3/5/08: “Student Demonstration Time” (1971)

It’s the Gore Effect in reverse, as the Beach Boys kicked off a tour this weekend in New Jersey. Now we’ve had a few balmy days here on the East Coast, and that’s another reason to speak in defense of Mike Love. For those who don’t know, Love’s the official boogeyman of modern pop for his role in the long-running Beach Boys soap opera—which is a quagmire that we’ll have to touch upon here.

1971’s Surf’s Up is a great Beach Boys album for several reasons. A lot of credit goes to Dennis Wilson, and you can hear why when his Pacific Ocean Blue album is reissued next month. The group was faltering at the end of the ’70s, and a new manager named Jack Rieley decided that the Beach Boys had to become relevant. His big vision involved booking the band to open for the Grateful Dead.

The band didn’t play along. There’s a bootleg of a 1971 Syracuse University show where the Beach Boys cover “Okie From Muskogee,” and boast about how they’d performed the song while opening for the Dead the night before. It’s really no wonder that the Beach Boys weren’t looking to get all hippie-dippy. After all, they were in the midst of trying to survive the walking anti-drug PSA that used to be Brian Wilson.

To his credit, Brian stepped up with some impressive (if revamped) contributions to Surf’s Up. Everybody rallied—including Bruce Johnston, whose “Disney Girls (1957)” will always make up for his composing “I Write The Songs.” Certain fans will tell you that the only thing that really ruins Surf’s Up—besides the exclusion of Dennis Wilson’s left-wing “4th of July”—was Mike Love’s undermining of Rieley with “Student Demonstration Time.”

 Love wrote new words to the old ‘50s hit “Riot In Cell Block #9,” and came up with a title that Rieley was sure to love. The lyrics were a different matter. “Student Demonstration Time” is a perfect little timeline of revolution gone wrong. The opening takes us to a reasonable take on the virus’ birthplace:

         Starting out with Berkeley Free Speech
         And later on at People's Park
         The winds of change fanned into flames
         Student demonstrations spark
         Down to Isla Vista where police felt so harassed
         They called the special riot squad of the L. A. County Sheriff

Love then dares to take a jaunty look at the then-recent riots at Jackson State and Kent State. We’ve never been big on making martyrs out of the—respectively—policemen and National Guardsmen at either event. Neither are we fond of college students throwing bottles at people’s heads.

Love’s lyrics aren’t really scathing toward either side. That’s one reason that certain Beach Boys fans dismiss the song as a conservative anthem. The other is Love’s closing advice for college students:

         I know we’re all fed up with useless wars and racial strife
         But next time there's a riot
         Well, you best stay out of sight

That would turn out to be the only good advice any rock band gave college students at the start of the ’70s. Sadly, few of them cared about the Beach Boys by then. You know that bootleg we mentioned? Somebody in the audience shouts a request for “Surf City.” If you don’t see a problem with that, then you need to learn more about this guy.

Make it your own: First off, here’s the song—and we’d watch plenty of live YouTube videos if they all looked like that footage. Any real Beach Boys fan already owns Surf’s Up. For an impressive (and impressively cheap) primer, pick up The Platinum Collection, with a third disc that’s an exceptionally fine compilation of the Boys in the ’70s.

 

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