Dark day on the beach

By the time you read this, Beach Boy Mike Love would have come and departed Manila, accompanied by several beach bums who mimicked the harmonies of the original late lamented group that was founded on the three Wilson brothers more than Love or anyone else. But two of the Wilson brothers –Dennis and Carl –are dead, and the lone survivor and acknowledged genius behind the band’s certified masterwork Pet Sounds, Brian, has all but faded into the sunset of much publicized assorted dementia.

To those of you who might have chanced on a Brian Wilson solo CD in the bargain bins entitled I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, you would have heard how the man, with Don Was as producer, reworked some Beach Boys chestnuts that came out sounding as if he were being chased down by his bette noir. A dark day on the beach it was, maybe just before the onset of a tsunami. The CD on the whole wasn’t bad, it was just... depressing, you could almost hear the remains of the Beach Boys singing backup harmony. Real fans might do better to tune in on Brian’s daughter in Wilson Philips or in varied session work, the daughter of entwined fates herself a survivor.

But many years later, the Beach Boy in Manila... what was that all about? There’s even a guy surnamed Johnston (Bruce) in the reconstituted band, said to be a late addition to the late hallowed group. Still we can’t help feeling that Love and company are cashing on this latest nostalgia craze of phony Beach Boymania. We don’t care how much the current group sounds like the original, all we’re asking for is a little intellectual honesty. Maybe Love has got debts to pay and mortgages to meet, but so do most of us. Or maybe he has to pay hospital bills and help support two widows and their families. But Paul McCartney never called his band the Beatles, he called it Wings, even if they did occasional Beatles tunes. A better name for those who visited Manila over the weekend might be Love Beach. Or Mike Love in the Beach. Or Wilsons Cousin. Or Beached Boys.

For the record, we never were that much of a fan of the Beach Boys – too American sunny California were they – except maybe for Pet Sounds, acclaimed as one of the best rock and roll albums of all time. The album had songs like Sloop John B., God Only Knows, and Caroline, No. I remember buying a secondhand copy off Raon in Quiapo, near the overhead walkway. A girl who once lived on Alabama Street in Cubao was crazy about Pet Sounds, maybe still is to this day. I have since lost contact with Ruth Umayam, twin sister of Ben Umayam, but whenever I hear songs in Pet Sounds, especially Caroline, No, those wild times in Alabama come alive again.

Then sometime in the mid-’70s, as an exchange student in Texas I chanced upon the Beach Boys, yes the real one, live, as a supporting act for Chicago in a Houston stadium. They wore their loud shirts and the harmonies came out fine, but we were there for Chicago and 25 or 6 to 4, among other tunes like Does Anybody Really Know What Time it is and Questions 67 & 68.

Better impressed on the fast fading memory is the sight of the Anckenbruck sisters, Lisa and Patty, cheerleaders both in the suburban Pearland High School, doing a pyramid balancing act in the open field with other cheerleaders from the school. They received a rousing applause indeed, and stirred up our adolescent hormones even more.

Well, at least I can say that I saw the Wilson brothers and Love and Al Jardine and maybe even Johnston long before their value appreciated over time. Jardine, that small smiling face one may well imagine embossed on the back of a cereal box, whatever happened to him? That’s a job for the Internet research team.

But for a while there the Beach Boys seized the moment, and that really is all that matters. Just as the Cascades too seized the moment in their time, before their lone album left us wondering if they didn’t in fact die in a plane crash along the way to becoming legends long past their prime. When they played in Manila perhaps they should have been renamed the Cascade.

Love has his reasons for dragging out the Beach Boys carcass for fans to see and to dance to, and musical necrophilia is definitely an acquired taste, but please, Caroline, No. Unless you want to hear the ghosts of the Wilson brothers singing harmony, or an alleged split personality overdubbing vocals a la backward masking.

We’d rather let sleeping dogs lie.