When I left Rishikesh, I told Maharishi that I wanted to visit Russia before returning home. I didn’t know anyone in that country, but we had gotten fan letters from there, and I wanted to see it. We were told the Russians were our enemy, but I didn’t want to succumb to demonization. Remember, this was 1968, when Americans were in the streets protesting their own government. Maybe our government was bent on war. Maybe the Russian government was bent on war. I didn’t like the militarization of either government and thought that the people of the world deserved better.
I told Maharishi that I wanted to fly to Russia for three days, bring a bunch of LPs from the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and give them out at the student union at Moscow State University. Neither group had performed in Russia, but I knew that the kids there loved both bands. If Russia and the United States were ever going to improve relations, I figured that music was a good place to start, and if we were going to have peace on earth, we had to start somewhere.
Maharishi said, “Better not to go to Russia right now.”
Well, he didn’t say not to go, just that it was better not to go. So I intended to follow up on my plan. I went to New Delhi and, with a couple of nights to kill, was invited to dinner at the home of some affluent Indians. I don’t know what I ate, but whatever it was, I wasn’t ready for it. I’d been eating bland foods for the past two and a half weeks. When I returned to the Oberoi Intercontinental Hotel, I got violently ill and found myself on my bathroom floor. The hotel doctor came by and gave me something to drink, but I was off my feet for three days and had to cancel my flight to Russia.
I was disappointed, but it wouldn’t be long before we were playing in a Communist country.
Perhaps the notion that either music or meditation could bring about a more peaceful world was naive, but when I returned to the states in March of 1968, it seemed that madness had become the norm. In Vietnam, where the body bags were mounting, an American official explained that it was necessary to “destroy” a particular village in order to “save” it. At home, the nonviolent counterculture, of peaceniks and poetry, was losing to a more bellicose opposition. Black militants were urging revolution. White reactionaries were demanding crackdowns. Even suburban housewives were taking up arms. That summer, the police would batter protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; urban riots would kill forty-six people; and a gunman would murder Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. America, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was going through “a nervous breakdown.”
Rock fans wanted music that spoke to the times, songs that exalted antiwar protests, free love, and recreational drug use, and they got that with artists such as Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix.
And the Beach Boys? In 1968, Capitol Records was promoting us as “the nation’s number one surf band.”
In fairness, we weren’t recording commercially successful music at the time, so Capitol didn’t have much to work with. We also remained clueless, or at least stuck in the 1950s, in our image. We had finally rid ourselves of the striped shirts but replaced them with all-white suits. Music fans wanted jambalaya; we were selling vanilla ice cream. We sometimes toured with a big band and performed Four Freshmen standards like “Graduation Day,” which went over well in 1964 but not for the new FM-radio-centric rock audience. In October of 1968, we played at the Fillmore East in New York, which was known as “the church of rock and roll” (and the counterpart to the more famous Fillmore West in San Francisco). Our appearance caused an outrage. The Village Voice said “it was the weekend the Fillmore tried out as a whore,” and the New York Times said we were overshadowed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, which was the opening act. I took some comfort in knowing that we sold out the place, or so we thought. We accused the club’s famous promoter, Bill Graham, of undercounting ticket sales and forced him to do a stub count after the show. Graham swore he would never have us back.
The Fillmore was the culmination of a disastrous concert season, which began in earnest with a major tour in April. We invested about a quarter of a million dollars in a new sound system. We hired eight musicians who would back us up. We used our own money to reserve many of the venues and to underwrite the promotions. It was called the Million Dollar Tour, not because we had that much money at risk, but it just felt that way.
We were to begin in Nashville on April 5 and do thirty-three shows in eighteen days, mostly in the South. We flew out on Thursday, April 4.
At least one member of the group later recalled that we had heard that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot before we took off, and then we were told he had died after we landed—the thirty-nine-year-old civil rights leader, standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis, struck in the cheek by an assassin’s bullet. What I remember was standing on the balcony of our Holiday Inn in Nashville and watching the troops massing down in the street. In fact, 4,000 Tennessee National Guardsmen were deployed after the police received reports of looting. Marches and protests, some violent, broke out all over the country, and over the next several days, more than a hundred cities convulsed in riots while 55,000 troops were summoned to try to restore order.
I felt numb more than anything else. If you lived through President Kennedy’s assassination, you can’t really be shocked by the mindless killing of another American leader. I also couldn’t help but juxtapose my experiences in Rishikesh with what I was witnessing at home. If any country was in need of spiritual regeneration, it was surely ours. This was the second time in five years that the Beach Boys were scheduled to play a concert in the immediate aftermath of an assassination, and just as we did after President Kennedy’s death, we intended to perform after Martin Luther King’s. That’s what we do—play music to bring something positive to people’s lives, and when would people ever need something positive more than after a national tragedy?
We went to Nashville Municipal Auditorium, and a good crowd had showed up, but as we were preparing to take the stage, the Guardsmen arrived, asked us to leave the premises, and then ordered the audience home.
Our Million Dollar Tour wasn’t worth a plugged nickel, as many of the concerts were either postponed or canceled, and we lost whatever money we had already put down plus another several hundred thousand in forgone revenue.
The following month, we tried something different. I invited Maharishi to join us on a seventeen-date tour in America, specifically to appear on college campuses, in more intimate settings, where I thought his message would resonate. His associate, Jerry Jarvis, had been traveling the college circuit for several years, and it seemed that young people were a natural audience for an Eastern guru who was advocating a new way of thinking about the world. The Beach Boys would play a set, and Maharishi—before or after—would take the stage and share his philosophy. The group would not make any money on the tour but would use the proceeds to cover expenses while donating the rest to Maharishi.
It didn’t work. The Beatles’ repudiation of Maharishi suddenly cast him in a negative light. For the tour itself, we were unable to book college campuses and ended up in large auditoriums, such as the Washington Coliseum and the Baltimore Civic Center, raising our costs and leaving many seats empty. Technical problems intervened. Maharishi had a soft voice, but he refused to allow anyone to put a microphone on him—he didn’t like to be touched. We found special boom mics that had good reach, but Maharishi was still hard to hear. Finally, most of the people who did attend came to see the Beach Boys. We continued on for a couple more days, to New Rochelle and to Philadelphia, but the crowds were no better in size or temperament. Some audience members taunted Maharishi, which ticked me off, but he never lost his cool. At one press conference, he faced a particularly obnoxious reporter, and we were getting ready to throw him out. But Maharishi instructed someone to tell the journalist that he would like to speak with him after the conference, and Maharishi would try to gently enlighten him.
We called off the tour less than a week into it. Like our canceled southern tour, this one was costly financially, and I take responsibility for an idea that didn’t work. But I don’t regret it. I thought I could do some good for people who were lost, confused, or troubled, particularly those who were young and idealistic but also vulnerable, and I thought that was true for a whole bunch of us.
—
If our tours were out of step with the times, so too was our new album—Friends, featuring mostly serene and spiritually uplifting songs. Dennis contributed two soulful ballads, “Little Bird” and “Be Still,” which he cowrote with the poet Stephen Kalinich. But the album bombed. Capitol, in a panic, promptly released an LP of Beach Boy hits, but included only the instrumentals, as if the lyrics didn’t mean anything. That LP, Stack-o-Tracks, fared even worse than Friends.
Brian was content to let others contribute equally. I knew that this democratic approach, while allowing the rest of us to grow musically, would never replicate our past success. I figured I would have to inspire Brian to do what we had done in the past. One day I got together with a high school friend, Bill Jackson, and we went to our old surf spot at San Onofre. It was one those perfect Southern California days—the sun, the waves, the girls—and it reminded me of how life used to be. I rushed like hell back to Brian’s house and literally got him out of bed. Told him about the day and gushed about how great it was and that we ought to write a song about it, and we could call it “Do It Again.”
So Brian sat down at the piano, and we did it again. He found the key, and I related the words.
It’s automatic when I
Talk with old friends.
The conversation turns to
Girls we knew when their
Hair was soft and long and the
Beach was the place to go.
Brian included a groovin’ “Hey now, hey now” chorus that was patterned after the 1950s song “Finger Poppin’ Time,” and “Do It Again,” in its lyrics and melody, very much evoked the music of our early hits. Carl, it should be noted, added the overdubs and actually finished the record. The song was released as a single on July 8, 1968, only a month after Robert Kennedy’s assassination and amid the summer turmoil of riots and protests—in other words, a song that was completely out of touch with what was going on in the country and the world. Yet it reached No. 20 in the United States, and it went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom, No. 1 in Australia, No. 3 in Sweden, and No. 5 in Canada and the Netherlands.
The song defied the conventional wisdom that our surf-and-sun harmonies were tied to a more hopeful time in American history, but I thought that people would always want to hear songs that made them feel good. Brian, for his part, said in an interview in 1980 that “Do It Again” was “probably” our best collaboration. It was certainly among them, and it was a reminder that the Wilson-Love tandem hadn’t lost its touch with the public. It was also a rare bright spot in a year that brought mayhem to the nation and the devil to the Beach Boys.