dim lights, provocative gyrations, drug-taking and ‘sexual misconduct’

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‘The Strip was suddenly alive with hairy teen hobos and older hippies in nifty belly-button-baring shirts and little girls with mop straight hair and belted hip huggers settled low and cool on their anatomies. The convergence of social types has created a permanent bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic jam in which it now takes some 30 sardine-like minutes to inch along the strip’s 1.7 miles. Modernist architecture added a celestial feeling to the drive-in restaurants, underground theatres, and coffeehouses, not to mention more than 35 psychedelic/mod nightclubs catering to the scene.’

Mike believed the Maharishi was going to teach him how to levitate

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The Maharishi spoke of eternal happiness and peace - he seemed for all the world a mystical, Eastern sage. But he was far from an unsophisticated hick from the Himalayas. College-educated, with a degree in physics, he had studied Sanskrit and learned the scriptures. The title "Maharishi" was self-adopted. In the late fifties he began to preach his brand of mystic salvation to audiences in various Western countries. Of all the Beach Boys, Mike Love was the most influenced by the Maharishi. "When I heard about TM, I consciously took steps to expand my awareness ... I didn't want to live life at the same level ... And one of the greatest things that interested me was that he said, 'You don't have to give up your Rolls-Royce ... and forsake all your pursuits of material pleasures ... to develop inner spiritual qualities.' That sounded real good to me." He managed to convince the rest of the group that it would be a good move for the Beach Boys to tour with the Maharishi. Billed as "The Most Exciting Event of the Decade," the shows took place in huge concert halls and stadiums. On opening night, "more police showed up than audience." The fans were completely uninterested in hearing the Maharishi, no one cared, which is what everybody told Mike would happen. On a typical tour date, the Maharishi opened with a long, boring, unintelligible lecture while the audience booed and yelled for the Beach Boys. "The Maharishi laughed, he was laughing all the time. He got his money."

"What else is there to do? Watch television? Music is everything!!"

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Unfortunately, it is precisely those who shouldn't listen to music who constitute the majority of its most influential critics. These people, the snarling dogs who enforce mediocrity through their vehemence, sneering, and know-it-all pretensions, resent music because to them it is an unfathomable, inscrutable riddle. They want to speak about it, hold forth on it, determine its future like the parched schoolteacher who crushes the spirit of the child because he too was crushed so long ago. It's important to identify "music for people who shouldn't listen to music" and separate it into a different camp; it is indeed another "thing." It should occupy a space for so-called music which isn't music at all - in the same manner that television news isn't news and fast food isn't food. This new genre would be for people who don't like music at all, but are gleaning some sort of identification through it.

get into debased beatnik bop and clip joint raunch

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I was sittin' one night talkin' to this guy and I told him, "Look. Mickey Mouse is not something that Disney dreamed up. Mickey Mouse is something that Disney grabbed hold of from some guy, and he was just a stick figure. Then he got some artist to work on him, and they developed Mickey Mouse through the years ... and I says "If you go back far enough, you can trace Mickey Mouse to this stick figure, with a circle on it, and you can also imagine, here's Mickey Mouse's father, he'd be something like a real ratty lookin' thing, and so since Superman had the 'S' on his thing, I put 'R.F." on his chest". So this guy comes around the next day "You know what, that Rat Fink you drew last night, I want a T-shirt with that on there." O.K., so I made him one, made his friends one, and their friends all wanted one, so pretty soon, I'm drawin' this Rat Fink on everything . And in 1963 I copyrighted it. But it was still supposed to be what Mickey Mouse's father looked like. I don't know what Disney'd say about that, but that was the original intent. We're gonna animate him, and Mr. Gasser, Hot Breath, and Junkyard Dog, these are all his buddies. Nobody's doin' a cartoon on what's really goin' on, that's what kills me. That's why I sorta wanta get this done because they're all super-heroes. I don't wanna talk about that. I want to talk about skateboarding, and goin' down to the beach, and hot-rodding. There's never been a cartoon done about "Wild Wheelies", and '57 Chevies skiddin' around corners and throwin' a shift like Mother's Worry … Nothin'! That's what I wanna do ... but the big guys downtown with the money, they all say "We don't want that. We want 'Spiderman' stuff." ... and I says "Well, that's too far out for me. It doesn't happen. It's not down to earth. It's not what's happening in the street.

what kind of song title was “Do You Like Worms”?

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Later, when the boys were young adults, as famous for their gothic personal lives as they were for their music, they told murky, often contradictory tales of their past that raised as many questions as answers. Did Murry once force a grade school–aged Brian to defecate on a plate in order to punish some small misdeed? Did he force tomato-hating Dennis to eat them nonstop until he vomited? Did he beat Brian with a two-by-four when he found the grade-schooler had unleashed a neighbor’s puppy while playing with him? Did he attempt some twisted form of character building by plucking out his artificial eye and forcing his sons to sit nose to nose with him, peering into the jagged maw of his blood-red socket?

“A diseased bunch of motherfuckers if ever there was one,” raved Lester Bangs. “But the miracle is that the Beach Boys have made that disease sound like the literal babyflesh pink of health…. Maybe it’s just that unprickable and ingenuous wholesomeness that accounts not only for their charm, but for their beauty—a beauty so awesome that listening to them at their best is like being in some vast dream cathedral decorated with a thousand gleaming American pop culture icons.”

ASSHOLES ALL! - Your guide to the entertainment industry

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There are no hindrances to keep provincials such as yourself from pursuing dreams of rock 'n' roll greatness. For a bagful of clams, you and some neighbourhood bone-grubbers can buy some serviceable instruments, make your caterwauling monkeyshines available to the public, and while away years of your lives trying to strike gold in the salt mines of Rock ... Perhaps, after selflessly giving the best years of your life to rocking and rolling, you will find yourself in some dingy supperclub listlessly performing your old hits to a small audience of apathetic drunkards sprinkled with drunken apathetes. You may wonder if you would have been better off with a more dignified calling, such as blowing dogs in the park for nickels. The answer is yes.