Two-minute warning

Listening to a playlist of songs that last no more than 120 seconds was a terrain marked by rockabilly, surf instrumentals, British Invasion hits, the Elvises Presley and Costello, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ Stay, the shortest song (1:34!) to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the punk novelty of speeding up old songs (U.K. Subs’ 1:41 version of She’s Not There).

Not surprisingly, Lennon-McCartney and Brian Wilson are good at this type of minimalism (And Your Bird Can Sing, For No One, I’ll Cry Instead, Dance, Dance, Dance, most of the Wild Honey album). Buddy Holly too (Rave On, Not Fade Away).

There are short stories like the Coasters’ Love Potion Number Nine and Willie Nelson’s The Troublemaker. The Stones’ I Wanna Be Your Man (1:43), the Boxtops’ The Letter (1:58), the Clash’s Career Opportunities (1:53) and the Byrds’ Girl With No Name (1:56). Each over in a couple of hundred heartbeats.

Three other songs jumped out as well for their sudden timeliness.

The singer in Mushroom Cloud (1961, 1:57) isn’t losing sleep over school or because he’s bugged at his old man or that his girlfriend’s parents don’t approve. It’s the specter of nuclear annihilation and the powerlessness that comes with it: “We party, we laugh, and we pray again/And we play it cool and try not to think of the mess we're in.”

The lyrics, written by Boudleaux Bryant and sung by Sammy Salvo, fall opposite to the song’s poppy 50s standard format, complete with Ray Conniff-style backing vocals. Bryant, along with wife Felice, wrote Love Hurts and most of the Everly Brothers’ hits, including All I Have to Do Is Dream, Bird Dog, Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie. Salvo was a regionally well-known Alabama pop singer who later left show business to own a meat-supply business.

Held Up Without a Gun (1981, 1:21) by Bruce Springsteen and the B-side of Hungry Heart, was inspired by the 1979 oil crisis (or at least the first stanza is): “I was out driving, just taking it slow/Looked at my tank, it was reading low/Pulled in an Exxon station out on Highway One/Held up without a gun.”

Never minding the rest of the song (in this case the last 40 seconds), autobiographical lyrics about a “damn fool with a guitar” signing a bad management contract. Heard today it’s yet another reminder of the endless loop of economic realities we're trapped in. 

Shape of Things to Come (1968, 1:54) from the teen-exploitation flick Wild in the Streets always had an ominous feel, from the fascistic name of the fictious band (Max Frost and The Troopers) to its lyrics darkly promising the wrong kind of change ("There's a new sun/Risin' up angry in the sky").

The film’s plot is about a rewrite of the Constitution that lowers the age requirement for voting to 14, creating a youth bloc that gets Max Frost (Christopher Jones), a narcissistic rock star, elected president. Frost runs as a Republican.

It’s still a pretty cool song.

Fantasy Park revisited

Fantasy Park was a 48-hour theatre-of-the-mind music festival, an imaginary rock concert aired by nearly 200 radio stations over the Independence Day weekend in 1975. Cooked up by a Dallas radio station, it used a mix of cuts from live and studio albums backed with crowd noises, complete with stage announcements, backstage interview and sound effects.

I caught bits and pieces of it when it originally aired and then again this past Labor Day weekend when the program streamed online. The slate of artists was a mid-seventies wish list; today it’s “classic vinyl”:

Friday: Chicago, Elton John, Joe Walsh, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton.

Saturday: Cream, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Poco, Alvin Lee, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dave Mason, Steve Miller Band, BB King, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Beach Boys, War, Grand Funk, Yes.

Sunday: Deep Purple, Steely Dan, Jesse Colin Young, Cat Stevens, The Who, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison.

Monday: Harry Chapin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Bee Gees, Paul Simon, Seals and Croft, America, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Brothers, Loggins and Messina, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Beatles.

Looking back, it’s a little odd. John Denver, Seals and Croft, and Carly Simon? Shawn Phillips, whose highest charting U.S. album reached #57? No Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane (Starship at this point), The Band, Jethro Tull, ELP.

In two years, nearly half the Fantasy Park performers would begin losing traction artistically and in album sales, replaced by performers who had yet to work out their sound or were still toiling in the minor leagues, like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Wings, Heart, Bob Segar, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

But for now, and as befitting a concert of the mind taking place during the smiley face decade, it’s nothing but good vibes all around. During the Beach Boys set, we’re told by the program’s roving reporter that the band was “really getting into it.” “It’s 1965 all over again,” he added after I Get Around, forgetting that the record came out in 1964.

Fireworks follow the Moody Blues, a Frisbee competition is held “over by the lake” and some dweeb talks kite-flying. During Joni Mitchell’s performance, a nurse who helped with the medical tent delivery of a baby is interviewed (a girl, 7 lbs., 10 oz., no name yet, but Joni would’ve been nice). No mention of any ODs or bad trips.

All 48 hours played over a looped bed of crowd noise that included a woman shrieking every couple of minutes, a Woodstockian Wilhelm scream that makes one wonder if the Ohio Players weren’t on the bill.

Fantasy Park naturally ends with the great white hoped-for, a Beatles reunion, a what-if played out repeatedly at the time in the rock press and during stoned conversations among fans. With between-song patter taken from Let It Be and other sources, their relatively brief set ends with John’s “We’d like to do something that we don’t normally get the chance to do,” – well, yeah – then A Day in the Life.

As the song ends, we can assume that the 750,000 concert goers have dropped through a trap door and the program ends abruptly with the sound of crickets chirping.

When it aired in 1975, listeners supposedly flooded radio station phone lines looking for tickets and directions. The IRS showed up at one station following up on gate receipts to ensure the government got its cut. Not quite as extreme a reaction that the War of the Worlds broadcast received in 1938, but maybe that’s an idea for a future special: Martians invade Woodstock.

Surf's Up

I found the Beach Boys in 1964 when I Get Around hit the charts. It had an instant appeal and didn’t sound like anything else on the radio in that summer of the British Invasion; it wouldn’t be until decades later that I’d realize how complex I Get Around is, seemingly all chorus, no bridge, almost an endless circular loop. It was the first notice that Brian Wilson thought about music, and heard it in his head, differently than anyone else.

Three years later, already a candidate for canonization by having written and recorded God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Caroline No and Good Vibrations, Wilson sang the quietly elegiac Surf’s Up alone at the piano for Leonard Bernstein’s prime time rock music blessing “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.” It was to be the centerpiece of Brian’s “teenage symphony to God,” Smile. He struggled to complete the album before his growing paranoia, drug issues and man-child excesses eventually sank it.

Brian in 1965

For decades Smile remained one of the great “what ifs” of popular culture. In his 1993 sci-fi novel Glimpses, Lewis Shiner’s central character time travels back to 1966 to encourage Wilson to finish the record. For those who read the book, it only added to Smile’s myth.

Brian’s trials over the next few decades are well-documented; in 1999 he publicly re-emerged and began touring again, backed now by younger, like-minded musicians. At the Beacon Theatre in New York City, he looked at times a bit startled, as if he’d just woken up to find himself on stage leading a band again. His stage movements were awkward. But the worshipful audience was behind him right from the start when we booed Mike Love’s talking head during a brief Beach Boys history video that kicked off the show.

During his summer 2000 tour performing the emotional powerhouse Pet Sounds, the audience knew every note – we cheered Brian’s brilliant production details, from the bicycle bell and horn in You Still Believe in Me to the bass harmonica solo in I Know There’s An Answer. The train whistle and barking dogs that end the album, sounds that always sent a chill on record, heard live and loud pinned me back on my seat. Wilson's stage moves were still non-existent, although he got out from behind his security blanket keyboard to play bass for a few numbers. I checked back at the setlist from that show. Thirty-four songs.

Encouraged by his band, in 2004 Brian finally completed and released Smile. I had mixed feelings about the record, a suite of interconnected pieces that were sometimes thrilling and at other times corny Americana. We’ll never know how the public would have reacted to the record had it been finished and released in 1967, whether it would have been seen as a masterpiece or interesting novelty. Hearing it in its entirety at Carnegie Hall gave a vibe outside of the usual concert experience, a spectacle that even attracted Lou Reed, who walked past me on the aisle.

What strikes me about those three concerts was the adoration that came off the audience.

Smile wasn’t Wilson’s only what if moment. If he’d been diagnosed early on and treated by real therapists instead of entrusting charlatans, had his supportive and talented younger brothers Carl and Dennis lived longer, his road may not have been so difficult. Even so, a Mount Rushmore of 1960s pop composers would offer up Wilson, along with Lennon and McCartney and Burt Bacharach. To label his music simply as being about “surfing” and “California,” does Brian a disservice. His brilliance was universal.