Aero-Views Concert Review by Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien
If someone had thought to put the Beach Boys and Airventure
together decades ago, we might have had Brian Wilson/Terry Melcher
songs about hot planes instead of hot cars. Instead, the kids of
America in the 1960s, of whom I was one, grew up listening to
"She's real fine, my 409," instead of a paean to, say, a Comanche
400, which was probably the aviation equivalent of a 409 Impala in
1963.
The Beach Boys concert Monday night at AirVenture 2006
both impressed and pleased me... so that I couldn't let it
pass without comment.
A lot of our readers, we know, didn't experience 1963, because
they weren't born yet, but it didn't seem to stop young people from
enjoying the intergenerational experience that is the Beach Boys.
Even the babies were rockin', while I saw one couple that clearly
were in the Social Security demographic doing some of the stylized
dances of the 1960s... when I took out a camera to photograph them,
they stopped, self-consciously. Dang, I didn't mean to do that. The
Heisenberg principle in action.
I grew up with the Beach Boys in the 1960s and remember the
anticipation before the needle hit the groove in a new record in
the console stereo, which is a bunch of words that will have much
less meaning to the young reader. I've heard the Beach Boys
live, now, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and now. They've never sounded
better. The band has only a couple of original members, but the
substitutes can match the original parts perfectly, and of course
musical and amplification technology allow the perfect reproduction
of sound, which was an unattainable dream forty years ago. (Ask a
modern collector about tube amplifiers, and he'll tell you about
the glories of tone. Ask someone like me who played in bands in the
sixties or seventies, and he's more likely to remember explosions,
fires, and static). The bottom line is that it was a marvelous
listening experience.
Beach Boys frontman Mike Love was not above joking about his own
age. "Hey, some of us are closer to hip replacement than hip-hop,"
he said, to laughs. But everyone enjoyed the show -- young, old,
in-between. Not everybody, of course -- I swear some of the EAA
old-timers were grumbling about the "newfangled kid music" which
they haven't adjusted to, despite forty-five years or so of
exposure to the Beach Boys. But the majority of people really
seemed to thrive on Love's sense of humor and on the band's
repertoire of familiar songs.
And what songs: Good Vibrations; When I Grow Up To Be A Man;
Little Deuce Coupe; Fun, Fun, Fun; Do it Again; and my personal
favorite, God Only Knows. (Ford, a show sponsor, even had a couple
of little deuce coupes on hand). They also treated the audience to
a number of songs by others, songs that were some of their
influences and inspirations... doo-wop songs from the fifties, and
R&B music from the days when it was "race music," all given the
Beach Boys harmony treatment.
Again, I didn't hear the whole show, but the parts I heard
seemed to hit a sweet spot of unabashed patriotism while remaining
completely apolitical, something that's a challenge in these tense
times.
The Beach Boys even inspired some of us to parody as we rode
along the road -- gentle, well-meaning parody, I swear. The others,
I'm sure, are too embarrassed by their feeble entries to put them
down in pixels, but here's part of mine:
Just a little golf cart with a buzzy sound
But she's made me the terror of the airshow ground
Pedestrians quiver with terror and rage
As I herd 'em on the way to the Beach Boys stage
She's my little golf cart, you don't know what I
got.
I'll spare you the other verses; honest, I sang this in the car
on the way to the show. Did my Aero-News buddies harmonize? Heck
no, they gave me a bunch of unsolicited and pointed advice.
Tell me, what's a "day job?" And what would I do with one if I
had it?
We don't know whose idea it was to bring the Beach Boys to
Oshkosh. (We're trying to find out). But there's a consensus here
that it was a really, really good idea. How is EAA ever going to
top this?
Maybe they better take a leaf from the Beach Boys songbook and
just "Do it Again!"
ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (04.15.24)
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