's gonna find me a mockingbird.

And if that mocking bird don't sing, pops gonna find me a diamond ring.

And if that diamond ring don't shine, pop go take you to five and dime hambo.

Yeah

And there's also a whole mini sub-genre of people saying they need pork to deal with health problems, usually involving the doctor figure that we also see in the lyrics to shortening bread.

For example, take pork chop blues.

I had a stomach trouble from missing my meals.

I beat a low and my side.

Dr.

Hay came in the crowd of my puffs and sat down on my feet.

And just by time when Mother walked in, this is the word he said.

He needs some poked up holders and the poking beans.

The greedy song three times a day.

If it hadn't been during three weeks ago, that squad's been well today.

Well, the main is sick and bout to die.

Just mix him up some sweet potato pie.

That track is one of a very small number of existing tracks by a duo called The Two Charlies, who were so called because they were both called Charlie.

In fact, both of them had more famous namesakes.

The lead guitarist was called Charlie Jordan, and there is a more famous guitarist of the same name who he often gets confused with, to the point that that track often ends up on complete recordings of Charlie Jordan sets.

The singer, meanwhile, was one Charlie Manson.

We know nothing else of the two Charlies, other than that they recorded the eight tracks they recorded together at ARC in New York in 1936.

Another 1936 pigmeat release on ARC was Pigmeat Papa by Hudie Ledbetter,

released of course under the name Leadbelly.

That was the first single by Leadbetter to be released after his split from John Lomax, though he recorded it in 1935 during the initial sessions that Lomax had arranged for him with ARC.

After splitting from John Lomax and returning to the South, Leadbetter had found himself no better off than he had been before his brief bout with celebrity.

He was working at a service station for 10 cents an hour to try to keep food on the table, but he hadn't given up on the idea of becoming a success as a musician.

He even wrote to Lomax suggesting that the two of them could work together again, just with a more reasonable set of expectations on Lomax's part.

Lomax didn't answer.

But John Townsend, the owner of the service station, was impressed with Leadbetter's stories about making records and appearing in films in the big city, and decided that there was an opportunity to make some money here.

He and his mother signed Leadbetter to a management contract and sold their service station to fund a trip to New York with Lead Better to try to revive his career.

But what Townsend hadn't reckoned on was his own lack of music management experience or contacts in New York.

While John Lomax had been terrible for Lead Better in almost every way, he had at least had social contacts in the city.

Townsend didn't, though he did manage to get a little further press interest in Lead Better, and he soon ended up going back to Dallas.

One of the things that they did do though was get back in touch with ARC, in the hopes that maybe they'd be interested in making some more records with Leadbetter.

They weren't.

They still had unreleased recordings from his earlier sessions, but they did release Pygmy Popper from those sessions because of this slight renewed interest.

was one of the girls named Sylvanna.

He looked at me and yelled and he said, the last word.

You can take me to the morning and we'll be fing me there.

You can take me to the morning, mama.

Leadbetter got himself a booking at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, which was his first time playing professionally for a paying audience of other black people since getting out of prison.

And this posed a problem for him in ways that say a lot about how race was perceived by different groups in the U.S.

at that time.

Ledbetter was a solo performer with a thick southern accent, who accompanied himself on the guitar.

For white academics and socialites of the type that John Lomax knew, whose idea of black authenticity was mostly taken from stereotypes and minstrel shows, that was exactly what they expected.

For them, black meant rural, in the same way that these days urban is often used by a certain type of person as a euphemism for black, as their stereotypes were formed before the Great Migration.

So while Ledbetter thought of himself as a professional entertainer, and preferred to perform in a neatly pressed suit and bow tie, to show his versatility on multiple instruments, and to do tap dance routines as well as singing, he had been forced to wear prison uniforms or rural clothes to seem authentic, to play to what white people's expectations of a black man were rather than how he, an actual black man, wanted to present himself.

It might be thought that performing for a black audience would mean he wouldn't have to do that, but there were other issues.

The music that Ledbetter made was the music of rural black people from the early decades of the century.

While solo black men with guitars like Blind Blake or Blind Lemon Jefferson had been very popular in the 1920s, by the mid-1930s they were yesterday's news, and performers like Ledbetter or Robert Johnson had no real popularity with black music lovers who were onto newer sounds.

Harlem in 1936 was the home of Count Basie and Duke Allington, the Inkspots and Cab Calloway, Chick Webb and Lucky Melinda.

And these were the kind of performers who are normally playing for the audience who are there to see Lev Better.

It was up at Mike's the other night.

There was really quite a sight.

Gather around, folks, while I give you all the lowdowns.

Tables were filled with gaudy frails, chewing on their fingernails.

They were waiting for the man from Harlem.

Drinks were served, six bits of throw.

Things were

The white owner of the theatre came up with a solution to this problem.

Ledbetter would perform a sketch before he started singing, in which he would essentially reprise his performance from the March of Time newsreel we heard last episode, performing in a mock governor's office with the governor giving him his freedom.

as an attempt to contextualize his music for an urban audience.

Ledbetter was stuck doing the same things that he'd had had to do for Lomax, even for a black audience.

The white audience wanted him to degrade himself because he was black, the black audience because he was rural.

This apparently worked for the Lafayette Theatre, well enough that the promoter decided to put Lebbetta on at the Apollo, but he went down much less well there, both with the audiences and with critics.

The review in the New York Age, the leading black newspaper of the time, read in part, The week before Easter is one of the worst weeks of the whole year in the theatre.

The management of the Apollo, anticipating a small turnout at the box office, has placed a show on the boards that will do its share towards encouraging the folks to stay home and keep Lent.

Top billing for the show goes to George Ledbetter.

This was the mistake of the writer.

Elias Leadbelly, a singing guitarist.

The advanced publicity stated that this man had been in two jails under murder charges, and that the wardens, on hearing him work out on the guitar and vocally, set him free.

Maybe they did.

But after hearing the man myself, I'm not so sure that the musical excellence prompted the two governors' actions.

It may have have been that both they and other inmates wanted some peace job in their quiet hours.

No, Leadbelly isn't the man of its music you want.

No matter how much he wanted it, it was clear that Leadbetter wasn't going to be a success with the black audience in New York.

He was completely out of step with the fashions of the time.

Instead, he was going to have to develop a new audience and a whole new social and musical circle.

I'm gone, gone, gone.

Keep my kill it good and greasy when I'm gone.

Keep my skill it good and greasy when I'm gone gone gone.

Keep my must kill it good and greasy when I'm gone.

Woody Guthrie, who we just heard, was one of several musicians who were introduced to Leadbetter by Mary Elizabeth Barnacle, a folk song collector who Leadbetter got to know through Alan Lomax.

While Leadbetter and John Lomax had had a major falling out, and the two would, as far as I can tell, never speak again, there was no real animosity between Lebbetta and Alan Lomax.

Alan Lomax, who from this point on I'll likely mostly refer to as Lomax, as his father barely enters the story from this point on so I don't need to disambiguate, was a folk song collector like his father, but a much better human being.

While he was far from unflawed, and he would still exploit the musicians he worked with in ways that are at the very least questionably ethical, though well within the norms both for the music business and academia, he was not the vicious, aggressive racist his father was, and indeed was as explicitly anti racist as it was possible for a white man to be in that time and place.

To the extent he was racist, it was an occasional patronizing paternalistic attitude, rather than outright hatred, and while John Lomax was a far right winger, Alan was at least sympathetic to the Communist Party, as many progressives were at that time.

Mary Barnacle was friendly with Alan Lomax, and the two of them had gone on their own folk song collecting trips, initially with their friend and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, making field recordings in Florida and Georgia.

Drop the strain and let me go.

Keep your hands on the cloud,

hold

Hurston, who was black, had actually advised Barnacle and Lomax to travel with her in Blackface to make people less suspicious of why two white people were travelling with a black woman.

Personally, I would be more suspicious of that.

But then, I'm not a racist in the 1930s Deep South.

Hurston and Barnacle soon had a falling out over communism and race.

While Barnacle was never a member of the Communist Party, she was sympathetic to its aims.

And Hurston believed that Barnacle was doing something a lot of communists did at the time, which was to befriend black people, not because she wanted to be their friends per se, but because black people, being for the most part people with very little power in a racist system that was inimical to them, would be more willing to be recruited to the party.

But Barnacle continued to make field recordings with Alan Lomax, and thought that both Lomax and Lebbetter had been treated very badly by John Lomax.

She was not alone in that opinion.

She introduced Lebbetter to the folklorist Lawrence Gellert, who was an academic with very strong negative views of John Lomax, who he said, failed to get to the heart of contemporary Negro folklore and embodies the slave master attitude intact.

Barnacle and Gellert were two examples of a new movement, which was changing both the Communist Party and folk music.

Up until the early 1930s, communism had tended to be associated with the most avant-garde modern music, and in New York the musicians most associated with it were the members of an organisation known as the Composers' Collective, which had a somewhat fluid membership which at times likely included the composers Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Crawford Seeger's husband Charles Seger, and Aaron Copeland among others.

It's difficult to say who exactly was a member.

The group's aims, according to their secretary Mark Blitzstein, were the writing of one mass songs dealing with immediate social issues, to be sung at meetings, on parades, and on picket lines.

2.

Choral music for professional as well as non-professional choruses, dealing in a broader way with the social scene.

3.

Solo songs on social themes to be sung at meetings and concentrate the attention on the subjective, private emotions to the exclusion of the realistic social questions.

4.

Instrumental music, to carry on the best musical traditions of the past, now threatened by the collapse of bourgeois culture.

But there was a big split in the group.

The composer Earl Robinson said later: We spent an awful lot of time talking about whether pure music, that is, instrumental music, could be useful to our purposes.

I said no, and Seeger agreed with me.

None of us used folk music at all until he and I started pushing it in 1934 and 35.

By 1936, Robinson was writing songs like Joe Hill, which Paul Robeson recorded and would later become a folk standard.

I dreamed I saw Joe Real last night, alive as you and me,

says I, but Joel, you're ten years dead.

I never died, says he,

I never

died, says he.

But meanwhile, other members of the collective were going in different directions.

There had been a contest by the magazine New Masses to write a melody for the lyric Into the Streets May 1st.

The chosen composition was by Aaron Copeland.

With a storm of banners, come

with the earthquake red.

Bells ring out of your belfries.

Red flag leap out your red

out of the shops and factories.

Up wheel the single and the hammer.

But Charles Seeger had argued, Do you think it will ever be sung on the picket line?

And anyway, who would carry a piano into the streets May 1st or any time?

Seeger, influenced by his wife, started to argue for vernacular music, for folk song, as the best way to motivate the working classes.

The Seeger's and their acquaintances, including Alan Lomax, soon became the dominant voice of music in the Communist Party in New York and its surrounding area, and the Seeger's attitude also influenced Seeger's son, Crawford Seeger's stepson, Pete Seeger, who would go on to be one of the biggest popularizers of both folk music in general, and of Lebbetta's material in particular, of the 20th century, and who is probably the person who, more than any other, is why Lebbetter's music is more than just a footnote today.

These groups of communist-affiliated, largely white, largely well-off musician activists became Lebbetta's new social circle and his audience and patrons.

Ledbetter was not himself a communist.

At various times, he would express support both for Franklin Roosevelt and for Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt's Republican opponent in the 1940 election, who was economically moderate and socially more liberal than Roosevelt, often criticizing Roosevelt from the left on civil rights issues.

It should be remembered that this was at a time when the two major political parties in America were not ideologically sorted.

While today the Democrats are a moderate centre-left Liberal Party and the Republicans are explicitly fascist, in the 1940s one's party affiliation said more about where one lived geographically than about ideological preferences.

But while Lebbetta was not a communist, he was not politically so opposed to them that he refused to play for them, and he particularly liked that the communists and their fellow travellers were explicitly anti-racist in a way that few other white people of the time were.

They were also very aware of the real injustices that had been done to him, in a way that general white society of the time was oblivious of.

You can see this distinction in the way Leadbetter was talked about in two publications.

On the publication of the Lomax's book on him, Life magazine did a three-page article on Leadbetter.

It was illustrated with a photo of his hands on his guitar, with the caption, These hands once killed a man, and the headline was, Bad N-word,

they used the actual word here, makes good minstrel.

By contrast, an article in the communist paper, The Daily Worker, read in part, This hard, stocky black man sang his way through the Louisiana swampland, the sunbaked cotton fields, and out of two state prisons, where he was sent for protecting himself against the aggression of Southern whites.

Down south the white landlords called him a bad N word again the original text prints the actual word and they were afraid of his fists, his bitter biting songs, his twelve string guitar, and his inability to take in justice and like it.

Because they feared him and respected his hardness, they called him Lebbelly, and at the first opportunity that came their way they threw threw him in jail.

When Leadbetter won himself a pardon for a second time out of a southern prison by composing folk songs, the southern landlords exploited him, robbing him of his self-made culture, and then turned him loose on the streets of northern cities to starve.

John A.

Lomax, collector of American folk songs for the Library of Congress, heard of Leadbetter and went to see him in prison.

And here begins one of the most amazing cultural swindles in American history.

And so, hated and despised by mainstream white society, regarded as an embarrassing remnant of a plantation past they wanted to escape by urban black audiences, Leadbetter found himself more or less by default in the company of people who, while they could be a little patronizing and patrician in their attitudes, at least saw him as worthy of respect as a human being.

And, as the good professional entertainer he was, Lebbetter started writing songs to suit the tastes of his new friends, political songs, and songs based on news events, protest songs.

And one of the earliest and best examples of this, the bourgeois blues, is illustrative of the complicated way that Ledbetter's new friends influenced his life.

And I'm going to be

in a colour

That was written after a June 1937 trip to Washington, D.C., where Alan Lomax was then living, working for the Library of Congress.

Leadbetter and his wife had travelled from New York with Barnacle and another white friend, and Lomax had offered to let the Leadbetters stay with him in his flat, sleeping on his floor.

But the morning after their first night there, they were awoken to Lomax's landlord screaming at him that he'd been told he wasn't allowed to bring N-words into his apartment.

The multiracial group tried to find somewhere else for the Ledbetters to stay, but the places that did rent rooms to black people wouldn't rent to them because they were travelling in a mixed group, and bringing white people around to black neighborhoods meant trouble.

They couldn't even eat anywhere, because not only would the whites-only restaurants not serve black people, but the black restaurants wouldn't serve whites.

Ledbetter was used to segregation, but he was astonished that the Jim Crow laws were being enforced even more severely in Washington, DC than they had been in the Deep South where he grew up.

Someone, different versions of the story have it as either Barnacle or Lomax, said something to the effect of, don't get too upset, Hudie, Washington's a bourgeois town anyway.

And Lebbetta wrote the song shortly after.

If you look on the Wikipedia page for that song, you will see the claim, There is doubt over the song's authorship, with the suggestion that Alan Lomax may have helped him write it.

And this just goes to show how there is an outsized impact of white ethnomusicologists in the Lomax tradition, even to this day, and how that affects perception of black music.

The source for this claim, if you track the citations, is a literal single sentence in the book Early Down Home Blues by the white ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon.

The entirety of the evidence for this doubt over authorship?

Titon says, And who can imagine that Leadbelly did not have some help composing bourgeois blues?

That's it.

One bloke in 1977 thinks it's self-evident that a black man in his late 40s who had been a working musician and songwriter for 30 years couldn't have written a song about being angry at racism.

And this is treated as a serious controversy to this day, and it's considered worth taking seriously.

The idea that Alan Lomax helped him write it appears to be original to Wikipedia, as it doesn't appear in the source.

Presumably, some Wikipedia editor just assumes that the most likely person to have been Lebbetta's secret collaborator who really understood racism and songwriting far better than the black songwriter, was a 22-year-old white man with no history of writing songs at all.

Titon's claim is that early blues had no real history of political protest, and that performers like Lead Better and Big Bill Brunzi were being influenced to sing political songs by their left-wing activist friends.

While it's definitely true that, like all performers, they tailored their material to their audience, so did the other musicians of their generation.

The commercial blues performers were recording for people like Valve Peer, who would not have put out songs attacking segregation.

The argument is one that dates back to the 30s, in fact.

Lawrence Gellert, a friend of Barnacles and another far-left folk song collector, was accused of unduly influencing the performers whose songs he recorded, because other folk song collectors like John Lomax collected far fewer political protest songs.

But Gellert pointed out that Lomax had been collecting his songs in prisons.

John Lomax had thought that he would find purer versions of folk song, unsullied by pop culture, from long-term prisoners who didn't get exposed to pop music.

But within a prison, there were things it was literally impossible for a prisoner to to sing about if he valued his own safety, and Gellert pointed that out, saying that this was the reason the black people Gellert collected songs from were more political than Lomax's.

It's safe to say that Lebbetter would have happily written more children's songs, for example, and fewer protest songs, if his audience had wanted that.

But it's also safe to say that Lebbetta's music always had a topical element.

He'd written songs about the sinking of the Titanic, for example.

and that he was happy writing songs about areas where his own political views overlapped with those of his new audience.

So for example he wrote songs about civil rights, but he did not write or sing pro-union songs, even though the communists in his audience would have liked him to, because at that time, many of the unions in the US were actively segregationist.

Other political songs Ledbetter wrote included Here's the Man in praise of Wendell Willkie, which he changed to He Was the Man after Willkie's death.

the man.

He is the man.

He is the man.

Cause he do understand.

He says he's going to make civil rights.

That means equal rights.

He says he's going to start right now.

Well, he got four years to see.

We're going to be watching, we're going to listen in.

He is the man.

He is the man.

He says he is the man.

And again, if he was writing these songs just because communists wanted him to, he he would hardly have written that.

He wrote the self-explanatory Mr.

Hitler.

tear Hitler down.

We're gonna tear Hitler down to me.

And the Scottsboro Boys, about a group of black men falsely accused of raping a white woman.

Accent told us age of me.

Don't you know what's wrong with magnifying Alabama?

That recording incidentally includes the clip I posted at the end of episode two of this mini-series, which is, as far as anyone is aware, the first recorded use of the word woke in the modern African-American vernacular English sense, where it means aware of systemic racism.

Leadbetter became the centre of a whole group of mostly white left-wing folk singers, including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Sarah Ogun.

most of whom looked up to Lebbetta as an inspiration.

He was also recording regularly, though he didn't make another commercial recording until 1939.

Rather, he was recording for Barnacle and her husband Tillman Cadill, who would send the recordings to the Library of Congress.

While Alan Lomax is regarded as the person most associated with both Leadbetter and the library, Leadbetter actually recorded far more songs for Barnacle than for Lomax.

It was, however, Alan Lomax who ended up arranging those next commercial recording sessions, and showing that while he was not a perfect human being by any means, he was a much better friend to Leadbetter than his father ever was.

Leadbetter, you see, had got in legal trouble again.

He had been arrested for assault after apparently stabbing someone.

The circumstances are unclear, but the story told by Leadbetter's friend Brownie Magee is that the victim was actually a burglar that Leadbetter caught breaking into his home.

That it was very likely some such act of self-defence is shown by the fact that, despite all the publicity about Leadbetter being about how violent and monstrous a person he was, and despite his previous unsafe convictions, he was only charged with assault in the third degree.

But those convictions also meant there was still the strong possibility that Leadbetter would, if convicted, get a lengthy prison sentence.

So Alan Lomax dropped out of Columbia University for a semester to help fundraise for Leadbetter's defence.

And as part of that, he arranged for Leadbetter to record for MusicRaft, a small label which had originally started out putting out records of Baroque music, but had recently moved into recording black folk music.

largely as a result of its owner's Liverville politics.

The result of those sessions was Leadbetter's first album, Negro Sinful Songs Sung by Leadbelly.

A collection of songs that aren't especially sinful in themselves for the most part, and probably thus named to distinguish them from spiritual songs.

This was an album in the original sense of the word incidentally.

Before the introduction of the long playing record a decade or so later, albums were collections of multiple 78 RPM shellac discs, packaged together in a box set.

In this case, the set was 13 songs split over five discs.

Some sides had two or three songs per side, while while on the other hand his version of the ballad Frankie and Albert was so long it took up both sides of the first disc.

Woody Guthrie was impressed enough with the album to buy a copy for his wife, inscribing it, The gift I'd buy had to be better than perfume and stronger than metal.

It had to be the simplicity of a whole people and the dignity of a race, the honesty of a saloon and the frenzy of a church.

So when I heard Lebbelly's voice on these records I thought, here is the surprise I've been looking for.

Surprise!

According to Alan Lomax, the money for the session went from Hudie's hand to the lawyer's pocket, but it didn't save him from conviction.

However, he only had to spend a few months in jail, rather than the potential longer sentence for an assault charge.

Before his sentencing, free on bail, he had happened across an armed robbery taking place in a shop.

He'd tackled the gunman and held him until the police could arrive, and the judge was impressed enough by this that he was given the shortest possible sentence.

It was only after he got out of prison that Lebbetta's career finally properly restarted, and with it the first great American folk music boom.

Ledbetter's first major performance after his release was at a show billed as a Grapes of Wrath Evening, a fundraiser for California's migrant workers put on by the actor Will Gere, later better known as Grandpa Walton, but then a respected stage actor and communist activist.

The performances that night included Pete Seeger's first public performance, the Golden Gate Quartet, Josh White, Burlives, and in his first major East Coast performance, Woody Guthrie.

Baby, if you say so, I never will work no more.

And I'll hang around your shanty all the time, time,

hang around your shanty all the time.

I'll hang around your shanty all the time, time.

And I'll hang

Guthrie had no fixed abode at the time, and Hughie and Martha Ledbetter invited the young singer to stay in their apartment, and he would make their home one of several bases for the best part of a year.

He later said, I came to his and Martha's apartment over on East Tenth Street and I carried my own guitar, and they begged me to stay, to eat, sing, and dance there in their apartment of three little rooms painted a sooty sky blue, and then smoked over with the stains from cigarettes, cigars of the rich and of the poor.

I saw Lebbelly get up in the morning, wash, shave, put on his bathrobe, and Martha would stand up in her tall ways and make me get shaved, bathed, washed, dressed, while she cooked Leadbelly as breakfast on her charcoal flat-top stove.

The stove was older than me, older than Martha, but not older than Leadbelly.

I watched him sit after breakfast, look down eastwards out of his window, read the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Worker.

I listened as he tuned up his twelve-string stellar, and eased his fingers up and down along the neck in the same way that the library and museum clerk touched the frame of the best painting in their gallery.

It was not possible for me to count the numbers of folks that came in through Leadbelly's door there.

Guthrie wasn't the only young musician the Leadbetters helped this way.

The blues musicians Sonny Terry and Varney McGee moved to New York in the early 40s and became part of the folk scene too.

Ledbetter went to visit them and said, I know that you guys ain't getting enough to eat here, you can't eat no pumpernickel bread, you ain't used to it.

Come over and live with me and baby.

I know you ain't making much money, but when you make money, bring it to Baby and put it in the pot, and we'll use it to set the table.

The two lived with the Ledbetters Betters for nearly a year, although they eventually parted ways.

As McGee said, there were certain stipulations Lead wanted and I didn't want to live up to them.

Rather than break that code of his, your necktie on, your shoes shined, that was his standards.

You didn't carry your guitar on your back, you carried it in a case.

You're a professional brownie, your guitar goes in a case.

And a necktie, you don't take your coat off on stage.

Lead was beautiful, neat as a pin and clean as a brand new bottle.

When he left his house going somewhere, he was always a gentleman.

With his necktie, his shoes polished, his guitar in his case.

It got unbearable to me.

I couldn't do that.

I said, you've got to go, McGee.

And Ledbetter really was a professional, and an ambitious one.

He got his own radio show on WNYC, and Henrietta Yochenko, producer of the show, said, He always arrived on time.

I could set my clock by his appearance.

Neatly dressed in a double-breasted grey suit, white shirt, and dark bow tie.

He got his own stationery printed up, with photos of himself both holding his guitar and tap dancing.

He still saw himself as an all-round entertainer, not just a folk singer, and with the text, Sweet Singer of the Swamplands, Hudie Ledbetter, Leadbelly and Southern Melodies, Only Act playing 12-string guitar, Gun Tap Dancing.

As well as his Library of Congress recordings, Ledbetter was also now recording quite frequently for commercial companies.

He recorded regularly for Folkways records, but as they were only a tiny specialist label and didn't pay very well, he had written into his contract that he was allowed to record for other labels as well, and he started doing things for some of the major labels.

Alan Lomax arranged an album for RCA Records, teaming Lead Better with the Golden Gate Quartet.

The quartet were not hugely impressed with Lead Better, but he enjoyed performing with them, saying, They are swell.

With the Golden Gate boys, the Midnight Special is a killer.

in Mexico Letter night special

Shining light on me

Let him in I special

light on me

You ever ever go to hear the sun

boy you let a woman ride

And you better not squall That album, sadly, only sold 500 copies.

John Lomax, of course, was still getting half the songwriting royalties.

In 1944, Ledbetter moved to Hollywood for a while.

He had always admired Gene Autry and had ambitions to become the cinema's first black singing cowboy.

He had more reason than most to think he could do the job, having actually been a cowboy briefly as a teenager.

In the 1940s, singing cowboys like Autry, Roy Rogers, and Tex Ritter, the latter of whom was a friend of Leadbetters, were huge successes as both musicians and film stars.

And a love of the Western genre is evident throughout Ledbetter's music.

When me a bunch of cowboys run in the Jesse James

When me and a bunch of cowboys run in the jets of James, all the bullets was a falling just like a shower

He had been suggested for a part in the film adaptation of the stage show Green Pastures, but it turned out that he didn't film well.

He had a scar on his face which makeup couldn't cover up.

He remained in Hollywood for a while though, as two other prospective film roles came and went.

One in a vehicle for Lena Horne with songs by Johnny Mercer, and one opportunity to play himself in a film based on John Lomax's autobiography.

with Bing Crosby as Lomax.

Neither film was made, but while he was there he recorded for Capital Records, getting introduced to the label by Tex Ritter.

Those Capital recordings show Leadbetter stretching himself musically, where most of his recordings up to that point had just been him on a 12-string guitar and otherwise unaccompanied.

Here he had a session musician playing Zither on several tracks.

Bill Marden done.

The D

that Bill Marden done.

First degree murder with a cold-blooded one.

The D

that Bill Marden done.

And he also showed off his multi-instrumental capabilities, playing magtime piano on Eagle Rock Rag.

After moving back to New York, he started getting treated as part of The Roots of Jazz by the jazz revivalists who were starting up and toured with revivalist jazz bands.

His fame started to spread to other countries as well.

In April 1946 a group of fans of his in London wrote a book about him titled A Tribute to Hughie Leadbetter.

Even though his records weren't available in the UK they'd heard them on Forces Radio and became fascinated enough to write about him.

Pete Segum and Woody Guthrie had by this time formed a musicians cooperative known as People's Songs, and that organisation had its own booking agency, which started getting Leadbetter more prestigious gigs.

He was still not the star he had always wanted to be, for by the mid-1940s he was at least making a decent living from performing most of the time.

But he was also having problems.

He'd been having difficulty walking, and at one point had been hospitalised because he was not able to stand up.

But he'd recovered from that, and according to one of the biographies I've used as a source for this, had even written a song celebrating his ability to stand up again, walk around my bedside, though I've been unable to find a copy of a recording of that to excerpt, sadly, which doesn't mean one doesn't exist.

Leadbetter was one of the most recorded people of the 30s and 40s, and there are literally hundreds of different recordings of him in archives, not all of which have ever seen commercial release.

In 1949, he made his first trip outside the US.

His reputation in Europe was now shaped by the myth, untrue but useful for him, that acoustic blues and folk performers have been the precursors to jazz, and so he was invited to tour in France with a jazz band.

But while he was there he he was taken ill again, and this time he was given a diagnosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as motor neurone disease, or, in the US, Lou Gehrig's disease.

He returned to the US and was able to do a handful more performances.

It's often said that his last ever performance was at a tribute concert for John Lomax, who had died the year before, and that would have a neat ironic symmetry to it.

But in fact, that seems to have been not quite his last performance.

He did a few shows after that, from what I can tell, on the same same bill as Pete Seeger.

By this point, he was too weak to get on and off the stage under his own power without the use of a cane, so proud as always, he got Seeger to place a chair on stage for him, and have the curtains open and closed with Lebb better seated, so the audience would not see his disability.

He died in 1949, aged 61,

and the very next year he became a star.

Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes had formed a vocal group, The Weavers, with the aim of making folk music more popular.

Steering away from the political material they had recorded with their previous group, The Almanac Singers, they started recording with orchestral backing for Decca Records.

And seven months after Lebbetta's death, The Weavers, backed by Gordon Jenkins in his orchestra and produced by Milt Gabler, who produced so many of the great records we talked about in the first year of this podcast, released a double-sided single, with on one side the Israeli folk song Singer, Singer, Singer,

and on the other their version of Good Night Irene.

Last Saturday night I got

Me and my wife settled down.

Now me and my wife are parted.

I'm gonna take another stroll downtown.

Irene, good night.

Irene, good night.

Good night, Irene.

It became the biggest hit of 1950, staying at number one on the charts for 13 weeks, and spawning cover versions in every conceivable genre.

Frank Sinatric fooned a version, Moon Mullican did a honky-tonk piano version, Ernest Tubb and Red Foley did a country version, Joe Stafford did it as light pop.

The song became one of the standards of the Great American Songbook, and its success ensured a renewed interest in Leadbetter's music.

Within a few years, Lonnie Donegan's version of Rock Island Line, learned from a Leadbetter recording, had had become the biggest hit in Britain.

And as George Harrison later said, if there was no Lead Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan, no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles, therefore no Lead Belly, no Beatles.

As Pete Seeger put it, if Hudie had lived just a few more years, he would have literally seen all his dreams as a musician come true.

The songwriting credit on the Weavers record read, of course, Hudie Leadbetter and John Lomax.

Sometimes I live in town

Sometimes I have a good notion

To jump in the river and drown

I read good night

I read good night

Good night I read

good night I read

I get you in my dream To this day there is only one thing we can be sure about when it comes to Charles Manson's motivations in 1968 and 1969, one thing that seems to have been a true expression of his own feelings, and that was that he really wanted to become a successful musician, and believed he had the potential to do so.

I say this because when it comes to the events that made Manson notorious worldwide, the mass murders that forever changed the attitudes of the culture at large to the hippies, and which to many people signalled the end of the 60s dream, Manson himself gave different explanations to different people at different times, and others have brought up other possible explanations of greater or lesser plausibility.

And none of those seem sufficient by themselves to explain his actions.

This has, in turn, led to a variety of more or less plausible conspiracy theories, with murky allegations about CIA experiments gone wrong and other such ideas which always crop up when something seems to resist neat explanation.

To me, the most likely thing is that there is no simple neat explanation, that Manson's actions were the actions of someone who found himself trapped in a situation only partly of his own making, improvising wildly to try to find a solution to the next problem in front of him.

It also seems likely to me that Manson was the kind of person who holds his beliefs lightly, that like many people who manage to inspire others for good or, as in his case, ill, he was able to convince himself of whatever lie he was telling in the moment, believing it himself until he needed to tell a new lie, and believing that as strongly.

But from the start, as soon as Manson had hit LA, he had tried to consort with celebrities, and use them in order to make him the rock star he believed himself able to be.

Most obviously, he had stayed with Dennis Wilson, but through Wilson he had met the other Beach Boys, Alex Chilton, John Phillips of the Mummas and the Poppers, Neil Young, Neil Diamond and others.

He had also spent some time hanging around Lovell Canyon, which after Frank Zappa had moved there had become the centre of LA hypnosis with the Mummas and the Poppers, Young, Joni Mitchell and many other of the new folk rock stars who were going to dominate LA music in the 70s, the way the Beach Boys and Phil Spector had in the 60s, moving there, initially because anywhere Zappa was living must be hip, and soon because Lovell Canyon itself had become the new place where the kids were hip.

But despite all of Manson's attempts at schmoozing, his major connections in the music industry were essentially the three men who made up the golden penetrators.

Dennis Wilson, Wilson's close friend Greg Jacobson, and Terry Melcher.

Of these, Wilson was by far the biggest star.

Jacobson was the one who seemed most convinced by Manson's talent.

But Melcher, as a successful producer of many hit records, was the real prize, because he could make Manson into a star as he had with the Birds or Paul Revere and the Raiders.

And all three men seem to have been at least interested in Manson's talent at first.

Now, it's very, very hard to get an accurate timeline in what follows.

None of the people who spent time around Manson were keen on talking about it afterwards, for very obvious reasons, and all did whatever they could to minimise their connections to him, while at the same time, several people who were only peripheral to the story have enlarged their own parts in it in order to make for a more interesting story to tell about themselves.

Also, many of the people involved in the story spent a lot of time using various substances.

Manson moved around a lot, and nobody was keeping accurate records.

No version of the story makes sense or tallies with any other version of the story.

Everything in the Manson story is loose ends, and tugging on any of them unravels the whole thing.

So what follows here is as close as I can get to a coherent narrative of what happened, but things may not have happened in the exact order I'm describing them, and some of these things may not have happened at all.

But if you want to look for the domino that started the chain of events that led to the Manson murders, that domino probably toppled on April 20th, 1968, likely before Charles Manson ever met Dennis Wilson, when Marty Melcher died.

Marty Melcher was the husband of Doris Day, and a film producer who had produced many of her films since their marriage, including some of her biggest successes, like Move Over, Darling.

That gleam in your eyes is no big surprise anymore.

Cause you fooled me before.

I'm all in a sphin.

Move over, darling.

About to give in.

Move over, darling.

And though it's

Melcher was also the adopted father of Day's son Terry, who took Melcha's surname, and Terry Melcher became very involved with the family business, including producing records for his mother like the one we just heard.

Marty Melcher also took on Day's religion.

At that time she was a Christian scientist, having been introduced to the faith by a previous husband.

And because he was a Christian scientist, and members of that faith believe in the power of prayer to treat medical problems, he didn't see a doctor about his health problems until it was too late, and he died of an enlarged heart.

As it turned out, that may have saved Doris Day from financial ruin, because after the initial shock of the death of his stepfather, in the months that followed, Terry Melcher had been horrified to discover that Marty Melcher's business partner, Day's lawyer, had embezzled almost Day's entire fortune.

It's still unclear whether Marty Melcher had been a witting partner to that, or if he had been conned.

But at the very least, Marty Melcher had been aware that Day was short of money.

She had been the top female box office star of the early 60s, but with the changes in fashion as the decade had worn on, her star had dimmed considerably, and it hadn't been helped by decisions like turning down the role of Mrs.

Robinson in the graduate on moral grounds.

The film she and Marty Melcher had been working on when he died, with Six You Get Egg Roll, would turn out to be her last ever feature film.

And so, without Day's knowledge, Marty Melcher had committed her to a five-year contract to make a TV sitcom, something which was, in the 60s, seen as an acknowledgement that a film star's career was well and truly over, but which would also bring in much-needed money.

And so, when Charles Manson first started looking to Melcher for a record contract, Melcher had more important things on his mind than dealing with his friend Dennis's weird friend.

Melcher seems to have thought that Manson had at least some potential, and to have had at least a little interest in working with him, and he seems to have spent more time socially with Manson than he was later willing to admit, but he was far more concerned with salvaging his mother's career than with anything else.

While Melcher had spent much of the mid-60s producing hundreds of records, his production in 1968 and 69 slowed to a crawl, and other than continuing with Paul Revere and the Raiders, he released little new music of note in 1968, and in 1969 he only produced three new albums.

The second album by Grapefruit, the Beatles' protégés we talked about last episode, whose first album he produced before Marty Melcher's death, Paul Revere and the Raiders' latest album, and The Ballad of Easy Rider by the Birds, who had returned to him as a producer after several years away from him, as we discussed in the episodes on Hickory Wind.

Though by this point, Roger McGuinn was the only remaining member from the line-up that Melcher had produced hits for.

Melcher was well enough disposed to Manson and his family that Manson visited him in his home on Cielo Drive on at least a handful of occasions.

Sly Stone, who was at the time friends with Melcher, and was rumoured to be having an affair with Day, says in his autobiography, When I was down in LA recording, I would hang out with Terry.

I met Doris, a nice lady.

One of the other people in Terry's circle was a short, intense guy who had kicked around the music business for a few years and kept auditioning for Terry.

His name was Charlie Manson.

I crossed paths with him a few times.

Sometimes he would give an opinion and I'd give the opposite and we'd have a little disagreement.

They weren't even about songs, they were about nothing.

Turn the lights brighter or darker, open or close a door.

Whichever way I went, he'd go the other way.

Terry wasn't going to sign him, but he also didn't tell him to leave, partly because Manson made everyone uncomfortable.

I remember once getting the feeling that he shouldn't be there anymore.

We have to get out of here, I said.

It's time to go.

I went to the door, walking real slow, making sure Charlie came along.

When he was out the door, I turned and went back in and worked on some songs with Terry.

I didn't put it all together until later.

Manson had his family, and I had mine.

So Milch was definitely spending time with Manson, but he just wasn't in a position to make any firm commitments about making records with anyone.

He'd taken on the responsibility of being executive producer of his mother's new TV show, and in early 1969 he even moved in with her.

But it says something about how willing he was to help Manson out that he recommended to the landlord of the Cielo Drive property that Dean Morehouse, a member of the Manson family, be allowed to rent the guest house, and Morehouse would regularly invite other family members to use the property's pool.

After Melcher moved, the main property was rented to Roman Polanski and his wife, actor Shannon Tate.

These were, if not close friends of Melcher's, certainly people in the same social circles.

Hollywood was small and everyone knew each other.

Melcher was friendly with the Mummas and the Poppas, and they were friends with Polanski and Tate, though John Phillips became less friendly with them after Polanski had an affair with Michelle Phillips.

Tate's ex-boyfriend and close friend, Jay Sebring, was the hairdresser who styled both Brian and Dennis Wilson's hair, and there were some rumours that Sebring had had an affair with Dennis's ex-wife after their marriage had ended.

Sebring had also appeared in the documentary Mondo Hollywood, which had also featured Manson family member Bobby Boceley, and Polanski had just released the film Mosemary's Baby, starring Mia Farrow, who had been on the trip to Rishikesh with Mike Love and the Beatles, during which the Beatles had written much of what became the White album.

little piggies, life is getting worse.

Always having done

to fay around

it.

Have you seen the bigger piggies?

While Morehouse was temporarily ensconced in the guesthouse at Tielo Drive, the bulk of the Manson family were splitting their time between two homes.

They had moved to a ranch on the outskirts of LA, owned by an old near-blind man named George Sparn.

The ranch had been a film set, with a fake Western town built on it for the use of film and TV companies, but with the decline of the Western genre it had fallen into disrepair somewhat.

Manson and the family got Spahn's permission to live on the ranch in return for doing chores, though there was more than a little conflict between them and the people working on the ranch.

But there was also a certain amount of restlessness among the Manson family.

Manson had promised them all that he was going to become a rock star, and after a year or so of them following him, there had been no sign of this.

Greg Jacobson, his biggest booster, had set up some recording sessions for Manson, with backing from some of the family members.

But nothing further had come of that.

Manson was fearful of losing his control of his family, so he started making plans to move them further away from the city, somewhere they couldn't escape him.

He was nothing without his followers, so he decided to move them into the desert, moving many of them to another ranch in Death Valley.

And to do this, he came up with a a pretext that they were going to be looking for a gateway into an underground world, a subterranean city where they would live while the apocalypse he told them was coming would happen.

Manson started to claim to his followers that there was soon going to be a race war.

The Black Panthers, a militant black power group who were at the time the target of a lot of hysterical news coverage, implying them to be much more dangerous and powerful than they actually were, were going to turn against white people and slaughter most of them.

But of course, they would soon realise that there was no way black people could govern themselves.

and then they were going to willingly turn to Manson and his followers as their new leaders.

Manson's story came from a mixture of far-right conspiracy theories, science fiction, the story of the underground city seems to be at least partly based on the Shaver Mystery, a series of stories published in science fiction magazines in the 40s, and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible, and in particular the Book of Revelation.

which refers to Jesus often as the Son of Man.

And he had one particular piece of evidence to convince his followers that he was a true prophet.

The Beatles had just released a new album, the White Album, and there was one song in particular that proved to the family that the Beatles were connected to Manson on a deep telepathic level.

The song Sexy Sadie had been written by John Lennon about his deep disillusionment with the Maharishi after he had left Rishikesh.

And indeed the song had originally been titled Maharishi before George Harrison, who was less angry than Lennon with the Maharishi, had persuaded him to change the name to make it less libelous.

But a few months before the album came out, Manson had nicknamed Susan Atkins, one of the family members who had a particular reputation both for enjoying sex and for being attractive, Sadie Glutz.

So a song about sexy Sadie was, in the minds of Manson's followers, proof that the Beatles knew all about Manson.

Their song about their disillusionment with the guru of one of the Beach Boys became firm proof that the guru of another Beach Boy was the real thing.

And with that coincidence, it became easy for Manson to claim that the rest of the album could be interpreted to be about the things he had been saying all along.

Honey Pie was a message to Manson himself.

The Beatles wanted him to sail across the Atlantic to be where you belong.

They wanted to make him a rock star, but they were too lazy to come to LA to do it, so they wanted him to visit them.

The Piggies, in the song of the same name, were the white people that the black militants were going to kill.

What they needs a damn good whacking, in this case meant they needed killing.

and this tied in with Black Panther Party rhetoric like the chant, The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun, off the pigs.

Blackbird was a message to the Black Panthers to rise up.

The lines in Revolution 1 about wanting to see the plan were the Beatles telling Manson that he should make an album describing his plans for after the Black Revolution.

Rocky Raccoon, well, the second syllable of raccoon was a slur for black people, the same one that was used to describe the songs sung by blackfaced minstrels.

Rolling Stone later quoted Manson as saying, Rocky's revival, revival, it means coming back to life.

The black man is going to come into power again.

Gideon checks out means that it's all written out there in the New Testament in the book of Revelations.

And of course, there was Revolution number 9.

9.

Number 9.

Given a sound collage in which it was possible to hear literally anything you wanted, Manson heard calls to rise, but also took the title to be a reference to chapter 9 of Revelation.

That chapter had passages like, The star was given the key to the shaft of the abyss, the abyss obviously being the underground city the family were going to live in.

The four angels who had been kept ready ready for this very hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of mankind.

The four angels were obviously the Beatles, and the third of mankind was the white people who were going to be killed by black people,

and so on.

It doesn't really matter to what extent Manson himself believed any of this.

What is evident is that he was able to persuade his followers that the Beatles were putting these messages in their work.

And so that was proof that he was correct.

He called the supposed future black uprising Helter Skelter, referencing another white album track.

But all this was mostly Manson's attempt to buy himself some time until the rock stardom he was sure was coming, and he still had reason to think this.

Greg Jacobson was still very enthusiastic about Manson's work, and Jacobson still had the ear of Dennis Wilson.

Jacobson had co-written several songs with Wilson, including the one that was going to open the Beach Boys' next album, Slip on Through.

Cause I love you,

baby, I do.

Now can you see

my love is growing

your heart is knowing

our love is growing.

But the Beach Boys were having problems even getting a record deal for themselves.

They were also going through other problems.

There were suggestions that Bruce Johnston was going to leave the band, and there were moves to replace him, with both their old guitar player David Marks and Carl Wilson's brother-in-law Billy Hinchy, formerly of the teeny bop group Dean O'Desi and Billy, whose two other members were the sons of Dean Martin, whose latest film at this time co-starred Sharmon Tate, and of Desianez and Lucille Ball, being sounded out as possible replacements.

Given that the group couldn't get a record deal for themselves, it didn't seem plausible that they could help Manson even had they wanted to, and even Dennis Wilson was seeming to get a little less keen on that particular idea.

But Jacobson kept pushing Melcher to sign Manson.

Okay, so Manson wasn't that great in the recording studio, but how about making a documentary film about him?

After all, everyone could see that there was something different about Manson.

He was clearly somebody who had a great deal of personal charisma and presence.

Maybe that would come across better in a film than on record.

And given that Melcher was now in charge of his late stepfather's film production company, maybe that would be an idea.

And there were clear signs that underground hippie-style cinema was about to become big.

Easy Rider had just premiered at Cannes, and obviously Melcher knew all the people involved in that.

Maybe some sort of documentary about a big hippie commune could be a hit.

Melcher agreed that this was a possibility, so he and Jacobson went to Spawn Ranch to see Manson in his own setting.

They brought along a third person, Mike Deasy.

Deasy is someone we talked about a fair bit in a few of the early episodes on the LA pop music scene.

He had played in bands in the 50s with Bruce Johnston and Sandy Nelson, among others, and he had gone on to be in Eddie Cochrane's backing band.

After Cochrane's death, Deasy had become a regular guitarist in the Wrecking Crew.

Not a first-call player like Tommy Tedesco or Al Casey, but still someone who frequently played on sessions for major artists.

He is, for example, one of the five guitarists on Mary Mary Better Monkeys.

where ya going to?

Mary, Mary, can I go to

this one thing

I would buy ya?

I'd rather die than to live without ya.

Mary Mary, where ya going to?

Deasy played sitar as well as guitar, and had also been in the studio-only psychedelic group The Caleb People, with Jim Gordon, Ray Couder, and fellow Wrecking Crew musicians Larry Nectel and Joe Osborne.

And he had also, under the name Friar Took, released an album titled Friar Took and His Psychedelic Guitar, a collaboration with Kurt Becher, on which Deasy played instrumental versions of current pop and jazz hits, while Becher provided largely wordless vocal arrangements with occasional lyrics.

We gotta go now.

Daisy would often claim that the big difference between him and the other wreck-and-crew guitarists was that at the time he was an actual rock and roller, while they were jazz musicians.

He actually liked the music of the counterculture and enjoyed the records he played on, while they saw them as just a job.

But as a sideline from his session playing, Deasy also owned a mobile recording truck and could make field recordings, and so Melcher and Jacobson brought him along to assess the feasibility of recording Manson's music on the ranch.

This did not go very well.

Manson gave Deasy acid.

I've seen this described differently, as either Deasy willingly taking the drug or Manson spiking him, and either could be the truth.

Whatever happened, Deasy had a very bad trip.

He spent three days there and has described it as being a visit to literal hell.

Deasy later told the writer Dawn Eden Goldstein in one of his few interviews on the subject, I took so much acid I couldn't get down.

I was having so much difficulty with my own mind.

Here I am working working with Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys.

I'm at the height of everything I've dreamed of doing.

I've got a wife and beautiful kids, and all of a sudden I've wrecked it.

It all crashed down and I couldn't put it back together.

Deasy seems indeed to have had a mental breakdown as a result of his experiences on the Spahn Ranch.

By his own description, it precipitated a period of intense searching to try to solve his problems.

in which he tried both Jungian psychoanalysis and transcendental meditation, until eventually he went to a Billy Graham revival meeting and became a born-again Christian.

Amazingly, this seems not to have been the last time that Melcher and Jacobson visited the Manson family at Spahn Ranch, but the next time seems to have gone even worse.

Manson beat up an elderly ranch hand, and the police turned up to question Manson about an allegation of a rape that had apparently happened on the ranch.

Melcher and Jacobson seemed to have decided then that they weren't going to move ahead with the project, and started trying to distance themselves from Manson.

but without actually saying nothing was going to happen.

Manson seems to have figured out, though, that Melcher Melcher was not going to do anything to move his career on.

As various people in Melcher and Wilson's circles started to be targeted by what Manson called creepy crolls, members of the Manson family would break into people's houses in the middle of the night and move things around, and occasionally steal small objects.

The people whose houses they broke into included both Melcher and Wilson, as well as the singer Jack Jones, who was then a popular soft pop vocalist but who would later collaborate with Melcher and Bruce Johnston in the mid-70s.

Well, it's country

What fantasy world and Disney girls,

The message here was blatant.

We can get into your house.

We can do whatever we want to.

Watch out.

But things were about to get seriously out of control.

And the cause of this was Tex Watson, the man who had been introduced to the Manson family after he had picked up a hitchhiking Dennis Wilson.

Watson had come up with a convoluted and not very impressive plan to get money by claiming to have a lot of cannabis, getting the money for it from a black drug dealer Bernard Crowe, known as Lotsapopper, and then running off with the money.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, Crowe didn't trust Watson, and so when he handed over the money, he insisted on keeping Watson's girlfriend with him until Watson returned with the dope.

When Watson didn't return, Crowe, who knew the Manson family, phoned Manson and threatened harm to the woman unless his money was returned.

Manson and another family member, Thomas John Wallerman, went to negotiate with Crowe.

but things got out of hand and Manson shot Crowe.

Crowe actually survived, Manson had run off without knowing this, and the next day they heard on the radio that a member of the Black Panthers had been shot and killed, and his body dumped at a local hospital.

Manson put two and two together to make five, and decided that Crowe must have been a Black Panther, and now he was convinced that the Black Panthers were going to come and try to kill him.

Manson was desperate for help, and for money from his old friends in the music business.

But by this point Wilson and Melcher were both getting seriously wary of Manson, though there are some reports that Melcher at least would be an occasional visitor to the Spahn ranch for the next few few months.

Both Melcher and Wilson were acquainted with Crowe and had heard about the shooting.

Indeed Dennis Wilson who was known to exaggerate things apparently told Mike Love that he had seen Manson shoot Crow and dump his body down a well and then to make matters worse there was another drug deal gone wrong this time Bobby Beausolei had acted as the middleman between a gang of bikers and one Gary Hinman a chemist known to the family who produced mescaline but after Beausoleil passed on a thousand dollars worth of mescaline to the bikers they said that they had had bad trips from it and wanted their money back.

Beausole confronted Hinman, and when Hinman refused to give the money back, he tortured Hinman for three days before murdering him, according to some sources, on Manson's orders.

Inspired by Manson's claims that black people were going to rise up and kill white people, and to try to make it look like the Black Panthers had killed Hinman, thus throwing the police off his own trail, Beausole wrote political piggy on the wall in blood.

That would, he hoped, mean that the police would cause enough trouble for the Black Panthers that they wouldn't come after Manson, who was still convinced that by shooting Crow he had killed one of the Panthers, and they would be out for revenge.

Don't be legal.

Got you inside.

They got you in a sad

Unfortunately for Beausoleil, his ruse didn't work and he was arrested for the murder on the 6th of August 1969, and this led to everything that followed.

Manson decided that he needed to do some copycat murders, and there have been multiple motives suggested, any one of which could be the real reason, and possibly all of them were.

If the family could kill some more people in the same way that Beausoleil did, maybe Beausole would be set free because it would look like he wasn't the real killer, because the real killer was still obviously on the loose.

To the extent that Manson actually believed his Helter Skelter story, he hoped that by making it look like the Black Panthers had started rising up and killing rich white people, it would inspire the rest of the black population to do the same and start the race war which would end up with him on top.

And he also wanted to send another message to Terry Melcher, and so he chose to have Tex Watkins, Susan Atkins, Linda Casabian, and Patricia Kvenwinkle go to 10050 Cielo Drive, Melch's former home, and kill everyone who was there.

The people who were murdered were Shaman Tate and an unborn child, her friend Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, the heiress to the Folger's coffee fortune, Wojciech Frakowski, an aspiring screenwriter and alleged drug dealer, and Stephen Parent, an acquaintance of the caretaker who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It has been suggested that yet another motive might be that Frakowski, like Hinman and Crowe, had been involved in a drug drug deal gone bad with the family.

One of the reasons there have been so many conspiracy theories about the Manson murders, in fact, is that there are such a plethora of possible motives, people seem determined to invent even more.

All of them were murdered, in ways which I will not detail, but the details of which are easy to find, and Piggy's was written on the walls in their blood.

A lot of other people came close to being further victims.

Van Dyke Parks had turned up to the house shortly before the murders, thinking Terry Melcher still lived there, and had been told Melcher's new address.

He is probably the last person to have seen Chavantate alive, other than her murderers and fellow victims.

The writer Jerzy Kacinski had been invited over, as had the novelist Jacqueline Suzanne and three of the Mamas and the Poppers, John Phillips, Cass Elliott and Denny Doherty, but all of them had ended up having other plans.

An urban legend has sprung up, around the time of Quentin Tamantino's film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that the sheep music for the Mamas and the Poppers song Straight Shooter was on the piano when the murders took place.

However, that doesn't seem to be the case from what can be seen in the crime scene photographs, which I would advise everyone not to examine unless, as I was, you need to for a project like this.

Nobody needs to see that.

Indeed, one can question how many of those celebrities were actually invited at all.

Sadly, one of the things that makes this story so hard to figure out is that while people who did know Manson have understandably always wanted to minimise their connection to him, people with no connection at all tried to get involved after the fact.

For example, Mick Cox, a guitarist who was playing with Jimi Hendrix around that time, claims in various interviews that Manson had tried to ingratiate himself with Hendrix, and also says that he and Hendrix had gone out onto Mulholland Drive the day after the Tate murders and seen police helicopters flying overhead.

The only problem with that story is that Hendricks was, at the time, in Woodstock, New York.

But the mamas and the poppers do seem to be everywhere in this story.

Cass Elliott was a good friend of Tate's, and there were stories of Fukowski and Sebring having beaten up someone who had had cheated them on a drug deal at Elliott's house a couple of days before the murders.

Mike Deasy had worked a lot with the mummers and the poppers.

Roman Polanski, Tate's husband, initially suspected that John Phillips had committed the murders as revenge for Polanski having had an affair with Phillips' wife Michelle, also of the group, and became obsessed with the idea to the point that Polanski at one point put a knife to Phillips' throat and demanded he confess.

And Terry Melcher had just started dating Michelle Phillips, having split up with his previous partner Candice Bergen, and used her as a defence to claims that he had been involved with some of the Manson women, saying, Why would I be with them when I can have her?

The night after the Tate murders, the four killers from the night before, plus Manson, Clem Grogan, and Leslie Van Houghton, all went to the house of Leno and Rosemary Labianca, a couple they had no direct connection with, but who lived next door to a house where various family members had attended parties not long before.

They killed the Labiankas and wrote Death to Pigs and Helter Skelter, spelling Helter incorrectly, on the walls with their blood.

A few days later, the Manson family also killed Shorty Shay, a rancher who worked on the Spahn ranch and with whom they had had disagreements.

Unlike the other murders, they hid Shay's body and it wasn't discovered for several years.

It took several months before the police made the connection between Manson and the murders, and in that time Manson became steadily more threatening to his old acquaintances.

at one point giving Greg Jacobson two bullets and telling him to tell Dennis Wilson that one was for Wilson and one for his son Scott.

That night Scott went missing, though thankfully he turned out to have just been with friends.

Dennis Wilson started sleeping with a gun under his pillow from that point on.

But eventually the murderers were arrested and became a pop cultural sensation.

Manson had finally become a star, and indeed his old friend Phil Kaufman released an LP of Manson's music, made up of some of the recordings he had done with Jacobson.

flying

Think you're loving baby and all you do is crying Can you feel

are

those feelings real?

Look at your game girl

Look at your

game girl

The album Lie the Love and Terricold

had a cover based on a life magazine cover with Manson's face on it, crudely edited to remove the F from life.

Manson and his co-conspirators were sentenced to death, but reprieved when California temporarily got rid of the death penalty.

But by the 1990s, Manson had become a cult figure in some musical and alternative circles.

His songs were covered by, among others, Marilyn Manson, who took his stage name in part from Manson, Red Cross, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Guns N' Moses.

Axel Rose was also known to wear t-shirts with Manson's face on, with the slogan Charlie Don't Surf, A line from Apocalypse Now.

These t-shirts were made, with Manson's permission, by a bizarre surfbear company named Zooport, run by a pair of fundamentalist Christians who donated part of the profits to an anti-abortion group, and who were also AIDS denialists who believed that Manson had been set up by his followers and was innocent.

The first of these major cover versions of Manson's work came in 1988, when the Lemonheads released a version of Manson's Your Home Is Where You're Happy.

Your home is where you could be what you are, because you were just born to be.

Now they'll show you their castles

and diamonds for all to see.

But they never show you their peace of mind.

1988 was also a big year for both the Beach Boys and and Terry Melcher.

The Beach Boys were, that year, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the same year as the Beatles and Hoody Ledbetter were also inducted.

I'd like to see Nick Jagger get out on the stage and do I get around versus John Jack Flash any day.

Now a lot of people are gonna

go out of this room and I think that Mike Love is crazy.

Well they've been saying that for years.

Ain't nothing new about that.

But what I'm talking about is forget this room.

The United States is 6% of the population of the world.

That's why I came here tonight with Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad!

Salaam alaikum.

I didn't even say alaikum salam.

Alaikum Salaam, he said.

Okay, I don't care what anybody in this room thinks.

You know what they were talking about?

This guy with the guitar?

You know, Aro's father?

The ruling left.

Yeah, well, I knew that.

Because my father...

Bob Dylan was also inducted at the same event.

I'd like to thank a couple of people who are here tonight.

I don't, who helped me out a great deal, Kamina.

Little Richard, who's sitting over there, I don't think I'd even start it out without listening to Little Richard.

And Alan Lomax, who was over there there somewhere too, but I spent many nights

at his apartment house, visiting and meeting all kinds of folk music people, which I never would have come in contact with.

And I want to thank Mike Love for not mentioning me.

And

I play a lot of dates every year, too.

And

peace, love, and harmony is greatly important indeed, but so is forgiveness, and we gotta have that too.

That year, the Beach Boys also had their first US number one hit since Good Vibrations 22 years earlier, with Kokomo, a song written by John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, Mike Love and Terry Melcher, and produced by Melcher, which became the biggest selling hit of the group's career.

But the Beach Boys on Kokomo were a very different band from the one they had been in the 60s.

Neither Brian Wilson nor Dennis Wilson were on Kokomo, for very different reasons.

Brian Wilson's fall from grace in the entertainment industry was very, very fast.

In 1966 he had been the single most important pop musician in North America, with the possible exception of Dylan.

By 1969, when his own father sold out his songs from under him, he was persona non grata among music industry executives.

Indeed, those songs themselves were considered so worthless that part of Murray Wilson's deal with AM to buy the songs out was that they would be able to put new lyrics to the music, replacing the passe subjects of cars and surfing and so on with new hipper subjects to make the songs more commercially palatable.

The AM staffer put in charge of that was Stan Shapiro, who was a friend of Dennis Wilson's, and incidentally there was also a Stanley Shapiro who wrote scripts for several Doris Day films.

I haven't been able to confirm that they're any relation, but it seems very plausible given that Stan Shapiro was part of the same social circle as Dennis, Terry Melcher and Greg Jacobson.

To write the new lyrics, Shapiro got in Tandon Elmer, who had written Along Comes Mary for the Association a few years earlier, but was in the process of trying to start his own career as a singer-songwriter.

Alma would not end up actually releasing any of his own material in his lifetime, but at the time it was being talked about as the next big thing, and Brian Wilson agreed to work with Shapiro and Alma on the new lyrics, by all accounts seeing this as being a way to reclaim a sense of value in his songs after his father had treated them so poorly.

But when Shapiro brought the tapes of the new versions of the songs, with Brian singing lead and Alma and Shapiro harmonizing, to AM, they were enthusiastic about the songs and performances right up until they heard who was involved.

They were not keen on Alma, who had been recently fired by A ⁇ M, but according to Shapiro they were even less keen on Brian Wilson's involvement.

In Shapiro's words, they said, what?

Brian Wilson?

There's no way we're going to do work with Brian Wilson.

He's crazy number one, and if we accept anything with him, he'll be down at this lot putting up circus tents.

But at the same time, while Brian Wilson was rapidly becoming seen as a liability for the band, his mental health problems now having become very obvious to everyone, he was also the only real asset the band had when it came to getting record deals.

The band eventually managed to get signed to a deal with Repriz Records, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, because Van Dyke Parks assured Warners that he would make sure Brian Wilson was reasonably involved in the creation of any new music.

And Brian was involved, to a reasonable extent, in the making of the first album for Warners, which consisted of songs they'd been recording while looking around for a new label, and which Warners turned down, partly because Brian's songs of this period were often quirky slice of life songs about his day-to-day living, with lines like, In the morning people are so happy, that's the time when I'm a Mr.

Businessman.

Warner rejected the second line-up of the album too, but a third version of the album was finally accepted.

Brian was a credited writer on slightly over half the songs, though sometimes that credit is slightly dubious and was included to make him appear more involved than he was.

Bruce Johnston, the credited co-writer of the song Deirdre, has said that Brian wrote about 5% of the lyric, but was given an equal credit.

Similarly, while Brian definitely contributed to the song All I Wanna Do, that's generally considered to be more Mike Love's work than Brian's.

Brian did though contribute a handful of strong tracks, including the dazzling This Whole World.

And Carl pulled together a track from half-finished takes of one of the songs Brian had been fiddling around with in various forms since the smile sessions, Cool, Cool Water, which is now often considered one of the Beach Boys' masterpieces.

Sunflower, the album that resulted, was actually released in two slightly different line-ups.

In the UK and Europe, the Beach Boys records were still being distributed by EMI, and so the European version of the album added one extra track, the hit version of Hudie Leadbetter's Cotton Fields that Al Jardine had produced, and which had been one of the band's last things on Capital Records.

The album is often considered the best Beach Boys album other than Pet Sounds, by both critics and the band members.

Bruce Johnston, for example, who has more creative contributions on this album than any other Beach Boys record, writing or co-writing two songs and singing lead on a third, has often said he thinks it's the best thing they did as a group, that he considers Pet Sounds Brian's masterpiece and Sunflower the Beach Boys' masterpiece.

But everyone seems to agree that if Sunflower is a great album, its greatness largely rests on the songs that Dennis Wilson had brought in.

Dennis brought in a song he'd co-written with Bob Berkman, which with contributions from Carl and Al became the psychedelic rocker It's About Time.

And he and Greg Jacobson had written the ballad Forever, which went on to become Dennis's most loved song.

So I'm going away,

but not forever.

Gonna love

in your way

In total, Dennis was the primary composer of four of the album's 12 tracks, and he could be proud of it.

One thing that's notable is that most of this work from Dennis was done before the news of the Manson family's involvement in the Tate and Labianca murders became public knowledge.

The next few years would see Dennis continue to have a creative hot streak, but for one reason or another, very little of his work would end up released on Beach Boys recordings.

By all accounts, his drug use and mental illness became significantly worse after the revelation that people he had been so close and intimately involved with had done such awful things.

He would not talk about the Manson murders except when he was intoxicated, when he would hint darkly that he knew things which were going with him to his grave.

But in 1970 at least, he seemed to be on an upswing.

He married his second wife, Barbara, who seems to have been a stabilising force in his life, and with whom he would have two children, named Michael and Carl.

He also took several months off from playing with the group, replaced temporarily by another denist, Dennis Dragon, the brother of touring keyboard player Darrell Dragon, to appear in the film Tulane Blacktop.

Got a thing's panel for it.

It's got a little bit of transmission trouble right now, though.

Probably blow our doors right off, wouldn't it?

Tulane Blacktop was Dennis's only film as an actor, and like Sunflower, it was a critical success and a commercial failure.

Starring James Taylor as a character known only as the driver, with Dennis similarly playing the otherwise unnamed mechanic, it was commissioned as a way to cash in on the success of Easy Rider, but failed to do anything at the box office, possibly because despite starring two famous musicians, it had no musical contributions from either of them.

The film is now, though, considered important enough that it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress and given a double disc release by the Criterion Collection.

And in 2003, a tribute album to the film came out, featuring new tracks by people like Wilco and Sonic Youth, as well as, for some reason, Hughie Ledbetter's version of Stew Ball.

Dennis also started seriously thinking about having a solo career at this point, and towards the end of 1970 released, in the UK only, his first single Outside the Beach Boys.

The single was credited to Dennis Wilson and Rumbo, Rumbo in this case being a nickname for Devil Dragon, his principal musical collaborator at this point, which makes one wonder how well his later career would have gone had it been credited to Rumbo and Teniel.

The A-side was a song that Wilson had written with Mike Love, Sound of Free.

the sound is coming.

While the B-side, Lady, written by Dennis alone, actually became one of Dennis' most loved songs, despite being the B-side of a flop single, and has since since been covered by a variety of artists, usually under the title Falling in Love rather than Lady.

Bring it for my lady.

All I can do,

you know,

you know it's for my lady.

I love her so

But while Dennis was becoming more creatively fulfilled, and the group were recording some of their best material, they were being regarded as has-beans by the public, who still thought of them as the surfing band they'd been nearly a decade earlier.

They needed to change that.

They needed to become hip.

Their first step towards this came, like their signing to Raprise Records, through the efforts of Van Dyke Parks.

Parks was on the board of the Big Surf Folk Festival, and when another group pulled out, he suggested that the Beach Boys be put on in their place.

The group had previously avoided playing big hippie festivals, but now they needed to make a case for themselves for the audience that had grown up in the years since they'd last had a major US hit.

On a bill with Joan Baez, Chris Christopherson, Mary Clayton, Linda Vonstadt, John Phillips and others, the group, minus Dennis, who was filming, but with a whole horn section, played two sets that were not what the audience were expecting at all.

As was normal for the group at the time, they didn't do any of the surfing or car songs that had made their name, at least in one of the two sets.

In the other, they threw a bone to the audience by including I Get Around.

And on the bootleg recordings of the shows, one can hear Bruce telling the audience not to shout out for those old songs.

They did do a handful of the hits.

They did California Girls and Good Vibrations, and the three hit singles from Pet Sounds, including, appropriately enough for a folk audience, Sloop John B,

a song which had first been recorded by Alan Lomax on a field recording in 1935.

But the bulk of their shows were, as was customary for the time, made up of obscure album tracks like Aren't You Glad from the Wild Honey album, B-sides like Wake the World from the Friends album, and recent tracks like Bruce's Tears in the Morning, Cool, Cool Water, and Cotton Fields.

cradle.

In them oh, oh, the cotton fields back home

Little business back in Louisiana,

just about a mile from the leaks again

In them oh

oh the cotton fields back home

The group went down well enough with that audience that even Yamwenna, who had devoted so many pages of Rolling Stone to dismissing them, was forced to give them some grudging praise in his review of the festival.

The group decided to take on a new manager who could guide them into becoming a success with the counterculture.

The man they took on was a broadcaster named Jack Riley, who seems to have been not the most honest of people.

He seems in fact to have been a hookster, and famously he got the job by telling the group that he had won a Pulitzer for his work in NBC's Puerto Rican Bureau, a statement which had an admirable efficiency in its ratio of lies to words.

He had never won a Pulitzer, he had never worked for NBC, and NBC didn't actually have a Puerto Rican bureau.

Riley soon installed himself not only as manager, but as effectively the group's seventh member, becoming a songwriting collaborator with all three Wilson brothers.

Soon after Riley was taken on, the group got a residency at the Whiskey Ago-Go, which several people in the group's orbit had said would be seen as a demeaning choice.

The whiskey was where you played when you were starting out, not when you were as big as the Beach Boys, but they realised that the Whiskey was also where all the LA tastemakers went.

The group were at the absolute top of their live form in 1970 and 71.

Some Beach Boys fans have said that they were better in 72 and 73, but that's because of a greater availability of good quality live recordings.

And soon they had queues stretching out the door and round the block, with hundreds being turned away.

Between the Big Surf Folk Festival and the Whiskey, the Beach Boys had won over the West Coast Tastemakers.

Now it was time for them to win over the East Coast with a similar one-two punch.

First they played a stunning set at Carnegie Hall, which sadly only exists in a poor quality audience recording, not good enough for me to excerpt here, with a 25-song set made up mostly of songs like Caroline No, You Still Believe in Me, Forever, Lady, and Cool, Cool Water, again with almost no nods to their hit-making days, and got some of the best reviews of their career.

And then, a few months later, They made a surprise appearance at the Film Or East, Guesting With the Grateful Dead, performing a short set with a couple of their own hits, a few cover versions of Coasters and Chuck Chuck Berry songs, and a version of Merle Haggard's Okie from Muscogee.

Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muscogee

Facewear even squares to have a thought

The Beach Boys were cool again.

They were no longer selling records the way they had.

But where a couple of years earlier they'd been playing to half-empty theatres, now they were getting massive audiences of hippies and students, people who appreciated live music.

They were on their way back to the top.

The next step was to make an album that was relevant to the concerns of early 70s youth.

Jack Riley suggested they write more explicitly political, and especially environmental, songs, and the resulting album became their first proper hit album in many years.

The album that became Surfs Up was in some ways a patchy one, but it saw the group taking Riley up on his challenge.

Mike and Owl's Don't Go Near the Water has the odd clunky line of lyric, but is a heartfelt plea for environmental protection.

and features a fascinating production style they would use a lot over the next few years, especially on owls songs, a combination of acoustic folk instruments like the banjo and Moog synthesizers, which is unlike anything else being made at the time.

Don't go near the water,

don't go near the water.

Carl, for the first time, wrote two songs without any of his bandmates, with Jack Riley providing the lyrics.

These are not explicitly political, or indeed explicitly anything.

Riley's lyrics were often opaque, and seemed to have been modelled on his impression of what Van Dyke Parks's lyrics were like.

And so, for example, I've seen interpretations of Field Flows that say it's about either ejaculation or cocaine use.

It could be about both or neither, but it sounds fantastic.

I feel flowing,

shadowy goes,

unbending,

And Brian contributed two new tracks.

A Day in the Life of a Tree, with lyrics by Riley, who also takes lead vocal, is a song that divides fans.

A song from the perspective of a tree that's dying because of pollution.

Some fans think that Riley's cracked, slightly off-key vocal, which sounds spookily like how Brian would sound a few years later.

And the overly earnest lyrics mean it's a joke by Brian, while others see it as sincere and quite moving.

I think it's both.

A song about both the environment and about Brian's own personal deterioration, where Brian is laughing to keep from crying, and the tag, with Van Dyke Parks, Riley, and Al Jardine singing lead, is quite lovely.

Nobody disagrees about Brian's other new contribution to the album though.

Till I Die is a song of heartbreaking lyrical simplicity and musical complexity, expressing Brian's feelings at the time, an existential despair so profound it almost becomes relaxing and calming.

The hey, hey, hey at the end of each verse is expressive of an emotion that most people who have struggled with depression, especially while neurodivergent, will recognize, but which is very rarely captured in art.

How deep is the

But there are two Beach Boys who for different reasons didn't get with the programme.

Bruce Johnston turned in what may well be his very best ever song, Disney Girls 1957, a song which is as far as possible from Riley's idea of progressive politically engaged music appealing to radical youth, with lyrics like Patty Page and Summer Days on Old Cape Cod and She's Really Swell Cause She Likes Church, Bingo Chances and Old Time Dances.

It's worth noting the 1957 in the title, which is often missed out when people talk about the song.

As Tilt pointed out to me after hearing the episode where I talk about the brutal murder of John Dolphin, which Johnston witnessed, Dolphin's murder was early in 1958, and 1957 was the last year before that happened.

Johnston's lyrics acknowledge that the past he's longing for was a fantasy world, but his feelings about a time before that profoundly shocking experience have a deeper emotional basis than pure nostalgia and make the song have a feeling of sincerity that cuts through the schmaltz.

for reality,

it's not for me, and it makes me laugh.

Oh,

a fantasy world,

and dizzy girls, I'm coming back.

Oddly, that nostalgia for a lost innocent, coming so soon after the death of the dream of the 60s, was probably more resonant with the intended audience than something like Mike's student demonstration time, which had aged poorly five minutes after the record came out, and latching onto that nostalgia rather than chasing current trends, would eventually be what brought the band back to the top.

Johnston despised the album, which was titled Surfs Up, and said later, To me, Surfs Up is, and always has been, one hyped-up lie.

It's a false reflection of the Beach Boys, and one Jack Riley engineered right from the outset.

Jack was very, very smart in that he was able to camouflage what was actually going on by making it look like Brian Wilson was more than just a visitor at those sessions.

Johnston soon left the band and would spend the next few years having a very varied career indeed.

He co-produced a solo album for Terry Melcher, on which he also co-wrote the song Dr.

Horowitz, an attack on gurus and alternative health practitioners.

Johnston also sang backing vocals with Doris Day and Elaine's Spanky McFarland.

He collaborated a lot with Melcha in the mid-70s, but also worked with other artists as a backing vocal arranger and producer.

He was involved in dozens of records at this time, including records by David Cassidy, a soft-pop supergroup called California Music, which he formed with Melcher, Kurt Becher, Gary Usher, and Dean Torrance, and to which Brian Wilson contributed slightly, and Eric Carmen, as well as doing the vocal arrangement for Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me by Elton John, for which he brought in Carl Wilson to add backing vocals.

hurt myself, it's always someone else I see.

I just allow a fragment of your life

to wander free.

And several songs on Pink Floyd's The Wall, including The Show Must Go On, on which Johnston sang with Tony Tenniel, the other half of The Captain and Teniel.

He also became the only Beach Boy ever to win a songwriting Grammy, getting one for a song he wrote for The Captain and Teneil, but which was most famously covered by Barry Marlowe, and which Johnston then recorded on his own solo album.

Dennis Wilson's reasons for not contributing any songs to the Surfs Up album were rather different though.

He had in fact written two songs that were considered for it, though neither ended up being released until decades later.

Wouldn't It Be Nice to Live Again, written with Stan Shapiro, eventually came out in 2013.

to live again

high on our hill,

making love again.

Whoever said

that love would die

while Fourth of July was co-written with Riley and featured Carl on lead vocals and would not come out until 1993.

Where has it gone?

Brothers, sisters, stand firmly and try,

reaching the spacious skies.

Fourth of July,

Brothers, sisters, stand firmly and try.

Reaching the spacious skies,

Fourth of July.

But Dennis pulled his songs from the album after arguing with Carl and Riley about sequencing of the album.

He said later, I have a belief in my music, and it sounds nothing like it should on the album.

It should have a flow in it from one song to another.

Part of the disagreement seems to have been about the title track.

Over Brian's objections, the band had pulled out the half-finished song Surfs Up from the Smile sessions and finished the recording, creating a Frankenstein version of the track that probably didn't represent his intentions, but which was nonetheless a masterpiece in its own right.

In 1967, Brian had recorded a handful of demo recordings of the song at the piano, but had only recorded a backing track for the first half of the song.

As Brian didn't want to be involved with it, Smile was associated with very painful memories for him, Carl sang a new lead vocal over the 1967 backing track for the first part of the song.

To a handsome man in the dark

of blind glass aristocracy,

back through the opera class, you see, appeared in the page of the dark.

Calling me Day Bruis.

Then, for the second part, where there was no existing backing track, they switched to a 1967 demo recording by Brian with some additional Moogo overdubs.

And then at the end, over Brian's vocal and piano from the demo, they overlaid a chant from another incomplete smile song, Child is Father of the Man, with Al Jardine singing new lyrics supposedly written by an uncredited Riley.

Brian didn't want the song on the album at all.

Carl and the record label did, and Carl wanted it to be the closing track on the album.

Dennis wanted his song to end the album and eventually pulled it.

Surfsup went to number 29 on the US album charts, the band's most successful album since 1967.

Dennis was becoming more unstable at this point.

In 1971 he punched his hand through a plate glass window, cutting his tendons and making it impossible for him to play the drums for a while.

He remained in the band as a co-front man with Love, roaming the stage, singing and occasionally playing keyboards.

And the band brought in Mickey Vittar, the drummer and singer and multi-instrumentalist from the black South African band The Flame, who Carl had recently signed to Brother Records, to play drums.

Soon they also added in his bandmate Blondie Chaplin on guitar and vocals, and the new line-up of the band got a reputation for a live power and muscular rock sound they'd never had before.

Dennis meanwhile worked on a solo album, tentatively titled Poops or Hubber Hubber, mostly in collaboration with Devil Dragon.

The album was never finished, but the tracks released on a 2021 box set, Field Flows, the Sunflower and Surf Sub Sessions, suggest something that could have been quite special.

I don't know

what to do.

Part of the reason the album was never released was that the next Beach Boys album, Carl and the Passions, So Tough, included two tracks originally intended for Dennis's solo work.

Both of them big, sweeping Wagnerian ballads, Cuddle Up and Make It Good.

I haven't known much.

All I know

is what I feel

and what I feel,

and what I feel.

Carl and the Passions is an album that has a bad reputation as far as the General Beach Boys Plan consensus goes, though it has its defenders.

Elton John, for example, wrote of it in a CD reissue liner note in 2000.

This is an album which I have loved for a long time.

This album is a step away from pet sounds but still has moments of breathtaking genius and experimentation.

When this record was released, I remember how different and fresh it sounded.

It still does.

Part of the reason for that bad reputation is that it's an album that's clearly made by several individuals using some or all of the others as session musicians, rather than a group, very much the Beach Boys equivalent of the White album.

It's essentially four singles by different bands collected together as an album, but they're good singles.

There's Dennis's single...

There's a single by Blondie and Mickey which sounds like they want to be the band.

rolling down the road,

rolling down the road,

rolling down the road.

Listen,

listen, hear the music play.

Listen,

listen, he'll the music.

And indeed, Blondie went on to join a 1980s line-up of the band and played on some Vic Danko solo records.

There's a single consisting of two rockers by Brian, You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone, written with Riley, and Marcella, a song about a sex worker of Brian's acquaintance, written with Riley and Tandon Alma.

And there was a single of songs about transcendental meditation by Mike and Al.

He Come Down, which was co-written with Brian and is gospel-flavoured, saying that the Maharishi gives a lift to every man's Bible and comparing him to Jesus and Krishna.

And All This Is That, written with Carl.

The album didn't chart, partly because in a bizarre marketing scheme it was packaged as a double album with a reissue of pet sounds.

However, the band were doing better and better as a live act, and were becoming properly hip in a way they never had been before.

They were willing to follow Jack Riley anywhere, and they ended up following him to the Netherlands.

Riley's suggestion was that the group should record in Holland, because it would be a central base for touring Europe, and because it would be possible to get Brian and Dennis away from drugs there.

An idea which those who have visited Amsterdam will find strange, but which apparently made sense in the early 1970s.

There were only a handful of problems with this.

The first was that Brian didn't come, at least at first.

It took three trips to the airport before he actually managed to get himself on a plane.

Dennis did come.

He was actually keen to get away from LA because he and his family were still getting occasional threats from the remnants of the Manson family, but he soon decided that he didn't like the Netherlands.

and decided to commute to the studio, from the Canary Isles,

a distance of about 2,000 miles miles each way.

The resulting album, Holland, was largely produced by Carl Wilson.

Brian only contributed one actual song to the album, Funky Pretty, a co-write with Love and Riley about a woman who was very into astrology.

His major contribution, instead, was a fairy tale.

Brian spent his time in Holland listening, over and over, to Randy Newman's album Sail Away on Repeat.

and writing a story about a prince with a magic transistor radio.

Narrated by Jack Riley, with Brian playing the the voice of the Pied Piper who talks through the radio, the story, Mount Vernon and Fairway, a fairy tale, was included as a 7-inch bonus disc with the album.

There was a mansion on a hill, but deep in a secret kingdom where a young prince lived.

He had four sisters and four brothers.

The prince had a special bedroom on the ground floor with a window that looked down into a deep, deep forest.

He could see distant lights.

The other members of the band stepped up.

Dennis contributed two songs, both of which featured Carl on lead vocals: Steamboat, written with Riley, a song about Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat,

and Only With You, a love song with lyrics by Mike Love.

Love

While Mike and Al contributed a rather mystical-sounding suite of songs about California, Blondie and Ricky brought in another band sound alike, Leaving This Town, and Carl wrote The Trader with Riley, a song decrying imperialism and colonialism.

When the band turned the album into Warners, though, the label thought that there were a couple of problems with it.

There was almost no Brian Wilson involvement, and there wasn't anything that sounded like a single.

Van Dyke Parks had a solution to both these problems.

He had in his possession a tape of a songwriting session he'd had with Brian, where they'd worked on a song called Sail on Sailor, which had been mostly Parks' idea, but to which Brian had contributed.

I can't.

Hypnotize me and tell me that I ain't um that I ain't humble.

I ain't crazy.

I'm insane.

See.

Exactly who ended up adding what to the song has been the subject of much dispute.

Brian seems to have played the song at multiple times for different people, who all thought they were collaborating with him on a new song, and several of whom later claimed credit, sometimes to the extent of suing over it.

Ray Kennedy, who later recorded a version of the song with totally different lyrics, apparently wrote it with Brian and Tanden Alma at Danny Hutton's house, and according to Kennedy at one point point it was considered for Three Dog Night, and Brian produced a track for them but then slashed the tape up.

According to Parks, his own credit sometimes disappeared from recordings of it, and he was never properly compensated for what had started out as more his song than Wilson's.

The current copyright to the song has Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and Tandon Alma as composers, and Ray Kennedy and Jack Riley as lyricists.

It would be the last New Beach Boys song to have any input from Jack Riley.

Riley decided to stay in the Netherlands when the band returned to America, and believed he could continue to manage the group from there.

The group disagreed, and soon Riley's time as the group's manager was at an end.

Brian wasn't very interested in producing Sail on Sailor, so Carl produced the track in the studio, with Blundy Chaplin on bass, Ricky Patara on drums, and Carl playing all the other instruments.

Brian was a sort of participant though.

He was on the phone to the studio and Carl would ask him about chord changes and arrangement details.

Dennis was meant to sing lead on the track, but after training one take he got bored and went surfing.

So the lead vocals are by Blondie, with Carl, Mike Love, Carl's brother-in-law Billy Hinchy, and Jerry Beckley of the band America adding the backing vocals.

commotion

Half and frightened,

unenlightened,

sail on, sail on, sailor.

Sail on Sailor did not make the top 40, but did become a regular on adult-oriented rock stations, and still gets airplay on classic rock stations that don't play anything else by the Beach Boys.

Dennis, Billy Hinchy, Danny Hutton and Jerry Beckley were also involved in the creation of a rather bigger hit, which also has murky authorship and conflicting stories about its writing.

And here I have to correct something I've said earlier, and also break a rule I've set myself previously.

Dennis Wilson would, in the late 70s and 80s, often sing You Are So Beautiful, the song by Billy Preston and Bruce Fisher, made famous by Joe Cocker, as an encore in Beach Boys shows.

By the time this was a regular feature of the show, Dennis's voice had been severely damaged, both by substance abuse and, apparently, by his being punched in the throat, and the huskiness of his voice gave it a slight resemblance to Cocker.

Now, Billy Hinchy for many years would say that he had seen Dennis at a party with Billy Preston noodling on the song, and that Dennis had later told him that he'd co-written the song.

But in a Patreon bonus on Joe Cocker, I said that while I thought Hinchy was likely telling the truth, I thought that Dennis probably was not.

I pointed out that Billy Preston's original version of the song has some substantial differences from Cocker's more famous cover version, and said, Wilson's performance and arrangements are closely modelled on Cocker's cover version, rather than the version by his supposed co-writer.

Every time there's a difference between Preston and Cocker's versions, Wilson goes with Cocker.

Given that, and that it simply doesn't sound like a complex enough song to have required three writers, I'm going to have to say that while I generally tend to err on the side of giving the Beach Boys credit for stuff, I think on this occasion Dennis didn't deserve it, and he was just copying a Joe Cocker record.

But, in reading up for this episode, I discovered something I'd forgotten.

In Billy Hinchy's telling of the story, Jerry Beckley was also there, and I happened to be friends with Jerry, so I dropped him an email and asked him just briefly to let me know if his memory checked out with Dennis's story or if I was right, expecting a simple confirmation of one version or another.

Jerry called me the next day and told me what he remembered happened.

Now, I normally have an inviolate policy.

I do not turn to people I know for information that my listeners can't check for themselves.

for a whole variety of reasons, including that I will have biases towards people I know, and more importantly that I want my listeners to be able to check my work and draw their own conclusions.

But in this case, because it's correcting something I've already said, I'll tell the story Jerry told me, which is an expanded and more detailed version of what Billy Hinchy said.

Now, you can't currently easily check what I'm saying against a source in the public domain, but Jerry tells me he tells the same story in the documentary I Need You, 53 Years of the Band America.

which is currently showing at various film festivals and will hopefully soon have a more general release, so you can check it in that in the near future.

As Jerry remembers it, a group of people including himself, Dennis, Billy Preston, Preston's then boyfriend whose name he couldn't remember during our call, Billy Hinchy, and Danny Hutton were all out at the Rainbow Bar and Grill partying, and then went back to Beckley's apartment, where Preston started playing the piano, playing a fragment of a tune.

They all, being among the greatest harmony singers in the business at that time, started singing along improvising harmonies.

Occasionally, one or other of them would push someone else to one side and play about on the piano a bit.

Jerry didn't remember much of the detail of the night.

Everyone there was at least a little intoxicated.

But he'd remembered it as a nice time.

Later, he recognised the Joe Cocker song as the one that Preston had been playing at his house, and after that, he noticed Dennis singing it at Beach Boys Gigs.

He spoke to Dennis about it, saying how nice it was to see Dennis singing that song because it reminded him of that fun night they'd all had together.

And Dennis said, yeah, when we wrote it.

We here, meaning not just him and Preston, but him, Preston, and Beckley.

Beckley was flabbergasted.

What do you mean we wrote it?

Dennis said, don't you remember, you wrote the bridge.

Jerry says that he has no actual memory of writing the bridge to You Are So Beautiful.

As I said, he doesn't have the clearest memory of the night in question.

But he says it's entirely plausible that he did, and that once Dennis had said that, it does sound like the kind of chord changes he would use.

And as soon as Jerry said that to me, I could hear the similarity too.

Jerry doesn't claim to have written or co-written the song.

He says, as far as he's concerned, Billy Preston and Bruce Foster are the credited songwriters, and that's what matters.

And if he did contribute to it at all, he has no memory of doing so.

But given that Jerry's version of the story matches very closely with what Billy said, I think it's at least plausible that the only time Dennis Wilson actually co-wrote a hit record, he didn't get any songwriting credit.

God bless you, Ingman.

You

are

so

beautiful

to me.

By this point, Brian was in a terrible state mentally, and Dennis was getting worse, too.

His drug and alcohol abuse, which had got worse since the Manson murders as a way of dealing with the trauma, had got to the point where Barbara had to leave him, though she would always love him.

She later said, There was never enough to fill him.

No matter how good-looking he was, no matter how successful, it didn't penetrate.

There was a huge emptiness, a pain that he carried inside.

On another occasion, she said, Dennis was just so empty empty inside, he never realised what a unique person he was.

He tried to fill the need any way he could.

When we were living together, he loved the sense of family.

The only problem was that he couldn't stay long.

He always had to leave and come back.

I was graced with the knowledge there was nothing I could do.

I either had to accept it the way it was or move on.

After their divorce, he started dating Karen Lamb.

an actor and model who had formerly been married to Robert Lamb of the band Chicago.

This relationship was not good for either of them, and over the next few years they would marry and divorce twice.

But the worst thing for both Brian and Dennis was the death of Murray Wilson in 1973.

Murray had been in most ways an awful father, he had been physically and verbally abusive, he had sold Brian's songs against his will, showing how little he thought of his son's work, and he had caused untold emotional damage to his sons.

But he was also the person who had pushed them into music in the first place, and to a great extent the main motivation for Brian and Dennis was to win his approval.

In the last year or so of his life, indeed, he and Dennis had started to bond.

They would watch the boxing on TV every week in their own homes, but talking on the phone while watching, and Dennis was starting finally to get a tiny part of the respect he'd always looked for from his father.

And losing him meant that that could never, ever come.

Barbara said later, it seemed to me that when Murray died, something in Dennis died, it took a real toll on him, and I think that was really when he started deteriorating.

Neither Brian nor Dennis attended the funeral.

Neither of them were in any state to.

This personal devastation came just at the point where the Beach Boys were starting to return to the public eye in a big way.

The mid-70s saw a huge wave of nostalgia among the older part of the baby boom generation in America for the late 50s and early 60s, 10 to 15 years earlier, when they had been in their teens and things had seemed simpler.

This would dominate pop culture for a big chunk of the decade, with things like the sitcom Happy Days and the musical Grease becoming immensely popular.

But the first real sign of this in mass media pop culture was George Lucas' film American Graffiti, a film set in the very early 60s and soundtracked by the music of his adolescents, which ends with The Beach Boys all summer long over the credits.

At this point, most of the Beach Boys music had been out of print since the end of their capital contract, Capital having deleted their back catalogue in a fit of petty-mindedness.

The group had retained the rights to the albums from Pet Sounds On, but all their early hits had been hard to find.

But in the wake of the success of American Graffiti, Capital decided to put out a double album of the group's biggest pre-Pet Sounds hits.

Mike Love helped compile it and suggested the title Endless Summer, and the result was a phenomenon.

It went to number one, went triple platinum, and spent 155 weeks on the chart.

A follow-up compilation, Spirit of America, also made the top ten and went gold, even though it had almost no hits and was mostly just a best of the rest collection.

The Beach Boys were now the biggest band in America, even as their personal lives were starting to fall apart.

By this time, both Brian and Dennis were seriously ill in different ways, both suffering from mental illnesses, and both also dealing with substance abuse problems.

The group, initially at Dennis' suggestion, though soon championed by Mike Love, started to add more of the old hits into their set, because they weren't producing anything new.

During a three-year period when the group could have put out anything and had it become a hit thanks to their new second wind of popularity, the only new release was a rather odd Christmas song, Child of Winter, written by Brian and Stephen Kalinich, which was, ludicrously, released on December 23rd, thus ensuring that nobody would want to listen to it.

Other than that, the closest thing to a New Beach Boys record was Wishing You Were Here by Chicago, which featured Carl, Al and Dennis on backing vocals and made number 11 on the charts.

Heaven knows and Lord it shows when I'm awake.

During much of 1975, the two bands toured together, performing double headlining shows as Beach Argo and guesting with each other on stage.

Jim Guercio, Chicago's manager and record producer, also became the Beach Boys manager at this point, as well as their on-stage bass player for a while.

By late 1975, Brian Wilson's wife Marilyn had decided that Brian needed help, and called in Eugene Landy, a controversial psychotherapist, to see if he could help Brian.

Landy's approach, which was basically just to bully his patients until they did what he told them, seems more like that of a cult leader than of a medical professional, but at least at first seems to have worked to an extent with Brian, perhaps because he was reminded of his late father, who took a similar attitude to his children.

In Landy's own words, I had to be crazier than Brian.

There is only room enough for one crazy person in Brian's head, and that's got to be me.

I have to be the ultimate power in this situation.

I said he had to get out of bed and start living a normal life, and he said, make me.

How do you make a guy get out of bed after so long explain it to him first no you throw water on him first that's just what i did i warned him and then threw water on him and he got up as a result of this therapy brian did stop taking drugs at least when landy was around which was almost all the time he lost some weight and started writing songs again he was also basically forced back into touring with the band By this point, Blondie and Mickey had left, and the group was now back to the five original members for its live shows, plus a host of additional backing musicians.

The shows were promoted with a huge publicity campaign themed around the phrase Brian's back, culminating in a TV special produced by Lauren Michaels, featuring a sketch with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi arresting Brian for the crime of never having surfed, and forcing him to surf for the first time in his life.

Are you Brian Wilson?

Yes, I am.

Good afternoon, Mr.

Wilson.

We're from the Highway Patrol, Surf Squad.

Hello.

Brian, we have a citation here for you, sir, under section 936A of the California Catch-A-Wave Statute.

Brian, you're in violation of paragraph 12.

Failing to surf, neglecting to use a state beach for surfing purposes, and otherwise avoiding surfboards, surfing, and surf.

Surfing, I don't want to go surfing.

Now, look, you guys, I'm not going.

You get your hair wet, you get sand in your shoes.

Okay, I'm not going.

Come on, Brian.

Let's go surfing now.

Everybody's learning how.

Come on, Sir Farry with us.

Come on.

Let's go.

All right.

To go along with this campaign, there was going to be a new album.

The first one with a produced by Brian Wilson credits since Pet Sounds a decade before.

Brian really was back.

Well,

sort of.

The resulting album, which had the working title Group Therapy from a joke of Dennis's, but was eventually released as 15 Big Ones, named for the group's 15th anniversary, was a commercial success, and even produced a couple of hit singles for the group.

a cover of Chuck Berry's Rock and Roll Music which made the top five and Brian and Mike's It's Okay,

which made the top thirty and featured a guest appearance from Roy Wood and Wizard.

But it came as a shock to anyone who was expecting an album that continued the progression of the last few Beach Boys albums, which had been part of the mainstream of 1970s rock.

The album was made up half of cover versions of stale oldies like rock and roll music and Blueberry Hill, and half of new songs in a bewildering variety of styles, ranging from Mike's Everyone's in Love With You, a song about the Mahavishi that sounds like an easy listening version of a whiter shade of pale, to Hataphonia, one of Brian's slice of life songs, and Brian's The TM Song, a slice of life song about the Maharishi.

But the real shock came with the sound of the album, a very stripped-down, minimal production style for the most part, a far cry from the lush wall of sound of Brian's Sixties productions, and of the group's vocals.

By this point both Brian and Dennis had done a great deal of damage to their voices through chain smoking, drinking, and vast cocaine consumption.

Brian's would recover somewhat, though he would never fully get the sweetness of his 60s sound back, but Dennis's would only deteriorate further.

In Brian's case, he also had personal issues making him want to sound different from his old voice.

His old voice, he thought, had been effeminate, now he was low and manly.

Even on the best tracks on the album, like the cover version of The Righteous Brothers Just Once in My Life, they simply don't sound like the Beach Boys.

me get what I want.

Girl, don't let me down.

Just once in my life,

let me hold on to

a good thing I found.

Don't let me down.

Baby, say that

you'll be staying.

By the end of 1976, Landy was sacked after raising his fees from an already excessive $10,000 a month to a ludicrous $20,000 a month, roughly $112,000 a month in today's money.

Brian continued to tour and record with The Beach Boys, and miraculously, 1977 actually saw the release of not just one, but two albums that many critics and fans consider among the very best to come from The Beach Boys.

The first of these, The Beach Boys Love You, is a truly strange album.

in a way that short excerpts in a podcast like this can't convey.

Every song is written by Brian, almost all of them solo.

Mike Love contributes lyrics to the opening track, and the album also contains Ding Dang, the shortened infred variation that Brian and Major McGuin wrote.

And in many ways it's almost a solo album.

The other Beach Boys all appear vocally, though Carl and Dennis are far more present than Mike Orrell.

But other than Carl's guitars, almost all the instruments are Brian, mostly playing analogue synths and hitting a single drum at a time.

The lyrics are both childlike and childish, songs about roller skating and watching Johnny Carson on the TV, about the planets and about honking down the gosh darn highway.

It's almost outsider music, and I would think it was the only response of a major 60s artist to punk that actually made any sense, if I thought for one second that Brian Wilson had heard a single punk record at this point.

As it is, it's just an example of great minds thinking alike, but musically it's far more complex than it sounds.

The closest I've ever been able to come to a capsule review of the album is to say, imagine if you gave Bach a stack of Phil Spectre records and said, write some stuff that sounds like that, then got Jonathan Mitchman to write the lyrics, Tom Waits to sing lead, and gave that group a synthesiser stuck on fart sounds and recorded the result.

It is a truly, truly strange album.

The album was loathed by most existing Beach Boys fans.

But Brian has repeatedly said over the decades that it's his favourite Beach Boys album, and he's not the only one.

Peter Book of REM called it, a window into the heart of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and wrote liner notes for its CD reissue.

Lester Bangs said it was the band's best album ever, and said the Beach Boys had, a beauty so awesome that listening to them at their best is like being in some vast dream cathedral decorated with a thousand gleaming American pop culture icons.

And Patty Smith wrote a long review in Hit Parader magazine, saying in part, Love you as siphoned from the meandering mind of a madman.

Like the hero dreamer of Slaughterhouse Five, we have yet another case where existence is elsewhere.

For the hero it lies in the future, but for Brian Wilson the dream is trapped within the wholesome abstraction of a jelload.

His desire is to escape into the real world.

The catchword for love you is please.

Songs of the immortal love mechanism, telepathy, songs of innocence and foreplay.

They are pleading with the same urgency as the boy in the back seat to the girl in 1963.

Please, it won't hurt.

His music, laced with tender cynicism, seems to exude from a dead man with memory, someone impossible to bury.

Love you.

I believe he does.

I don't think the Beach Boys are part of this game, the treacherous mania of need.

I think they make their records and stroll off into the sunset with their hands in their pockets.

And I think after everyone's gone, when he's all alone, for no apparent reason, Brian Wilson bursts into tears.

Not necessarily unhappy ones.

Manic and monotone.

In the privacy of his own barbecue.

The Beach Boys Love You would turn out to be the last Beach Boys album where Brian Wilson had creative control over the band.

The other album to come out to the group in 1977 was shocking in a different way.

The group were in the process of signing a new deal with CBS Records, and as part of that, Jim Guercio signed Dennis to a solo deal with Caribou Records, his own label distributed through CBS.

Dennis's solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, only sold moderately, but in the decades since it has consistently been assessed as possibly the greatest masterpiece any of of the Beach Boys were ever involved in, other than Pet Sounds.

It's been included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, in Mojo's ranking of greatest albums of the 70s, and made number 18 in GQ's magazine list of the greatest albums ever.

Most of the other Beach Boys, past and present, were involved in the album in one way or another.

Mike Love wrote the environmental lyrics for the title track Pacific Ocean Blues.

trauma

people

are rising.

Oh, well, killing crawling.

You got a heartball.

Wait a minute, can't you see?

We got an enemy.

Yeah, it's no one

love.

All the pacific ocean is blue.

Carl co-wrote and sang sang harmonies on the opening track, Riversong.

Walking down

by the river

water

running through my knees,

the love

and the world's all rain.

Oh,

by the river in the

Carl also co-wrote Rainbows with Dennis and Stephen Kalinich and played much of the guitars on the album.

As well as actual Beach Boys, the band's sideman Billy Hinchy also added guitar and backing vocals, while Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean, who had, in his capacity as a graphic designer, designed the covers of several recent Beach Boys albums, also added backing vocals.

And ex-bandmates Ricky Fatar and Bruce Johnston also contributed.

Fatar played drums on several tracks, while Johnston provided backing vocals and vocal arrangements on the last song on the album, End of the Show, written like most of the album by Dennis and Greg Jacobson, who also co-produced the album.

Oddly, that song became very possibly the 70s Beach Boys original heard by most people.

The year after, Cliff Richard, Britain's biggest solo pop star of all time, did two reunion shows at the London Palladium with his old band The Shadows.

The set lists for the shows covered the whole span of their careers together and apart, which at the time covered 20 years, from early hits like Move It and Apache, cover versions like Willie and the Handrive and Do You Wanna Dance?, which coincidentally had been a song Dennis had sung lead on in the Beach Boys version in 1965,

through to a cover of the Larry Norman song Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

from Cliff's then-decent contemporary Christian album.

And the last song of the night, which became the title track of the live album, which made number five on the UK charts and went gold, and video to the show, Thank You Very Much, was End of the Show.

Thank you very much

for everything

we've ever wanted.

I haven't had it confirmed, but I suspect the song was suggested to Cliff by Tony Rivers, who was the backing booklet arranger for the show, and who is a major Beach Boys fan and was previously leader of the Beach Boys soundalike group Tony Rivers and the Castaways.

But while the other Beach Boys participated in the album, it really was a Dennis solo album.

Dennis wrote or co-wrote every track, usually with Jacobson, but a couple with his on-again, off-again wife Karen, sang lead and played piano, Hammond organ, ARP synthesizer, Moog bass, mini-moogue, clavinet, fender ohades, drums, percussion, bass harmonica, tuba, violin, and lap steel guitar.

He also played viola and cello on an outtake released on a later CD reissue of the album.

The highlight of the album was Farewell My Friend, a song written about the death of Otto Pops Hinchy, the father of Billy Hinchy and of Carl Wilson's first wife Annie.

Dennis was close to Billy and had more or less adopted Pops Hinchy as his own substitute father, and claimed both that Hinchy had saved his life and that he had died in Dennis's arms.

It's hard not to hear the song as about the loss of Murray Wilson as well as Otto Hinchy.

My beautiful friend,

farewell.

You take the high road, but I'll take the low road, and we'll need again.

There was a plan for Dennis to do a solo tour in support of the album, but that fell through due to disagreements within the band.

By this point, the Beach Boys were barely functioning.

They now had two separate planes to tour on.

One plane was for the meditators, Mike Love and Al Jardine, who were clean living, avoided drug use and meditated a lot, and the backing band members who followed transcendental meditation, and the other was for the partiers, Carl and Dennis Wilson, and the backing band members who lived more stereotypically rock and roll lifestyles.

Dennis Wilson used to accidentally go onto the non-smoking plane and smoke, just to upset Mike Love, with whom he was now largely in a state of undeclared war.

Their enmity, according to Love's autobiography, dated back to Dennis finding out that before Dennis had married his first wife Carol, she had briefly dated Mike.

In Revenge, when his marriage to Carol had ended, Dennis had started an affair with Mike's second wife Suzanne, which had contributed to the Love's divorce around the same time as Dennis' involvement with Manson.

Fundamentally, Mike and Dennis seemed to have disliked each other in part because they were so similar in many ways.

Both men were capable of both great sensitivity and great selfishness.

Both would end up getting married five times.

One of the biographies I'm using here says that Mike has been married seven times, but I can only find evidence of five, including in Mike's autobiography, and his most recent marriage seems to have been for good, as they've been married over thirty years now.

Both were often in competition for the same women, and were the two focal points of attention on stage.

Love eventually tamed his worst impulses with meditation, while Dennis self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, and both seemed to have seen in the other a version of themselves that they didn't want to be.

Carl Wilson was normally the peacemaker in the band, but he was going through his own substance abuse problems at the time.

Carl's problems were much less dramatic than Dennis or Brian's, and he worked through them without causing the kind of public scandal that they did.

But he had also been deeply affected by Murray Wilson's death.

His own first marriage was breaking up.

He would eventually marry Gina Martin, the daughter of Dean Martin and sister of Billy Hinchy's Dino Desi and Billy bandmate Dino, and he was in severe physical pain at the time.

The Wilson family had hereditary back problems, and Carl was suffering particularly badly at this point, using a wheelchair when not on stage, though he would later find treatments that eased his pain somewhat.

The combination meant that in 1977 and 1978, Carl was at his most distant from the other members.

Al Jardine, who had no great love for Mike Love, and who had spent much of the 80s and 90s feuding with him, was at this point more or less thrown together with him, because at this point the distance between the lifestyles and attitudes of the two halves of the group was at its widest.

Brian was deteriorating again.

He had enthusiastically recorded a follow-up album to The Beach Boys Love You, an album called Adult Child, which in some ways would make the third part of a Brian's back trilogy, and to my ears at least makes the previous two albums cohere more in retrospect.

It's a mixture of covers of late 50s and early 60s pop, like the cover versions on 15 Big Ones, and eccentric pop songs like those of Love You, but this time with many of the tracks done in an orchestral pop style reminiscent of Sinatra.

But the album, which seems from bootlegs to be complete, had been scrapped as an embarrassment, and Brian had more or less withdrawn.

He was increasingly present on stage in body, but not in spirit, though in nowhere near as bad a state as he would be a few years later.

Brian was basically passive, almost catatonic, and would do whatever the last thing someone said to him was, as a strategy to not have to make any decisions himself.

And so there became a tug of war between the two factions of the band to get Brian to be on their side as the deciding vote in any decisions that were made.

This came to a head on a runway on September 3rd, 1977, with both band factions trying to get Brian to get on their plane rather than the other.

All the frustrations they all had with each other came pouring out, and the band split up.

Dennis told Cameron Lamb, Remember this day, September 3rd.

The Beach Boys broke up on Al Jardine's birthday.

Two weeks later the group reunited, but the damage had been done.

And September 3rd, seventy seven is the first of four dates one can really look at as the end of the Beach Boys.

From this point on, the Beach Boys albums would not be group efforts, but would be led by one or other faction, with token input from the other members.

And which side got control of the next album, MIU Album, is easy to see from the fact that the MIU in the title stands for Mahirishi International University.

MIU Album is quite possibly the shoddiest album released by a major act in the seventies.

Ryan is a credited co-writer of most of the songs, but has put no effort into them at all, and the lyrics, primarily by Love, try to be clever but fail.

The production, by Jardine and touring keyboard player Ron Altbach, does its best to compensate, but there's no making up for material that seems like intentional sabotage much of the time.

The opening track, She's Got Rhythm, a reworking of an instrumental album track by Love's Side Project Celebration, opens with Brian screeching, Last Night I Went Out Disco Dancing, in a hideous parody of his early falsetto, and the album mostly only gets worse from there.

The album includes the single worst and least releasable track from Adult Child, the borderline paedophilic Hey Little Tomboy, and the rest of the originals are just dire.

Carl Wilson, at this point far and away the group's best singer, only takes one lead vocal on the album, on the soporific Sweet Sunday Kind of Love.

Al Jardine does two competent cover versions of Fifty's hits, Peggy Sue and Come Go With Me, both of which would become minor hits released as singles.

But the only truly standout track on the album is Dennis's One Lead, and his sole performance on the album, other than some backing vocals on Hey Little Tomboy.

That's My Diane, a song Brian had written at the same time he wrote much of the Love You and Adult Child material, about the end of his affair with Diane Ravelle, his wife's sister.

Did you think that you would chain down

and now

that you are free?

Everything is wrong and nothing is right.

I want you back.

Dennis was literally looking at the clock when he was recording that vocal, and as soon as he'd finished, he flew away from Iowa, where the group were recording recording the album, and took no part in the sessions.

Dennis said of the album, I hope that karma will, and here he uses a word I can't use without messing up my clean rating, up Michael Love's meditation forever.

That album is an embarrassment to my life, it should self-destruct.

Instead, he concentrated on recording his second solo album, which was to be named Bamboo after a brand of cigarette paper.

During the recording of that album, he met and fell in love with Christine McVie, the singer and keyboard player with Fleetwood Mac.

They would be together for three years and Christine would say of him, Dennis has thrown me into the deep end literally and figuratively, and I'm in love with Dennis and I will marry him the minute he's free to ask me.

McVeigh would add guest vocals on one of the tracks on bamboo, Love Surrounds Me, singing a high vocal part that sounds like in better times it would have been sung by Brian.

surroundings.

Bamboo never came out, and that's partly because two of the best tracks ended up on the next Beach Boys album, their first for CBS after MIU had fulfilled their Warners contract.

Brian was in no fit state at all by this point, even though he was supposed to be producing it.

He'd repeatedly been hospitalised for his mental health problems, and when the head of CBS heard the initial rough tapes for the album, he said to his colleagues, Gentlemen, I think we've been and here he used that word that Dennis Wilson used about Mike Love's meditation.

In desperation the group brought Bruce Johnston back into the band, where he remains now forty-six years later, and made him the producer of the album, which had almost no active involvement from Brian, though there was one song Brian had co-written with Carl in 1974, Good Timing, which became the lead-off track.

The result, LA Light Album, is a remarkably listenable record given the circumstances of its making, and the last properly good Beach Boys album to be released until 2012.

Al Jardine turned in his best Beach Boys track with Lady Linda, based on Bach's Jesuit Joy of Man's Desiring, which Dennis helped him arrange and which became one of the group's biggest hits in Britain.

When you lie, Lady Linda

come along with me.

Won't you lie, lady,

Watch and sing the sight.

Mike only brought in one song, one of his weaker solo efforts, Sumaharma, an Orientalist ballad that hasn't aged well.

Carl brought in three, Full Sale, Going South, and Angel Come Home, the latter of which Dennis sang lead-on as his rough voice fitted the song's ache better.

Pieces don't fit.

I move from chair to chair.

Think that empty ones there where she used to sit.

I'm sitting here going out of my mind.

Cause she's gone away.

She couldn't wait more eyes.

Dennis gave the group two songs that had been the heart of bamboo: Love Surrounds Me and Baby Blue, which featured Carl and Dennis alternating leads.

Baby blue eyes, I dream of you.

Late at night,

Unfortunately, the album got a bad reputation because of the lead-off single, the group's attempt to go disco.

Johnston and his California music collaborator Kurt Becher put together an 11-minute disco version of Here Comes the Night, a song from the Wild Honey album, not the Them song of the same name, which is both a poor example of disco in its own terms and had the misfortune of jumping on the disco bandwagon right at the point everyone got sick of the style and the disco sucks campaign was ramping up.

But the last album to feature new contributions by all the original Beach Boys ended with a remade version of Brian's arrangement of Shortening Bread, which he'd originally cut for Adult Child.

This time Carl took the lead, and Dennis sang the bass vocals, and Brian played keyboards.

It was the last new recording to feature the three Wilson brothers together to be released in their lifetimes.

My mother's in the shoes and

myself

shoes on chilling.

My mother's in the

shallow bread.

From that point on, the Beach Boys career was intermittently commercially successful, with the odd novelty hit, but was of no artistic worth whatsoever, and it's not worth looking at the five albums they released as a group over the next 17 years in any detail at all.

The titles really tell you all you need to know, Keeping the Summer Alive, The Beach Boys, Still Cruising, Summer in Paradise, and Stars and Stripes Vol.

1, a collection of remakes of their old hits with various country stars.

There was no volume 2.

For much of the 80s and early 90s, the group was driven by a collaboration between Mike Love and Terry Melcher, who collaborated with both Love and Johnston quite extensively.

With Johnston, he worked on recordings for his mother's TV series, the one on which she famously had her friend Rock Hudson, who was dying of AIDS guest.

and which did a lot to help remove the stigma around the disease.

The recordings Melcher and Johnston produced for the show included Day's versions of Disney Girls, You Are So Beautiful, and a song collected by the Lomaxes and previously recorded in different versions by both Woody Guthrie and Hudie Ledbetter, Stew Ball.

He never drank water,

he always drank wine,

His bridle was silver

His maynot was gold

And the worth of his saddle

Those recordings were finished up and released in 2011 after Melcher's death and the album made the top ten in the UK making Day who was then eighty nine years old the oldest ever artist to have a UK top ten record with new material.

Melcher and Love wrote a large number of songs together which attempted, with little success, to recapture former Globies.

They did have the one big success with Kokomo, which Melcha produced and which went to number one in the US in 1988.

And by and by, we'll define a little bit of gravity

afternoon delight

with cocktails and

midnight.

That dreamy look in your eye.

Give me a tropical contact heart.

Way down in Kokomo.

The video for Kokomo featured a guest appearance by the actor John Stamos, who was then a major TV star in the US.

Listeners outside the US will have no clue who this man is, as is attested by the amusement shown by the audience the one time I saw Mike Love introduce him as a special guest for UK shows.

But having seen some shows in the US at which he appeared, I can attest that, at least to American women of a certain age, his full name is not actually John Stamos, but, Oh my gosh, Blackie from General Hospital, my girlfriends and I had such a crush on him!

All one word.

Stamos would have the group guest on his TV show Full House on several occasions, and made Dennis's Forever something of a theme song for his character on the show, performing it multiple times with his in-show band Jesse and the Rippers, and even cutting a new version of it with the Beach Boys on their Summer in Paradise album.

Incidentally, the creator of Full House, Jeff Franklin, later bought the land on CLO Drive where the Tate murders took place and built a mansion there, which he listed for sale in 2022.

The house, which now has a new address of 10,066 CLO Drive rather than 10,050, is currently available to rent on Zillow.

The asking price is a mere $247,500 a month.

PETS NOT ALLOWD

The Beach Boys' performances had deteriorated badly in the late 70s and early 80s, partly because Brian and Dennis were getting steadily worse health-wise.

At one point Dennis physically attacked Mike on stage, and the two could only be on the same stage together once restraining orders were in place.

Carl, the most professional of the band members, got so sick of the infighting and bad performances that he quit the group in the early 80s, saying, They wouldn't

Carl recorded two solo albums, mostly co-written with Myrna Smith Schilling, a former member of the Sweet Inspirations and wife of Jerry Schilling, who had become the Beach Boys manager after working for Elvis.

heaven's the place for me to go

No one

ever could have told me how

No one ever

could have told me how

Heaven

could

be here on earth

Carl rejoined the group a little over a year later, but in the meantime the band grew steadily worse.

Both Brian and Dennis were fired from the band at various points in the early 80s because their mental health problems and addiction issues were making them impossible to work with, and there were shows with no Wilsons on stage at all.

Eventually, the band became convinced that what was going to happen to Brian was the same as what had happened to Elvis, especially given Schilling's experiences, and they called in the one person who had previously seemed to help.

Eugene Landy.

Landy did wean Brian off most of the drugs he had been using before, and put him on a strict diet that made him lose most of his weight.

Brian's mental health issues manifested in distorted eating that meant he could lose easily half of his body weight and still end up a healthy weight.

It is likely, knowing what we know about Brian's lifestyle in the early 80s, that had something like the Landy regime not happened, Brian would have been dead within a year or so.

On the other hand, the part of Landy's regime that worked was essentially just having a minder there around the clock making sure he stuck to his diet and didn't take cocaine, something that didn't take anyone with any great skill to do.

On the downside, Landy misprescribed many psychiatric medications, which seem to have had permanent effects on Wilson's health.

I am not a doctor and it is not right to speculate on what those results were exactly, but anyone who has had experience of dealing with people with certain conditions can look at interviews with Wilson during Landy's time and see changes in things like his speech patterns that are very suggestive.

Landy also discouraged Brian from seeing his family and bandmates.

His mother and daughters weren't allowed to speak to him as bad influencers, and while he was officially still a Beach Boy, he stopped touring with them again and Landy would make sure that messages about recording sessions didn't get to him.

Brian wasn't on Kokomo because he wasn't told it was being recorded.

Landy instead, other than a few high-profile performances like Live Aid, encouraged Brian to start a solo career.

Brian's first solo album, titled Just Brian Wilson, saw him working with a handful of talented collaborators like Jeff Lynn, Lenny Warinker, Russ Teitelman, and especially Andy Paley, a young writer-producer who had worked with people like Patty Smith, the Ramones, and Jonathan Mitchman, and who would be Brian's often on collaborator for the next couple of decades.

The album was only the third album, after Smiley Smile and the Beach Boys Love You, to be made up entirely of new Brian Wilson originals.

And if you can listen past the very 80s production style and Brian's deteriorated voice, there's some great stuff on there.

But on its original release, many of the songs had co-writing credits for Eugene Landy and his girlfriend Alexandra Morgan, credits that were later removed after lawsuits.

Landy also had a credit as executive producer, and on Brian's next album, Sweet Insanity, Landy inserted himself as a full-scale co-writer and co-producer of the whole thing.

The tapes were rejected by the label and have still not been released, and with some exceptions, one can see why.

Smart girls are the love smarter, sexy limits with smiley.

Smart girls, I love the marker.

You ready face with your attitude?

Big brains are awesome.

That album was produced by Brains and Genius, a production company owned 50-50 by Brian and Landy.

Landy was the credited co-writer on all the songs, and also got 25% of all Brian's songwriting and record production earnings.

He was also paid $35,000 a month for his medical services, until his licence was withdrawn, partly because of misconduct towards Brian, partly because of allegations of sexual misconduct with a female patient, $300,000 a year for career advice, and $150,000 a year to be Brian's representative at Beach Boys board meetings.

Andy had Brian change his will, so that if he died, for example, from an overdose of improperly prescribed medication, let's say, Landy would get 70% of his estate, and Landy's girlfriend would get much of the rest.

Eventually, the combined efforts of Carl Wilson and of Melinda Leadbetter, a woman Brian had been dating before Landy cut them off and who had gone to become his second wife, managed to get a conservatorship put in place for Brian, barring Landy from having any contact with him, and lawsuits got Landy's name taken off the songs Brian had written during his time under Landy's thumb.

The day after the court order was put in place, Brian was on the phone to Andy Paley saying, I can do anything I want now, let's make some music.

The two started writing and recording together, creating a series of recordings that they hoped would eventually form the basis of a new Beach Boys album.

But it took a while for things to normalise within the Beach Boys enough for that to be possible.

There were legal matters to attend to first.

There had been a supposed autobiography published in Brian's name, but largely cobbled together by a ghostwriter from a mixture of other biographies and from interviews with Landy, and which had libeled Love and Jardine, leading to lawsuits.

And there had been other lawsuits over songwriting credits.

Brian had sued Irving Almo, the company that had ended up owning his songwriting catalogue, claiming that the songs had been sold without his knowledge and should be reverted to him.

He didn't get the ownership back, but he did get a substantial payment of unpaid royalties in the tens of millions of dollars.

But this brought to Mike Love's attention the fact that on about 30 of the songs he had co-written with Brian, including major hits like California Girls, his uncle Murray had left his name off the credits.

And so Mike in turn sued Brian for credit and a share of the royalties.

Mike gets some criticism for this.

and some of it is fair, as his contributions to some of the songs were minimal or non-existent.

For example, Mike claims to have written one line of lyric for Wouldn't It Be Nice, Good Night Baby, Sleep Tight Baby, and Tony Asher, the song's principal lyricist, says he didn't write even that.

But even if he did, the way the decision was handed down, with Mike getting equal splits of everything, means that Mike now gets more money for that one line of Wouldn't It Be Nice than Asher gets for the entire rest of the lyric.

But while one can dispute individual cases, it seems very likely that Love did write the bulk of the lyrics to songs like I Get Around, Help Me Rhonda, and California Girls, and one can broadly sympathise with Love wanting a fair share of the payment for co-writing such massive hits.

After those lawsuits were all settled, the group got together to maybe record an album using Brian and Paley's recordings as a starting point, but only two tracks were ever completed: You're Still a Mystery, with Brian singing lead, and Soul Searching, largely written by Paley with a Carl lead.

lie.

I did you wrong.

I made you cry.

So now I'm walking all alone

down the darkest streets of town,

standing in the rain

while my tears keep falling down.

There were rows over the music, and instead the group recorded the country collaboration album Stars and Stripes Volume 1.

By that time, Carl was looking seriously ill, and in 1997 it was announced that he had cancer.

He died in February 1998, not long after the Wilson Brothers' mother Audrey died.

In his last years, Carl's primary creative focus hadn't been on the Beach Boys, who were by this time a tired shadow of their former selves live, but on a collaborative album he was making with Jerry Beckley and Robert Lamb, Like a Brother, which ended up being released posthumously, with the title track being Carl's tribute to Brian.

And we

will

see

I

The Beach Boys split up, with the group's company licensing the name to a touring band featuring Mike Love and Bruce Johnston, initially also with David Marks.

That group started out very rough, but by the mid-2000s, after some line-up changes, had become a genuinely good live act in a way that, frankly, the actual Beach Boys often hadn't been, doing honour to the whole span of the group's career.

While they mostly concentrate on on the meat and potatoes hits, especially when playing outdoor venues, I've seen them do 50 song sets including Till I Die, All This Is That, Forever, Surfs Up, and many of the other songs I've excerpted in this episode.

I can't say I necessarily recommend seeing them, because since the last time I saw them, they've had a change in personnel, dropping their long-time musical director Scott Totten and drummer John Cowsill.

two musicians who would be very hard to replace, and so I can't speak for their current quality.

But in the shows I saw between 2008 and 2023, especially, they were far better than one would expect from a band with so few members of their classic line-up.

And amazingly, Brian started to tour as a solo act, overcoming a stage fight and putting together literally the best live band I have ever seen, a band of musicians who were dedicated to reproducing his music accurately.

He confronted the demons of his past and conquered them, even in 2004, recording a completed, finished version of Smile and touring it.

Canvas the town and brush the backdrop.

Are you sleepy?

Run the chore.

Over the next couple of decades, Brian released a stream of solo albums, some excellent, some frankly rather poor, but with about as reasonable a quality rate as the contemporary work of any of his 60s peers.

Brian had finally, after 30 years, got back to being not legendary acid casualty Brian Wilson or Brian the Legend coming back at last,

but just Brian Wilson, the working musician making an album every couple of years and regularly touring large theatre venues.

The Beach Boys reunited in 2012 for a good but not great reunion album, That's Why God Made the Radio, and a brief 50th anniversary tour with the best members of both Mike and Brian's bands.

And since that tour, Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin, who wasn't part of that tour, have toured with Brian and his band.

In recent years, Brian has had some severe health problems, and especially since the death of his wife Melinda last year, he seems unlikely to tour again.

But Al has recently announced that he'll be touring with Brian's band members under the name The Pet Sounds Band, and is also releasing a new EP soon, including a duet with Neil Young.

That tour will be focusing on songs from The Beach Boys Love You, and Al initially wanted to call it the Ding Dang Tour.

But of course, The Beach Boys rally ended in 1983.

Dennis had gone downhill faster and faster from the late 1970s onwards.

Dennis had been with Christine McVeigh for three years, but he had tried her patience in numerous ways.

Mick Fleetwood said of him, Chris almost went mad trying to keep up with Dennis, who was already like a man with 20 thyroid glands, not counting the gargantuan amounts of coke and booze he was shoving into himself.

Their relationship got worse when Dennis had an affair with Stevie Nicks.

Indeed, it apparently went further.

According to one anonymous associate of Fleetwood Mac, quoted in John Stebbins's biography of Dennis, Dennis had sex with every woman that was in any way remotely involved with Fleetwood Mac.

Singing members, wives, girlfriends, secretaries, everyone.

It was unbelievable.

Eventually, while they had been planning on getting married, she had to leave him and wrote the song Only Over You about the end of their relationship.

But I'm

That wasn't the only song by a member of Fleetwood Mac inspired by Dennis.

Two years later, Lindsay Buckingham recorded DW Sweet on a solo album.

Buckingham said of him, He was kind of lost, but I thought he had a big heart.

I always liked him.

He was crazy, just like a lot of other people, but he had a really big heart, and he was the closest thing to Brian Wilson there was too.

But by that time, Dennis Wilson was dead.

After his split with Christine, he had got worse and worse.

He had continued trying to finish bamboo, but was too intoxicated to complete any mixes.

He got fired from the group on numerous occasions, but they always let him back no matter how awful his behaviour, and towards the end it could get ridiculous in only the way a rock star with immense charisma and an infinite number of extra chances can can get.

Mike Love had been accused in 1964 of having fathered a child, Sean Harris, who took the name Sean Love.

Love always denied he was the father.

And Dennis, pushing 40, decided to marry this barely legal teenager who claimed to be the daughter of his cousin.

Some have said that he took her in because he felt sorry for her and one thing led to another and he genuinely felt for her.

Others that it was purely to rub Mike Love's nose in it.

I suspect the former.

That marriage, unsurprisingly, did not last long, though it did lead to a baby son, Gage.

Dennis often found himself temporarily homeless, and when he did have a home, he would do things like take in a homeless alcoholic busker and offer him a job as the Beach Boys Support Act.

The other Beach Boys, fearing another Manson scenario, would not let him go on.

He was so generous he would literally give people the shirt off his back, to the extent that he would actually often turn up to shows topless because he no longer owned a shirt at all, so he'd grab one from the merch stall to wear on stage.

By the end, his voice was so damaged that it wasn't just husky and maspy like it had been, it was barely a voice at all, and he was having seizures because of his alcoholism.

His last show with the Beach Boys was on September 8th, 1983, and he was banned from future shows until he straightened himself out.

He had no money and wanted to be back in the group.

and they told him the only way for him to do that would be for him to go into rehab.

He checked himself into rehab on December the 23rd and checked himself out again on Christmas Day.

Jim Guercio wanted to get himself made Dennis's conservator.

Other band members, including Carl, wanted to get Dennis seen by Landy, who seemed at that point to be helping Brian.

They decided to leave everything until after the holidays and get Dennis some help in the new year, which would be a fresh start.

But Dennis never saw that new year.

In the mid-70s he had owned a yacht, the Harmony, which had been his most prized possession, but which like everything else he owned of any value he'd sold off.

And on that yacht he'd also had rows with Cameron, his third and fourth wife, where they'd thrown things at each other, some of them going overboard.

On December 28, Dennis visited friends at the marina where the Harmony used to be moored, who had the spot next to hers.

After drinking rather too much vodka, Dennis, who was always a very strong swimmer, had an idea.

He was going to go diving and see if he could find some of those things that had been thrown overboard.

He dived to the bottom and came back up with a framed photo of himself and Karen.

He went to the bottom again and came back up again.

And then he went down to the bottom and stayed there.

He was thirty nine years old.

Like Brian Jones fourteen years earlier, the band member who in some ways was the least essential one in the group and who caused the most trouble, but in other ways was the reason the group existed at all, had drowned shortly after being forced out.

Most drowning victims, by all accounts, have expressions of horror on their faces, signs of their last struggle.

Dennis Wilson didn't.

He was found curled up in a fetal position with a smile on his face, looking for all the world as if he'd just decided to lie down and have a rest.

And that's probably, in the end, just what happened.

After 39 years of running, from his father, from Charles Manson, and from an emptiness inside himself that no amount of love or drugs could fill, Dennis Wilson decided to rest

for the first and only time in his existence.

Oh,

I'm on the mountain again.

Oh,

I wanna see you again

Oh,

what's when I see you again?

Oh,

I wanna see you again.

Robin

is music to my ears.

Rolling, rock, and rim of

the

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