THEATRE: Robert Greig
ONLY recently has Beach Boys’ music been seen as anything more than pap — happy, bouncy, high-school rock with sand between the toes.
Their slightly chastened last two collections are musically sophisticated, if uncomfortably self-regarding. They still have those characteristic, abrupt shifts of tempo and tone which are also found in the music of the Mamas and the Papas and which alert one to the possibility that more is involved in their music than first enters the ear.
Jimi Hendrix, quoted in the programme of California Dreamin’, puts them down as a barber-shop quarter. It’s a good definition with a profound historical sense, albeit ironic because the Beach Boys were white. Yet the closer one gets to the Beach Boys and their music, the more they seem shot through with confusions and ambiguities.
I saw the Beach Boys in the late Seventies at the Albert Hall; it was a performance of rare, piquant mixed signals. There were these shaggy, stoned hippies singing about sun, surf, woodies and T-birds, to a bunch of pallid Poms who’d come in tubes.
After that, there was the usual silence, filled with suicide and drugs, the staples of mainstream pop culture.
The Paul Hepker presentation at the Theatre on the Track, though enjoyable, has few pretensions and perhaps a lack of ambition. But that may be because the cast is relatively young and inexperienced.
It’s possible that the show could have been stronger had it chosen to present the Beach Boys’ milieu as well. There is a stab at narration but only a stab; without a context, the music tends to seem dismissable.
In fact it isn’t, at least in terms of rock. The music stands for a time of pre-Vietnam War innocence: it gains much of its pathos from what it omits and from a retrospective sense of what was impending. It is a musical version of American Graffiti.
Musically it is interesting because of the crude contrast netween androgynous presentation and jock lyrics.
The shifts in tone and tempo are tantalising. It’s almost as if the Beach Boys never really found their voice and focus and were caught between safe commercial demands and the urge to extend the formula into new shapes. (Their recent songs, notably those set outside California, come closer to being accessible and achieving new directions than anything else.)
Brian Wilson’s fairly loopy experiments with opera exemplify this. But they were there earlier: Farmer’s Daughter, Lonely Surfer … the kind of music one disliked when it first appeared because it was slow and unpredictable.
Beach Boys music was difficult to dance to: it did not observe the proper formalities and gradations of the teenage mating ritual. One moment you’d be bopping spectacularly, carefully not looking at your partner, whom you did not know anyway. The next moment, the plug would be pulled out: the music would slow down and you were expected to start gripping someone you’d only planned to make out with after the courage of three more beers.
The emphasis of the show is on the Beach Boys’ music, which is a pity, and not much attempt is made to connect the music of the two, which is even more of a shame. The Mamas and the Papas are far more secure in their lyricism — great, swathing sound, again with the sudden mid-song change of gear and tone, the lurch from confidence to uncertainty.
Common to the presentation of both is a tendency in Kepker’s direction to disco the songs, speeding up the tempo, trying to give it unformity of tone. This may have been necessary given the cast, but it makes little sense: it distorts the music.
But ultimately California Dreamin’ sets out to supply nostalgia and it does. But I think it was put together on automatic pilot and perhaps over-directed in the sense that a clearly capable, energetic cast could have contributed more to the show’s shape and direction.