P. 176-77: “The first show [of the 1985 ‘Virgin Tour’] was at the Paramount Theater in Seattle… An hour before the show, I went outside to get a breath of fresh air. As I stood near the theater’s front entrance, I watched car after car pull up and drop off several young girls, all dressed in their Madonna-like sleeveless tops, studded black gloves, and dangling necklaces. The majority of the other attendees were a mother or a father with their kid in tow. I’d guesstimate that 75 percent of the audience was under the age of fifteen – some accompanied by their parents, some not – and the other 25 percent was gay men.

“When the show started, the kids went nuts, screaming and screeching as kids are prone to do. I don’t know if this was in reaction to the kids’ reaction, but Madonna got raunchier than I’d ever seen her… while saying the filthiest stuff you can imagine. As she extolled the joys of masturbation, I scanned the crowd, taking in the adults’ shocked, appalled expressions…

“After the show, I tracked down Freddy [DeMann, Weisner’s business partner] and asked him ‘What’re we doing here? Is this how we want to be represented? Do we want to be associated with some girl who thinks it’s okay to finger herself in front of a roomful of junior high schoolers?

“Freddy scoffed, ‘They loved it! Madonna’s going to be huge!…”

P. 178 [discussing dissolving his partnership with DeMann and splitting up their clientele]:  “We went down the roster, and when we got to Madonna’s name, I said, ‘You can have her. You belong together.’  The second those words left my mouth, I felt like a huge, vulgar, surly, masturbating-on-stage weight had been lifted from my shoulders.”

No insights here about Steely Dan LP/cassette song sequences I’ve puzzled over in these pages. Just disarming short essays about the Boswell Sisters, Henry Mancini, Ike Turner, Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics, Ray Charles, Jean Shepherd, NYC jazz radio in the 50s and 60s, Bard College, and Ennio Morricone. This is all topped off with grouchy journal entries from the “Dukes of September” tour with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald. This whole thing was so much fun I’ll likely reread it for kicks.

P. 106: “JULY 6. I’m finally back in a civilized hotel, the Four Seasons on Elliott Bay in Seattle…They have a serious spa here and there’s just time enough to get a massage…I drew a girl – let’s call her Naomi – who was young and pretty, which is always nice. But she looked a little scrawny for the job.

“Working on the backs of my calves with some minty oil, she asked me if I wanted her to go deeper, so I said sure, a little bit. Suddenly Naomi from Seattle turned into Rosa Klebb, the SMERSH interrogator from the James Bond series. I couldn’t believe the force with which she was driving her knobby little knuckles into my petrified muscles and tendons. It was excruciating, but I have this stupid thing – like, no son of Staff Sergeant Joseph Fagen, veteran of the Big One, is going to whine about a little pain in front of some strange girl. Finally, all greased up and smelling like a Twizzler, I limped into the elevator in my bathrobe, crab-walked back to my room and started to pack for the gig.”

I’m still laughing about Fagen’s report from San Antonio.

Pp. 121-122: “JULY 18… [T]he ambling ghost of Fess Parker intersects our path. In 1955, the elders of San Antonio, Texas, after noticing the influx of tourists following the final episode of the Davy Crockett series…got some Disney architects to look at the river, resulting, many years later, in a sort of San Antonio Land, which is the present-day River Walk. Our hotel is on the River Walk, and that’s why I was awakened earlier than I wanted to be by a loud mariachi band just outside the window.

“…I’m back from the show. The house was a legion of TV Babies, maybe tourists from Arizona. I don’t know. Probably right-wingers, too, the victims of an epidemic mental illness that a British study has proven to be the result of having an inordinately large amygdala, a part of the primitive brain that causes them to be fearful way past the point of delusion, which explains why their philosophy, their syntax and their manner of thought don’t seem to be reality based. That’s why, when you hear a Republican speak, it’s like listening to somebody recount a particularly boring dream.

“…The crowd sat through our versions of some of the great sixties soul tunes, hating them, waiting only for the amygdala-comforting Doobie Brothers hits that Michael sings, Boz’s dance numbers and the Steely Dan singles that remind them of high school or college parties…Toward the end of the show, during McDonald’s piano introduction to “Takin’ It to the Streets,” I think I really made [backup singers] Carolyn and Catherine uncomfortable by walking back to their riser and telling them, as a way of venting my rage, that I’d been imagining a flash theater fire that would send the entire audience screaming up the aisles, trampling each other to get to the exits, ending up in a horrible scene outside on the sidewalk with people on stretchers, charred and wrinkled. When things aren’t going well, the girls, standing just behind me, have to listen to my insane rants. If they’re singing, I’ll rant to Jim Beard, playing keyboards on the next riser, or, if he’s busy, I’ll walk across the stage and harass the horn players.”

The following account also appears in Howard Sounes’s Fab (2010). Can’t help but be curious about this Mormon girl who got under Beatle Paul’s skin.

P. 38: “As the spring of 1971 turned to summer, the strangeness that came with Paul’s extraordinary fame began to creep back into the McCartneys’ lives…Determined devotees would make the long pilgrimmage to Argyll, since it was no secret now that the McCartneys spent much of their time near Campbeltown….

“More worryingly, a young girl, a Mormon from Utah, had taken to camping on the edge of some woods just beyond the boundary of High Park, so that she could get close to Paul without trespassing on his land. The McCartneys often saw her, partially hidden by the trees, watching them through binoculars. One day in the summer of 1971, Paul apparently snapped and, according to the girl, came out of the house, drove toward her in his Land Rover, and angrily emerged, shouting and swearing.

“The girl claimed that she couldn’t remember much of what happened next, except that in the aftermath, her nose was bleeding. The implication, obviously, was that McCartney had assaulted her, which Paul denied. ‘I have been asking her politely – pleading with her – to leave me and my family alone,’ he stated. ‘She refuses to recognize that I am married with a family.’ “

An entry in Nicholas Rombes’ A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (2009), in which the phrase “There is nothing inherently wonderful about starkness” serves as a stand-alone entry in the T section:

P. 289: ” ‘There is nothing inherently wonderful about starkness’: A sentence from a scathing 1976 article about Patti Smith by Ira Robbins, the editor of Trouser Press. Describing Horses – which had been released in December 1975 – as a ‘fairly good album, capturing a small part of the feeling one got seeing her at Max’s a year ago,’ Robbins wonders why she has become a darling of the ‘straight press.’ His critique rests on two objections. First, her music has been transformed from a sort of self-deprecating ‘imitation’ of rock and roll into an actual, serious effort to be rock and roll… Second, her newfound success with Horses is a betrayal of her roots and of the New York underground scene…

“In some ways, Robbins’s article predicts the countless attacks on punk and indie bands that would, in the coming decades, be accused of selling out, either because they signed to major labels or because they began adjusting their sound to accommodate the broader tastes of wider audiences.

“But more than this, Robbins’s assault has the tone of a spurned lover or, worse yet, a forgotten one. Patti, why have you forgotten me? I love you. Please come back. It’s a feeling we’ve all had at one point or another about a favorite band, and about the betrayal we feel when that private experience goes public and everybody gets a chance to listen. In this respect, Robbins’s essay is not a hatchet job but a confession of love.”

Years ago I’d read Joe Jackson’s Cure for Gravity and mentioned it here. Certain words of his that I didn’t write about then have stuck in my head:

“…It still amazes me how much scorn some people can muster for musicians – or the wrong kind of musicians. The biggest fights are not necessarily between, say, jazzers and folkies, or rockers and baroquers. The greater the distance between two genres or subcultures, the more likely they are to be irrelevant, even invisible, to each other. It’s ironic, but this is the way that grudges and rivalries seem to work. Poor people don’t envy the rich nearly as much as they envy the poor person who gets a break… The history of rock ‘n’ roll teems with such wars of attrition…

“Of course music per se is not always the issue, and it’s impossible to completely separate any kind of art – or any kind of product – from the preoccupations of its time. I like to say that I have no agenda. I say it because I don’t run with any particular gang, and because agendas are often no more than defensive postures we take up against other people’s agendas. But I do have an agenda of sorts, or a guiding conviction, and I may as well be honest about it. Music is either an art form or it isn’t, and I say that it is: the greatest of the arts, and one of the closest approaches we mortals have to the divine. And try as I might, I can’t seem to reduce it to the level of the matching handbag that goes with this year’s jacket. Nor can I inflate it to the level of tribal warfare.”

Pete Townshend says this about the Everlys in his Who I Am:

“Best of all, I found two great albums by the Everly Brothers, one was called Rock and Soul, the other Rhythm and Blues… The Everly Brothers played a number of R&B classics, but it was their original material–or the very obscure material they introduced as covers–that I thought exceptional.  ‘Love Is Strange’ is an eerie bluegrass song that the Everlys transformed into a driving showcase for jangling electric guitars and nasal vocals…There were few artists that all four of us respected and enjoyed, and the Everly Brothers were among them.”

Townshend’s actually talking (I assume) about the Rock’n Soul and Beat & Soul albums, both great.  As for the “bluegrass” origins of Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” (written by Bo Diddley), I’m all ears. Anyone?

The Everly Brothers – “Love Is Strange” (1965)

Mickey and Sylvia – “Love Is Strange” (1956)

Lagoon is the Farmington, Utah, amusement park that “all the kids dig” in the Beach Boys’ “Salt Lake City.” I’ve just spent some time with Ian Rusten and Jon Stebbins’ new book The Beach Boys in Concert to get the lowdown on how many times they played there:

Sat, 9/7/63: “The audience response was so strong that the group was hastily booked for more Salt Lake shows that December…According to David Marks, Brian and Mike composed the song ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ at the hotel room after this concert.”  The December gigs happened at the Terrace in Salt Lake City.

Fri, 6/12/64 and Sat, 6/13/64: “Over 5,500 fans attended the Saturday show underlining the Beach Boys’ strong popularity in this area.”

Wed, 7/29/64 (with Eddie Hodges, Jimmy Griffin and Lynne Easton, and the Kingsmen) [Jimmy Griffin would certainly visit Salt Lake City many more times in the seventies…will need to wait for someone to write a book called Bread in Concert for details]: “Over 3,500 teenagers attended this show, breaking Lagoon’s weekday attendance record.”

Fri, 9/11/64 and Sat 9/12/64

Sat, 5/29/65 (7:00 pm and 10:00 pm) (with Glen Campbell and Dick and Dee Dee) [This is the tour, I think, where Beach Boy Dennis tried to make the moves on Dee Dee by informing her he’d had a vasectomy. I read about that in her Vinyl Highway. Rock stars…sheesh.

Fri, 9/10/65 (9:00 pm) and Sat, 9/11/65 (7:00 pm and 9:30 pm): “The Beach Boys…were given the keys to the city by Commissioner Joe L.  Christensen.”

Fri, 9/9/66 (9:00 pm) and Sat, 9/10/65 (7:00 pm)

Sat, 6/15/68 (7:00 pm and 9:30 pm): “A month after the Maharishi fiasco, the Beach Boys headed to Salt Lake City, Utah, where they could always rely on attracting a sizable audience. There the group took part in a photo shoot for Fabulous 208 magazine. Accompanied by writer Cyril Maitland, they took a jeep ride to locations Al Jardine had previously visited and thought would look good in photos. They posed at an old amusement park and pier [Saltair], as well as on the shores of the Great Salt Lake [see below].”  Incidentally, Rusten and Stebbins, I don’t believe the Maharishi was a fiasco for Mike Love.

(KNAK DJ Bill “Daddy-O” Hesterman is the man in orange)

Sat, 9/7/68 (7:00 pm and 9:30 pm) (with the Box Tops)

Fri, 9/5/69 (9:00 pm) and Sat, 9/5/69 (9:00 pm) (with Paul Revere and the Raiders)

Sat, 9/12/70 (9:00 pm): “This was the group’s final appearance at this legendary venue.”

Bookshelf OCD.

(P. 82-83) “…On July 2, 1979, we played on a bill with Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Johnny Winter, AC/DC, and Nazareth to a crowd of forty-six thousand people in Toronto…I saw the other bands we were playing with and I thought, ‘This isn’t gonna work.’ I complained to Premier, our booking agency, about it, and they said, ‘We’ve been in the business a long time, we know what we’re doing’…

“About five or six songs into the set, the whole crowd stood up, and I thought it had started to rain. Dee Dee thought the same thing, but they were throwing stuff at us – sandwiches, bottles, everything. Then, all of a sudden, I broke two strings on my guitar in one strum. I thought it was a sign from God to get off the stage, because I’d rarely break a string, maybe once a year. So I just walked to the front of the stage, stopped playing, and gave the audience the finger – with both hands. I stood there like that, flipping them off, with both hands out, and walked off. The rest of the band kept playing for another ten or fifteen seconds until they’d realized I was walking off, and then they did too. I wasn’t gonna stand there and be booed and have stuff thrown at us without retaliating in some way. We had to come off looking good somehow, and there was no good way to get out of that.”

Bonus:
(p. 72): “We played with Cheap Trick one time, and the bass player sound-checked his instrument for an hour, so we never got a sound check. I have no idea what makes people do this stuff. This ain’t science.”

(p. 87): “We tried to bond with Spector. We watched the movie Magic at his house one night, and we’d go out to dinner with him. One night, Grandpa Al Lewis from The Munsters even came over. He’d be okay with us, but he was very abusive to everyone else around him.”

The resurfacing of David Marks has been one of the many happy developments in the Beach Boys saga. Marks joined the band when he was 13, replacing Al Jardine after the first single and appeared on the first four albums before an altercation with Beach Boy dad and manager Murry Wilson prompted his exit. Marks’s precocious guitar chops were crucial to the band’s early instrumental sound, a fact that gets overshadowed by their celebrated vocals and songwriting. You can read about Marks’s contributions in Jon Stebbins’s book The Lost Beach Boy (2007), which never strikes me as an overstatement of the case. It’s loaded with valid info any Beach Boy fan will appreciate.

Be forewarned, though, that the The Lost Beach Boy is a frustration fest recounting the following: David’s blustery departure from the group; Murry’s possible efforts to blacklist David Marks and the Marksmen from the airwaves; the undeserved commercial failure of his psychedelic group The Moon; the premature replacement of David by Eric Clapton in Delaney and Bonnie’s band; Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour wrecking David’s house; a falling out with buddy Warren Zevon, who thought Marks was having an affair with his wife; David getting off on the wrong foot with Phil Everly after meeting him; drug and alcohol abuse for several lifetimes; financial rollercoasters and more.

Cutting through all of this, though, is the clear sense that Marks takes full ownership of his disappointments and relishes every opportunity to continue associating with the extended Beach Boys family. This is also evident in Marks’s interviews and general demeanor elsewhere (I love this recent series of YouTube videos, for example, in which Marks gives an uber-simpatico clinic on Beach Boys guitar at Hawthorne High). The happiest result of my reading of The Lost Beach Boy, though, was the long stretch I spent with David Marks and the Marksmen’s Ultimate Collectors Edition on repeat in my car. (You’ll have to download it from Amazon – it’s currently not available for an affordable price any other way.) Give a listen to this muddy but eminently cool 1964 B-side and see why it might have that effect.

David Marks and the Marksmen – “Cruisin’” (1964)

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