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.

Gimme shelter

Fifty years tonight I saw the Rolling Stones, and in a roundabout way began making my way into the rest of my life.

The Stones announced their 1975 summer tour by playing Brown Sugar on a flatbed truck rolling down Fifth Avenue in New York City, shows that included six nights at Madison Square Garden. For me, discovering pot and holding my youthful belief that rock music was a signpost on the road to illumination, seeing the Stones live was a necessity.

With 120,000 tickets available over six evenings, I drove into a deserted Manhattan around dinnertime, parked a block away from the Garden and bought seats for the June 24 show.

I chose June 24 purposely. What better way to celebrate the third anniversary of the first date with my then-girlfriend? Uh no. She seemed less than thrilled about the prospects of spending this special evening listening to songs about the Boston Strangler (Midnight Rambler), inter-racial sex (Brown Sugar) and groupie sex (Star Star).

1975 Rolling Stones live

If she’d managed any enthusiasm at all for the show, it likely began to slip away as we navigated through the scary flood of humanity that washed up on the sidewalks around the Garden on a concert night: kids out of their gourds stoned and/or drunk, guys selling drugs and bootleg t-shirts, ticket scalpers, wild-eyed city people, vendors selling their diarrhea-inducing gyros.

After fifty years, I’ve forgotten a lot about the show – how could I’ve not remembered that Billy Preston was part of the band for the tour? What I remember best was the spectacle. The giant lotus flower that opened to reveal the stage. The stupid inflatable phallus that rose up from the stage (her enthusiasm now vanished). Jagger swinging on a rope over the stage. Steel drummers accompanying the band on Sympathy for the Devil – they played Sympathy for the Devil! And for some reason, the haze of cigarette smoke around Keith Richards and Ron Wood.

The Stones, man!

(An audience tape of the concert can be found on YouTube. The band sounded a little chaotic, but it was the Stones).

While I’m fuzzy about the show’s details, what occurred afterwards remains clear. Back at her house The Tonight Show was on; Kenny Rankin was singing. Rankin was a popular singer/songwriter with a jazz influence, laid-back music perfect for Sunday brunch programming on an FM rock station. As we watched, she told me how stupid the concert had been and that she’d rather go see Kenny Rankin.

She may as well as admitted to being a Republican.

We had friends who got married out of high school and converted to Christianity. How much of an influence were they? Was I ready to take eternal vows or submit to some mysterious conversion? Or give in to a lifetime of nodding out to James Taylor? Four months later, we agreed to move on. 

In 1975, life seemed full of endless possibilities; I just needed to make the right choices and be true to myself. No crystal ball could have predicted it any better.

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.