By Ralph Greco, Jr.
Here’s a question that may be on nobody’s mind but mine: Just who is left of the original “beach boys” in The Beach Boys? The 60s good-time band is still touring and I wonder, just who is it we are plucking down our dollars to see? I realize the hit-making man/producer/driving force of the band, Brian Wilson (one of the actual brothers of the band) has been out of the “boys” for decades, choosing his own demons over touring way back in the late 60s (though touring recently with his own, startlingly talented backing band); Dennis Wilson drowned years ago; and Carl Wilson passed from this mortal stage to the play for the choir indivisible. So I ask again…Who the hell is left in this band that they can call themselves The Beach Boys when most of those ‘boys’ are long gone?
How about that southern rock institution, Lynyrd Skynyrd? Tragedy found that particular group of musicians in 1977 when their plane crashed, claiming the lives of various crew and band members. Ten years later, someone got the great idea to pull the surviving members together to see if they could make some money. Ronnie Van Zant, their late lead singer, was replaced by younger brother Johnny, new guitarists replaced old sickly ones, and the “band” soldiered ever onward. Now Skynyrd seems to be enjoying a new life, with a few albums under their belt, a minor hit, and the popularity to sell-out out medium-sized venues (or ‘sheds’ as they are called in the business). But again, band members have come and gone now for so long, there are only two original members left in the current incarnation!
When is it simply too ghoulish and too greedy to raid a group’s reputation? Isn’t it wrong have newer band members replace older ones, with the newer ones so young they weren’t even alive when the band first formed? How many members have to go until all you have left is a very good cover band? When you get the look-alike and semi-sound-alike brother to sing hits his brother wrote, is some spirit of his older brother retained or simply running for cover? Given the advent of technology, I beg to wonder if we could dig up John Lennon and George Harrison and make their arms and mouths move by some sort of modern medical marvel, would we be tempted to? With studio trickery, the remaining Beatles (when Harrison was alive) reconvened for the “Free As A Bird” single for the Beatles Anthology, basically pasting new parts to an old Lennon demo.
Is live ‘performance by resurrection’ really all that far behind?
Of course, in all this, we, the audience is to blame. There would be no market for a new Lynyrd Skynyrd if people didn’t buy their product and attended their concerts. Is hearing the music more important then hearing the musicians (or even a few of them, for Christ’s sakes!) that originally made it? There is something truly magical when a group of people, men and women alike, gather in a room together, somehow subdue their egos and create music that is so powerful an audience will forgive the slight fact, decades after said music was first produced, that none of those people who made that music are the people they have come to see make that music now!
Or how about going to see a band, all original members intact, and they ‘augment’ the group with extra musicians? If — and this is often the case — you haven’t played together (or even alone) for so long you need extra musical muscle on stage to help you play songs that just a decade ago were not so daunting, maybe you should not be on that stage in the first place…or maybe you old guys simply need more practice. I know hell is going to freeze over for some bands, but give it a few extra months, fellows, please!
I know I shouldn’t complain. First of all, we get to hear these songs again…maybe not by the guys who originally played and wrote them, but at least we’re close. And hell, these days if you get a bunch of musicians on stage and they are actually playing and singing live, you’re certainly ahead of the game! But with ticket prices what they are and most of our dreams crushed by the time we hit our mid-forties, it would be nice if we could still have one pure and everlasting vestige from our youth when Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith weren’t the soundtrack to car commercials or chopped-up Who songs weren’t used as the opening for television shows!
Ah youth.
