Tag Archives: Happy Birthday

A Musical Appreciation ► Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins

, , , , , , ,

DATELINE January 10, 1935 – Ronald “Rompin’ Ronnie” Hawkins is born in Huntsville, Arkansas, just two days after Elvis Presley is born in Tupelo, Mississippi. Both carved out quite a niche in Rock and Roll, but Elvis’ story is better known. That’s a shame.

Ronnie Hawkins started his first band when he was studying Phys Ed at the University of Arkansas. Called The Hawks, it toured throughout several southern states. On the advice of Conway Twitty, who was one of the up and coming Rock and Rollers who played at a club Hawkins owned in Fayetteville, he began playing in Canada in 1958. The first place he played in Canada was the last place I lived in Canada: Hamilton, Ontario. Apparently he was a huge hit at the Golden Rail, near the corner of King and John Streets. It was this initial success that prompted Hawkins to move to Canada.

The Hawks were less thrilled with Canada and they all quit and went back to ‘Merka, except for Levon Helm, the good ol’ boy drummer. Ronnie Hawkins was forced to recruit a new set of Hawks. He found some good ol’ Ontario boys in Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. This version of The Hawks was rehearsed within an inch of their lives by Hawkins, a notorious perfectionist. When, some 5 or 6 years later, this tight group of Hawks up and quit on Hawkins, they changed their name to The Band and worked with some barely known folk singer named Bob Dylan in a barely known town in upper New York named Woodstock.

This is why, in homage to their early mentor, Ronnie Hawkins appeared at The Last Waltz.



When the band called The Hawks quit to become The Band, Hawkins hired a new band, which he called “And Many Others.” When, some 4 years later, Hawkins fired “And Many Others” they took the name Crowbar. This was also in homage to Hawkins who told them as he sacked them, “You guys are so crazy, you could fuck up a crowbar in 3 seconds.”

Crowbar became one of Canada’s best-known bands, who had a huge hit in 1971 with “Oh, What A Feeling.”

John Lennon & friends bundled against the Canadian cold

I wasn’t as lucky as John Lennon, who hung out at Ronnie’s farm signing his Bag One lithographs while planning a peace festival. However, I was still fortunate enough to meet Ronnie Hawkins twice. Both times he had me laughing so hysterically, my sides hurt.

The first was soon after he appeared as a special guest vocalist on a spoken word LP by Xaviera Hollander, still in the flush of success following the publication of The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. Hawkins was helping her promote the GRT release and appeared on my show at Radio Sheridan, the college campus station. During the interview he swore more than I had ever heard anyone swear before, telling one obscene joke after another.

This was only a week after Xaviera Hollander simulated giving me fellatio under the table during her interview about the LP. As Station Manager I was called on the carpet for the “inappropriate” content of the Hollander interview. Now Ronnie Hawkins had me in stitches and he was being far more obscene than Xaviera had been. As I doubled over in side-splitting laughter, I couldn’t help but think the administration was going to revoke our license to operate. Luckily nothing happened. Either the admin didn’t get wind of it, or John Bromley decided we were a lost cause.

The next time I ran into Ronnie Hawkins was more than 15 years later. I was working at Citytv by then and heard a loud voice coming from a room that was normally locked and used for storage. I peeked inside and Ronnie Hawkins was pacing the room all by himself, rehearsing some words that he was expected to tape for MUCHMusic, which was broadcast out of the same building. He noticed me in the doorway and stopped, so I reintroduced myself to him and reminded him of the interview and how much I feared being called up in front of the administration for it, but it would have been worth it.

While not acknowledging whether he remembered me or not, he started off on a series of obscene one-liners that didn’t stop until he was fetched 15 minutes later for his close-up.

There are two stories I’ve heard about Ronnie Hawkins and I pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster neither of them are apocryphal:

After Ronnie Hawkins had his first brush with fame, he decided he deserved a Rolls Royce. He went to the Rolls Royce dealer on Bay Street in Toronto looking like a Hippie and the saleman treated him like something that had stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He wouldn’t even let Hawkins have a test drive. Imagine that! Hawkins left and came back a short time later. He slapped — in cash — the asking price of a Rolls Royce on the hood of one and drove it out of the showroom.

The second story is from when Hawkins was hiring the [not yet] The Band to be The [replacement] Hawks. As incentive he apparently said, “Sign up with me boys and you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.”

Happy Birthday, Ronnie Hawkins!!!

Here’s a Ronnie Hawkins documentary for those who want to know more:

Synchronicity Two

, , , , , , , , ,
The Rolling Stones at Altamont

Dateline October 24 – In a weird act of Flying Spaghetti Monster manifested Synchronicity, today is the birthday of both Bill Wyman (1936) and Meredith Hunter (1951). Although separated by 23 years, they will always be linked by a singular event in history: The Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969.

Bill Wyman

Bill Wyman was the second bass player for The Rolling Stones after the original bass player, Dick Taylor, decided to return to school. There are conflicting stories of how Wyman heard of the opening. One says early Stones drummer Tony Chapman told him; another report says he answered an advertisement. Both could be true. Either way, by December of 1962 Wyman was a Rolling Stone and stayed with the band until he quit the Stones in 1993.

Meredith Hunter

Meredith Hunter was an 18-year old from Berkley, California who went to Altamont Speedway (along with an estimated 300,000 other people) for a free concert which advertised appearances by The Rolling Stones, Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and The Grateful Dead. In the end the Dead declined to play because of the violence.

The concert was a gift from The Rolling Stones to ‘Merka and had been hastily organized after many people criticized the band for the high price of tickets for their ‘Merkin tour. Originally the concert had been planned for San Jose State, then changed to Golden Gate Park, but they couldn’t get a permit. The next proposed venue was Sears Point Racetrack, which was owned by Filmways, Inc., the same company know for such tee vee hits as The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres. However, Filmways wanted $300,000 up front and the distribution rights to the resulting movie. This left slighly less than 2 days to find a new venue and the Altamont Speedway was hastily chosen.

One of the major complications of the venue change was the height of the stage. It was only a meter high. That would have suited the Sears Point Raceway, which would have placed it at the top of a hill. The location for the Altamont stage was at the bottom of a hill. To keep people from rushing the stage The Hells Angels, hired to provide security for a reported $500 in beer, surrounded the stage.

By now everyone knows what happened. The Hells Angels were out of control, as was the crowd. There were many fights, long before The Rolling Stones hit the stage. However, the one that everybody remembers is when Meredith Hunter, hopped up on methamphetamines, was stabbed to death by Hells Angel Alan Passaro. The horrifying act was caught on film directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. The resulting movie was called Gimme Shelter and chronicled the entire ’69 tour, but culminated in the disater at Altamont, often called the deathnell of the Hippie movement.

Passaro was charged, tried and acquitted of murder after he claimed self-defense. The jury agreed after being shown some of the footage above. He later served time on unrelated charges and was found drowned in the Anderson Reservoir a year after he was released from jail.

Happy Birthday Bill Wyman and Meredith Hunter.

Me and Pierre Trudeau ► Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

, , , , , ,

DATELINE October 18, 1919 – Pierre Elliot Trudeau is born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. While he was born into wealth, when he became Prime Minister in 1968 there were no Canadians who didn’t think he also spoke for the “little guy.”

I shook Pierre Trudeau‘s hand once. It was 1967. I was a 15 year-old ‘Merkin and at summer camp, which was in Michigan. Every year, in an effort to shoehorn culture into us, we would be sent to Stratford, Ontario to take in a Shakespeare play. We were waiting in front of the playhouse and the doors were still closed, long past the time they should have opened. Several of us were milling around on the steps, hoping to be the first to get inside.

Suddenly a black limousine pulled up, a man jumped out of the back, and the crowd went wild. Suddenly all the Canadians erupted in applause and cheering. As the doors to the playhouse opened, and we were held back from entering, PET bounded up the few stairs shaking hands all the way as the crowd magically parted for him. I was right at the door. Pierre Trudeau turned to his left, where I standing, and reached out to shake my hand. I reached back. For 2 seconds we were connected. Then he ran into the theater. The audience was held back another few minutes so he could get settled, but the crowd waiting was ELECTRIFIED. I had never seen anything like it before. I turned to the closest Canadian and asked, “Who was that?”

“That’s Pierre Trudeau. He’s our Justice Minister,” words that meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Skip ahead a few years. By 1971 I was living in Canada and Pierre Trudeau was MY Prime Minister.

Trudeau was a transformational politician. He was a Rock Star. He was loved and hated, but remained Prime Minister until his defeat in 1979. However, just a year later the Joe Clark government fell on a Motion of Non-Confidence and the Liberals won the subsequent election, with PET serving as Prime Minister until 1984 when he decided to retire.

Pierre Trudeau will always be known as the Prime Minister who patriated the Constitution from Great Britain in 1982.

This documentary was made during the period when Pierre Trudeau was still Justice Minister and shaking my hand. It was made by celebrated Canadian journalist Norman DePoe for the CBC program News Magazine.

Pierre Trudeau died in 2000 and the entire nation mourned.

Happy Birthday Lenny Bruce

, , , , , , , , ,

Dateline October 13, 1925 – Leonard Alfred Schneider is born in Mineola, New York. By the time Lenny Bruce died in 1966 he had changed the face of comedy forever. However, more importantly, he changed the face of The First Amendment and Free Speech forever.

“I rode with him in a taxi once,only for a mile and a half. Seemed like it took a couple of months”

– Bob Dylan about Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce had many run-ins with the authorities over obscenity in his night club act. According to the WikiWackyWoo:

 On October 4, 1961, Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that “to is a preposition, come is a verb”, that the sexual context of come is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, he “probably can’t come”. Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity.

Bruce was arrested again in 1961, in Philadelphia, for drug possession the same year, and again in Los Angeles, California, two years later. The Los Angeles arrest took place in then-unincorporated West Hollywood, and the arresting officer was a young deputy named Sherman Block, who would later become County Sheriff. The specification this time was that the comedian had used the word schmuck, an insulting Yiddish term that is an obscene term for penis.[citation needed]

In April 1964, he appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. On both occasions, he was arrested after leaving the stage, the complaints again pertaining to his use of various obscenities.

A three-judge panel presided over his widely publicized six-month trial, prosecuted by Asst. Manhattan D.A. Richard Kuh, with Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon both found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. The conviction was announced despite positive testimony and petitions of support from – among other artists, writers and educators – Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin, and Manhattan journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen and sociologist Herbert Gans. Bruce was sentenced, on December 21, 1964, to four months in a workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Solomon later saw his conviction overturned; Bruce, who died before the decision, never had his conviction stricken. Bruce later received a full posthumous gubernatorial pardon.

“Lenny Bruce died from an overdose of police”
– Phil Spector

 Much of what Lenny Bruce said is as true today as it was when it came out of his mouth:

Take away the right to say “fuck” and you take away the right to say “fuck the government.”

The only truly anonymous donor is the guy who knocks up your daughter.

If something about the human body disgusts you complain to the manufacturer.

The kind of sickness I wish Time had written about, is that school teachers in Oklahoma get a top annual salary of $4000, while Sammy Davis, Jr. gets $10,000 a week in Vegas.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. 

 A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That’s what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord… there should be a statute of limitations for that crime.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

If you’re from New York and you’re Catholic, you’re still Jewish. If you’re from Butte Montana and you’re Jewish, you’re still goyisch. The Air Force is Jewish, the Marine Corps dangerous goyisch. Rye Bread is Jewish, instant potatoes, scary goyisch. Eddie Cantor is goyisch, George Jessel is goyisch-Coleman Hawkins is Jewish.

“Bruce stands up against all limitations on the flesh and spirit, and someday they are going to crush him for it.”
– The New York Post

Some of what Lenny Bruce said is just outright funny:

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.

Some of what Lenny Bruce said is just poignant:

I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.

This is one of Lenny Bruce’s most famous routines:

“But like all the truly important people in the world, he’s dead but he”ll live on.”
– Ralph J. Gleason

I first learned to love Lenny Bruce when Frank Zappa released The Berkeley Concert on his Straight label. It’s still worth a listen:

Lenny Bruce had a life worth exploring. If you are unfamiliar with his life and troubles with the law, this is a good place to start.

I’ll Take Game Shows Hosts For 200

, , , , , , , , ,

Who began his career on a televised sock hop in Canada in 1963?

Need another clue?

It was called Music Hop.

Another clue? Are you brain dead? Okay. he hosted the following exciting CBC competition show:

What about if we give him a mustache?

Happy 72nd Birthday, Alex Trebek. You’re a Canadian institution, on tee vee since 1963, longer than most.



And, a prank played on Alex Trebek:


Happy Birthday Roger Ruskin Spear ► Bonzo Dog Band

, , , , , , , ,

It wasn’t all that long ago that I celebrated the birth of Dennis Cowan, a founding member of The Bonzo Dog Dada Band. Today let’s all press our trousers for Roger Ruskin Spear, another founding Bonzo. Music/Not Music called Spear “The Forgotten Bonzo” just 12 days ago. Not for me. While Spear never achieved the later fame of Neil Innes, for me Roger Ruskin Spear was the one who put the Dada in The Bonzo Dog Dada Band, those off-the-wall tangents into clothing and other fashion accoutrements that’s clearly a Spear obsession. Ironically, while he played many instruments — tenor saxophone, trumpet, xylophone, bells, clarinet, guitar, oboe, accordion, glockenspiel, as well as sang — he is still best know for playing The Theremin Leg, most notably on the recording “Noises For The Leg.”

Here Roger Ruskin Spear plays the dress form to piano accompaniment on Strauss’ Blue Danube:

I was fortunate to see The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band live once at, of all things, The First Annual Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, in May of 1969, my last summer in ‘Merka. That’s where I first heard Bonzo Dog Band and was amazed at the performance they put on. Check out that line-up: Among the other band that performed that weekend
were MC5, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Dr. John, Johnny Winter, Stooges, Amboy
Dukes, SRC, The Frost, The Rationals, Teegarden & Van Winkle, Lyman
Woodard, Up, Wilson Mower Pursuit, Grand Funk Railroad, Third Power, New
York Rock & Roll Ensemble, David Peel & The Lower East Side,
Red White & Blues Band, Sky, The Train, Savage Grace, James Gang,
Caste, Gold Brothers, Dutch Elm, Plain Brown Wrapper, Brownsville
Station.

When I moved to Canada, I took with me my love of the Bonzos with me. However, I found that most of the people I tried to turn on to The Bonzos already knew who they were, from the British/Monty Python influence.

Bonzo Dog Band performing at the First Annual Detroit Roch and Roll Revival. Photo by Alan Gotkin.

Because people always get the various Bonzos confused, here’s a handy introduction:

Amazingly, I find that Roger Ruskin Spear still has a few dates on his calendar, even tho’ Neil Innes has him retired, with Three Bonzos and a Piano.

I will go on record again: Bonzo Dog Band is the most influential band no one knows. 

Let’s end with a Roger Ruskin Spear Jukebox:


As always CRANK IT UP!!!

Happy Birthday ► Mel Kaminsky

, , , , , , , , ,
Dateline June 28, 1926 – Melvin Kaminski is born in Brooklyn, New York. It will be many years before he changes his name to Mel Brooks and makes the world laugh. Born only in 1926? Feels like Mel Brooks is as old as The Bible.

I’m not sure I believe that birth year. Mel Brooks has offered proof over and over he is at least a 2,000 Year Old Man.

Deep down inside, Mel Brooks wants to be known as a song and dance man. Over the years he’s given us some terrific Musical numbers.

No one in Pop Culture, including Glenn Beck, has made more references to Nazis.

Brooks has also mined Rap more than once, with equally fun results.

And, this is why people call me Hedley Lamarr:

However, my favourite Mel Brooks movie is the little known The Twelve Chairs, which was released in 1970 between The Producers and Blazing Saddles. Here is the whole movie:

Happy Birthday, Mel!!! Thanks!!!

Musical Appreciation ► Georgie Fame

, , , , , , , , , ,

I first heard Georgie Fame as did many other ‘Merkins, as the singer of “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967. It was one of those out-of-the-box hits that always appealed to me. I was unaware of his earlier hits “Yeh Yeh,” which knocked The Beatles off the #1 on the British charts, and “Getaway.” Nor did the name Georgie Fame register with me. Therefore, I was surprised many years later when my boss at Island Records Canada handed me a record to promote. One of the tracks was “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” and I knew every note and nuance, even if I didn’t know the name Georgie Fame. I later learned this was a compilation LP by Georgie Fame. (I’m not sure how that came about. My assumption, which could be wrong, is that Island Records licensed the tracks for markets other than Great Britain.) However, I soon learned “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” was not representative of the music Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames (a name that didn’t appear on the sleeve, if memory serves) had been making. I immediately became a fan, precisely because his music is so hard to pigeon-hole, playing Jazz, Ska, R&B, Rock and Roll, Pop, and Standards.


This clip shows a nice bit of Georgie Fame’s history, along with Bonnie & Clyde’s.

Georgie Fame performing his earlier hit “Yeh Yeh” live for a Swinging Sixties tee vee show:

Georgie Fame & Alan Price performing one of their best known songs: Rosetta:

Let’s not forget that Georgie Fame was such a huge fan of Ska, that he started performing it in the ’60s, which only helped popularize the genre throughout the British Colonies. That’s why he can hold his own with Prince Buster and Suggs from Madness, (along with getting his own shout-out:

Presenting a Georgie Fame Jukebox, which includes a few renditions of a song all about him, while you read a short little bio of Georgie Fame:

As always, CRANK IT UP!!!

Born on June 26, 1943 in Leigh, Lancashire, where his father played in an amateur dance band and where music was a intregal part of home life. Early training on the piano led to a love of some of the early rockers like Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Soon he was performing with his own band “The Dominoes.” As the story on the official web site goes:

In July 1959, at a summer holiday camp, Clive was spotted by Rory Blackwell, the resident rock and roll bandleader. Blackwell offered the young singer/pianist a full time job and the teenager happily left his job at the weaving mill. Rory and the Blackjacks departed for London, their hometown, when the summer season ended prematurely and Clive went with them. The promise of lucrative work in the music business didn’t materialize, however, and the band broke up. The determined young man from Leigh opted to stay on in London, but for a time it proved rough going. He tried unsuccessfully to make his way back home, and eventually he had the good fortune of finding “lodging” at The Essex Arms pub in London’s Dockland, where the kindly landlord provided him a room where he could sleep.

In October of that year, the Marty Wilde Show was performing at the Lewisham Gaumont and Rory Blackwell arranged for Clive to audition “live” for impresario Larry Parnes. After walking on stage, without any rehearsal, he sang Jerry Lee Lewis’ High School Confidential and was promptly hired as a backing pianist for the Parnes “stable” of singers. As with all the other young talent Parnes had taken on (such as Billy Fury and Johnny Gentle), he renamed Clive Powell “Georgie Fame,” and the name has stuck to this day. By the age of 16, Georgie had toured Britain extensively, playing alongside Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Tony Sheridan, Freddie Canon, Jerry Keller, Dickie Pride, Joe Brown and many more. During this time, Billy Fury selected four musicians, including Fame, for his personal backing group and the “Blue Flames” were born. At the end of 1961, after a disagreement, the band and Fury parted company.

I was also unaware Fame’s earlier work with Alan Price. Price was already well-known in the world of Pop music. He had hired a young Eric Burton to sing with his “Alan Price Rhythm and Blues Combo” in 1962, which by 1964 had become The Animals, mining old Blues songs. Price’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” was a worldwide hit. Skipping ahead some 7 years, as the Alan Price web site tells us:

He then began a partnership with fellow-blues keyboardist and old chum, Georgie Fame, which gave birth to a hit single, Rosetta (which reached No. 11 in 1971), a highly-rated album (Price And Fame Together), their own television series (The Price Of Fame), and regular appearances on many others.

It was during one of the duo’s road tours that Malcolm MacDowell and Lindsay Anderson approached Alan about composing the music for the legendary cult film, O Lucky Man (in which he also appeared as himself). The phenomenal success of this project earned Price a BAFTA award, an Oscar nomination, and yielded his first US chart album.

Georgie Fame has been performing his own brand of music for more than 50 years. I feel lucky I got see him in a club on Jarvis Street in Toronto years later. Happy Birthday, George. You brought me many years of terrific music.

Today’s Irony ► Malicious Virus Spoils Birthday Celebrations in Oceania

, , , , , , , , , ,

Dateline June 25, 1903 – Future, and futurist, English writer George Orwell is born as Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bihar, India. Today “Orwellian” is an adjective everyone knows. That Big Brother is watching over us was his concept, as was the idea of “Thoughcrime” and “thoughtpolice,” words now used daily.

However, we only know Orwell as a novelist. In his lifetime he was best known as a journalist and Socialist. According to the WickiWackyWoo:

During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism,
in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books
of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Irving Howe, Orwell was “the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson.”[86]

Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world where the state machine exerts complete control over social life. In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 were honoured with the Prometheus Award for their contributions to dystopian literature. In 2011 he received it again for Animal Farm.

Here’s the supreme irony:

Maybe we already live in a dystopian society and we just don’t recognize it yet. I would have preferred to quote from the official George Orwell site. However, it’s been infected by malware. Clicking on it garners this message:

Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

However, let’s forget all that unpleasantness and watch this wonderful BBC drama of 1984, broadcast in 1950, just two years after the novel was published. The more things change, the more they stay the same:

And, if you’ve never seen the animated Animal Farm from 1954, here’s a treat for you:

Finally, the late Christopher Hitchen at the 2002 Hay Festival, on his book “Why Orwell Matters.”

Remember: Some animals are more equal than others. Just ask today’s GOP.

Happy Birthday, Brian Wilson: Genius ► A Musical Appreciation

, , , , , , , , , ,

There’s no point in writing a Brian Wilson biography; every one knows the high points of his life. What started as a love of the four-part harmonies of The Four Freshmen consumed a lad in Hawthorne, California, who went on to write music that defined several generations. As the leader of The Beach Boys and beyond Brian Wilson has created true art in the form of music. For me it’s sufficient that Brian Wilson’s music is the background to so many of my memories. His music will stand the test of time, but it’s an absolute bonus that he’s come back around to playing music again, both without and with The Beach Boys. Celebrating their 50th Anniversary The Beach Boys are touring again, with Bruce Johnston and David Marks. Too bad Glen Campbell couldn’t join them. They have also released a new album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” which will be a fitting capstone to their career, if they decide to wrap it up.

Brian Wilson still has the ability to write an instant classic:

The first 45 I ever bought (kids, ask your parents) was “I Get Around,”
because it was all the money I had left over after buying “The Best of
the Lovin’ Spoonful.” I have been a huge Beach Boys, Brian Wilson fan ever since; collecting bootlegs like I also did with The Beatles. One of the things that I have found thrilling is that 20 years ago, starting with the 4-CD box set of “Good Vibrations; Thirty Years of The Beach Boys,” the band has been releasing alternative takes and works-in-progress in the studio. [Sadly, that box can’t be shared on Spotify.] It was also done with The Pet Sounds Sessions and culminated in the semi-recent massive box for The SMiLE sessions. These give the listener the total Fly on the Wall experience. With SMiLE, we can hear just how close Brian Wilson really was to releasing his Magnum Opus. Collectors of bootlegs have, over the years, put together the fragments based on scant evidence. It’s great to finally hear SMiLE as Brian envisioned. It was worth the wait.

SMiLE took his sanity and some 35 years to finally finish, but Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys are back and, if show biz metrics mean anything, back on the top of the game. This week The Beach Boys broke a record set by The Beatles. As Billboard tells us:

 As their reunion set, “That’s Why God Made the Radio” (their first album of all-new material since 1992), bursts onto the chart at No. 3,
the Beach Boys break a record by expanding their span of Billboard
200 top 10s to 49 years and one week. They first graced the top 10
with “Surfin’ U.S.A.” the week of June 15, 1963.
 The
Beach Boys’ stretch between their first week in the Billboard 200
top 10 to their most recent is now the longest among groups, passing
the Beatles, whose top 10 span covers 47 years, seven months and
three weeks. The Fab Four first entered the top bracket when “Meet
the Beatles” rocketed 92-3 on the Feb. 8, 1964, chart at the
blastoff of Beatlemania. The group most recently appeared in the top
10 with “1” the week of Oct. 1, 2011.

 Now with sell-out concerts and current hits on the radio. Here’s a Brian Wilson Jukebox for your listening pleasure, with some rarities, some well-known songs, and some versions you’ve never heard before:


 As always, CRANK IT UP!!!

A BRIAN WILSON – BEACH BOYS BONUS:

For people who are as certifiably insane as I am, here is every version of Heroes and Villains I could find. Set on crossfade and you will never need another song. Ever!