Buzzbox
There aren’t many A-list pop musicians less likely than Paul Simon (pictured) to become summer tour institutions. But for the second consecutive shed season, Simon is on the road with a venerable co-draw. Last year it was Bob Dylan. This year, Brian Wilson, the famously troubled Beach Boy, is his fellow warrior. Unlike the Dylan match-up, Simon isn’t expected to share face time with Wilson onstage, a fact that highlights the oddness of their pairing.
Wilson currently enjoys a significant renaissance as both songwriter and performer. Never fully comfortable with an audience, Wilson recently enlisted California pop revivalists the Wondermints (a crack band with a couple of great albums of its own) as his backing band and celebrated last year’s small tour with a recently released live album. He won’t be joking with the crowd much, or even seeming as though he’s in the same zip code while at the keyboard, but the lush harmonic epics of Pet Sounds are finally getting the live treatment they’ve always deserved.
Simon, who has never lacked critical or popular acceptance, has seen his stock fall during the past decade. A prolonged silence after the twin towers of Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints (and the huge tours behind each) turned out to have been devoted to an ill-conceived Broadway show (The Capeman) and another oddball pairing — his marriage to Edie Brickell. Last year’s quiet and quietly received You’re the One earned the requisite Grammy nods as a matter of habit; except for two or three songs worthy of the Simon brand name, the album was his weakest in almost twenty years. Now touring with a much smaller outfit with few traces of his multicultural leanings, Simon has been playing as though nothing has slowed him down. In fact, his shows with Dylan and since have proven more celebratory than is typical of his usually introspective style. It could turn out that Simon will come closer to a summer sound than Wilson.
Even without Wilson, whose split from the band he founded with his now-deceased brothers, Carl and Dennis, seems permanent in the wake of a lost lawsuit for songwriting credits brought by Mike Love, the 2001 Beach Boys are ridiculously fragmented. Wasting an opportunity to honor its legacy, what’s left of the band will again trot out the expected surf-and-sun hits rather than reexamine the post-1970 catalog Capitol recently reissued with adoring liner notes by folks such as Tom Petty, Elton John and Peter Buck. (Most of those albums still aren’t very good, but they beat the holy hell out of “Kokomo.”) Love now tours under the band moniker with Bruce Johnston, a utility Boy since the ’70s. (The other surviving Beach Boy, Al Jardine, bills himself as the AJ Family and Friends Beach Band, a name fit for a barbecue in a Sears parking lot.) Though Love’s voice is recognizably that of a Beach Boy, you’d be hard pressed to find a more vilified member of a major pop act. After aligning the band with the worst jingoistic impulses of the Reagan ’80s and disparaging Brian Wilson (then suing him) and the only fully realized albums the band ever made, Love has alienated all but those who are willfully ignorant of the band’s post-1980 output. Of course, that segment of the Beach Boys’ audience still finds its way to amphitheaters every summer to partake of the pandering nostalgia act the group has become in Love’s hands.
