Heroes and Villains – The Beach Boys (1967)
A personal tale of how Brian Wilson’s music filled the gap between Bowie’s Golden Years and The Damned’s New Rose in the long hot summer of 1976.
Last week’s blog noted the acres of words that were written in the aftermath of the death of funk and soul pioneer Sly Stone. But the death of another colossus of 1960s American music a few days later generated hectares of words. As with Sly, I am going to add to the blanket coverage of the passing of Brian Wilson with what has become a slightly longer-than-normal post. However, I’m not going to try and compete with those that have set out Wilson’s long and winding story from teenage pop star through reclusive, disturbed genius to the damaged but delightful elder statesman of music he became. That has been done most impressively by Richard William’s excellent obituary in the Guardian. I recommend you pause reading my nonsense and click the link below to enjoy his writing and Brian’s incredible story. Don’t forget to come back here, though…
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/11/brian-wilson-obituary
My contribution is a much less informed personal one and begins long after the Beach Boys’ 60s heyday. I was fifteen as 1976 began with Bowie’s Golden Years peaking just inside the top ten – I wrote about hearing and buying it in the WIS 22Nov24 blog. Turning sixteen in April 76, I knew my musical taste and that of my friends was maturing from the chart-focussed pop and airwave-friendly rock we had grown up with. In my case, with Mott split and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band starting to tread water, I felt I was drifting a bit, looking for something new.
With us all having Saturday jobs (I was stacking shelves in the long gone supermarket chain Fine Fare), there was a bit of money to buy LPs. But everyone was going off in different directions – albums by Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Be-Bop Deluxe and others started appearing on turntables when we got together. As the spring began, the only record I recall us all agreeing on was Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy, with The Boys Are Back In Town shaping up to be the single of the summer.
By the autumn, I had followed my pal Davie Ross in getting the incendiary Eddie and the Hot Rods Live at the Marquee EP and the music press were talking up a new wave of noisy young bands. And then in early December, as described in WIS 6Oct23, I heard New Rose by The Damned and I knew things would never be the same again.
So all mildly interesting but what the hell has this got to do with Brian Wilson? Well, in the middle of my musical transition, the UK underwent the famous long hot summer of 1976. Although climate change has since broken the record temperatures from that time, it was officially the UK’s warmest, sunniest and driest summer of the 20th century. Glasgow morphed into LA (kinda), having its driest summer since 1868! With what seems like incredible foresight (but was actually huge luck), EMI’s newly created UK TV advertising division issued a career-spanning Beach Boys compilation they called 20 Golden Greats.
It was released in June, just as the sun came out and retailed at only £2.99 for a 20-track LP with a simple but hugely effective surfer graphic sleeve. I recall they promoted it with large record store window displays and heavy rotation TV adverts. One lasted a minute and featured old film and newsreel clips “scratched” to give the effect of people dancing to the song excerpts. Worth the click below to see Adolf Hitler dancing to Fun Fun Fun – I kid you not!
The marketing and the weather combined with the quality of the music and resulted in the record being a massive hit. It was the second biggest-selling album of the year and it went on to spend a whopping 86 weeks on the UK album chart, selling over 1.1 million copies. Rising along with the temperature, it peaked at number one in July 1976, where it remained throughout the heatwave for 10 weeks. It was playing everywhere you went that summer – every home seemed to have a copy. Having been No 1 in the UK in 1966, Good Vibrations was re-released as a single and made the UK top twenty again ten years later.
The LP track listing was essentially chronological and, had Sloop John B and You’re So Good To Me been swapped around, Side 1 would have been entirely the 63-65 surf-pop period before Pet Sounds and Side 2 would have been Pet Sounds and beyond. The familiar hits of Side 1 was most played at get-togethers but, although happy to hear the brilliance of Help Me Rhonda over and over again, I was always keen to flip it over and make sure Side 2 got a listen. With the benefit of nearly 50 years of hindsight, I think this is because something inside me recognised that the writing got more interesting as Wilson began to push the pop music boundaries as far as he could. Years later, I now know, his obsessive desire to innovate his studio techniques resulted in sounds that were unrecognisable from the instruments that made them. Yet the endless shifts and changes in the sonic jigsaw puzzle of Good Vibrations somehow come together into a thrilling whole. I talked about the instrumental and harmonic complexity of the stunning God Only Knows in WIS 17May24, where Brian’s brother Carl gives the lead vocal performance of his life.
But the track I have decided to feature on this slightly unusual tribute to Brian Wilson is the one that took him to the edge of his fragmentary song-writing style and came at a pivotal point in his psychological decline. Heroes and Villains was to be the follow-up to the US No1 single Good Vibrations and was as central to the planned new album Smile as the latter was to Pet Sounds. It was Wilson’s first collaboration with composer Van Dyke Parks and was the most complex recording the band ever attempted. Wilson is said to have experimented with a dozen versions of the song, all in excess of six minutes and recorded over a twelve-month period by the end of which Parks had walked out in frustration at Willson’s approach.
Then, in a fit of lawsuits and band infighting fuelled by addiction, Wilson abandoned the Smile project, wiping some of the master tapes. Under pressure from the record label to deliver the promised single, in June 1967 Wilson holed up at his makeshift home studio and produced a three-and-a-half-minute version of the tune that was released in July. It received a mixed reaction, only making No12 in the US charts and No8 in the UK, and it is this version that appeared on 20 Golden Greats. While still featuring the complex vocal arrangements, unusual musical juxtapositions and tempo changes of the Smile session versions, it was considered by the band and many hardcore fans to be an inferior recording as it was missing some sections and had a strangely muddy mix.
Wilson re-recorded the song in 2004 including some of the missing parts that had been on the original recordings. And then in 2011, a box set of all the surviving studio tapes from the 1966/67 sessions was released as The Smile Sessions. The box included a pieced-together ‘hypothetical’ version of the full Smile album as it might have been released back in 1967. Heroes and Villains is nearly five minutes long with a cleaner mix and many of the missing parts reinstated, including what is known by aficionados as the ‘Cantina’ section. Having listened to it, I can now better understand Wilson and Parks’ original declared vision for the song to be themed around the Old West and the early history of California. Judge for yourself as I’ve decided to playlist it at the top of the blog this week – and here is the cartoon video, complete with Brian in the Cantina.
After years of decline with addiction issues, eating disorders and mental health recoveries and relapses, Wilson became more stable and underwent a career resurgence at the turn of the millennium. Although a little damaged and his falsetto was diminshed, he was well enough to form a touring band and took his music back out on the road where he remained until as recently as 2022 at 80 years of age. And so it was that some thirty years after 20 Golden Greats and the long hot summer of 1976, I was lucky enough to see the great man perform live on 7 July 2007 at the T in the Park Festival just a few miles from where I am typing this. It was a no-brainer to choose his headline set (on a stage re-named Pet Sounds for the weekend) over the two K headliners on other stages (Kooks and Killers). And we were not disappointed. As you can see from the setlist here, his stellar twenty-four song set featured 14 of the 20 Golden Greats, including Good Vibrations, God Only Knows and Heroes and Villains from Side 2! The tent was packed and the atmosphere was celebratory as everyone there knew they were in the presence of a genuine musical genius.
I don’t often listen to Pet Sounds but I have been doing so this week in the aftermath of Wilson’s death. So it seems right to end with some lyrics from the track I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times. Although written by Mike Asher for Wilson’s music, the lyrics say a lot about the brilliant but troubled man that Wilson was.
Every time I get the inspiration
To go change things around
No one wants to help me look for places
Where new things might be found
Sometimes I feel very sad
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times
Last Word
Last week and this week, I have written weighty pieces about two pioneering music icons who were dogged by darkness but who brought great light to millions of people.
I am away for a good part of next week so you’ll be delighted to hear that WIS will be much shorter and less heavy, whatever I find time to do! Sly and Brian have been added to the pile below.
AR
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