Friday, June 12, 2015

Wouldn't It Be Nice - If I Hadn't Gone to BYU...

Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the new biopic about Brian Wilson, Love and Mercy. It's a sensitive and fascinating examination of the former Beach Boys' sheer genius and fragile emotional state. While the story shifts back and forth in time, its focus is Wilson's recording of Pet Sounds, the 1966 album that continues to rank at #2 on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest albums of all time - #1 is Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which the Beatles released the following year, and drew heavily on Pet Sounds in its influence.



I grew up in Southern California and listened to the Beach Boys as a child. Like many people my age and older, their music is permanently stamped in my psyche. Even today, whenever I hear one of their classic tunes, the warm Southern California breeze, the hot sand beneath my feet, and the sweet smell of the ocean stirs in my memory. Good vibrations.

However, thanks to a certain deranged chucklehead at BYU, one Beach Boys song inadvertently conjures a foul memory.

In the late 1970's I was taking education classes to qualify for my teaching credential. Among the requirements were a series of single credit courses, lasting about six weeks, on topics pertinent to secondary school teachers. Many of these mini-classes were taught by young profs who had recently come from teaching in public schools and were exceptionally enthusiastic about their subject. So, when I signed up for a class about drawing on popular culture to assist in lesson preparation, I expected to learn some fresh, new ideas.

On the first day, my seven or so classmates and I were greeted by a roly-poly gent somewhere in his 60's. He sat on a metal folding chair that could barely accommodate his girth. Next to him was a portable record player - one of those numbers that could be carried like a suitcase and then opened with the turntable on the bottom and the speaker in the lid. He promised to, by way of example, demonstrate the evil, pernicious messages that were being fed to our children through today's popular music.

There was a certain whimsey to the whole experience. Bear in mind this was around 1978. The big acts of the day were the Bee Gees, Rod Stewart, the Commodores, Elton John, ELO, the Village People, Supertramp, etc. But Professor Chucklehead, convinced he was on the cutting edge, spent our class time dissecting songs that were at least a decade or two old, by artists whom the current rising generation would never listen to, unless it was to humor their parents or some other tiresome grown-ups in their lives.

I exchanged pained winces and stifled snickers with my fellow classmates as Chucklehead interpreted the underlying meaning of tunes like "Under the Boardwalk" - I know what those Drifters really want you to do under there - "We'll Sing in the Sunshine" - catchy finger-popper, but an obvious vehicle for free love - and even "Wake Up Little Susie" by the Everly Brothers - what, indeed, will they tell their friends when they say "ooh-la-la?"

Ironically, during this same semester, one of my housemates had taken to doing her living room aerobics routine to David Bowie's "Suffragette City."



The class started out as merely amusing. That is, until Professor Chucklehead went after one of my favorite songs of all time, "Wouldn't it Be Nice." The first track on Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds, it is both complex in its musicality and innocent in its message, much like Brian himself. (Tony Asher wrote the lyrics.) I won't go into what Chucklehead had to say about it, as I would rather my gentle readers remember it as the artist intended: a sweet and soulful tribute to adolescent longing.

You know it seems the more we talk about it 
It only makes it worse to live without it
But let's talk about it...





I highly recommend Love and Mercy. It left a profound impression on me, enough of one that I might even be able to, once and for all, bury the memory of Professor Chucklehead. And god only knows, I could do without him.

19 comments:

  1. Chucklehead had all of the salacious songs of the 1970s to choose from, and he chose 50s and 60s music? It sounds like he needed more sinister musical influences in his life.

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    1. I think if we'd played him some of those 70's tunes we would have had to administer smelling salts.

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  2. I'll bet a an ugly tole painted bunny rabbit that Chucklehead found salacious messages in albums from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, especially when he played them backward.

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    1. I had a BYU roommate that thought Sesame Street was a Communist tool. Very strange place...

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  3. There are a lot of reasons I wish I hadn't gone to BYU. Number one being that I don't like putting it on my resume.

    Experiences like this one are also at the top of my list. I'm sure Chucklehead would have preferred the message of 'marching as to war' to 'ooh-la-la'; because, violence is always preferable to sex in Mormondom.

    Donna, it's too bad we didn't meet while we were at the Lord's University. We could have gone out for scones. (What was the name of that scone joint?)

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    1. Ha! It was the Rolling Scone! I used to love the honey butter ones. Of course, they weren't really scones, they were Navaho flat bread rolled up like a burrito, but hey, it was a cut above the rest of Provo's cuisine.

      I wish we'd known each other then too. Also, I hate that BYU is on my resume too.

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  4. It must be something in the perverse genes of education professors. It was a bit earlier than your experience, of course, but I had an education professor at the University of Puget Sound, who played Ray Charles' "What'd I say" and then read the salacious lyrics out loud, insisting that the "huh-ho" call and responses were blatantly mimicking the sounds of sex. Okay, so some of the lyrics are suggestive, but his whole point seemed to be how clever he was to interpret the lyrics in the way most of us got the first time we heard it. I'm pretty sure he wasn't Mormon, though. More likely Jewish.

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    1. Hi Mark!!

      Clever indeed! I'm always amused by uber religious/otherwise uptight people who look for "smut" in everything they see and hear. Yes, most music and art is inspired in part by romantic love and sex (duh) but most people enjoy rather than obsess about it.

      I knew a Mormon lady who used to go to R rated movies and count every expletive and sexual innuendo. She took along a clicker. Very strange way to spend her free time, IMO.

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  5. Awesome post! Wouldn't It Be Nice is a beautiful song with a great message.

    Remember that guy Lynn Bryson who used to give firesides at stakes all around the country about the evils of pop music? He'd talk about backward messages and other weird, crazy stuff. That whack job made it so I had to discover the genius of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles later in life ):

    http://www.experttextperts.com/2013/03/witchcraft-rock-n-roll-and-mission-lore.html

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    1. OMG, I had not heard of Lynn Bryson. I just followed your link and listened to the beginning of part 2 of his talk. So creepy! (Satan doesn't want us to have bodies - nor does John Lennon!!)

      I will give the guy credit for using examples current to the time period. At least he didn't pull out the Kingston Trio like that chucklehead at BYU.

      Great post over on Expert Textperts! Are you the author?

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    2. No. I'm not the author. Sorry, I should have mentioned that. I'll be sure to do that in the future.

      I had to ask my wife to remind me of Lynn Bryson's name. Her parents went to one of his firesides and then became even more psycho about devil worship, demons, playing cards, body movements to music (being under the spell of the music), and end-of-the-world stuff.

      I grew up in a small, isolated town in Utah. After the fireside in my stake, I had friends whose parents would only let them listen to compilation tapes of music Lynn Bryson sold to them. When you have a snake oil salesman like that come into town, it just spreads paranoia and fear that can literally last for decades.

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    3. Aha! So he had his own angle going. I can imagine these compilation tapes were insanely overpriced, not to mention insanely dorky. Thanks for introducing me to this Bryson character. Every time I think I've heard it all...

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  6. Now I'll definitely see the movie due to your post. :) I've never really listened much to the Beach Boys. I was raised on Fleetwood Mac, Doobie Brothers, and the Moody Blues. My husband is a HUGE Rush fan and we're actually seeing them next month in SLC. But I've always like The Beach Boys' songs so I'll Redbox the film. :)

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  7. My dad thinks he may know who Professor Rotundo might be.

    When my brother and I were from maybe the ages 1 to 3, Pet Sounds, Endless summer, aand Sgt. Pepper's, Magical Mystery tour, and something in there by the Kinks were among the CDs he would play in the car on long trips because we would listen and quietly sing along. I started driving him crazy when I was about 1 1/2 because I took the songs very literally. He had to listen to endless questions about, 'Daddy, why the boy not like Wendy anymore?" "The girls on the beach, what their name is?" "Why the boy have to stay in his room all the time?" "Who is the fool on the hill?" "How can somebody be the Egg Man AND the Walrus?" My dad said it was a tough call whether to take the music off and listen to us cry and whine, or deal with my endless questions about the sings.

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    1. Ha! Sounds like proof that he was filling your heads with evil Satanic messages! In spite of the warnings from Professor Rotundo, I played those tunes for my kids too. :)

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  8. Ah, Lynn Bryson. I'm a vinyl junkie trapped in Utah, with a collecting interest in the local strange and bizarre. LOTS of strange local music pops up in my hunts.

    In my college days in Nevada, an instructor in a freshman writing comp course passed out the next section's term papers to us at the end of the semester to give up an idea of the next term's expectations. One of the students had written a paper about eeevil rock satan music, "Negative Aspects of Rock Music," and I got an eyeful of claims that Stevie Nicks and the Eagles were hellish stuff (1982). The led me to discovering bookshelves full of nutty stuff in Christian bookstores --I never knew until that time that there were Christian-only...and Mormon-only book chains cloning their own versions of regular book and record shops' inventory.

    Anti-rock stuff: check out David A. Noebel, Pastor Bob Larson, Dan/Steve Peters (record burnings going church parking lots to church parking lots when Reagan was president), Lex De Azevedo, E. Lynn Balmforth (1971 LDS), Frank Garlock (1971 Bob Jones University), etc.... Ghastly fun stuff.

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    1. Wow. Thanks for the suggestions, Anon! I will check them out. I did see the Lex De Azevedo/Balmforth book on a friend's shelf sometime back in the 1980's and skimmed it. Pretty paranoid read.

      The Eagles are evil?! That's a new one. (Exactly what happened on that corner in Winslow, AZ?) Too funny.

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