NigelT on Beach Boys Disney+ Documentary
Much trailed, this is a new 2 hour documentary on the band, simply titled ‘The Beach Boys’ and now available on the Disney+ channel (why are all these streaming sites something +…?).
I love a music documentary, and as a huge Beach Boys fan I was obviously particularly looking forward to seeing this. It is very much an official, band endorsed film and features new and archive interviews with all surviving members of the Beach Boys (although Brian’s interviews are, I guess of necessity, pretty much entirely historical), as well as plenty of archive interviews with Dennis and Carl, so it is told almost entirely from their own personal points of view. There are also a number of music luminaries and with ex wife Marilyn also commenting from time to time.
So what do we get..? For anyone with any previous interest in the band, the story presented is a well-known one; 3 brothers and a cousin enjoy singing together as youngsters and then, along with a couple of friends, form a band based on Four Freshman type harmonies. They then cotton on to surfing as a craze and get loads of hits in the US with records about that, along with the associated subjects of cars and girls. Having churned out 4 albums of this stuff between late 1962 and October 1963, they then get rocked by the arrival of the Beatles, and Brian starts taking notice. Hating touring anyway, Brian retreats from the road and beavers away in the studio away from the touring group. Pet Sounds is the most famous product of this, but it is largely ignored in the US, and the follow up album Smile is dogged by Brian’s developing mental illness, which is exacerbated by recreational drug use, and never appears. The band becomes deeply unfashionable in the late 60s. They then embrace the counter culture and produce 4 good to great albums after switching record labels, but the buying public largely ignore them. As nostalgia becomes a thing, Capitol release a compilation of early hits called ‘Endless Summer’ in 1974 and they find a new audience who want to hear them play the oldies live. They then do this for 50 more years ad infinitum.
There are plenty of TV clips from the 60s, most of which were new to me. There is the familiar footage from the Pet Sounds and Smile sessions, along with some nice interviews with members of the Wrecking Crew, and these are genuinely interesting. It does, however, rather skate over some of the story although it doesn’t ignore the issues we all know about: Brian’s mental problems, Murry Wilson’s abuse and sale of the music catalogue, Mike’s beef about credits, Dennis and Charles Manson and so on. It would have been great if this had been longer and taken more time to dwell and celebrate certain albums and milestones, as well as talk about what they did after about 1976 – they did, for instance, have a smash No1 hit with Kokomo in 1988, but this just gets played over the credits. There is no mention of Brian’s solo work or their later albums, or even the wonderful 2012 concerts. There is also a missed opportunity at the end when they all reassemble on the spot where the Surfin’ Safari album cover was shot, but you don’t get to hear the conversation at all.
What did I learn..? One thing was that documentaries about subjects that you are very familiar with are intensely frustrating because you keep wishing there was more detail. For newcomers or casual fans this would be fine however. It did emphasise for me a couple of things I hadn’t really considered before – Brian was never happy on the road, but Mike loved it, and that was a schism that just grew. The shots of Brian onstage from 1976 (Brian’s back!) which open the film show a person that would rather be anywhere else but there, but with Mike looning about as usual, totally in his element. It is so sad to see their reliance on Brian for the music and as their totemic member, even after all the pain and suffering he went through, and which was so intense that it caused his unravelling, was still being inflicted upon him even then.
There is a tearful moment with Mike Love at the end when he tells us how much he loves Brian, which I think is actually genuine – I want to think so anyway.
I’m sure anyone with an interest in the Beach Boys will want to see this, but it is a bit of a missed opportunity to tell the full story of one of the most important bands of the 20th century.
Doing a double whammy this weekend… the wonderful ‘Let It Be’ yesterday – what a remarkable film – and ‘The Beach Boys’ tonight. You can tell the football season’s over, I’ve got six weeks to do such things. So this is what people who don’t do sport do! Who knew?
Record Collector have a Beach Boys Special in the shops, which is heartily recommended, it’s a cracker in a series of distinctly diminishing returns, but £40 for ‘The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys’ tie-in with the above film has got me digging out the Uncut Special and Keith Badman’s diary format book from twenty years ago instead. More than enough.
I don’t over-think summer… it’s surf and Test Cricket all the way.
The book, as you’d expect from Genesis publications,
is rather lovely.
Only problem being it stops in 1980
The book, as you’d expect from Genesis publications,
is rather lovely.
Only problem being it stops in 1980
Haven’t completely ruled the book out. We’ll see.
Oh yeah, hold that thought about seeing it tonight, I’m too tired! Catch it tomorrow.
You’ll turn it off once they’re past roughly 1968, though, won’t you?
Nope.
They were still making terrific records up to the Beach Boys Love You in 75 or 76.
I won’t Colin, no, but as you well know, after that it will be a decline. Everything was a decline.
We are now living in the long-time fall-out of that decline.
I like you, but please grow up.
.
Can we at least agree that medical science and automotive safety have improved?
Food much much better, tolerance towards ethnic minorities has improved. Probably less mindless violence in general.
And better beer!
Bonus point for recognising those lyrics…
I went to a learning event two weeks ago.
In 2010, the sum total of all medical knowledge had doubled since 1995. Fifteen years. In 2020, the sum total of the entirety of medical knowledge had doubled since 2017. Three years. The doubling rate as of today? The sum of total of ALL medical knowledge? A year? No… Seventy-three days.
Let’s hope some of it has improved matters.
How long will it take for me to forget it all? I’ve been retired 73 days today.
The + is a warning that it’s not free. Have your card details ready.
It’s free on azm.to – click the filemoon server.
The movie isn’t bad. The story’s been told many times over, with a slant this way or that, and nobody has anything new to say. But saying it again is fine, there’ll always be someone who doesn’t know it and hears the music for the first time. Interviewees include Lindsey “Eraserhead” Buckingham and some people under sixty I’ve never heard of, presumably to attract the Youngs.
What makes the movie special is the visual aspect: rare photographs, some brought to 3D-like life, colour home movies, well-chosen and unfamiliar archival footage of the places and the times, and it’s this, rather than the talking heads, which make it very enjoyable to watch. The editing is quick and smooth without being irritating or straining for effect.
It’s not a searing exposé of drug abuse and mental decline, which may disappoint those who use this as a model for their Brian Wilson reality, but neither is it a sickly corporate gloss-over. The balance is about right, and although it ends the narrative way too soon it’s probably as good a doc as we’re going to get on the band.
A Disnified documentary indeed. Enjoyed it, felt it stopped too abruptly (why couldn’t we hear what they were talking about on the beach at the end? Was it really too dull/contentious?)
But I guess it would have been hard for them to cover the 80s onwards with any degree of accuracy without opening up all manner of unpleasantnesses, from Dennis’s decline and (final) fall, to Landy, the ongoing internecine imbroglios and that awful 1985 album. We got Kokomo, which is about as sunny as it got in the 80s.
Still, I didn’t expect I’d end up feeling sympathetic to Mike Love, who acquits himself well and not without charm. Especially moving when he started blarting away at the end. And oddly, Murray too. Despite the awful clips of him drunkenly berating Brian and Al in the studios, I like how they gave some perspective and context to his character, with Audree Wilson’s voice adding some insight into that angry little frustrated man’s own thwarted ambitions.
Just finished this as part of a one-month Blitzkrieg on Disney
Enjoyed it far more than I thought I was going to. The companion book
Is very, very good, too.