Song 177: “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, Part 3: “Mister, Can You Give Me Some Direction?”

A History of Vogue Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Higgy Song 177 Never Learn Not to Love by The Beach Boys Part 3 Mr Can You Give Me Some Direction Before I begin, this episode, like all of this miniseries, deals with some difficult topics, including grooming and manipulation, and with racist exploitation of black people. It also contains some quotations from people expressing extremely racist opinions. I have tried to steer away from quoting anything with a direct slur in, but some of the quotes are non-less disturbing, but needed to be quoted to give context for the rest of the narrative. We talked back in part 1 of this series on Never Learn Not to Love about the roots of American popular music in Vaudville, which in turn had its roots in Minstrelsy. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a competitor to Vaudville, and that competitor was known as Chautauqua. These days, if people have heard of Chautauqua at all, they've heard of it from one of two sources. They've most likely heard about it from Robert Percik's mega bestselling book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which he wrote between 1968 and 1974. That book was one of those books that becomes culturally ubiquitous for a few years, and then vanishes again just as suddenly. Percik later tried to explain the success of the book, which came as as much of a shock to him as to anyone else, saying, The book also appeared at a time of cultural upheaval on the matter of material success. Hippies were having none of it, conservatives were baffled. Material success was the American dream. Millions of European peasants had longed for it all their lives and come to America to find it, a world in which they and their descendants would at last have enough. Now their spoiled descendants were throwing that whole dream in their faces, saying it wasn't any good. What did they want? The hippies had in mind something that they wanted and were calling it freedom. But in the final analysis, freedom was a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun, but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. Percik's book was partly an autobiographical tale of a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California with his son, and of his own experiences with mental illness. Partly a self-help guide of sorts of the kind we talked about disparagingly the last episode, the one which nowadays would almost certainly lead to the author being diagnosed as neurodivergent, as many of the things he talks about as universals of human experience seem less universal and more specific than maybe he realized. And partly an attempt to expound Percik's own ideas about philosophy, was seen partly to come from Plato, partly from Taoism, partly from Zen, and to have crystallized around the phrase Tatuamasi. Sorry if I pronounced that wrong. One of the Sanskrit Mahavakyas, the great sayings of the Upanishads, the founding texts of Hinduism. Tatuamasi is usually translated as Thou art that, and is part of a series of great sayings which, when taken together, express a philosophy which I may well misunderstand. So apologies to any Hindus, or to anyone else for whom the Vedas have great significance if I express this poorly, but which come down to the idea that Brahman, the supreme God, is everything. Everything is an aspect of Brahman, and that everything is, in some sense, everything else. The that in Thou art that, as I understand it, can mean both God and another thing. You are that orange or computer or writing desk or other person, but both you and that also are, in some sense, God. This idea had a profound effect throughout much of the counterculture and alternative culture in the 60s and early 70s. In Stranger in a Strange Land, the Heinlein book we talked about briefly last time, the main mantra come slogan of the Church of All Worlds, the religion set up in the book, is Thou art God. Similarly, the Beach Boys, after hearing these ideas expressed by the Maharishi as the set of sayings, I am that, Thou art that, and all this is that. Wrote the song, All This Is That, for their 1972 album, Carl and the Passions, So Tough. Inspired by this insight, Persig decided to write a book trying to explain his own personal philosophy, and he described the explanations he interspersed through the book, which he called Chautauquas, as follows. What is in mind as a sort of Chautauqua? That's the only name I can think of for it, like the travelling tension of Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster paced radios, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. That is, broadly speaking, accurate, but it's only half of what the Chautauquas were. The other half is shown in the only other real pop cultural survivor of the Chautauquas that anyone is likely to be familiar with, the Elvis film, The Trouble With Girls. In The Trouble With Girls, one of Elvis's more watchable films, partly because of a cast that includes Vincent Price, John Caradine, Dabney Coleman, Joyce Van Patten and many more great character actors, Elvis plays the rather sleazy manager of a rather scammy travelling show, which seems rather more low class than Persec's description, but which is also called a Chautauqua. The answer is that Chautauquas were both of these, sort of. They had their roots in the kind of progressivism we talked about in the last episode with respect to Pat Neff, a combination of ideas that don't seem to go together all that well today, like Methodism, Populism, Temperance and Prohibition, Women's Suffrage and a kind of bootstrap mentality and prosperity gospel. Chautauquas were touring shows, often performing in tents like circuses, which makes lectures which were meant to be uplifting, educational and morally improving, with light entertainment of a slightly more genteel type than one would find in Vaudville. Where in Vaudville, for example, black performers would have to do minstrel acts, performing as racist stereotypes of their own culture. In Chautauqua, they would be more likely to be acts like the Fisk Jubilee singers who sang spirituals. A typical programme for Chautauqua would be like one from Iowa City from 1909 that had found in the University of Iowa's online collection of materials on Chautauquas. That programme included a Hopi performer giving a talk about the history and legends of his race, and also performing magic tricks presented as if they were real or called powers. Several bands and orchestras, a lecture by Honourable Harris R. Cooley on the advanced methods of dealing with dependents and criminals, a lecture by Harvey Washington Wiley, later the first head of the FDA, on the need for laws around pure food, three comedians, a lecture on the power of suggestion for health, happiness and good, the Reverend Charles Medbury on the problems of America's young manhood and womanhood, a quick draw cartoonist, a lecture about the horticulturalist Luther Burbank by a friend of his, a series of songs and stories on the theme, he can, who thinks he can, and you get the idea. There were a mixture of light entertainment, actually educational talks, and the kind of self-help stuff that would later migrate to books like Dale Carnegie's and Prosperity Gospel Evangelists. By the late 1920s, Trotorquas and Fordville essentially merged, as Fordville slowly cleaned itself up and got a little more respectable in an effort to get more high-class audiences, while Trotorquas started incorporating more and more entertainment and less and less education in an attempt to attract more paying customers. But they originally started out as a far more sincerely educational effort than what they devolved into. They were a way for people without access to formal education, to get some form of basic learning, and to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, rooted in a Methodist ethic of self-improvement. The first Trotorquas were very much of this type, and were rooted in one spot rather than travelling all over the country. That spot, Lake Trotorqua, is where they took the name from, and in the mid-19th century people would travel from all over to spend a few weeks every summer at Lake Trotorqua, learning cut-down, simplified versions of what richer people were learning at university. And one man who would go along every year was a country schoolteacher from Texas, who only had one year of university education and hadn't been able to afford more, named John Lomax. Oh my wife and child lookin' pickabela cotton, and my wife and child lookin' pickabela day. Oh lord, hey pickabela cotton, and a, oh lord, hey pickabela day. Gonna jump down, turn around and pickabela cotton, gonna jump down, turn around and pickabela day. We've talked in many previous episodes about John Lomax, the famed ethnomusicologist and folksong collector, though we've talked more about his son, Alan. Lomax, along with his sons, Alan and John Jr., who we just heard singing, was the person who, more than any other, was responsible for the shape of American folk music in the 20th century, for both good and bad. Lomax always thought of himself more than anything else as a teacher. One of his most formative memories, as he would later account it, was of being a small child and teaching an older black teenager named Nat Blythe, an indentured servant who had been born into slavery. To read and do algebra, he would say, Nat made me a teacher. To what extent this is actually true is, as with a lot of things to do with Lomax, open to question, but it tells us a lot, not only about how he saw himself, but about how he saw black people. Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867, two years after the ending of the slaveholders' rebellion, later euphemized as the American Civil War. The son of someone who had been in charge of punishing enslaved people, and had bought his own land with money from his crimes. Two years after his birth, though, the family moved to Texas, where he grew up and spent much of the first half of his long life. Lomax grew up on a farm, and everyone in the family was expected to work on the farm, but the family also expected the men to get at least some education, so he had a year of university before he had to start work. After his one year at university, he became a country school teacher, but he wanted to be better educated than the people around him. So every year he went off to Chautauqua in the summer. Chautauqua had started in 1874, so only a few years earlier, and had originally been a training school for Sunday school teachers, where they would go in the summer months. Lomax would later sneer at the cut-down version of a humanities education he got from Chautauqua, and to an extent he had good reason to, as the education obtained from Chautauqua was probably not that far from the one that could be gained from that other fine American institution, the Readers Digest, with cut-down, easily digestible bite-sized versions of mathematics and the humanities. But in another sense, there is nothing wrong with simplified versions of complex subjects, as an introduction to them for those like Lomax who had gone to be scholars, or as a taste of them for people with a more casual but real interest. On his annual visits to Chautauqua, Lomax learned the rudiments of Latin, rushed up on his mathematics, and was introduced to the poetry of Tennyson and Browning, both of whom were hugely influential on his thought. He also got a rudimentary introduction to art music there, although he was never a fan of it, or of what he called, citified singers. In particular, Lomax was someone who preferred what he thought of as primitive expressive art to sophisticated technique. This was especially the case when it came to music from black people. Lomax would later complain that groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers were machine-like and insipid, and didn't make proper black music. Of course, the fact that Lomax thought the tea, the white son of a literal slave driver, was a better arbiter of what was authentic black music than a group of black musicians, is itself very telling. After Lomax's father died, he inherited 11 acres of land, and with that, plus the sale of a pony, and more importantly, alone from a rich cousin, whose mother had inherited a lot of enslaved people, and who had thus been the wealthy side of the family, he went off to the white son the University of Texas, finally starting to get a proper university education, aged 27. He stayed at the university from 1895 through 1903, first getting a bachelor's degree in two years, and then studying for a master's degree while working as a university registrar. In 1903, Lomax seems to have had something of a mid-life crisis, precipitated by a long-distance girlfriend dying of tuberculosis, very close in time to his rich cousin Lon, the one who had lent him the money for his tuition, also dying. Soon after this, he ended up marrying a woman 13 years his junior, who had been introduced to him by his dead girlfriend, and moving from the University of Texas to Texas A&M, the University of Texas's main rival, where he spent a couple of years as a lecturer. At one point, he was to supervise classes at Fairview State Normal and Industrial College, a branch of Texas A&M that gave vocational classes to black students. He wrote to his fiancee about seeing a student concert there, and warning, this passage contains some very racist statements. The singing is perfect, the rhythm, modulation, and perfect time I have not heard excelled, yet the old-time Negro trill is gone. These blacks are civilized. Still, it is pitiful. Pitiful! With my heart all tender and softened by the two days I had with you, something I find in these faces, the impossible barrier so plain to me that bars and perpetually from the highest achievements of civilization, the almost hopeless struggle before them, it is hopeless in its larger meaning, with a thousand thoughts like these the day and its experiences have moved me highly. This attitude would be the one Lomax would hope for the rest of his life. The black people were incapable of being civilized, and their attempts to do so would only lead to their art being lessened by having the rough edges smoothed off. After a couple of years at A&M, Lomax went off to Harvard to do postgraduate study, and there he found what would end up becoming his life's work. Oh, for he bend my bony young man, I've bent the wild wet mither, mark my bed soon, for I'm weary, we're hunting, and a thing would lie due. That song, Lord Randall, is one of the child ballads, the most famous English language traditional folk song collection. That collection, more formally titled the English and Scottish popular ballads, contains 305 numbered folk song lyrics, each with many variants, and was an attempt to catalog the lyrics, though not the music, of every traditional English or Scottish folk song and their American derivatives. The English and Scottish popular ballads was a ten volume set, and was largely the work of Francis James Child, who in 1876 had become the first professor of English at Harvard University, and was a noted scholar of Shakespeare and Chaucer, but who is now best remembered for his folk song collection. But Child had died before the completion of volume 10, which was thus edited by his successor as professor of English at Harvard, George Lyman Kittrich, a close colleague of Child's with a similar passion for ballad collecting. When Lomax got to Harvard, he took a class on literary history in America taught by Barrett Wendell, who told his class that he was bored of getting papers on the same four or five authors all the time, and so he wanted them to write papers on some aspect of literature that was local to the part of America they came from, rather than just going over the same old stuff. Lomax had been interested in the folk songs he'd heard growing up. He would later talk about how he collected a lot of songs as a young man, but burned his manuscript after getting told that kind of work was not appropriate when at the University of Texas. Given Lomax's character, that's likely a self-aggrandizing tall tale, but it is the case that during Lomax's time at the University of Texas, there was an anonymous article published, Minstrelsea of the Mexican Border, in the U of T magazine, which appears to be Lomax's work and contains short sections of lyrics of several cowboy songs. Lomax suggested that he could write about the songs of the cowboys for his paper, and Wendell was so impressed with the idea that he arranged for Lomax to meet Kittridge. Kittridge was enthused by the idea, not only because he was interested in collecting folk songs, this was the point when the Old West was starting to be consolidated as America's great national myth, and there would be no better time for a project focused on cowboys. When I was a cowboy out on a western fling, When I was a cowboy out on a western fling, I made a half a million, putting on a bryler range, come a cow, cow, yiggy, come a cow, cow, yiggy, yiggy, yiggy, come a cow, cow, yiggy, come a cow, cow, yiggy, yiggy, yiggy, yiggy, oh the hardest battle for the ever on a western fling. Lomax started work, initially just writing letters to newspaper editors throughout the west, asking of anyone knew any old cowboy songs that had never been published, and for them to write to him with the lyrics of them. After his year of graduate study at Harvard, Lomax returned to A&M, but remained in correspondence with Kittridge and Wendell, and his project eventually turned into a book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, for which Lomax was able to use his Harvard connections to get former president Theodore Roosevelt to provide an introduction. That book contained folk songs that Lomax had collected, many of which have since become classics of western music, like Githulung Little Dogies. And Home on the Range. Where the deer and the ant are all play. Where seldom is heard, but his courageing word, and the skies are not cloudy all day. That last became one of the most well known songs of all time, though it was embarrassing for Lomax later, after the song had become a massive hit, to discover via some highly public legal action, that Home on the Range wasn't an anonymous product of the folk process, but did in fact have named authors, one of whom was even still alive when the book was published. Though, thankfully for Lomax, copyright law at the time, was such that the song was out of copyright anyway. After his Book of Cowboy Songs, Lomax's intended next project was a collection of songs from Black People. For all that Lomax had a terrible attitude towards Black People as people, he was always an admirer of Black People's music, at least as he saw it. But that project came to nothing and his next book, A Collaboration, was instead a book about Texas. The followed an anthology of cowboy poetry in 1919, but Lomax's life was starting to fall apart. He had moved from A&M back to the University of Texas thanks to some internal academic politicking, but then in 1917 he got forced out of that role, again thanks to academic politics. He got a role running at the organization for ex-students of the University, but ran into problems with that too, and in 1925 he ended up working for a bank. It had been six years since his last book, and fifteen years since he'd decided to do the Book of Black Songs, and so far there was no sign he would ever complete that. 1925 though was not the best time to be starting a career in banking, because it was just four years before the Wall Street crash. The bank coped for a few years after the crash, things moved more slowly then, but Lomax was the one who was tasked with phoning customers and letting them know that they'd lost all their money. This job was, as you can imagine, both stressful in itself and especially demeaning for one like Lomax, who had had aspirations of being a Harvard professor. And then to make matters worse, Lomax's wife died and left him to look after their four children. Lomax's own health had never been great, and the stress exacerbated it to the point that he was incapable of doing his work, and in 1932 he was told by the bank to take a year of unpaid leave. His job would be there for him in a year if he got well enough to come back to it. And so, at the age of 64, John Lomax finally started on his life's work. Lomax had sunk into a deep depression, but as it happened as son John Lomax Jr, known as Johnny, had also lost his own job at a bank. And Johnny, being much younger and with some savings, took a very different attitude to the one that his father did. As far as Johnny was concerned, this was an opportunity for his father to do all the things he'd spent decades saying he wanted to do, but had never been able to do because of his day job. Lomax had been saying for more than 20 years he wanted to do a book on black music, and he wanted to do an American version of the Child Ballads, collecting American folk songs the way Child had collected English and Scottish ones. Why not just do that? He could do a lecture tour because he was still known in folklore circles, and that could bring in some money. And while doing that he could also renew his connections with people in the folklore world, and get resources for the work of collecting folk songs he was planning to do. Johnny would be his assistant, booking the tour and driving him around. He would give lectures at any institution that would take him, and he would sell copies of his books after the talk. Soon the two were joined by Lomax's younger son, Alan, who took over Johnny's role as Johnny got a job. John and Alan Lomax had very very different political philosophies. John Lomax was a right-wing Southern Democrat, at a time when the Democratic Party was the most socially conservative of the two parties in the US, though by this point it had started its leftward journey thanks to the beginnings of the New Deal, while Alan was a left winger, and at the very least a fellow traveler of and sympathiser with Communists, if not a Communist himself. Lomax soon got a contract with McMillan, the publishers of his earlier Cowboy Song book, for a book that would eventually be written in collaboration with Alan, entitled American Ballads and Folk Songs. According to Lomax, the song that persuaded McMillan to publish the book was actually a version he'd collected of Ida Red, the song we talked about way back in episode 3, though the Ida Red that Lomax collected was actually much closer to the song known as Over the Road and Bound to Go than to the Ida Red variants we talked about there. John and LaHon Lomax started an association with the Library of Congress, and started collecting songs to be used, both in the book they were working on, and in the Library of Congress's archives. To do this, they started making field recordings, taking disc recording equipment with them to record the songs they were collecting as performed, rather than just writing them down as most previous Folk Song collectors had done. And they were going to start their recordings in prisons, and recording specifically Black People. John Lomax wanted to record the primitive original versions of Folk Songs, not music that had been tainted by commercialism. In part, this was because after he had collected Home on the Range, it had become a huge hit, and he wanted to be able to copyright any songs he collected in his own name, in the hope that lightning would strike twice. And Lomax's racist views led him to believe that Black People had a more primitive culture that wasn't influenced by the white world, and certainly not by the commercial world. But he also was aware, as we've seen, that there were Black People who were making sophisticated music. Rather than thinking of that as a sign that he was wrong, and that Black People were as interested in pop music as whites, he rather saw that as a terrible adulteration that needed to be avoided if he wanted to capture older traditions. And he came to the conclusion that the best way to do that would be to visit prisons, because there would be large populations of Black People who had been locked away from white society for years, so who wouldn't have been contaminated by Tin Pan Alley and jazz, and other such evils of the modern civilized world. So John and Alan started visiting prisons with letters from the Library of Congress easing their way, and recording the singers there. Their first visits were to prisons in Texas, where they recorded singers including Moe's Platt, nicknamed Cleo Rock, and James Baker, nicknamed Iron Head. Lo-Max was particularly impressed with Baker, who we just heard, and who he referred to as a Black Homer. This is worth mentioning because of who the Lo-Max is next recorded. Because in July 1933, they went to Angola, and there they discovered Hudi Ledbetter. And it's at this time that, for the first time ever, the name Led-Bally gets associated with Ledbetter in any information we have. Ledbetter himself never used the name to refer to himself in his private life, seeing it as a stage name, and not one he was fond of, and always signing his full name on letters. And none of his friends and family use the name, but John Lo-Max used it all the time, and seems never to have referred to him by any other name. We don't have any documentation as to how the name got attached to Ledbetter, and most people think of it as a prison nickname, and that's probably the most likely explanation. But I can't help but notice the similarity between Led-Bally and Iron Head as names, and wonder if, given that these recordings came only a few days after Lo-Max had been impressed by Baker, the name was Lo-Max's idea. When they met Ledbetter, he had just been told that he would be eligible to apply for parole if the governor would sign the relevant papers, usually a formality, but the governor had not yet signed them. Between songs, Ledbetter told them Harry was eligible for parole, and would they put in a good word with the governor to get him to sign the papers? Lo-Max initially considered doing so by his own account, because he was impressed enough by Ledbetter's singing and guitar playing that he thought he would be useful as part of Lo-Max's lecture tours. But then he reconsidered. After all, as he wrote in his autobiography, the picture kept coming to my mind of Alan and myself asleep by the roadside in the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi, with this particular black man on his cart nearby, and the prospect did not look attractive. But he was, however, still impressed by Ledbetter's music, and particularly by one song, one that Ledbetter had written, though it was the product of the folk process. The melody is the same as a spiritual chord if it had not been for Jesus, and some of the lyrics are something to a similarly titled minstrel song. While Lo-Max had no intention of helping Ledbetter get free of the prison, he did have other intentions. As he wrote to his fiancé, he sung us one song which I shall copyright as soon as I get to Washington, and tried to market in sheet music form. He actually didn't get around to copyrighting it for three years, but to this day, the song writing credit for Good Night Irene, a song that is still in copyright, reads Words and Music by John A. Lo-Max and Houdi Ledbetter. Over the next year, the Lo-Max has got some better recording equipment, but found themselves frustrated by the way that the Black people they approached everywhere except prisons seemed not to be particularly interested in singing for two educated white Southern men with recording equipment. Right, some of them even seem to want paying, and some of them wanted to sing the songs they wanted to sing, rather than the ones that the Lo-Max has wanted them to sing, as they wrote in a petulant letter to a funding body. The Negro in the South is the target for such complex influences that it is hard to find genuine folk singing. His educational leaders broadening his concept, and thus making him ashamed or self-conscious of his own art. His religious leaders turning away from revival songs, spirituals and informal church services to hymns and formal church modes, ranting against any song that has to do with secular subjects. Prosperous members of the community bolstered by the church and the schools, sneering at the naivete of the folk songs and unconsciously throwing the weight of their influence in the balance against anything not patterned after white bourgeois culture. The radio with its flood of jazz created in tea rooms for the benefit of city dwelling whites. All these things are killing the best and most genuine Negro folk songs. What they needed, they decided, was a black person to come with them and demonstrate the kind of things they wanted, someone who could sing and play himself, and someone who would fit in in the porous black areas, and someone who would, ideally, be totally reliant on the lo-maxes. What they needed was hugely led better. A year after their initial recording of led better, they returned to Angola, where led better had spent a frustrating year caught in a Kafkaesque web of bureaucracy trying to get the governor to sign his parole letter. With letters directed to the wrong people, letters not answering the questions, telling him to do things he'd already done, and all the rest of the nonsense that anyone who has ever tried to deal with a bureaucracy that has control over their lives would find very familiar. By July 1934 though, it seemed likely that led better would be getting out soon anyway, whether the governor signed the papers or not, with no previous convictions on his record because his Texas conviction had been pardoned, he would be considered for letting out for good behavior at the beginning of August. However, he had no reason to think that this would go through, given his previous experiences, so while he was waiting to be considered for early release, he decided that while the lo-maxes were there, he might as well also try the same thing that had worked with the governor of Texas, and got the lo-maxes to record a plea to the governor of Louisiana. John Lo-max left a recording of that song with the governor's office, though there's no evidence that governor Allen ever actually listened to it, and Lo-max would always claim that this led to Ledbetter being pardoned, and would tell Ledbetter that himself. Ledbetter knew better, he was let out for good behavior, and if he was convicted of another crime which would get him sent back to Angola, he would have to serve the remaining five years of his sentence before whatever new sentence he got for his new conviction, but still, he was finally out of prison. Lo-max would claim responsibility for Ledbetter's release, partly as a way of making Ledbetter seem obliged to him, and Ledbetter went along with this because Lo-max had promised him a job, and he needed one. Lo-max would always pretend later that Ledbetter, after being released, had tracked him down and come begging for work, but the two had actually corresponded before Ledbetter's release, with Lo-max eager to get Ledbetter working for him. In fact, the job that Lo-max had offered was not quite what Ledbetter might have hoped. Allen Lo-max had taken ill, and what John Lo-max needed was someone to perform all the tasks that his teenage son had been performing for him unpaid. Ledbetter would drive the car, work the recording equipment, and talk to the people whose songs Lo-max was collecting, and would do so for no pay other than his expenses. Lo-max would give him a per diem for food and lodgings, but no actual wages. As they were travelling around the segregated south, the two would not stay together at night. Sometimes this would be to Ledbetter's advantage. He would get to play music in the black areas in the evenings and pick up some extra money, but other times it would decidedly not be. When they went to prisons, for example, to record the prisoners, Lo-max would get to stay in the prison administrator's homes, where he would be waited on by black prisoners. Ledbetter, on the other hand, would have to stay in the prison itself. As well as doing all the stuff that Allen had to do for his father, Ledbetter also worked as Lo-max's servant, still unpaid. Lo-max wrote to his newly married second wife. I found my first experience with a body servant pleasant. Each morning he waked me and handed me a cup of hot coffee, made ready my bath, laid out my clothes, allowed no hotel porter to touch my shoes or valisers, and, as we started our daily drive, opened for me the door of a freshly cleaned car. Ledbetter did get something out of the work though. He was promised that Lo-max would get him an audience for his music, and the work also introduced him to other songs that became part of his repertoire, like the work song Rock Allen Line, which led Better than Lo-max recorded a group of convicts led by one Kelly Pace singing. However, Ledbetter was soon getting sick of being an unpaid servant, going back to the prisons he'd only recently been let out of, and being strung along with promises that he would eventually get to play his music for paying audiences in the north. Lo-max wrote to his wife not long after started working together, saying, Lo-max started including Ledbetter in his lectures. Lo-max would talk about folk music, and then Ledbetter would give a performance. Lo-max would get paid for his talk, and Ledbetter would be allowed to pass a hat around for tips for his performance, tips which he would then have to share with Lo-max. Lo-max also started to do things like going off without Ledbetter one day, leaving him with no food money for the day, and then punishing Ledbetter when he complained about this, deciding that instead of giving him his money for all the day's food in one go, he would only give him enough for each meal at mealtimes. Ledbetter started a campaign of malicious compliance, deciding to follow Lo-max's instructions precisely, even driving through a red light on Lo-max's orders, until Lo-max lost his temper. With Alan Lo-max joining them, they headed north and started performing for organizations like the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia. Lo-max insisted on promoting the performer as Ledbelly, even though he always referred to himself by his given name, and while Ledbetter believed that as a performer he should dress smartly in a suit and bow tie neatly pressed, Lo-max made him perform in his prison uniform, seeing him as a specimen, not an artist. Lo-max was though interested in promoting his discovery, in his own way. After arriving in New York, he gave an interview to the Herald Tribune for an article headlined, Lo-max arrives with Ledbelly, Negro Minstrel, sweet singer of the Swamplands here to do a few tunes between homicides. The article said, The Negro Minstrel bears an undying affection which led him on September 1 to pledge them his life and services till death should part them. He has followed them everywhere as chauffeur, handyman and ever-ready musician, and has asked for nothing but the privilege to continue. But Lo-max was worried. Ledbetter was starting to enjoy New York, and to hang out with other musicians. He had, for example, been to seek Ab Callaway perform, and had been paying attention to Callaway's performances. Indeed, Ledbetter was starting to talk about maybe singing with Callaway's band. And Lo-max was very aware that the publicity that Ledbetter was getting might lead him to want to, for example, get paid, or work for someone other than Lo-max. He quickly had a management contract drawn up, and it's notable that while most of the contract is typed, the length of the contract and Lo-max's percentage were written in afterwards, in Lo-max's handwriting, and not initialed by Ledbetter. The contract, which tied Ledbetter to Lo-max for five years, said that all money would be paid to Lo-max, who would deduct expenses off the top, and then keep 50% of what was left, giving Ledbetter the rest. In return for this, Ledbetter and his new wife would move in with John and Alan Lo-max and work as their unpaid servants while the Lo-max has worked on a book about Ledbetter and his music. They moved to a rented house in Wulton, Connecticut, close enough to New York that Lo-max could get Ledbetter to theatres and recording studios, but far enough away that Ledbetter wouldn't be tempted to go out and spend time with other musicians and talk about contracts. Lo-max got Ledbetter a contract with ARC, a record label that within a couple of years would rebrand as Columbia. Art Satherly, who produced records for Gene Autry, the Carter family, Big Bill Bruunzi, Bob Wills, Memphis Mini, Ray Aikoff, and many other of the most important country and blues artists of the 30s and 40s, was put in charge of Ledbetter's recordings. But while Ledbetter's repertoire covered hundreds of songs in styles ranging from cowboy songs to children's party songs, Satherly only wanted Ledbetter to perform blues. Shortly after these recording sessions, Lo-max and Ledbetter portrayed themselves in a film, a five-minute section of the March of Time newsreel recreating their meeting and subsequent business relationship, released in the way that Lo-max always described it. It's truly awful to watch with Ledbetter playing a pathetic caricature of the grateful black servant and with Lo-max at one point using a word that is clearly intended in the script to be Negro, but which he pronounces as if it's spelled N-I-G-R-A. Lo-max's portrayed as the hero of the story, and you can get an idea of it from this brief clip. You got a pistol? No, sir, I got a knife. Let me see it. What do you know about the knife? I use it on somebody's body, you boss. Please, boss, take me with you. You never have to tie your shoes to anything more. You let me long to keep you with you. All right, Ledbetter. I'll try you. Thank you, sir. Thanks. I'll die of your old and new non-station. I'll sing all songs for you. You be my big boss and I'll be your man. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. John Lo-max does take the Louisiana... Meanwhile, while Lo-max, who got paid for the script for that, was getting Ledbetter to perform in films and make records, he still had other demands. He wrote in a letter about Ledbetter. At times his vanity becomes annoying, but on the whole I guess I shouldn't complain. He still looks after my shoes, helps me everywhere with my coat, Alan too, helps Martha with the home-making, does the washing, presses my suits, etc, etc, and our ninth requirement calls for my slippers, pajamas and dressing gowns be hanging before the fire and a hot water bottle in my head an hour ahead of the time I lie down. But of course, just because Lo-max had both Huda and Martha Ledbetter as unpaid servants, and was getting 50% of Huda's income from passing a hat around at performances where Lo-max got an actual fee, didn't mean he felt he was being fairly compensated for tolerating the man he described as, an unbelievable combination of a brute, a pest, a shuffling servant and a supreme egomaniac, a liar incarnate, a hypocrite, a willing worker, he does all our washing, builds the fires, keeps them going, pumps and brings in all the water. He has totally devoid of any sense of gratitude. Lo-max was in fact so annoyed by Ledbetter's ingratitude at all the things Lo-max was allowing Ledbetter to do for him, that he rewrote their contract the same week as that film appearance. Now Lo-max would get two thirds of Ledbetter's performance income, after what expenses Lo-max decided to take off. Meanwhile the Lo-maxes were writing their book, which became the definitive source for information on Ledbetter's life for many decades. The book was a combination of songs of Ledbetters, copyrighted as by him and the Lo-maxes of course, and biographical essays, including a 26 page section purporting to be in Ledbetter's own words. In fact this long section, written in white imitation of black dialect, and very different from any recording of Ledbetter actually speaking, was written by the Lo-maxes based on their memories of what Ledbetter had told them, a mixture of stuff they made up, stuff he made up for reasons of his own, like claims that the men he was imprisoned for attacking were black, when his conviction for attempted murder was for a white man. He did not want to get known as someone who had attacked white men because that could easily lead to him being lynched in 1930s America, and the occasional grain of truth more or less there by accident. To give some example of the general tone of the book, the opening section, including the biographical material, has the title, The Worldly N Word. Except the Lo-maxes use the actual word. With a footnote that that word is, almost universal among Negro laborers in the southern states, Ledbelly invariably thus referred to himself in other blacks. It is notable that there is no recording of Ledbetter using that word about himself or any other black people, except in songs like the bourgeois blues, where he puts it in the mouth of white racists, and he never uses the word in any letters or telegrams we have from him. It is, however, used almost constantly in John Lo-max's writings. Ledbetter later wrote in a letter, There is a book about my life and I don't think nothing of that book, and that Lo-max did not write nothing like I told him, and specifically also complained about the use of the N word. Yet this book by the Lo-maxes has been taken by almost every researcher up to the present day as being a more or less accurate account of Ledbetter's life, and has been the basis of pretty much everything that has been said about Ledbetter up until the publication of Sheila Cohen Bernard's book last year. Ledbetter and Lo-max toured together while Lo-max was working on the book, but Lo-max's attitude to Ledbetter got ever more bizarre and paranoid. One day, Ledbetter asked in the morning to borrow the car for a few hours, as they didn't have any plans until the evening's performance. When Ledbetter had not returned by noon, Lo-max called the police on him, reporting the car as missing with an Negro driver. Ledbetter turned up on time for the evening performance, of course. Eventually, in March 1935, only a few months after the two men had started working together, Ledbetter and Lo-max had had enough of each other in parted ways. After $1,550 that Ledbetter had earned for his music during those few months, a significant amount in 1930s dollars, Lo-max's contract meant that after expenses and Lo-max's share, Ledbetter was only due $300 with Lo-max getting the rest. When the two men parted in March, Lo-max gave Ledbetter half of his $300 in cash, with the other $150 as checks. When Ledbetter went to cash them, he discovered that the checks were post-dated to May, June and July. The Ledbetter sent a telegram to Lo-max saying, We have checks post-dated, must have money on same, answer by Western Union what to do. Huda and Martha led better. Lo-max, who knew that Ledbetter had been let out for good behavior, but if he was convicted of another crime, would have to serve up to more than five years remaining on his previous sentence, as well as whatever new sentence he received, wrote to Sheriff Tom Hughes, the racist sheriff of Shreveport, whom Ledbetter had memorialized in one of his songs. Lo-max claimed that Ledbetter's telegram politely asking for the money he was owed, rather than the illegal post-dated checks, was a threat against Lo-max's life. Luckily for Ledbetter, Hughes actually took his side against Lo-max, sort of, and insisted that Lo-max pay up the $150 he owed, but he also made the Ledbetter's leave Shreveport, deciding that they were troublemakers. Lo-max, meanwhile, was unfazed. He had, in his opinion, made Ledbelly, and now Ironhead was out of prison he could just continue with him instead, the fact that you had almost certainly heard of Ledbelly long before this podcast, and have almost certainly not heard of Ironhead, should tell you how well that went. McMillan, the Lo-max's publishers, eventually decided that the contract Lo-max had with Ledbetter wasn't good enough for the book, and Ledbetter, who wanted to be let out of his unfair contract anyway, was eventually paid $250 to sign over all his copyrights on the 48 songs in the book, in return for the end of his contract with Lo-max. Later he realized that this meant that Ledbetter himself couldn't perform the songs he'd written without the permission of Lo-max's publisher. Ledbetter eventually managed to get the rights to perform his own songs, though not the copyrights for them, back a couple of years later, in return for indemnifying John and Alan Lo-max against any claims against them for anything relating to their book about him, or anything else ever. By November the 16th 1937, Hughley Ledbetter was once again free to sing his own songs, though he would never own them again. My mother was dropped me in the cradle and the old cotton filled that home or when dumb cotton gold it rotten. You and I got you, baby, who needs cotton in their mold? Cotton fills back home. Brother, only one thing more that's gonna warn you. A summer's day out in California. It's gonna be the cotton's fields back home. When we left The Beach Boys, Charles Manson had just turned up at Dennis Wilson's house. At the time, Dennis was the perfect target for someone like Manson. He was going through an immensely difficult time both professionally. The Beach Boys record sales in the US had dropped off a cliff even though they were as big as ever or even bigger in Europe, and personally, as he was just going through a divorce from his first wife. He was seeking spiritual answers, it was him who had suggested seeking out the Maharishi, and trying to become more creative himself. He was though still popular and connected with the music industry at large, the co-owner of Brother Records, which at this point still looked like it might become a proper record label. Very rich, almost pathologically generous, and someone who had a vast appetite for both sex and drugs, both of which Manson's family offered in abundance. One of the first things Manson did to his new female recruits was to break down any resistance they might have to being sexually available to him or to anyone he told them to be with. And Manson's ideas, at this time mostly presented as a mixture of the same kind of spirituality that Maharishi was selling, with chunks of Scientology and self-help material bound up in it, along with chunks of hippie-free love and acid philosophy, appealed to Dennis. Most of Manson's ideas weren't very coherent, but that didn't really matter that much to Dennis Wilson, who had never been one to prioritise thinking over feeling. A year later, in an interview with Britain's Rave magazine, he would say, I've only ever read three books, Black Beauty, The Prophet, and Stranger in a Strange Land, given the influence that Stranger in a Strange Land had on Manson, and how apparently fresh it was in Wilson's mind in that interview, in which he talked about how someone should make a film of it with Paul McCartney in the lead role. It would make sense that he read it at Manson's suggestion. Either way, Dennis Wilson was not a particularly systemic thinker, or particularly well educated. But he was eager for some kind of spiritual awakening, and it was that, as well as sex and drugs that Manson offered. And in return, Dennis offered Manson a connection to the rock stardom he was sure would soon be his. It is very difficult to get any kind of accurate timeline for what followed. For very obvious reasons, in later years, Wilson did not want to talk about his association with Manson, and everyone around him seems to have downplayed the length of time the two were involved with each other, mostly in order to play down their own involvement too. The official story has Manson and his family living in Wilson's house for a few months, probably from April 1968, which is when Wilson seems to have encountered Manson for the first time. According to that story, Wilson moved out of the house in August, because by that point he was starting to get creeped out by Manson, and didn't want to be the one to evict him. So he moved in with his friend Greg Jacobson, and let Manson and the family stay in his mansion until Wilson's landlord evicted them. If that was the case, then given that the Beach Boys were on tour for most of April, part of May, the first half of July, and almost all of August, then Wilson's association with Manson would have lasted a few non-contiguous weeks, and would barely be worth a footnote. But there were interviews with Wilson, published at the time, from the Beach Boys Yorah Pien Tour in summer 1969, a full year after he supposedly started to try to distance himself from Manson, in which he talks enthusiastically about his friendship with Manson. But either way, in summer 1968, Wilson was very enthusiastically introducing Manson to the whole of the music world, as both his guru and as a new discovery. For example, that summer, Alex Chilton of The Box Tops came to stay with Wilson for a short time. The Box Tops were one of the bands who would regularly support The Beach Boys in this period, and had recently had a hit single with The Letter, which The Beach Boys also covered in the Hawaii shows in 1967. Chilton later described the family. Occasionally things got a little uncomfortable. One day I was going to the store when some of the girls heard about it and showed up with a groceries for me to buy. So it's like, okay, I've got some money and hey, this is California, I guess it's cool, I'll buy the groceries. And the girls meet me in the driveway and look through the bags and they go, oh, you forgot the milk. And they're like staring at me very intently. So I'm going, gee, I'm sorry, forgot the milk, oh boy. So they go in the house and I'm kind of ambling my way round to the door and by the time I get there, two of them are standing in the doorway, blocking my way. And they say, really intense look. Charlie says, go get the milk. Can you believe that? So I'm like, Charlie, which one is he again? Oh yeah, little guy plays guitar. Yeah, I got him. So he wants me to go get the milk. Uh-huh. Another star who was introduced to Manson was Neil Young, who at the time was in Buffalo Springfield, who like the box tops were a frequent support act for The Beach Boys in early 1968. As we'll hear in a future episode, Young was about to embark on a solo career. And there even seems to have been some brief suggestion that he might sign some other records. There's at least one live recording of him from earlier in his solo career, which seems to have him introduced as brother recording artist. Manson and Young was something of a mutual admiration society for a little while. And Young would later be the only rock star Manson would say anything good about, remembering that Young had given him a motorbike. And unlike almost all of his associates, Young would not try to disassociate himself from Manson, saying later, He seemed a little uptight, a little too intense, frustrated artist, spent a lot of time in jail. Frustrated songwriter, Singer, made up songs as he went along, used up all the time, no two songs were the same. I remember playing a little guitar while he was making up songs, strong will that guy. I told Mo Austin about him, Warner Brothers. This guy is unbelievable, he makes the songs up as he goes along and they're all good. Never got any further than that, never got a demo. He was an angry man, but brilliant. Wrong, but stone brilliant. He sounds like Dylan when he talks. He's like one of the main movers and shakers of time. When you look back at Jesus and all those people, Charlie was like that. But he was kind of skewed. You can tell by reading his words, he's real smart. He's very deceptive though, tricky, confuses you. Young would later write Revolution Blues about Manson, a song which according to Young, his bandmates in Crosby Still's National Young refused to play live because they didn't want to be associated with Manson. Though David Crosby plays guitar in the studio recording, which also features Rick Danko and Leavon Helm of The Band. Manson was delighted with all this interest from luminaries of the music business, though he had little time for most of the music they made. Other than his own music, Manson only really enjoyed the music of the Beatles, with whom he was increasingly obsessed, and the moody blues. But he was determined to become a rock star himself, and surely these famous musicians would help him in that aim. In particular, Manson was very eager to work with Wilson's friend Terry Melcher, because Melcher had a connection to the actual Beatles. When the Beatles set up Apple, they didn't set the organization up all at once. Before setting up the record label, they'd set up a publishing company, but that publishing company had still scouted for and recorded artists, which it had then got signed to other labels. One of the first bands to be discovered by Apple was a group named Grapefruit, given their name by John Lennon, after Yoko Ono's book of the same name. Grapefruit were led by George Alexander, a stage name for Alexander Young, whose younger brother George Young was the main songwriter for the Easy Beats, and whose even younger brothers Angus and Malcolm would later go on to form ACDC, while the other three members of the group were former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had released a few unsuccessful singles. As Grapefruit were only signed to a publishing and management contract with Apple, they'd had to be placed with another record label. In the UK they'd been signed to RCA records, but in the US they were signed to a new label, Equinox, that Terry Melcher was starting up. Equinox would only release a handful of things in 1967 and 68, because Melcher was about to have his own life completely derailed, though it would later be revived in the mid-70s with Bruce Johnston partnering with Melcher. But in early 1968 Equinox seemed to have a strong connection with Apple, and Melcher produced Grapefruit's records, including their UK top 20 hit Dear Delilah. Grapefruit's follow-up single, Elevator, apparently even had a promo film directed by Paul McCartney, though the film doesn't seem to have ever been released. Manson became convinced that Terry Melcher, a man who was actually working with the Beatles, would be his key to beatle levels of success. And at the time Melcher was very close to Wilson indeed. He, Wilson, and Greg Jacobson, another close friend of Wilson's who would later become his songwriting collaborator, hung out together all the time and called themselves the Golden Penetrators because of their informal competition to see who could sleep with the most women. Melcher also apparently, at least at first, became equally interested in Manson. But Manson's main hope of getting a record deal was with The Beach Boys, who were working on the album 2020 when Manson joined their circle, though the sessions in late May and early June, and indeed throughout 1968, were largely aimless and unfocused. At one point they even recorded the Wilson brothers mother Audrey singing the old standard Is It True What They Say About Dixie, as made famous by the blackface performer Al Jolson. In a three week series of sessions they cut a track called Where Together Again, which didn't get released until it came out as a bonus track on a CD reissue in the 90s. A novelty song called Loop De Loop Flip Flop Flaying in an Airplane, which finally got finished in 1998. The endless unfinished versions of Old Man River we talked about in part one of this many series, the single Do It Again which we also talked about, and a song that sums up Brian Wilson's attitude at the time, I Went to Sleep, which actually made it to the album. 1030 I Turned My Radio On, some group was playing a musical song, it wasn't too long. Dennis Wilson was also working on a song which would also make the 2020 album, and that one also seemed to sum up his attitude at that time and at all times. 11. While Mike Love sang lead on that, there's no doubt that it was a pure expression of its composer's deepest feelings. Not least because, if you listen to the full track, The Ending, which I'm not going to excerpt here because I want to keep a clean rating, is a veritable recording of Wilson having sex with a woman in the studio, apparently he did multiple takes. That wasn't the only track that Dennis Wilson recorded during these sessions though. There's another one titled Well You Know I Knew, which was unfinished and didn't get a release until a digital only archival release in 2018, and which could very easily have been the work of his good friend Neil Young. 12. The guitarist on that track, by some accounts, is Charles Manson, and the tape on which it was recorded apparently includes the take of Manson recording Look At Your Game Girl, a different version of the song from the one that has since been released. Indeed, it seems that Manson recorded a whole album of unreleased material in Brian Wilson's home studio, where the Beach Boys were doing most of their own recording, and with the involvement of not just Dennis but according to some sources, Brian and Carl Wilson too. That material has never been released and will never be released, for fairly obvious reasons. There's also been some suggestion that Manson may have co-written that song, though we'll never know for sure. There was apparently a deal between Manson and Wilson that Wilson would buy out Manson's share of two songs that they co-wrote. There's been a lot of speculation and some outright statements of fact, though based on what evidence I'm unsure, that one of the two songs Manson and Wilson co-wrote was Be With Me, a song on 2020 that's credited solely to Wilson. With both these songs, Manson apparently wanted money but not credit, and have seen various different claims as to why this is, ranging from him not wanting to be associated with the uncool Beach Boys to just being more interested in getting the money than the credit. One interesting thing that might point to Be With Me being the co-written song. On the released version of the song, Wilson sings a line, a new child is born, the mother is still waiting. But on the demo, I couldn't swear to it. But it sounds to me like he might be singing A Moon Child Is Born, which might point to some of the influences Manson had picked up, not just from Scientology, but from organisations like the Church of Satan and the Process Church, both of whom were influenced by Crowley, and both of whom he'd spent some time around after leaving prison. I'm genuinely unsure myself what I'm hearing here, and I could be very wrong, so see what you think. By this point, Dennis was fully involved with the Manson family. So much so that he would in the 1970s, while intoxicated and breaking his general silence on the matter, tell one journalist that he and Manson had started the family together, rather than Manson doing it on his own, and he was even doing things like letting them have the use of his cars. So much so that Dennis, who had originally got to know the family picking them up hitchhiking, was now hitching lifts himself because they were driving his Rolls Royce in Ferrari and damaging them. And one of the people who picked him up was one Charles Watson, nicknamed Tex. Dennis took Watson back to his house, and as Watson later said, I wanted the kind of love they talked about in the songs, the kind of love that didn't ask you to be anything, didn't judge what you were, didn't set up any rules or regulations, the kind of love that just accepted you, let you be yourself, do your own thing, whatever it was, the kind of love I seem to be feeling right now, sitting around this coffee table getting zonked on some of the best hash I'd ever had, with a rock star and a fat old hippie and the little guy with the guitar who just kept singing softly, smiling to himself. It occurred to me that all the love in the room was coming from him, from his music. Tex Watson was soon also part of the Manson family. Dennis Wilson seems to have started to somewhat distance himself from the Manson family around the end of the summer of 1968, or at least that's the way the story is generally told. As it's normally told, he and the Beach Boys management got sick of the cost of dealing with Manson, but Dennis was scared of him. So Dennis moved out of his house, which Manson then ransacked stealing some of his gold records, into a room in Greg Jacobson's home, leaving Manson to get evicted by Dennis's landlords, and Manson, after getting evicted, looked around for somewhere else to live before settling on Spar and Ranch. This was a small ranch near Chatsworth, roughly 20 miles from LA, and which was a fake frontier town, which had been purpose built for shooting western films. There were many of these built in the 20s through 50s, when that genre dominated the cinema the way superhero films do now. But in the 60s the western film had largely died out. For a while in the early 60s there had at least been TV westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, but by the late 60s those were also falling out of fashion, and the ranch was largely disused. It was owned by an elderly, almost blind man named George Sparne, who was having difficulty with the basic upkeep of the ranch. And Manson got some of the girls to approach him and offered their help in looking after both the ranch and his day-to-day living, in return for them and their friends being allowed to stay there. Sparne eagerly agreed. The time at Sparne Ranch has often been portrayed as happening after Dennis Wilson started to distance himself from Manson, but there's evidence that that is far from the case. In July 1969, nearly a year later, Wilson was interviewed by Record Mirror and spoke about Sparne Ranch as if he were not only resident there himself, but as if the family was as much his as Manson's, without mentioning Manson's name. He said, and I'm going to read out a fair chunk here. The house was in Pacific Palisades but there were hordes of people with binoculars and the police got the idea that it was an orgy and drug scene. We were on that to start with, but we soon got wise. Too many people, mostly girls, got onto it and we had to move. Now we have an old movie lot owned by a blind man who lets us run the place. We try to make it productive by helping anyone we can who looks like they need it. In the beginning there were just a few girls living there besides myself and the other guys. We'd make love and discuss things while contributing to one purpose, to help others. The girls would go out on the streets and beg money from those that looked like they could afford it, then bring it home. I'd say go out and don't come back until you have five dollars. Later I might say, do you love me? They might say yes and I'd say, then go out and bring back another woman. Soon there were large numbers living there. We'd all combine efforts as if we were all writing a poem. We'd get the good and the bad from everybody until the end product was fantastic. I gave all I had to bring this about. We would make clothes for those who needed them or give them money to charity. We had complete freedom. We might decide to do all our talking by singing to one another for a day. All of us gave what we had and had a good time. There is so much in the power of love. If all you knew about the family was that interview, you'd think it was the Wilson family rather than the Manson family. But while all this was going on, of course the Beach Boys were continuing to work on their new album and they were starting to expand their stage lineup. For their tours in 1968 they brought in three additional musicians to augment them on stage. There was a keyboard player named Doug Dragon who had played with his two brothers in a surf band appropriately called The Dragons. His brother Davil would soon replace him in the band. Davil's penchant for wearing a sailor's hat led to him being given the nickname Captain Keyboards by Mike Love and he would later go on to fame as half of the Captain and Tennille. Another former member of the Dragons was Ed Carter, a friend of Bruce Johnston's who had gone on to join a blues rock band called the Nunidea who had been signed to Witch Season Productions in the UK by Joe Boyd, but whose one album had not yet been released and wouldn't be a success when it was. The Nunidea's bass player Gary Thane was from New Zealand and went on to join the Keith Hartley band and Uriah Heap before dying tragically young in 1975 of a heroin overdose. The other two members, guitarist Ed Carter and drummer Mike Kowalski, joined the Beach Boys touring band and would remain with it off and on until 1996 in Carter's case and 2007 in Kowalski's. For the first period of time with the group Kowalski was splitting his time between The Beach Boys and The Johnny Otis Show. He was one of the few white musicians ever to play in Otis's band and he played on several tracks on Otis's son's Shuggy Otis's classic album Freedom Flight. Through the connection with Joe Boyd, Kowalski would also play on several classic British folk rock albums like Mike Herron's Smiling Men with Bad Reputations, John and Beverly Martin's The Road to Ruin and Nick Drake's Brighter Later on which Carter also played bass on one track. In the touring band Carter would mostly play bass, allowing Bruce Johnston, who had never been comfortable with the instrument, to play keyboards instead, while Kowalski would play percussion parts. Most of the Beach Boys records had both a drum part and a separate percussion part as Brian Wilson never particularly liked the sound of cymbals and so would have the high frequency percussion parts provided by tambourines or sleigh bells or similar instead. Kowalski would also move over to the drum kit on occasion though when Dennis would come to the front to sing, something that would happen more often over the next few years as the various group members started to come out of Brian Wilson's shadow and write, produce and sing lead on their own tracks more. Dennis had already started this on the previous album as we saw in the last episode, but on 2020 every member of the band had a chance to shine on their own with the exception of Mike Love, unless you count him having the idea for Do It Again. Only five of the album's 12 tracks were Brian Wilson's songs, and of those only two were new contributions to the Beach Boys, Do It Again and I Went to Sleep. The other three were Time to Get Alone, the song he'd written and produced for the band that would become Three Dog Night, and two previously unreleased tracks from the Smile Sessions which Carl dug out of the vaults and completed, Our Prayer and Cabin Essence. Instead, the other band members spread their wings a little. Carl Wilson produced and sang lead on what became the first Beach Boys single with no Brian Wilson involvement at all, a version of the Ronettes flop single I Can Hear Music, written by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector, around the same time they wrote Bivvy Deep Mountain High. Carl's version showed that he'd been studying his brother's style very well, and he made number 24 on the charts, becoming their last US Top 40 hit for nearly a decade. As was becoming routine at this point, the track did better in the rest of the world than in the US, making the Top 10 in the UK and in much of Europe. It's also notable that other than some percussion overdubs by Kowalski, the track was otherwise played entirely by the Beach Boys, again showing that they were actually capable of approximating the wall of sound style that Brian had often used a Wrecking Crew for. Some Wrecking Crew members did, though, play on our Jardines showcase, a version of Huda Ledbetter's Cotton Fields. It's clearly a song that meant a lot to Jardine, in an interview with Uncut in 2022 where he talks about important records that have shaped his career. He mentions Ledbetter's original version of the song as being a favourite, along with the Kingston Trio's version of the John B. Sales, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers' Why Did Fools Fall in Love, and talks about how much he enjoyed his Ledbetter's 12 string guitar playing and had loved the track from first encounter and get in the 50s as a folky. That said, the version of Cotton Fields that the Beach Boys did seems to owe at least as much to another of the greats of Southern California music, Buck Owens, the king of the Bakersfield sound, who recorded a very similar arrangement on his hit 1963 album On the Bandstand. The version of Cotton Fields that Jardine came up with seems to have been based around Owens's arrangement, but with additional lyrics by Jardine, who didn't give himself credit for them, about hitchhiking after getting a nail in his tyre. Jardine got Brian Wilson to co-produce it with him, and both men play on the track playing banjo and keyboards, though most of the more complex banjo parts seem to be by Wrecking Crew player Alves Govo, with Hal Blaine and Lyle Vitz of the Wrecking Crew, and Ed Carter. I've seen some claims that Brian and Al are actually the only vocalists on this track as well, and I definitely do hear multiple owls, but I think I can hear both Carl Ambrose in the backing vocal stack at points. But it shows how much the dynamics of the band had changed in just two years, that even though Brian Wilson had co-produced that track, and it had been released on the 2020 album, Al Jardine was unhappy with the recording and decided he could do better than Brian. A little over a year after recording that version, Jardine took the group back into the studio to re-record it, this time with the band themselves playing the basic backing track, with Carter on bass, percussion by Wrecking Crew percussionist Frank Cap, and Pedal Steel by the wonderful Orville Red Roads, the steel player in Michael Nesswith's band at the time. Jardine's production was released as a non-album single, and did nothing on the US chart, but made number 5 in the UK and number 1 in many other countries. Bruce Johnston's contributions to the album were less successful, at least commercially. His major artistic contribution to the record was an instrumental titled The Nearest Far Away Place, which shows the first signs of the schmaltzy side of Johnston that would later lead to his most successful song, when Barry Manilow had a hit with his I Write The Songs. While it is a little over a second from my personal tastes, and seems closer to the kind of music that Murray Wilson was writing than it does to the music of The Other Beach Boys, the track has become something of a fan favourite, and I have to say that when I'm in the right mood it can be quite pleasant. Johnston's other contribution to the album was a track he had originally been working on as a solo side project, a version of the old Ursul Higgy Rockabilly song Bluebirds Over The Mountain. This song has come up in previous episodes of the podcast, and again I should emphasise the Ursul Higgy is, as far as I'm aware, no relation. The original had been a minor hit, and had been a big influence on Bert Burns. But the version Johnston initially produced, and which with Carl Wilson's co-production he turned into a Beach Boys track with a Michael of Leed vocal, is such a mix of stylistically incongruous elements that it seems like it's the result of a game of consequences. With this nursery rhyme like basic 50s pop songs substantially rewritten, only the chorus and the first two lines of the first verse are kept the same, though the writing credit is left as just Higgy. Where Higgy's song has, he looked into her eyes of blue, she swore to him that she'd be true. Love instead sings, he looked into her eyes and said, ooe baby you're so good to my head, and the second verses of the two songs are totally different. That basic song then has some very plodding, stiff drum work from session drummer Jim Gordon, who sounds like he's almost mocking this square music when you compare it to his work with Derek and the Dominoes and other artists, and infuriating the repetitive riff played by Larry Nectle on the bass and Darrell, Captain Keyboards, Dragon and Vybraphonum Mimba, a string and horn arrangement by Van McCoy, later to find fame with The Hustle, and then over that some lead guitar from Ed Carter. The new Nadia had jammed with Hendrix once when they'd been playing in London, and it's clear that Carter wanted to emulate his style. Mother Astonishingly, that was released as the second single from the forthcoming album, after Do It Again but Before I Can Hear Music. Mother Less Astonishingly, the single, which was released on November the 29th 1968, one week after The Beatles' White Album came out, sank without tracing most countries, not even making the top 60 in the US. In the UK it did do a little better, briefly making the lower reaches of the top 40, but the only place it had any real success was in the Netherlands. And of course Dennis Wilson had three tracks on the album, more than anyone except Brian. We looked at All I Want To Do, which he wrote with Stephen Kulinich, and Be With Me, on which he has a solo writing credit earlier, but there was one other song which was released as the B side of the Blue Birds Over the Mountain single, and which was credited to Dennis Wilson alone, though it was in fact a collaboration. Never Learn Not To Love is a song that started out with a rather different title, and some different lyrics. Originally titled Seize To Exist, it was actually written by Charles Manson as a gift to the Beach Boys, or so he would later claim. Music Manson said of the song later, they were fighting among themselves so I wrote that song to bring them together. Submission is a gift, bring it to your brother. Dennis has true soul but his brothers couldn't accept it. He would go over to Brian's house and put his arms around his brothers and they would say, gee Dennis cut it out, you know, they could not accept it. According to at least one biography of Dennis Wilson I've read though, much of the original lyric is actually Scientology terminology. Though I've read up a fair bit on Scientology, and if it is it's been changed to the point I don't recognise it as such. What is clear though is that the song is about more than just brotherly love. In Manson's version it starts with the phrase Seize To Exist for example. The song is about ego death and giving up on the very idea of existence and submitting to the will of someone else. All lessons that Manson was very keen for his family members to learn from him. So it made Manson very unhappy when Dennis Wilson changed the lyrics, or at least so it was later claimed. The changes that were made were apparently meant to make the song seem less creepy, but if anything they have the opposite effect. Where Manson sings Seize To Exist, Wilson sings Seize To Resist, which combined with the change from submission as a gift, go on give it to your brother, to submission as a gift give it to your lover, makes the song seem like it's all about pressuring a woman to have sex. Though that's not completely missing from Manson's original song with its repeated Pretty Girl lyric. Most sources say those lyrical amendments are the only changes that Wilson made to the song, but in fact his changes are at least as radical as those that Jair Dean and Johnston made to the songs they brought in. Although the difference is that he didn't credit Manson at all, while they didn't credit themselves. He adds a whole new section, the Come In Closer section. Come In Now Closer Come In Closer Closer Closer Ah He also changes the structure of the song drastically in other ways, and tidies it up and makes it into a proper song rather than a free-form ramble, which is odd because structure was normally something that Dennis relied on others to help him with. He adds in a backing vocal chant, which also turns up in some of his other songs from this period, and seems itself to actually be something that came from the Manson family originally, and changes the melody at one crucial point. When Manson sings, and I love you, submission is a gift, go on give it to your brother love and understanding is for one another I'm your kind, I'm your kind, I'm your brother love That might have been a little too close to a similar phrase in Knights in White satin by the Moody Blues, the only band other than the Beatles, who Manson rated. I love you Manson seems to have been in the habit of unconscious plagiarism. There's another section on the record, not on Manson's demo, but which according to Dennis Wilson's biographer Adam Webb comes from, a relaxation chant dreamed up by Charlie for the birth of his son Zizzo Zozizadfrak. However to my ears at least, it sounds very similar to the falsetto vocal on GTO. A Beach Boys sound like hit from a few years earlier by the studio group, Runny and the Daytonas. I can't help but wonder if Manson was thinking of that, and if he may be even believed that had been by the Beach Boys themselves. Certainly enough casual listeners believe that that by the 1990s the group bowed to the inevitable and started performing it in their own shows. The resulting track was considered strong enough that even after it was released as the B-side to the flop Bluebirds over the mountain single, the group chose to spotlight it on what was an increasingly rare US TV appearance on the Mike Douglas show to promote their next single I Can Hear Music. On that performance, which can be found on YouTube in a rather poor quality recording that looks like it's from an off-air videotape, Dennis is upfront singing the lead vocals live, while the band mime rather unconvincingly to the backing track. The car's miming to the drum part were only bearing the slightest resemblance to what was on the record. It's very easy to see the charisma everyone talks about with Wilson, but it may just be me, or it may be the poor quality of the video making his eyes look more shadowed than they should, but there's also something sinister about his performance. Never Learn Not to Love was credited only to Dennis Wilson, as I've said, and there are many conflicting stories as to how that came to happen. Some have said that Manson asked just for a lump sum payment, not for credit, while others have said that Wilson was annoyed with Manson at the time, and thought that the amount of money he and the family members had sponged off him was enough that he didn't need to give him credit. It's definitely the case that the Beach Boys were never too finicky about songwriting credits, especially when the Wilson father Murray was running the publishing for Brian's songs. Murray Wilson seemed to take the view that his sons were the only ones who deserved credit for anything, to the extent that my club, Murray's nephew, eventually had to sue in the 90s for royalties and credit on dozens of songs he co-wrote. Many co-writers of Songs With Brian had their credits removed or downrated, and there are stories about collaborators in the 70s occasionally having similar experiences with other members of the band. So it's entirely plausible that Dennis just removed Manson's songwriting credit. But it is also more than plausible that, as I've seen suggested in multiple places, Manson himself didn't want credit for something put out by a band as unhappist the Beach Boys were at that point, and that as he disliked the band's music he was just interested in getting paid. Either way, the song was a minor track and a minor album. 2020 did better than Friends on the charts, making number 68, though it did better elsewhere. In the UK, on the back of it containing the number one hit Do It Again, it made the top five, and it would turn out to be the band's last album on Capitol Records for 20 years. Brian Wilson didn't appear in the group photo on the cover. The band were becoming much less popular at that point, at least in North America, to the point that they were being asked questions about it while touring. Bruce replied when asked in January 1969 about their lack of popularity. Well, a lot of our concerts do okay, and I know we still get royalty checks. We're just doing our thing and why should everyone dig us? Everybody can dig the Beatles, but why should everyone dig us? You know, the Beach Boys image is kind of like a group Doris Day, you know what I mean? A lot of people stop digging the Beach Boys, you know, and in their mind that image is probably still that Doris Day image, and I think that a lot of kids are going away from all that clean thing because that's where their parents are at. This image wasn't helped by the fact that Carl Wilson, as a conscientious objective from the Vietnam War, had to do community service which involved a group playing concerts in prisons, and in order to get those prison shows they had to play nice with state governors, which sometimes meant things like a show they did in Oklahoma where they played a decency rally run by the governor, part of a wave of such rallies that started out as a way of protesting Jim Morrison having exposed himself on stage. The group's final single under their capital contract was co-written by Brian and his father, Mori Wilson, who had been inspired by hearing a TV presenter saying they were going to break away to a commercial. As was increasingly the pattern, break away only made number 63 in the US, but was a top 10 hit in much of the rest of the world. The lyrics to the song suggest something of the mental pain Brian was going through at the time, though the song also seems to advise hope about the group's future. Oddly, Mori Wilson insisted on being credited under a pseudonym. Rather than his own name, the record label calls him Reggie Dumbar. As you might have gathered from the story so far, even while the Beach Boys couldn't get arrested in the US, there were still major stars abroad. And indeed on a European tour in June they became the first American band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, playing three shows in Czechs of the Vakia, mere months after the Soviet invasion. On that tour in the UK, Carl Wilson also discovered a black South African band, The Flame, who he signed to Brother Records and who became the first and only band other than the Beach Boys to release anything through Brother, with an album Carl produced for them. Guitarist Blondie Chaplin and drummer Ricky Fittar would soon join the Beach Boys fast expanding backing band as well. But while the group had their own record label, they had no distributor for that label. They'd split from capital, and no other label in the US was interested in taking on a fading rock group who were still producing the occasional fluke hit, but who weren't selling albums, which was now where the money was. During 1969, in between intense international touring, the group continued recording, putting together tracks for a new album even with no ideas to who might release it. Brian Wilson produced very little after Breakaway, and what he did produce was mostly trifles like Games To Can Play, a song inspired by Joe South's Games People Play, which was itself inspired by one of the self-help books that had so influenced Charles Manson. And that's the time when I'm a Mr. Business Man. Later on I really get to go in. I get my motor running. I get my legs to moving. I just know good and less too can play. I was laying on my back the last night. I played my radio. It was out of sight. Joe South was singing. Games People Play. But the others were pulling their way to making up for Brian's absence, with Dennis Wilson in particular producing some of his best ever work. Forever, a song he co-wrote with Greg Jacobson would become the song most indulably associated with him, capturing him at a point where his voice was still strong, where his demons had not yet started to attack him too badly, before the darkness that was about to fall. Fill your heart with joy, I'd say forever. Forever, forever, forever. I've been so happy, love from you. The group was still making optimistic, joyful music, even though they didn't have a record contract, in the belief that one would turn up. And one did, of course, eventually. But it took time, and in the meantime, Edith Fess-Brain was making statements to the press saying that if they didn't have any more hits soon, they'd go bankrupt, which did not make negotiating contracts with worthy record companies any easier. The Beach Boys did not look like a short commercial bet. And in November 1969 came two events that between them would permanently change the Wilson Brothers' lives for the worse. Murray Wilson, Brian, Carl and Dennis' father, was the 50% owner of Sea of Tunes, the publishing company that had published every song that Brian had co-written up to that point, with Brian owning the other half. But through some means unknown and now unknowable, he got Brian to transfer a total control of the company to him. Brian alleged in a lawsuit in the 80s that his signature on the documents was forged. Others have said that he was just bullied into signing the papers. Either way, Murray got control of the company through means that would be unethical given Brian's mental health, even if he hadn't been his father. And then he sold the company. He sold all of Brian's copyrights, and all the future publishing income from them, to Irving Almo publishing for $700,000, and thought he'd got himself a good deal. Nobody would be wanting to hear good vibrations or I get around or California girls anymore. Better to cash in while you can, right? Sell it now so some other sucker would be left holding the bag when the money totally ran out. In the 55 years since that time, those songs have earned well over $100 million in royalties for Irving Almo and its successors in interest. It turned out that Irving Almo's lawyer was also Murray Wilson's lawyer. Brian was devastated by this. He no longer owned his songs, his babies, and he no longer owned them because his own father no longer had any faith in him. While Brian had been mentally unwell for some time, people in his life point to this as a real turning point, after which he would just descend further and further. Howl Blaine would later recall Brian turning up shortly after this at Blaine's house, holding a box of his gold records wanting to give them away to Blaine. They weren't his anymore because they weren't his songs. Blaine said of the experience he was removing himself from his own past. He was headed somewhere else but I don't think he knew where that was exactly, and right then I don't think he cared. And it was very, very sad. But that was only the second worst thing to happen to the Beach Boys in November 1969. The worst was that Dennis's good friend Ninguuru and sometimes songwriting partner Charles Manson was arrested along with much of his family for mass murder. And we'll talk about that next time in our final episode on the Beach Boys. Be warned, it's going to get very, very, very dark. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Foodtree by Nick Drake. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Arise. 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