Summary

TAPE: EF01/0510 IN_TIME: 13:44:49 DURATION: 1:34 SOURCES: APTN RESTRICTIONS: music/performance rights must be cleared DATELINE: n/a SHOTLIST: 1. GVs army base 2. SOT Question - "So do you think the band has got a future?" SOT voxpop - "I think they have got a pass right about now. They still sound good, they still have the harmony and everything. I think they are good." 3. SOT voxpops -"I love the Beach Boys." SOT Question - "What do the Beach Boys mean to you?" SOT voxpop - "Surfing, beach music." 4. GV arrival of Beach Boys on stage 5. SOT Beach Boys (l-r, Mike Love, Brian Wilson) - SOT Mike Love - "A lot of people play guitar better then we can, maybe they are better singers in the sense of a soloist. But when you are talking about harmony we're over all in that department so I think that is a distinguishing characteristic." SOT Brian Wilson - "To this day we hold our own, after a nap of course." 6. Performance of "California Girls" BEACH BOYS MARCH TO A MILITARY BEAT Air Force officials at Kadena Air Base, Japan, threw open their gates for Americafest 2001, a gala celebration of American Independence Day. This year, the celebration at the largest U.S. Air Base outside of the United States included two days of military displays, food, game and information booths, as well as entertainers including the pop groups 98 Degrees and the Beach Boys. But the celebration was muted by news of an Air Force sergeant being implicated in the rape of a Japanese woman on the eve of the celebration. Air Force officials said they did not consider canceling the event because of the incident. On the same day of the concert, news also broke that original Beach Boys member Al Jardine is suing his former band mates for about $ 4 million, claiming they have excluded him from recent concerts. Jardine, 58, filed the lawsuit against Mike Love and Brian Wilson in Superior Court on Friday. Other defendants include the Carl Wilson Trust and Brother Records Inc., the corporate entity of the Beach Boys. "Jardine claims he has been frozen out of the Beach Boys," attorney Jeffrey Benice said Tuesday. Jardine also claims that Love promoted the current Beach Boys lineup as the "real" and "genuine" group. He says Love is the only original member. Jardine says he has had problems booking shows for his "Beach Boys Family and Friends" group. The Beach Boys' sunny vocal harmonies are one of the signatures sounds of the modern era. Among rock and roll groups of the Sixties, the California quintet place second only to the Beatles in terms of their overall impact on the Top Forty. They were the Fab Four's only serious competition on a creative level, too. Paul McCartney has admitted that the Beatles' masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was their attempt to rise to the challenge of the Beach Boys' magnum opus, Pet Sounds (which itself was inspired by the Beatles' first self-contained album, Rubber Soul). This creative dialogue between the two biggest bands of the Sixties pushed rock and roll to its artistic apex. The Beach Boys were largely a family affair that came together in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, California, in 1961. Three brothers, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson were joined by their cousin, Mike Love, and a friend, Alan Jardine (who was replaced for a time by David Marks, before rejoining). Brian Wilson, who demonstrated an aptitude for music at an early age, was the group's leader, orchestrating their harmonies, writing the music, producing the recording sessions. One of the few undisputed geniuses in popular music, Brian possessed an uncanny gift for harmonic invention and complex vocal and instrumental arrangements. Initially, the magnitude of that genius was overlooked owing to the subject matter of the band's early hits, surfing, hot rods, girls. The Beach Boys' increasingly sophisticated harmonies and arrangements around this time owed to the fact that Brian quit touring with the band in December 1964 in order to work full-time on their recordings back home in California. While the Beach Boys were off touring behind their growing treasure chest of hit singles, Brian began work in January 1966 on Pet Sounds. He laboured over it nonstop for four months, enlisting a veritable orchestra of session musicians to help him chase the "pet sounds" he heard in his head. At the end, the Beach Boys returned to add their bouquet of voices to the finished instrumental tracks. Now recognized as an innovative classic, Pet Sounds sold poorly as an album, though it yielded a bounty of singles, including "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "God Only Knows" and "Sloop John B". Brian pressed on to his next project, "Good Vibrations," a "pocket symphony" (as Wilson described it) that packed an album's worth of ideas and production tricks into one song. "Good Vibrations" returned the Beach Boys to the top of the charts and added a new phrase to the pop-culture vocabulary. During the Seventies, the Beach Boys became an in-demand touring act whose popularity soared as the rock audience rediscovered all the old hits, which had come and gone so quickly in the previous decade. Capitol Records' release of Endless Summer, a double-LP greatest-hits collection, surprisingly streaked to the top of the album charts, and the Beach Boys were suddenly hot all over again. Subsequently, the band has intermittently released new albums and toured like clockwork every summer while making headlines for various extracurricular mishaps: the accidental drowning death of Dennis Wilson in 1983; the legal battles over Brian's conservatorship between elements in the Beach Boys' camp and his control-oriented (and since-deposed) psychologist, Eugene Landy; and Mike Love's lawsuit against Brian, wherein he claimed to have coauthored certain Beach Boys songs credited to Brian alone. Burdened by these and myriad other subplots, the Beach Boys at time seemed to be rock and roll's longest-running soap opera. At the same time, they've been responsible for some of the most perfect harmonies and gorgeous melodies in rock and roll history. MUSIC CLEARANCE DETAILS TITLE: Californian Girls ARTIST: The Beach Boys WRITER: Wilson/Love PUBLISHER: Rondor Music LABEL: Capitol Records